Campaigns have consequences
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried his best Wednesday to soften some of the toughest talk of the day before on health care – meeting with Republicans in hopes of showing bipartisanship on the issue isn’t dead.
But taxing health benefits to pay for an overhaul? That’s still dead, Democratic leaders made clear again Wednesday.
And another thing that’s increasingly in doubt: any hopes of getting a health reform bill voted out of the Senate by August, a byproduct of the leadership’s decision to lay down the law on finding a new way to pay for it.
Reid’s move blows a gigantic hole in efforts to find $1 trillion to pay for health reform – and set off a scramble Wednesday to come up with a replacement for the suddenly missing $320 billion over 10 years.
And if Democrats thought taxing health benefits was unpopular, the second-least-popular idea might be a tough sell, too – a straight-up income tax hike on people making more than $250,000 a year. That idea gained new currency in the Senate and the House Wednesday in part because it would not divide the Democratic base as much as taxing health benefits, which could hit the middle class, and unions strongly oppose it.
We know that “elections have consequences” but we’re far less willing to acknowledge that campaigns have consequences too. Obama’s consistent attacks on John McCain’s proposal to lift the deduction on health benefits were staggeringly effective, so much so that if recent polling is any guide, the vast majority of Americans are dead set against any proposal to tax their benefits, hence the party leadership’s refusal to even entertain the idea. Indeed, it’s fair to say that President Obama has boxed himself in with regards to paying for health care reform; the obvious mechanisms (a broad-based tax of some sort) are politically untenable, and the remaining solutions – taxing the rich, again – aren’t even really solutions, they’re band aids.
