(Due to the length of this article, we were required to break it up into multiple parts because of technical difficulties. It appears in the printed version as one story)
By Charles McClure
news@ltview.com
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are officially on break; however, this is a working summer for legislators. That includes Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, who both represent the Lake Travis area.

Congress has been laboring over H.R. 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009,” the most recent congressional bill drafted in an attempt to reform America’s health care system. Legislators have returned to their districts to vigorously support or oppose the bill, depending on their views — and there are plenty of both to go around.
Doggett worked on some portions of the bill and advocates its passage.
“There is no doubt that there is room for improvement,” Doggett told the Lake Travis View. “While I was personally involved in writing some of it, it wasn’t written as I would have done it, where I writing it myself. But I still think it merits approval.”
U.S. President Barack Obama who made health care reform an essential component of his domestic policy spurred the bill. An overhaul of the $2.5 trillion health care system is the President’s top domestic priority. His hope is to expand insurance coverage while holding down skyrocketing medical costs, which Obama sees as essential to long-term economic recovery.
“Comprehensive health care reform can no longer wait,” Obama said on the White House web site. “Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business, and government budgets. Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have doubled in the last nine years, a rate three times faster than cumulative wage increases. This forces families to sit around the kitchen table to make impossible choices between paying rent and paying health premiums.
“Given all that we spend on health care, American families should not be presented with that choice,” Obama continued. “The U.S. spent approximately $2.2 trillion on health care in 2007, or $7,421 per person – nearly twice the average of other developed nations. Americans spend more on health care than on housing or food. If rapid health cost growth persists, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2025, one out of every $4 in our national economy will be tied up in the health system. This growing burden will limit other investments and priorities that are needed to grow our economy. Rising health care costs also affect our economic competitiveness in the global economy, as American companies compete against companies in other countries that have dramatically lower health care costs.”
Ask virtually anyone on Capitol Hill if Americans need health care reform, and the answer is almost always “yes.”
However, the House bill currently on the table has divided lawmakers, even Democrats, and has drawn sharp critics, in addition to its many advocates. Clearly, there is no easy solution to creating a health care reform bill that would win a broad spectrum of support from both political parties, as well as the multitude of special interest groups that oppose or advocate H.R. 3200.
However, H.R. 3200 cleared its first hurdle last Friday after the final House panel, the Energy and Commerce Committee, gave its approval to the bill by a narrow 31-28 margin. Five Democrats who voted against the bill joined the Republican minority on the panel. And so-called “Blue Dog Democrats,” who are fiscally conservative, blocked the bill from coming to the House floor for a vote until after the summer recess, despite Obama’s repeated attempts to force it through before Congress adjourned for its break.
House leaders are still working to solve the concerns of the Blue Dogs. A primary obstacle is division over a proposed $544 billion income surtax on the wealthiest Americans to help pay the roughly $1 trillion, 10-year cost of the legislation.
Still, Obama sees the vote as a victory.
“This historic step by the House Energy and Commerce Committee moves us closer to health insurance reform than we have ever been before,” Obama said in a statement released by the White House Saturday. “The bill that they have passed will strengthen consumer protections and choice, while lowering costs and improving care, underscoring the broad consensus among all of the bills that have emerged in Congress. Over the next few weeks, we must build upon the historic consensus that has been forged, and do the hard work necessary to seize this unprecedented opportunity for the future of our economy and the health of our families.”
One of the primary aims of H.R. 3200 is to impose end insurance company practices that deny coverage to those who become ill by creating a new government-sponsored plan to compete with private companies.
For decades, all major health care providers have included provisions that can allow companies that purchase insurance coverage for employees to include provisions that prohibit medical care, even in the case of life-threatening illnesses. Riders can deny numerous illnesses and even cap how much money can be spent to battle certain life-threatening illnesses, like cancer.
In the proceedings that lead to H.R. 3200, the leaders of several of the major health care providers were called before the Congressional Commerce Committee to testify as to why they condone practices that have often led to the death of patients, as well as why they frequently canceled policies when the insured become ill in order to cut costs. When asked if the companies would continue such practices in the future by Congress, each said they would, because current laws allow it.
“No one can defend, and I certainly cannot defend, the practice of canceling coverage after the fact.” said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., “This is precisely why we need a public [insurance plan] option.”
The practice has been widely criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. Advocates of health care reform said the session was reminiscent of when executives of America’s seven largest tobacco companies testified before Congress in 1994, each maintaining that tobacco was not addictive.
“It’s shocking.” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. “It’s inexcusable. It’s a system we have in place that we have to stop.”
Windell Potter, a former insurance executive-turned whistleblower, has detailed some of the industries tactics to Congress, as well opinion pieces and in an interview with PBS’s Bill Moyers. Included in his revelations was an alleged insurance industry campaign developed against Michael Moore’s “mockumentary” “Sicko.”
“I have seen how the industry’s practices – especially those of the for-profit insurers that are under constant pressure from Wall Street to meet their profit expectations – have contributed to the tragedy of nearly 50 million people being uninsured as well as to the growing number of Americans who, because insurers now require them to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets before their coverage kicks in – are underinsured,” Potter said in an opinion piece for Politico.com. “An estimated 25 million of us now fall into that category.
“What I saw happening over the past few years was a steady movement away from the concept of insurance and toward ‘individual responsibility,’ a term used a lot by insurers and their ideological allies,” Potter continued. “This is playing out as a continuous shifting of the financial burden of health care costs away from insurers and employers and onto the backs of individuals. As a result, more and more sick people are not going to the doctor or picking up their prescriptions because of costs. If they are unfortunate enough to become seriously ill or injured, many people enrolled in these plans find themselves on the hook for such high medical bills that they are losing their homes to foreclosure or being forced into bankruptcy.”
However, many of the laws insurance companies use to discontinue or prohibit coverage are passed by state legislatures. This is an area where Smith believes the government could design legislation to increase competition. However, he does not believe H.R. 3200 will accomplish that goal.
Former President Bill Clinton is also backing health care reform. In a statement he sent to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Clinton said Republican opposition to H.R. 3200 – or any health care reform bill – was strictly based on partisan politics.
“Republicans have made a political calculation that they’d rather attack congressional Democrats with sound bites and misleading characterizations of the President’s health care reform plan than work on behalf of the American people,” he wrote. “It’s up to us to prevent the Republican Party and their special interest backers from doing whatever they can to prevent this historic opportunity to make quality health care affordable and accessible to all.”
While in office, Clinton also attempted to reform the health care system placing his wife Hillary, now Secretary of State, in charge of the effort. His Administration’s efforts ended in failure.
Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who has been battling brain cancer, said Tuesday that health care reform was the “the cause of my life.”
“But quality care shouldn’t depend on your financial resources, or the type of job you have, or the medical condition you face,” Kennedy told Newsweek. “Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.”
However, one of the key criticisms of H.R. 3200 is that if falls well short of the quality health care provided to members of Congress. However, health care reform advocates generally believe the bill, if passed, is necessary and could be amended over time as faults surface.
Undaunted, the Obama Administration said it would like a health care reform bill completed in both houses of Congress this year. As for criticisms of the cost associated with the plan, Obama has repeatedly argued that Americans already spend more money per capita than any other nation.