The health care summit now underway in Washington is being packaged by both sides as a serious debate over the most pressing problems facing the nation’s dysfunctional health delivery system.
It’s hardly the case.
Republicans have entered the building dead-set in opposition to the Democrats’ reform plans, and it doesn’t matter that a number of GOP provisions are a part of the proposals, nor that it was the Republicans who seven years ago enacted the largest (unfunded) Medicare expansion in the history of the program. GOP leaders will emphasize that the Democrats’ bill was pieced together behind closed doors (a partially accurate claim), and call for the whole thing to be scrapped in favor of a piecemeal approach — never mind that decades of piecemeal approaches are largely the reason that the health system is broken to begin with.
Democrats, for their part, are hoping that the high-profile summit (what else is anyone talking about today?) will dull some of those criticisms of back-room deals and a lack of transparency. (They never anticipated that something as wonky as extra Medicaid funding for Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D) Nebraska — a deal that’s rightly become emblematic of everything that’s wrong with Washington — would stir so much voter anger.) Yet Democrats, too, are coming to the summit convinced that their reform bills are the right diagnosis for the sick system. In this sense neither side is there to debate so much as they’re there to sell preconceived ideas to the viewing public.
In other words, the health care summit is perfect daytime TV: Rehearsed, emotional, full of platitudes and, finally, meaningless.