Health Care Overhaul: Is Bipartisanship Dead?

Nov. 10, 2009— -- For supporters of health care overhaul, the process of crafting and passing legislation was never going to be pretty. But President Barack Obama and key stakeholders had hoped it could at least be bipartisan.

Now, after only one Republican supported the House bill and few of them are inclined to endorse the Senate version, the spirit of bipartisanship -- which helped forge nearly every major piece of legislation, from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to tax policy overhaul in 1986 and No Child Left Behind in 2001 -- appears largely absent from the process.

"We don't believe in bipartisanship just because we think people should be nice to each other," said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that had been urging a bipartisan compromise on health care legislation.

"When you're trying to do something as significant as reorganizing a sixth of the U.S. economy, not only is it hard to adopt that legislation through one party, but it's hard to implement something like that if 40 percent of the Congress is, on some level, wanting it to fail."

While Grumet hasn't lost all hope that a bipartisan solution will be achieved, he says it appears unlikely. "The health care debate has become a complex brew of serious policy differences enflamed by an iconic political testosterone battle," he said.

The partisan divide that has colored much of the debate has been brewing since the start of the Obama presidency and now poses potential complications for a number of major pieces of legislation awaiting consideration by Congress.

Implementation of health care overhaul, climate change legislation and immigration law, among others, could all be imperiled by strictly party-line votes.

With the changing tides of Washington politics, such sweeping, partisan legislation could be susceptible to change, depending on what happens in the midterm elections next year. "I think there certainly will be a sense that it is less-secure policy than would be the case otherwise," Grumet said.