Last week the press, both in the US and internationally, devoted a significant amount of coverage to President Obama’s bipartisan health summit.
So what is a summit? A summit is generally understood to be a meeting of heads of state, i.e. heads of governments. However, it can also be used to describe a meeting of leaders in any field. Last week’s health summit in Washington was a meeting of US political leaders.
The Obama health summit was meant to help leading lawmakers from both parties, Democrats and Republicans, bridge the gaps between their respective positions and move forward on the much needed health care reform bill. The hope was that participants would recognize where they are in agreement and make good faith efforts to resolve areas of disagreement. Ultimately, the hope was that these leaders would, indeed, lead.
Unfortunately, as happens all too often in Washington today, the attempt to craft good public policy quickly devolved into partisan conflict. At the outset, Republicans demanded that the president rule out using reconciliation to move the legislation and recommended that all of the bipartisan work done on this critical piece of legislation since June be scrapped and that the parties start again from the beginning with a blank piece of paper – thus jettisoning all the bipartisan work of Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate. And experts wonder why Americans have lost faith in Congress.
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