Health care bill discussions should be public

One would be forgiven for giving up on the idea the U.S. ever will pass health care legislation. It’s the fight that just won’t end.

However, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The question is whether that light is a solution or yet another train coming to run the whole process down.

Before he was elected president, Barack Obama made a pledge that health care reform would be made in the harsh light of day — “televised on C-SPAN” — to allow voters to see who were making arguments for the health care lobby and who were defending their constituents.

Now, though, the Senate is preparing to lock three senators in a room with presidential advisors and craft the final bill that will come to a vote on the Senate floor, a process that seems to run counter to every element of Obama’s pledge.

Sens. Harry Reid, D-Nev., Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., are the final deciders on which elements of the two bills that made it through Senate committees will make the final bill. Crucial questions, such as whether to include a so-called “public option,” solely lie in their hands.

Voters should be outraged. The majority of the nation cannot say these men were elected to represent them. Unless a person lives in one of the three states represented by the trio, he or she never had a chance to vote for or against them. Why should they be given the power to decide how the future of health care will look to everybody in the U.S.?

They might be the Senate majority leader and the heads of the two committees through which the bills passed, but they still have not faced the national scrutiny such a position would seem to demand.

It’s also distressing the three all are Democrats. Although they might have a majority of seats in the Senate, they do not have them all. Including one Republican would have given the Democrats a majority in the room while providing viewpoints that could prove valuable.

We understand there is an occasional need to conduct negotiations behind closed doors. Classified matters such as national security demand it, in fact. But health care is not national security.

Given the nature of the debate over the issue thus far, with the chaotic town halls and endless shouting, it’s also understandable why our leaders would want to make the process more private. But they mustn’t forget those demonstrations, and volume, are the voters’ attempts to express their will to those who are supposed to represent them.

Nobody said politics was an easy game. It’s impossible to please everyone, and every choice an elected official makes will anger somebody. But that’s no reason to run away.

Obama was right when he made the pledge to keep the process transparent. People need to know who is arguing what in order to best understand how we came to an end result. It also helps to keep officials honest by forcing them to live up to their every word.

Health care is too important to be decided in the dark.