After the Bipartisan Meeting on Health Reform: “Our differences and our common goals”
Earlier today, President Obama sent a letter to Congressional leaders thanking them for their participation in last Thursday's bipartisan meeting on health reform. In the letter, the President discussed areas where Republicans and Democrats agree, as well as areas where real differences remain:
I have always believed that our legislative Cheap Cialis process works best when both sides can discuss our differences and common goals openly and honestly, and I’m very pleased that our meeting at Blair House offered the American people and their elected representatives a rare opportunity to explore different health reform proposals in extraordinary depth.
The meeting was a good opportunity to move past the usual rhetoric and sound-bites that have come to characterize this debate and identify areas on which we agree and disagree. And one point on which everyone expressed agreement was that the cost of health care is a large and growing problem that, left untended, threatens families, businesses and the solvency of our government itself.
I also left convinced that the Republican and Democratic approaches to health care have more in common than most people think.
For example, we agree on the need to reform our insurance markets. We agree on the idea of allowing small businesses and individuals who lack insurance to join together to increase their purchasing power so they can enjoy greater choices and lower prices. And we agree on the dire need to wring out waste, fraud and abuse and get control of skyrocketing health care costs.
But there were also important areas of disagreement. There was a fundamental disagreement about what role the oversight of the health insurance industry should play in reform. I believe we must insist on some common-sense rules of the road to hold insurance companies accountable for the decisions they make to raise premiums and deny coverage. I don’t believe we can afford to leave life-and-death decisions about health care for America’s families to the discretion of insurance company executives alone.
...While we all believe that reform must be built around our existing private health insurance system, I believe that we must hold the insurance industry to clear rules, so they can’t arbitrarily raise rates or reduce or eliminate coverage.
The President also outlined four ideas put forth by Republicans at the meeting that he was willing to consider, including ways to cut down on Medicare fraud and waste, new ways to resolve medical malpractice suits, increasing doctor reimbursement for Medicaid, and including high-deductible health plans as an option in the new Insurance Exchanges.
Finally, the President re-affirmed his commitment to moving forward with comprehensive reform as the best way to reduce premiums, end the exclusion of people with pre-existing conditions and provide Americans the security of knowing that they will never lose coverage, even if they lose or change jobs.