Last Wednesday was supposed to be Sen. Max Baucus’ “Da Vinci Code” moment. It would be the day that the Montana Democrat and his moderate Republican colleagues would announce that they’d cracked the code, crafted a health-care reform bill that could attract both Democratic and Republican votes.
It didn’t work out that way.
Yes, after a long summer of negotiations the Senate Finance Committee chairman unveiled a bill that does a lot of good things: It extends coverage to millions of the uninsured. It guarantees that Americans can buy affordable insurance, no matter if they have a pre-existing health condition, lose their jobs, move, or get too sick to work. It discourages expensive, so-called “gold-plated” health insurance plans that boost already rocketing health-care costs and hide the real costs from consumers.
Most encouraging: Unlike the Democratic House bill, the $856 billion Baucus plan wouldn’t add to the federal deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It reduces the deficit by $49 billion over 10 years.
The reviews from Baucus’ congressional colleagues? They weren’t glowing.
Many Democrats (and at least one Republican senator, Olympia Snowe of Maine) complained that the bill was too stingy with some subsidies so many low- and middle-income people couldn’t afford the health coverage the government was forcing them to buy. Many Republicans said it created a huge and expensive new government entitlement and would tamp down health-care insurance competition.
We see this as a work in progress. There’s a lot to like in this bill — particularly when it’s compared to the Democratic alternatives.
There’s also room for improvement in it.
The Baucus bill wisely avoids the biggest pitfall: Creating a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers. That wouldn’t promote competition, it would kill the private market. Baucus envisions nonprofit insurance cooperatives in every state to compete against private carriers. Those state-run co-ops could be almost as bad, though. Think public option lite. Let’s hear more about how they would operate.
The point of reform should be to increase the choices people have, not to straitjacket them into government-dictated coverage they may not want or need.
Case in point: Massachusetts. The mandate for soup-to-nuts insurance plans there is a big reason health care is busting the state’s budget.
We’re still waiting for a national health-care bill that would prompt competition and lower costs by freeing private carriers to sell insurance nationally, instead of state-by-state as laws now dictate.
The Baucus bill could be a key moment in the health-care debate, if Democrats recognized it as a significant step toward compromise on a bill some Republicans could support. Instead, many Democrats see Baucus as a traitor to their cause.
A new USA Today/Gallup poll shows that many Americans are still skeptical about President Barack Obama and Democratic leaders’ reform efforts. Many people are inclined to believe that those efforts would make the health system worse, not better.
The swift rejection of Baucus suggests that Democratic leaders still want to ram through a big, confusing and expensive program on their own, despite the public’s skepticism.
That’s misguided. They should pick up on the Baucus plan and filter in some Republicans’ ideas for cost containment and competition. For their part, Republicans ought to start selling their ideas. Right now they sound like the party of ‘no.’
The health-care code can be cracked if there is a genuine bipartisan effort.
