Recently Mr. Obama’s health care strategy, delineated in an 11-page document that mentioned the word “tax” 35 times, was scraped after only being on the table for a mere ten days. Its presumed selling point was its “simplicity” i.e. fewer pages. The public was not fooled. No problem. Team Obama went back to the drawing board and faster than one can say “it’s the exact same thing,” voila, they pulled another gimmick out of the hat.
The president outlined his current approach in a letter to Congressional leaders. In that letter Mr. Obama threw Republicans a bone, saying that he would be “open” to covert investigations of physicians who receive federal payments, $50 million for medical malpractice demonstration projects, raising Medicaid reimbursement rates, and allowing HSAs in the exchange. These gestures give the façade of reaching out to the other side and no doubt they have been spun accordingly, but in reality they fall way short of bipartisanship muster. The country needs comprehensive tort reform, not a few scattered demonstration projects. Furthermore, the inclusion of HSAs in the exchange is a moot point, if government bureaucrats outlaw them outright. Democrats have long opposed HSAs and previous ObamaCare versions could easily pull the plug on these popular plans that empower patients and encourage wiser consumption of health care dollars. As for Medicaid, its expansion is a central tenet of the president’s platform. To do this without improving stingy Medicaid reimbursements will only place more and more patients on waiting lists.
Even if the president’s feigned attempt at bipartisanship were genuine, it would be unwise for Republicans to take the bait when attached to a proposal that would grant the federal government more and more power over health care decisions and place Washington bureaucrats in between patients and doctors. It’s still an agenda that will ruin the world’s premier health care system and will irreversibly restructure a sector where 90% of people have insurance and over 80 percent of those like what they have. Just as before, it will roll the dice with one sixth of the country’s economy and won’t even control costs. It’s still the same bad medicine.
Mr. Obama has repeatedly redefined and rebranded his radical product. The public has yet to buy the charade. Now Mr. Obama is trying a new approach. Paraphrasing Lincoln, he’s trying once again to fool enough of the people enough of the time to prevail. This time he is trying to give the appearance that he is changing the substance when he is merely tinkering at the periphery. Throwing a few semi mediocre paragraphs into a horrendous two thousand plus page bill crafted by one party negotiating with itself behind closed doors does not make this a good bill. Similarly, compelling someone to adopt your philosophy by holding a legislative gun to their head is not bipartisanship–and frankly its not good faith either. Republicans have an obligation to set the record straight. If the president would really like to court Republicans ideas and reach across the aisle he should renounce reconciliation, scrap the whole thing, and start over. Obviously, this is not the path he has chosen!
Jason D. Fodeman, M.D. is an internal-medicine resident at the University of Connecticut. A former health-policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation, he is the author of How to Destroy a Village: What the Clintons Taught a Seventeen Year Old.