Boehner gives Framework for GOP Health Care Reform: Too bad it is light on Health Care and Heavy on Profiteering

House Minority Leader John Boehner proclaimed the GOP actually has a health care plan for America that they will be putting out a full version on the House Floor. Boehner points to some basic components of the GOP health care reform plan:

* To let individuals and small businesses look for better insurance deals in other states. Considering their control of Congress for so much of the last 15 years, and their proclaimed love of free markets, one has to wonder why they have isolated state markets for so long if this was such a good solution.

* To allow them to pool together to find better health care deals like big corporations get. Yet, there is no reason why they couldn't do that before. All they would have to do is create a group or organization already like the "Dairy Farmers of California" or some other similar name. This really isn't anything new.

* To create an environment that gives states greater range to experiment with cost-saving health care reforms. So exactly what "creates" this "environment"? This is so vague it allows them to keep saying things like "if it would create the environment, then we would do it" and every time someone critiques something they could easily say "well, that wouldn't create the environment, so we wouldn't do it." It is a way to dance a rhetorical dance without actually changing anything, and in all likelihood, it is a profit seeking ploy for insurance companies.

* To institute tort reform. This has already been done in some states like Texas, which has disempowered citizens and empowered insurance companies to deny coverage because it is cheaper to accept the lawsuit than it is to pay off the claim, especially around expensive cases like life-threatening cancers that require expensive treatments, or expensive diagnosis tests. This is just another profit making move for insurance companies and a way to deny coverage for you and me to save their bottom line.

The GOP continues to put forth tweaks and play rhetorical games that do nothing more than empower corporations to make big money off of us while denying coverage to us in order to grow their own bottom line. That isn't health care reform. That is the destruction of care for you and me while enriching their own pockets. We need something better than corporate rationed health care focused on their profit, not our health.