Here Comes Health Care

It’s not hard to understand why President Obama has made reforming
the busted American health-care system a top priority. The United
States has by far the most expensive health-care apparatus in the
world, and yet it fails to care for 47 million Americans who lack
health insurance. That alone should be enough of an indictment, but
there’s more: The high cost of individual health care (even for those
with insurance) is one of the leading causes of personal
bankruptcy in this country, and the high cost to businesses that
provide health insurance is a drag on an already-struggling
economy.

What to do? It’s a question people in D.C. have been trying to
answer for decades, and one they dramatically failed to answer in 1993
when the last Democratic president to try to overhaul health care, Bill
Clinton, failed. Now, prodded by Obama, Congress is taking up the issue
again, and all the usual interest groups—doctors, patients,
malpractice lawyers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical
manufacturers—are gearing up for a huge battle ahead of an
expected vote on a reform package later this summer.

The biggest fight is going to be over the so-called public option,
which is shorthand for the idea that a government-run health-insurance
plan should be created as a way of expanding coverage to more
Americans, increasing the competition faced by private health-insurance
providers, and ultimately lowering costs to consumers and businesses.
For conservatives, this is the dreaded “socialized medicine,” but for
most Democrats—and for many familiar with the way most other
industrialized nations do health care (hint: It involves even greater
government intervention than the proposed public option)—this is
a no-brainer.

“There is going to be a public option,” liberal Seattle congressman
Jim McDermott told The Stranger on June 16, speaking by cell
phone as he headed into a D.C. meeting on health-care reform. It’s easy
for him to say, since he casts his votes in the House of
Representatives, which Democrats control by a wide margin. Over in the
Senate, where Democrats don’t quite have the 60-vote majority needed to
easily pass legislation, things get a bit more tricky.

Washington’s two Democratic senators, Maria Cantwell and Patty
Murray, both sit on committees that are currently drafting their
chamber’s health-care proposals, and both favor a public
option—though with varying degrees of rhetorical force. Murray
spokesperson Alex Glass said her boss “is in favor of a strong public
option.” Cantwell spokesperson Ciaran Clayton said her boss is “looking
at all the proposals for the public option, but she wants to make sure
any proposal allows for competition.”

Perhaps most important: Neither Cantwell, Murray, nor McDermott
voiced opposition to Democrats using a controversial maneuver known as
reconciliation to ram through a public option if they can’t get 60
votes in favor of it in the Senate. “It would be better if we can move
forward with some consensus on this,” Glass, Murray’s spokesperson,
said. “If we can’t, reconciliation remains an option.”