Republican lawmakers issued their own healthcare reform plan the other day, and you'd have to look hard to find a more cynical document purporting to represent the best interests of the American people.
How does the GOP plan fail at addressing our core problems of 47 million people lacking coverage and runaway medical costs? Let us count the ways.
First off, the plan actually increases the number of uninsured over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. By 2019, the CBO estimates, we'd have no fewer than 52 million non-elderly people without health coverage.
The Republican plan would allow insurers to cross state lines in offering their policies but would exempt them from many consumer-protection laws outside their home state.
Insurers would still be able to deny coverage to people with preexisting medical problems.
Employers wouldn't have to offer health insurance to workers.
Lower-income people would receive no additional assistance buying coverage for their families.
Needless to say, there's no mention of a public insurance option.
Perhaps the sole merit to the Republican reform plan is its price tag -- $61 billion over 10 years. But considering that it does virtually nothing to address current problems, and in some ways only makes those problems worse, taxpayers might wonder what exactly they're paying for.
"This doesn't do much to accomplish the goals that most people have for healthcare reform," said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Washington think tank.
"At the top of that list has to be getting more people covered, and this wouldn't do that."
So why would our Republican friends put forward such a patently bogus reform agenda? Now they can tell voters that they had their own plan on the table, and they can point to that relatively minuscule cost as an example of good old-fashioned GOP conservatism.
Not like those spendthrift Democrats, who wanted to plunk down about $1 trillion over 10 years bringing health coverage to almost everyone and making the insurance market more competitive with the introduction of a public plan.
Speaking of which, more than a few conservative-minded readers took issue with my column last Sunday in which I wrote about the Business Roundtable's opposition to a public insurance plan.
