One of the last scenes in “Back to the Future III” finds Marty McFly (played by recent olympic hero Michael J. Fox) speeding on a runaway train, heading towards a cliff at breakneck speed. Marty and his scientist friend “the doc” are throwing special logs packed with jet fuel onto the fire with the hope that the train will make it to 88 miles per hour – sending it to a time when the bridge is complete – before they reach the end of the rails and crash into the ravine as a spectacular fireball.
I bring up this classic moment in one of the best trilogies in film to give you an idea of where health care reform is right now. Here’s an analogy key: the train is the health care bill, Obama is Marty McFly, and the cliff? The cliff would be the inevitable final vote in the congress. Obama has just tossed another jet fuel log into the fire, and the day of the make-or-break vote seems to be drawing ever nearer. There is one major difference here between the train in the movie and health reform: no matter how quickly the bill moves to the vote, it will never pass (nor will it time-travel to a date where it has a shot of doing so.)
The Obama administration and the House Democrats have ramped up their efforts to bring the proposed reform bill to vote by using a tactic called “reconciliation.” This would allow them to make some minor changes in the original bill (using proposals from the health summit last week) and pass it with a simple majority, instead of the now-impossible 60 votes required to circumvent a Republican filibuster. Obama is even including some ideas the conservatives have been harping on since day one, including increased tort reform efforts and better oversight on medicare and medicaid waste. Maybe the president can’t travel through time, but it sounds like he might just have shortened the gap enough to make the jump across.
Of course, nothing is ever easy, especially when you’re talking about the United States Congress. There is a major downside to this reconciliation tactic: because it entails taking an approved bill and adding minor components, certain unpopular measures in the original senate language cannot be changed. The most notable of these immutables is an unpopular leniency towards federally-reimbursed abortion coverage, which even some middle-of-the-road democrats (who voted in favor of the house bill last time) said would force them to oppose the bill, no matter what else is in it. Also, key Republicans are saying that Obama’s attempts to appease their party by including these last-minute conservative measures won’t be nearly enough to salvage what they have repeatedly called a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation.
So, is Obama losing his mind by throwing another log into the fire, pushing the bill to a certain fireworks display of a demise just a little faster? At this point, every day the bill languishes on the table is another day Obama’s approval ratings drop in the wake of this ugly debate. Perhaps Obama is wise to just want to get it over with as soon as possible and move on with other (equally-doomed) initiatives. Besides, when the train inevitably goes over that bridge and the American media is there to gawk at it, it should at least be extremely entertaining. [Reuters]
-Michael B. Sauter
Hidden somewhere in folds of the health bill passed today is a measure which requires most restaurants and fast food chains to prominently display the calorie content of their menu items. To date, Seattle, New York City, and the state of California have imposed similar laws, with mixed results. Now that we’re all going to be covered by the new health care policy, who cares what we eat? [AP]
