August has been a brutal month for advocates of government-run health care. According to a new CNN poll, for the first time in his presidency, a majority of independents (53%) now disapprove of how President Barack Obama is handling his job. And a majority of all Americans (53%) also disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling health care. Responding to these new facts on the ground, senior Obama officials are now telling Politico that when Obama does finally detail the specifics of what he wants to see in a health care bill, the public option will not be included.
Instead, according to Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, President Obama will focus on health reform that will “create competition and choice.” Axelrod’s focus groups must love that phrase, because the White House has been selling Obamacare as “choice and competition” for some time now. Unfortunately, even without the public option, the other pillars of Obamacare (federal regulation of health insurance, massive new taxpayer-funded subsidies, and employer and individual mandates) will all decrease, not increase, Americans’ health care choices.
- Federal Regulation of Health Insurance: Both the pending House health care bill and Senate HELP Committee bill include provisions that would, if enacted, result in sweeping, complex, and highly discretionary new federal regulation of health insurance. Taken together these provisions would make the current situation worse by driving costs higher and by encouraging more employers and individuals to drop coverage.
- Massive New Taxpayer-Funded Subsidies: Both the House and Senate would expand eligibility for Medicaid, and create new taxpayer-funded subsidies to the middle class. Such commitments would result in millions of Americans dependent on the government to finance their health care.
- Employer Mandate: Both the House and Senate bills would impose an employer mandate for employers who do not offer coverage and for those whose benefits do not meet a new federal standard. An employer mandate would hurt low-income workers the most and would also stifle much-needed economic growth. Employer mandates are passed on to workers in the form of reduced wages and compensation. This is exactly the wrong prescription for businesses, especially during a recession.
- Individual Mandate: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a federal individual mandate for health insurance would be unique and unprecedented because it would “impose a duty on individuals as members of society” and would “require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated” by the government. According to President Obama HHS nominee Dr. Sherry Glied: “Developing a system to promptly identify and penalize scofflaws will take effort and ingenuity, particularly in our diverse and mobile country. It may require a degree of intrusiveness and bureaucracy that some will find unpalatable.” In fact, it was jut last year that then-candidate Obama also opposed individual mandates.
Conservatives have been for increased “choice and competition” in health care long before David Axelrod discovered the phrase was popular with the American people and commandeered it to push Obamacare. Such pro-competition reforms include giving individuals the freedom to purchase coverage from trusted sources and not be restricted by where they happen to live, equalizing the tax treatment of health insurance purchases, and putting Medicare and Medicaid on a fiscally sustainable path.
Heritage Center for Health Policy Studies Deputy Director Nina Owcharenko concludes: “Instead of continuing to protect the status quo, Congress should advance improvements that put the health care system on a path to reform. Such improvements should be focused on increasing choice and competition not by turning control over to Washington but by empowering individuals and families to control their health care dollars and decisions.”
Quick Hits:
- California’s San Joaquin Valley is facing 14.3% unemployment thanks largely to a drought … a man made drought caused by the Endangered Species Act.
- Speaker Nancy Pelosi will let Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) keep his chairmanship despite his failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets on federal disclosure forms.
- According to the National Legal and Policy Center, the White House New Media operation is planning to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.
- According to Service Wire, the Department of Education is planning an unprecedented nationwide address on September 8th by President Barack Obama to the nation’s PreK - 6th grade students that also instructs teachers to have their students read books about Obama and ask them: “Why is it important that we listen to the President?”
- Obama administration bailed-out and United Auto Worker-owned Chrysler actually saw their sales drop 15% during the Cash for Clunkers program.
Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s Washington Post op-ed shows that she’s studied the focus groups and tracking polls on health care: Just beat up on health insurance companies enough, and you can get Americans to accept a thousand plus pages of legislation that would do just about anything. And then, make sure to tell Americans not to focus on what the legislation actually says. She flat-out writes: “we can’t let the details distract us…” Just trust us. We are from Washington. We are going to rearrange the entire health system.
If it were a national economy, our health system would be the sixth largest economy in the world – larger than Britain’s entire economy. And remember, the guys who are rewriting our health care are the same people who not only grossly miscalculated the cost of Cash for Clunkers but are now hard-pressed to explain the legislation for that program. And it merely gives away money rather than affecting potentially life-or-death decisions. Ah, but let’s not be bothered with such details when we could be bashing health insurers.
But regarding health insurance, as Shakespeare wrote, “The lady doth protest too much.” There is actually broad bipartisan support for prudent steps to build a better infrastructure for health insurance. Even health insurers agree. But rather than work across the aisle, and with states, to fix the problems with solutions that everyone can agree on, Secretary Sebelius and Congressional leaders are using the straw man of faceless insurers to surreptitiously undermine insurance that most Americans are happy with.
There are two basic features that almost everyone agrees needs to be fixed. First, you can’t insure someone in a conventional way when that person is a known huge financial risk. That’s why a teenager who has a fender-bender or wreck every month can’t get an affordable auto policy – or maybe one at all. And it’s why someone with a costly medical problem often can’t simply phone up and get an affordable policy. That’s not because of evildoers at Blue Cross. It’s about dealing with high-risk individuals.
Second, because we have a tax system that ties insurance to the workplace, it means every job change or layoff can mean losing your insurance.
We at Heritage have laid out simple bipartisan solutions to these problems months ago. The solution is for states to work with insurers to develop ways to spread the costs of sicker Americans rather than denying them insurance, such as through high risk pools, reinsurance, and risk-adjustment systems. The feds need to give states the freedom to do that. As a former governor, Secretary Sebelius knows this. And it means providing similar federal tax breaks to Americans without employers, who don’t have employer-sponsored insurance, to provide them the same opportunities as those who do. This is not rocket science, and doesn’t take a thousand pages of legislation.
So let’s slow down, take a deep breath, and take sensible steps rather than disguising a radical, ideological rewrite of our health system with a populist campaign against health insurers