GOODY TWO SHOES: When "Good Enough" Isn't
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), one of 16 doctors in Congress who disagree with each other on what healthcare reform should accomplish, proposed a two-page amendment to the Senate Health Committee’s 1,000-page cobbled-together bill that requires every member of Congress to “demonstrate leadership and confidence in the system” by compelling members and their families to drop the Cadillac coverage they have now and use the same beer-budget Medicare-like “public option” plan that the rest of us will be forced into when private insurers start to withdraw from the marketplace. The amendment passed 12-11, with all but one of the Repubs on the committee voting “Aye” and all but three Dems (Acting Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd (CT), Sen. Ted Kennedy (MA) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (MD) voting “Nay.”
The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund notes that “[E]ven a self-described socialist like Vermont's Bernie Sanders, who supports a government-only system, wouldn't sign himself up” and that neither would Judd Gregg (R-NH), because the public option “will be so bad that I don't think anyone should be forced to join.” Fund doesn’t expect the amendment to survive the horse-trading that it will take to reconcile competing versions of a healthcare reform bill that are being drafted by various Congressional committees.
For his part, Matt Miller, host of the public radio program “Left, Right and Center,” argues that it is not possible to offer all Americans the same “heavily subsidized preferred provider plan” that members of Congress have, and wonders what’s wrong with requiring our elected representatives to get the same health coverage that they want us to use. He also offers his own proposal for “hybrid” coverage that falls somewhere in between the gold-plated Congressional plan and the increasingly unpopular public option.
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