Political heavy hitters join forces on healthcare

Four former Senate majority leaders  have joined forces to form the latest bipartisan group taking aim at healthcare reform — a movement they expect to be led by the next president.

At a press conference Wednesday, Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and George Mitchell (D-Maine) announced the founding of The Leaders’ Project, an offshoot of the nonprofit-financed Bipartisan Policy Center .

{mosads}Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) round out the foursome of political veterans.

“Our goal is to develop parameters for reform to provide the necessary policy foundation to address the delivery, cost, coverage, financing — all these challenges facing the healthcare system,” Dole said.

“The effort that we begin today is, to say the least, ambitious,” Mitchell said.

The current crop of presidential candidates have made healthcare a prominent issue in their campaigns, a reflection of the plethora of opinion polls that show cost, quality and access to medical care at the forefront of voters’ minds. Although the Democratic candidates, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), have emphasized the issue more, presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) has been promoting his own plan.

Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties are positioning themselves to join what is expected to be the first major debate about the healthcare system since President Clinton’s first term. Preparations are also being made in the healthcare industry.

The former senators emphasized that they will not release their recommendations until after the election is decided. Over the next six months, each of them will host a public forum on aspects of healthcare reform, and they will present their findings to the White House and Congress next year.

Daschle, who recently released a book on healthcare reform, will host the first event in Washington next week.

In spite of the recognition that the public demands action on healthcare, the former senators face considerable political obstacles, not least of which are their own ideological differences.

“We all know there are flaws in the healthcare system and we all have different ideas for how to fix it,” Dole said. “Our minds are open; they’re not empty.”

Dole was blunt about the treacherous nature of healthcare reform for elected officials: “Nobody wants to back into a buzz saw unless it’s absolutely necessary.” The group’s role, the ex-lawmakers said, is to convince the next president and Congress that facing down that buzz saw is essential, both politically and economically.

Moreover, Dole and Mitchell argued, the next president must start quickly out of the gate.

“There’s going to be an opportunity after the election but we’re not sure how long it’s going to last,” said Dole, noting that elections come along every two years and tend to bring major reform efforts to a halt.

Dole and Mitchell faced off in 1994, when they led their respective parties in the Senate during the Clinton administration’s failed effort.

Indeed, the political fallout from President Clinton’s failure on the issue contributed greatly to the GOP takeover of Congress and to Dole’s succeeding Mitchell as majority leader. Mitchell did not stand for reelection in 1994.

Times have changed since then, Mitchell maintained. “The seemingly impossible has become possible,” he said.

The prerequisites for any major legislative effort are a broad consensus about what the problem is and a broad consensus about how to solve it, Mitchell said. “For many years now, the first consensus existed; the second has not. … What is different now is that with each passing year, and I would argue with each passing day, the deficiencies and failures of the current system become more evident and the persons failed by that system grow in number,” he said.

“If this is made a priority by the Congress and by the [next] administration, and by consumers, and providers, and all these people who are going to be involved, we can get it done,” Dole said.

Former senior aides to President Bush and President Clinton will lead the project for the ex-senators.

The co-directors of the group are Mark McClellan, who ran the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration for Bush, and Chris Jennings, a Clinton White House veteran and adviser to Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign. “We will reach out to every player in the healthcare field,” Jennings said.

Harvard University professor and Center for American Progress fellow Jeanne Lambrew and American Enterprise Institute scholar Joseph Antos will work alongside McClellan and Jennings.

This bipartisan “strange bedfellows” coalition is just once of many that have cropped up in the past year or so. Others brought together organized labor, big business, healthcare industry groups and consumer advocates, and the former senators and their advisers said they view their work as complementary.

What the participants in The Leaders’ Project are counting on, though, are their years of legislative experience and ability to take advantage of their relationships with members of Congress and the presidential candidates.

They also have ties to business interests with a stake in the future of the healthcare system. Dole, Mitchell, Baker and Jennings each, at some point, were registered as lobbyists for healthcare companies or on healthcare issues. Senate records show that only Jennings was registered for any healthcare clients in 2007. Mitchell and Baker no longer work as lobbyists, while Dole registered for only one client last year.

Daschle has never registered to lobby but is an adviser at the lobbying and law firm Alston & Bird , where Dole also works. McClellan has never lobbied and currently heads a healthcare reform research group at the Brookings Institution and is an American Enterprise Institute scholar.