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Friday, July 24, 2009
PULL FOR TRIGGER IN HEALTH REFORM

Source: Lincoln Journal Star

If President Barack Obama wants to see progress on health reform, he would do well to follow the advice of Sen. Ben Nelson and other common-sense members of Congress.

That means giving up on grandiose plans like that rammed through the House of Representatives by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in favor of realistic, affordable reform that minimizes government intrusion.

There's little doubt of the need for reform. Everyone from liberal groups to the AARP to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has complaints about the nation's dysfunctional health care system.

Obama reminded the country of the demand for reform in his prime-time press conference Wednesday when he said that he gets letters every day from "families that are being clobbered by health care costs."

The cost of health insurance also is a drain on employers, and a drag on economic growth. The costs of Medicare and Medcaid continue to rise faster than inflation. Americans spend about twice as much on health care as other wealthy countries but rank worse on measures such as infant mortality, life expectancy and survival rates for heart attacks.

One of the sticking points so far in the health care reform debate in Congress revolves around the question of whether the plan that emerges will have a "public option," or a health insurance option provided by the government.

Left-leaning supporters of reform insist that the public option is needed to create pressure on private insurers to reduce costs.

Conservatives decry the public option as a "government takeover," insisting that ultimately the federal government would offer such a heavily subsidized program that private insurers could not compete.

There is another option, however, that is supported by Nelson and others. That is for a health reform plan that contains a "trigger," which would authorize a public option if private insurer's fail to meet goals of reducing costs and expanding the number of Americans with coverage.

Even Rahm Emanuel, Obama's hard-nosed chief of staff, voiced interest in a trigger earlier this month. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Emanuel said that a trigger would meet the White House goal of "a means and mechanism to keep the private insurers honest."

Emanuel noted in the interview that Republicans included such a trigger mechanism in the prescription drug benefit passed in 2003. The trigger has not gone into effect because competition among private companies has remained sufficient.

There's little doubt that partisan politics once again stand in the way of making progress on the problems that afflict the American health system. Some Republicans would like to pin the failure of reform on Obama, scoring political points at the expense of problem-solving.

But a realistic, carefully fashioned plan still has a chance of passage. Realistic members of Congress are pointing the way.

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