Debating the "Government Option/Public Plan
By: Hugh Hewitt
Examiner Columnist
July 6, 2009
Today is "health care debate" day on my radio show. Three experts will each spend an hour outlining and critiquing the radical proposals currently circulating in the Senate and the House.
Dr. Robert Moffitt is the Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. Moffitt has been tracking the Congressional tinkering with American medicine for a quarter century.
Like everyone else who has ever been covered by the federal Employees Health Benefits Program -"FEHB" for short--and with the grasp of details that only a former senior official at the Office of Personnel Management which oversees FEHB can bring to the conversation, Moffitt knows and is quick to firmly point out that when President Obama tells the public that he wants to offer everyone the same sort of "public plan" members of Congress and federal employees enjoy, the president is misleading his audience.
There is no "public plan" for the members of Congress or federal employees. None. There is rather a wide-open competition among hundreds of private plans. President Obama wants the public to think that D.C. elites enjoy a special government-owned-and-operated health insurance plan, but no such thing exists.
Professor Clayton Christensen is one of the brightest lights at Harvard Business School, and he has been engaged in the study of American health care for a decade. He is co-author of a new book, "The Innovator's Prescription," which brilliantly diagnoses many of the ails of our current health care system and offers numerous excellent ideas on the way forward.
Professor Christensen is appalled by the prospect of a "government plan/public option," as is almost every serious proponent of improving the quality and affordability of American medicine. The current proposals circulating on the Hill are so far removed from real reform that Professor Christensen would rather the Congress do nothing than anything it presently has it sights on trying.
Dr. Irwin Redliner is president and co-founder of the Children's Health Fund, and a professor at Columbia's medical school. Dr. Redliner is a self-proclaimed progressive, whom I place on the "smart Left."
He and his colleagues want mostly to get health care to the radically underserved urban and rural poor. He'll take a government option, but readily admits that it doesn't do much for the underserved who need clinics with open doors and staffed by competent doctors and nurses.
Redliner would much rather see billions pumped into a community clinic system that delivers real medicine to patients than spent on a massive bureaucracy overseeing an extension of Medicare rationing to every American, which is the essence of the "government option/public plan."
Most honest health care experts I interview from across the ideological spectrum will quickly agree that a "government option/public plan" is a cure in search of a disease. It does not solve the problems of the uninsured and it does not deliver basic health care to the neediest poor.
It doesn't open or maintain a single community clinic. It doesn't relieve the massive and massively expensive use of emergency rooms for minor ailments. It doesn't reform the out-of-control tort law system that drives doctors to practice ridiculously expensive defensive medicine by covering their every diagnosis in a battery of unnecessary and costly tests. It doesn't develop a single new drug or provide a single free screening for any disease.
What the "government plan/public option" does do is dramatically increase the power of the federal government over a vast part of the private sector, while providing powerful incentives to private employers to dump their employees into a new federally-owned-and-operated health insurance plan.
President Obama says again and again that everyone who likes their health insurance can keep it under his plan.
And every single time he says that, he is deceiving the public because his plan will lead tens of thousands of employers of tens of millions of Americans to dump those employees into a new, stingy, unwieldy and quick-to-ration federal health insurance program.
That's not reform. That's politics. And it has to be defeated.
All three hours of these discussions today will be posted as podcasts at HughHewwitt.com and transcribed there as well. No one who listens or reads any series of serious discussions about the president's proposals will think the "government option/public plan" will fix anything.
Examiner columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com
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