'SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING HERE'

15 Years Later, America Tries For Health Reform Again

The Senate HELP Committee Releases (Most of) Its Health Reform Bill

This is it.This is what health reform looks like. Embedded in that link is actual legislative language. More than 600 pages of it, in fact. It's the preliminary first draft of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee's bill (there are still some holes that will be filled in Friday or Monday). It's the work of Chris Dodd, but more properly understood, the product of his mentor, Ted Kennedy (and his staff), who has been grinding away at this issue for decades. The dream, it turns out, will never die: it will just be modified and re-released into each new Congress.
In the lower chamber, the Ways and Means Committee has released an outline of their coming health reform bill. And the Senate Finance Committee, of course, is looking to unveil its bill next week.
It's worth taking a step back for a second to consider the weight of the moment. It's been 15 years since Congress last tried, and failed, to reform the American health care system. Fifteen years in which everything has gotten worse. In which health care costs have risen and insurance coverage has contracted. In which individuals have lost their protection and businesses have lost their competitiveness.
It's easy, in the daily jockeying between committees and factions and caucuses, to forget that something pretty big is happening here: Congress is trying to solve, or at least improve, one of the most severe and enduring public policy problems confronting the country. A problem that has resisted the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, but is pressing enough that for all its difficulty, it has never dropped from the agenda.
And here we are again. The bills are being written. The committees are holding their mark-ups. The president is laying down his markers. The industry is calling for consideration. It's worth remembering that the history of this issue is filled with moments of false optimism and dashed hopes. And maybe this time will be no different. Maybe we'll all be picking through the wreckage of the strategy and showing why it was really quite inevitable that health reform failed.
Or, maybe not.
(Photo credit: Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post Photo LinkHere