The Senate's Secrecy Over Health Care Was Decades in the Making
Such deeply clandestine lawmaking is without precedent. But there’s plenty of bipartisan blame to go around for the breakdown in transparency on Capitol Hill.
Congress struggling to finish a huge budget reconciliation bill. A GOP president pushing a major overhaul of federal payments for health insurance that could transform the lives of sick patients.
Sound familiar? The year was actually 1986. I was a rookie health reporter on Capitol Hill and watched a Medicare bill move from introduction, to hearings, to votes in subcommittees, to full committees, and then to the entire House—an operation that took months and was replicated in the Senate, before the two chambers got together to iron out their differences for final passage. Everything was published in the official in almost excruciating detail for everyone to see—as long as they could read
