Kim Strassel gave some great advice to the GOP concerning Obamacare in a November Wall Street Journal column:
'You can't fight something with nothing," muses Tom Price, the Republican for Georgia's Sixth District. That adage, which the surgeon-turned-congressman is now repeating to any colleague who will listen, is gaining steam within the broader GOP.
As the ObamaCare disaster dominates the public debate, Republicans are engaged in an animated discussion behind the scenes about their next move. Health reformers like Dr. Price, Reps. Phil Roe and Steve Scalise, and in the Senate Tom Coburn and Mike Lee, are pushing colleagues to go on offense and start selling the public on innovative, pro-market health reforms.
They've been met with reluctance, and some of it understandable. The ObamaCare meltdown has been a political gift for Republicans, many of whom don't currently want to risk getting in the way of the law's collapse. Putting out a GOP "alternative," they say, would simply allow Democrats to refocus headlines by attacking a Republican plan.
Some worry conservative proposals don't offer enough political cover on touchy issues, like the number of Americans insured, or pre-existing conditions. Others are opposed to any big bill, given the public backlash to ObamaCare's size and complexity. Yet others fret that too many of their own members still aren't able to competently discuss health care.
These are risks, yes, though in politics everything is relative. And as the reformers are rightly pointing out, there is a greater risk to the GOP right now of doing nothing. (KF note: Obama regularly beats Republicans up by arguing the GOP has no plan and ignored the subject for years.)
The biggest of these risks is put succinctly by Sen. Coburn, who warns: "The failure of ObamaCare will not guarantee the success of free-market health reform." The president's law is destroying the private market, and the left will seek to capitalize on that. "If Republicans don't present a clear alternative the American people can understand and support we run the risk of single-payer becoming the default fix," says Mr. Coburn.
Tactical GOP silence also does nothing to combat Mr. Obama's favorite talking point. Republicans, he insists, just "want to drag us back into a broken system." As unhappy as America is with ObamaCare, that line hits home. While the U.S. health system before 2010 was the best in the world, it was still too inefficient, too regulated and too costly for too many people. Consumers don't want that back, either, and Republicans suffer if their party is tagged with that position.
Republicans have hopefully learned, too, that political nature abhors a vacuum. The party's failure this summer to delineate an ObamaCare strategy opened the way for louder voices to demand what became an ill-fated shutdown. If leadership isn't going to drive this agenda, it risks even more divisions with outside groups and with a grass roots that is hungry for some aspirational leadership. It risks once again reacting to events, rather than shaping them.
Finally, the party could throw away a huge opportunity. Democrats have owned the health issue for decades, but their ideas have now been exposed as abject failures. They are about to head home for Thanksgiving recess to be shellacked by angry constituents. Rarely has there been a moment where the public has been better educated on the health-care issue and more open to pro-market alternatives.
The GOP also has built up a surprisingly rich body of those policy reforms. This has been a longtime in the making—not to mention hard and unrecognized work for many of the trailblazers. The process has been aided by an influx of doctors to the GOP caucus, who have used their experience to craft original health reforms on everything from medical malpractice to high-risk pools, as well as thinkers like Paul Ryan, who has directed his budget expertise to policy reforms for health entitlements.
Those reforms have accumulated in a number of bills: the Coburn-Ryan proposal of 2009; a bill by Mr. Price; a Roe-Scalise plan endorsed by the Republican Study Committee; and more. No one of these proposals is perfect, but the GOP doesn't need one, big bill. They have an impressive framework of ideas that can be promoted and explained as a modern and dynamic health system—one that not just overthrows ObamaCare, but eclipses the system that preceded it.
Policy aside, Republicans might use this unique moment to redefine the broad concept of health care: Patient-centered, patient-driven, patient-owned (even when workers change jobs); a deep well of competitive choices that ensures access by all; fairness in tax treatment; ease of use; and a more streamlined and limited safety net.
Talking about these concepts, and the policies that underlie them does not get in the way of the ObamaCare collapse. Quite the opposite: It provides a contrast that could hasten the law's end.
The GOP's long reticence to address health care provided Mr. Obama with the moment to pass his law. The GOP is now faced with another such moment, only this time the party is far better positioned to show policy boldness. If it only will.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Kim Strassel to GOP: Nature abhores a health care vacuum.
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5 comments:
I have a lot of respect for Dr Coburn, 2nd term Senator of OK and physician. I would listen to him on healthcare because he is honest on the political failure of the Congress on oversight, power of the purse, and true representative democracy. He term limited himself as a Senator unlike our Sen. Cochran.
I know the plan will be based on personal responsibility, behavioral aspects of health, attitude to health, and health savings accounts. The other legs will be catastrophic coverage, high risk pools, and price transparency. The balance will be drawn from ACA such as IT improvements.
The GOP doesn't need to reinvent the wheel .
You didn't want single payer and did want private insurance based and that's what you got.
The bulk of the language in ACA would be part of any health care bill.
What you need is a plan to make insurance more competitive. One way is to open it up to global competition or at least threaten to do so.
You need to do the same to our pharmaceutical industry so that medicines developed overseas, like the new , successful chemo treatment the French developed for ovarian cancer, can be approved here more rapidly. And, you need to close the loophole that allows a pharmaceutical company to add a non-essential additive and call an old drug no longer protected a new drug.
For a society that claims to be capitalistic, that we don't encourage competition is the height of hypocrisy.
It's time to get some State Insurance Commission butt as well. Much of the health care problems and increasing expense can be laid at the feet of the insurance industry. For starters, health care is a long term strategic problem, and using quarter profits as a basis doesn't work. Cutting corners now can often mean higher costs later and that is much of what we are seeing.
And, the insurance industry if they are to be a business rather than a service must take the hit for their bad decisions. If most of us who have been insured for two decades had wisely invested the monies when paid for insurance, we could self-cover. The industry played fast and loose with their investments and that has added to costs.
And, you can't get price transparency under current law that allows the insurance industry to have their information be proprietary! Step one is to change that!
And, don't forget that when the industry could have refused to cover incompetent doctors with more than one malpractice charge , they didn't. Instead, they raised the rates for ALL doctors! Let me say three words on that, " Crazy Dr. Smith".
That is Karl denninger's premise. The parties did nothing about the monopolies. Indeed, Obamacare strengthened them.
"Abhors," not "abhores"...Spelling? Not so important in a comment, when passionate conviction often overrides orthography, but in a header, I'd check it twice before pounding "publish"...dilutes the argument. Sorry, but 'tis so.
KF, I don't disagree but the Devil is in the details. Think back to when ACA was first introduced and language was added/deleted in hopes of the GOP getting on board.
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