Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has a new oped up on Yahoo that makes the case for health care reform. It is pretty much a retread of the same arguments that the Administration has been making for months (even using the same tired phrases like “a public plan that would increase competition and keep private insurance companies honest”). And once again while Sebelius claims that their health care reform will do everything from bending the cost cover, covering the uninsured, rooting out waste, to of course not changing anything for those who currently like their health care plan, she offers few specifics on how this would be accomplished.
She asks in the oped “So what will reform actually look like?” but then doesn’t really answer that question. Instead she lists things like “we have to align incentives for doctors and hospitals so that they’re rewarded based on the quality of care they provide, not on how many tests or procedures they prescribe,” but doesn’t really say how that will be done. And she talks about “billions in savings” and the program not adding to the deficit, but we all know that the CBO has found that in fact Democrats’ proposals don’t save enough and do add to the deficit.
Polls suggest that the public is starting to understand what’s at stake in this health care debate and is increasingly skeptical about the trillion dollar government-centered plan. Democrats are going to have to come up with something new instead of rehashing the same talking points if they want to reverse that trend.