ObamaCare getting even more partisan and more unwieldy

posted at 8:22 am on September 16, 2009 by Karl
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Pres. Obama’s healthcare speech to Congress last week was but one of a number of shifts to a more partisan tone on Capitol Hill. The Washington Examiner’s Chris Stirewalt reported on the GOP half of the “Gang of Six” on the Senate Finance Committee:

For Republicans Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, Olympia Snowe, avoiding the idea of a federal health mandate – get insurance, go into a government program, or pay a hefty fine – is a top priority. All three have proposed alternatives, including Snowe’s plan to allow insurance companies to offer national plans instead of operating in the thicket of state regulations.

That would be big news if it was true, as the individual mandate is as important to a government takeover of healthcare as a government-run insurance plan.

But is it too good to be true? The New York Times story Stirewalt linked does not say that all three reject the mandate — and neither does CBS News or the Politico. These other reports put Grassley against the mandate, but are silent as to Enzi and Snowe. And as the Examiner’s editorial board notes, Enzi has previously co-sponsored a bill including an individual mandate (the editorial also notes some objections to the mandate). It would be nice if someone in the media would post the original committee documents outlining the Senators’ positions, so that we could see if Stirewalt really had the scoop.

In the bigger picture, we do know that none of the GOP Gang of Three has signed on to Senate Finance Chairman Baucus’s mark… yet. Sen. Grassley complains that he and his fellow Republicans have been “pushed aside” by the Democratic leadership in the rush to meet an arbitrary deadline. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats may be even less happy with Baucus than the GOP Gang of Three. It is a distorted echo of 1994, when centrist mandate-driven healthcare proposals could not attract substantial support in the Senate.

Of course, the more liberal bills working their way through Congress also include the individual mandate. Accordingly, they are running into the problem into which all liberal healthcare bills run — the price tag:

[E]ven after Max Baucus (D-Mont.) spoke optimistically of gaining bipartisan backing, lawmakers continued to haggle over a question at the heart of the debate: How can the government force people to buy insurance without imposing a huge new financial burden on millions of middle-class Americans?

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“We’re talking about the equivalent of a middle-class tax increase,” said Michael D. Tanner, a health-care expert at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Yes, they’re paying it to an insurance company instead of to the government. But, suddenly, these people are paying more money to somebody.”

The Dems want to dole out tax credits to make the mandate affordable, but the underlying math is not pretty (a big reason why similar schemes failed in 1994). Ironically, Obama’s speech — which called for immediate access to insurance for those with pre-existing medical conditions and a $900 billion price tag — has made that math more difficult for Congressional Dems, not less.

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