Now that the House has voted to repeal health care reform, what will the Senate do? Or, more specifically, what will Senate Republicans do?
On the health care reform issue, Republicans may have painted themselves into a corner. They’ve spent the past couple of years whipping the base into hysteria over “Obamacare.” They campaigned for re-election on the slogan “repeal and replace,” and now their constituents expect them to deliver.
But then something happened the politicians probably didn’t anticipate. The health insurance industry studied the final bill and decided it wasn’t so bad, after all. In fact, they kind of like it. There are some things in it they want to tweak, certainly, but they don’t want it repealed, and in particular they don’t want the individual mandate to purchase insurance repealed.
And, according to OpenSecrets.com, the insurance/finance/real estate sector contributes much more money to the Republican Party than any other sector of our economy.
So, for the next few months, it’s likely Senate Republicans in Washington are going to make a great show of repealing health care reform — without actually doing it. And this will mostly be just political theater.
How this could play out — there is talk of using procedural maneuvering to force a vote on the repeal bill in the Senate. Normally a bill is introduced into a committee, and if the committee approves the bill it is voted on by the entire Senate. But since Democrats are a majority on the committees, Republicans have to do an end run around the usual process. For example, they could offer the repeal bill as an amendment to other bills.
However, at some point or another in any procedural maneuver the Republicans will face having to round up 67 votes — two thirds of the Senate — to stop all objections and force a vote. But there are only 47 Republicans in the Senate.
This actually works for Republicans, because this means they can stomp and howl all they like about repealing health care reform, secure in the knowledge it won’t happen. If they actually had the power to repeal health care reform, they’d have to choose between the wrath of constituents and the wrath of the health insurance lobby.
The next question is, how long will they keep this up? That depends on public opinion. Although it could go either way, it’s likely that as time goes on and citizens notice they sky isn’t falling, and that the death panel police haven’t come to collect Grandma, opposition to health care reform could fade away. And if that happens, all but the the most ideologically zealous politicians will quietly let the issue drop.
The demagogues may have spooked the public with stories of “socialized medicine,” but Americans, including those suffering from mesothelioma, are fed up with the old status quo. They are tired of being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, and with insurance companies that arbitrarily decide what treatments they will pay for and what they won’t. If the health care reform law is allowed to go completely into effect in 2014, these will be problems of the past.
However, it’s also possible that Republican politicians will try to keep the hysteria going so they can run on repealing “Obamacare” again in 2012. It’s going to be a long couple of years.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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