Opinion: End This Reckless Strategy on Health Care

(March 19) -- Lawmakers in Washington have debated the Democratic plan for health care for more than a year now, and the verdict of the American people is in: In town halls, elections and survey after survey, Americans have made it clear that a bill which raises taxes and premiums, slashes Medicare, expands the cost and reach of government, and forces taxpayers to pay for abortions is not reform.

Unfortunately, Democratic leaders in Congress have decided to ignore these concerns. They're plowing ahead in a mad scramble to scratch together just enough votes to squeeze this deeply unpopular bill through Congress and over the objections of their constituents. And the more resistance they've met, the more unsavory their methods have become. It's become vicious cycle.

We watched last summer as Democratic leaders forced their partisan health care bill through the various committees. We watched as they tried to sell it to the public as something other than what it was. We watched as they wrote the final bill behind closed doors, then wheeled and dealed to get the last few votes they needed to push it through both chambers on a party-line vote.

We saw the Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Gator Aid, and all the other special deals that were promised to a handful of senators as a way of securing their votes. But as ugly as all this was -- as distasteful as all these deals have been -- they were child's play compared to the scheme that Democrats cooked up this week to get this bill over to the White House for a signature.

House members were understandably reluctant to vote for a bill that contained all these unsavory sweetheart deals, so they came up with an even more unsavory deal to approve it.

Their plan is this: to use an obscure parliamentary gimmick that would allow them to approve the Senate bill without actually voting on it. This so-called "deem and pass" strategy, endorsed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is the ultimate backroom deal. It's a way for lawmakers who don't have the courage to vote for this bill to get it through Congress without their fingerprints on it.

This "Scheme and Deem" approach has never been tried on a bill of this scope, and the American people are rightly outraged by it. If lawmakers are willing to reshape one-sixth of the economy and our entire health care system along with it, they ought to be able to stand up and say so with their votes. More to the point, if this were legislation to be proud of, lawmakers wouldn't be afraid to vote for it.

Anyone who believes they can send this bill to the president without being tarred by it is delusional. Lawmakers may think this strategy gives them an out. In reality, it guarantees that they will forever be remembered for trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, by claiming not to vote for something they did. This will be a career-defining and a Congress-defining vote that Americans won't forget.

Fortunately, it's not too late to end this reckless whatever-it-takes strategy on health care. The recent health care summit at the White House highlighted several commonsense ideas that both parties could rally around as a way of lowering health care costs. After all, wasn't that the original goal of reform: to lower health care costs? Somewhere along the way that goal seems to have been lost.

Republicans will continue to remind Democratic leaders of what the American people have been telling us for months: get back to the basics and focus on cost. We will continue to press Democratic leaders to scrap their massive health care spending bill and embrace commonsense ideas instead -- to start over and work together on a bill that Americans can embrace, and that lawmakers can be proud of.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is the Senate Republican leader.