Once, under local anesthesia on an operating table, I overheard doctors in heated disagreement on what to do next. It was not reassuring, but compared to Washington squabbling over health care reform after the Massachusetts debacle, restful.
The Surgeon-in-Chief wants to “move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that…health insurance companies are taking advantage.” He cites the need for “essentially a patient’s bill of rights on steroids.”
As he complains about “a fixation, an obsession in terms of the focus on the health care process in Congress,” the President still insists “I’m not going to get into the legislative strategy…my job is to as president, is to send a message in terms of where we need to go…to set direction.”
But how do you set direction for an unharnessed team of horses going every which way while tethered to another that is dug in not to move at all?
Paul Krugman translates Obama’s prescription as “Run away, run away!” but when the finger-pointing is over, there will have to be a fallback consensus. In the Washington Post, Ezra Klein proposes something “real simple: Medicare buy-in between 50 and 65. Medicaid expands up to 200 percent of poverty with the federal government funding the whole of the expansion. Revenue comes from a surtax on the wealthy.”
But it’s unlikely that anything “real simple” will pass in today’s climate.