Health Care Theater

What are the Party of Nope's ideas on health care reform? NPR's Julie Ravner wraps up the Blair House summit here. The heart of the discord she says is the following:

RAVNER: [There is a] fundamental philosophical disagreement about the role of government in the health care system. Democrats think that if whats broken is to be fixed it will take a lot more government involvement. Republicans think there should be less government involvement.

If this is accurate (i.e. ignoring the Waterloo and Rope-a-Nope talk), Republicans should take note of two things:

• Americans seem to want more government involvement, if the high approval ratings for the public option indicate anything. And the irony of their position is not lost; the Nopers, riding high on the Coakley debacle, have championed the lack of a majority public approval rating for the health bill as a reason for rejecting it.
  
• There are no advanced nations that have less government involvement in their health care systems than we do and there are plenty of advanced nations that have more government involvement. Of these, all of them have a lower cost health care system and many with equal or better quality. For the Republican realists out there, empirical evidence should mean something.
  

Further on as Ravner chats with the anchor, the following bit smacked of neutrality rather than objectivity:

RAVNER: President Obama and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee got into an argument about whether the Democrats' bill would raise or lower insurance premiums. ... both point to the Congression Budget Office to make their case.

ANCHOR: Who would you say is right.

RAVNER: They both are sort of. It turns out that for most people premiums would go down slightly, because those people have group health insurance. For individuals who are a small minority... premiums would go up, but that's because the would get better coverage... they wouldn't pay more because the bill would give them help to pay those premiums. For the few people who wouldn't get help, the better coverage would probably mean they would pay less overall in total out of pocket costs for their medical bills.

ANCHOR: So the answer is its complicated.

RAVNER: Exactly.

Actually it's not so complicated and the last couple of editorial remarks were disingenuous. While Alexander was correct in a narrow construction, he is also off base. What matters is how much it costs per unit of health care, a number which the CBO says goes down. And who among those receiving subsidized individual coverage would complain about paying less for more? For more on this see Krugman's column.

The Republicans are failing their duty as an opposition party. They should be criticizing the lack of major cost controls, especially the watering down of the Cadillac tax.