SenateFinanceCommittee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., left, shakes hands with committee member Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is seen at center, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009, on Capitol Hill in Washington, after a committee vote regarding the health care reform bill.
Tell us what you think about the Committee's vote to send its version of the bill to the Senate floor!
As the Senate Finance Committee nears a key vote on health care reform legislation, Max Baucus (D-Montana), Chairman of the Committee, said, "Now it's time to get the job done. My colleagues, this is our opportunity to make history."
Tell us what you think. Will this plan pass? And will it garner enough support to then pass the full Senate?
by Bob Hancké, Political Economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science
After a month of self-imposed silence – and in a world in which little seemed to be happening, judging from my occasional glances at the International Herald Tribune and Repubblica, which left little to comment on – here we go again. Let me kick off the season with something European that is likely to influence US citizens as well.
Few countries in Europe are deeply concerned about the state of their health care. As far as I am aware, only the UK has regular fits about the costs of health, the efficiency of its health care system, and the sometimes laconic health standards in public hospitals. Despite having been a resident there for almost nine years, I have never truly understood why the country seems both unable to get its act together on health and complain about it all the time. But that is not the point; France, Italy, Germany, and basically all the other continental economies, including those in the former east bloc, have excellent and on the whole relatively inexpensive health care systems. They also have a wide variety of financing and organizational arrangements. The single provider system of the British NHS is, in fact, a rare oddity in Europe. Most of the countries allow patients to choose their doctor, and often their health insurance company as well. In some countries, health insurance comes with citizenship, in others with your (or your parents’) job. Care is universal or at least as good as. And all but the poorest countries have, as far as I can tell, excellent results for the vast majority of the cases they treat.
Affordable, excellent universal health care, the norm in Europe, has for some reason been demonized in the US, and I am not sure I understand why. If the problem is that people don’t like the idea of state provision (assuming that this is a problem), then design a privately organized system (like the German and to some extent French ones). If the problem is that it is mandatory – so are seatbelt, gun and a host of other laws, and no one seems to get too upset over those (OK, admittedly some do about gun laws); there are good reasons, found in standard economic theory, why health insurance should be mandatory. If the problem is fear of some state board deciding who lives and dies – despite the horror stories doing the rounds in the US (who starts such nonsense anyway?), that does not happen in Europe either; some medical conditions may not be recognized as such, but generally medical boards err on the side of caution.
There are problems, of course. France often looks like a country of hypochondriacs: even the very small town where my parents live boasts three pharmacies, all of whom have plenty of business indeed. And in Germany a culture of de-stressing spa holidays (all paid for by their health insurance) has emerged, which is probably not the wisest way to spend money. And in Belgium the health care system had in the 1980s become somewhat bloated: for every bed and brain scanner in a religious hospital one was allocated to a state hospital as well. I vaguely recall a statistic along the lines of Belgium having a ratio of scanners over population that was possibly ten times higher than the second on the list. All clear cases of waste, to be sure, but even with those slightly exorbitant traits, France, Germany and Belgium spend less of their GDP on health care than the US, and have excellent universal coverage.
by Scott W. Atlas
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Professor, Stanford University Medical Center
The Obama and Democrat health care agenda is meeting loud and strong opposition from American voters, who are fighting back for what they believe in, instead of bending over and blindly accepting what they themselves do not want and did not endorse in the last election.
And still, most of the talking heads and liberal news media are misinterpreting the lesson here. It's not about misdirected tactics, or the opacity of abstract arguments, or inadvertently confusing the public with nuances, or even the determination of the opposition. It isn't about who has the better organization, or a battle of strategies in some sort of political game plan.
It is about one, and only one, simple and unavoidable truth - the President is fundamentally wrong about his radical plan for health care reform, out of step with the American public. And even a speaker as articulate and capable as this President, with a team as experienced in winning political battles, cannot hide that truth, despite all their campaign-style, polarizing rhetoric.
Why do Americans hold fast to their convictions in the face of their still popular President as he refuses to acknowledge this newly apparent disconnect, as he proclaims the moral basis of his opinion, as he decries as lies and distortions the views of all those opposing his opinions?
First, Americans realize they have the most advanced health care in the world, with far greater access to life-saving drugs and the most modern diagnostic tools than all countries with government-dominated health care.
And proven by decades of data in the medical and scientific journals, Americans know that systems of other countries with government-dominated health care suffer from worse outcomes, more lost lives, scandalous limits in access to specialty doctors, unacceptable waits for important medical procedures, restricted availability of highly beneficial drug treatments, and still exploding costs.
Second, Americans resent that our President actually believes he and his government appointees, politicians, and bureaucrats should decide what health insurance must include by defining "acceptable" health insurance coverage for Americans and their families, and that these same bureaucrats and appointees are going to decide what medical care options are available for Americans and their families. And Americans resent they are going to be forced to purchase that government-defined coverage, loaded with government mandates that are themselves a main culprit for the high cost of health insurance.
Third, Americans recognize that offering government insurance for all is the recipe and forerunner of an insurance system dominated by government.
Americans appreciate that a radical government take-over ending in a single payer system of health care is precisely what the President and his Democrat allies in Congress want - because the President and his Congressional allies themselves have expressed this desire repeatedly, in writing and in speeches underscoring that ultimate goal. A system intended to force down costs by limiting medical care, restricting access to new drug treatments, and to safer diagnostic technology - decisions that the President wants government to control, rather than Americans and their doctors.
Fourth, Americans already have experienced that displacing and ultimately eliminating the alternative of private health insurance will be the consequence of a government insurance "option", that choice of insurance is reduced, not increased, by a public option. They have seen the results of government take-over of health insurance in our own failed state experiments, like Maine and Hawaii. In those state, two-thirds to over three-fourths of those "choosing" the public option were previously insured by private plans, massively shifting costs onto tax payers from those who were already buying their own insurance.
Fifth, Americans realize the absence of logic in a plan that throws massive amounts of taxpayer money to further tilt our health system toward government control, toward what is already proven to be unsustainable here and abroad. Massive amounts of money toward a plan that raises our national debt to shocking and perhaps even irreparable levels, calculated by the government's own Congressional Budget Office.
Finally, Americans cannot overlook the obvious contradiction in the Administration's agenda that is justified as "a moral imperative" yet scores of published data directly contradict that claim, as published facts document worse survival from disease, lower access to new and safer treatments, less availability of sophisticated diagnostic tools, reduced use of screening tests and preventive care, and a bigger discrepancy between health of poorer segments of societies compared to their richer countrymen in nations with those very systems our President seeks to emulate in his new American system. Americans fully comprehend that punishing future generations with unprecedented debt because of an ideology-based commitment to socialized medicine is a flawed vision for America's future and in the end a failure of leadership. Who truly has the moral high ground here?
As the health care debate continues, some politicians are throwing a new alternative in the mix -- the health care coop!
We want to get your thoughts on these coops. How do you feel about this new alternative to the public option? What are some unanswered questions you have? Let us know, and we'll get you answers from our experts!
FOX News Channel's "Team Washington" is about all things politics. Check back daily for web exclusives from Special Report's Bret Baier, quotes of the day, viewer votes and more.
