After passing the House by a slim margin last week, the American Health Care Act is headed to the Senate, where Republicans aim to amend the bill to strike a compromise between conservative and moderate concerns about health-care reform.
Because of the delicate balance these two wings of the Republican party in the Senate — and because of the razor-thin majority the GOP holds over Democratic senators — the House version of the bill stands next to no chance of passing as it’s written. As a result, the Senate has formed a working group to craft a version of the bill that at least 50 of the 52 Republicans can sign onto.
But the working group has been getting some blowback from both Democrats and the media for being composed of 13 men and no women. “Women’s health” groups such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL have insisted that it is sexist for men to be “deciding” women’s health care when they don’t personally experience all of the health issues women do. This attitude explains some of why the health-care debate has become so protracted.
For one thing, these latest critiques incorrectly assume that the working group is attempting to produce a finalized version of a health-care reform bill that will immediately be put to an up-or-down vote. Rather, the working group intends to create a first draft of sorts that the rest of the Senate will have time to debate and amend as needed. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said as much when asked about the group’s all-male composition.
“The working group that counts is all 52 of us,” he said, referring to the Republican senators. “Nobody’s being excluded. Everybody’s at the table.”
These critiques also set an impractical standard for representatives who have a role in crafting health-care policy. If men are supposedly incapable of making determinations about the structure of our health-care markets — simply because they’re men and therefore don’t experience life and health exactly the way women do — the makeup of our entire government will have to change drastically to accord with this view.
The logical extension of such an argument is that the Senate working group must not only be composed of an equal number of men and women, but also must represent every race and religion and, not only that, but also people with every type of health condition. If men can’t weigh in on health-care policy without consulting an equal number of women, there’s an even stronger case to be made that people without diabetes can’t shape health care for those with diabetes, and so on.
But such an argument is highly unrealistic and ignores the fact that people can, in fact, make determinations based on information that they haven’t experienced firsthand. Men know that women need certain types of health care that men don’t, and vice versa, just as a person who has never had cancer can appreciate the need for chemotherapy treatment, and so on.
It’d be a lot easier for Congress to produce a reasonable health-care reform bill if Democrats, the media, and progressive groups would comment only on the substance of the debate rather than creating divisions where there need not be any.