GOP offers few health-care options, some acknowledge

October 31, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON

As they campaign to recapture Congress, Republicans are vowing to repeal President Barack Obama’s new health-care law and relieve Americans from rising insurance premiums and bigger government.

But some conservatives acknowledge that the health-care program offered by party leaders is largely unchanged from the proposals the GOP pushed when it held majorities from 2000 to 2006. During that period, insurance premiums were skyrocketing, businesses were reducing benefits, and the number of Americans without health insurance rose.

“I’d be the first to admit to you that Republicans did not address health care the way they should have,” said Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., R-La., a surgeon who was elected in 2004.

Now, though there is some disagreement in GOP circles, Republicans largely have coalesced around an approach that builds on basic pillars of Republican health-care policy: Loosen state regulation of insurance markets to allow insurers to sell policies across state lines, put new limits on medical- malpractice lawsuits, and expand so-called high-risk pools to provide insurance to sick Americans who are denied coverage.

“We will approach it in smaller bites. That is the wiser course,” said Minnesota Rep. John Kline, who is in line to chair the Education and Labor Committee in a Republican-controlled House.

Kline and other Republicans pledge to protect a health-care system they say is threatened by the new law.

“One of our No. 1 priorities needs to be to preserve the good things we have now,” said Rep. Wally Herger of California, who would chair the House Ways and Means health subcommittee if Republicans take the House.

But as costs continue to rise and the ranks of uninsured swell, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office last year estimated that the House Republican plan would leave 52 million people without insurance in 2019, compared with 50 million today.