Rep. Jim Matheson: Bipartisan work needed to fix health care

SALT LAKE CITY — Despite passage of the new Democratic health care reform law, Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, said Monday that health care is still not fixed — and truly repairing it will require members of Congress to act more like grown-ups.

"Whoever is in the majority needs to be a little more inclusive, and the minority needs to be more constructive," he told the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.

"I wish the debate had been more constructive," he said. "I think the two political parties really went after each other, and you saw a lot of bickering, a lot of partisanship."

Matheson — one of just 34 Democrats who voted against his party's reform bill — said the new law helps only one of two issues he saw with health care: the need to insure more people.

But he said the new law does far too little to address the other major problem: health care costs that have been rising much more quickly than inflation and that need to be slowed.

"I don't think we reached much consensus in this country about what the problem is that we ought to be addressing," he said. "It was a real tough call for me (on whether to support the bill). I felt real strongly about some of the provisions in the bill." But he said he believed it did not do enough to address cost growth.

He noted that the new law may be too much like health care reform attempted a few years ago in Massachusetts. Matheson said that plan added people to state insurance without cutting costs, and now a fifth of people there essentially have no coverage because costs increased so much they cannot afford what is available to them.

While Matheson was critical of both parties, he especially attacked Republicans.

"People who get in the just-say-no category ought to be asked, 'What would you do instead?' " he said. "From people in the other party, it's all been just say no without offering different solutions."

Matheson called for continued work to slow health care cost increases. "The path we've been on in this country is not sustainable."

He told how, in 1983, Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill were faced with imminent bankruptcy of Social Security. They worked together and found a solution that wasn't popular but was needed: to raise taxes and lower benefits.

Matheson said such bipartisan work toward a solution is needed now.

"If we're really going to take on the reform issues that we have to take on, we need a little better behavior in Washington," he said.

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