POLITICS: Senate Veterans Say Now is the Moment for Bipartisan Health Care Reform

One thing all former Senate Majority Leaders have in common: they didn't fix U.S. health care. One thing at least four former Senate Majority Leaders have in common: they want to try again and they believe now is the moment.

Two Democrats, George Mitchell and Tom Daschle, and two Republicans, Bob Dole and Howard Baker, teamed up several months ago at the Bipartisan Policy Center and they have made health their signature issue. They cited both a moral and economic imperative to address the intertwined issues of cost, coverage and quality.

"There are no easy fixes or they would have been done already," Dole said during a joint appearance with Mitchell at the National Press Club. Mitchell was only half-joking when he said that fixing health care is more difficult than bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

The four leaders, working with an experienced bipartisan team of policy analysts, plan on holding four forums during the next several months, before submitting to the next president and Congress policy recommendations that they said would be less detailed than a piece of legislation but more targeted and meatier than vague statements of principles. They won't make the recommendations public until after the elections, to avoid injecting themselves into politics. But then the next president, they said, needs to act fast before the window of opportunity closes.

The words they used were carefully selected, leaving them plenty of bipartisan wiggle room. For instance they didn't specifically come out and call for covering all Americans (although that sure felt like the subtext). Instead they said they wanted to provide "affordable accessable coverage choices in a reformed insurance market." They stopped short of calling for an individual mandate that would mean everyone had to have insurance, instead saying the goal was "ensuring and promoting a strong individual role in health care coverage and costs." They want to open a conversation, not end it.

Given that all four of them have been political brawlers in their time, it was striking to hear how emphatically they endorsed a bipartisan solution (which is what we tell anyone who will listen—and some who won't.). Sixty votes -- at a minimum -- will be needed to get legislation through the Senate, they said. And if there's one thing that these four men know better than anyone, it's what it takes to get, or not get, legislation through the U. S. Senate.

"I'm optimistic now that there is a now a real will to act," said Mitchell, who since retiring from the Senate in 1995 has not taken on a project unless he meant business, whether seeking peace in Northern Ireland or rooting out steroids in baseball. He said he believes that this country has reached the point on health care where "there's a hunger for change." He described a near-unanimous consensus that the system has "deficiencies and failures" and he said that feeling is getting so powerful that it's poised to create a second consensus around how to repair it. We can't wait.