Students Debate Nancy Pelosi’s Health Care Proposal

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Author: Ben Dalgetty

 

This Monday at 7 p.m. eight Occidental underclassmen stood before 25 of their peers and debated the merits of health care reform and the public option as laid out in House’s health care bill, the H.R. 3962, in Johnson 204. The student debaters were divided into panels arguing for and against the health care proposal with Sam Boland (first-year), Alex Acuna (first-year), Maria Stewart (first-year) and Chelsea Boren (first-year) arguing for the proposal and Thomas Graham (sophomore), Patrick Stevenson (first-year), Evan Pritsos (first-year) and Anthony Labarga (first-year) arguing against.

The debate was organized by Veronica Pinkham (sophomore) with the help of the politics department. Pinkham, like most of the debaters, was participating in the debate in part to fulfill a requirement for an on campus civic debate for Professor Caroline Heldman’s Politics 101 class. She said, “I just love watching and participating in political debates . . . [and] I chose health care as the issue for this debate because it is a hot topic and an important one, yet very complex, so I felt a structured debate could be a way to inform more students and clarify the arguments.”

With the House’s recently passed Affordable Health Care for America Act and the recent Senate vote to begin debating the health care bill which was compiled by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) from the various committees, health care reform remains the main priority of Congress. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the House plan would cost an estimated $1 trillion over the next 10 years, which will come primarily from taxes on high-income households and fines for businesses who don’t provide insurance. The CBO places the Senate bill at $849 billion over the next 10 years, which will come mostly from taxes on high-end, or “cadillac,” health care plans and the companies that provide them as well as individuals who don’t have insurance. Over the next 10 years the House bill would reduce the deficit by $109 billion compared to $130 billion in savings under the Senate proposal.

However, the complex nature of the proposals allows for widely varying interpretations of what the ultimate impact of the bills would be. This was evident in the student debate, with each side quoting opinion polls and cost numbers that sometimes seemed contradictory. As Christopher Beam wrote in June piece on Slate.com, “Health care polling is especially variable, depending on the wording, the context, and the momentary angle of the sun.”

Boren opened the debate with the assertion, which would be repeated throughout the debate, that private insurance companies have had no choice but to pursue “profits over anything else.” This assertion has been the backbone of the argument for a public option, supported by stories of patients who were cut from plans and bankrupted by medical procedure. Those arguing for reform painted a picture of morally bankrupt corporations controlling access to health.

The students arguing against the proposed reform focused around classic economic theories of free market competition, the inefficiency of government services and a scarcity of medical resources. Put simply by Stevenson, “The last thing Americans need is more government.”

Both sides were, however, able to agree on a number of issues, including medical tort reform and reductions of administrative overhead. Reform would entail the reworking of convoluted legal framework, which governs medical malpractice lawsuits and causes many practitioners to perform exhaustive, expensive and often unnecessary tests out of fear of patients, and has long remained a hot topic for Republicans.

However, Democrats have long opposed such reform and are closely allied with trial lawyers. An analysis by the Washington Examiner of 15 top trial lawyer firms found that of the $636,305 given to federal politicians and Public Action Committees in 2009, 99 percent went to Democrats.

Administrative overhead reduction, most notably the digitization of medical records, which got $20 billion in stimulus funding, has remained popular with both parties as a means of cutting bloated administrative costs. According to Graham, 40 percent of premiums go to administrative costs.

Stewart argued that status quo for health care is not tenable and that reform needs to happen now. “The house bill does just this, it repairs a broken system.” Graham, in contrast, said there was no need to create a public health care option, as private competition over customers’ business would eventually ensure high-quality care and medicine. He added emphatically that “private industry has its flaws, but a public option is not the answer.”

Pinkham said in an e-mail interview that although she would have liked more students to attend, she was still pleased with the turnout and event. “The debaters were so excellent that they deserved a bigger audience.”

She added that, “I think it is an incredible experience as a student to participate in them with your peers, whether formal or informal.”

She was happy the quality of the debate and said, “Both sides explained the complexities of the arguments for and against health care excellently.”

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