In case you don’t have a TV in your office and weren’t glued to C-SPAN all day yesterday, we asked Disruptive Women’s Wendy Grossman to take a minute to recap a few of the highlights. She spoke with several Disruptive Women and had this to say:

Democrats: We want to get this done by the end of March. We have 9 out of 10 of your wish-list items. Let’s do this.

Republicans: No. We don’t like it. Let’s trash it and start over from scratch.

Democrats: Not possible.

Republicans: Seriously. Let’s start over. Clean page. Fresh slate.

Throughout the day, President Obama pointed out that people on both sides of the table want the same things. He gets letters every day from hard-working people who have lousy (or no) health insurance — people who are losing their house and going bankrupt to pay their medical bills.

He argued that his proposal and the bill that passed in the Senate at Christmastime wasn’t a “radical change” — most people who have health insurance now will still have it, it will just cost a little less. And people who can’t afford it, or who have pre-existing conditions — could get coverage.

While Republicans argued that folks are furious at the idea of Big Government stepping in and forcing people to buy insurance — Obama argued that he just wanted to make sure everyone could have it. The way the FDA makes sure meat isn’t poisoned or drugs won’t kill you. He said there ought to be a little bit of regulation — the same way doctor’s have to go to med school and pass board certifications before they can practice. He just wants to make sure everything is fair, and everything is safe.

At the beginning of the summit, Senator Harry Reid (D-Majority Leader) said, “If you have a better plan for making health insurance more affordable — let’s hear it.”

And the plan that was echoed over and over again is we don’t like this current plan, no one talked to us about it — we should have had this meeting nine months ago — let’s scrap it and do it again. Obama said he didn’t want to “pretend” like he was going to change health care reform and not actually do it.

Instead of tearing apart the bill and nitpicking about what people like or don’t like — Obama proposed that they talk about what they like in the bill. (It seemed like he was trying to salvage what’s there and show people that they don’t hate everything in it.)

“There are a lot more concepts that they agree on. This summit showed that,” says Dr. Elena Rios, President and CEO of the National Hispanic Medical Association.

Still, others didn’t think the legislators sitting around the table telling stories about sick constituents with high premiums was particularly productive.

“It’s a show,” says Stephanie Cohen, CEO of Golden & Cohen, a health benefits consulting company. “They’re not focusing on what the real issues are. None of the things they’re doing is going to help anybody. It’s not going to make a difference.”

She doesn’t think there’s any way the legislation will be completed in the next month.

“I think they need to start over,” she says. “This is an elephant. And you can’t move an elephant so fast.”

Disruptive Women’s Robin Strongin has a suggestion on how to speed up legislation.

“While today’s summit was certainly groundbreaking in what it represented, it’s time to move things along. Every Member of Congress, the Administration and their families should lose their health insurance until such time as they can get their act together and pass health (insurance) reform. Dick Cheney just suffered his fifth heart attack—imagine what that would cost him if he had to pay out of pocket every time his heart malfunctioned.”

“It’s going to be a tough battle,” says Rosemary Gibson, author of The Treatment Trap. “It’s going to be tough. But there’s always hope. Let’s have hope. I still think a lot of reform can still happen.”

Like Nancy Pelosi (D-House Speaker) said: “Health care reform for all Americans is hard, but we will get it done.”

We sure hope so.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 9:50 am and is filed under Health Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.