You know things aren’t looking good for healthcare reform when Washington Post liberal blogger Ezra Klein is not only acknowledging that “health reform is, I think it fair to say, in danger right now,” but is actually taking Congressional Democrats to task over their latest tactics to get reform passed.
As we reported yesterday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has delayed plans to unveil his committee’s version of healthcare reform until later this summer. This was clearly the result of a Congressional Budget Office report on Senator Ted Kennedy’s Affordable Health Choices Act - where the CBO announced that Kennedy’s plan would be far more expensive than originally thought and would not come close to achieving universal healthcare coverage in America. Conventional wisdom indicated that Baucus was looking for ways to identify new revenue streams to raise the money necessary to pay for his plan.
Yet, according to Klein’s sources, instead of finding more money for his plan, Baucus has vowed to cap his plan at $1-trillion over ten years - as opposed to the $1.6-trillion it is estimated at now. Klein, for one, thinks this is a bad idea.
There are two ways to make a $1.6 trillion bill a $1 trillion bill. The first is to do less reform. The second is to do more reform. That sounds confusing. But it shouldn’t be: In health care, the less you change, the more it costs.
Right now, I’m told Finance is going down the road of less reform. They’re cutting the subsidies, cutting the generosity of the basic benefit package and cutting the number of people who will ultimately be insured by their proposal. This reflects a simple reality: If you’re going to try to leave the central features of the health-care system untouched, you can’t get to universal coverage, or even anywhere near it, on $100 billion a year.
This approach is exactly what free-market conservatives have been warning against all along and what the Clinton Administration learned back in the days of HillaryCare. Unless the government assumes complete control of the healthcare industry - which has not been ruled out by a number of single-payer advocates in Congress, universal healthcare - where EVERY American is insured, is unachievable. Furthermore, creating a government-run healthcare plan will lead to a reduction in the quality of care the average American currently receives as more and more people are forced onto a public-option plan.
Klein sees the Democrats left with a politically dangerous decision. Do they abandon their ambitious plans for healthcare reform - a move that will likely cost them a significant number of seats in Congress in the 2010 elections and possibly the White House in 2012? Or, do they abandon any hope for bipartisan support of reform and propose a single-payer system whereby the government nationalizes healthcare - which would send the federal deficit into unrecoverable territory?
But health reform has just gotten harder. The hope that we could expand the current system while holding costs down appears to have been just that: a hope. And CBO doesn’t score hopes. It only scores plans. The question now becomes whether we want health-care reform that achieves less of what we say the system needs, or more. Doing less would be cruel to those who have laid their hopes upon health reform. But doing more will be very, very hard.
Of course, Democrats could always reach out across the aisle to their conservative colleagues and find a way to initiate market reforms and tax incentives in an effort aimed at letting the American people determine the future of our healthcare system. I’ll continue to hope a Washington Post blogger comes up with that plan.
Tags: 2010, 2012, Affordable Health Choices Act, Congressional Budget Office, Democrats, Ezra Klein, healthcare reform, HillaryCare, Max Baucus, public-option, Ted Kennedy, universal healthcare, Washington Post
