Where good ideas go to die

Why has Washington, DC increasingly become the place where good ideas go to die?

On May 12, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on health care reform. There was a long table of 13 experts, and a vast majority agreed that ending the tax exemption on employer-provided health benefits should be part of a reform package.

They gave the reasons that experts — on right or left — always give for supporting this idea. The exemption is a giant subsidy to the affluent. It drives up health care costs by encouraging luxurious plans and by separating people from the consequences of their decisions. Furthermore, repealing the exemption could raise hundreds of billions of dollars, which could be used to expand coverage to the uninsured.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden piped up and noted that he and Republican Senator Robert Bennett have a plan that repeals the exemption and provides universal coverage. The Wyden-Bennett bill has 14 bipartisan co-sponsors and the Congressional Budget Office has found that it would be revenue-neutral.

The Finance Committee’s chairman, Senator Max Baucus, looked exasperated. With that haughty and peremptory manner that they teach in Committee Chairman School, he told Wyden and the world that this idea was not going to happen.

In the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, senators don’t run things. Chairmen and their staffs run things.

That is David Brooks; read the whole thing here.

Lessons:

1. The big battle over health care is now dead. The vast machinery of politics and media will trudge on for months, but essentially this is over. History will look back at the $1.6 Trillion CBO score and recognize it as the turning point. Why did it happen?

2. President Obama made the same vague mistake that President Bush made. Rather than specify a solid framework for legislation (on immigration, on Social Security, take your pick), the new way to kill your own agenda is to talk up general principles and leave Congress to craft actual legislation. Without clear leadership (and not just behind the scenes), the modern result is acrimony. Inside the beltway, the Clinton health care experience remains a searing lesson in the "wrong way" -- overly strong presidential specificity. But the lesson has been overlearned. What the Clintons did wrong was to hijack the legislative process with a massive semi-secret commission. That wasn't leadership. Somewhere between being a control freak and a mere rhetorician is the golden mean of presidential leadership.

3. It's not too late. Despite lesson #1 above, Obama and key Senators could skip the whole kabuki dance of failure. Announce the old approach dead. Admit you lost, and explain why. And then restart by working with a new coalition, a truly bipartisan one this time (hint Wyden-Bennett). It's been done before. Tax reform in 1986 died and was reborn many times, as recounted in The Showdown at Gucci Gulch.

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