At the start of the great push for health care reform, President Barack Obama told Congress he wanted to have legislation to sign before legislators went home for the August recess.
Well, that date has come and gone, with nothing — thankfully — for the president to sign.
Slow down, President Obama, please. Haste, the old saying goes, makes waste ... especially when you’re talking about messing with one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Six committees in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are working feverishly to craft a reform package to begin action on.
In the Senate, all eyes are on the Finance Committee and its chairman, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, who’s been closeted with five colleagues, including three Republicans, trying to devise legislation that would garner at least a modicum of bipartisan support. Waiting in the shadows, ready to pounce, is the liberal lion of the Senate, Health Committee chairman Ted Kennedy of Massachhusetts.
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Kennedy and the Senate’s liberals are getting restless, trying to force the hand of Baucus and the Finance Committee by imposing an arbitrary date of Sept. 15 for the conferees to finish their work. If they don’t, the liberals hint they’ll use parliamentary procedure to vote on a bill to their liking and pass it with only a simple majority, not a filibuster-proof margin of 60 votes.
We have some advice for Sen. Baucus and his Finance colleagues: Hold firm, and call their bluff.
And while we’re at it, a second piece of advice: Go for broke and embrace a bit of truly radical reform of the system, as advanced by columnist Charles Krauthammer, printed elsewhere on this page.
Abolish the medical tort and malpractice system. Seriously consider taxing employer-provided health insurance, returning the money to individuals to purchase insurance on their own and allow insurance providers to compete with one another from one end of the country to the other for customers.
Krauthammer, a Harvard-trained physician who also is a trained economist, points to studies that estimate as much as $200 billion is spent annually on “defensive tests,” ordered by doctors to protect themselves against possible malpractice suits. In turn, he argues, abolish how our legal system currently deals with malpractice actions, in effect cut trial lawyers, along with the juries they’re often able to manipulate emotionally, out of the picture.
The second leg of Krauthammer’s radically simple approach to reform is equally ambitious: tax health care insurance provided by employers and return the money to employees to purchase policies that best suit their needs. At the same time, allow individuals to buy insurance from any provider in the country that has a policy that meets their needs.
Politicians, bureaucrats and policy wonks see the only answer to big, complicated problems as being bigger, more complicated “solutions.” Overbearing mandates and inscrutable funding formulas, more often than not, form the basis for future problems, not real solutions.
It’s almost as though the Democrats are creating a system as stumbling, bumbling and cumbersome as the one they claim to be reforming.
Sometimes, though, true reform comes wrapped in the simplest of packages. It just takes political courage to apply the brakes and go in a new direction.
Do it right, Mr. President, not fast.
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