The House came through for President Obama in his drive for health care reform, but that may be the last piece of good news on the subject that the president has for quite a while.

Even though the vote on the House bill, H.R. 3962, was a squeaker, passing only by a 220-215 tally, it was still a historic moment.  Yet, that is hardly the kind of momentum necessary to spur any kind of fast action in the Senate that the president wants.  

It was a nail-biter in the House right until the vote on Saturday evening, Nov. 7, with a flurry of compromises being made during the day, particularly on the issue of coverage for abortion.  In the end, the Democrats managed to siphon off one Republican vote, a representative from Louisiana.  Thirty-nine Democrats voted against it.

While there was a lot of high-fiving and cheering among the House Democratic leadership, particularly among those members who have been carrying the torch for universal health coverage for years if not decades, the White House is starkly aware that this fight is nowhere near over. 

The reality is that the finished product—if there is one—is going to look very little like the House bill.  The components of the Senate bills that Sen. Harry Reid is trying to conflate into one bill are already vastly different than the House bill. 

Then Reid is going to have the problem of getting the 60 votes necessary to even bring the bill to the Senate floor.  If and when it reaches the floor, the debate and chance for offering amendments are pretty much open-ended.

At this point I’d say that having a bill on President Obama’s desk by Christmas looks a lot more like wishful thinking than something that is likely to happen.   

But then, Virginia, it is the Senate and it is Washington we’re dealing with, after all, so you never know.

After months of just saying no and being proud of it, the House Republicans came up with an so-called alternative to the Democratic health care bills that have preoccupied us for all these many months. 

This was greeted with all the fanfare of one hand clapping.  Yet, for something so curiously light, it landed with a pronounced thud.

Wasn’t it Diana Dors whose story was titled ‘Too Much, Too Soon’?  This GOP plan is like the alternative universe version of that title—‘Too Little, Too Late.’

So, what do you do when your pent-up emission elicits no response?  You organize a protest, another one of those manufactured Tea Parties, hallowed relics of the 18^th Century.

  And sure enough, that’s exactly what the GOP did on Nov. 5 at the Capitol, with chanting screaming protesters gathered to hear their leaders.

“This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen,” said Minority Leader John Boehner, otherwise known as Rep. No.

You can tell how desperate and bankrupt of ideas this fellow is since he has started calling the House bill “PelosiCare.”  Just a reminder, John, that trying to scare people with this kind of moniker has gotten very tired.  They may hate the messenger but still embrace the message.

A fellow GOP congressman, Steve King of Iowa, said, “We’re not going to leave this Hill until we kill this bill.”  Love those internal rhymes, Steve.  Who knew you were a poet?

On the very same day, and at least as momentously if not quite as noisily, the House health reform bill got the endorsements of the AARP and the American Medical Association.

President Obama at the White House was very happy with the endorsements of those two organizations.  They no doubt went a long way to drowning out the noise from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Far be it from me to use football terminology, but it sure seemed like America’s Health Insurance Plans threw a Hail Mary pass when it issued an eleventh-hour report that it apparently hoped would throw a giant-sized monkey wrench into the glacially-coalescing health care reform legislation being incubated by the Senate Finance Committee.

The Finance Committee was scheduled to vote—finally!—on its package on Tuesday, Oct. 13.  AHIP released its study on Sunday, Oct. 11.  The gist of the report, cobbled together (and none too well at that) by PricewaterhouseCoopers, was that the Senate Finance legislation would actually jack up the cost of health insurance premiums for ordinary folks. Indeed, the report said, premiums would rise higher than under the current system.

Now, if you’re going to do something like this—especially after you’ve pledged to play nice, as health insurers have—you really need to make sure that the bomb you’re lobbing is actually going to go off and cause the havoc you desire on your target as opposed to exploding in your hands and leaving you in tatters like Wiley Coyote or some other cartoon character.

The administration and other Democrats were quick to jump on the 26-page report as “distorted and flawed” (in the words of a White House spokesman).

The New York Times reported it thusly: “White House officials said the industry had ignored features of the bill that would lower costs for consumers, like subsidies for people who could not afford insurance.  The report, by PricewaterhouseCoopers, acknowledges, ‘We have not estimated the impact of the new subsidies.’”

Oops.

It is hard for me to believe that AHIP President Karen Ignagni, who is usually very savvy in the ways of Washington, could believe that this type of thing would succeed. 

Rather, it has all the flat footedness and tone deafness of executives who can only see what they want to see without regard for how it’s going to play out in the political arena and in the long term. 

And, of course, what it does is once again reinforce that image of health insurers as greedy, ‘we’ll do anything for a profit’ robber barons. 

Earth to health insurers: That image needs no further reinforcement.

Even the GOP, which ordinarily would jump on something like this, kept its distance.  As if what looked like red meat had a distinct odor.

On the other hand, perhaps the report did have a bit to do with swaying one vote among the Finance Committee members.  Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Me., who was the only Republican to join committee Democrats in approving the bill, was reported as saying of the AHIP report that “it wasn’t based on any valid assumptions.”    

The final vote was 14-9 to vote the bill out of the committee.

I don’t think anyone should have great expectations about insurers being called on for their input from here on out.  The folks who are going to be doing all the wheeling and dealing as the bill makes its way to the Senate floor and then into the Senate-House conference to iron out the differences between the two chambers’ final bills are probably going to have pretty vivid memories of how faithless insurers were at the end of the process.

With this report, insurers committed the worst blunder possible in D.C.: they looked desperate and they failed.