In the first two years of the Obama administration, “Read the bill!” was an effective anti-Obamacare rallying cry. Republican congressmen, as well as conservative and Tea Party activists, demanded that legislation weighing in at more than 2,000 pages and affecting one-sixth of the economy be carefully considered by Congress and openly debated before the American people. As the House prepared to vote on the final version of the bill in March 2010, Republican minority leader John Boehner bellowed on the House floor: “Have you read the bill? . . . Hell no, you haven’t!”
As Senate Republicans prepare to rush to a vote on their own bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare, they’ve come under criticism for doing exactly what they decried in 2009 and 2010: hurrying toward a vote on a bill that hasn’t been exposed to the light for long enough to allow an informed debate, a bill that most likely is not really understood by the people voting on it. It’s hard to say the criticism isn’t warranted.
True, claims that Republicans have been hiding a “secret health care bill” are exaggerated: There was no hidden bill floating around Congress. There was only an unfinished draft being written by aides to Senate leadership. But the ability of even the best staffers to think through all the consequences of policy-making in such a complex area is limited. Didn’t Republicans once claim to have read a bit of Friedrich Hayek?
And it’s also true that the GOP bill will be much shorter than Obamacare (the Senate discussion draft released June 22 was just 142 pages), so it will literally take less time to read. But “Read the bill!” was meant to be taken both literally and seriously: Legislators need not only to read it; they should at least come close to being able to understand, explain, debate, and justify it. And that is why it’s impossible to defend the Republican plan of voting on the bill days—not weeks—after the text is released to the Senate and the public.
Don’t take our word for it. Just listen to what a few Republican senators have had to say about the process. Mike Lee of Utah, one of the 13 senators who participated in the Senate GOP health care working group set up by leadership, said this last week: “Even though we thought we were going to be in charge of writing a bill within this working group, it’s not being written by us. It’s apparently being written by a small handful of staffers for members of the Republican leadership in the Senate. So if you’re frustrated by the lack of transparency in this process, I share your frustration. I share it wholeheartedly.”
As do many of his colleagues. “We used to complain like hell when the Democrats ran the Affordable Care Act—now we’re doing the same thing,” John McCain of Arizona told reporters.
“I just find it very hard to conceive that I’ll be able to gather all the information I need to justify a yes vote,” Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson told Politico.
“Pelosi said, ‘We’ve got to pass it to find out what’s in it.’ Well, we don’t want the Republicans to pass a bill like that,” Iowa’s Chuck Grassley told The Weekly Standard. Asked how much time they should have to review the bill, Grassley said: “More than [Harry] Reid gave us.”
If Republicans don’t want to be subject to the charge of being less open and deliberative than Harry Reid in 2009, they should take weeks, not days, to read and debate the health care bill. Senate Democrats held hearings on different versions of their bill in the summer of 2009, but it wasn’t until after Thanksgiving break that a bill hit the Senate floor. On Saturday, December 19, Harry Reid unveiled the final product with a 383-page manager’s amendment, and the Senate passed that bill 60-39 just a few days later on the morning of December 24.
Obamacare was a bad bill passed under a bad process and has made for bad law. Insurers are abandoning the market in many states, and premiums have skyrocketed for individuals and families with nowhere else to turn. Because of both parliamentary rules and political calculations, Republicans are not fully repealing and replacing this bad law. But even a bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare will significantly affect millions of Americans, and legislators ought to take their time and get it right. Republican legislators should remember this isn’t primarily about passing anything just to say they kept their promises, or clearing the decks to move on to something more attractive. They should remember they’ll be judged on the real world consequences of this legislation—and at this point, we think it’s fair to say, they have very little grasp of what those will be.
The honesty of some Senate Republicans about the lack of transparency surrounding their health care bill is refreshing. They should turn their commentary into action, and refuse to go along with a vote next week.
They should demand that they, and everyone else, have time to read and debate the bill.
