Health Care Reform: Getting Ready for Crunch Time
For health care reform, the next few weeks will be critical. Congressional committees are poised to pass legislation (to put this in perspective, this never happened during the Clinton Administration’s reform efforts in 1993-94). President Obama and his aides will become even more engaged concerning the legislative language they would like to see Congress enact. Senate moderates will begin taking sides on critical issues. In short, this is when it all starts coming together. In the next few weeks, it will become clear if Washington will enact health care reform and, if so, what it will look like.
Events will move quickly, so I’m clearing out some short items that have been lingering in my “to blog” folder for awhile. They are a random assortment of items unlikely to become stand-alone posts. Taken as a whole, however, I hope they provide some useful background to the history about to unfold.
- Health care reform ideas are flying around the Capital in ever increasing numbers. Keeping track of them all can be a challenge. Good thing there’s the Kaiser Family Foundation’s health care reform proposal comparison tool. It makes comparing the entire plan or just particular issues across the various proposals simple.
- One of the plans we have yet to see details on will be presented in the next few days in the Senate Finance Committee. They are working hard to construct a legitimately bi-partisan proposal, which means it has the greatest likelihood of foreshadowing the legislation likely to emerge from Congress. To get an early taste of the coming debate in that committee, check out the dialogue between Senator Charles Grassley and Senator Charles Schumer on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
- I’m a fan of the FiveThirtyEight.com blog. The site applies rigorous math to political topics. Very rigorous math: it’s prediction of election outcomes during the presidential primaries and the general election were eerily accurate. The site has a left-leaning bias on some topics, but overall, its posts are more nerdish than ideological. Recently it did an interesting analysis on how campaign contributions may derail a public option plan. Of course, whether Senators vote a certain way because of the contributions they receive or they receive contributions because of the way they vote is an open issue (which, to his credit, the author acknowledges). But the issue of causality does not change his conclusion: unless the several stars fall into place, a public option is unlikely to be part of the final health care reform package.
- Need more evidence a government-run health plan is losing momentum? As noted last week, Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee feel the need to dress their public plan proposal in moderate clothing. Then there’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel making clear today the Administration is willing to accept legislation without a public plan. According to the Wall Street Journal Mr. Emanuel says “’The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest. The goal is non-negotiable; the path is’ negotiable.” Mr. Emanuel goes on to say creating a public plan only if the private market proves incapable of offering competition would be one acceptable solution.
- Is a government-run plan even needed for health care reform to be meaningful? Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton, uses the German health care system as evidence it is not. This is not to say that the German system is an appropriate model for the United States, but it does undermine the argument that health care reform will only work if the government is both referee and player.
- All the health care reform attention is focused on what’s happening in Washington. Some folks think this is a mistake. Instead, the federal government should simply enable states to pass their own reform plans. This would allow solutions to reflect local values and enable the best ideas to emerge over time. I disagree. States lack the levers of power necessary to reform something as complex and critical as health care reform. In a post from 2007 I cited an article by Ezra Klein describing the many failed state health care reform efforts. That doesn’t mean, however, that every health care decision needs to be made at the national level. Meaningful structural change — and the financing required to implement it – requires the federal government. Implementing those changes can be managed and administered at the regional, state or even local level.
- The status quo is on life support. Health care costs are rising faster than either general inflation or wages. (To see for yourself, check out Tom’s Inflation Calculator). We have the opportunity today to enact responsible, meaningful reform. Without such intervention, the current system will eventually deteriorate until unwise and extreme proposals make sense. Fortunately, what’s likely to emerge from the current debate will be determined by moderates. This doesn’t mean the reforms won’t be flawed, but it does mean that there’s a chance for responsible reform sooner rather than later.
- The advocates of a single payer system know that the status quo is unsustainable. It is why some of them will oppose whatever moderate reforms emerge from the current health care reform debate. They are like a doctor who sees surgery as the solution to every ailment. If the patient takes medication, and it works, they don’t get to cut. Similarly, if reasonable changes increase access to affordable, quality health care coverage and reduces overall spending, the need for a single payer solution vanishes.
- Meanwhile, back at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver crunches some poll result numbers and points out that moderates are disappointed with President Obama’s handling of health care reform. Whether these results show President Obama needs to get more specific in describing his health care reforms (as Mr. Silver concludes) or whether he needs to focus more on pushing the right health care reform, is something to ponder.