Will We Finally Have Health Care Reform This Time?

Will we have a big health care reform bill passed by the Congress and signed by the President in the next year?

Readers of this blog know my opinion--show me where the trillion dollars comes from and I will be optimistic.

CQ's Drew Armstrong and Alex Wayne have a thorough and detailed feature article on that question in the April 5th CQ weekly, "A Second Onion."

Here's a bit of the article and a free link to the rest:

It seemed conceivable on the afternoon of March 5 that Congress might have a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health system on President Obama’s desk within months, if not weeks. A strange-bedfellows audience had greeted Obama as he opened his White House “forum on health reform” — lawmakers from both parties, advocates for consumers and lobbyists for the health care industry, and a few average citizens who had held discussions on health care policy in their communities over the winter.

For the afternoon, politics were set aside. Obama cast an overhaul of health policy as a national imperative, not a Democratic Party agenda item. People in the audience who had helped defeat similar efforts in the past — health insurers and business lobbyists — promised the president that they wanted to help pass one this time around.

But the bipartisan afterglow from that event has faded in the ensuing month. Politics have returned and lawmakers have resumed fighting over fundamentals of overhauling the health care system.

Too often I see reports that just fall into the easy conclusion that this year is different and health care reform is at hand. These guys dug a lot deeper.

Read the rest here.