The Republicans' genius compromise strategy

The Republicans' genius compromise strategy
By Ezra Klein
Copyright by The Washington¨Post
February 24, 2010; 12:35 PM ET
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/02/the_republicans_genius_comprom.html?wpisrc=nl_pmpolitics


David Leonhardt has a nice piece running through the basic dynamics of not only tomorrow's summit, but health-care reform from here on out. A lot of the piece is a discussion of compromises: What's blocking them, and what's possible yet.

But the difficulty with this discussion is that the GOP has accidentally hit upon a brilliant insight: The best way to guarantee substantive concessions is to refuse to compromise. Think about the plan that Barack Obama and the Democrats have been left with: It's not single payer. There's no public option. It doesn't cover all of the uninsured. It doesn't change the insurance of about 90 percent of the country. It doesn't add to the deficit. It pays for itself with difficult, unpopular and necessary reforms in entitlement programs. It includes a commission to make future reforms of Medicare and Medicaid both easier and less politically dangerous for Republicans.

In fact, the Senate health-care bill looks a lot like Wyden-Bennett -- but smaller, and more incremental, and more respectful of the status quo. That is to say, it looks like a more traditionally conservative incarnation of Wyden-Bennett. And it got that way not because Republicans compromised, but because they didn't compromise.

As Democrats came to realize that they couldn't get Republican votes for the bill by adding policies that Republican senators supported, they began trimming their ambitions in order to keep their caucus together. As they came to realize that they couldn't pass the legislation without their most conservative members, they gave their most conservative members a veto card over the bill's provisions. The result is legislation that's not only much more conservative and incremental than what past presidents have proposed, but is also much more conservative than the major health-care reforms -- namely Medicare and Medicaid -- that past presidents have passed. And Republicans got these substantive concessions not by making a deal, but by not making a deal.

So even putting the political incentive to kill this bill aside, why should Republicans who care about conservative policy think that coming to the table will make for policy they prefer? In a small sense, it's true that they could have gotten more tort reform if they were willing to vote for the bill. But in a larger sense, the bill would have been much more liberal if Democrats expected they could get Republican votes by adding tort reform to the legislation.