JR: What do you think that the Obama administration’s decision to back off on the CLASS Act shows? Is Obama starting to realize that maybe Obamacare is not quite cracked up to what it is supposed to be, which you have been saying for the past almost three years?
TP: Well, we have been thinking that. In fact, we gave that same specific assessment of the CLASS Act. I’m not certain that they’ve come to that grave realization. But you know that within the CLASS Act language, it requires a complete assessment of the finances to make certain it worked before you get the rules and the regulations to put that program into place.
Clearly, what they did was what we did and put the financial assessment, which is what we told them would happen … and came to the stark recognition that from a financial standpoint it was a disaster for the taxpayer and could not work. Therefore they had to pull the plug on it.
Now, that being said. It is important to say that he hasn’t given up on it, which means that he hasn’t given up on failed policies and that continue to bankrupt this country, which I think is very sad.
JR: What are your thoughts about some of these things that are coming out of the woodwork on Obamacare?
TP: I talked about as you may remember at the time that this bill violated every single principle in healthcare, whether it was accessibility, or affordability, or responsiveness of the system, or innovation that we need, or choices, or even privacy of patients. This bill violates every one of them.
And as people come to appreciate that and realize what the specifics of the rules that this administration is writing to put this insane program in place then they recognize that the consequences are exactly what we predicted. It does not increase the quality of health care, and it certainly doesn’t give the patients of this country any comfort to know that this administration will have access to this kind of personal information.
JR: Do you think that Obamacare is going to be as big of an issue in 2012 as it was last year?
TP: I do. I do for a variety of reasons, but not the least of which is I think the Supreme Court is probably going to rule before the election that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. The big question is whether or not the court rules simply that the individual mandate is unconstitutional alone, or whether it rules that because the mandate is unconstitutional and that it is the linchpin of the rest of this program that the entire thing must come tumbling down.
I hope it’s the latter. If it’s not then we have real challenges because some of the “solutions” that the president’s program puts in place only work if you believe they work and only work from the financial standpoint if the individual mandate is in place. There are some guaranteed community ratings that cannot work in any other kind of system.
This will be a disaster to both access and quality for all Americans.
JR: Herman Cain mentioned your proposals from the last Congress, HR3400, as the way to go for healthcare reform. What do you think?
TP: It is just heartening that people are starting to recognize that there are positive solutions. Our plan has been mentioned a couple of times among the presidential debate forum. HR3400 is what it was in the last Congress. This year, it’s HR3000 with some more up to date language and some further programs.
And what the bill does is, is it makes it so everybody can get the kind of coverage that they want for themselves and for their families and not what the government wants for them. It addresses and solves the insurance challenges of portability and pre-existing [conditions].
You ought not lose your insurance if you change your job, or you lose your job. And you ought not be priced out of the market if you have an awful diagnosis, or an awful injury. You can solve those again without putting the government in charge.
And it addresses where clinical decisions oughta be made. Almost everybody in this country believes that [that] clinical decisions, medical decisions oughta be between families and doctors, and nobody else.
Sadly, I think we need to write that into the law now.
And then it addresses the whole issue of lawsuit abuse and the practice of defensive medicine. We could save $600 billion – that’s with a “B” – if we had some robust lawsuit abuse reform. And our bill would do that.
So you can get folks covered. You can handle challenges. You can make decisions where they oughta be made and address the lawsuit abuse issues. You can solve all of those things without putting the government in charge of a thing.
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Mr. Price is the fifth-ranking member of the House Republican leadership and is chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.
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