You remember this delicious lede from last week's Republican health plan roll-out:
"House Republicans presented a four-page outline of their health care reform plan Wednesday but said they didn’t know yet how much it would cost, how they would pay for it and how many of the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance would be covered by it."
A thing of beauty, no? In the intervening week, not much more has been developed in that plan. But that hasn't stopped Chairman of the House Health Care Solutions Group Roy Blunt from attempting to tout it. He sat down yesterday with the editorial board at the Kansas City Star, and the results are brutal.
[H]is presentation was marred by assertions that were more opinion than fact and by proposals that lacked enough detail to allow evaluation....
But it was Mr. Blunt's response to my criticism that was most revealing. He said, anecdotally, that he has had serious medical problems and that he was very satisfied with his health care.
The response revealed two major areas of confusion. First, a patient's satisfaction level with his/her health care is not the same as satisfaction with the health care payment system. The first could be great, the second awful.
More significantly, Mr. Blunt has the finest health care insurance money can buy, and he's a member of Congress. Does he really think the insurance company (or the health care provider) would do anything but treat him as a VIP?
Of course Mr. Blunt is likely to be satisfied with how he's treated.
But ask John Doe who does not have a vote in Congress how his insurance company treats him when he has an expensive illness. Mr. Blunt confuses (or conflates) his experience with what the average American gets....
With respect to the passage of health care legislation, Mr. Blunt argued that it would be a mistake for the Senate to pass any health care legislation that would affect the entire country without significant agreement.
He said Democrats shouldn't pass such legislation without 70 votes. But what percent of major legislation in the last 50 years has been passed with 70 votes? How many votes authorized the Social Security Administration? Anyone want to guess? Mr. Blunt's assertion is what the minority party always says to try to prevent legislation they don't like.
Ah, bipartisanship. You can't pass a plan without 70 votes, but we won't let you pass a plan that will actually do anything to expand coverage and reduce costs for individuals, and we certainly won't come up with our own plan. But you can't do anything without us. Let us just spew some more Frank Luntz-generated, insurance industry sponsored talking points out, and try to work around us. To wit, the latest RNC ad.
The modern Republican party in a nutshell--all empty phrases and no substance. No wonder the past eight years has been such a debacle--rhetoric cannot substitute for governance. And rhetoric is all the Republicans have got on this, on anything. Let's hope the bipartisanship fetishists on the Dem side of the aisle figure that out before it's too late for real health care reform.