With health care reform dominating the national conversation, U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt came to Southwest Missouri on Thursday to lay out his position to his constituents.
Blunt said he believes the health care system needs changes but he opposes the trillion-dollar proposals put out by President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress.
Blunt said he favors changes that would let the market place create more choice in health care coverage and lower costs.
“If government is ever the sole source provider for health care, it fundamentally changes the relationship between people and the government,” Blunt said. “Health care is the one thing that people have to have an ultimate level of dependence on and if you ever change that level of dependence to where someone else besides you and your doctor are making the decisions, that’s not a good things.
“One thing you’re going to hear this month is if you’re not for the administration’s plan, you’re for exactly what’s happening now. In my case, that’s certainly not true.”
Blunt said creating a government-run health insurance option will lead to government-run health care in the next eight to 10 years.
“The big question after that is, is there anyway that a government competitor doesn’t lead to a government take-over of health care,” Blunt said. “My view is no.
“The president says you’ve got to have this government competitor otherwise there is no other way to get competition. The government competitor would be cheaper so everybody would have to compete down to get to that government competitor. Well the government competitor is cheaper because the government can’t possibly compete fairly. It’s just impossible. The government doesn’t have shareholders, the government doesn’t pay taxes, the government doesn’t have money-borrowing considerations, the government doesn’t have escrow. Even if you put all those things in, the government can’t compete fairly, so if you’ve got this unfair competitor in there, everybody else eventually goes away.
“Everybody that’s looked at this knows if you have a government competitor, within eight to 10 years, you would have only one competitor left and then you have a government-run system.”
Blunt said the Democratic proposal would partially pay the $2 trillion bill over 10 years by cutting $500 billion from Medicare and increasing taxes by $600 billion.
Blunt said he prefers a system that provides more choices in health coverage options, more control over health care by the patient and more transparency regarding costs and results by health care providers.
