Breaking Bad with Obamacare? - A Comparison and Contrast

Every now and then I'm struck by the care and effort that goes into the construction of a song, a show, a movie, etc., etc. Sometimes things come easy, and sometimes they don't. If you watch the extras on the Sixth Sense DVD, you may be struck by the attention paid to so many details and interrelationships. How much effort went into making sure that Memento "worked"? Breaking Bad was nothing short of incredible in terms of the way that characters and storylines were interwoven into a unified whole. Do we think that the elegant conclusion of The Mary Tyler Moore Show happened by accident? Songs like Stairway to Heaven and albums like The Wall are, I would submit, nothing short of musical tapestries. Sure, some things just roll right out of the minds of their creators. But sometimes the process itself is magical, and leads to magic.

Which brings me (somehow) to current events involving health-care reform. I think that there is a point being missed in the raging debate over Obamacare. In particular, many seem to have forgotten the process by which the legislation initially became law. When Scott Brown won his Massachusetts senatorial election, the only way - creative as it was - for the President to cause the proposal to become law was for the bill that had passed the Senate to be presented to the House. In that way, and in that way only, could the President avoid having the bill sent back for a vote in the Senate, a vote which, it seems clear, he could not possibly have won. Indeed, the Senate bill was in many ways a response to the House bill, and, before the Brown election, there was the clear expectation that material negotiation was about to ensue. The results of this process leading to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act thus included (i) the skipping of a conference, which I submit quite undoubtedly would have resulted in substantial, substantive and fundamental give-and-take between staffers, technical experts and, ultimately, the two houses of Congress, and (ii) the resulting passage by both houses and eventual enactment of what essentially was draft legislation - not-ready-for-prime-time legislation - that did not have the benefit of the conferencing process. I am not trying here to advocate for whether Obamacare is a good or a bad idea; I am simply trying to make the smaller point that it should not be surprising that a landmark law of this reach and complexity is not working out so well, given that the enacted legislation was not the bill that anyone thought would be the final, considered work of Congress.