If I were a Republican Senator from Arizona….
Think what you could do in this health care debate as a GOP Senator right now. You could break ranks and come up with some market reforms that you’d like added to the bill in exchange for support of its final passage. You could push for fiscal mechanisms to help contain costs. You could do a great deal to ensure that the final bill was more conservative, more market-oriented, and more likely to be fiscally solvent – and you could do it all by yourself.
This is the paradox power that comes with the filibuster. If you can ensure that a bill is filibuster-proof, you have a great deal of sway. Olympia Snowe knows this, but she’s full of hesitation. And let’s face it, Snowe doesn’t really operate from a pro-market stance so much as she does from the position of wanting to help people, but not wanting to upset the status quo. I understand the first position, but I also believe that the status quo is the problem. We don’t have a free market when it comes to health care, and we don’t have transparent costs for the consumer.
John McCain seemed to understand this, and he pushed for a tax on employer-provided benefits during his presidential campaign, and a system of vouchers so that people could purchase their own insurance. These were good ideas.
Where is the Senator now? I liked his health care proposals. They were more radical and more sensible than either Clinton’s or Obama’s. Why hasn’t he come forward to work with Democrats to get some of them implemented in the final legislation? Is health care reform only important if it’s part of a platform?
Sure, there are plenty of obstacles to disrupting the status quo.
For one thing, big labor opposes just about any move toward killing the status quo, because it gives them quite a lot more bargaining power. Employer-provided benefits, sheltered from income taxes, are good for the unions. They’re good for big businesses, too, or at least they were until health care costs began to spiral out of control.
But it’s not good for consumers – at least not in the long run.
If I were John McCain, I wouldn’t have let go of health care reform just because I’d lost the election. McCain still had a chance to secure his legacy. Saving our health care system would have been a good place to start. And taking on the unions on behalf of health care reform would have made sense for the GOP, too.
(Image via Daylife)
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[...] has a new post up at his True/Slant digs asking why John McCain hasn’t done much to participate in the health care debate. I don’t have much to say about the main substance of the post, but this bit did stick out [...]
ED – You presume some level of courage on the part of Republican senators that they’ve proven time and time again is absent from their souls.
Olympia Snowe isn’t concerned about upsetting the status quo in health care; she’s worried about upsetting her automatic re-election. But she lacks the vision to understand what it would mean to be the one who appeared to make HRC happen.
As for McCain, it’s laughable to suggest that he has anything to contribute to this debate. He hasn’t expressed any interest in it; whatever “bi-partisan” credentials he has were simply manufactured by the press 15 year ago; anything he proposed would get shot down as a Trojan Horse to destroy what little federal safety net exists today.
Seriously, McCain voted against confirming Sonia Sotomayor. Explain to me how somebody so hopelessly retrograde would have anything to contribute to our modern world.
What can I say? I’m an eternal optimist in cynic’s clothing.
Seriously, though, I agree that McCain was far from fully invested in the politics of health care reform. That’s why I said that if I were McCain, etc. et.
[...] Senator McCain were to cross the aisle and work on solutions for health-care, he’d be tarred and feathered. Any clout he might have in convincing the base, building up a [...]
[...] 2009 November 4 tags: labor, unions by Jamelle E.D. has a new post up at his True/Slant digs asking why John McCain hasn’t done much to participate in the health care debate. I don’t have much to say about the main substance of the post, but this bit did stick out [...]