Posted on 09/13/2009 12:21:21 PM PDT by KeyLargo
The Republican Health Care Failure
Steve Chapman
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Republicans fault President Obama for plans that would greatly expand federal outlays on health care, enlarge the federal role in the provision of medicine, doom private insurance and wrestle Aunt Sally into the grave. They have some valid points. But while they're heaping blame on Obama, they need to save a share for someone else: themselves.
His GOP critics in Congress, after all, have proposals to help the uninsured and curb health care costs. During his speech to Congress Wednesday, they waved their own bill at him. But for four years under President Bush, we had not only a Republican president but also a Republican Congress.
And what happened? Nothing. Republicans left health care reform to wait until the Democrats regained power, and now the Democrats have.
One reason the president has a good chance of getting ambitious legislation passed this year is that so many health care failures have gone unaddressed for so long. Obama and his allies can justify their program partly because the GOP has been so slow and tepid in offering alternatives. If the choice is between the quite imperfect Democratic plan and nothing, the public may prefer the Democratic plan.
It didn't have to be this way. Republicans actually have some plausible ideas for improving the health care system. Let small businesses band together to buy insurance? Sure. Medical malpractice reform? Bound to help. Giving federal subsidies to help low-income individuals buy coverage? Go for it.
But for Republicans to propose all these measures brings to mind my friend who, new to Chicago, approached a city transit officer and said he'd like to get to State and Randolph streets. The frosty reply: "Buddy, who's stopping you?" The only people who stopped Republicans from putting these ideas into practice were Republicans.
Former Reagan administration official Joseph Antos, a health care expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is among those who wonder why. "The sad thing is Republicans have been talking about these things for a long, long time," he told me.
You may have forgotten that George W. Bush made a big deal of proposing tax credits of $7,500 per person or $15,000 per family to purchase medical coverage. He did that in 2007, only to be spurned by a Democratic Congress. Why did he wait till the seventh year of his term? He didn't. He had offered the idea in 2004, only to encounter raging indifference in his Republican Congress.
The truth is Republicans just can't muster an interest in the subject until a Democratic president comes along and offers legislation, which is their cue to wake up and scream in horror. They solemnly agree the existing system has a host of serious flaws. But they can never get excited about fixing them -- only about making sure Democrats don't get to.
"The passion you need to drive health care reform through Congress has not been present with Republicans," laments Gail Wilensky, who headed the agency that runs Medicare under President George H.W. Bush and advised both George W. Bush and John McCain. "Even liability reform -- they couldn't get that through."
Stuart Butler, a veteran health care expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, shares her frustration. When I asked him whether he blamed Republicans for not adopting sensible innovations when they held power, he replied, "Absolutely! They just don't get it. They just feel that it's not something they do, somehow. Republicans missed a tremendous opportunity."
Actually, they did worse than miss an opportunity. They stimulated the public appetite for lavish federal spending on health care while catering to the illusion that it can be provided painlessly.
"They put in prescription drug coverage for Medicare," Butler complains, "the biggest entitlement since the Johnson administration." That program is projected to cost nearly $1 trillion in federal outlays over the next decade, most of which will be paid for by sending the bill to our children.
So now we have the GOP railing against Obama because he rejects their good ideas, busts the budget and enlarges the government's role in our lives. No wonder they're mad. Heck, if that's what the American people wanted, they could have left Republicans in power.
Why shouldn’t the GOP take a conservative wait-and-see approach rather than tinkering wildly with an entire system whether it works well or poorly?
Fair enough criticism. Except that Republicans haven’t been campaigning on health care reform for 30+ years ... Democrats have ... and they still haven’t gotten it done. (They’re lamer than us excuse)
Even so, Republicans knew or should have known this issue was not going to just go away and they should have gotten out in front of it well before now.
“Why shouldn’t the GOP take a conservative wait-and-see approach”
They did and now the Democrats will pass a bill and be the heroes. Even though it destroys what is left of our economy.
More like be the zeroes.
Zero’s reform isn’t just “deeply flawed” it runs in the exact wrong direction from where the nation should be going. The one conservative reform that Bush tried turned into a fiasco (Social Security) - I think the country just isn’t ready for real changes, but after four years of watching Zero bungle everything he lays his fingers on perhaps we will be.
