Opinion

RepubliCare

Mr. President, Republicans are calling your bluff.

During last Tuesday’s State of the Union, President Obama responded to the GOP’s attempts to repeal ObamaCare this way: “If you have specific plans to cut costs, cover more people, increase choice, tell America what you’d do differently,” he said. “We all owe it to the American people to say what we’re for, not just what we’re against.”

Challenge accepted.

Last week, three GOP senators — North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn and Utah’s Orrin Hatch — introduced a new proposal that would do far more than repeal ObamaCare and return us to what we had before. It would improve our system in three broad ways the American people are likely to support:

  • First, it would keep employer-provided health insurance. That’s politically wise, given that most Americans are used to it and happy with it. But it also caps company deductions for employee-insurance plans — thus introducing much needed cost-containment on the so-called Cadillac plans that help to drive up health-care costs. In addition, it provides a refundable tax for low-income people to buy policies if they don’t have employer-provided ones.
  • Second, the senators recognize that covering pre-existing conditions is a popular benefit. In sharp contrast to ObamaCare — which perversely incentivizes people to avoid buying insurance until they are ill — this plan would enable individuals with pre-existing conditions to switch plans without losing coverage.
  • Finally, it would help reform Medicaid with something once put forward by Bill Clinton: giving Medicaid dollars on a per-capita basis, which recipients could then use to buy private ­insurance.

Writing in The Weekly Standard, health-care expert Jim Capretta described the Republican challenge this way: “What the public wants is real reform, the kind that will actually solve the problems that have been present for many years in American health care, without all of the big government baggage of ObamaCare.”

The Senate bill is not perfect, but it is an impressive answer to these questions.

Even if Harry Reid refuses to allow this plan to be debated in the Senate, GOP candidates heading into their campaigns this fall now have a genuine alternative that would offer universal ­coverage. In other words, the president asked for an alternative, and Republicans delivered.

Bring on the debate!