Matt Yglesias

No Solutions from Head of GOP “Solutions Group”

Roy Blunt Has No Solutions (wikimedia)

Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO) explained yesterday that he has no intention of writing up an alternative health care bill, the better to be able to pretend that the right-wing has some kind of cost free magical pixie dust solution to America’s health care problems:

Republicans who had promised last month to offer a healthcare reform alternative are now suggesting no such bill will be introduced.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said, “Our bill is never going to get to the floor, so why confuse the focus? We clearly have principles; we could have language, but why start diverting attention from this really bad piece of work they’ve got to whatever we’re offering right now?”

Greg Sargent notes that Blunt is the head of the GOP “Health Care Solutions Group”.

Offering no bill is fine in my view, but it emphasizes that the alternative conservative solution for the real world is perpetuation of the status quo. And that’s something Steven Pearlstein had a good column about yesterday:

Among the range of options for health-care reform, there’s one that is sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.

That’s the option of doing nothing, letting things continue to drift as they have for the past two decades as we continue to search in vain for the perfect plan that would let everyone have everything they want and preserve everything they already have while getting someone else to pay for it.

And these are the right questions to ask. Not how does a bill look compared to an abstract alternative, but how does a bill look in comparison to continuing with business as usual.

Roy Blunt Wishes There Were No Medicare

It’s often frustrating to argue with conservatives who won’t admit that the logic of their position is that popular, uncontroversial, and long-established government programs never should have been created. So House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) did us all a favor yesterday by going on the radio and opining that we never should have started Medicare and Medicaid:

HOST MIKE FERGUSON: What is the proper role of government, and what are the potential impacts of the direction that we’re going right now?

BLUNT: Well, you could certainly argue that government should have never have gotten in the health care business, and that might have been the best argument of all, to figure out how people could have had more access to a competitive marketplace.

Government did get into the health care business in a big way in 1965 with Medicare, and later with Medicaid, and government already distorts the marketplace.

For the record, Medicare and Medicaid were passed at the exact same, both as part of the Social Security Act of 1965. And it’s crucial to understand that Medicare, in particular, didn’t just come about because of some random bleeding heart impulse. The reason there was political muscle to get Medicare passed even though it wasn’t possible to move to a true universal system is that private health insurers wanted nothing to do with the senior citizen client base. Insurance takes advantage of risk-pooling and risk-aversion to offer people security at a price that’s both profitable and attractive. When the whole pool is bad risks, as senior citizens are, there’s no real business opportunity.