If you doubt that Virgina gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell would be a fiscal conservative, just pay a visit to his Alexandria campaign office. The carpet is dingy, the lighting is terrible, and a thin, low-paneled ceiling is probably all that separates you from the assumed rodent metropolis overhead. Okay, so perhaps it wasn’t that bad — but if Bob McDonnell is paying a lot for a top-flight campaign, it’s not in the form of rent.
I’m sure that Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty has worked better venues. However, he seemed to be perfectly at ease campaigning for McDonnell yesterday, even when tasked with swinging by the office to give a pep talk and pose for photos with a few dozen phone-bank volunteers.
Of course, for those who haven’t seen him before — Pawlenty is very, very good on the stump, and his ability to campaign is a major reason why he’s considered one of the frontrunners for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. But there’s another good reason for the Pawlenty hype: To be brutally honest, he is one of only a few top-tier Republicans known for being credible talking domestic policy. Listening to John McCain talk about anything other than foreign policy last year was . . . well, the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead.
When I approached Pawlenty and asked him about health care, the first word out of his mouth was revealing: “Awesome.” So Governor Pawlenty, what should be the Republican answer to health-care reform?
First of all, it’s appropriate for Republicans to stand up and fight against this Obama proposal. It’s a bad idea. We also have to offer our own positive solution, so we need to do both, and even though it’s somewhat dry, some of the things that I think could be the basis for a bipartisan or Republican health-care package would include these: better protections for doctors and health-care providers against frivolous lawsuits. Harvard University recently came out with a study that said that 30 percent of all health care provided in this country is medically unnecessary in part because of fear of lawsuits.
Two, we should allow cross-state-line purchasing of health insurance. It’s ridiculous that I’m limited to essentially three choices in Minnesota. Why can’t I buy my health insurance in Wisconsin or Iowa or South Dakota or Virginia or, for that matter, Germany or Japan? We should have consumer protections around that, but we should open up the market and allow the market to work around those issues.
Next, we should also allow across state lines a risk pool. We should also encourage and incentivize electronic prescriptions and electronic medical records and use of technology, so the system is more efficient, and take paperwork out of it. Importantly, we should also switch payment system from paying for volumes of procedures to paying for better health and health-care outcomes.
We should also have tax equity. So right now if you’re an employer and you purchase insurance you get a fairly sizable deduction. If you’re an individual and you go to the marketplace and you buy this . . . you don’t. That’s unfair. You know you shouldn’t have a two-tiered system in the tax code around deductions and credits or health-insurance purchases and more. But those are five or six examples of the kinds of things that we could do.
I’m pretty sure that in one breath Pawlenty just offered up more specifics on the issue than most national GOP leaders do in a given year. Of course, Pawlenty readily admits the sentiments above are hardly a series of digestible sound bites. “Ten seconds into that, people’s eyes glaze over because it’s technical and dry and all of that. But those are the kinds of things we should roll up our sleeves and work on, because we should all start with the premise that the current system is broken.” Given how progressive the tax code is, rapidly rising health-care costs often outstrip nearly every other expense for many families. Any politician worth his salt should be blunt about the system being broken, and they’d better be able to rattle off a specific plan for fixing the problem that seems to be a plausible counterweight to Democratic attempts at reform.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but the GOP could take a lesson from Pawlenty. Finally, the big question — will Pawlenty run in 2012? “I haven’t ruled anything in, haven’t ruled anything out,” he said.