I’m not so sure they’ll be the heroes.
Many ‘progressives’ are already deeply disappointed in the current proposals (they don’t go far enough for them).
Also, when/if the reform takes place, many people may not be happy with what they got, even those who supported ‘reform’.
We need to start writing our own bill. I have two ideas to start.
1. Medical malpractice insurance needs to be a rider purchased by the consumer of services separately from basic health care insurance.
2. One price for a procedure. Always. All prices must be published and available on request. The published price must be the billed price.
Past time to purge this clowns who do nothing but spew Democrat Party propaganda while claiming to be “Republicans”.
Instead of whining hysterically about Bush, this columnist COULD of wrote a column about the Republican alternative bills that are getting NO press coverage. Instead, as usual, the supposed "Conservaive" media wastes our time and bandwith with the hysteric whining of clowns like this author who are busy doing the Democrat Party campaign pr for them.
Republicans are pretty much impotent when it comes to doing anything positive thru government. The GOP is infected with LICE (Libertarians Infiltrating Conservative Entities) and as I have said many times, sending a Republican to Congress, or the White House, is like hiring an atheist to be your pastor.
The GOP hasn’t caught on yet that Wall Street screwed the country or that doctors kill a whole bunch of people or any other fact of reality. The whole dang worthless bunch ought to just change their name to the Silly Twit Party.
parsy, who left the Silly Twit Party in 2001 after 30 years of being a Silly Twit.
There are several BILLS written by Repubs for Health Care reform....just no one will LISTEN or publish them...especially the Dems.
Republicans could have written and passed the greatest healthcare bill ever, but that would not stop the rats and libs from proposing socialist care. To think otherwise is ridiculous. They won’t stop until they turn this country into socialist hell.
Chapman, without realizing it, actually touches on a bigger issue plaguing Republicans: They don’t dream anymore. There’s no passion to advance conservatism. When Republicans had power, where were the bold ideas at? Instead we got more lukewarm socialism under the guise of compassionate conservatism. Republicans are all about reacting and calling the Democrat’s plans “socialism.” Well, that’s true but people still want alternative plans.
I couldn’t agree more.
The sudden influx of Liberal propaganda on this board alone is aggravating, to say the least.
There is only one truly American alternative to socialized medicine: FREEDOM.
The Federal Government has no Enumerated Power in this area, and needs to be made to butt out.
I agree.
Pub’s typically don’t believe that HC needs much change. Even today 89% of people are satisfied, including about 67% of the “uninsured” (voluntarily self-insured).
There are a few glaring areas for reform, including price transparency, guaranteed individual insurance and more affordable, portable post-employment coverage (super-cobra). These reforms would be cheap, and easy to implement given good leadership from DC and the states. Tort reform and more flexible quality standards that take costs and ROI’s into account would be nice too (they don’t now, essentially mandating “gold plated” care at any cost).
However, 0 and company keeps pushing this horrid, socialist take over.
This is always how it has been. Dems WANT the existing system to collapse so they can take it over. I have walked the halls of state capitals and Congressional offices for years, and have seen this myself.
Sometime in 2005 Bush&Company went into a coma. For all intents and purposes, the GOP remains in a coma.
Tru, but had we addressed the most glaring problems with the system back when we ran the show, what support there is for Obama and the Dems “reforms” just would not be there.
The biggest problem we have is that even when we are in power, we ignore huge swaths of issues like Health Care and the Environment because supposedly they are “not our issues”. But they are big issues to a lot of people, and a lot of them are swing voters we need to win elections and take or keep power.
Ignoring problems and then suddenly realizing this is a big deal when a Democrat becomes President and want’s to do the stupidest and most radical reforms possible and then flailing wildly clamoring for them to accept our proposals even though when we had power we really never tried to implement them ourselves, is insane and detrimental to our Country.
None of the bills on either side of the aisle are going to fix this problem. The only way you can fix this problem is by eliminating the doctor shortage. In other words, it’s a supply problem, not a demand problem. Health insurance has nothing to do with supply. It operates solely on the demand side.
Unless they are actually going to deal with the supply problem, then we’d be better off if they do nothing. Anything else they do will just screw things up worse.
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