Hegel's thesis was that for any problem, you could take the best parts of each side, and combine them to form something that will satisfy everyone.
This approach does not seem to be working for health care. Obama has spent nearly a year pushing for a major health care overhaul. In his latest push, he's trying to start a bipartisan summit on the issue, which would give him a chance to use something like Hegel's concept of synthesis.
A major obstruction in Obama's path so far has been the apparent lack of unity. Republicans are ideologically opposed to any health care reform, and now that they have sufficient votes to filibuster, this is a major problem. Combine that problem with blue dog democrats who are opposed to government spending, and it's next to impossible for Obama to compromise.
Structural differences meant that the house was able to pass a health care bill that contained more of the provisions that democrats liked. The Senate bill did not contain key provisions that were in the house bill, such as the public option.
This is really an example of Hegel's process of synthesis. Both parts of congress do the process on their own. The house has debate and creates a synthesis of the ideas of the two opposing sides, and so does the house. Then, they both get together, and do the process over again, using the product of house and senate discussions as the starting point. This is the part that has our current congress stuck; Pelosi can't convince enough democrats in the house to approve the senate bill, and the Republicans have too much power in the senate to pass anything more than they did.
Hegel's dialectic approach to problem solving would work great in the example above, except for the fact that votes are ideologically based, not logically based.
I agree that Hegel's dialectic process should be applied to health care reform. Ideally, world, Obama would push reforms with broad public and bipartisan support, work to win over the GOP and a bill would pass. I do not agree that the lack of compromise is the fault of obstructionist, ideological Republicans. To say that Republicans are "ideologically opposed to any health care reform" is simply false. In fact, Republicans have put forward three different bills on health care reform. What they oppose are many of the Democrats' reform proposals, which they see as ineffective or counterproductive. The credit for a failure to compromise on a "synthesis" belongs entirely to the party that controls Congress, the White House, and the health care debate. Democrats have made little to no effort to win over Republicans--they propose things the GOP firmly opposes, refuse to negotiate and then complain about partisanship when the GOP votes against them.
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