As President Trump continues to pressure Congress to repeal the failing Obamacare law and as GOP senators remain divided over the way forward, a resolution appears to be as unreachable as a galaxy far, far away.
Not so, says Fox News commentator, author, columnist and former Harvard-trained medical doctor Charles Krauthammer.
He explained on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Tuesday that Congress can accomplish a huge and much-needed improvement to America’s health-care system simply by enacting tort reform.
Accomplishing that, he contended, could make up to half a trillion dollars a year available for helping low-income people with their health-care costs.
At a minimum, he said, it would be “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
See his interview:
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His comments followed by only hours word that three GOP senators would not support Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to repeal now and replace later, meaning Republicans would be one vote short of the 50 needed.
President Trump’s reaction was strong.
“Let Obamacare fail,” he said at the White House. “It’ll be a lot easier, and I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll just let Obamacare fail. We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.”
However, even Trump-friendly pundits disagreed with the president’s assessment, saying that the GOP, after years of promising that repealing and replacing Obamacare would be their absolute top priority upon retaking control of the government, would indeed “own” the health-care debacle of Obamacare if they fail to fulfill their promises and replace it.
Trump later told senators to cancel their August recess and stay until “this is complete.”
“We should hammer this out and get this done,” he said.
Krauthammer said “the first thing is to recognize a mistake that Obama and others have made in thinking you can revolutionize a system as unbelievably complex and interlinked as medicine.”
He said one change causes changes for “80 other things,” and reorganizing the whole system at once means “you have no idea what the outcome is going to be.”
So Congress should try a piece-by-piece repair.
“The medical malpractice system is totally out of control. Everybody in the system knows it. It’s not just the outrageous judgments, not just the fact some people get millions of dollars, and others get nothing.”
While all the lawyers involved get rich, he said, physicians are forced to practice “defensive medicine” because of the legal threats, something Krauthammer estimates amounts to a staggering one-quarter of all procedures in hospitals, tests, etc., all done not truly for medical reasons, but “to fend off the lawyers.”
“I know … I was there. I did the same thing. You have to do it,” he said.
He explained that the one quarter of procedures and tests that are done for legal reasons, not medical, result in “massive” costs.
“We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year … half a trillion dollars a year,” he said.
“Imagine if you cut that in half, with a rational tort reform. You could use that money to subsidize the health insurance of every poor person in America,” he said. “The only reason the Democrats did not include it … in the [Obamacare] bill of 2,000 pages, is because they are owned by the trial lawyers.”
He also suggested people should be allowed to buy insurance across state lines, the government should concern itself only with caring for the “very sick” and the rest of the population should get insurance regulated by the free market.
He also called Congress’ outcome on health-care overhaul an “epic fail.”
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On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence joined Trump in criticizing Congress for failing to advance one of the administration’s major legislative goals, seeming to portray allowing the current law to remain in place as untenable.
“Inaction is not an option,” Pence said in remarks to the National Retail Federation before the repeal-only plan, too, appeared doomed.
“Congress needs to step up. Congress needs to do their job, and Congress needs to do their job now.”
