HEALTH REFORM: Kids as the Starting Point for a New Agenda

With so much buzz about how Rahm Emanuel may become President-elect Obama's White House chief of staff, we thought it would be useful to share this glimpse of how he saw the priorities of the new administration. It comes from a New York Magazine piece that ran shortly before the election:

"My view is that we gotta be the party of reform," Emanuel begins when I reach him on his cell phone. "There are four reforms. There's financial-regulatory reform, tax reform, health-care reform, and energy. Regulatory will kinda come down the chute fast. Tax reform will take a little longer, because it's not until 2010 that Bush's tax cuts expire. Energy, you can do some things immediately. And with health care, you've got the children's health insurance as the first piece of a series of things you gotta do."

Emanuel's reform agenda is helpful because it's clarifying-in terms of timing, in terms of priorities, and in terms of suggesting where Obama's plans and the appetites (and political tolerances) of congressional Democrats intersect.

So health care is in there, part of the Big Four. How quickly Obama moves ahead, whether SCHIP expansion will include any other health cost, quality or coverage elements, isn't yet clear. We at New America of course believe that we should—and can—do more than expand SCHIP, and we know that a lot of people on the Hill are already hard at work figuring out how to get there and the election results will only make them work harder. But even if the hard-charging Emanuel sees a more gradual approach, it's reassuring to know that he recognizes there are a lot of things "you gotta do."