Grassley not betting on Dem failure on health care reform

yIOWA CITY - Unlike some of his Republican colleagues who would like to give Democrats enough rope to hang themselves on health care reform in order to gain

some future political advantage, Sen. Chuck Grassley isn't willing to take that risk.

Instead, Grassley said Thursday, the best approach is a bipartisan effort to craft a plan that would make health insurance affordable and accessible to everybody and lower costs by focusing on preventive medicine and treating those diagnoses that consume the largest share of health care dollars.

Although many Republicans hold a philosophical opposition to government-run health care, doing nothing is not an option, the Iowa Republican told the Old Capitol Kiwanis in Iowa City. "People expect us to do something."

Hoping that health care reform plans implode under weight of Democratic in-fighting is a bet he's not willing to make.

"I'm not a gambler." Grassley said. "If you go a partisan way, the Democrats have the capability of screwing up our health care system forever. If it is screwed up forever, we could get big majorities two or four years down the road, but we ain't going to turn it around. So I'm a little more cautious than a lot of my Republican colleagues."

The best bet for getting a bill to President Obama this year is the bipartisan work being done by the Senate Finance Committee where he is the ranking Republican, Grassley said. Whatever reform plan that comes out of the House will be highly-partisan just by the nature of the House, he predicted. Sen. Ted Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has rejected Republican input.

He laughed off suggestions by White House adviser David Axelrod that Kennedy's committee was working in a bipartisan manner by adopting 80-some Republican amendments.

"My colleagues tell me they were all technical corrections that there is no change in policy," he said. "They want to make sound like it's a bipartisan bill, but it's not."

There has been progress, Grassley reported. The public option - an insurance alternative to private insurance - is less of a sticking point than it was a month or two ago. That's assuming Congress sets up cooperatives to offer that alternative rather than mandate a government-run public option, he added.

The federal government might offer one-time grants to make co-ops solvent and loans to help them get started, similar to start-up aid given to rural electric cooperatives or county mutual insurance companies established to provide fire coverage to farmers, Grassley said.

The co-ops would negotiate with private insurers to offer insurance coverage to those who are uninsured or dissatisfied with their current insurance.

In addition to bipartisanship, Grassley called for caution "because, you know, we aren't just affecting health care."

Whatever Congress does will affect approximately 17 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, he said.

"That's why I say it ought to be bipartisan because we ought to have a consensus when you do something that gigantic," Grassley said.

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