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WASHINGTON- After seemingly interminable debate and months of backroom horse trading, Congressional Democrats and Republicans finally reached a consensus on health care reform yesterday. President Obama is set to sign the bill, which was sent back and forth between various committees a near record number of times, at a rose garden ceremony tomorrow.
Gone from the bill is the ballyhooed public option that would put a government run health insurance plan up against private insurers in the open market. Stringent regulation and oversight of insurance premiums and healthcare costs is also absent from the bill’s final draft, as those provisions proved too contentious for any final consensus. In their place is a regulatory scheme for 'non-profit, private, third party co-insurance cooperatives,' which do not currently exist. In fact, the only large scale change in the bill’s final iteration is a ban on public funding for hospitals and clinics that perform abortions.
“We faced so much uncertainty, so much confusion over the past several months,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- Cal), “We eventually started to believe that it was more important to pass some kind of legislation, no matter how weak the language, reform, and, enforcement mechanism may be.” Indeed, the final draft of the health care legislation that made it through the bicameral conference committee was only 4 pages long, and two of those pages were intentionally left blank. Several senators were overheard at the final vote discussing the fact that this bill was the first piece of legislation any of them had read cover to cover since Reagan was in office.
“Candidate Obama promised change, but not even he could have anticipated the scale of the paradigmatic shift that President Obama has delivered,” said White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel this week on Face the Nation. In the past, the vast majority of presidents have felt the need to speak out against problems, push for legislation, propose meaningful reform- President Obama has moved beyond all of that.”
Emmanuel went on to explain that the President’s approach to the health care debate is part of a larger policy strategy that has shaped his entire administration. “Sure, policy wonks will praise Obama for not offering any legislation to Congress and letting both houses bicker endlessly over the details before eventually arriving at a compromise that offends no one and runs no risk of failure. When you look back, though, you will notice that President Obama has successfully diffused every issue without making so much as a ripple. When the economy started slumping, instead of offering a comprehensive bailout package to stimulate growth in lagging sectors, he just gave a blank check to some bankers and let them do whatever they wanted. We weathered the storm, let the economy improve on its own, and then claimed that our calm and measured response was the appropriate course of action. The strategy works in foreign policy as well- President Obama’s big change in Afghanistan was to keep doing the exact same thing, but with some artful wording, he was able to parlay that ‘plan’ into a Nobel Peace Prize. The approach of acting through inaction is perfect because we can claim success for everything that goes right, then blame the previous administration when something goes wrong. Look at Iran; they’re still enriching uranium, and we say that it’s because we haven’t engaged them enough. Nobody even knows what that means, so we can take credit if the situation improves and continue shifting the blame if it doesn’t.”
The bill has received the sort of bipartisan support not seen on the Beltway in decades. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D- Nev) did not try to hide his excitement at the press conference held to announce the passage of the bill. “From Roosevelt to Johnson to Clinton, democrats have tried to pass a bill called ‘Health Care Reform.’ But only through my visionary leadership and my cunning idea t
o include no actual health care reform in the bill of the same name was our great country actually able to achieve the goal. So suck on that, bitches. Now can somebody please give me some money? Everybody finally realized that I’m a fraud, and I’m going to need to pull a Steinbrenner and spend my opponent into submission if I want to get re-elected.”[Left- The solid form of Santorum poses for his family's 2009 Christmas card.]
On the other side of the aisle, prominent republicans exhibited similar enthusiasm. Former Senator Rick Santorum, who is busy in preparation for a 2012 presidential campaign, said that the bill has made him question his assumptions about the way democrats do business. “When I was in the Senate, we had republican control, and the democrats were always trying to block what we were doing. I thought it was because they were socialists, but I was wrong. It turns out they just didn’t want to do anything. Health care reform that does nothing but ban abortion? That’s a plan that Rick Santorum can get behind,” the candidate told a crowd of confused gay men at an adult bookstore in Boston. The crowd mistakenly gathered in response to a “See Santorum live on stage” flier outside a nightclub and proceeded to sit through one of the most awkward hours since they came out to their grandparents.
“With leadership like that, maybe I will run for president as a democrat instead! My former Pennsylvania colleague Arlen Specter switched last year, and I’m at least as much of an opportunistic douchebag as him!” Santorum added before lighting a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. on fire and goose stepping off of the stage.
With the heath care legislation in the books, the White House has started to prepare for inaction on several new fronts. Next up on the docket is same-sex marriage legislation that is heavy enough in legal doublespeak that it will confuse everyone into no longer talking about the issue.
