ZPXFW Blog

During confirmation hearings today for sormer South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle senators as different as Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Bob Dole (R-KS), came together to sing the praises of the nominee to lead the department of Health and Human Services, a department widely seen as the focal point of the new administration’s promised action on health care reform.

Mr. Kennedy called Mr. Daschle “the perfect man for the job”, while Mr. Dole praised his “acute understanding” of the issues involved in the giant undertaking that is the reform of the American health care system.

Considering that the Senate is, more than anything else, a club with membership privileges which (most of the time) transcend partisan policitcs, Mr. Daschle’s nomination appears to be a done deal.

Those of us who care deeply about issues such as universal coverage, can take heart in the knowledge that Mr. Daschle (who collaborated extensively on health care reform with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton) will bring the energy and knowledge of the issues involved in health care reform that will be sorely necessary in the time ahead.

Specifically, Mr. Daschle will have to sway an un-friendly republican delegation, which views the incoming administration’s plans for a public health coverage plan to compete with private insurance companies as an enemy of capitalism.

Whether the former senator’s pull on Capitol Hill will suffice to sway the GOP (and their supporters and lobbyists in the private sector ) remains to be seen. President-elect Obama has pledged to fix the husrting U.S. health insurance system once and for all (a job which has been tried before), and Mr. Daschle indeed appears to be right man in the right place at the right time.
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———-The author, Jonathan Krakowski, writes a weekly column for Life Insurance In-Depth, an award-winning insurance information site.

He also writes regularly about Florida auto insurance.