HUFFINGTON 09.09.12
that in ‘94, Clinton didn’t spend
a lot of time dealing with all the
stakeholders, and they all came
out against it. Because they didn’t
feel brought into the process,”
explained a top administration
official shortly after health care
passed, who spoke on condition
of anonymity because he wasn’t
authorized to discuss the deliberations. “So we brought them all in.”
At first, openness meant hosting public forums where groups
ranging from the unions to private
insurance companies could voice
their visions for reform, from the
need for preventative services to
the pitfalls of fee-for-service care.
Behind the scenes, however, the
White House went out of its way
to ensure that any group or lawmaker with relevance to the bill
wasn’t alienated by the negotiations. According to Democratic
officials close to the situation, the
administration decided not to enlist its massive email list to fight
for the public option — a government agency to provide insurance
coverage — because they worried
that the measure would inevitably be traded away, disappointing
those who fought for it.
“He was husbanding them for
the political battles to come instead of releasing them to go nuts,”
said a former top Senate leadership
THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
transactional politics.
The decision to tackle health
care reform itself was born from
an un-inspirational premise. While
Obama had talked frequently during the campaign about the moral
obligation to expand access to the
uninsured, it was basic accounting that convinced him to move
forward in the spring of 2009.
Rising health care costs are one
of the biggest drivers of the national debt, and curbing the rate of
growth was not just a policy objectiv e, but a governing necessity.
“He was persuaded to do health
care, I believe, by Peter Orszag
[the budget director], not Ted
Kennedy [health care reform’s
righteous champion],” explained
one top ally in the fall of 2010,
who requested anonymity in order
to speak frankly.
Having reached this conclusion,
Obama and his advisers made a set
of strategic decisions that would
define the subsequent health care
reform process. The first was that
everything had to be paid for.
There was little appetite for more
deficit spending after the Troubled
Asset Relief Program, the stimulus
and the auto bailout. The second
was to grant Congress a huge say
over the legislative process.
“There was a view — and I don’t
know how accurate the view is —