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Critics of health care reform have been hammering away at its substance for months. But, since last week's election in Massachusetts, they’ve been focusing their attacks more on the way reform has come together in Congress. As the argument goes, Democrats wrote the bill on their own and in secret, producing proposals full of shady back-room deals that aren’t in the public interest. The symbol of reform’s hidden corruption is the so-called Cornhusker swindle: A promise, extracted by Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, that the federal government would pay the entire cost of expanding Medicaid in his state.
You can’t really defend the deal on the merits. No other state got the special treatment that Nebraska did. But if you stop and think about why Democratic leaders cut that deal, you’ll realize just how wrong-headed the broader critique of the process is. If Democrats hadn’t been so determined to reach out to Republicans--and worked so hard for an agreement that didn’t seem overly partisan--they wouldn’t have made the Nebraska bargain, or many others, in the first place.
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