Playing healthcare poker

Reportedly, President Barack Obama was a canny poker player when he served in the Illinois state Senate. And it looks like those skills came in handy as he tried to win a big healthcare pot at the end of this session of Congress. But throughout this process, the president and his team have made several common poker-playing mistakes that have complicated the legislative process and made his seeming victory much less valuable than it might have been. Having played a few hands of poker myself, I recognize some of those mistakes. Indeed, I have made many of them myself. Here are a few of them.

Overplaying your hand: Sometimes when your first two cards are a pair of 10s, it may make sense to bet big. But sometimes those 10s don’t amount to much. The president thinks he got a huge mandate to take the country to the left, and he overplayed the cards he was dealt. He misread what the country wanted from his leadership. The American people didn’t want to pay higher taxes and risk their healthcare quality in order to fix the problem of the uninsured. The president thought he had all the cards and kept pushing up the stakes in an effort to win the pot. But he overplayed his hand, and now his whole agenda is in real trouble.

Waiting for the inside straight: Let’s say you have a 10, jack, king and ace. The prudent bettor wouldn’t put all of his or her money on pulling a queen on the last card, because frankly, the odds aren’t that great. But that is exactly what the Obama administration has tried to do with the Senate. Instead of coming up with a bipartisan plan that could have attracted 70 votes or going with a reconciliation strategy that would have required only 50, the president’s team came up with a strategy that required 60 votes. Waiting for that 60th is just like waiting for an inside straight. The problem for the president is that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) is not an inanimate playing card. He is a negotiator who extracted an unnecessarily and precedent-setting high price for his vote.

Falling in love with your cards: Let’s say your first two cards are aces. Then, let’s say your next two cards are kings. Pretty good hand, huh? So you keep betting that those four cards are guaranteed to propel you to victory. You fall in love with your cards, even though there is a very real possibility that your opponent might have three of a kind or a straight or a flush. That is pretty much what the Democrats did with the public option. They loved that public option. They kept pointing to its popularity in the polls. They put all of their rhetorical firepower behind it. But no matter how much they loved the idea, it was never going to win in the Senate. They fell in love with their cards, but they didn’t have the winning hand.

Going all in with weak cards: One of the biggest sins in poker is not understanding how your opponents might react when you decide to put all of your chips in the pot, especially if you have weak cards. Going all in with a weak hand, when it is very likely that you will be called, is just plain stupid. Well, the president and his team did exactly that with the healthcare debate. They went all in with the expectation that Republicans would just cave and give them what they wanted. But the Democratic healthcare hand was not nearly as strong as they thought it was. It cost a lot of money when the American people were worried about deficit spending. It didn’t do much for premiums (in fact, it increased premium costs) when that was the No. 1 concern of most Americans. It sharply raised taxes when the voters were in no mood for higher taxes. And it relied on a huge government presence, when most Americans have lost faith in just such a proposition due to an inefficient and increasingly incompetent federal government. Despite all of these signs, which Republicans picked up on while Democrats ignored, the White House decided to put all of its eggs in the healthcare basket. It went all in with a weak hand, and the GOP called its bluff.

Neither Barack Obama nor Harry Reid has played his cards all that well in this high-stakes healthcare poker game. It looks like they will win a small hand at the end of the day, but the damage to their political fortunes is already evident. As Kenny Rogers once sang, you've got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.

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