Rep. Gottwalt vs. Speaker Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi is insisting that federal health care reform include a public-run option. Most likely, that’s because she agrees with President Obama’s power grab goals. HINT: Democratic Health care reform isn’t about providing high quality care at reasonable prices. It’s about controlling 16 percent of the U.S. economy.
Let’s contrast that with legislation chief authored by Rep. Steve Gottwalt. I wrote in this post that Rep. Gottwalt’s legislation “will improve care for 84,000 Minnesotans, and save the state about $200 million in the coming biennium.”
Friday afternoon, I attended Steve’s townhall meeting. After the meeting, I spoke with Steve about how he came up with the $200,000,000 savings for this biennium. Steve’s reply was that he started out by building a policy with a specific set of things covered. After that, he went out and priced how much actual insurance companies would charge for his policy. After getting those figures, he and his staff figured out the cost of insuring 84,000 people on MinnesotaCare vs. the cost of insuring these people with his policy. Plugging these people into Steve’s program was $200,000,000 cheaper than plugging them into the existing MinnesotaCare program.
It’s worth noting that Steve said the cost of his plan was based on all 84,000 people being smokers. In other words, the savings would be bigger in reality than in his estimates.
I wrote Thursday that Steve’s bill was so well-constructed that is received unanimous approval in the Health Care and Human Services Policy and Oversight Committee.
At one point, Carolyn Laine was so surprised with the savings with Steve’s plan that she asked how this could be. It didn’t dawn on her that private health insurance could be cheaper than government-run health care. It certainly didn’t dawn on her that significant savings could be realized through private sector insurance.
Which brings us back to Prime Minister Pelosi’s intent to include a government-run option:
“This is not only about the health of individuals in our country, which will be justification enough,” said Pelosi, a California Democrat. “It’s about the competitiveness of our businesses to make them globally competitive because they are competing with companies and countries where the federal government, their governments, pay for health care. They don’t have to bear those health care costs.”
For instance, Canada’s health care system is crap:
Dr. Sean Gartner says 11 per cent of the people who came to the emergency room at his hospital in Guelph last month ended up leaving without receiving treatment.
What’s the likelihood that U.S. citizens would knowingly accept a health care system where every ninth ER patient doesn’t get treated? That isn’t the only stain against Canada’s health care system:
Health officials say a man who died in the waiting area of a major Winnipeg hospital’s emergency department may have been dead “for some time” before medical staff was alerted, 34 hours after he arrived.
The choice before us is simple: we can accept government-run health care like Canada’s system or we can move towards Rep. Gottwalt’s plan which realizes significant cost savings without a reduction in quality and which increases accessability and includes portability.
This isn’t a difficult choice if the goal is maintaining the high quality of health care while increasing accessability for people. The only reason why people would pick Prime Minister Pelosi’s plan over Steve’s plan is if your goal is to control one-sixth of America’s GDP.
Technorati Tags: Reform, Health Care, Free Markets, Steve Gottwalt, Cost Savings, Capitalism, Republicans, Speaker Pelosi, Power Grab, CanadaCare, Democrats
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog
March 31st, 2009 at 7:23 am
When will it become obvious to the conservative movement that “health care” is the least of concerns for the lying left?
Pelosi’s, Obama’s, Dodd’s, every one of the lying left is concerned only with maximizing government intrusion into the lives of every citizen, and “health care” represents a touchstone issue with the voters.
Health care? If they were really concerned about it they would remove the restrictions to its delivery.
March 31st, 2009 at 8:44 am
Ignorance is their best ally. As long as Joe Sixpack goes along nodding his head while Chairman Obama nationalizes GM on his quest to micromanage our lives, the love affair continues, and were all dancing with the stars.
Health care? My dear fellow, your really quite selfish wanting to decide everything for yourself.