What today’s health-care summit can accomplish
E.J.Dionne
WashPost
The real value of today’s White House health-care summit came clear to me during a conversation with my friend Steve Luxenberg. Steve, who was editor of The Post’s Outlook section for many years, was speaking generally about what he saw as the difference between “honest disagreements” and “dishonest disagreements.”
If today’s summit does nothing else but to sort out the difference between these two kinds of disagreements in the health-care debate, it will be a huge success.
At the heart of the fight between Republicans and Democrats is an honest disagreement over the role of federal government. The Republicans don’t want our national government to play a major role in solving the core problems of our health-care system. They insist that more federal action will simply make things worse. (Although they then turn around and criticize any cuts President Obama proposes in Medicare, which, last I looked, is a federal government program). The GOP’s suggestions are small because they don’t want government to do much. The party’s main health-care proposal would spend $61 billion over 10 years -- in other words, an average of $6 billion a year -- and cover an additional 3 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amounts they propose are a smidgen compared to the value of the tax cuts the Republicans voted for during the Bush years.
And the truth is that if using the federal government to solve some of the problems in the health-care system had been a priority for Republicans, they could have passed something when they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. They chose not to.
(More here.)
WashPost
The real value of today’s White House health-care summit came clear to me during a conversation with my friend Steve Luxenberg. Steve, who was editor of The Post’s Outlook section for many years, was speaking generally about what he saw as the difference between “honest disagreements” and “dishonest disagreements.”
If today’s summit does nothing else but to sort out the difference between these two kinds of disagreements in the health-care debate, it will be a huge success.
At the heart of the fight between Republicans and Democrats is an honest disagreement over the role of federal government. The Republicans don’t want our national government to play a major role in solving the core problems of our health-care system. They insist that more federal action will simply make things worse. (Although they then turn around and criticize any cuts President Obama proposes in Medicare, which, last I looked, is a federal government program). The GOP’s suggestions are small because they don’t want government to do much. The party’s main health-care proposal would spend $61 billion over 10 years -- in other words, an average of $6 billion a year -- and cover an additional 3 million people, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amounts they propose are a smidgen compared to the value of the tax cuts the Republicans voted for during the Bush years.
And the truth is that if using the federal government to solve some of the problems in the health-care system had been a priority for Republicans, they could have passed something when they controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. They chose not to.
(More here.)
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