Like Many Before Him, Carl Cameron Tries in Vain to Explain Health Care to Imus

Worn out from covering this weekend’s drama on Capitol Hill, a weary Carl Cameron could use some of that health care reform that everybody in Washington is so excited about. But first, he’ll have to climb the mountain that is explaining what happened in the House of Representatives last night to the I-Man.

Following the House’s narrow 219-212 vote to pass the most recent incarnation of President Obama’s sweeping health care reform bill, Cameron said the bill has to clear one final hurdle before landing on Obama’s desk.

“It goes to the Senate, and the Senate has to pass it, and then if the Senate does pass it and they don’t make any changes to it, it can go to the President and can become law,” said Cameron, Fox News’s Chief Political Correspondent.

Confused yet? Good, because there’s more.

Should the Senate make any changes to the reconciliation package (the bill), it will go back to the House to be voted on. Again. But the American people aren’t the only ones left in the dust by all of the procedural minutiae.

“The truth is, it’s well beyond the American Congress,” said Cameron. “There’s only a half dozen or so people who actually work through the way in which this all happened. That’s all part of the back room dealing.”

Most of the 435 members of the House don’t know their Deem and Pass rules from their elbows. “There’s a tremendous amount of ‘inside baseball’ that never actually gets outside the capitol because people look at it and it’s so ugly,” Cameron said.

If and when Obama signs this monster bill into law, some of its provisions will go into effect immediately, like forbidding insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions, while others won’t be implemented until 2014. Either way, the bill’s contents have enraged members of the Tea Party movement, many of whom protested in Washington, DC over the weekend.

“A handful of people got too crazy, got too worked up, and said stuff, and it makes them all look bad,” said Cameron, speaking about the sickening, offensive slurs hurled by some protesters at member of Congress.

What makes Congress look bad, however, is the threat of being sued by upwards of 20 states that would use legal proceedings to prevent health care reform from becoming law on their turf.

“Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it give the government the right to tell the American people they’ve got to buy health insurance,” Cameron pointed out. “It’s a little bit difficult, and there’s an awful low of animosity.”

It remains to be seen whether this hostility will last into the November elections, when Democrats in both chambers of Congress will be holding on for their political lives. One thing’s for sure: no matter how many people clarify this thing to Imus, he’s not likely to grasp it.

“Thanks for explaining all that,” he said to Cameron. “Whatever the hell it is.”

-Julie Kanfer