Orthopedic surgeon Tom Price, MD, has represented the Atlanta area in the House since 2005. A strongly committed conservative, he has been a leader of the GOP charge against the Democrats’ health reform bill.
The former assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine went mano y mano with Barack Obama in a televised meeting between the president and Republican representatives on Jan. 29 and managed to score some points. At the meeting, Dr. Price stood up and took President Obama to task for claiming that Republicans don’t have an alternative to the Democrats’ reform bill.
“What should we tell our constituents who know that Republicans have offered positive solutions and yet continue to hear out of the administration that we’ve offered nothing?” he asked President Obama.
Dr. Price provided the president with a copy of his 130-page health reform bill, which presents a wide variety of reform measures on topics like Medicaid coverage, individual insurance, tort reform and employer-sponsored insurance.
President Obama responded: “Is this something that will actually work or is it boilerplate?” He warned Dr. Price about making claims that his bill wouldn’t cost any extra money.
GOP bill won’t put healthcare ‘upside down on its head’
A reading of Dr. Price’s legislation, however, suggests the bill might well do the things he says it will do. The bill contains a very modest set of proposals that, unlike the Democrat’s ambitious plan, do not attempt to reconstruct U.S. healthcare.
For example, while the Democrats’ bill would subsidized millions of the uninsured, Dr. Price’s bill would expand coverage by allowig tax deductions for individual insurance premiums and letting individual insurance-holders join groups to obtain discounts. It would also expand Medicaid, but only if 90 percent of recipients below 200 percent of the federal poverty line can be covered.
Dr. Price does not believe the American people want a full-scale overhaul of their healthcare system. On the House floor, he has passionately warned that the Democrats’ bill would “turn the whole healthcare system upside down on its head” and “increase drastically the intrusion of the government into healthcare.”
His bill also shies away from some highly popular reforms, such as barring insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Instead, a section titled “pre-existing conditions” proposes helping states’ high-risk pools take in the people that commercial insurers have rejected.
But the sheer breadth of the bill underscores Dr. Price’s wide-ranging authority over healthcare matters. He is, after all, a physician who has been immersed in healthcare his whole professional life. There are 16 doctors in the U.S. House and Senate, spanning several medical fields, and the vast majority of them are in Dr. Price’s party.
Dr. Price is mindful of the concerns of his profession. His bill would institute physician-led quality measures, rebase the sustainable growth rate that causes Medicare fee cuts each year, and reform the medical liability system. Rather than put caps on noneconomic damages, Dr. Price’s tort reform provision would set up “healthcare tribunals” to review malpractice cases rather than send them to the courts.
Orthopedic surgeon smells opportunity to oust South Dakota Democrat
As the Democrats falter on health reform and face what could be to a bruising midterm election this fall, some well qualified Republicans feel they have a chance to take away Congressional seats from Democrats.
One of these new candidates is another orthopedic surgeon, R. Blake Curd, MD. He is running for the GOP nomination to unseat Democrat Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in South Dakota’s only House seat. The primary takes place on June 8.
Dr. Curd was lashing out at the Democrats’ reform bill even when it still seemed to have good chances of passage. “This government takeover proposal is not the right solution,” he said last October, shortly after he declared his candidacy. “The devil is most definitely in the details with this 1,990 page proposal. South Dakotans deserve real healthcare reform, not a public option, increased federal mandates and cuts to Medicare.”
The 42-year-old hand and microvascular subspecialist is chairman of Surgical Management Professionals, which assists physicians in building surgical hospitals. As a top officer of Physician Hospitals of America he has visited Washington many times to lobby against a provision in the Democrats’ reform bills that would stop the growth of physician-owned hospitals.
He has been serving in the South Dakota legislature, where he has chaired the Health and Human Services committee and has been a member of the Local Government and Stimulus Plan committees. In July, he spoke at a South Dakota Tea Party rally on healthcare.
“As a physician, I want my patients to receive the best care possible,” he said this fall. “I would fight for the same as South Dakota’s Congressman.”
As Dr. Curd mounts his campaign to join Dr. Price, the Georgia representative has been extending his reach beyond healthcare. He is a 55-year-old third-termer with a reputation of being ideologically pure at a time when many in the GOP think it needs to go that way. He is currently chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative members of the House.
The Georgia congressman continues to be outspoken. Reacting to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, he said, “I’d give him an ‘F’ for listening to the concerns of the American people.”
Learn more about Dr. Tom Price.
Learn more about Dr. Blake Curd.
