Sen. Mike Johanns (R., Neb.) says President Obama’s health-care summit has gotten off to a “very, very slow start.” The format, he says, “isn’t working.”
“If the president wanted to showcase his views, he didn’t need a six-hour summit to do it,” Johanns tells National Review Online. “I’d rather have seen him clear the air and announce that reconciliation is off the table — that he didn’t support it as a senator and will not support it now.”
Johanns also sighs whenever he hears summiteers eat up time with long, winding anecdotes about health care. “I don’t deny that there are people out there who have suffered — people who’ve been mistreated by insurance companies, who didn’t get the medicine they need. I recognize that. The problem with the stories being proffered today is that they seem to imply that if you pass this big government takeover of health care, then the world immediately get better. That’s just not the case. The highest rate of denial amongst the major insurance companies in Medicare comes from Medicare. You can’t spin that.”
Will Johanns watch the rest of the summit? “Yes, most of it, when I can,” he says. “It’s not the only thing on my schedule.”