As the Boston Globe notes today, the “complex policy disagreements” in the debate over the nuts and bolts of how to reform healthcare are likely to be a major stumbling block for any legislation (assuming any one bill reaches critical mass).
Well, if we’re not tied by such a tight deadline anymore, why doesn’t everyone just kickoff their shoes and head for the beach this summer? Not so fast.
For one thing, nobody is conceding the healthcare fight, at least not just yet.
Quite to the contrary: The policy shops and those who inhabit their cramped cubicles, are kicking into overdrive. As the Globe report pointed out:
Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office, a critical nonpartisan authority that tallies up the cost of legislation, is swamped with the job of analyzing competing healthcare proposals.
But it’s not just the CBO that’s in overdrive. Think-tanks on all sides are cranking out research at an amazing clip.
On a daily, and sometimes hourly basis, this writer’s inbox has faced a virtual avalanche of emails touting the latest “policy memo” or “policy update” since the President and Congressional Democrats began the drumbeat towards reforming healthcare.
As the Globe notes, however, timing and pace of the debate is perhaps just as important as the actual policy being debated. Here’s why: the policy agenda was set right after President Obama took office. Congressional Democrats, as the Globe points out, want to get healthcare out of the way (and off the agenda) before the 2010 elections roll around.
After all, who still wants to be talking about the “nuances” of healthcare reform (i.e. the Trillion dollar price-tag), when voters have already begun demonstrating a distaste for out of control government spending (see our lefty friends at Pew for a comparison of recent polls–showing at best–that the public is split evenly between making stimulus spending and deficit reduction the priority).
Another issue the policy wonks are warring over is how broad a reform package should be. For instance, should it include provisions to provide healthcare coverage to illegal immigrants? Now there’s an issue, if I’ve ever seen one, that’s sure to grab public attention; imagine being a politician at a town hall, and that question coming up. How to explain the “nuance” of reform then?
But it’s the behind the scenes number crunching and wrangling over actual policy–some of this is evident in new media buzz words like “rationing” and “public plan”–that is quite likely a better explanation for gumming up the timeline.
Take for instance this fisking of The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait by CATO wonk Michael Cannon. The policy wonks are in the trenches, firing back and forth as fast as they can hammer out their detailed point-by-point analyses, rebuttals, and ad nauseam counter-rebuttals.
While it may be a snooze-fest for the general public, and even less interesting to politicians and their staffs who have to wade through the minutest of details, what I’m dubbing the “War of the Wonks,” is quite possibly the battlefield where it’ll be determined whether healthcare reform survives the summer.
Tags: Healthcare Policy, War of the Wonks, Wonks
