POLITICS: Senate Finance Begins Hearings on Health Reform

The Senate Finance committee kicked off a series of hearings on health reform this week, beginning with testimony from two former Health and Human Services Secretaries, Donna Shalala and Tommy Thompson. We were thrilled to see that one of the most powerful committees in the Senate—that will surely play a key role in any major health reform initiative—take on the issue of health reform in an open, bipartisan, and productive manner.

Reuter's Donna Smith has a good summary of the hearing, but having sat just a row behind Shalala and Thompson we'd like to add a few of our own highlights from the hearing.

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) is a man who not only knows how to quote Goethe (as he did to open the hearing) but clearly knows how to talk about health reform. Stressing the need to move beyond incremental efforts and find a comprehensive way to cover all Americans, he said: "The moral and economic case for reform has never been stronger." We couldn't agree more.

Former secretaries Shalala and Thompson, veterans of the Clinton and current Bush administrations, respectively, had strikingly similar messages:

• The time for change is now.
• Reform must be comprehensive.
• Reform must be bipartisan to reach out and reflect the interests of all stakeholders.

Thompson stressed the urgency, noting "all the stars are aligning" and "that both political parties for the first time are saying something has to be done," on health reform. Shalala emphasized that a system which covered all Americans would result in "healthier citizens, a more robust economy, and billions saved."

The hearing also touched a variety of reform issues from changing the tax code to implementing health IT to increasing the supply of nurses and primary care physicians. On Medicare, both former secretaries agreed changes must be made as part of broader system reform, because the problems facing the health insurance program for the elderly are really the problems of health care cost growth as a whole. As Thompson said: "You've got to transform the whole system," because just addressing "one piece is not going to do it."

Admittedly, neither Thompson nor Shalala sang such a catchy optimistic bipartisan tune when they were in office, but we hope whoever succeeds them under an Obama/McCain/Clinton cabinet was humming along.