Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. (AP photo)
Washington (CNSNews.com) – The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said Friday that the nation’s health-care “crisis” is the fault of medical “entrepreneurs” and a “dysfunctional” medical insurance market he likened to the “Wild West.”
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said the medical insurance market is in anarchy and must be reformed this year, and he said those reforms must include a government mandate that individuals purchase insurance.
“We really don’t have an American health-care system, we have a hodge-podge; we have a collection of various different components,” Baucus said Friday at a forum sponsored by the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund.
“In the vast majority of states, the individual market is like the Wild West. It’s unacceptable,” he added. “That’s probably half of why there’s such a hodge-podge – that, and because everyone wants to be perfectly healthy.”
Baucus said requiring individuals to buy health insurance is the only way to control costs for policyholders -- and he promised it will be a feature of the health- care reform plan that he and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) plan to introduce in Congress later this year.
“People forced to buy health insurance on their own are forced to buy it in a dysfunctional and increasingly unaffordable individual insurance market,” Baucus said.
“An individual obligation to get health insurance is essential,” he added. “It is the only way to stop cost-shifting for uncompensated care. Getting all Americans covered will also make insurance markets functional.”
But Baucus also blamed some of the health-care system’s woes on the fact that doctors and other medical “entrepreneurs” try to profit from their knowledge and abilities – that people in health-care are, in his words, “trying to make a buck.”
“We’re the United States, we’re not other countries,” Baucus said. “There’s entrepreneurship, creativity, there’s ‘go west, young man’ -- that’s much more a part of our culture than it is in other countries and various groups; doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, (medical) equipment manufacturers -- they’re providing care, but they’re also trying to make a buck.”
Baucus, meanwhile, said that the Democratic health reform plan will require “give-and-take” and seemed to indicate that conservatives who oppose government expansion into the health-care system would not be totally shut-out of the process.
But Baucus argued that the time for action on health-care reform is now.
“We will be looking for a (health-care bill) markup in June. It’s ambitious, but I think it has to be ambitious and we have to seize the current momentum in order to be successful,” he added.
That means the health-care reform “train” is leaving the station, the Montanan told reporters.
"People know the train is leaving the station. Insurance companies know the train is leaving the station. Large companies know that the train is leaving the station. So there’s some huge pressure on those who had some initial concerns about the public option to start to work within the timeline to make it work,” he added.