Jim Cooper defends his work on health care reform
by Jeff Woods
Rep. Jim Cooper isn't holding any town hall meetings on health care, but that doesn't mean he's hiding from constituents during Congress' August recess. He's hanging out in his Church Street office when he's not speaking to civic clubs. The door's open and invitations to drop by have gone out. Strangely, hardly anyone's taking him up on it.
Apparently, teabaggers aren't interested in polite discussion. We went to see Cooper last week (at his bidding, believe it or not) and he was a chatterbox. Like the Maytag repairman or an island castaway, he seemed starved for conversation. In his trademark monotone, he plunged right into the health care debate and droned on practically nonstop until we called an end to it.
"Sometimes I think of this as like reentry into the earth's atmosphere," Cooper says of the difficulty of enacting reform. "You either go in too deep and you burn up or you bounce off the atmosphere and you're in outer space forever. You have to find the window to come in.
"There's an opportunity here to get things right. But the emotions are turned up so high both on the left and on the right, there's increasingly little dialogue. We're inviting everyone in who wants to talk to me about health care and, as you can see, we're all full right now," he says, laughing and waving his arm at the empty office. "None of the Tea Party folks have accepted our invitation to come in and talk about it, and likewise many of our friends on the left have not exactly wanted to talk about it."
Cooper is desperate to explain himself. He thinks he's badly misunderstood on this issue, especially by liberals who don't trust our Blue Dog Democrat at all. No obstructionist, he says he's actually the pragmatic one holding out the only true solution to the problem. He wonders why everyone doesn't see it the same way.
"It is deeply frustrating," he confesses. "I don't have any ulcers yet. I'm good at biting my tongue.
"People are entitled to their opinions. But I have been working in a constructive, positive fashion on this for a long, long time, perhaps longer than anyone else in Congress. So I think there is a positive way here to get this done, and I don't think I'm being an obstructionist. I've had the earliest bill to meet the president's guidelines, and the only bill that meets his guidelines. Am I to be faulted for that? I think that's a positive contribution to the debate. An obstructionist would be a critic who had no positive alternative, and I have always had a positive alternative dating back to 1992. This is not obstructionism. This is helping guide the debate toward a direction where we might actually be able to achieve something."
Cooper's touting the legislation known as Wyden-Bennett after Senate sponsors Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bob Bennett, R-Utah. Among its co-sponsors is Lamar Alexander. Cooper describes it as "a beacon of hope out there." He sees it as a Third Way harnessing both the Democrats' dream of universal coverage and Republican love of market forces.
Liberals don't like the bill because it lacks a public option, but Cooper says he's not opposed to adding one. He points out that, unlike the alternatives, his bill would achieve universal coverage right away. He signed on as an original House sponsor last year.
Wyden-Bennett effectively blows up employer-based insurance. People would buy coverage for themselves through national or state health insurance exchanges. Since they would pay the full price, people would become more cost conscious, sign up for more cost-effective plans and spend less. The bill would tax Cadillac health plans for the wealthy. Employees moving out of worker health plans supposedly would get pay raises matching the cost of their new, outside plan. The bill had been largely ignored in the national debate, but it's beginning to gain notice as the more popular options bog down. It's the only bill that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said wouldn't add to the deficit.
"Somewhere in the area of Wyden-Bennett is probably where the center is," says Cooper. He insists he remains confident Congress will act this year on some form of reform and, he says, Wyden-Bennett is the proposal with the best chance of winning the 60 votes needed to stop a Senate filibuster.
"I liken it to frontier times when pioneers settled near a salt lick. That's why Nashville was settled. That's the place in the forest where both the animals and the people gathered because they had to have salt. Well, a centrist compromise on health care reform is a lot like a salt lick. That's where people gather because that's where the salt is. It's got to work for everybody. That's fundamental. And it can't be a purely partisan approach and succeed or half the country is going to be deeply suspicious of it. We can have partisan fights on other issues. But this one is separate, it seems to me."
Email jwoods@nashvillescene.com, or call 615-844-9445.
Comments (1)
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Looks like Cooper's wait-and-see, block and stop approach to health care isn't working. Cooper is to blame for all the anti-health care protests we are seeing around the country. Time to boot Coop if you favor health care, as these protestors said this weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTW8x3GnudM
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