Varied Opinions on the Health Care Reform Summit

Yesterday, on February 25th, 2010, President Obama and members of his administration held a bipartisan health care summit to try and bring leaders of both parties together and reach a common ground. The results were…sadly, less than stellar, with little progress made on major issues and only conciliatory common ground found on minor issues. As one would expect, major media outlets had a lot to say on what happened and as well as what didn’t happen.

First off, from USA Today, they had an article entitled, “Health summit exposes irreconcilable differences”. Their article was fairly colorful in its disdain for what happened at the summit. To sum up, “The takeaway from more than six hours of debate about health policy — which felt at times like an endless Thanksgiving dinner with two families whose members can barely stand each other — was that Republicans and Democrats are still too far apart to make a deal on anything beyond minor matters.” They seemed fairly upset as to comments like “There are some fundamental differences here that we cannot paper over,” from Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. They weren’t happy with Democrats either, which brings us to our next article.

Over on The New York Times, they had an article entitled, “Uniting Democrats Is Challenge at Health Forum”. This article discussed not only the problem President Obama had at gaining ground with Republicans, but also problems uniting those within his own Democratic party. The article cites several Democrats saying they don’t want to quit, while others aren’t sure if they should continue with this debate.

The Washington Post had several articles, but since we have one kinda bashing Democrats, I felt it fair to find one doing so to Republicans as well and found an article entitled, “At summit, Republicans prove they aren’t putting America’s health first”. Fairly harsh title, if you ask me. This sentence is also harsh, “The most important thing Republicans think is that if there are Americans who can’t afford the insurance policies that private insurers are willing to offer, then that’s their problem — there’s nothing the government or the rest of us should do about it.”

After reading articles like this, one has to wonder what really came out of Thursday’s summit. I think one thing is particularly clear, however. There’s less common ground on this issue between the two parties than anyone might’ve though before the summit, and it paints a somewhat bleak picture as to the future of reform in general. While we’d like to think that this debate isn’t dying, seeing the so-called results from the summit don’t exactly fill people with hope either.