Sunday, October 25, 2009

Moving Toward Health Care Compromise?

This morning on CNN's State of the Union, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) made the following comment:

Republicans would like 50 state laboratories, 50 states working on these things with yes, the help from the federal government and doing it in accordance with the needs of those states. If we did that, I think you'd find a really good health care system that would incrementally grow, be better, save costs, save -- bring down insurance premiums from where they are going to go if we don't. And I have to say, you know, stop the federal government from taking over everything in our lives.

My first thought was to reconsider my earlier posts on the state-level health care option. My second thought was that Senator Hatch was signaling some movement on the part of Republicans toward compromise. That would be useful.

A caveat might be that States that want to opt out of the public option be required to develop a program with measurable criteria (coverage and cost containment goals for starters) that would have to be reevaluated after experience with their program. If States want to pursue ideas such as Health Savings Accounts and catastrophic private insurance, let's see whether such programs (surprisingly, there are neo-liberal and liberal variants) will work better than the public option. It's a way to either confirm or reject some of the free-market ideas based on experience rather than argument.

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