Why Obamacare might have been Bushcare
December 5, 2013, 5:22
AM
By Russ Britt
Bushcare?
It’s what might have
been the moniker for health-care reform instead of Obamacare, if history had
taken a different turn. And we’re not talking about the last President Bush.
We’re talking about George H.W. Bush.
It was nearly 22 years
ago that the elder Bush, fighting for political survival during his failed 1992
re-election bid amid a crushing recession and falling poll numbers, delivered a
proposal to a group of business leaders in Cleveland on the subject of
health-care reform.
Dr. Louis Sullivan, who
was Bush’s Health and Human Services secretary at the time, said in an
interview with MarketWatch that Bush’s plan had several major similarities to
that of the Affordable Care Act. It would have created health-insurance
exchanges that would have been open to small businesses as well as consumers,
subsidies for low-income consumers and even a mandate requiring individuals to
get coverage. The latter proposal, Sullivan says, came at the suggestion of a
number of Washington think tanks.
Shortly after telling
Cleveland business leaders about the idea, Bush proposed it to Congress. And
the idea quickly died. If you can imagine it, a Republican president couldn’t
convince a Democratic Congress to adopt an idea that had many of the same
characteristics that the Democrat currently occupying the White House couldn’t
sell to a single Republican lawmaker in 2010.
There are a couple of
explanations for that. One, Democrats in 1992 were hell-bent on winning the
White House and would not cooperate with Bush. Plus, they had designs on more
elaborate health-care coverage, including a single-payer system for everyone —
sort of a Medicare for all.
Also, Bush’s proposal
featured a number of ideas that probably would have been more appealing to
Republicans, such as no requirement for employers to provide coverage, limiting
malpractice lawsuits and stemming growth in government health plans.
But Sullivan, a
Republican who founded an effort to bring health-care providers into the
digital age, says he supports Obamacare even if it has had a rocky start. The
key, to him, is that too many individuals are uninsured.
“The act was designed to address that as well
as enhance health promotion through these prevention activities to help us move
from a sickness-care-oriented system to a wellness system to keep people healthy,”
Sullivan said.
“The thing I say all the
time is this: We’re talking about a large segment of our economy, some 18% in
GDP. So there’s no such ability to have a perfect bill or even a perfect
implementation of that legislation,” he added. “It’s been more troubling than
we had hoped. But I’m hoping and reasonably confident that they will get this
straight.”
So what does Sullivan
say to his Republican friends when he says he supports Obamacare? To be clear,
he notes he is not nearly as conservative as many members of the party are
today, and will sometimes vote Democratic. But he has another message:
“What I’d like to tell
my Republican and Democratic friends is we elect you to solve problems, not
create problems,” he said. “There’s been, I think, to much focus on
polarization and scoring political points. We need to score points for our
citizens.”
Can you top this? Thad Cochran, Mississippi Republican today gave a speech praising Nelson Mandela in which he compared Obamacare to apartheid, implying that those who oppose it, such as him, are Mandela-like. What next?
ReplyDeleteThat is a bit of a stretch
ReplyDeleteIt could perhaps only happen in America!.
ReplyDeleteWell... Here we are again.... We have been over this before but as democrats will perpetuate a myth to suite their own ends... the tripe continues.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, if this contention were absolutely true... one could fall back on the old tried and true democratic philosophy of "I voted for it before I was against it" but alas... no one is doing that.
Stuart Butler:
My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.
But the version of the health insurance mandate Heritage and I supported in the 1990s had three critical features. First, it was not primarily intended to push people to obtain protection for their own good, but to protect others. Like auto damage liability insurance required in most states, our requirement focused on "catastrophic" costs — so hospitals and taxpayers would not have to foot the bill for the expensive illness or accident of someone who did not buy insurance.
Second, we sought to induce people to buy coverage primarily through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher, financed in part by a fundamental reform of the tax treatment of health coverage, rather than by a stick.
And third, in the legislation we helped craft that ultimately became a preferred alternative to ClintonCare, the "mandate" was actually the loss of certain tax breaks for those not choosing to buy coverage, not a legal requirement.
DID YOU READ THE LAST LINE ABOVE? Their was never a punitive 'mandate' ever proposed. Of coarse reading all the left spun articles about what the Heritage Foundation said, you might conclude that it included a mandatory prison sentence.
Heritage always said of Obamacare that surely a Supreme Court would strike down such a federal overreach... Sad day for the country and its constitution that it didn't.
Mark my words, the danger in this mandate is, at least for those who don't believe that living in a communist state, is that health and healthcare encompass just about everything in society.... how about adding a provision for the types and numbers of calories per day you MUST buy... or a predetermined home of specific size with provision of private space for each family member... and of course, unless you are a member of the elite, your home can't be bigger than a certain size because it wastes to much of the state resource and belittles those who can't afford one....
Face it....It is a bad, ill considered law that only piles more bureaucracy on top of the bureaucracy which created the cost spiral in the first place.
Sorry this comes direct from the horses mouth, the Kathleen Selebius of his time. Why would he lie about it, because he is a moderate? G H W Bush was a moderate also. This was Bush's pre election plan to counter the Clinton's.
ReplyDeleteThe dems said no for many of the same reasons the repubs say no today. Poiltical points and obstructionism. Funny how the roles change over time. Dems become repubs and repubs become dems. Ha!
What I am saying is that the Pauly plan was the Heritage plan and as written above, the heritage 'mandate' that democrats of the time objected to looks considerably different than the mandate framed in the ACA.... Not that either one addresses the real problem with health care prices. No one wants to talk about those sacred cows because democratic wallets are being filled by the same companies that filled the republicans before.
DeleteWe need to fix healthcare but we need, like poverty and gun violence, to address the REAL problems and not contrive some new reason for the government to get their fingers even deeper up our azzez.....