Late to the Dance
Rep. Roy Blunt is promising to release something approximating a plan tomorrow for reforming the nation's health care system. Blunt's health care task force has been working since February, and has been a miserable failure to date.
Conservative advocates and fellow Republicans have been lamenting the lack of leadership from Blunt for months. In mid April, Blunt promised to release a solid plan within a few weeks. And then the deadline was pushed back to Memorial Day. And now it's mid-June.
Here are just a few of published mumblings about Blunt's inability to bring his own people together and draft an alternative plan.
- "The void on the right has been...vast," wrote the Politico in April.
- When Republicans "look into their own camp" for an alternative, "they get nervous," wrote the Politico in April.
- Members are "very concerned" about the lack of a House alternative, said a GOP aide in early June.
- "We have to have an alternative. ... I will tell you, I don't think there is a Republican alternative," said GOP Senate candidate Rob Portman (Ohio), last month
- “They [House GOP leaders] are virtually useless," said Heartland Institute health expert Greg Scandlen. In fact, Scandlen claimed that while House leaders "are often criticized for being too ideological, they have displayed no ideology on health care, and not even much real interest."
The lack of substantive movement from Blunt and House Republicans is nothing new. In fact, Blunt admitted in May that "no more than two dozen" GOP House members were engaged on the health care issue before the beginning of the year. And incredibly, Blunt asked grassroots advocates to stay out of the entire debate last week. If reform were a real priority, they would have started long ago, when they were in power.
Hopefully, Blunt's health care "plan" has more details that the GOP leadership's embarrassing "budget," to which Blunt was a key signatory. That "budget," you may recall, actually lacked numbers.
It's also worth noting that yesterday, Blunt and Minority Leader John Boehner claimed to have the House GOP "united behind better solutions". But today, a group of moderate Republicans published their own rival proposal, unsatisfied with the results of Blunt's work with right-wing ideologues.
