Corker health trickery

By Chas Sisk, The Tennessean 

Democratic-led efforts to reform the nation's health-care system depend on budgeting "trickery," Sen. Bob Corker said on Monday.

Speaking to reporters after an event at Belmont University to promote efforts by the school, Music Row groups and the U.S. Congress to fund clean water projects in Africa, Corker said the health-care measure put forward by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would shift costs to the states, raid existing programs and rely on gimmicks.

He said the Senate should shift its focus to ideas that are less costly and rely more on private insurers.

"This bill is not health-care reform," he said. "There are ways to reform health insurance markets and to look at tax code reform that would add 16, 18 million people to the private sector rolls. There are ways to do that, and this is not what this bill does."

Corker and Sen. Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, are again attacking the health-care reform legislation after the measure developed by Reid and Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., survived a procedural vote Saturday to open debate when the Senate reconvenes after the Thanksgiving recess.

In a speech from the Senate floor on Saturday, Alexander described the plan developed by Reid and as "arrogant in its dumping of 15 million low-income Americans into a medical ghetto called Medicaid that none of us or any of our families would ever want to be a part of for our health care."

On Monday, Corker also criticized the plan to expand Medicaid eligibility, repeating an estimate by Gov. Phil Bredesen that the expansion would cost the state of Tennessee $740 million over the reform plan's first five years.

Corker also said the legislation uses a budgeting trick of balancing the books by allocating a decade's worth of revenue to programs that will not start up for another four years, and shortchanges Medicare by rededicating some of its funds to health-care reform.

"If Lamar Alexander and I proposed this bill, word for word ... there's not a person on the other side of the aisle that would vote for this bill," he said. "It's my hope that we can stop this and then do those appropriate things that actually move people into the private market."

Corker also said the Senate should be given six weeks to eight weeks to weigh the proposal.