Americans love agreement. In kindergarten, we are taught to play nice, share our blocks and get along with others. This elementary principle enters our political minds, and because of it, we want bipartisan agreement. A partisan bill equates to hogging the Legos when the majority party passes legislation without input from another party. Many citizens think that the more people who agree, the better, so if no one disagrees with the bill, it must be a good idea.

Politicians love bipartisanship because it can often capture where the all-important median voter lies. They like bipartisanship so much that both presidential candidates touted their bipartisan records and promised bipartisan presidencies.

While bipartisan agreement seems ideal, it hardly ensures good outcomes in our highly partisan political world. Even though few major bills are passed with widespread bipartisan support, some of the most controversial Bush-era bills gained support from both parties. The Patriot Act had a tremendous amount of bipartisan support, with just 62 Democrats in the House and just one in the Senate voting against it, but it is now widely disliked by politicians of various political backgrounds as citizens have learned the truth about the bill and its invasion of privacy.

The Iraq war resolution also had votes from both sides of the aisle. The Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership sold the Iraq War so well that more than 100 congressional Democrats voted in favor of invading Iraq. Unfortunately, many of these Democrats do not like what they bought: They expected to topple a brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction in a war the Bush administration claimed would pay for itself. Despite bipartisan backing, the Patriot Act and the Iraq war did not produce the positive results many citizens would expect from bills that passed with such ease.

This leads us to last week, when Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., came out with a long-awaited health-care proposal designed to ensure bipartisan backing of reform. Democratic leaders had waited for months as presidential and congressional poll numbers dropped, town halls meetings raged and Senator Baucus negotiated with the bipartisan Gang of Six in hopes of reaching a set of reforms that both parties could support. When Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, rolled out his plan, it gained bipartisan agreement, but not quite the kind Senator Baucus had hoped for: Both parties agreed that they would not support this bill.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who is Senator Baucus’ main target for Republican support and the only Republican interested in serious, bipartisan reform, said she could not support the bill in committee. Even one of reform’s biggest advocates, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., refused to vote for the watered-down bill. While it is possible that Senator Baucus could further weaken the bill to gain Senator Snowe’s approval when it gets to the floor, the bill will likely lack the punch and effectiveness of a partisan healthcare reform bill.

Bipartisan bills do not inherently produce poor results—in fact, they can often fix problems within the political system. For example, the McCain-Feingold Act added stronger regulation to the campaign finance system, giving citizens fairer elections. But when a topic like health-care reform causes heavy fighting along partisan lines, a bipartisan solution likely evades the difficult but necessary steps to fix a problem. Regardless of whether Senator Snowe signs the health-care reform permission slip, Democratic leadership should move forward with strong health-care reform because what America needs is reform built well, not just bipartisan block-sharing.