President Obama has presented the idea of hosting a televised bipartisan meeting on health care on February 25. The idea is to jumpstart stalled health care legislation in Congress.
But why is that necessarily a good idea?
After all, what was passed in both the House and Senate made for bad policy, bad economics, and according to the polls, bad politics. Why should this effort be in anyway restarted?
According to the February 9 New York Times, House Republican Minority Leader John Boehner (OH) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) sent a letter to the President on Monday noting that “members of their party would be ‘reluctant to participate’ in the meeting with Obama if the bills passed by the House and the Senate were the starting point. The American people have ‘soundly rejected’ those bills, they said.”
And they are correct.
Bipartisan meetings in our nation’s capital often do not turn out well for the taxpayers, and/or can serve as only means for trying to score political points. Is this a serious attempt to debate and discuss health care issues, or is it just an effort to regain political ground for costly, misguided big government health care policies?
Raymond J. Keating
Chief Economist
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
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