Healthcare Reform is Coming

Last Thursday, Barack Obama announced he wanted “swift action“ on healthcare reform. "It's hard to overstate the urgency of this work," he said. He has Tom Daschle [picture] poised to drive the program through, working with the Democratic coalition from one end of the spectrum to the other (Daschle is the former Senate Democratic leader), and with key interest groups including the American Medical Association (unhappy with a current regime that often leaves doctors undercompensated).

But Daschle has also said he will use “the Senate's rules to prevent opponents from filibustering healthcare legislation", a move that one senior Republican staff member warned would make it "extremely difficult" to get any GOP support for major reform. One good way to drive reform through—have an enemy to build your movement around. On healthcare reform, that enemy would be Republicans.

Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer has highlighted some of the difficulties with the Obama-Daschle anti-GOP approach to reform. Speaking on “Special Report with Brit Hume,” Krauthammer, an M.D. himself, noted Daschle explained he will cut costs:

in part by saying he will work on prevention. Now, I have been in the business for 30 years, and you hear it every year, and you want to weep when you hear it again and again. Prevention is a nice thing, but it doesn't save money.

HUME: Why?

KRAUTHAMMER: For example, the biggest preventative healthcare success in American history is the reduction in smoking. What happens instead of dying young if you smoke, you die older, spending years in a nursing home, and the costs end up higher. I'm not in favor of dying young, but it's more expensive if you live longer.

If you die of a heart attack at 50, that's awful, but it's cheap. If you live into your 80's, you will end up with Alzheimer's or cancer or a chronic disease that's expensive. . .

The way to save money in healthcare, the most immediate and effective, is to eliminate defensive medicine. I was a chief resident 30 years ago and a lot of our tests are entirely unnecessary and are a way to prevent lawsuits. The Democrats will never do that because of their dependence on the trial lawyers.

With a coalition built on excluding Republicans, you know trial lawyers will succeed in keeping medicine expensive for the rest of us.