The Health Care Summit Trap

With the election of Scott Brown to the Senate, and Obama’s increasingly dismal poll ratings, and the debacle poll ratings for numerous Democrats in the Senate and House in the upcoming fall election, President Obama has indicated that he may be willing to compromise on the proposed health bill stalled in the Congress. He has invited Republicans to a televised “summit” on February 25 at Blair House.

I am for health care reform, just not Obama’s health care reform. That is the message of the American public as evidenced by the Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts special elections. Yet while Americans are screaming for jobs, Obama and his homeys continue to harp on the health care issue largely stalled by his own party. If he couldn’t pass it with his majority in the House and super-majority in the Senate…what’s a Republican to do? But they persist, nonetheless.

There is big part of me that hopes a summit meeting such as this would succeed. Until you have been in the position of losing your health care and not able to buy it, you have no idea how important that pre-existing condition provision is. I have been there and it is scary. But that massive ideologically based 2000 plus page reform bill isn’t the answer, and Obama’s continual focus on it rather than moving to the jobs issue gives me concern.

I suspect this is a setup. This past year, I have witnessed some of the most rotten, base, and slimy political maneuvering and payoffs with this Obama group I have seen in all the years I have been following politics. I have now been conditioned to expect the worse, and I am rarely disappointed. This is a scummy bunch who will stoop to anything to get 100% of what they want 100% of the time. They keep going for broke, and keep coming up empty. Their learning curve is a tad skewed. Maybe it is because they are from Chicago, or maybe it is because they are hard ideologues incapable of viewing the world from any perspective other than their own.

At any rate, the administration seems incapable of understanding that the problem isn’t how the message has been delivered. Americans understand the message as well as the despicable process they used to achieve it. Americans don’t like the process. Americans don’t like the message.

There are those who believe this health care summit is being designed to give Obama cover. The real purpose is to find a way to blame Republicans, who had little to no input on the health care bill, for its failure; then to use that blame to pass large parts of it through the reconciliation process contrary to American wishes.

I think they are on the money. But I think it will fail. Obama has placed himself into a cocoon of progressive advisors and is oblivious to just how unpopular the current health care monstrosity is. I don’t believe sufficient members of the House or Senate would try this given the toxic political landscape it would create for them.

That is a lesson Obama will have to learn; that is if he is capable of learning. Ehhhhh!