Politicians Call for Common Ground on Health Insurance Reform
Throughout confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill for sormer South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle senators as different as Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Bob Dole (R-KS), joined together to sing the praises of Daschle to lead the department of Health and Human Services, a department widely seen as the focal point of the new administration’s promised action on health care reform.
Mr. Kennedy called Mr. Daschle “the perfect man for the job”, while Mr. Dole praised his “thorough understanding” of the issues involved in the monumental undertaking that is the reform of the American health care system.
When you consider that the Senate is, above all else, a club with membership privileges which (generally) transcend partisan policitcs, Mr. Daschle’s nomination appears to be all but assured.
Those who are very interested in issues such as universal coverage, can take heart in the knowledge that Mr. Daschle (who worked extensively on health care reform with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton) will bring the energy and knowledge of the issues surrounding health care reform that will be definitely necessary in the time ahead.
More importantly, Mr. Daschle will have to sway a hostile republican delegation, which sees the incoming president’s plans for a public health coverage scheme to compete with private insurers as an abomination.
Whether the former senator’s clout on Capitol Hill will be enough to convince the GOP (and their partisans and lobbyists in the private sector ) remains to be seen. The incoming administration has pledged to fix the struggling U.S. health care system once and for all (a mission which has been tried before), and Mr. Daschle definitely appears to be right person in the right place at the right time.
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———-Jonathan Krakowski writes a weekly column for Life Insurance In-Depth, an award-winning insurance information site.
He also writes regularly about Massachusetts auto insurance.
