Emerson: Revisions, reform possible for health care bill

To be politically incorrect, the fat lady has yet to sing as far as the federal heath care bill is concerned, according to 8th District Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson:

“Last week, Congress put the finishing touches on a health care bill. I have now voted against four major articles of health care overhaul legislation, despite the fact that hundreds of opportunities exist to lower costs and to bring positive changes to our American continuum of care. It is, beyond a doubt, the biggest missed opportunity I have ever witnessed in a career of fighting for improvements to our health care system.

With passage of the health care bill, the conversation has shifted from stopping the bill to undoing the bad provisions in it. Politically, making changes to the law will be difficult since the majorities in the House and Senate and the White House have all endorsed the bill. But changes in the political landscape may make future revisions, reforms and repeal possible.

Surely, changes to the law will be made. The bill passed in the House had the bipartisan opposition of every Republican member of Congress and 34 Democrats. All of us who voted against it have concerns about the trillion-dollar cost of the bill, special deals for special interests, and the intervention of the federal bureaucracy in the daily health care decisions made by millions of Americans. Everyone who opposed the bill ought to remain united to amend the law in the future.

The question is where and how to begin.

My staff and the staffs of a number of House committees have already begun to comb the law for sections we can change or eliminate. We are also working to explain the ramifications of the bill to the Americans who are directly and immediately affected by its provisions. Though we have started to work on this task immediately, we do have some time before the vast majority of new insurance rules and regulations take effect in 2014.
It is important to remember that some of the goals of the health care bill are shared by members of both parties: stopping denials for insurance coverage based on pre-existing conditions, eliminating restrictions that prevent Americans from buying insurance across state lines, and establishing basic ways in which we can bring more competition to the health care market. None of these reforms is particularly controversial, and most Americans can agree that these steps can dramatically expand access to insurance coverage.

If the bill had stopped there, it would have passed overwhelmingly. Instead, the legislative language is controversial, mostly by ignoring what every American with or without health insurance worries about each time they visit a doctor, a pharmacy or a hospital – the cost of their care.

States, too, will bring lawsuits against the law. The mandate on every American to purchase health insurance may not pass constitutional muster, and state attorneys general will also sift through the law for violations of states’ rights. In Congress, federal legislators will certainly weigh in on these efforts and lend support, too.

Though the bill barely passed, there are dedicated lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are going to fight for revisions to the law. I am one of them. And the place we will start is obvious – we will begin by working to reduce the cost of this enormous new mandate on the American people.”