The Health Care Sausage
By GAIL COLLINS
NYT
Watching Barack Obama trying to push members of Congress toward some kind of agreement on a health care bill gives you a new appreciation for why Hillary Clinton decided to just write the whole thing herself and dump it on them.
Every inch has been torture. The president spent an hour the other day with seven fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who weren’t happy with their leadership’s legislation. Then he turned them over to the entire White House health care team, which sat down with the Dogs and negotiated a plan to create an independent commission to set Medicare rates.
This cost-containment commission now appears to be a centerpiece of the administration’s health care goals. I am a positive person, so I like to believe that this was not sheer desperation but rather the slow rolling out of an incredibly subtle plan to trick Congress into thinking it’s calling the shots.
Meanwhile in the Senate, everyone is waiting on Max Baucus of Montana. Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus, whose vast authority stems from the fact that he speaks for both the Senate Finance Committee and a state that contains three-tenths of one percent of the country’s population.
(More here.)
NYT
Watching Barack Obama trying to push members of Congress toward some kind of agreement on a health care bill gives you a new appreciation for why Hillary Clinton decided to just write the whole thing herself and dump it on them.
Every inch has been torture. The president spent an hour the other day with seven fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who weren’t happy with their leadership’s legislation. Then he turned them over to the entire White House health care team, which sat down with the Dogs and negotiated a plan to create an independent commission to set Medicare rates.
This cost-containment commission now appears to be a centerpiece of the administration’s health care goals. I am a positive person, so I like to believe that this was not sheer desperation but rather the slow rolling out of an incredibly subtle plan to trick Congress into thinking it’s calling the shots.
Meanwhile in the Senate, everyone is waiting on Max Baucus of Montana. Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus, whose vast authority stems from the fact that he speaks for both the Senate Finance Committee and a state that contains three-tenths of one percent of the country’s population.
(More here.)
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