Enough about bipartisanship — Give us healthcare reform

Chris Bowers at OpenLeft reminds us that bipartisanship is not about doing what’s right, but about doing what makes sense politically:

Actually, the goal of health care legislation is to reduce the cost of health care and increase access to health care. By contrast, the goal of bipartisanship is to get Democrats and Republicans to agree with each other. Those are different goals with no inherent connections.

Given the numbers — i.e., that the Democrats have significant majorities in both houses — you’d think they could dispense with this false comity. Nope. Their commitment to it has political purpose:

The purpose of bipartisanship is so that, in the event that you pass legislation that is unpopular and / or does not end up working, then it is impossible to take all of the blame for it.

In some ways, this makes the Republicans seem more principled (they aren’t, by any stretch of the imagination) — they had no interest in bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

One thought on “Enough about bipartisanship — Give us healthcare reform”

  1. I am not optimistic that anything significant will be done. Too many politicians have been bought off by the insurance and drug company behemoths. And too many Americans have been scared and stupefied by the right wing propaganda machine. We need one payer NOW but I guess I would settle for an actual, non-watered down, non-phoney baloney public option. If all we get is a sliced and diced public option then we will be worse off than we are now. And things are very bad now and will only get worse unless the Democrats get a spine, which isn't likely. The GOP is hopeless and they are always against anything that helps ordinary Americans. The GOP has massive empathy for the rich, the powerful, the CEO class and the medical-industrial complex.Slightly off topic but isn't it interesting that the latest shooters and assassins (of the ObGyn doctor and the Holocaust Museum security guard) are anti-government, anti-tax and the museum shooter also belongs to the freaks who believe that Obama was born in Kenya. These anti-tax, anti-government wackos are dangerous and a menace to this country. They are domestic terrorists.

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