Republicans are very concern on Obama's healthcare reform proposals
15 06 09 - 12:13
G.O.P. Senators Question Obama’s Health Reforms
By M. AMEDEO TUMOLILLO - The New York Times
Republicans on Sunday continued to express strong concerns over the Obama administration’s plan to reform health care and its call for a public insurance option.
“I think that, for virtually every Republican, a government plan is a non-starter,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We know that, if the government gets in this business, pretty soon nobody else will be in the business.”
Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican of the Senate Finance Committee, added that that he had not determined whether the spending cuts Mr. Obama has outlined were realistic.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. defended the administration’s plan, which aims to retain consumer choice and cut rising costs of medical care while extending coverage to the 45 million uninsured people in the country. But the overhaul is expected to cost more than $1 trillion over 10 years.
“It’s going to be one of the most comprehensive changes in the law since Medicare in the beginning,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Mr. Biden said there were a number of ways to offer the public insurance option that would lessen opposition to it, and that it would bring much-needed competition to the insurance industry.
Mr. McConnell, from Kentucky, said similar plans in other countries have led to delays in medical care, and that improvements to the system could be made with litigation reform and government incentive for wellness programs.
“There are a whole lot of other things we can agree to do on a bipartisan basis that will dramatically improve our system,” he said.
Mr. Obama’s budget has set aside $635 billion for the plan, and he has said another $313 billion can be covered by cutting unnecessary spending and increasing the efficiency of health care.
Paying for Mr. Obama’s plan includes cutting more than $200 billion in expected reimbursements to hospitals over the next decade, a proposal that Mr. McConnell called “extremely controversial.”
“You’re going to hear from every hospital in America and virtually every doctor pushing back, because they’re having a hard time dealing with the cuts that have been imposed already,” he said.
Even before Mr. Obama made his reform plan the focus of his Saturday radio address, the president of the American Hospital Association, Richard J. Umbdenstock, told his members across the country that Congress might cut provider payments. Mr. Umbdenstock asked hospitals to “push back” against the proposed cuts.
Senator Grassley, speaking “Fox News Sunday,” questioned the figures the White House has attached to its cost-saving plan.
“There is a lot of waste in government-run programs generally, and a lot of waste and fraud and misuse of money in Medicare and Medicaid that can be saved,” he said. “But right now, I could not put a figure on that amount of money. There is some savings there that can be made and ought to be made, whether or not we are doing things for health care reform or not.”
One of his concerns was how the president’s proposals would affect rural health care options.
“In Iowa, reimbursements are so low we have a hard time making sure that we can recruit doctors to come to our state,” he said.
Mr. Obama’s proposal to limit tax deductions for high-income people as a way to partly pay for the reforms has also encountered resistance on Capitol Hill.
“I don’t think know we ought to, at the outset here, be talking about tax increases,” Mr. McConnell said. “We ought to be talking about how to make the current system we have work better.”
Senator Grassley said taxing employer-provided benefits was possible, but Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services, said on ABC’s “This Week” that such measures would work against the Obama administration’s goals.
“Taxing those benefits may indeed discourage employers from offering health care to their employees, exactly the opposite of what we want to do in the future,” she said.
She also said that concerns over a public-insurance plan taking business from private insurers were unwarranted.
“State employee health plans in 30 states have private options side by side with public options,” she said. “It works well. It provides some choice. It exists in children’s health insurance programs.”