Health Care Summit: Make ‘Em Put Up Or Shut Up

The Obama administration may finally be learning how to deal with Congress. Obama has proposed a bipartisan health care summit for February 25, basically answering the critics who have said the process has not been transparent enough. Jonathan Cohn and others noticed some interesting passages in the invitation:

It came when President Obama issued his formal invitation to the bipartisan meeting on February 25. The invitation sketched out the who (Congressional leaders and ranking committee members from each party, plus a few guests), the where (Blair House), and the what (opening remarks followed by discussion about key policy questions.)

But the letter’s most important passage was this one:

Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package. This legislation would put a stop to insurance company abuses, extend coverage to millions of Americans, get control of skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reduce the deficit.

That passage caused some confusion. Was the Obama administration going to introduce its own health care bill? Ezra Klein followed up with the White House and confirmed that the package will be the deal between the House and the Senate (Senate bill + reconciliation sidecar). The White House also says that the bill will be posted to the internet 72 hours before the summit.

Obama is challenging the Republicans – we’ll post our bill and discuss and you post your bill and we’ll discuss it. Obama knows this is an argument that he can win. The Republicans don’t have a comprehensive bill, and the one they did propose covered only 3 million additional uninsured people. Obama has called the Republicans’ bluff. Republicans have argued that the bill was not posted online, the process was not transparent and that they haven’t been consulted. Well, now the Republicans have the opportunity, live, on national TV. They’ve now been trapped in a cage of their own making. As Ezra points out, the Republicans are now in a state of confusion:

That’s not necessarily surprising: The two chambers were pretty close to agreement on a compromise package before Scott Brown’s election threw everything into chaos. Presumably, that’ll be dusted off for this meeting. The Republican response to this is that they’re demanding that the House and Senate refrain from coming up with any unified plan before the summit, which is sort of an odd argument. In essence, the Republican position is that a free and frank exchange of ideas sounds great as long as the Democrats don’t bring their ideas.

The fact that Republicans are making bizarre requests to change the rules of the summit rather than just ignoring the gambit altogether suggests they’ve not figured out how to deal with the event. This is the first time since the Massachusetts election, in fact, that’s it’s been them, rather than the Democrats, who’ve seemed confused. The White House deserves some credit for that, and we’ll see if they can keep congressional Democrats in line long enough to press the advantage.

The stakes are high for this summit. Polls have shown that more than 60% of Americans want Congress to keep working on health care reform and I think the White House has finally gotten the message – do it right. Obama has also learned that despite the fact that Congress is full of able-bodied adults, they need a lot of hand-holding. America will be watching. Democrats – don’t screw this up.