Not true, Mr President…..

President Obama continues to make the claim that Republicans have not put forward viable alternatives to his (or rather, the House and Senate’s) health care plans. He made that claim in his State of the Union speech, and he repeated it in his meeting with Republicans yesterday. Not true, Mr President. There have been lots of sensible solutions offered. For example:

In August John Mackey put forward proposals in his Wall Street Journal article The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare. Here were his suggestions:

1) Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees' Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.

Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan's costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.

2) Equalize the tax laws so that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits. Now employer health insurance benefits are fully tax deductible, but individual health insurance is not. This is unfair.

3) Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines. We should all have the legal right to purchase health insurance from any insurance company in any state and we should be able use that insurance wherever we live. Health insurance should be portable.

4) Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

5) Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care.

6) Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost. How many people know the total cost of their last doctor's visit and how that total breaks down? What other goods or services do we buy without knowing how much they will cost us?

7) Enact Medicare reform. We need to face up to the actuarial fact that Medicare is heading towards bankruptcy and enact reforms that create greater patient empowerment, choice and responsibility.

8) Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

In April, Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in the New York Times in a piece called The Misguided Quest for Universal Coverage, suggested two major reforms:

1) The moral case for universal coverage is that we have an obligation to see to it that the poor and the near-poor have access to good health care. But universal coverage is only one way of realizing that goal, and not necessarily the best one. For people with pre-existing health problems, for example, direct subsidies would probably be more efficient than rigging insurance markets to make sure they are covered.

2) An alternative approach would be to make it easier for people to buy insurance that isn’t tied to their employment. The existing tax break for employer-provided insurance could be replaced with a tax credit that applies to insurance purchased either inside or outside the workplace. At the same time, state mandates that require insurers to cover certain conditions, which make it expensive to offer individual policies, could be removed.

Books like Healthy Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It, by Michael Cannon, and Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, by Arnold Kling are full of good ideas that don’t require trillions of taxpayer dollars and more federal bureaucracy.

It’s simply not true that there aren’t lots of alternatives to the current liberal health care plans. It is true that few of them propose massive government intervention, and many of them would impact the Democratic base (like trial lawyers and unions) and so perhaps that is why Speaker Pelosi isn’t interested in them.