Gene Lyons: President Obama, ditch bipartisan rhetoric, enact healthcare reform w/o AMA, GOP [View All]

Sickly talk about fixing healthcare
President Obama, ditch the rhetoric about bipartisanship and enact reform with or without the GOP and the AMA

By Gene Lyons

Jun. 18, 2009

President Barack Obama was elected with perhaps the best chance in a generation to reform America's unjust and grotesquely inefficient healthcare system. To do so, however, he'll have to conquer not only entrenched special interests like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and the American Medical Association but also his own sentimental rhetoric about bipartisanship.

According to Washington Post columnist David Broder, "The president has told visitors that he would rather have 70 votes in the Senate for a bill that gives him 85 percent of what he wants rather than a 100 percent satisfactory bill that passes 52 to 48." That kind of talk gets a certain kind of Beltway pundit purring like a housecat on a windowsill.

It's a mistake, anyway. As the source for this heartwarming anecdote was evidently Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who recently dispatched a peevish Twitter message complaining about Obama's "sightseeing" while visiting France to commemorate D-Day, perhaps it needn't be taken too seriously.

Possibly it's a political head-fake, with Obama appearing reasonable and accommodating in the face of GOP hysteria over "socialized medicine" and "government rationing." Here's Karl Rove writing in the Wall Street Journal: "If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program, America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state." Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., predicted a ruined economy with Americans needing to ask government permission to visit their doctors.

Kind of the way seniors do under Medicare, I suppose, which is basically what the "public option" consists of: an opportunity for Americans to buy into a government-run health insurance plan like that currently available to federal employees. Or to stick with whatever private health insurance program -- employer provided or not -- makes sense to them.

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/18/lyons/