Thoughtful Conservative

I’m mad. As an American, you should be too. After the release of the 2,000 page HR 3962 House insurance bill and the high-fiving press conference today put on by Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues, one thing has been made crystal clear – the Democrats in Washington are not interested in real health care reform. Let’s walk through the Democratic selling points and why I believe this to be true.

The bill is deficit neutral

The funny thing about a $900 billion bill that House Democrats claim to be deficit neutral is that you need to raise $900 billion elsewhere to pay for it. Democrats plan to do this by cutting health care benefit to seniors and raising taxes. While some in Congress think that taxes increases and money grow on trees, Margaret Thatcher knew better when she said that “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money [to spend].”

Health insurance companies are the villains

President Obama and his friends in Washington would have you believe that insurance companies are evil. They tell us that these companies make huge amounts of profit at the expense of everyday Americans. Unfortunately for the President, the Associated Press released a fact check report recently that showed that the net profit margin of the health insurance industry was only 2.2% last year. This would lead most reasonable people to wonder if the problem might be somewhere else. Another argument is that insurance companies won’t cover Americans with pre-existing conditions. At 2.2% profit margins, this is a tough prospect. I do believe that in conjunction with some other cost savings outlined in this article, there could be enough savings to offset legislation to prevent insurers from denying these Americans.

The public option will provide competition necessary to keep private insurers honest

The selling point for the public option is that it would provide competition for private insurers, thereby lowering health care costs for everyone. This belief is unfortunately short sighted. We know that the health insurance companies had profits of only 2.2% last year. This means that without fixing other problems, the Government-run insurance company could only reduce prices by about 2.2% before it began losing money. One reasonable solution to increasing competition would be to allow interstate competition between private insurance companies, rather than allowing the Government to be the only insurance company allowed to compete across state lines.

This bill will lower the overall cost of health care

This is just simply false. There is no discussion of fixing the underlying problem, which is likely the health care delivery system. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, $200 billion is lost annually from inefficient claims processing, and another $200 billion is lost due to practicing defensive medicine for fear of malpractice. A more intelligent solution to health care reform might be to pass tort reform and institute a national standard for claims processing. Let’s also shift doctors from pay for procedure business model to a salary-based model while we’re at it. If the Government is really feeling ambitious, they might hire an independent third party to go after Medicare fraud and abuse. Let’s also task the Health and Human Services folks to work on national wellness and preventative medicine programs. Another area of significant cost savings lies in allowing the reimportation of pharmaceuticals. Where is the talk of this? Instead the authors of the House bill would rather raise taxes on both everyday Americans and pharmaceutical companies. This solves nothing. Once we have an actual plan to lower health care costs, then we can allow the Government to expand programs to help low income Americans receive health care coverage. In spite of what Democrats on television would have you believe, Republicans are not heartless and in fact want to help their fellow citizens.

The health care reform process with play out on C-SPAN

President Obama made a pledge to Americans that the health care process would be transparent. Unfortunately, HR 3962 was drafted in a back room on Capitol Hill, with visibility provided to only a few Democratic legislators. Even today’s “press conference” to unveil the bill was invite only. Democrats argued that Republicans had no specific objections and were simply being obstructionist, but the truth of that matter is that they had no ability to be specific because there was no bill and they had no visibility into the creation of the bill.

So let’s conclude by comparing HR 3962 to my idea.

HR3962: