Everyone, that is everyone in the punditocracy, keeps insisting that some form of health-care reform just has to pass. Inevitable, they say. Too risky not to. But it sure doesn’t look that way based on this week’s developments. The Hill reports:

A key Senate panel wrapped up the first week of its consideration of a sweeping healthcare reform bill with major questions unanswered.

The Senate Finance Committee began marking up legislation authored by Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) Tuesday but called it a week at midday Friday and will not resume until Tuesday.

“This was a good week. It was a productive week. And next week, our work will continue,” Baucus said in a statement. “We will continue to make this a better bill.” . . .

But what Baucus did not have Tuesday, and continues to lack, is a clear path to success.

“We have debated, we have questioned, we have prodded at times, and we have discussed — and discussed. Most important, we continue to move forward,” Baucus said.

In its current form, however, the bill does not address complaints about key issues, such as whether it would make health insurance affordable for lower- and middle-class people or whether it would adequately strengthen coverage in existing government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

At some point, huge, complicated and highly controversial legislation lacking strong popular support simply collapses. That’s what happened to social security and immigration reform under George W. Bush, and one senses that we are now meandering in the legislative weeds once again without direction or momentum.

Remember what Baucus’s committee is up to: plowing through 500 amendments. Tevi Troy explains:

In addition to the fact that these kinds of hearings can be very boring, we have learned a variety of things about the Baucus plan and the process over the last few days:

First, the mandate really is a tax increase, despite the president’s protestations. The penalty for violating the mandate will be collected by IRS. In addition, the “fees” on manufacturers will be passed on to consumers, which is another form of tax.

Second, the effect of the bill will be to raise the price of insurance for healthy individuals, especially the young, who voted in heavy numbers for Obama. This will hurt low-income people as well by making it harder for them to purchase insurance.

Third, some of the amendments exposed some real weaknesses that the Democrats will have to work through . . . [and] all but one of the Democrats voted to strike the Bunning amendment, which would have required that the bill text be available online for 72 hours before the vote on it.

In addition, Democrats also rejected the Hatch amendment, which would have stopped implementing the bill’s provisions if 1 million Americans lost “the current coverage of their choice.” This is effectively an admission that Democrats believe many Americans will lose their health insurance as a result of the bill. If they didn’t fear the possibility, it would have been easy to vote for Hatch.

In the end, the Baucus bill, with or without those hundreds of amendments, may be irrelevant. As the Washington Post noted:

In a plodding week of partisan sniping, the bill that was supposed to be President Obama’s greatest hope for a grand bipartisan solution was instead described as little more than a decent rough draft, certain to be rewritten by others. The president’s own party remains sharply divided over fundamental questions such as whether to create a government-sponsored insurance option, whether employers should be required to contribute to the cost of health care, and who should bear the burden of expanding and improving the current system. And Republicans used the week of committee wrangling to sow doubts about possible tax increases and proposed Medicare reductions needed to pay for reform.

What we really learned this week is that unless Democrats are willing to ram through a huge revolutionary change in health care that a majority of Americans don’t support on a strict party-line vote with the help of controversial legislative tricks, the only hope of reform lies in breaking it up into discrete parts, focusing on some incremental reforms with bipartisan support and calling it a day. At some point, I suspect, that is where we will wind up.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 7:27 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.