Watching sausage get made

The old saw is that you should never watch sausage and legislation getting made. This seems to especially hold true for the efforts by the Democrats to craft health care reform legislation. The Hill reports on the state of play today in an article titled "Dems reel on healthcare"

Congressional Democrats and the White House are scrambling to regain their footing after a series of setbacks has stalled political momentum to reform the nation’s healthcare system.

Despite having a popular president in the White House and comfortable majorities in Congress, the Democratic rollout on healthcare reform has encountered significant bumps in the road.

A cost estimate hanging a $1 trillion price tag on an incomplete bill, salvos from powerful interest groups and great uncertainty among key Democrats on what will actually be in the legislation that moves through Congress have emboldened Republican critics.

It's tough to remake a major fraction of the American economy and still pretend that it is not going to break the bank. It doesn't help to have the supposedly Congressional Budget Office (whose leader is appointed by the majority party) comes out scoring just a portion of the Kennedy bill and finds that it will increase the deficit over a trillion dollars and only insure about a third of the people who are supposedly uninsured now.

And then there was this tidbit from the CBO trashing President Obama's PR attempt to demonstrate that he was responsible for the industry cutting costs.

The CBO also threw cold water on a promise by a coalition of healthcare industry groups to reduce healthcare spending by $2 trillion over 10 years. Obama announced their promise to much fanfare, but the CBO found that while a few of the cost-cutting measures would save money, others would cost money. In sum, they would not have a big impact on federal spending, the CBO concluded.

Ouch. The Democrats are reduced to aiming their fire at the CBO.

The White House and Senate Democrats tried to downplay the CBO finding. They also criticized the nonpartisan agency.

“The way CBO scores some things sometimes doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — I mean, real-life sense,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa.).

I remember when Republicans would criticize the way the CBO scored tax proposals without using dynamic scoring. And the Democrats would hoot and hollar about how sanctified the CBO projects are. Now they can enjoy the shoe moving to the other foot.

Just because the Democrats are supposedly reeling today, don't expect that state to continue. The Republicans need to put forth a realistic proposal of their own. And the pressure on the Congress by groups who don't want to see the government taking over health insurance for everyone and the resulting rationing of health care. This is just one campaign in a long war.