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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (13459)	2/17/2010 3:01:54 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

Consensus health care plan already exists By J. Roy Rowland I have good news for President Barack Obama and Congress. They don’t have to give up on comprehensive health care reform and settle for minimal results at most. A plan is within their grasp that could make dramatic progress in fixing the system in ways that would be agreeable to most Americans, including most members of the U.S. House and Senate on both sides of the aisle. It’s called the “consensus” plan, and 15 years ago it proved a bipartisan, grass-roots strategy featuring innovative, constituent-friendly ideas could bridge the partisan divide over health care reform. The Health Care Reform Consensus Act was written by five maverick Democratic congressmen (including me, a family physician then serving as a U.S. House member from Middle Georgia) and five Republicans during the last mega-health care reform debate in 1993-94. The consensus plan was one of a variety of alternatives to President Bill Clinton’s plan that started it all. It emerged as the one option that could have passed if partisan politics had not kept it bottled up in committees. In both the current and previous debates, Democratic leaders attempted to enact unpopular plans by coalescing their party’s House and Senate majorities. Last time, they opted not to bring any reform to a floor vote when the Clinton plan bogged down in the face of persistent public opposition, refusing to negotiate over a bipartisan agreement even after it was apparent that would be the only chance to get anything done. As we now know, the failure to deliver on the majority’s promise of reform played a big part in the next election when Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress. What is difficult to understand is why my fellow Democrats did not learn from the past failure of a partisan strategy. Although they pushed through separate House and Senate bills on razor-thin, party-line votes by wheeling and dealing more freely than President Clinton and his congressional allies, it was questionable whether they could have reached a final agreement even before the Democratic loss in the recent special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat sealed the fate of the administration-backed plans. Their margin was extremely fragile and constituent opposition was intensifying. The consensus model worked before and it could work now. It’s true a bipartisan effort in the Senate collapsed in disagreement last year. It’s not easy to come up with solutions that can get the job done in ways that are generally acceptable to a public that is unified over the goals of reform while deeply divided over how to reach the goals. But the consensus plan demonstrated it could be done. Although critics tried to portray it as something less than “real” reform, in fact it would have eliminated or dramatically mitigated the problems that have caused financial and health-related hardship for countless millions of Americans. We started with reforms just about everyone supports such as insurance portability and protection against denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Then we came up with nondivisive ways to address the tougher issues. To expand access to care, we proposed a nationwide network of community health care centers open to Medicaid patients and everyone else on a means-tested basis, a system patterned on the 1,200 existing community centers providing quality care for a much lower cost than state averages. We included preventive care programs, anti-fraud measures, administrative modernization, tort reform, 100 percent tax deductibility for individual coverage and creative cost offsets such as a prefunding mechanism for anticipated future federal retiree health benefits. It would have come close to meeting the universal care threshold as defined by the costly, government-oriented Clinton plan in ways that would have cut government and consumer health care costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It did not rely on tax increases, deeper deficits or an expanded bureaucracy. By reaching for the goals without antagonizing much of the population, it eventually attracted more than enough co-sponsors and verbal commitments from members not wanting to disappoint constituents whose expectations had been raised by the debate. Strong Republican support came early on. Aside from the plan’s merits, the consensus plan provided “cover” against charges of obstructing reform for political advantage. Strong rank-and-file Democratic support came after core consensus co-sponsors hit upon some breakthrough ideas that expanded the plan’s scope within the plan’s cost and bureaucracy-related parameters. Pressure to enact publicly acceptable reform trumped leadership arm-twisting. The dynamics are the same today. So is the choice. President Obama and Congress can coalesce over a bipartisan consensus-like plan or they can throw in the towel on comprehensive reform. In the last debate, the best choice for the country would have been best for the majority party. In my view, it would have been the best long-term choice for both parties. Nothing has really changed. J. Roy Rowland is a former U.S. House member from Georgia. ajc.com