COMMENTARY: Vote On Health Care Expected

If everything stays on track, the U.S. Senate will cast another historic vote tomorrow.

The Christmas Eve vote, necessitated by Senate rules, will be to advance a Senate bill for national health care reform.

Whether it passes depends on whether a coalition of 58 Democrats and two independents holds together to support a measure that clearly satisfies no one completely.

It seems as if everyone can find something to hate in the bill.

But these 60 senators have found enough to like to pledge support for it. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., who faces re-election next year, was slow to agree; but she and Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., are among the slim majority needed to keep the bill moving.

It will be 2010 before the differences in the House and Senate bills can be resolved - if they can be resolved.

Nevertheless, this vote on Thursday, like an earlier procedural vote on Monday, is historic because other efforts to reform health care, reaching back seven administrations, have all failed.

This year’s actions won’t mean much either, however, unless the House and Senate get together and give President Barack Obama a bill to sign, preferably early next year.

The 60 votes in the Senate have been so hard to secure that the expectation is that the final bill will have to look less like what the House passed than the Senate version, which was pushed so strongly by Sen. Harry Reid, the Democratic majorityleader from Nevada.

In coming to this vote, the nation’s lawmakers have demonstrated the best and the worst of the legislative process.

The best is the involvement of so many minds, representing such different states, as they’ve wrestled the broader details of this legislation. That’s what will ultimately produce the big decisions - the ones to extend health care to Americans who have been uninsured or underinsured, insurance protections for people with pre-existing conditions and many more sweeping changes that will be welcomed by Americans of all political stripes.

The worst of the process includes the bartering that has little to do with the substance of the legislation and more to do with a what’s-in-it-for-me attitude as members trade votes for special treatment for themselves, their states or districts.

Also aggravating, but a timeworn part of the process, are the procedural delays used in this instance to force oddly timed votes - one cast, as Republicans repeatedly said, “in the dead of night” and the other scheduledlate on Christmas Eve. Had this been less divisive legislation, the Republican party leadership would have allowed waiver of the requirements that forced this timing. Holding out hope that one of those 60 Senate votes might be changed, thus killing the bill, they’ve relentlessly demanded their time even as they’ve criticized Democrats for the timetable.

And then there’s the incessant fear-mongering, designed as much to diminish public support for change as to raise any real concern about the legislation.

As the vote approaches, it is obvious and unfortunate that this hugely important legislation will apparently be decided strictly along partisan lines. And those votes will be based on a relative few issues, despite the fact that there has been a strong bipartisan influence on the overall legislation.

Remember, members of both parties, and the few independent lawmakers, have leaned on their respective staffs, on their colleagues and constituents and on lobbyists to help them interpret the legislation as it has made its way through different committees and now the separate chambers.

If somehow forced to admit it, every one of these people would have to say they like more than they dislike about the legislation.

It’s just that what they dislike are deal-breakers for them.

Like it or not, that’s the process.

It may - or may not - finally result in meaningful health reform.

BRENDA BLAGG IS A COLUMNIST FOR NORTHWEST ARKANSAS NEWSPAPERS.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 12/23/2009

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