Blunt: Health care hasn't been a priority for House leadership

Sometime in the next two weeks, Roy Blunt is expected to present his Republican colleagues in the House with a plan set of talking points for derailing the President's health care reform initiatives.  Blunt has been leading the House GOP effort on health care issues this year, and Republicans all over Washington have been scrambling to come up with something approximating a plan so they can say they've done something more than just oppose Obama's efforts in a partisan manner. 

The problem for Blunt -- and the whole national GOP team -- is that they didn't do much to address the problem when they ran the entire national government, and haven't put forward any proposals to counter the President's initiative, other than lame statements about how the government is bad news.

This perception that Republicans haven't really been working on health care reform comes stems from the fact the Republicans haven't really been working on health care reform. 

In recent years, says former GOP whip Rep. Roy Blunt, “no more than two dozen” Republican House members have been deeply engaged in the health-care issue. That is now changing, thanks in large part to the challenge of defeating Obamacare.

Quite an admission. If only Blunt had been in a position to provide some leadership on the issue!

While Blunt's leadership of the GOP's health care reform efforts may be a nice campaign-year(s) accomplishment, it's amazing that it's taken this long for there to be substantive action on the issue. There are 178 Republicans in the House now, but there were as many as 229 Republicans in the House when Blunt was Majority Whip and Majority Leader.  Yet during that time -- according to Blunt's own estimate -- fewer than 25 of his Members were deeply engaged on health care.

If you're interested in Blunt's package of alternate ideas, visit his Health Care Solutions Group webpage. There, you'll find a 45-second YouTube video, a list of the members in the working group, a one-page "progress report" from May 6 stating that Blunt's team has been working really hard, and links to a few articles and press releases.  He promises more soon, but that's all we have to date. 

Given that addressing our health care crisis only became a priority for House Republicans a few months ago, we probably shouldn't expect to be blown away.