Weekly Column:   –  “Last week, the U.S. Senate took its first steps in what will certainly be a long debate over health care reform, but unfortunately they were steps backwards.

A partial score of one Senate bill weighed in at a whopping $1.6 trillion over ten years.  The bill was scored without any assessment of measures which would be used to pay for the spending increase.  Covering a figure so enormous would certainly require heavy tax increases on working Americans.

The other failing, cited on the Kennedy bill, is the estimation that only 16 million people in this country would be removed from the rolls of the uninsured.  It would solve merely one-third of our national uninsured problem.  On the twin problems plaguing the American health care system – access and cost – this first effort doesn’t do nearly enough to improve our nationwide standard of care.

Obviously, $1.6 trillion in new spending on health care reform to cover 16 million more people defeats the purpose of finding economical solutions.  On average, that equates to $100,000 for each new covered individual.

On Thursday, I stood with three other members of the U.S. House of Representatives – two Democrats and one Republican – to express our great concern that good, bipartisan, fiscally-responsible ideas of many members of Congress are being shut out of the health care debate.  I doubt our concerns will make the front page of the big papers, but I think the reservations we expressed resonate with a lot of Americans who are interested in the concept of health care reform and skeptical of the proposals they have seen so far.

When your insurance company rejects the procedure you need from the specialist who can help you, politics don’t play a part.  How you vote makes no difference when you have to choose between the prescription drugs you can afford to take – and some 80 percent of Americans with prescriptions are in exactly this situation.  There is no dividing aisle in the doctor’s office.

Likewise, health care solutions from both sides of the aisle need to be part of consensus reform.  Cost reductions might be one of the best, and Missourians who have followed this issue know that I have advanced several ideas to reduce costs to patients and taxpayers by emphasizing preventative care, lowering prescription drug costs, and finding risk-appropriate insurance solutions that work for the Americans who struggle to afford it.

And we must keep government out of the health care business, in as much as we do today, in order to preserve the ability of the American people to choose the doctor they want and get the quality health care they deserve, especially in rural areas like ours.

One last thought: it is today’s generation of health care recipients who need to set this problem right.  We have a tremendous system of health care packed with the most talented medical professionals and the best technology in the world.  We must not lay the bill for our health care at the feet of our grandchildren, forcing them to make do with a system less-well-equipped to serve them.  The responsible solution is the one that pays for itself.  Now that would be a big step in the right direction.”