PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon, as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

George Will has a point.

In a recent column in the Washington Post, Will skewers Democrats for falling all over themselves to advocate for a totally government-run health care system, even if that meant some citizens would lose private health insurance coverage – coverage they might value.

But Will’s point is one that could have been made for years as policymakers in Washington, D. C. have labored for years over health care policy usually with more regard to politics than to policy.

Will used the recent D presidential “debates’ by Senator Kamala Harris, the Democrat from California, to criticize Harris and most of her colleagues on stage. Here is what he wrote:

“If Senator Kamala Harris is elected president in 2020 and re-elected in 2024, by the time she leaves office 114 months from now, she might have a coherent answer to the question of whether Americans should be forbidden to have what 217 million of them currently have: Private health insurance.

“Her 22 weeks of contradictory statements, and her Trumpian meretriciousness about her contradictions, reveal a frivolity about upending health care’s complex 18 per cent of the U.S. economy. And her bumblings illustrate how many of the Democrat presidential aspirants, snug in their intellectual silos, have lost — if they ever had — an aptitude for talking like, and to, normal Americans.”

My point in this blog is not to rail against Harris and her ilk. Rather, it is to make a point I have made for years, including my more than 25 years as a lobbyist for Providence Health System, including its insurance arm, as well as its special programs.

My point?

What we need is a process that produces a product. What I mean is that smart minds on both sides (or more than just two) – and, yes, there are some smart minds left even as many pander to one extreme or the other – should gather in a room with a round table.

There, they should find the middle ground on health care policy, a middle that doesn’t take away your doctor (as President Barack Obama said he wouldn’t do, but did, under his :”Affordable Health Care Act”), doesn’t take away your private insurance (as Harris and others among the D presidential candidates would do), and – very importantly – finds a way to provide health care services to as many Americans as possible, if not every American.

This can be done, but it cannot be done if Democrats start over, if Republicans oppose everything (as they are wont to do), and if no one heads toward the middle.

As the “Affordable Health Care Act” comes under increasing attack, including in court (one reason is that the act no longer includes a key underpinning – an individual mandate to buy insurance much as what already exists when it comes to driving a car…you have to have insurance or you’ll pay a penalty – it is past the time for cooler heads to prevail.

I am not an optimist on this, but I choose to think that compromise is still possible.