The Health Care See-Saw
One way to think about the health care debate as it plays out in congress is in terms of vote-buying. The closer from passage a health overhaul gets, the more valuable everyone’s votes become, and the more reasonable it becomes for members to start raising all sorts of objections to try to maximize their share of the surplus. But anytime the prospects for reform start looking bleak, there’s a bubble in vote prices that collapses. The 218th House vote is very valuable, but the 112th is worthless. That creates incentives for members to make their asks cheaper and then things move forward.
A consequence of this is that the metaphor of “momentum” is very misleading—it’s more like a pendulum. Which I think is borne out by what you see on the ground. Something like the House passing a version of reform doesn’t, via momentum, eliminate objections in the senate. Rather, it leads to an intensification of intra-caucus animosity. What relaxes tensions is the prospect of failure.
It’s not clear to me if the final settling place of this dynamic is passage or failure, but I think it points toward passage. Another point is that Republicans, by taking themselves out of the game, are ceding a huge amount of bargaining power to the Democrats. If Republican members were willing to be more creative and buck their leadership, they could gain a ton for themselves.
13 Responses to “The Health Care See-Saw”
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November 10th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Republicans, by taking themselves out of the game, are ceding a huge amount of bargaining power to the Democrats. If Republican members were willing to be more creative and buck their leadership, they could gain a ton for themselves.
It’s incredible to me to watch this, especially the Californians. Their state is in total catastrophe. If Mary Bono got 5 of her colleagues together, she could get anything for her district right now. I’m sure there’s a loan forgiveness program they’d design just for the inland empire. All I can figure is it’s a terror of primaries. The lunatics really have taken over the party.
Republicans are really setting themselves up as a party that doesn’t govern–just a rump majority full of people who work for the government. At this point, being a Republican representative is like a no-show job. You go into the office occasionally, do something that’s totally pointless with your friends and fellow-travelers, and then go back home to be equally pointless.
Yet another reason we need to get rid of the filibuster. We need to hold majority parties accountable for DOING things. This would be far more effective than a term limits law in ensuring that people who are sent to Washington actually do the things their constituents elected them to do.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Um, Matt, I’m not quite sure how you arrive at the idea that the GOP has ceded “a huge amount of bargaining power to the Democrats.” The goalposts have only moved further and further to the right since this reform effort commenced. it seems to me that “by taking themselves out of the game” the GOP has guaranteed a Republican-friendly piece of legislation beyond their wildest dreams. And this assumes a best-case scenario: a passage of a bill with no meaningful public option and some variation of Stupak language.
I still think there’s a significant chance the legislation will collapse altogether, despite all the glib “we’ve never been this close!” posts we’ve read from you and Lil’ Ezra.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
The goalposts have been moving to the right because to pass you need to get the most conservative Democrats on board. But there’s nothing in either the House or Senate bills that will help Republicans get re-elected. It’s good for Republicans only from an ideological point of view.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Scott P, In case you haven’t noticed, but Republicans care more about achieving their ideological goals than they do about winning elections. That’s probably the biggest reason they are more successful than Democrats over the long term. Democrats want to win and then do nothing with their victories. Republicans just want to institute their ideology, and will seek to do that regardless of any other circumstances.
Given the two party nature of this country, neither party can actually die out by moving too far to the left or the right. One will only die out if they both become so centrist that no solution to a national crisis can occur. The Whigs are gone because, by 1860, there was only room for one pro-slavery party. If Democrats hadn’t severely changed their ways in 1932, only one of the current parties would likely exist.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
The goalposts have only moved further and further to the right since this reform effort commenced.
Actually the goalposts started firmly to the right thanks to Obama’s secret deals with lobbyists.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Confessions of an ObamaCare Backer: A liberal explains the political calculus.
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy:
So what does it all add up to? The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment to help provide health coverage for the vast majority of its citizens. I support this commitment, and I think the federal government’s spending priorities should be altered to make it happen. But let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t.
Many Democratic insiders know all this, or most of it. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it (and many other Administrations before that) is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind. At some point in the future, the fiscal consequences of the reform will have to be dealt with in a more meaningful way, but by then the principle of (near) universal coverage will be well established. Even a twenty-first-century Ronald Reagan will have great difficult overturning it.
That takes me back to where I began. Both in terms of the political calculus of the Democratic Party, and in terms of making the United States a more equitable society, expanding health-care coverage now and worrying later about its long-term consequences is an eminently defensible strategy. Putting on my amateur historian’s cap, I might even claim that some subterfuge is historically necessary to get great reforms enacted. But as an economics reporter and commentator, I feel obliged to put on my green eyeshade and count the dollars.
November 10th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Tomorrow, Roader will find out the GOP wants to cut taxes because it actually wants to cut Medicare and privatize Social Security!
November 10th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
The Whigs are gone because, by 1860, there was only room for one pro-slavery party.
No, the Whig Party disintegrated because they couldn’t resolve the issue of whether to allow slavery in the territories, and after the 1852 election the anti-slavery faction went on to eventually become part of the Republican Party. Lincoln himself was a Whig member of Congress and fairly representative of the Republican Party of 1860, which was one reason why he won the Republican nomination for President in Chicago.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Not really. By taking themselves out of the negotiations, the Republicans essentially for the Democrats to negotiate with the most conservative Democrats, which is important as this implies maximum leverage. An alternate scenario, in which the GOP negotiates with the Democrats, could very, very quickly degenerate into some sort of cross-partisan alliance of blue-district and blue-state members, in which case the conservative leverage would be significantly weaker.
Right now they are negotiating with people whose local tendency is weighed against comprehensive reform. If the GOP were to join in, such people could be replaced with people whose local, constituency tendency is for reform, such as the Maine senators and blue-district Congressmen.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I think Matt’s actually wrong about the Senate in this instance. We passed a point of no return, either in August or once AHIP released their bullshit study. Everybody pretty much agrees that if there’s no bill, there will be no Democrats next year.
We’ve reached a saturation, too; health care and the economy are going to be the only 2 things on voters’ minds next year. At this point, it’s understood that reconciliation would be a matter of survival, not a matter of ideological rigidity.
So Landrieu, Lieberman, and Nelson can’t stop the bill. They can only hope to contain it.
In fact, a filibuster by any of them would result in a much more liberal bill going through reconciliation.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I think MY’s right about this dynamic. It’s fun to call it momentum, because that’s a word that sounds good to politicians and the media. But really, things just kinda seem to seesaw their way to passage. Somebody doesn’t like something so it seesaws right, then concessions are made and it seesaws back.
As well, Republicans here HAVE taken themselves out of the game, and we’re left with making concessions to conservative Democrats that look like Republicans. Snowe got quite a bit on the stimulus bill, and if she’s allowed to get in on health care, she’ll get to take her arbitrary chainsaw to it too.
November 10th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Re: Republicans care more about achieving their ideological goals than they do about winning elections.
I would say it’s the other way around: they care only about winning elections. Once in power they quickly forget their promises to all save the highest bidders (and even then they usually match an ugly botch of things). Recall what happened to the Contract With America.
November 10th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
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