A solution, no hearers

Left to rot in that legislative tomb known as the House committee is a spindling thing whose low voice Nancy Pelosi has determined none should hear and whose existence Barack Obama is determined to deny. It’s an alternative to the health care reform the president sought to sell to a wary public Wednesday by way of prime-time speech before a joint session of Congress.

Put off by the absence of sweeping acquiescence, Obama took to assault by cant over the holiday weekend during a stop at a Labor Day AFL-CIO picnic in Cincinnati: “You’ve heard all the lies” about health care reform, Obama declared. “I’ve got a question for all those folks: What are you going to do? What’s your answer? What’s your solution? And you know what? They don’t have one. Their answer is to do nothing.”

Well, naturally. After all, where is the alternative to the House reform bill Obama cherishes? Ask Pelosi.

H.R. 3400 wastes away in committee – where the House speaker has determined, like her own death panel, that the bill must die. Introduced July 30 by Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., and co-sponsored by 27 of his conservative pals, this legislation is not to be confused with H.R. 3200, the 1,000-page leviathan that is the object of Obama’s affection. Price’s proposal is to that bill a paltry hors d’oeuvre, 63 pages of pure sensibility that don’t go so far even as to call for a Qualified Health Benefits Plan Ombudsman. What good can that do?

Here’s what:

The bill, known as the Empowering Patients First Act, would establish a sliding scale of advanceable tax credits and deductions allowing people who lack money or insurance to buy it. A crucial component would trigger the formation of insurance pools that would in turn drive down prices. Competition, which Obama comically claims a government plan would engender, would be fostered under Price’s plan, in part, by permitting consumers to cross state lines to purchase insurance.

Not less vital, H.R. 3400 would restrain the unbridled frivolity of malpractice lawsuits, establishing health courts composed of experts in medicine to hear cases. We prefer the tort reform espoused under the Bush administration that would have capped pain and suffering rewards at $250,000 in addition to replacing lost income and covering legal fees. But Price confronts a problem acknowledged by Obama but ignored in the proposals he supports. Malpractice suits add billions of dollars annually to the cost of health care. Reform that excludes malpractice is puffery.

Price’s plan would require no increased taxes, a benefit Obama takes lightly but not so taxpayers. He repeatedly has claimed that the House reform bill would be “deficit-neutral,” a concept facts drive in reverse. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would stack another $1 trillion on the federal deficit over 10 years. Asked over the summer whether the House proposals would cut federal health care costs, CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf answered: “On the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.”

To believe Obama is to believe that those meanie dullards on the right aim only to dismantle him and so must be their objective with reform. Hyperbole in Washington is like a gun belt for a cop, part of the standard equipment. But its use doesn’t make it so. There are ways to right health care that do not require government takeover or further swelling of the federal deficit. The trouble is not the absence of alternatives but Obama’s refusal to consider them, a pattern in his White House that bodes ill for America.