Democrats had 44 public meetings drafting Obamacare. Republicans have had 2.
In 2009 and 2010, as Democrats prepared to overhaul the American health care system, they held 44 congressional hearings and public meetings over the course of 15 months of drafting and discussing their legislation.
They held hearings on topics including “strengthening employer-provided health care” and “examining the single-payer option” and “What is quality health care, and who decides?” There were, according to a tally made by Vox’s Garet Williams and Carly Sitrin, 22 hearings in the Senate and 22 in the House.
Republicans are on track to hold exactly two congressional hearings — both in the House of Representatives — on their six-month sprint to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The Senate plans no hearings at all on their legislation, which they are expected to take a vote to open debate on today. You can see how the timeline stacks up in the graphic below.
Our analysis is a bit different from one published earlier this week by the New York Times, which looks at all public activity (including floor debate) around drafting a health bill. We focus specifically on public hearings.
The point of these hearings, of course, is to actually discuss and figure out what a health care bill ought to do. The Senate held an entire hearing in April 2009 to hear from states which health reform efforts had worked locally, and another to examine how to address underinsurance in the United States.
But the Senate bill will receive no expert input from public testimony and little, if any, public debate before a vote. The bill was introduced on Thursday without any committee process. Some Republican senators didn’ t see the document until it was posted online. New provisions have since been added with little debate and fanfare.
Make no mistake: This is a very different process from what we saw in 2009 and 2010 during the 110th Congress, when the Affordable Care Act was drafted. To show this, we used a tool from the research website ProQuest to search for all hearings marked as part of the bill’s legislative history. We found 38 events. We also added six additional hearings not in the ProQuest history but that we deemed clearly related to the law’s drafting.
This means we can compare the public discussion between the current and last health reform efforts. And the difference, as you can see below, is quite stark. Compared with their Democratic colleagues eight years earlier, Republican legislators are crafting their bill with little input from the public — and little time to debate and discuss its merits.
House hearings
Senate hearings
