How Soon is Now?

HEALTHCARE: Still Walking with a Limp.

Words.

"Unless the sun rises in the West tomorrow, Thursday's health-care reform summit will yield no bipartisan concord. Congressional Republicans remain unalterably opposed to health reform; the ideas they've advanced -- which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says would insure no more than 3 million of America's more than 45 million uninsured -- barely reach the level of piddling.

But unto themselves, the Democrats have the votes to enact comprehensive reform. And -- what is new -- they finally have a plan on which the president has put his stamp.

The plan that the White House released Monday strongly resembles the compromise proposal that House and Senate Democrats have been negotiating. It is a more politically sustainable synthesis than the Senate's original offering; the Achilles heels and banana peels in the earlier bill have been scrapped. The subsidies that the president's plan offers low- and-middle-income shoppers on the new health insurance exchanges are more generous. It raises the threshold for the excise tax on high-cost insurance policies so that only a relative few policyholders will be nicked. It restores the progressivity of the House bill by extending the Medicare payroll tax to the interest, capital gains and dividend income of the wealthy. Instead of the federal government picking up only Nebraska's new Medicaid expenses -- Ben Nelson's stinkeroo of a deal -- it will now pick up the new Medicaid expenses for all states, easing the plight of America's chronically beleaguered state governments.

...So why are some Democrats still hanging back?

...for Democrats who question whether now is the time, I suggest they go back and read Harry Truman's November 1945 message to Congress calling for national health care. "The principal reason why people do not receive the care they need is that they cannot afford to pay for it," Truman said. At the time, the cost of health care accounted for 4 percent of the nation's income.

Truman didn't get his plan enacted, of course; no plan for universal care has been enacted since. The principal reason people don't receive care remains its unaffordability, but the aggregate cost of health care has since risen to 16 percent of the nation's income. Absent a universal plan, it will continue to rise.

Truman sent his message to Congress 65 years ago. The debate over national health care is old enough to collect Social Security. The question for timorous Democrats is: "If not now, when?""

THE WASHINGTON POST: On health care: If not now, when?