Rough road ahead when Rep. Dahlkemper discusses health care reform

The big, bold letters on the front page of the 1,017-page tome sitting on the picnic table read “H.R. 3200.” Below in smaller type: “To provide quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.” A rainbow of red, green and blue placemarkers stick out of the curled, tattered and slightly discolored pages. A light breeze flicks the pages open, revealing highlighted passages and handwritten notes.

The author of those notes, Democrat U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, stands just feet away, engaged for nearly two hours in animated and sometimes slightly heated give-and-take with a handful of constituents who’ve dedicated part of their Saturday morning to taking up her invitation to talk. It’s one of a series of bike and hike events she’s scheduled across her Third District, which includes most of Crawford County, all of Erie County, and parts of Warren, Mercer, Venango, Butler and Armstrong counties.

Nobody’s under the illusion that the next several months’ discussion and debate over one of the largest, most expensive and most significant pieces of legislation in recent memory will be easy, pleasant or even civil, but as Saturday’s event revealed, Dahlkemper and her constituents’ experience with the process may tend toward the rougher end of the spectrum.

Part of the reason has to do with the situation in which the representative finds herself. The Third District put a Republican into office for six terms straight before the Obama phenomena and widespread disenchantment with the Republican agenda swept Dahlkemper and a Democrat majority into power. Having ridden Obama’s coattails into office, however, Dahlkemper now faces the tricky task of carefully positioning herself to reflect Third District values that tend to be more conservative than the Democrats’ national agenda. For example, Dahlkemper has joined the “Blue Dog” Democrats, a fiscally conservative group that tends to the right of the party’s mainstream when it comes to spending. Several members of this group recently made national headlines as they held up amendments to the heath care reform plan in an ultimately successful effort to cut the projected costs. Dahlkemper also voted against the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s environmental plan — the so-called “cap and trade” legislation. During Saturday’s event she eagerly revealed to a constituent that she rejected personal entreaties by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Vice President Al Gore to vote yes.

In trying to reposition herself, Dahlkemper risks angering the left wing of her party, both nationally and in the district, which could handicap her re-election. The gamble is that by establishing credentials as a conservative Democrat, she can attract enough liberal and moderate Republican support within the district that she can win re-election in years when the Republican agenda is not so far out of favor as it was in 2008.

Health care reform poses yet another significant challenge in this process. Because the vote on the final proposal will be a defining moment, Dahlkemper appears to be approaching with caution that leaves stalwarts on either side of the issue wanting. Dahlkemper told those attending Saturday’s session that those in favor of a single-payer health care system have staged what she described as “passionate” demonstrations at her offices. And the Republican Party is already running advertisements in the district calling on residents to urge Dahlkemper to reject reform.

Not surprisingly, the representative has yet to lay out a clear way forward beyond collecting input from constituents at events like Saturday’s.

While she tells a reporter that “everybody knows the system is unsustainable as it is” and that there must be significant reform, a good number of those at Saturday’s event disagreed outright and most of the rest took issue with the form of the currently proposed reforms. Interestingly — or perhaps tellingly — there were no local Democratic Party leaders in the audience.

Although Dahlkemper asserts that change must come to health care, she also stands firm on her lack of commitment to any of the current proposals, and she does not dismiss the possibility of voting against whatever reform plan emerges. She points out that there are several proposals and amendments in the House and Senate and it will take a considerable amount of time for them to reconciled and for a final version to come up for a vote.

She says that any health care reform plan she votes in favor of “must be right for the Third District,” but when asked what such a plan would look like, she offers relatively few details. Right for the Third District, Dahlkemper says, is a proposal that provides affordable, stable insurance, offers a choice of plans and demonstrates that it will contain and decrease health care spending. Then she moves on to reciting statistics, often repeated at Saturday’s event, designed to show that the United States spends too much on health care for sub-par results.

Eventually — likely before the end of the year — the dance around the elephant in the room will come to an end when a health care reform plan is put to a vote. Until then, Dahlkemper stresses, “I want to continue to hear from people.”

How Dahlkemper responds to what she hears is key to Chuck Gilmore of Blooming Valley, who had a firm, lengthy give-and-take with the representative on Saturday about his concerns over health care reform.

Nonetheless, Gilmore is living proof that Dahlkemper’s effort to reposition herself may be gaining traction.

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