Political gamesmanship takes over health care debate

The politics of health care reform are overwhelming the policy discussion. That's inevitable, although nonetheless regrettable.

The Democratic strategy is to recast health care reform as a political melodrama. The villain has been cast: the evil health insurance companies, who are standing between the American people and a beneficent government that wants to shower them with quality health care for everyone.

Hence President Obama and his administration now refer to health insurance reform, rather than health care reform, and inveigh against the cruel and rapacious insurance companies at every opportunity.

There's just one rather large problem with the Democratic narrative. The health insurance companies, by and large, are actually supporting the Democratic plan.

The heart of the Democratic proposal is to treat health insurance as a public utility. The government will decide the benefit packages companies can offer. Medical underwriting is prohibited. Price differentials based upon other factors - age, gender, geography - are sharply limited. Profits are capped.

The health insurance companies are willing to accept being treated like a public utility. They have asked for only one thing: a mandate that everyone purchase their product. That way the subsidy for the health care of those older or with chronic illnesses will be borne by the young, who will pay much higher premiums than if medical underwriting were permitted.

The health insurers have also asked not to be subject to one thing: a government-owned competitor, the much-debated public option. But they are playing an inside lobbying game against the public option, not engaging in a scorched-earth outside public education and grassroots mobilization campaign against the public option or the Democratic reform proposal in general.

There is, however, such a scorched-earth campaign going on, manifested most visibly in the congressional town hall protests. These protests are the subject of remarkable disingenuousness by Republicans and hypocrisy by Democrats.

Republicans are portraying protesters as citizens who are just so upset they have spontaneously dropped their plows and frying pans to go yell at their congressman. In reality, they are being mobilized by fiscal conservative organizations, primarily FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, to turn these public meetings into an act of political theater.

Using protest politics and treating public meetings as political theater, however, has been a staple of the left since the Progressive Era. Democrats just can't get over the shock of it being used against them rather than for them.

Those tut-tutting such tactics tend to have false memories of an era in which Americans discussed political issues civilly and with respect. Such an era never existed. American political discourse has always been dominated by partisan sniping, hyperbole and bluster.

The federalists and republicans had substantial philosophical differences. But in political combat, they rarely debated them. Instead, they mostly maligned each other's character. Occasionally, there were even duels fought over the insults.

We've moved beyond politicians shooting at each other, but our political discourse has rarely risen much above the scurrilous.

What's new and different aren't the tactics. It's that fiscal conservatives are using them.

Social conservatives have always been able to mobilize. Fiscal conservatives appeared to be unorganizable. These town hall protests, and the tea party protests that preceded them, suggest they may be organizable after all. That would be a new dynamic in American politics.

Protest politics aren't my cup of tea. I prefer civil discourse, even if I don't have any expectation of actually seeing it.

Still, in this case the protests reflect the hard edge of a broader resurgent skepticism about the reach of the federal government that I had feared had faded away. So, it's welcome, even if I wish it were expressed with more decorum. source>>>

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