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- Health Care Sucks Oxygen from Climate Bill
- September 27, 2009
By Bill Polits
The much-publicized debate over the size and shape of current national health care reform legislation threatens to drag on this fall, eclipsing the Obama administration's efforts to push a climate bill through the House and Senate in advance of the international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen in December.
If the tendency of the fracas about the "public option" and "socialized medicine" to swallow up headline space at the end of the summer is any clue, health care reform's legislative hurtles may require a large amount of political bloodletting before there is a resolution to the issue. If this state of affairs persists into the fall, democratic lawmakers may be unwilling to go to the mat for the president on the Waxman-Markey climate legislation as the health care issue is costly in terms of political capital with mid-term election campaigns coming up in 2010.
Senate majority leader Harry Reid has asked that the senate's version of the climate bill be ready to go by the end of September. But by that time, floor time devoted to health care may push the climate debate off the schedule for the foreseeable future.
Watch the fallout Obama's health care speech to congress slated for next week for clues on how the debate will unfold this fall.