Have you ever had a fight with someone that lasted so incredibly long that you couldn’t even remember what you were fighting about in the first place? Did the fight go from being solely about a conflicting issue to being more about simply winning the fight? If you can relate to this scenario, then you can probably understand what is happening in Washington these days. Allow me to give you a few examples of what I’m talking about.
“The doc fix.” In the halls of Washington, the issue of getting rid of the 21% cut in Medicare reimbursement because of the SGR is being called “the doc fix.” At the beginning of the year, the doc fix was pushed back from January 1st to March 1st. Then, when we came to the end of February, the bill that would have fixed this problem was attached to the jobs bill. If you’re anything like me, you are probably wondering what Medicare has to do with a jobs bill. I still don’t have an answer for that. Nevertheless, the doc fix was attached to the jobs bill, and for a while it looked like the thing would pass in time for the March 1st deadline. Then, along came Senator Jim Bunning, the Republican Senator from Kentucky. Senator Bunning waged a one-man filibuster of the bill that stopped it dead in its tracks for more than a week. As a result, we missed the March 1st deadline, and CMS had to stop paying claims for 10 days to give Washington time to get its act together. What was Senator Bunning’s issue with the bill? On the surface, it appeared that Senator Bunning’s concern was about how this bill was going to be paid for and whether or not it would add to the deficit. While the deficit is certainly an important issue of concern for many people, the fact of the matter is that this round of political fighting was probably more about winning the argument than about reducing the deficit.
Recently, President Obama indicated that he would like to include some of the Republicans’ ideas from the health care summit into his version of the bill. He pointed out four of the Republicans’ ideas that he would consider adding to his bill. These things include: allowing investigators to go undercover and pretend to be patients in an effort to find more Medicare fraud and abuse, increasing the pilot programs on tort reform, increasing Medicaid payments to providers, and expanding the use of health care savings accounts. To say that these four items represent a compromise is a little bit like when my wife told me she wanted to get a cat. I don’t like cats and didn’t want to get one. So, we compromised and got a cat. My point here is that both sides are so involved in winning this fight that they have lost sight of their goal which is to make whatever changes are necessary to the American health care system to make it more affordable and cover more Americans without damaging quality and access. You can’t tell me that these four items are the only good ideas that the Republicans have offered.
Now don’t get me wrong. This article is not meant to be a one-sided attack on the Democrats. I think the Republicans are just as guilty of playing politics as anyone. Even if the President would have come out and adopted every single one of the Republicans’ ideas, my guess is that the Republicans would still do everything in their power to stop the bill. That’s exactly what this entire health care reform debate has turned into: the scenario I described in the opening paragraph. It’s like that fight you had years ago and nobody can remember how it even started. The health care reform battle is shaping up to be very similar. It’s morphed into a contest based on winning a political battle, and it’s no longer focused on finding what is right for the American people in terms of health care. Both sides have clearly lost sight of why they are even fighting for.
So what is the next step in all of this? Well, if you have been paying attention to what the media has been reporting lately, it looks like we may be in for the political version of the shoot out at the O.K. Corral. The Democrats are marshaling the troops and are going to try to pass their bill any way that they can. Their approach will likely include using reconciliation to get it through the Senate. The Republicans are loading their guns and are going to do everything in their power to stop any bill from passing. Their approach will likely include using filibusters and any other parliamentary process they can to hang things up.
The problem with all of this is obvious. We still haven't solved any of the major problems with our health care system, and all of the political upheaval surrounding the debate has taken the focus away from the real reasons this debate began in the first place--to actually solve these problems!
So the political battle continues. But what happens to the innocent bystanders--a.k.a the American people? Well, when you have a shootout like the one at the O.K. Corral, stray bullets are likely to hit those innocent bystanders. Similarly, when our politicians forget what they were elected to do and they focus solely on keeping score, someone is going to get hurt. In the contest between donkey and elephant, it's the American people, the innocent bystanders, who are going to get hurt the worst.
Grab your shootin' irons boys; there's gonna be a gun fight!
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