Last week I found myself talking about healthcare for a few minutes with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and at one point she remarked sarcastically that if healthcare reform was such a great idea, 
why didn’t Congress give itself whatever deal it was foisting on the rest of us? I mumbled some kind of lame reply, but little did I know that the Senate bill actually does this. Joe Klein explains:
My favorite provision requires that all members of Congress give up their federally-funded health care benefits and join the health care exchanges that will be set up by this bill. This is brilliant politics, addressing the tide of populist anger and fears of incipient socialism. But it also makes an important substantive point. The future of health care reform in this country will depend on how effectively the exchanges — health insurance super-stores — are working. If members of Congress have to participate in this system, you can bet they’ll insist on a array of choices, similar to the system they currently use, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan.
There are actually a couple of ways you can look at this, and the pessimistic way is that if you make Congress buy insurance from the exchange then we’ll never get any cost controls in place — because members of congress will never approve of anything that might infringe on their own perks of office.
But even I’m not quite that pessimistic. I think Klein is right: if this survives the conference report, and gets the publicity it deserves (why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?), it will actually go a long way toward assuaging public cynicism about both Congress and healthcare reform.
(And hey — why is this the first time I’ve heard about this? It’s not as if I don’t follow this stuff pretty closely. Was it added in by Harry Reid at the last second? Or what?)
UPDATE: Answer here!
