Are President Obama and Congressional Democrats more concerned with the facade of bipartisanship than with getting you good health care? Chris Bowers says yes, and that it's all about political cover:
Bipartisanship has nothing to do with reducing the costs of health care or increasing access to health care. However, bipartisanship has a lot do with providing politicians political cover in the event that a piece of legislation fails to deliver on its ostensible purpose.
But if the goal is for political cover, why is the President considering implementing one of the most unpopular of reforms: taxing employer-provided health care plans? This was a proposal that he openly mocked Senator John "Not Your Friend" McCain for during the election, and that 77% of the public opposes?:
The reason Barack Obama's campaign ran so many ads against McCain's proposal to tax health care benefits is that most people hate the idea. When asked whether health care reform should be funded by taxing health care benefits in a recent poll, only 19% favored the idea, while 77% opposed. Over half, 52%, strongly opposed the idea. On the other hand, paying for health care reform through the progressive tax plan proposed by Obama was favored 62%-35%.
One possible explanation is that the political cover that this "bipartisanship" is seeking isn't from the American public, but from private insurance and big pharma lobbyists. This isn't centrist, it's "centrist," with quotation marks, the kind of Clintonista "centrism" that means putting the interests of big business donors who fund a vast majority of the Senators of both parties over the interests of getting good, solid progressive policies passes.
As I commented last week on another Bowers' post, this is the defining battle of the Obama Administration. Failure here means absolutely no bold, transformative change for the next 4 to 8 years.
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