Summary
Democrats may have stumbled on a brilliant (albeit Machiavellian) strategy to get what they want in health care passed this year: Split the bill:
Pass one half that contains the controversial stuff through the reconciliation process which requires only 50 votes in the Senate (plus VP Biden) and the less controversial stuff (which might even get some token Republican support) through the regular legislative process (requiring at least 60 votes in the Senate even to be brought up for a vote).
Analysis
The strategy would be to segregate out all the really controversial stuff. This would include the public health insurance option, end of life counseling and establishment of a comparative effectiveness research institute with actual teeth. These, in the aggregate have been anointed as "socialized medicine" and "death panels", even likening them to the Third Reich, by certain extreme right wingers who have been exhorting their minions to exercise their First (and even Second Amendment) Rights to appear foolish (if not downright scary) at the Health Care Town Hall Meetings this month.
Balancing the realization that a public insurance option will get no Republican support, while the absence of one will lose enough Liberal Democrats to kill a bill, the Obama Administration and its progressive supporters in both Houses of the Congress, increasingly, have had to conclude that the only way to get healthcare reform legislation through this year will be to pass a separate bill containing the public insurance option option (as well as the other controversial provisions listed above which have been the subject of so much demagoguery this month) with no Republican support through the reconciliation process (requiring just a simple majority in the House and Senate).
The rest of the provisions of the current bills passed by four House and Senate Committees or still being negotiated in the Senate Finance Committee, (which constitute more health insurance than. health care reform, such as the elimination of insurance practices around pre-existing illness exclusions, rescission of coverage due to catastrophic illness, loss of insurance with unemployment and life time caps which reforms even some Republicans, as well as virtually all Democrats support) could pass through the normal legislative process.
Interestingly, the extreme right wingers who have been mounting the most virulent public displays of opposition to any form of health care reform legislation have targeted the necessary cost containment measures to prevent the (currently projected) $45 trillion in unfunded Medicare (government health care) liabilities from swamping the economy for the next generation. These "nouveau conservatives" are railing against the same admonitions of unbridled government spending (in this case by the Medicare Program) voiced by a certain Democrat turned Republican in the 1960s in response to the passage of the Medicare Act in 1965, viz. Ronald Reagan.
Ironically, it would seem that the health care views of these modern day "conservatives" (which they surely are not in the true sense of the word) to prevent any reasonable way of containing the runaway costs of the taxpayer financed Medicare Program are more in line those of Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society, than those of their supposed patron saint, Ronald Reagan.
Companies likely to be most impacted by splitting the health care reform bills in order to get national legislation passed this year include:
1. Aetna
2. United HealthGroup
3. Cigna;
4. WellPoint; and
5. Humana;
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
