Responding to Republican criticism of his troubled health-insurance program, President Barack Obama continues to complain that the GOP has offered no solution of its own to the serious health-care challenges that are facing this country.
U.S. Rep. Tom Price, a Roswell doctor, begs to disagree.
“We’ve had plans out there for three or four years that would fundamentally change the health care system,” Price told Fox News on Sunday, citing his own “Empowering Patients First Act” as a prime example. According to Price, he has contacted the White House repeatedly about his plan, but the response has been “silence … crickets.”
As we’ll see, that’s not quite true. However, “silence … crickets” would certainly describe the response from Price’s fellow House Republicans. When his plan was introduced in June, the legislation was referred to various subcommittees and it has sat there untouched since then. Even a subcommittee on which Price himself is a member has taken no action on the bill.
The same thing happened when Price introduced the same plan back in 2011, and in 2009. For more than four years now, the legislation has been sitting in the House and “silence … crickets.” If Price’s own Republican colleagues don’t take the legislation seriously, why should the White House?
There’s a lot of reasons for that silence. The first is that Price’s bill would add substantially to the deficit. It calls for a variety of new tax credits, including a less-generous version of the ObamaCare health-insurance subsidies for lower-income Americans. It also calls for federal funding to help lower insurance costs for those with pre-existing conditions, and it allows individuals who buy their own insurance to deduct the cost from their taxable income.
All of that costs money. But unlike ObamaCare, which at least funds itself through higher taxes, the Price plan makes no effort to pay for itself. That’s probably why more than four years after its introduction, no fiscal analysis by the Congressional Budget Office has been requested. Such an analysis would tell the world that his plan is financially infeasible.
Price was also being less than honest when he told Fox News that he has gotten no response to his plan from the Obama administration. In a meeting between Obama and House Republicans back in 2009, Price took the opportunity to push his plan directly to the president. He bragged to the president that his bill “would provide health care coverage for all Americans,” including those with pre-existing conditions, and it would do “all of that without raising taxes by a penny.”
Obama quickly recognized the magic wand that Price was trying to wave. “If you say that we can extend coverage to all Americans and it won’t cost a penny, that’s just not true,” he told Price. “You cannot structure a bill in which suddenly 30 million people have coverage, and it costs nothing.”
No, you can’t. House Republican leaders, including Price, haven’t allowed his legislation to emerge even from subcommittee because they don’t want the embarrassment of having to vote on a bill that would raise the deficit by untold hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s far more valuable to them as a bill that they can claim at least theoretically as the Republican alternative to ObamaCare.
In fact, I very much doubt that the Price bill would pass the House anyway. Back in April, House leaders were pushing a bill similar to provisions in the Price bill that try to lower the cost of insurance for people with pre-existing conditions. That approach hasn’t worked very well, but the legislation was at least an attempt to prove that Republicans really were concerned about the plight of those in that situation.
However , conservative groups immediately rushed to condemn the “Helping Sick Americans Now Act,” dismissing it as “CantorCare,” after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who championed it.
“This proposal would further extend the federal government’s role in healthcare,” the Club for Growth complained. “ … It creates the moral hazard of avoiding insurance until it is needed and provides an extra incentive for people to enroll in federally run insurance.”
The bill was then pulled from the calendar and consigned to legislative oblivion. It sits there still … right next to the “Empowering Patients First Act.”
