Healthcare hardball

It is hard to recite all of the things we did do when we had the majority in five
seconds or less.

We added a section to Medicare (Part D) that provided a prescription drug
benefit to senior citizens.

We started and expanded a federal-state partnership to provide low-income
children healthcare insurance.

We made healthcare more portable, so if you change jobs, you can take your healthcare
with you. We protected healthcare privacy. We created Health Saving Accounts
and Medical Saving Accounts.

We didn’t do everything we wanted.

We wanted comprehensive medical liability reform. Democrats stopped it in the
Senate. We wanted Associated Health Plans so that small businesses could band
together and negotiate better healthcare prices across state lines. Democrats
stopped it in the Senate. We wanted to expand health savings accounts to make
them more workable in the marketplace. Democrats stopped it in the Senate.

We tried to refine the marketplace to give consumers more power to negotiate
lower prices, more information to make decisions, more control over their healthcare
policies and spending. We believe that the private marketplace is the best way
to provide more access, higher quality and better cost. We believe that because
that is true for every commodity known to man.

Too much government involvement leads to either rapidly higher costs or rapidly
declining quality.

A single-payer system, which is the ultimate goal of Democrats in Congress,
will cost trillions of dollars, which we simply don’t have at this moment. From
the looks of it, we probably won’t have the money for the next hundred years.

Chris, we didn’t pass national healthcare when we ran the Congress because we
don’t believe in government-run healthcare. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t
try to improve the marketplace, because we did. And we got some stuff done. Just
not all of it.

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