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Now this is interesting. I said earlier that Senator Rockefeller's comments in the Hill health care story didn't scan right to me. The reporter quoted Rockefeller saying “We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” and suggested this showed widespread reluctance to attack health reform on the Hill. But that didn't track with my understanding of Rockefeller's position. So I called his office, and got a call back from Steven Broderick, Rockefeller's press secretary. Here's what he said:
It's not that we shouldn't do health care, but we need to be realistic that we're broke. So the Senator's position is let's take the priorities and take them out of PAYGO and take it off budget and get it done. Let's do it that way. Same goes for climate change. If anything, we've shown if we want to get something done, we'll find the money to do it. But we shouldn't be tying our hands with budget rules. Rockefeller is unbelievably passionate about health care and if it were up to him he'd take it out of PAYGO and do what needs to be done.So the actual position is rather the opposite of how it was presented in the Hill article. Rockefeller isn't saying we can't pay, so we shouldn't try. He's saying, essentially, money shouldn't be the object here. We shouldn't let budget mismanagement tie our hands on major priorities. Rather, take them out of the normal budget process where you have to balance new programs with cuts in other spending, get the major priorities done, and then set about fixing our fiscal house. It's a radical argument, to be sure, but it's radical in the direction of achieving health reform, not in the direction of impeding it.
