More real reporting on healthcare

The significant retreat by Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, shortly after meeting privately with the president, immediately after the president’s speech suggesting support for the public option, is clearly, by far, the most important result of the speech. We can debate the merits of this in the comment section, but this is the news. Any new analysis must suggest that what the president told the leaders in the private meeting was much different than what he said in the public speech.

Second, the president’s comments about how he will pay for the program are not received with high credibility from serious budget analysts. He spoke in generic terms about cuts in Medicare spending to pay for a major portion of the program without any specific explanation of what in Medicare would be cut.

Setting aside the usual Republican attacks and Democratic support, there are virtually no serious independent budget analysts who give credence to “waste, fraud and abuse” without details. The news analysis is that there will be major controversy when a final bill must detail exactly where Medicare would be cut to pay for whatever is passed.

The third piece of under-reported news is what Ted Kennedy actually wrote in his letter to President Barack Obama, which was written in May and designed to be read by the president before Kennedy’s passing, and released to the nation after his passing. And, tied to the content of the Kennedy letter, how this will affect the reaction of liberals to the Obama-Reid-Pelosi shift on the public option.

What Kennedy wrote to Obama did not include even one word about compromising. Of course Kennedy, if he were in the Senate, would support some form of compromise. Had he included any mention of compromise in his letter, it would have given the president cover with liberals. Almost certainly deliberately, Kennedy entirely omitted this subject, and used language in the letter of “no retreat” and “resolve.”

On the news analysis front, the key issue will be whether congressional progressives join Reid, Pelosi and Obama in a significant back-off that occurred Thursday, and if not, to what degree will they threaten a serious fight along the themes of Kennedy’s “no retreat” letter. Some will, some will not; the issue is how many liberal votes could be lost on final passage balanced against how many House Republicans support the bill, and how many Blue Dogs go along. The House vote on current course will be very close.

On the news front, the media is almost totally missing the most important point. Right or wrong, there is zero chance a pure public option will become law. The issue under serious negotiation is whether there will be some form of hard trigger that will guarantee a public option if other policies fail to prevent industry abuses. The movement by Pelosi, Reid and Obama away from the public option makes a hard trigger less likely; the pushback from liberals who are more angry privately than they express publicly may or may not be enough to strengthen the bill.

For discussion of the trigger, readers might look at my column “Public option” that ran in the paper on Tuesday.

Next week the president will give a major speech on Wall Street reform on the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse. Perhaps I will write about exactly what Wall Street and banking reforms have been achieved, and have not been achieved, by President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with a comparison of his words in speeches and his action in practice.

I would observe, again, that to understand the Obama presidency, one should ignore the words and follow the money, the actions and the details, which are often quite different from the words.