Missing the Big Picture

Roy Blunt's Health Care Solutions Working Group finally unveiled it's "plan" for health care reform yesterday, after months of criticism from fellow Republicans and conservative activists about his lack of leadership. The four page outline that might someday serve as the framework for a plan garnered dozens of national news stories.  In Missouri, not so much.

Maybe it's because Blunt's work as the top dog on the House GOP's health care efforts is so unimpressive? (If so, wouldn't that be an ever bigger story?)

The one notable story on the unveiling of the talking points, from KY3's Dave Catanese, misses the bigger picture:

Blunt is the leader of the House GOP efforts. The KY3 story fails to mention that Blunt was hand-picked by Minority Leader John Boehner in February to be the GOP's point person in the House to "develop real solutions" and fend off the accusations that the GOP is just a "party of no."

Blunt still doesn't have an actual plan. As has been widely reported by the national press, Blunt's plan doesn't have cost estimates, sources of funding, estimates of how many people it might cover, and any real details at all.  It is literally an outline of potential ideas.

Blunt acknowledged yesterday that the actual plan is still weeks away (at best). At the unveiling of the "proposal," a reporter asked the following question:

REPORTER: Mr. Blunt, your plan doesn’t have a whole lot of numbers in it. I’m wondering when you guys have a sense of roughly how much your plan would cost, how much you’re going to -- how are you going to pay for it, are there going to be any tax increases, and how many of the uninsured do you estimate would ultimately get health insurance who don’t have health insurance right now?

BLUNT: Well, we believe we can come up with a plan where every person in the uninsured has access to insurance. Now, we -- we -- we’re going to have no mandate, no employer mandate, no individual mandate. And we’re going to try to think of ways to encourage the -- the 28-year-old guy who thinks he’s invincible to get into the health care system.

"We believe we can come up with a plan." Blunt is a very talented wordsmith, but even he will have a hard time explaining how attempts to create a plan and beliefs about future plans constitute an actual plan in hand.

It is completely wrong to say, "Blunt says GOP healthcare plan can get everyone insured." Catanese's Twitter link to his own story read, "Blunt says GOP healthcare plan can get everyone insured w/o mandate."  This is false. His story has been updated from its original form, but as his own story reads, the number of Americans Blunt hopes to insure is completely unknown. Blunt didn't try to venture a guess, and has never put forward anything that would extend coverage to everyone.

Equating unknown details of Democratic and Republican reform plans is downright absurd. This kind of false equivalence is really hard to comprehend:

The overall cost of the plan remains unclear -- as does how many more Americans Blunt and Republicans hope to insure. On the other hand, Democrats have not detailed how they would pay for their plan either.

Democratic proposals are still being negotiated, but are light-years ahead of Blunt's proposal. Blunt has a 3.5 page press release with bullet points . That's all. (Read it yourself, if you think it's an exaggeration.) The substantive plans being debated in the Senate Finance and HELP committees are hundreds of pages of complex, serious legislation. There are obvious unknowns and unresolved portions of the bill, and questions about the best ways to fund the reforms to lower costs and increase access, but suggesting that the Senate proposals and House GOP plan are similarly undeveloped is preposterous.

In fact, Blunt complained about the estimated costs of one Senate proposal in his press conference yesterday -- because there is an actual Senate proposal that can be evaluated.  Blunt's proposal is still just a list of bullet points.

Blunt knows that his "plan" will be less expensive than any Democratic alternative, but also has no idea how much his plan will cost? Someone will need to explain that to me.  And explain how much the cost of the maintaining the status quo factors into that analysis.

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The other alternative is for Blunt to just stop pretending to have a "plan" and devote himself entirely to obstructing the reform efforts of others. No one believes that he's serious about putting forward an actual alternative anyway.

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For more on Blunt's failures to come up with an actual health care plan:

Submitted by .Sean on June 18, 2009 - 10:09am
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