| Apparently, a number of hackles got raised the other day when the President had the audacity to stand by his campaign plan of supporting a public health insurance option in a letter to Congress. The resulting letter has Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, Orrin Hatch, John Ensign, and, apparently, others quite upset. After all, they don't like a public health insurance option and their 40-member caucus represents the vast minority of the country, so why wouldn't the President bend to their demands?
Bipartisanship is a good tactic and, often, even a good goal. It is better to pass good legislation with support from both sides of the aisle. But the bottom-line on this stuff, of course, has to be to pass good policy.
Somewhat ironically given Chuck Grassley's opposition is that Senator professes, at leastin this CNBC appearance alongside Max Baucus that "bending the curve" (e.g. reducing costs) is his top priority: And if I could comment on that. You know, this is restructuring, as I said, and we need to have the Congressional Budget Office as an impartial person show us that over the long term, we are going to bend this curve so that this big increase doesn't come. Because if it isn't, you know, we aren't accomplishing our goal. We'd just be spending more money on a program that isn't good. Now he says that we need to listen to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and figure out how to solve healthcare inflation. Ironically, he blames Medicare for cost increases in healthcare.
Why is that ironic? Well, contrary to conservative rhetoric, Medicare has done a better job of controlling costs than private insurance. Beyond that, the considered reforms are proposing to do even better cost containment on the Medicare side, containment strategies that could be imposed on a public plan and translated to private insurance through that magical device known as the invisible hand of competition.
But here's the other thing -- every analysis I've seen shows a public option restrains health care inflation more and the more robust and open the public option, the greater restraint on healthcare spending.
So if the Senator from Iowa is being honest, he should favor a stronger public option, not a non-existent one.
Update -- Ezra, nearly simultaneously, makes a similar point: What you're seeing here are people who fundamentally don't want a universal health care system, and are willing to be flexible in how they argue and advocate for that goal, fighting with people who fundamentally do want a universal health care system, and are willing to be flexible in how they argue and advocate for that goal. A lot of these relatively esoteric policy disputes are simply manifestations of those two underlying impulses. |
