write your own health care bill ... or is it doomed?

[guyton]

So I started to write a post about how we should be able to encourage (mandate) serious competition among insurance companies and come up with a bill that didn't cause the rethugs to automatically want to vote against it. After all, they're in favor of competition and we'd like to keep costs down too, so what's the problem? We just have to do it with a minimum of "big government" looking over (regulating) the health insurance companies.

And then I remembered we have two insurmountable issues that divide us.

1) The rethugs really are evil and don't want to raise taxes to pay for health care for the poor (after all if god had wanted them to live, they'd have money).
2) The rethugs really are evil and would vote against a resolution praising motherhood if the dems sponsored it.

So there really isn't a way to have a bipartisan bill of any sort.

Or am I wrong? Is there something we could write that would pass both the sane and insane litmus tests?

I'm convinced health care reform (not heath insurance reform) is doomed until the dems get some balls and use the majority that they have.

[FiveGoodMen]

1. Fine. I'll have what Canada's having.

[Ms. Toad]

2. Without necessarily labeling R's evil, #2 is unfortunately substantively correct

I am on the governing board for a well-respected non-profit, nonpartisan, lobbying group that has been around for 65 years. At our annual meeting this year, several of the lobbyists (who have been successful in lobbying members of both parties in the past, and at least one who has been a lobbyist for more than two decades) indicated they had never seen partisanship like this.

Their take was that it really didn't matter what was in the bill - particularly with health care reform, if the bill was sponsored by a Democrat it would not get Republican votes even if it was tailored to provide what Republicans had indicated they wanted (i.e. praising motherhood). They are targeting one or two Republicans who are lame ducks on one or two issues, but otherwise don't have much hope for anything bi-partisan.