Election-Year Patient Rights or Prescription Drug Legislation?
In both patient rights and drug benefits for seniors, the congressional Republican leadership is being driven farther than they want to be by the presidential election and the positions their candidates are finding they have to take in order to be responsive to voters.
The wild card for Republicans will be the election year process.
If it becomes clear to the Republican members of Congress, during their re-election campaigns, that there is no choice but to pass a patient rights bill or a prescription drug bill that Clinton will sign, then we will get one.
Today, the only patient rights or prescription drug bill Republicans would pass would be a bill that Clinton would be eager to veto. And, the Republicans would love to see him veto their bills — all the better to take the high ground on healthcare in an election year. If Clinton vetoes a Republican healthcare bill, Republicans would argue, the Democrats could no longer claim they were running against a “do-nothing” Congress or that the Republicans were the ones obstructing health reform.
You should expect that the next few months will produce a series of attempts at healthcare one-upmanship as each side tries to outflank the other on patient rights, prescription drugs and the uninsured.
Clinton Keeps Healthcare Pressure on Republicans
The Democrats intend to attack the Republicans on the healthcare issue throughout the campaign.
Clinton dramatized this in his State of the Union address reminding Congress of numerous Clinton/Gore healthcare proposals left over from last year’s budget debate, as well as formally introducing some of the new ideas Gore has advocated on the campaign trail.
In addition to his support for the Norwood-Dingell patient rights bill and the Clinton/Gore Medicare plan, Clinton proposed what is essentially an abbreviated Gore campaign program to reduce the 44 million uninsured. He proposed spending $110 billion over 10 years from future projected budget surpluses to create a number of new health insurance options to reduce the number of uninsured (Gore estimates his plan for the uninsured costs $146 billion over 10 years)
FamilyCare — an expansion of Medicaid to provide higher matching state payments to expand coverage of uninsured parents of children covered under Medicaid. This is essentially one of Gore’Congress is now back to work just as the presidential election campaign moves to the first ballot boxes.
Healthcare is proving to be a top presidential issue with Congress facing increased pressure to do more than just kill a patient rights bill.
Campaign Pressures Congress
It is more than notable that all the presidential candidates, the most liberal and the most conservative, are in at least vague agreement on two major issues:
Patient rights including a patient’s right to sue his or her HMO; and
Helping seniors pay for outpatient cheap prescription drugs.
All the presidential candidates have said that a patient bill of rights should be passed and that it should include the ultimate right of a patient to sue an HMO. However, the Republican candidates do not support the right-to-sue provision in the Al Gore-favored Norwood-Dingell bill, which would allow a suit to go forward even before all appeal steps were exhausted. Instead, Republicans see the right to sue as a last resort — only after all appeals have been exhausted.
While the Democratic candidates have very specific Medicare drug plans, the Republicans are generally vague in calling for more private prescription drug insurance options to be available to seniors under the Medicare supplement options.
Whatever the detailed differences between the candidates at this early point in the election, Congress, particularly the Republican leadership, is getting the message: They can’t duck these two popular issues.