The 2009 Health Care Bill Fiasco

No matter how this year's Health Care reform plays out I hope academics and historians are paying attention and keeping good notes. When we look back on the events of this past year we will realize that after much public debate and behind-the-scenes deals, when it comes to health care reform, just about everyone lost.

If a health care reform bill passes, Republicans certainly lose and Democrats will lose because almost nothing they initially wanted remains. Of course passage will be viewed as a political victory for the Obama administration, but unfortunately there is no victory for anyone who values meaningful results that actually benefit citizens in a meaningful, and measurable, way. If the bill fails we will have spent months without any progress toward meaningful reform.

The process started well. President Obama is elected by a strong majority after a campaign that had health-care reform as a cornerstone. He studied the lessons of President Clinton's failed health care reform efforts and pushed Congress to pass something before his “honeymoon” popularity passed. But that effort not to waste time is what destroyed this bill. Promises of bipartisanship continued to be made, but clearly couldn't happen in such a hurried effort. Then prominent congressmen mocked the idea of actually reading the bill before voting on it. (While I applaud their honesty, I'm appalled that they think this is a good thing. Clearly in a representative government there is an expectation that our representatives will do their homework, otherwise what's the point of having representatives?) This public display of incompetence proved to be yet another catalyst for public opposition to the bill. Then there were the historic town-hall meetings where representatives were clearly unprepared to discuss the bill, perhaps because their constituents had read the bill and they hadn't. Not doing your homework has a way of catching up with you. The President chose to cash in some political chips and addressed a joint session of Congress, too bad so little of what he promised in that speech wasn't actually in the bill at that time, nor is it in the current bill. Congress attempted to manage public descent by simply not publishing the bill for public review, but fortunately we still have a free press and free speech.

On second thought, I think the founding fathers win. The Bill of Rights was designed to help keep the government in line and hold them accountable. Considering the majority the President has in both houses and the ineptness of the minority party, the difficulty pushing this bill through is a direct result of public descent expressed through free speech. Just as the founding fathers intended.


That's Mr. Huey's 2-cents.