McCotter Makes Fun of Dems Health Plan

Republicans think the Democrats' health care plan is a Faustian web of Washington bureaucracy. To make their case they're doing exactly what they did in 1994, when President Clinton unveiled his plan, they're circulating a chart with lots of pretty colors, boxes, lines and acronyms. It's meant to confuse people and make light of the Democrats' plan.

Thaddeus McCotter had this to say about it:

It might make for a lovely board game but it makes for horrible health care system.

McCotter obviously never had to deal with HMO's, referrals, denial of claims, etc. Or, as Jonathan Cohn put it:

But these charts--and, more important, the Republicans who use them as propoganda--tend to ignore one inconvenient fact: American health care is already complex. Ridiculously complex. Thanks to decades of haphazard, disorganized growth, it's evolved into a mind-numbing web of institutions, agencies, businesses, and individual actors. And while that may be self-evident to anybody who's ever had to deal with, say, a billing dispute between an insurer and hospital, it's easy to lose sight of that when the discussion is all about what reform might do--rather than what health care would be like without it.

TNR developed their own chart (with the help of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation) illustrating just how byzantine our system has become. McCotter should check out.

Actually, if bureaucracy is a problem for Republicans, they might want to get on board with single-payer.

Single payer reform... would eliminate the bewildering patchwork of private insurance plans with their exorbitant overhead and profits, as well as the costly paperwork burdens they impose on providers. These savings on bureaucracy - nearly $400 billion annually – are sufficient to cover all of the uninsured and to provide first dollar coverage for all Americans.

(Cross-posted at Blogging for Michigan.)