Dole and Daschle Release Health Care Plan
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Bipartisan, Health Care, Legislation
Does anyone care about the opinions of former Senate majority leaders? What if one was once his party’s presidential nominee and another one nearly became President Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services?
Today, former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole, Tom Daschle and Howard Baker released a health care plan they claim includes the kind of compromises necessary to win significant support from both parties.
The plan seeks to reconfigure health care reimbursement to focus on health outcomes – a tricky maneuver to say the least. But that’s just one of the ways they hope to reduce costs. It’s not where the “compromise†comes in. The former senators want to tax health care benefits over a certain level (something most Dems are against), mandate coverage (something Republicans don’t like), cap premiums and out-of-pocket percentages (market controls that aren’t usually popular with the right) and create state-level insurance systems rather than a federal one (and you know the left has their heart set on a Big Daddy system coming out of Washington).
Whether this plan is any good or not is up for debate. But at least Dole, Daschle and Baker are making a concerted effort to draft bipartisan legislation. Rather than trying to ram through one side’s idea or saying no to every idea, this plan takes a shot at bringing everyone to the table.
Dole says a true bipartisan bill should be able to win the votes of 20 Senate Republicans. That’s a tall order. But if enough congress people buy into the idea of compromise (and there is some common ground out there), it might be possible. Whether a compromise bill ends up being any more effective than one forced through by Democrats is unknown. But I think it’s definitely the way we should be heading.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 and is filed under Bipartisan, Health Care, Legislation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
June 18th, 2009 at 8:57 am
The idea of a plan proposed by a bipartisan group composed of folks with legislative experience and without a reelection motive is appealing to me.
I am not against taxing benefits over a certain level, because I think part of reform should be leveling the playing field, in the sense of the system not having as many clear winners and clear losers. People with really great plans that are primarily funded by employers are enjoying a great deal, and if their deal is made a bit less great in order to make the deal better for the folks who usually slip through the cracks, that’s a pretty defensible compromise in my eyes.
Same thing with caps. Whatever providers and servicers are able to demand really high compensation for certain services are often (though not necessarily) getting a great deal. If that has to be capped to control costs, that’s Ok with me. And I’ll even go ahead and acknowledge that such caps may dampen the motivation for innovation. I think slowing the pace of new advances is probably a plus from the perspective of controlling costs. Currently, the high-cost US system generally finances innovations, and so in a sense subsidizes it for the rest of the world.
In an environment of unlimited demand and limited supply I think it’s obvious that we must ration care. And if we must in some real sense ration care in order to control costs, I would choose to do so by slowing the pace of future innovation than to restrict the availability of current treatments with demonstrable efficacy.
One more component of reform I would like to see is that whatever the new system is, it provided access of each consumer to reasonable choices to control costs themselves by shouldering somewhat more risk. So for example you can choose a higher deductible plan with a lower monthly cost, so you could choose to try to save money presuming health, and then if you got sick it would be more expensive. I thin k the plans where you shoulder say a 10% or 20% cost up to a ceiling where 100% coverage kicks in are a sensible option.