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Press Releases
111th Congress - 2/25/2010
WASHINGTON – Congressman Jerry Lewis issued the following statement Thursday on the Health Care Summit between President Obama and congressional leaders: I was struck by the effort the President put in to bring people together to talk about health care. But it seemed clear that the President and his congressional allies oppose Republicans’ call for starting with a blank paper and trying to reach some compromise to solve basic health care needs. Republicans came prepared to present a plan that I believe would lower health care costs without following the President’s path of expensive government-run health care. They called for malpractice reform, for working toward a plan for portability that will allow people to take their insurance with them when they change jobs or cross state lines. They talked about ways to ensure that people would not be denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions. If the marketplace allows companies to compete across state lines, we have as many as 2,000 carriers who could be in every market and consumers could decide what kind of health plan they want. With national pools, pre-existing conditions could be underwritten with relatively small impact on premiums. Most basic is that consumers would retain the right to deal directly with their physicians without bureaucrats getting in the way. The President continues talking about an insurance exchange, which will create a huge bureaucracy and force people to buy government-designed health care plans. It is clear that the President leans in that direction, and Speaker Pelosi is committed to it. This is unquestionably the first step toward a government-run, single payer health care system, and that is unacceptable to me. If we do not start over with a blank page, we ignore the fact that the American public does not want a massive government takeover of healthcare that does not make healthcare more affordable. They want it fixed, with common sense, step by step reforms.
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