Bipartisan Group of Former Senate Leaders To Make Recommendations for Overhauling U.S. Health Care System
Former Senate Majority Leaders Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and George Mitchell (D-Maine) on Wednesday announced they have formed a coalition to develop a series of recommendations aimed at reforming the U.S. health care system and will present them next year to Congress and the next president, the AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports (Freking, AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/16).
The coalition, known as the Leaders' Project on the State of American Health Care, will be co-directed by Mark McClellan, former CMS Administrator and former head of FDA, and Chris Jennings, who served as health policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton. Jeanne Lambrew, a University of Texas associate professor and fellow at the Center for American Progress, and American Enterprise Institute scholar Joseph Antos also will work as advisers. The former senators stressed that the advisers would provide technical expertise but that they would be responsible for the final recommendations (Young, The Hill, 4/16).
Each of the former senators will oversee a public forum focusing on a single element of improving the health care system: increasing quality and value, improving access to care, ensuring a strong role for consumers and securing financing for the recommended changes (AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/16). The first forum, to be held next week in Washington, D.C., will be hosted by Daschle.
The recommendations will not be released until after the presidential election (The Hill, 4/16). The project will be funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (AP/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/16).
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Dole said, "Our goal is to develop parameters for reform to provide the necessary policy foundation to address the delivery, cost, coverage, financing -- all these challenges facing the health care system." He added, "If this is made a priority by the Congress and by the (next) administration, and by consumers, and by providers and all of these people who are going to be involved, we can get it done."
"The effort that we begin today is, to say the least, ambitious," Mitchell said (The Hill, 4/16). In a statement, Mitchell said, "There is no doubt that concern about health care is top-of-mind for families and individuals across the country," adding, "I believe now is the right time for this issue to finally be resolved" (Graham, "Triage," Chicago Tribune, 4/16).
