The Best Lines of the Night
In last night’s State of the Union address – and the Republican response – there wasn’t much said on the topic of health care on a night largely devoted to broader economic issues, immigration and guns. There were a couple of passages in both President Obama’s speech and Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) response that are worth noting.
Midway through the speech, the President spoke about investment in innovation and said, “Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. We’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs…Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the space race. We need to make those investments.”
The President is absolutely right. Those investments do need to be made. Health innovation is a necessity if we are to reduce the high cost – in both human and economic terms – of debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
Yet, it’s unfortunate that President Obama undercut this vital message with an earlier passage in his speech in which he called for significant changes to the Medicare Part D prescription drug program that would, in essence, impose price controls on pharmaceutical manufacturers. Not only would this have a negative impact on what, to date, has been one of the federal government’s most successful programs, one that is extraordinarily popular among seniors and has cost tens of billions of dollars less than original budget projections, but it would have a chilling effect on biopharmaceutical innovation.
Senator Rubio also commented on Medicare and said something that is undeniably correct. “Anyone who is in favor of leaving Medicare exactly the way it is right now is in favor of bankrupting it,” he said.
That was some much-needed straight talk to counter the alarmists who decry every reform proposal as a threat that would ‘end Medicare as we know it.’ The Senator is right. The program is simply not sustainable in its current form. That’s not opinion. That’s math.
And while Senator Rubio went on to say that Republicans have a “detailed and credible” Medicare reform plan ready to go, what needs to be said is that Democrats and Republicans together have a path forward to make Medicare more sustainable for future generations. Without that bipartisanship, we’re not going to see meaningful and necessary Medicare reform.
The upshot of State of the Union night? Advancing innovation in one passage while undercutting it in another. Promoting Medicare reform, but not yet having a bipartisan mechanism to get there. Noble ideas still awaiting effective execution.
