Health Care Redux

"In an interview Sunday with Katie Couric of CBS News, Obama said he planned to ask Republican leaders 'to put their ideas on the table.'"

As if.

The Republicans do not have any ideas. What they have are objections and tweaks. Their "plan" is not unknown to us. This was the Republican "plan" on 10/31/2009 as articulated by House Minority Leader John Boehner:

– To let individuals and small businesses look for better insurance deals in other states.

– To allow them to pool together to receive the kind of insurance deals typically offered to large corporations.

– To create an environment that gives states greater range to experiment with cost-saving health care reforms.

– To institute tort reform.

Item one: Simply preserves the present "free market" approach to health care that has left thirty million people with no health care coverage. So what if a mom and pop grocer in Ohio can get insurance from a company in Missouri? They still can't afford it. The idea, of course, is to increase competitiveness. Yeah John, and we know how well that has worked out with Cable Television.

Item two: Again, the function of this is to support insurance companies in the "free market". The fact that larger groups spread risk has not prevented the continuous rise in rates for corporations and has done nothing - as the linked article attests - to prevent them from using discriminatory practices that push some people out of the market. Setting up "health care co-ops"may improve access to insurance, but it does not address costs in anything but a superficial manner. Someone who makes $25,000 per annum cannot afford $13,000 per year for insurance for their family, no matter where they get the coverage.

Item three: Another pet project of conservatives such as Boehner is to return us to the Articles of the Confederation, that is, a loose confederation in which states are more or less autonomous members. All that is really happening here is that Boehner and the Republicans continue in their effort to strip the Federal Government of any power to regulate the states, outside of the first nine amendments to the Constitution. And this is the rub: "experiment"?! Here is how things worked out with Tennessee's most recent "experiment" with health care cost savings reforms: hundreds of thousands of people kicked off of the health care rolls and hundreds of thousands more required to absorb major costs for their care. Yes John, let's do experiment with peoples lives, I mean after all, your coverage is secure. We should remember that it was the states, not the federal government, that created the Jim Crow laws. It was the Feds who ended them. But then maybe John doesn't think ending them was such a good idea.

Item four: Boehner thinks that tort reform is a big deal. He has felt that way for years, there is nothing new here. He thinks it will be the magic pill. Truth is, not so much. What it does do is pit two of the most powerful lobbying groups in DC - The American Medical Association and the Trial Lawyers Association - against each other. which means that both will be dumping beau coups bucks on the Congress. Reform? Maybe not. Let's be clear: George W. Bush was a major advocate for tort reform at a time when Congress was owned by Republicans. Wonder why it never happened? The call for tort reform is nothing more than a call for continued paralysis.

And that is the point of the Republican's plan. The idea is the appearance of change, with no actual change. They really don't think that things are so bad the way they are. Again and again they tout the idea that America has the best health care in the world. And they should know, they alone have access to it. The facts are a little different: the US has the highest percent of Gross Domestic Product devoted to health care, the highest per capita spending on health care and the highest percentage of health care cost covered by private insurers, according to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Yet we get much less bang for our considerable bucks than nations such as France and Norway.

So, yeah, Mr. President, invite the Republicans to the table. Just please have no illusions that it will make any difference whatsoever to the American people.

Tags: Health Care Reform, Republicans, Obama, Boehner

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