Republicans missed chance to reform health care in Bush era, ex-adviser says

Former President George W. Bush wanted to reform the health care system, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t back him, a former Bush administration official told a group of students and professors in a lecture Tuesday at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Allan Hubbard, a former economic policy assistant to President Bush and director of the National Economic Council, said Republicans should have handled health care when they had a Republican controlled Congress and Presidency from 2002 to 2006.

Hubbard and Mike Leavitt, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services, tried to convince Republicans in Congress to support Bush in a health care reform initiative.

“We had a huge opportunity to deal with this. We knew the American people wanted health care reform,” Hubbard said. “And we got nowhere.”

Hubbard said Republicans in Congress told him and Leavitt that the American people saw them as the party of defense and taxes, not health care. Hubbard told Republicans that if they didn’t deal with it, the Democrats eventually would.

“It happened to be one of the few things that I was right about,” Hubbard said. “It was a big mistake that they didn’t deal with it when they had the chance. They’re responsible for this bill.”

Meng Yao, a junior health administration major, said he was also frustrated with Republicans.

“All they do is complain,” Yao said. “At least Obama is trying to do something about it with this bill.”

Hubbard praised the recently passed health care bill for covering 32 million uninsured people, expanding medicaid, penalizing employers who don’t provide health insurance and making insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. He also railed against the bill for being too expensive.

“It is not paid for,” he said. “And it doesn’t do anything to reduce the cost of health care.”

Hubbard identified four major problems in the health care system: sky-rocketing costs, millions of uninsured, discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and job lock. He asked audience members to raise their hands if they had recently shopped for health care by actually calling doctors’ offices and asking for price quotes to find the best deal.

One audience member raised his hand.

“See, the rest of us don’t do it,” Hubbard said. “The system’s not set up to do it. No one ever does it. We never worry about the price.”

He said this makes consumers “price insensitive” and used an analogy of buying “grocery insurance” instead of health care insurance where employers would pay for an employee’s grocery bill. Customers would simply use their “green cross, green shield cards” to pay for groceries, Hubbard said.

“You don’t worry about what it costs. You don’t worry about over-consumption,” he said. “The supermarket owner would stop providing pricing. I’m a business guy, you know what I would do, I would sorta edge those prices up. It doesn’t cost you anything.”

Dr. Rob Stone, director of Hoosiers for Commonsense Healthcare and a Bloomington ER doctor, took issue with the grocery store analogy.

“All of us are going to use groceries today, most of us would rather not go to the doctor anymore than we have to,” Stone said. “When someone comes into my ER and gets off an ambulance, are they going to say to me, ‘Doc, you got any specials today?’”

But Stone said he did agree with many of Hubbard’s points, even though they are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Yao also agreed with some of Hubbard’s points, despite his concerns with Republicans.

“I think a little differently now,” Yao said. “I can see how this bill isn’t perfect.”