President Barack Obama will have a key role in healthcare reform, according to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.
As a warm-up to Congress' wrestling match with healthcare reform, the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday held the second in a series of discussions on health reform. The meeting tackled how to pay for reform – which, according to Grassley, will require the president's leadership.
"President Obama's leaderhip is not only essential in how we're going to pay for healthcare reform, but for healthcare reform in general," he said.
Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said the bulk of the debate has yet to be tackled, and that financing reform will be the most critical element.
"It won't be easy to get there, but we will get there," he said. "We will be working on this for many more weeks, months and the next several years. We need a uniquely American solution. We're going to put this together in a way that really makes sense."
Much of Tuesday's roundtable centered on tax breaks for employer-provided healthcare benefits.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said the "right reason" to worry about the erosion of the employee tax subsidy is that older people are treated more fairly under an employer-based healthcare system.
Baucus predicted that repealing the tax exclusion is not going to happen this time around – nor will a single-payer system.
Gail Wilensky, former chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and currently senior fellow at Project HOPE, said she supports altering the tax structure to raise money and drive better health outcomes, but she isn't in favor of eliminating the tax break altogether.
"The employer tax break on health benefits is regressive and there is a lot of money available there to fund reform. I don't think you can avoid taking that on," she said.
Wilensky also said a physician reimbursement overhaul is a necessity. "There have been no fee increases for over a decade," she said. "This is unsustainable and unfair."
The discussion also touched on lifestyle improvement incentives as a possibility for raising healthcare reform revenues. Many favored tax increases for cigarettes, alcohol and sugar-based soft-drinks.
Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, D.C., said financing health reform will likely require a whole array of changes, not just one.
Photo by IowaPolitics and obtained under Creative Commons license.