According to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), 95 percent of our health care problems would be fixed if we allowed people to buy their own insurance. Plus a little tort reform.
In this utopian world, “You own your health care just like you own your auto insurance,” Bachmann said. One might ask, how would that lower costs? “You can band together with whomever you want,” she said, “so you have purchasing power.”
“It’s called freedom!” she said to whoops and cheers. She was speaking, along with Reps. Tom Price (R-GA) and Chris Smith (R-NJ), at a health care Q&A, part of the Values Voter Summit in Washington.
The hour-long panel was a lesson in how removed many conservatives are from the health care debate the rest of us are having. Insurance company regulations, preventive care, getting insurance for people who can’t afford it — these things are replaced with calls for tort reform, making sure abortion isn’t federally funded and lauding Medicare out of one side of the mouth while attacking government run health care out of the other.
After Bachmann claimed all of the nation’s woes were caused by government intervention, Smith stepped in to praise Medicare and Medicaid. But a government health care reform bill, he said, is different.
“Obamacare is reckless,” he said.
Smith, though, mostly stuck to the topic of abortion, claiming the bill will fund abortions and, therefore, abortions will increase by a third.
“This is the biggest threat since Roe v. Wade itself,” he said.
Republicans are often accused of opposing the Democrats’ plan without having one of their own. Their defense is usually to cry “Tort reform!” Today’s panel was no different.
To her credit, Bachmann acknowledged that President Obama has asked Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to look for governments and groups who have an alternative medical liability system, to find out what works and what doesn’t. But, Bachmann said, that program is worthless unless there’s language in the health care bill that changes the way malpractice law works.
“We already have a pilot program,” she said. “It’s called the state of Texas.”
Texas instituted malpractice reforms in 2003, cutting the number of suits by half and lowering malpractice insurance premiums for doctors. But health care costs in Texas are still high, and among the fastest growing in the nation.
In the end, it seems these conservative opponents of the various health care bills winding through Congress don’t want an alternative. They simply want the bill to fail, so much show that they’ll ask for divine interventions. Price, for one, asked the audience to pray for the Blue Dogs to have some “backbone” and vote against reform.
So much for bipartisanship.
