Criticizing the Boxer-Pelosi health care plan which squeaked through an overwhelmingly Democratic House yesterday after the majority party’s leadership crafted special deals in back room and offered payoffs to various wavering legislators to secure their votes, the woman whose chances of replacing Ma’am Barbara Boxer in the Senate increased dramatically last night had this to say:
While our nation’s health care system is in need of reform, the legislation passed today is an example of the ‘cure’ being worse than the disease. It is a patchwork of Washington insider deals, and it will cost California taxpayers millions, if not billions, of dollars we cannot afford.
Carly Fiorina then repeated the points she’s been making for some time about what real reform would look like:
- Building on programs that provide incentives for receiving preventative care and for healthy lifestyles.
- Reforming malpractice on a national level as has been done in California.
- Providing greater access to lower-cost community-based primary care clinics.
- Encouraging more transparency about pricing and quality of health care services.
- Allowing consumers to purchase any health plan from anywhere in the country.
- Creating more market-based competition for everything from health insurance to prescription drugs.
Unlike the schemes Senate Democrats unanimously backed last December and which a divided House Democratic caucus adopted last night, Fiorina’s reforms are based on ideas which have lowered the costs and increased the efficiency of services in health care and other industry. By contrast, most provisions in the Democratic plan aren’t based on programs which work, indeed, many of them are based on programs which have seen huge cost overruns and led to a rationing of services.
Let us hope that in her first days as a United States Senator next January, this breast cancer survivor from California introduces a bill to effect these reforms in the debate Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opens to repeal the bill just passed.
Dan, no offense intended, but I’m not encouraged.
Several of those points are meaningless blah, blah, blah. Only the second and fifth points (malpractice tort reform and interstate competition) would change the game, i.e. significantly as well as in the right direction. And some other needed reforms are missing. A real program would look more like this: