From the ArcaMax Publishing, Clarence Page Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/clarencepage/s-570134-959647
As debate over President Obama's health care proposals kicks off, his
opponents are lining up in a predictable way. On one side,
conservatives call Obama a "socialist." On the other side,
left-progressives wish that he were.
If he really were a socialist, in my view, Obama would propose
something like expanding Medicare, the government's health insurance
program for seniors, to cover everybody regardless of age.
It's simpler and therefore an easier sell than the hopelessly
complicated health care reform plan that Bill and Hillary Clinton
suggested in the early 1990s. It also would increase the mighty
leverage that the world's biggest health insurance program could
negotiate in lowering costs for drugs and services.
But when I brought up that option with Obama in an interview during
last year's primaries, he rejected it. One big reason: he didn't think
it could get enough votes to get through Congress. He may be right,
considering the stormy opposition that more moderate alternatives are
running up against in Congress -- especially from leading Democrats!
Yet the central argument in the health care debate appears to be
centered on Medicare by another name, the "public option," a
government-run health insurance plan that would compete for our
consumer dollars against private plans.
Obama reiterated his belief in a Tuesday news conference that a public
option "made sense" and that private insurers should find ways to
compete for clients. But he declined to say whether he would veto
legislation that did not include a public plan option. It's too early
in the process to "draw lines in the sand," he said, speaking for
himself. Some Republican leaders and insurance companies are drawing
lines of their own.
Over in the House, for example, Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio
compared the public option to "the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles)"
and the post office, as if that's a bad thing. Please. After having
gone through telephone hell with my insurance provider a few times,
the DMV and post office look remarkably consumer-friendly.
Besides, as several late-night comics have noted, who else will come
to your house, pick up your letter to Aunt Nelly and reliably deliver
it to her anywhere in the country in two or three days for 44 cents ?
The post office argument already is getting old. A recent CBS News/
The haggling turned to shock on Capitol Hill when the Congressional
Budget Office estimated the price tag on the bill working its way out
of the Senate Finance Committee could come to $1.6 trillion over ten
years. That figure caused such a bad case of "yikes" that Sen. Max
Baucus of Montana, the committee's chairman, postponed a drafting
session for the bill in his committee. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa,
the committee's top Republican, suggested on
Piling on more debt, even $1.6 trillion worth, is an important
concern, but it need not be crippling. Team Obama argues that new
efficiencies in health care can bring those costs down, closer to a
less ghastly trillion dollars. Besides, even $1.6 trillion over ten
years they point out is less than one percent of the nation's gross
domestic product, by their estimates. If so, less than a penny on the
dollar doesn't sound like too much to pay for a new health care safety
net.
Unfortunately cutting costs has been an unnatural act for our nation's
lawmakers and so far, the health care debate has not given them a
sudden burst of thrift.
Nor have they shown much interest in offending the insurance industry
or big employers.
For example, Senate moderates are pushing health-care "cooperatives"
as an alternative to a public option. Trouble is, nobody seems to know
exactly what a health care "cooperative" is. There has been a lot of
general talk about some sort of quasi-public/private organization, but
few specifics yet.
After a summer of more haggling, I still expect a final health care
plan to make its way through a House-Senate conference committee with
some muscle applied by Obama and his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The
package should include a Medicare-like public option or some kind of
cost-cutting co-op that offers close to the same thing. Anything short
of that won't look like much of a victory.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o
Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY
14207.