News Journal: Do health care reform right

Whew, that was close.

The final Senate vote on the Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare was a nail biter, for sure. It fell one vote short of passing a bill that was supported by fewer than 30 percent of Americans and virtually zero percent of organizations involved in the country’s health care system.
It was easy for House Republicans to vote to repeal Obamacare more than 60 times before 2017, knowing there would be a certain presidential veto. It turned out to be impossible for them to agree on what a reasonable replacement would look like when they had a president ready to sign anything.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell came face to face with the fact that it was easier to be against everything proposed by the Obama administration for eight years than it was to do the hard work of crafting successful legislation.
The most ironic result of the months of news coverage of the similarly flawed House and Senate bills was that nationwide support of Obamacare finally polled at over 50 percent for the first time.
All in all, it was as big a political fiasco as we have seen in Washington for many years.
But something positive has come out of it. Republican and Democratic Senators have actually begun talking about producing a health care bill under “regular order.”
The failed bill was produced by 13 (all male) Republican senators sitting behind closed doors. Regular order is how the legislative process is supposed to be conducted in the Senate.
Committees meet and hear testimony from organizations and experts in health care. The committees draft a bill that goes to the floor where amendments are accepted from senators of both parties. Finally, there is a vote requiring 60 (and therefore, in this Senate, some bipartisan support) votes to pass.
That’s how Obamacare was created. I was in the Senate at the time and was one of the 60 votes in favor of it. Yes, it is true that it passed with only Democratic votes. But Republicans had made many amendments that became part of the law and had input every step of the way.
Everyone who voted for the bill was aware it was hardly perfect. Just as with other major pieces of legislation such as Social Security and Medicare, we knew that changes would be required as flaws were discovered.
We took it for granted this would happen, as it always had in the past. What we didn’t envision was that, rather than try to make improvements, Republican-controlled Congresses would waste years in pointlessly voting for outright repeal.
Let’s hope that the restoration of regular order in the Senate is a harbinger of better times, and will result in the fixes Obamacare definitely needs. Let’s hope too, that the whole sorry spectacle we have just lived through reminds us that the focus on health care should never again be about political wins and losses.

It is just too important for that. Health care represents more than 20 percent of our economy. Health care laws affect every single one of us, none more so than our children.
In fact, that was my first thought when I had that “whew, that was close” moment a couple of weeks ago. We all read the CBO statistics about how many millions of people would have lost insurance had the vote gone the other way. Disastrous enough, but I wondered what those drastic Medicaid cuts would have done to our kids. So I did a bit of research.
The Georgetown University Center for Children and Families took the CBO scores for the Senate and House bills and came up with an estimate that passage of either one would have resulted in health care cuts for 45 percent of American children under the age of 6.
Think about that. Beyond the sheer cruelty involved, think about what that would have meant for the future of our country.
It is a well-established fact (and facts still count) that early childhood development and education is the most critical factor in eventually producing a well-educated, productive workforce. What happens to a country that purposely reduces the chances of sending healthy, well fed, well-rested kids to school?
Did we really come close to doing that in order to reduce the taxes on the very wealthiest among us? I’m afraid so.
I don’t know what lessons we will take from the health care debacle of 2017. But no matter how contentious future political debates become, I hope we will always keep in mind what our long-term priorities as a nation must be.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware

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