Beitzel: Reconciliation the greatest hope for resolving health care hoopla

Get ready to choke on it, GOP, because health care reform is coming! You say it’s being… Get ready to choke on it, GOP, because health care reform is coming! You say it’s being “rammed down the throats” of Americans, but the reconciliation tactic being used is more like massaging a cat’s throat to get the pill down.

Reconciliation is a mundane procedure that ties legislation to budgetary impact. It has the ability to bypass the super majority of 60 votes needed in the Senate to break a filibuster.

If you’re not face down on the page by now, here’s why the Democrats need to use it.

The Census Bureau estimated that there were 46 million uninsured Americans in 2008. In the past two years that number has ballooned as high as 52 million by some estimates, probably because of skyrocketing insurance rates and unemployment. Pink slips end insurance coverage and suddenly that adult-onset diabetes becomes a pre-existing condition. Insurance monopolies extort the rabble. Anthem Blue Cross raised its rates by 39 percent because $500 million in profits is apparently peasant money. The proposed health care bill — including the reconciliation bill — would help about 30 million Americans get coverage, make insurance more affordable, end pre-existing condition discrimination, increase competition in the marketplace, make insurance plans portable from job to job and actually decrease the national deficit.

Yet Republicans have been stubborn. President Obama has tried negotiating with them on health care, but if you listen to Rush Limbaugh, you’d think this bill reanimates Stalin’s corpse to euthanize senior citizens.

What more can Obama do? He tried compromise. He held a summit to discuss options. He met with Republicans on television and in private. He dropped the public option. He removed the sweetheart deals. He added tort reform, tax breaks, small-business incentives and deficit reduction. Yet he will get no Republican votes. Sen. Lindsey Graham said reconciliation — a Senate creation — will destroy the Senate. What do you want from us, Lindsey? You want nothing, that’s what you want!

Reconciliation is the only way to get this done. Republicans want Congress to look stagnant because it makes the majority party look weak and ineffectual. Democrats look bad when progress is stymied because they’re apparently just sitting around holding tickle festivals.

Now the Republicans say, “The American public wants to start over.” When? When Republicans eventually get back the majority? They were in power from 1996-2006. Health care barely got a mention, but Republicans found time to use reconciliation on a host of other bills.

Republicans have actually used reconciliation almost twice as much as Democrats — 14 to 8 according to PolitiFact. They used it for the welfare reform bill in 1996, for which, by the way, House Minority Leader John “Do I Kind of Remind You of Snooki?” Boehner voted. Would Republicans say that he “jammed through” welfare reform, as he says about Obama and health care?

Republicans again used reconciliation in 2001 and 2003 to pass the famous Bush tax cuts. The 2003 cuts passed on a 51-50 vote, with Darth Cheney rising from his crypt to break the tie. And at $2.5 trillion, those tax cuts were more than twice as costly as the House health care proposal, according to a study by the Citizens for Tax Justice. Conservatives can’t say a bill of this magnitude has never gone through on reconciliation before.

The whole thing reeks of intellectual dishonesty.

Republicans hemmed and hawed and fed the public lies — death panels, illegal immigrant coverage, etc. — until they plowed enough people into believing the bill was a death sentence. That’s why polls show a majority of Americans hating “the bill” but loving all of its individual components. They’ve been fleeced by conservative opinion-makers.

If the Republicans had any dignity or belief in their own rhetoric, they’d explain the details of the bill in town halls. They’d talk about the components, which are wildly popular. They’d ask for ideas on improving it, because the bill isn’t near perfect.

Instead, they just trot out the 2,400-page document. They squeal and shriek about socialism. They brought out their caricaturized version of the Founders, regurgitating their CliffsNotes understanding of the Constitution.

The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. Neither is reconciliation. They’re both parliamentary parlor tricks — neither of which voters will care about in November — and when Democrats are in the minority, they’ll rage with the fury of hell to stop Republican reconciliation bills.

The heart of either argument is majority versus minority rights.

Conservatives say this reconciliation bill tramples all over the rights of the minority. It does trample all over Republicans, but they’re not the minority here. The minority is 52 million uninsured Americans. They can’t afford health care, so they certainly can’t afford to lobby with the ferocity of pharmaceutical and insurance corporations.

That’s the minority that needs to be protected here, and this legislation starts doing that.

E-mail Dave your attack ads at drb34@pitt.edu.

Click here to read Steve Kaszycki’s counterpoint to this column.