Reichley Column: The bill nobody can get right

Last year President Obama promised that by the end of the year, he would deliver a "fix" to our health care system that would lower costs, reduce premiums, cover every American, improve services, and reduce the federal deficit. And while the federal government has no business doing any of those things, most people agree that these are desirable wishes.

A year later we have nothing but two different bills (neither of which achieves those goals) that the Democrats can't reconcile. The Democrats control the House and until last week had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The Republicans couldn't stop anything the Democrats wanted, and the Democrats shut the Republicans out of the health care bill process. Both the House and Senate versions are written by the Democrats, for the Democrats, in order to please the Democrats. There was no "compromise" with the Republicans -- the Democrats could put anything in the bill they wanted.

And yet the House and Senate produced remarkably different bills to solve the same problem. When the House finished its bill, we were told it was "the solution" to the health care "crisis". And when the Senate finished its bill, it was also exactly what the doctor ordered -- and apparently the doctor prescribed hundreds of millions of dollars of giveaways to a few states to buy the votes of their senators.

I wrote to our two Senators, Jim Webb and Mark Warner, to ask why they hadn't gotten protection for Virginians from all the bad parts of the bill that other Senate Democrats obtained for their states -- exempting their seniors from Medicare cuts, forcing other states to pay for their higher Medicare premiums, shielding their hospitals from new mandates and costs, and protecting their insurance companies from massive new taxes.

Neither senator addressed my question. The Democrat's health care bill is so bad that many want to exclude their own states from its provisions. But both Warner and Webb, who had just as much power to get protection for our state, did nothing.

Sen. Warner, discussing the "significant differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill," says the Senate version is better than the version supported by Gerry Connolly and Jim Moran, the two Democratic House members from our area. But he says the Senate bill is "not perfect." Why didn't the Democrats write a perfect bill? Which Democrat is forcing us to accept a health care bill that isn't as good as it should be? What does Warner think would make it better?

Sen. Webb says he voted for the bill "despite my disappointment with some provisions in the bill." He mentions the "difficult votes" he took, "often breaking with my party, in order to strengthen the bill." If you believe the government should take over our health care, Webb's additions to the bill are improvements -- health insurer accountability, limiting excessive administrative costs, a small business health care tax credit and an attempt to reward quality Medicare services.

But that means the original Democrat-written bill had none of those things until Webb "broke with his party" to get them passed with Republican support. Our two Democratic Senators both object to health care provisions written by their own party, and are fighting members of their own party to try to get a "less imperfect" bill passed.

The flawed process used to pass this legislation has yielded not just an imperfect bill, but a monstrosity of payoffs, bribes and special interest provisions bargained with special interests, donors and the politically connected, behind closed doors. Democrats discarded their own flawed principles, such as drug re-importation, to buy support.

Re-importation is a bad idea, but is popular in the Democratic Party. But Obama and the Democratic leadership forced Democrats to vote against it -- because Obama made a deal with the drug companies to kill re-importation in exchange for their support for his bill.

Now the Democrats are working in secret, outside the normal reconciliation process, to try to merge the Senate and House bills. It's a fool's errand -- neither bill accomplishes the goals set out by the president, and the American people are solidly opposed to this legislation.

It is time to go back to the drawing board. Nobody wants a 2000-page bill. Nobody has confidence that this bill will fix anything. Government can barely do the simple things. If members of their own party are arguing over how bad the Democrat's bills are, the truth is likely much worse.

Charles Reichley has been a Prince William County resident since 1981. He can be reached at: criticallythinking@msn.com.