http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...588195568.html
Editor’s Note: We asked five opponents of government-directed health care for their thoughts on our new health-care entitlement. Specifically: Now that ObamaCare is law, how should Republicans respond? Should they work to repeal some or all of it, and do they need to offer an alternative health reform proposal of their own?
We Good Europeans
By Mitch Daniels
As if governors these days don’t have enough on their plates. Now that ObamaCare has become law, there’s a whole new to-do list for my state:
1) Plan for the termination of our Healthy Indiana Plan. This is the program that’s currently providing health insurance to 50,000 low-income Hoosiers. With its health savings account-style personal accounts, it has been enormously popular among its participants. I hope those folks will do all right when they are pitched into Medicaid.
2) Start preparing voters for a state tax increase. The axe won’t fall until someone else is governor. But when we are forced to expand Medicaid to one in every four citizens, the cost will add several hundred million dollars to the budget.
3) Check to see if Indiana should drop its health insurance plans and dump its government workers into the exchanges. Paying the new tax penalty might actually be cheaper for the state, as it will be for many private firms. I’m not certain the same rule applies to government as to business, but since no member of Congress read this entire bill before the vote, I don’t feel embarrassed about not knowing.
4) Ramp up our job retraining programs to handle those who will be fired by our medical device companies, student loan providers, and small businesses as they wrestle with new taxes, penalties, or in the student loan case, outright nationalization of their business.
5) Call the state’s attorney general to see if we can join one of the lawsuits to overturn ObamaCare. Yes, it’s a long shot. But why not try?
6) Investigate an offset to all this extra cost. We may no longer need the Department of Insurance since insurers will now be operating as regulated utilities under the thumb of the federal government.
It’s discouraging that all of this could have been avoided. Congress could have done what Republicans should suggest now: Shift to a system that allows individuals—not businesses—to buy health insurance tax free. They could also create tax credits for buying health insurance based on income and health status to guarantee everyone coverage and encourage medical care and insurance competition. Republicans should push to lower barriers for buying insurance across state lines, create incentives for states to repeal mandates, and limit frivolous lawsuits that increase the price of insurance.
But for the moment, our federal overlords have ruled. We better start adjusting to our new status as good Europeans.
Mr. Daniels, a Republican, is governor of Indiana.
This Law Will Not Stand
By Mike Pence
In the dead of night on Sunday, Democrats rammed their health-care overhaul through Congress. Some say we made history. I say we broke with history, turning our back on this country’s finest traditions of limited government, personal responsibility, and the consent of the governed.
Republicans remain committed to reforming health care in a way that honors these values. For the past year we have suggested ways to fix the system by reducing costs—specifically through instituting tort reform and by allowing Americans to purchase insurance across state lines.
As Washington Democrats embark on their attempt to sell government-run health care, they are in for a rude awakening. A few more speeches about the same bad law will not change any minds. The American people don’t want a government takeover of health care and House Republicans will work every day to repeal this law and start over.
If we repeal ObamaCare, we can start over with common-sense market solutions to lower the cost of health insurance. We can end the era of defensive medicine with real malpractice reforms, and use the savings to fund state programs that provide insurance for Americans with pre-existing conditions. We can renew our commitment to seniors in Medicare and pursue the kind of reform required to achieve its long-term solvency.
Finally, if we repeal this bill, we can restore the historic prohibition on using public funding for elective abortion. House Democrats were wrong to exchange 30 years of pro-life statutory protections for a piece of paper from the most pro-abortion president in American history.
Liberal Democrats had their say on the third Sunday in March. The American people will have their say on the first Tuesday in November. House Republicans are committed to repealing ObamaCare and starting over with reforms that reflect the desires of the American people.
Mr. Pence, a Republican, is a congressman from Indiana.
Resistance Is Not Futile
By Phil Gramm
For every dollar’s worth of health care that Americans received last year, they paid a dime and somebody else paid 90 cents. If you bought food the way you buy health care—where 90% of everything you put in your basket was paid for by your grocery insurance policy—you would eat differently and so would your dog. We have the best health-care system in the world, but as rich as America is we can’t afford it.
Any real debate about health-care reform has to be centered on solving the problem of cost. Ultimately, there are only two ways of doing it. The first approach is to have government control costs through some form of rationing. The alternative is to empower families to make their own health-care decisions in a system where costs matter. The fundamental question is about who is going to do the controlling: the family or the government.
President Obama and his congressional allies systematically excluded every major proposal to empower consumers to control costs. From beginning to end, they insisted on a government-run system. That’s why compromise was never possible.
The plan signed into law by the president on Tuesday is simply a hodgepodge of schemes to expand insurance coverage and government power with no coherent program to control cost. By contrast, the old Clinton health-care bill was a plan to control costs through health-care purchasing cooperatives, standards of medical practice, and penalties for providers who violated those standards. When Americans came to understand the loss of freedom resulting from the Clinton plan, they rejected it. The Democrats learned from that experience. This time around they simply left their cost control component to be added later.
Even though the Obama bill became far more unpopular than the Clinton bill ever was, the daunting size and rigid commitment of the Democratic majority to a government-run system was such that they could override public opinion. Now the Democrats are out to make Americans like their plan—or at least get them to acquiesce to it. But as Gandhi once explained, 40,000 British troops cannot force 300 million Indians to do what they will not do.
