U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn issued a warning to her Senate counterparts who are introducing massive health reform bills this week: Learn from Tennessee’s experiment into “nationalized” health care. “All approaches for a nationalized health care system simply don’t work, and we saw this with TennCare,” Blackburn said this week during a discussion on the future of employer-based health coverage at The Heritage Foundation. In 1995, the state implemented TennCare, a health program modeled after Medicaid. While it covered more uninsured adults, the budget-busting program grew at a 1.5-percent annual rate, …
With Congress and President Barack Obama ramping up their health care reform rhetoric this week, it seems all of the major players in the health policy arena are weighing how likely meaningful health care reform will pass and be doable for Americans and the private health care system. One theme everyone seems to be in agreement with is that any health care legislation must have broad support to actually pass and be implemented. “If Congress wants long-lasting health care reform, they’ll need broad consensus on what that is,” Heritage’s Nina …
New legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Richard Burr (R-NC) features several important conservative principles for health-care reform that would allow free-market solutions to take root in the broken U.S. health care system, and give patients more decision-making power with their health care dollars. A corresponding bill also was introduced in the House this week by Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI). It’s the first health-care reform package that has been introduced in the current Congress. Several Democratic congressional members are expected to introduce their versions …
Fresh out of a roundtable hearing in the Senate Finance Committee this morning on models for financing health care reform, Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming said Congress will need to take a bipartisan approach as it prepares to markup and debate major health care reform legislation. “And I don’t mean bipartisan like on the economic stimulus bill,” Enzi quipped during his speech at the Heritage Foundation today. While some components of the in the current health care debate have become nonnegotiable for both sides of the aisle — such as …
Senate Finance Committee’s Roundtable Discussion on “Expanding Health Care Coverage” was disrupted this morning by eight hecklers who yelled demands for single-payer health care before being removed from the room by Capitol Police. The disruptions came mere hours after MoveOn.org hosted an “emergency” online briefing/conference call last night. Democracy for America Executive Director Arshad Hashan told MoveOn members: “Health care is really just starting to heat up in Congress. And the fight is … to get real reform passed is starting literally this week, literally at a hearing tomorrow the …
Former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary and Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt warned yesterday that a public health insurance option in any comprehensive health reform would be the “Trojan horse” that would force Americans into a single-payer health system. Proponents for a public health insurance plan, which has been suggested to be modeled after Medicare, employ “a real clever use of language,” using words like “choice” and “competition” when discussing the plan, Leavitt said in a conference call — one of his first commentaries since leaving the federal health agency …
We all know health care coverage in the United States is a dire issue — especially since most health insurance is workplace-based and people who have lost jobs have few options to affordable and portable coverage. But as Heritage analyst Robert Moffit recently noted, it’s important to understand the real numbers of the uninsured. Families USA, a liberal health advocacy group in Washington, recently commissioned the Lewin Group to analyze data from the U.S. Census Bureau to determine how many Americans were uninsured for an unspecified time within the time …
Health-care policy doyenne Sally Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, lived under the Canadian health care system — before moving to the United States in 1991 and becoming a citizen in 2006 — and she’s not excited about America’s health system heading in the same direction. “Understanding health care is like unraveling an onion: There are many tearful moments,” Pipes said at a recent Heritage Lecture about the U.S. health-care reform debate. “When I look at [President Barack] Obama’s plan for health care, I see it leading …
Several leading European and Canadian health economists, physicians and scholars — in Washington recently for the Galen Institute’s conference, “Lessons from Abroad for Health Reform in the US” — met with analysts from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think-tank leaders. They wanted to explain why Americans should be concerned when officials push for government-controlled, universal health care coverage that includes innocuous-sounding but largely intrusive and prohibitive health measures. “We were told single-payer health care would be a true liberation for Canada when they enacted it 40 years ago, and …
