As the August congressional recess gets fully underway this week with members of both the Senate and House back home, a tumultuous national debate about Obamacare is swinging into high gear. Already, numerous congressmen have learned at town hall meetings that many of their constituents are in no mood to accept Washington double talk as answers to legitimate questions about reforming health care. This debate could become a tremendously positive experience for the country if it leads to genuinely effective reform that enjoys broad national support. For that to be the result, however, two things must happen.
First, President Obama must call off the union thugs, repudiate incendiary remarks among his appointees threatening violent retaliation against his critics, and acknowledge in a credible way that most Americans want no part of any reform that includes a “public option” that, sooner or later, will result in a government-run health care system. Obama’s credibility would be helped if, instead of denying it, he would frankly concede that, while he has indeed spoken in favor of the latter in recent years, the reality is that most of his countrymen oppose such a system and that he accepts this fact.
Second, Obamacare opponents shouldn’t just settle for defeating the president’s proposal; they must also have a better reform. As David Frum rightly points out, just beating Obamacare is a losing proposition because: “We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.”
So Obamacare opponents must begin making a case for genuine reform in the strongest possible terms. A solid starting point is the Health Care Freedom Plan introduced by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC, and the analogous Putting Patients First proposal of the Republican Study Committee (RSC) on the House side. The heart of these alternatives is providing all Americans without employer-provided coverage with vouchers to purchase health insurance that meets their needs from any insurance company in the country. This would create a truly competitive national, private health insurance market and put consumers in control of their coverage, not federal bureaucrats. To pay for the vouchers, TARP financial bailouts would be repealed.
In addition, states would get federal block grants to develop innovative coverage for pre-existing conditions, and caps on medical malpractice suits would put an end to “defensive medicine” whereby doctors order unnecessary tests and procedures to protect themselves against predatory trial lawyers. Finally, health care providers would be required to provide accurate price information for individual services, so that consumers could make knowledgeable decisions. These are the signposts along the road to concrete reform.
