New Senate health care proposal needs work

Last week, the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Senator Max Baucus of Montana, released its proposal for health care reform. I am still reading through it to analyze and determine how this will affect the health care of Nebraskans. However, I have already discovered some details of great concern.

In a time of unprecedented budget deficits, rising debt, and government intervention in private businesses, the Baucus plan will commit the country to almost $1 trillion in new spending. The Committee's cost estimate is $856 billion over ten years, but that figure counts only six years of costs. The first four years will be spent implementing the major provisions. So the actually ten-year cost when the program is fully operational is much higher.

I am also concerned about the "individual mandate" provision included in the bill, which is also being touted by President Obama. This individual mandate would require most Americans to sign up for health insurance, or else be fined up to $3,800 as a family, and up to $950 as an individual. The President maintains that a government mandate to take "personal responsibility" is not a tax. Yet the Baucus bill itself states that this mandate amounts to an "excise tax" that "would be assessed through the tax code and applied as an additional amount of Federal tax owed." The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates this will yield $20 billion--this sure sounds like a tax to me. We are still a nation built upon individual rights and freedoms. If our government changes the boundaries in this area, it will fundamentally alter our freedoms and how Americans are taxed in the future.

I continue to have major concerns about unfunded state mandates--passing costs, in this case for Medicaid expansion, onto the states. This Medicaid expansion would cost states almost $29 billion and is not included in the estimated costs of the bill. This is a heavy burden on a state like Nebraska, which dutifully balances its budget year in and year out. Nebraska would be forced to either raise taxes or cut services to generate funding for its share.

In the coming weeks, I will dig deeper into the Baucus proposal, which is sure to be amended as it goes through the Committee process. Furthermore, this proposal still needs to be merged with the legislation passed by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Then CBO will need to estimate the costs of this new merged legislation. I hope Senate Democrats do not rush this bill to the floor without a true understanding of the bill's implications and costs. A bill impacting one-sixth of our economy is too important to rush through based on ill-advised proposals. When it gets to the Senate floor, I will look for ways to improve this legislation. I am hoping my Senate colleagues and I can provide enough constructive ideas to make this bill work for the people of Nebraska.

Sincerely,

Mike Johanns