The New Health Dialogue

I regularly read, and occasionally link to, Paul Levy's Running a Hospital blog, and I've had on my to-do list for some time a list of other health care CEO bloggers to check out. With health reform now in such flux, I thought today would be an interesting day to read them, and I did browse nine or ten.

To my surprise, only one had posted anything recently on national reform, what its success or failure might mean. That one CEO blogger wrote about how great it is that now that we have Scott Brown coming to the Senate, we're going to have bipartisanship. He's only one person, he doesn't speak for the entire health care sector (and as the Wall Street Journal noted today, certainly a lot of the health care industry has endorsed reform).

Bipartisan sure sounds great. But we suspect this particular blogger isn't on John Cornyn's NRSC email list (the one that praised Scott Brown for stopping the Democratic "takeover" of health care). Or heard House Republican Leader John Boehner's thumbs-down to compromise on a scaled back bill. Or was watching when Mitch McConnell persuaded all the Senate Republicans, including ones who had some interest in reform, to walk away. Remember the House Republican health care proposal, according to the CBO, would actually mean the number of uninsured Americans would rise to 52 million over the next decade.

Don't get us wrong. We don't oppose bipartisanship. We CALLED for bipartisanship for months. We were (reasonably) patient as Senate Finance Committe chairman Max Baucus spent months trying to get a few key Republicans on board. We understood that passing legislation was going to be tough without bipartisanship -- and sustaining and implementing legislation in the future was going to be even harder. But we aren't seeing a lot of outstretched hands from Capitol Hill right now. As Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who as a moderate is well placed to seek out bipartisan opportunities, concluded, "You've got a Republican Senate that didn't want to pass any bill, so a debate about a particular provision is probably not all that relevant because they don't want to pass any bill on health care at any time."