NOTE: Congressman Garamendi, California’s Insurance Commissioner for eight years, is hosting a live chat on Daily Kos tomorrow (Friday) at 1 PM EST, 10 AM PST. He will focus on health care reform but is available to answer other questions.
It’s a busy week for health care reform. Yesterday, as Congressman Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled WellPoint on why they thought it appropriate to raise health insurance rates in California by as much as 39 percent in the middle of an economic downturn, the House voted for a bill that will end insurance company collusion.
I helped author H.R. 4626 by Representatives Tom Perriello (D-VA) and Betsy Markey (D-CO), and I was very adamant in public and private conversations that we must not allow loopholes in the bill. I learned long ago that when you create carve outs and exemptions for an industry motivated by rapacious greed, their teams of lawyers will find a way to continue harming consumers.
More over the flip...
After a Republican push to gut the bill was defeated on the House floor, H.R. 4626 ultimately passed by a comfortable 406-19 margin. If it survives intact in the Senate, the Consumer Federation of America predicts that it will save consumers $6 billion per year, and they think it could give federal agencies the tools they need to fight against state-level monopolistic market concentration.
Ending monopoly protections for insurance companies is worth celebrating, but our work improving our broken health care system is far from done. Today, President Obama and Congressional leadership from both sides of the aisle are holding a health care summit to see if a compromise can be reached.
At stake are the 45 million uninsured Americans and the rest of us subject to the whims of the insurance industry. We spend 17 percent our nation’s wealth on health care. And what do we get out of it? We have a system that performs worse than Columbia, and we are at the very bottom of all industrialized nations in stopping preventable deaths.
I’m an eternal optimist and wish the President the best from today’s summit, but color me skeptical. The health care debate has dragged on endlessly, and through it all, Congressional Republicans have done all they can to derail meaningful reform.
To date, GOP leaders have offered slogans and band aids at their best. At their worst, their proposals would undermine existing state insurance protections and create a race to the bottom. I spent eight years running junk insurers out of California, and it’ll be a hot winter day in Washington before I vote to undermine the consumer protections we’ve spent decades fighting for in my home state.
As I said on the House floor last night (see video), the best thing that could come out of today’s summit is an indication that the public option is still on the table. One of my first votes in the House was for a good health care reform bill that included a public option, but in the name of acquiring 60 votes, the Senate abandoned the public option. If it turns out that Senate Republicans continue to stand in the way of anything close to real reform today, I say we’ve waited long enough. It’s time we continued with what works in America and passed a strong public option by majority vote.
Other popular public options – including Medicare, CHIP children’s insurance, the military’s TRICARE system, and Veterans Administration hospitals – have worked well for decades, providing high quality coverage at low cost.
And passing health care reform through reconciliation is nothing new in America. As NPR recently reported (h/t David Waldman at Kos), at least nine health care bills have cleared the Senate in the past 30 years through the reconciliation process.
That’s where I stand. There are good things that can emerge from a health care bill without a public option, but our work is incomplete without a public option.
So where do we go from here? Many of you are involved in public policy and grassroots mobilization, and all of you know someone who has been harmed by insurance company malfeasance. I’d love to hear from you on what you think should be done, and I’m available to answer your questions on health care policy or any other issue that is on your mind. Tomorrow, I’m hosting a live chat here at Daily Kos at 1 PM EST, 10 AM PST. I’ll be here for about an hour, and I hope you can join us.
Congressman John Garamendi (D-Walnut Creek) represents California’s 10th Congressional District. He served as California’s Insurance Commissioner for eight years.