Jennifer Foster: This health care reform not what nation ordered

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s announcement Thursday that his chamber won’t take action on health care reform until after the August recess was more a confirmation than breaking news.
Democratic congressional leaders have spent the last three weeks trying to keep their fingers in the dam of growing public skepticism and intraparty squabbling over the details of the plan. One of three Republican senators working to forge a compromise on the issue left the table this week, convinced Democratic leaders weren’t interested in listening.

Supporters of the working bill have even taken after its opponents – Democrats included. The White House targeted with new ads this week several moderate Democrats whose concerns about the deficit are holding the bill up in the House. Anyone not falling in line behind the president’s plan is being charged with trying to maintain the status quo.

It didn’t have to be this way. Reforming the nation’s $1 trillion health care industry isn’t – and shouldn’t be – an either/or proposition. The bill’s opponents, Republicans and Democrats, aren’t against reform in general. They’re just against this reform.

It is indisputable that something must be done – for the 50 million uninsured Americans, yes, but for health care providers, too.

Our critical shortage of general practitioners exists in no small part because doctors know the reimbursement rate reality: To have an outside shot at paying off medical loans and making a decent living, specialties are the way to go.

Pundits say that President Obama’s election itself was a national mandate on health care reform; he had made it one of his top domestic priorities during the campaign.

But just as restaurants mess up and bring you something you didn’t order, the reform that President Obama is delivering is not the kind Candidate Obama promised.

Candidate Obama talked about finding efficiencies and holding down the rising costs of medical care. He talked about expanding the use of and access to electronic medical records, among other things.

But the bill’s only reference to electronic records deals with standardizing administrative transactions (read: payments), and President Obama has allowed Congress to pack the working bill full of waste. The bill includes sections on coordinating “diversity and cultural competency programs” and “cultural and linguistic competency training for health care professionals.” It is even being used as a tool to advance liberals’ social agenda: It writes affirmative action into eligibility requirements for federal grants and leaves the door open for taxpayer dollars to be used for abortions.

There is the public option, which the president seems now to support. He’s fond of saying that if you like your current insurance, under the new plan, you can keep it.

Here’s the dirty little secret about that: You can’t keep it if it doesn’t exist.

Republicans and some conservative Democrats worry that a public option would wreak havoc in the private insurance market, causing private options to dwindle; fewer private options, they argue, would lead to higher enrollments in the government program, eventually making its costs unsustainable.

And then there is the mandate, which Candidate Obama opposed.

He said it so many times, I memorized it: Americans don’t have insurance not because they don’t want it, but because they can’t afford it.

Was he not telling the truth then, or is he doing something unnecessary now?

The House bill now includes a tax penalty for “individuals without acceptable health care coverage.”

Yes, Uncle Sam will be deciding what constitutes “acceptable” coverage for you. Inexplicably, this provision is found in the section on “Individual Responsibility.”

This isn’t what the nation ordered on Election Day.

Someone get me the manager.

Jennifer Foster is a political enthusiast who lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.