Today, the White House unveils the president's health-care proposal in preparation for this week's big summit. Here is a summary [PDF] for your reading pleasure.
This is the most detailed health-care vision that the president has endorsed thus far, reflecting a hope that associating this bill with the president rather than the less-popular Congress will make it more palatable to the public. It mainly reflects the pre-Scott Brown compromise between the Senate and the House but includes a few changes, including new provisions to stop sudden, large insurance rate increases that Jon Cohn broke down last night. Politically, note that the White House is reframing health insurance subsidies as "the largest middle class tax cut for health care in history." Now the subsidies are tax credits, with the same effect of making universal coverage work within a private health-care system. The public option remains in limbo: The administration apparently supports the popular policy but didn't include it in this proposal despite its regathering momentum in the Senate.
The larger focus this morning will be on procedure, however. Unlike Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the White House didn't call for reconciliation directly, instead saying that they are open to all procedures and that this legislation deserves an "up or down vote," which is the same rhetoric Republicans once deployed to defuse filibusters.
This effort strikes me as the right kind of stage-setting for what has become an outreach effort directed at a single audience: Congressional Democrats. Right now, the Democratic Party has health-care reform in its grasp, and having already paid most of the price for reform, it ought to seize its moment. Republicans, meanwhile, will be unhappy that the president did not scrap the entire plan to start over from scratch. Will they still come to the summit? I think they will, but they'll come out complaining.
-- Tim Fernholz