Republicans have a job to do. They must make it clear to the American people that this is only the beginning of the debate. There will be two congressional elections and a presidential election before the government takeover is implemented in 2014.
I believe that Republicans should take the unequivocal position that if they are given a majority in Congress in November, they will stop the implementation of the government takeover. And if a Republican is elected president in 2012, they will do with Mr. Obama’s health-care bill what the American voters will have done to the Democrats: throw it out. If the voters demand change in November, even the Democrats who remain in Congress will help give it to them.
If Republicans don’t want America to follow Britain and Canada down the road to socialized medicine, they must change the system so that families have more power to control their own health-care costs. This will entail real changes like tax deductions for health insurance, not for prepaid medicine; refundable tax credits for families to buy their own insurance; freedom to negotiate with insurance companies; rewarding healthy lifestyles; tort reform; and reforming Medicare and Medicaid so every consumer has deductibles and copayments based on their income. This system will require Americans to make choices in health care—just as they do in every other area of their lives.
There is one more overwhelming reason freedom is so critical in health care. In the end, even the greatest health-care system in the world fails. At 92, my mother decided to stop going to the hospital, stop going to the doctor, stop taking her medicine, and to die in her own bed. It was a free choice, and she made it. For her family, it was a painful choice, but she died as she lived—proud and free. Government bureaucrats did not make that decision; she did. And that made all the difference.
Mr. Gramm, a Republican, was a senator from Texas from 1985 to 2002 and served as chairman of the Health subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Finance.
Massachusetts
Is Our Future
By Timothy P. Cahill
White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod hailed the Massachusetts health-care program as “the template” for the national health-care reform legislation the president signed into law earlier this week. That should be cause for serious concern about this law’s ability to improve our health-care system at an affordable cost.
As state treasurer, I can speak with authority about the Massachusetts pilot program. It has been a fiscal train wreck.
The universal insurance coverage we adopted in 2006 was projected to cost taxpayers $88 million a year. However, since this program was adopted in 2006, our health-care costs have in total exceeded $4 billion. The cost of Massachusetts’ plan has blown a hole in the Commonwealth’s budget. Just last Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick’s office announced a $294 million shortfall related to health-care costs.
If not for federal Medicaid reimbursements and commitments from Washington to prop up this plan, Massachusetts would be broke. The only reason MassCare has survived is that we have been repeatedly bailed out by the federal government. But that raises the question: Who will bail America out if we implement a similar program?
While everyone should have access to affordable health care, our experience in Massachusetts tells us that the new federal entitlement will burden future taxpayers with unfunded liabilities they cannot afford. Health-care inflation will continue. Mandates will increase insurance premiums. And the deficit will reach frightening levels as the law’s costs greatly exceed the projections of its advocates.
As lawmakers push for changes in the bill, they should start by being honest about its costs and focus on making health care more affordable without bankrupting the country.
Mr. Cahill is the state treasurer of Massachusetts. He is currently running as an independent for governor.
Persistence Is the Key
By Bobby Jindal
After forcing through a massive health-care overhaul that the public does not want, the president and Democratic leaders in Congress are threatening us with yet another PR campaign to make us like it. Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, some level of handwringing has broken out among GOP strategists. Should we push for repeal? Will it work? Is there some danger in that strategy?
Well, let’s see. We just spent 13 months arguing against the Democrats’ top-down approach to health care, contending that it must be stopped for the good of our country, the health of our citizens, and the future of our nation’s economy. So, should we try to repeal it? Only in Washington is this a hard question.
The arguments against repeal are the following:
1) It’s next to impossible. Nothing of this magnitude has ever been repealed.
2) Even if Republicans take control of Congress this fall, the president would veto repeal.
3) It will be hard to take things away from people once the government starts giving them out.
4) There are parts of the bill that the public will like.
5) We don’t want to be labeled the party of “no.”
Let’s take them one at a time.
1) It’s impossible. Wrong. There is a first time for everything. It’s similarly “impossible” for the son of Indian immigrants to get elected in the deep South. It’s impossible for an African-American to get elected president. You get the picture.
2) President Obama would veto a repeal bill. Yes, he sure would. Do it anyway. And do it again after he is gone. (By the way, President Clinton vetoed welfare reform twice before he signed it into law.)
3) It will be hard to take things away. Probably so. But the reality is that growth of federal entitlements is strangling the economic engine of our country. Someone has to draw the line somewhere. Do we want to go the way of Western Europe? If not, we better get moving in the other direction immediately.
4) There are parts of the bill the public will like. No doubt about it. There are parts I like—though I have yet to read the fine print—such as allowing parents to keep kids on their policies until they are 26-years-old. And there’s bound to be more good policy in there: 2,409 pages can’t be all bad. But the overall direction of the bill is to empower government, not patients.
5) We don’t want to be labeled the party of “no.” As it pertains to this bill, how about “hell no”? Newt Gingrich is saying we should “repeal and replace.” That works.
Mr. Jindal, a Republican, is the governor of Louisiana.
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