The way Utah's junior senator sees it, once Congress reconvenes — after a month of often-raucous encounters with the public — the health-care debate will go in one of three directions.
Bob Bennett outlined these with the kind of deliberate, soft-spoken self-assurance he regularly brings to editorial-board meetings at this newspaper.
No. 1 — Nothing passes. The whole idea of reform crashes and burns on a heap of town-hall protest placards.
No. 2 – The president and Congress decide to pass only health-insurance reform instead, making rules about pre-existing conditions, portability, etc., and then call it a day, making sure to declare a glorious victory.
No. 3 – President Barack Obama's plans come crashing down, but all parties decide to start over from scratch with some new assumptions as a basis for the debate.
It's the third option Bennett is rooting for. That's the only one that would allow for his bill to be considered.
Even though you live in his state, you may not have heard of his plan, which has been lost in the blaring, mostly off-key brass bands of death panels and creeping socialism. But there are faint signs the Bennett-Wyden "Healthy Americans Act" (Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, lends political balance to the bill), has been gaining a little momentum during this congressional recess.
There are two reasons for this. One is that it is supposed to not add a cent to the deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Commission on Taxation.
The other is that it would provide people with real choice, which means real competition among health insurers.
Which brings me to a somewhat uncomfortable question. If you are a self-professed free-market lover who opposes any type of health reform, just exactly what is it that makes the current system market-driven?
A company hires you, then offers you a health plan. If you're lucky, you get a choice of a few plans, but that's it. Pick one, and you pretty much have to stick with it, except perhaps during a small window that appears once a year.
The Bennett-Wyden bill would require everyone to get health insurance — just as all drivers now must insure their cars. Then it would allow everyone to choose from a wide array of plans regulated by the government. Premiums would be adjusted to incomes.
As the New York Times' David Leonhardt wrote last week, "The longer-term advantage would be that health insurance would become fully subject to the brutal and wonderful forces of the market. Insurers that offered better plans … would win more customers."
Sounds good, but it isn't flawless. Requiring everyone to be insured would naturally create a burden, no matter how slight, on low-income people. If insurance companies compete mainly on the basis of affordability, healthy people may benefit more in the long run than those who really need health care. And the plan would necessarily require the government to decide which insurance companies qualify to be in the pool.
That last one has raised the ire of conservative groups who oppose Bennett and hope to challenge him in the next election. Bennett's answer to this concern may not make them feel any better.
"We believe, given the nature of this whole thing, the government is the best instrument to organize it, but the government has no ownership."
And the government would be mainly the states, not Washington.
Given what we've all been through in the past few months, this plan at least deserves some attention. Bennett isn't terribly optimistic, however. Of the three possibilities he outlined, "No. 2 would appear to be the most likely."
But, he adds, he deliberately left out a fourth option — that Obama gets what he wants. "At the moment, that's off the table," Bennett said.
Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret News edito?rial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com. Visit his blog at deseretnews.com/blogs.