McDermott will be smack in the middle of fights over Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. McDermott: No retreat on health law

In Jim McDermott’s ideal world, health reform would have meant a single-payer health care system.

But in Jim McDermott’s real world, he’ll happily defend President Barack Obama’s health care law — and defend is precisely what he expects to do in his new post as the ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee.


Defend as in the beach at Normandy, said the Washington Democrat, who is seldom at a loss for a hearty metaphor.

“We’re on the beach, and we got this thing started,” he said. “To be thrown off the beach and have to go back to England and replan a new one would have been a terrible thing.”

“It’s not where I would have chosen to invade if you want to put it in those terms, but we are now on the ground, and we’re gonna take back Paris,” he added.

Stepping into the position long held by Pete Stark, McDermott will be smack in the middle of fights over Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, including the new taxes and insurance subsidies. It’s a logical role for the 76-year-old psychiatrist, who has cultivated an interest in health care and routinely files legislation to create a national insurance plan even though none of those bills have made much progress.

With Republicans holding the subcommittee reins, he’ll instead spend the next two years trying to navigate a working relationship with newly installed chairman Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is arguably as conservative as McDermott is liberal.

The two worked together on the trade subcommittee last session, when Brady was chairman and McDermott was ranking member, and McDermott insists he likes Brady on a personal level.

“The real problem is at the top,” McDermott told POLITICO in an interview, referring to the House GOP leadership team. “He may act on their behalf, but I’ve always been able to talk to Kevin.”

But beyond that mutual respect, there’s little evidence the two will be able to find common ground when Republicans advance Medicare reform later this year. Brady is already working on legislation modeled after Rep. Paul Ryan’s premium support plan — a version McDermott is sure to oppose.

And he’s not likely to go along with Medicare cuts that even some Democrats have at times supported, ideas like raising the eligibility age or charging wealthier seniors higher premiums. Instead, he says the focus should remain chiefly on saving money through payment and delivery reforms.

“You are going to at some point run out of savings, but we don’t know how much we could save if we reformed our system,” McDermott said. “And that’s why I’m not willing to say you have to cut benefits.”

He’s frustrated with Republicans who still call for repeal of the health law. And he’s leery of attempts to dismantle pieces of it, saying that it’s like trying to unspin a portion of a spiderweb.

“The Republicans should stop this repeal stuff and get on with fixing it, and I hope that we move to that stage pretty quickly,” McDermott said. “At this point, I don’t know what their agenda really is.”

And he doesn’t have a lot of patience for arguments about the contraception coverage rule, not even from his alma mater, Wheaton College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1958. The evangelical school is fighting the rule in court, arguing that its religious freedom will be violated by having to provide employees with coverage for certain types of birth control to which it is morally opposed.

“I can respect anybody’s religious choice or what they decide, but I think the school oughta provide for their employees and not make the choice for them,” McDermott said. “It doesn’t reflect well on them, in my view.”

Always enjoying landslide elections, the silver-haired congressman has held his seat for nearly a quarter-century.

But as easy as elections have been in his district, McDermott has generated his fair share of headlines over the years. Perhaps the most infamous was in 2004, when Rep. John Boehner sued him for leaking an illegally recorded phone call to the press — and won.

More recently, he’s gained some attention for taking several unusually pricey trips overseas and undergoing a messy divorce from his second wife, Therese Hansen.

But for all that, he doesn’t seem to have lost his pugnacious personality, which earned him a colorful description in 2004 from then-Sen. Joe Biden, who told a group of College Democrats that the Seattle lawmaker “has more moxie than any other member of Congress.”

Given the chance, he’d direct that moxie at doctors’ Medicare fees — an area he says needs reform. In 2011, he introduced legislation to stop the American Medical Association from making specialist-oriented payment recommendations, pointing out that the group often raises the fees but rarely lowers them.

“How many doctors have you ever heard say, ‘I get paid enough’?” he said, chuckling. “You could count them on one hand.”