Republicans want Oompa Loompa NOW
February 10, 2010 by Rachel Baker · Leave a Comment
Much like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who has everything she could possibly want and hope to get, the Republicans want their Oompa Loompa now. Its not good enough that their core “common-sense” ideas are included in the Senate health care bill, they want to start over. At some point, it will be increasingly difficult to not look at our Republican politicians on the Hill as the spoiled brat Mr. Willy Wonka saw in Veruca.
The President has asked the Republicans to join him at a Health Care Summit (televised on C-SPAN) on February 25. The GOP leadership sent a letter outlining things they need to see to be able to pass a bill. Further in October, 2009, John Boehner gave a weekly Republican address outlining four ideas that need to be met for them to vote for new health-care legislation.
These ideas are the GOP’s common-sense health care solutions…and they are included in the Senate Health Care bill (H.R. 3590) that the Republicans voted unanimously against.
Yesterday, Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, has pointed out where in the Senate Health Care bill these health-care solutions demanded by the GOP are found, as well as two other GOP ideas that have been an area of contention for the Republicans.
Eric Naing at opencongress.org has also given us a closer look at the Republican ideas added by the Democrats into the Health Care bill. Naing added links to the sections of the bill to make cross referencing and reading in context a bit easier.
For easy reference, I’m adding the text from the Eric Naing post on OpenCongress below:
- Conservatives argue that regulation of insurers can be too harsh in certain states and that the insurers should be allowed to sell policies across state lines. Klein says this idea lives on in Section 1333 of the bill, which allows for the creation of “Health Care Choice Compacts.” Under these compacts, a group of states could allow one insurer from any of those states to sell policies in all of them.
- A second tenet of the GOP’s health care reform plan is to “allow individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do.” As Klein says, this is exactly what the exchanges in Section 1312 of the bill are supposed to do or as the bill says, insurers have to consider everyone covered by a plan in “a small group market” “to be members of a single risk pool.”
- The third GOP idea is to allow states to adopt their own innovations in lowering health care costs. This idea too is in the bill under Section 1332, Klein accidentally points to Section 1302. Under this section, states can apply for a waiver exempting them from the demands of the bill if certain requirements are met.
- The fourth and final idea from the GOP website is to simply “end junk lawsuits.” The issue of malpractice is a controversial and highly partisan one and though the bill addresses it, Klein concedes that this might not be enough for conservatives. In Section 6801, states are encouraged “to develop and test alternatives to the existing civil litigation system,” the more promising of which should be evaluated by Congress.
- Klein also throws in a couple ideas not mentioned on the GOP’s website, one of which is to cap or repeal the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance. He says the Senate bill accomplishes this through its excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” insurance policies or as they’re defined in Section 9001, “high cost employer-sponsored health coverage.” This provision is one of the main reasons the House is reluctant to vote for the Senate bill. Labor unions in particular oppose taxing high cost insurance policies.
- The final GOP idea Klein points to is the fact that this bill is a private market plan. In a Democratic dream world, this bill would create a single-payer system where the government was the sole provider of health insurance. This idea was ruled out immediately and in its place, concepts were enacted like the exchanges in Section 1312 where the private insurance industry still maintains power.
The GOP’s have told the President they would like him to scrap the approved bills from the House and Senate and start over so they can have their ideas implemented into a piece of legislation they feel comfortable supporting. They’ve further said, there’s no point in participating in the Health Care Summit next week if the process isn’t starting from scratch.
Its very hard to continue to have any belief that the GOP want to pass health care reform of any kind when they constantly say they haven’t been a part of the process (they have – reference the two groups from both sides that helped to develop these bills), and the bills already include the Party’s core ideas for health reform.
