Dems Now to Go it Alone on Healthcare, Dumping Bi-Partisanship?

by Warner Todd Huston | August 20, 2009 2:02 am

The New York Times is reporting that Congressional Democrats and the White House are now completely abandoning the claim that they want a bi-partisan healthcare “reform” bill thereby confirming conservative claims that no compromise is coming from the left with healthcare policies.

The spin from Democrats is that Republicans are at fault for the lack of bi-partisanship because if their “strident” stance against Obamacare.

Top Democrats said Tuesday that their go-it-alone view was being shaped by what they saw as Republicans’ purposely strident tone against health care legislation during this month’s Congressional recess, as well as remarks by leading Republicans that current proposals were flawed beyond repair.

Of course, the truth is that the GOP has not been included in any meaningful way since the beginning. Democrats have reached out to just the few Republicans that they think they can cajole to join their ideas, but there has been n o effort at all to include GOP leaders in the healthcare debate.

Naturally, the so-called paper of record approaches the story as if “reform” is a must. Another fact of this debate is that most Republicans don’t want the government involved in healthcare at all, so it is natural that the GOP would resist Democrat’s efforts to take over the nation’s healthcare system.

White House arm twister Rahm Emanuel is also trying to spin this debate as that of a GOP resistant to the goodness of change.

“The Republican leadership,” Mr. Emanuel said, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

Notice how the debate is now all of a sudden about “health insurance reform” when that was not how the debate was initially sold. The truth is that Democrats have made a “strategic decision” to recast the debate as one from healthcare to “insurance reform.”

From this change in the rhetoric of the debate, we can see that the White House knows that it is losing and that they now feel that they need to hide behind new language to sell what Americans do not want.

Of course, the reality is that Democrats were never interested in any bi-partisan bill. It was always to be the Democrat’s way or the highway.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)