Over and over I've heard the GOP offer some of their ideas for health care and their criticisims of Obama's approach without anybody from the administration or press really critiquing the content of what they were saying.
Then I turn on NPR this morning and FINALLY I hear a news organization discussing the merits of what they said rather than just repeating what they said.
The main things I always hear them say are that we need tort reform, interstate insurance and the dems need to work with the GOP.
Also that the current bill is "socialisim" and too extreme.
Here are a few tidbits
On how we need malpractice reform:
Medical malpractice is a good example. Republicans have long advocated for a bill that would cap so-called noneconomic damages — those for victims' pain and suffering — at $250,000. It passed the Republican-led House eight times between 1995 and 2005. But it never even won a majority in the Republican-controlled Senate, despite several attempts. Republicans have long blamed the failure on the influence of trial lawyers, but Nichols says there's also just a lack of consensus on the issue.
On the idea of interstate insurance:
Another favorite Republican proposal is the idea of selling insurance policies across state lines. That would let people in one state buy cheaper insurance in another state. But without nationwide insurance regulations and a ban on insurers discriminating against people with pre-existing health conditions, the insurance might not cover as much. The idea also has alarmed state insurance regulators, who would no longer know who would be in charge of regulating what.
In fact, the idea has been so controversial, says Dave Kendall, of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, that Sen. Mike Enzi, a Republican from Wyoming, failed to get members of his own party to go along with it.
That the dems need to work with the GOP:
Enzi was one of the Republicans who spent much of last spring and summer unsuccessfully working to craft a bipartisan bill with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana.
All of which makes Kendall wonder why Democrats would take Republican offers to work together any more seriously now.
"We had an opportunity to approach this in a bipartisan way, and Republicans made it very clear they were interested in taking down the president by defeating health care reform," Kendall said. "So I don't think it's a real offer."
That the current bill is too "socialistic"
He says both the House- and Senate-passed bills have far more in common with the bill put forward by Republicans in 1993 than with the competing plan pressed by then-President Clinton and congressional Democrats.
"Because it relies much more on markets, much more on individual requirements, much more on incentives in the health care system," Nichols says. "And to claim that this bill is somehow a left-wing government takeover is rhetoric of a rather extreme sort, no question about it."
In fact, Nichols says he finds it odd that Republicans have turned so strongly against the concept that underlies the Democrats' bills — that of requiring everyone to have insurance. That's because the so-called individual mandate began as a Republican idea of the early 1990s, "created back in the day as competition to the employer-mandate focus of Democrats at the time."
http://www.npr.org/...
Thank you NPR! Finally a bit light shed on the opposition.