Republicans’ scary strategy

While the politicians continued launching volleys at each other over health-care reform, a sobering reminder surfaced Tuesday about why fixing our broken system is so urgent.

After surveying health insurers around the country, Aon Consulting of Chicago projected that health care claims will rise another 10.5 percent over the next year, following a 10.6 percent hike forecast last year.

A bad situation just keeps getting worse. Repeated double-digit hikes in health care costs, which the Aon report says is fueled by an aging population and growing patient demand for services, mean fewer employers can afford to offer coverage to workers, fewer individuals can afford to buy it themselves, and budgets at all levels of government fall further behind.

Rather than engaging in a serious policy discussion, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Tuesday unveiled the party’s latest hit piece, a “Health Care Bill of Rights for Seniors.” It vows to protect senior citizens from Democrats who would have them “pay a steeper price and will have their treatment options reduced or rationed.”

If Steele’s idea is to keep Medicare going just the way it is, he won’t be doing current and soon-to-be seniors any favors. America’s biggest government-run health system is on a path to insolvency. If hundreds of billions can’t be wrung out of the system by stopping wasteful practices, millions of seniors will find learn more than they ever wanted to about rationing.

But that requires fundamental change to the current system, whose payments encourage multiple tests and procedures — which studies show don’t generally improve outcomes — rather than focusing on cost-effective, high-quality care. And that makes it easy for those who want to want to keep the system largely intact to conjure up images of doctors and bureaucrats deciding that grandma can’t have a life-saving operation.

Politically, it might work. Health care reform is a complicated issue — a lot of complicated issues, actually — and details are easy distorted. Scare enough seniors, who tend to vote regularly, and you might just win back some of the congressional seats you lost the past few years.

Health care costs are out of control, and they threaten to sink us. Republicans should be working with centrist Democrats, many of whom aren’t thrilled with some of what’s being proposed, to adopt new incentives for doctors and hospitals to avoid waste, thereby improving care and saving money. Instead, they’re focused on the next election, determined to derail anything majority Democrats can claim as a victory.

That’s a strategy that should scare everyone, including seniors.