MIA from health care talks: Women and Dems

There has been much attention to the gender composition of the group creating the Senate plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. All 13 of them are men.

That’s even though women make up slightly more than 50% of the population, and they might have had a thing or two to say on such things as whether maternity care and gynecological services should be covered. Surely, the Republican leaders could have picked at least one of the five female Republican senators.

But don’t overlook a more jarring omission: Democrats.

This might sound odd given how partisan Congress is these days. But the absence of Democrats is not only unfortunate, it is a radical departure from how the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was negotiated in 2009.

You might not know it now with all the white-hot rhetoric, but the law credited with extending health coverage to 20 million Americans was substantially bipartian. Not in the House, to be sure, where the usual party lines were drawn, but in the Senate. Its version was negotiated by a “Gang of Six” — three Republicans and three Democrats.

As Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa told PBS, they were “working on what we thought to be not just a bipartisan bill, but a kind of consensus bill.”

Alas, that consensus was never to be. By late summer Grassley and one other Republican, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, had dropped out after the rest of the party turned against the measure. The third Republican, Olympia Snowe of Maine, stayed on board through her committee vote, but switched to no when the bill reached the floor in December.

In the end, Obamacare passed with only Democratic votes. But it would be wrong to call it partisan or hastily considered. The Senate version went through hearings and committee markups. It was drafted in part by Republicans and spent months in the public eye. Eventually, the House bill was dropped and the Senate version became the law that is in effect today.

Contrast that with what is happening now. After House Republicans rammed through a repeal bill without sending it to committee, subjecting it to hearings, allowing the Congressional Budget Office to gauge its impact, or engaging in any meaningful debate, the Senate stepped in supposedly to add gravitas to the situation.

But any thought of the Senate serving a more mature role has dissipated. Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky not only had the Senate version drafted in secrecy, he also plans a floor vote next week within days of its public debut.

So much for the Senate being the wiser of the two chambers. And so much for the pledges of bipartisanship that followed the tragic shooting at a congressional baseball practice this month.

Though a vast improvement over what existed before, the Affordable Care Act does have problems, such as making it too easy for healthy people to opt out of insurance. Its flaws could be fixed, but first lawmakers would have to return to a more bipartisan way of governing.