Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) answered numerous health care related questions on YOUR SHOW Sunday morning including on maintaining consumer choice, a government-run system, malpractice caps, taxes on health care benefits and changing the incentive structure in health care to focus on keeping people well in the first place. Bennet says he has told his fellow Democrats in the Senate he will not vote for any reform that doesn't make the hard choices needed to pay for it now. "We have to pay for it," he said. "I've said it in our caucus in Washington I can't support a plan that's not paid for. I don't want a plan that's going to increase our deficit and I don't want a plan my kids are paying for." The first-term Democrat says inaction though should not be an option. He says people can't handle the double-digit health care cost increases they are seeing each year and that the people who have insurance can't keep covering the costs of those who don't and who are then treated in the emergency room which he called "the most expensive brand [of health care] you can have." "People all across this state are hanging on by their finger nails in part because of the consequences of our broken health care system. I talked to a person last week, a small business owner who has been in business since 1972, who just had to make the choice to take himself and his wife off health insurance in order to pay for their daughter's college education. These are not the choices people ought to be making," Bennet said. Bennet says a comprehensive approach is needed and that both parties ought to "ignore historic orthodoxies" in searching for a solution. He cites statistics that more than a million Coloradans are spending more than 10 percent of their annual income on health care and that's heading higher in the near future. 
Still, with his own mother currently going through chemotherapy, he says consumer choice needs to remain and that he's not in favor of a government-run system like there currently is in Canada and England. "If people want to keep their doctor, they ought to be able to do that. If they want to keep their insurer, they ought to be able to do that," he said. "[As for a public option] if it looks like Medicare, then we'll have done nothing to hold down costs or to increase quality of care."  |
