Our view on medical overhaul: Obama lays cards on table. Where’s the GOP health bid?
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If Republicans harbored any illusions that Obama would go back to the drawing board, as they've been demanding, he dashed them with his some-from-Column A, some-from-Column B approach to the separate health bills passed by House and Senate Democrats. His plan is as easy to pick on as its precursors were. (What change of this scale isn't?) But strip away all the Washington ax grinding and ideological infighting, and the plan can be put to a very simple test: Would it produce a health care system better than today's — one that would leave people confident that they could get high-quality care at a reasonable price? The answer is yes. And for all our misgivings about aspects of the plan, that is not a close call.
In a nation where 46 million people lack health insurance, Obama's proposal would eventually cover more than 30 million. It would provide subsidies to help lower-income people buy policies. And it would eliminate an array of noxious insurance company practices, such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Like other plans on the left and right, the biggest weakness in Obama's is that it falls short in curbing the medical inflation that threatens to send premiums and the federal deficit soaring. It's disappointing that the president further weakened the "Cadillac" tax on expensive health insurance plans, one of the most important ways to discourage overuse of medical care — and cut costs.
The larger picture, though, is that his plan would improve the lives of tens of millions of people without increasing the budget deficit. Republicans, by tossing bombs while refusing to negotiate, effectively stand for the unacceptable status quo, which is doubly troubling because individual Republicans have good ideas. Obama has adopted some, notably ones aimed at reducing Medicare and Medicaid fraud. He should take more, such as malpractice reform to reduce costly "defensive medicine." But responding to Obama's plan Monday, Republicans pretty much stuck with their drumbeat of demonization and obstruction, which has proved politically profitable.
Key Republicans have dropped their support for fixes they once supported, such as curbing Medicare spending and requiring everyone to have medical insurance as a matter of personal responsibility. And the only coherent alternative the GOP has collectively produced would barely cover an extra 3 million people out of 46 million uninsured, according to the Congressional Budget Office, at least 27 million fewer than the Democrats' bills.
At Thursday's televised summit, Obama will meet with Democratic and Republican leaders to talk about a bipartisan health fix. There's nothing we'd like to see more than the two parties joining hands to repair a system that works well for some Americans but harms or bankrupts too many others. But we have no delusions that starting over, as Republicans now insist, is anything but a politically motivated stall.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/02/debate-on-medical-overhaul-our-view-obama-lays-cards-on-table-wheres-the-gop-health-bid-.html#more
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