Quote of the Day: Peter Orszag on the health-care reform obstructionists in Congress

By Michael J.W. Stickings

On CNN earlier today, Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, said this:

We have to remember: there are some who are advocating delay simply because they don't have anything to put on the table. The typical Washington bureaucratic game of — "if you don't have a better alternative, just delay in the hope that that kills something" is partly what's playing out here.

He added: "[T]there are those who are advocating delay just as a desperation move to try to kill this."

He claimed that he wasn't referring specifically to Blue Dog Democrats or otherwise to "members of Congress and Senators who are actually actively participating in the debate," but it's pretty clear that he was targeting not anti-reform Republicans, those who are ideologically opposed to reform and who will never support any effort that includes a public option (and that challenges the supremacy of the market, or of the various private interests, such as the HMOs and Big Pharma, that dominate the market at the expense of adequate care for millions upon millions of Americans), but rather self-styled centrists in both parties, and even more directly those in his own -- the various centrist and conservative Democrats who in some cases are pandering to ignorance and in others are seeking merely to position themselves in the middle no matter what. These aren't the ideologues, they're the ego-driven opportunists. And they're the problem, not the right-wing extremists who are decidedly in the minority in Congress.

However, I would add that it's not just that they don't have a "better alternative," as Orszag suggested, but that they are, like their extremist right-wing colleagues in the GOP, fundamentally opposed to genuine reform, that is, to the wholesale reform of the system that even the cautious Obama seems to support, reform that would ensure universal, or at last near-universal coverage, of all Americans while/by taking the power away from profit-driven private interets and controlling the escalating costs that are sinking health care in America. They may want some compromise to be worked out, with themselves as the ultimate deciders of what passes and what doesn't -- and of what the new system will look like -- but any such compromise would be inadequate.

Furthermore, what they are doing is not so much laying the groundwork for a compromise but enabling the anti-reform elements that have lined up, within Congress and without, to try to defeat any reform initiative that comes forward, bipartisan or not. In other words, if they get what they want, the reform bill won't nearly be enough. And if they don't, their current opposition to Democratic reform efforts will only help the Republicans in their ongoing efforts to defeat whatever bill does end up coming forward.

And therein lies the key question: Would the Democrats among these centrists prefer a Democratic bill with elements they oppose, such as a robust public option, or Republican opposition to reform altogether?

I suspect it's the latter. Whatever the motivation, they'll delay and delay and delay, until reform is finally killed, perhaps, or until Obama and the Democrats are able to pass a robust bill in spite of their opposition. Perhaps some of them will come around, perhaps some of them will ultimately do what is right, and what their country needs, but, given their appalling me-first opportunism, I'm hardly optimistic.