Health Care, the GOP, and the Consequences of Compromise

Abandonment is one of the most effective, though least utilized, public relations techniques ever invented. It works like this: When your prospects for success are doomed, giving up is sometimes the most unpredictable – and devastating – thing you can do to your opponents.

To be sure, liberals such as Howard Dean, who has referred to removing the public option as "a great mistake," would be upset by the maneuver, but the pressure would be on Republicans. Already, conservatives are divided over what to do – and the public option hasn't even been officially dropped yet. The conservative Heritage Foundation is on record as stating that, "Health care cooperatives can work as private entities in a private market and give another choice to families, but they have to be done right."

Others see a co-op plan as merely a gimmick to pass a government-controlled plan by a different name. As RedState's Erick Erickson wrote recently, "You are going to hear a lot of talk in the coming weeks about co-ops. The Obama administration is signaling that the 'public option' may not be needed in the health care plan. They are retreating to 'co-ops.' Friends, a cooperative health care device is the public option just with a better poll-tested name."

In other words, some conservatives are worried the co-op is merely a more palatable way to get to a government takeover. This rings true, inasmuch as Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) himself said, "We're going to have some type of public option, call it 'co-op', call it what you want."

But the fact that Heritage is on board with the notion that some co-ops could be good muddies the waters a bit. Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity tells me that ultimately the problem is that the word co-op is meaningless: "The term isn't very telling in itself. There's a huge range of possible policies that you could implement. Democrats are inclined to do something that's still a government-controlled plan."

Ultimately, Kerpen believes conservatives must oppose any proposal that includes employer or individual mandates. But even in the unlikely event Republicans were to strip health care of everything they really detest, another school of thought says that it's simply bad politics for Republicans to give Democrats a win by helping pass any bill.

Accepting a co-op compromise -- mandates by another name -- would deflate the town hall, grassroots activists who, after years in the wilderness during the latter Bush tenure, have found a reason to rally again around the GOP. Today's town hall attendees aren't clamoring for conservatives to "slightly fix" Obamacare – but to kill it.

As always, there are parallels to 1994. Ironically, the conventional wisdom is that by killing the public option and accepting co-ops, the government would be moving away from a Hillarycare type plan toward a compromise solution. This is not quite right. While people think Hillarycare was a single-payer plan, it was actually a "managed competition" model. The Clintons called them "alliances," not "co-ops," but that seems a distinction without a difference. For all practical purposes, the Clinton plan was a co-op.

And – as far as the political concerns that compromising with Democrats could hurt Republicans electorally -- that almost happened in 1994 when Sen. Bob Dole considered accepting several compromises rather than killing Hillarycare outright. Were it not for Dole's concerns that turning his back on grassroots conservatives could have political consequences for his presidential run in 1996, he would likely have accepted a compromise. And, it is certainly reasonable to assume that if the Republicans had agreed with a compromise – rather than terminating Hillarycare outright – the Republican Revolution of '94 might never have taken place.