Sen. Tom Harkin, one of the co-authors of the Affordable Care Act, now thinks Democrats may have been better off not passing it at all and holding out for a better bill. “We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it,” Harkin told The Hill. “So I look back and say
we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all. “What we did is we muddled through and we got a system that is complex, convoluted, needs probably some corrections and
still rewards the insurance companies extensively,” he added. “All that’s good.
All the prevention stuff is good but it’s just really complicated. It doesn’t have to be that complicated,” he said of the Affordable Care Act.
Harkin, who is retiring at the end of this Congress, says in retrospect the Democratic-controlled Senate and House
should have enacted a single-payer healthcare system or a public option to give the uninsured access to government-run health plans that compete with private insurance companies.“We had the votes in ’09. We had a huge majority in the House, we had 60 votes in the Senate,” he said.He believes Congress should have enacted
“single-payer right from the get-go or at least put a public option would have simplified a lot.”“We had the votes to do that and we blew it,” he said. It was the first time since 1978 that Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate majority.
Harkin, however, believes Obama and Democratic leaders could have enacted better policy had they stood up to three centrists who balked at the public option:
Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), a Democrat turned independent, Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).“The House passed public option. We had the votes in the Senate for cloture,” he said.“There were only three Democrats that held out and
we could have had those three,” he added. "We had “[Sen.] Mark Pryor [D-Ark.] so we could have had Lincoln.
We could have had all three of them if the president would have been just willing to do some political things but he wouldn’t do it." Harkin and other liberals are now
faced with the bitter irony that the centrists tried to placate five years ago by crafting a labyrinthine market-based reform are now all out of the Senate. “So as a result we’ve
got this complicated thing out there called the Affordable Care Act,” he said.
He believes Congress should have moved legislation in the first 100 days after Obama’s inauguration, which drew over a million people to the National Mall on a frigid January day. “There’s this old saying, ‘If you have the votes, vote. If you don’t, talk.’ We had the votes but we talked,” he said. Then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) held listening sessions with Republican senators for months but ultimately failed to pick up a single GOP vote on the floor.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/225812-harkin-dems-better-off-without-obamacare2014 Article
