Derek Schmidt and Sam Brownback renewed their pledge Monday to do all in their power to destroy the health care bill Congress passed earlier this year.
All in their power isn’t much.
Schmidt is running for Kansas Attorney General. Brownback wants to be governor. They will have about the same leverage on federal law as will County Commissioner Dick Works if he is re-elected in November.
State Sen. Schmidt and U.S. Sen. Brownback are both lawyers, both are very bright, both are fully aware that the health care law isn’t going to be repealed — it would take a two-thirds majority to do that over
a presidential veto — both must also doubt that the courts will find it unconstitutional.
The primary legal argument against the law is that it requires citizens to buy health insurance in the future or pay a fine. Kinda like drivers must buy liability insurance. Even though a passel of state attorney generals — almost all of them Republicans — signed up to fight the case, non-political lawyers don’t give the challenge much of a chance.
So why do a couple of state politicians want a piece of this action?
One guess. Bullseye! They are opportunists. Being against health care for everyone is required of all red-blooded Republicans these days. Doesn’t matter if you’re running for a state office or want to be elected county noxious weed control officer. You must declare that a national health care program is only a step away from lockstep socialism.
Schmidt said he might file a lawsuit against the federal government if the health care bill appeared to be in conflict with state law. (No matter that federal law almost always supersedes state law.)
But Brownback did Schmidt one better. “I believe in the Kansas way, not the Obama way,” he said, and wisely left it there.
Wisely, because there isn’t any Kansas way to institute national health care reform. What he said meant absolutely nothing at all.
Kansas has offered no way to provide health care to the 50 million Americans without health insurance; Kansas has no program to extend health insurance to children in a covered family until they reach the age of 26, as “Obamacare” has already done. And it wasn’t any state law that required health insurance to cover existing conditions or did away with lifetime limits, as the national law already does.
No, Sam, there isn’t any Kansas way. You’re just blowing smoke.
CYNICAL politicians latch on to the cause of the day hoping that bandwagon will carry their campaign down the road a piece — and it works.
Consider health care. The promise to reform the way health care is delivered and paid for may have been the primary reason for Barack Obama’s election in 2008. The facts were on his side. More than 50 million Americans were without health insurance. Health care costs consumed about 17 percent of the U.S. gross national product, more than 50 percent above costs in any other rich nation. U.S. businesses screamed because the cost of health insurance was pricing them out of international markets. The cost of providing health care to their employees and retirees was one of the major factors in making U.S. automobile companies uncompetitive.
Not only did U.S. health care cost more than other nations paid, health care outcomes were better in many other countries. All of these negatives remain true today.
Studies show that health care costs can be reduced in the United States by moving away from fee-for-service payments toward salaried caregivers and by adopting team medicine. Costs at the prestigious Mayo and Cleveland Clinics are substantially less than the national average because, among other things, they have adopted these practices.
The need for a change was obvious; the kinds of changes needed had been identified.
Then the special interests went to work.
A misshapen health care bill did pass, but it protected many of those who don’t want health care to cost less because that would mean that they get less. And it put off covering the uncovered for years. Is it socialism? Far from it. The money still goes to private insurance companies, private hospitals, private practitioners.
But the bogus cry that Obama was shoving socialized medicine down the throats of the American people created an enemy to fight for those made angry by the recession and fearful of the huge deficits created to prevent the recession from becoming another Great Depression.
The exasperating consequence of this progression of events is that at least half of the country is now fighting against making the health care system better. And two of the Kansans who will probably hold high office in our state have joined the destroyers.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
