Women aren't the most glaring omission in GOP health bill talks

There has been much attention to the gender composition of the working group creating the Senate plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. All 13 of them are men.

That's even though women make up slightly more than 50% of the population, and they might have had a thing or two to say on such things as whether maternity care and gynecological services should be covered. Surely, the Republican leaders could have picked at least one of the five female Republican senators.

But don't overlook an even more jarring omission: Democrats.

This might seem like an odd thing to say given how partisan Congress is these days. But the absence of Democrats is not only unfortunate, it is a radical departure from how the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was negotiated less than eight years ago.

You might not know it now with all the white-hot rhetoric, but the law credited with extending health coverage to 20 million Americans was the product of bipartisan negotiations. Not in the House, to be sure, where the usual party lines were drawn early, but certainly in the Senate. Its version of the law was negotiated by a “Gang of Six” — three Republicans and three Democrats drawn from the Senate Finance Committee.

As Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa told PBS, they were "working on what we thought to be not just a bipartisan bill, but a kind of consensus bill — in other words, something that would get 75 or 80 votes.”

Alas, that consensus was never to be. By late summer Grassley and one other Republican, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, had dropped out after seeing the rest of the party turn sharply against the measure. The third Republican, Olympia Snowe of Maine, stayed on board for a few more months. In October, she became the only Republican on the Finance Committee to vote yes. But in December, when the bill came upon the Senate floor, she switched her vote to no.

In the end, Obamacare passed with only Democratic votes. But it would be wrong to call it partisan or hastily considered. The Senate version went through the normal process, with hearings and committee markups. It was drafted in part by Republicans and spent months in the public eye. After the loss of a seat in Massachusetts robbed Democrats of a supermajority to block Republican filibusters, they opted to jettison the more partisan House version and make the Senate bill the law that is in effect today.

Contrast that with what is happening now. After House Republicans rammed through a repeal bill without sending it to committee, subjecting it to hearings, allowing the Congressional Budget Office to gauge its impact, or engaging in any meaningful debate, the Senate stepped in supposedly to add gravitas to the situation.

But any thought of the Senate serving a more mature role has dissipated. Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky not only had the Senate version drafted in total secrecy, he also plans to put it on the floor for a vote next week within days of its public debut.

So much for the Senate being the wiser of the two congressional chambers. And so much for the pledges of bipartisanship that followed the tragic shooting at a congressional baseball practice this month.

Though a vast improvement over what existed before, the Affordable Care Act does have some problems. It makes it too easy for healthy people to opt out of buying insurance, for example, and it keeps insurance markets too fragmented. These problems could be fixed, but first lawmakers of good faith would have to return to a more bipartisan way of governing.

Dan Carney is an editorial writer for USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter: dancarney301

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