Today, the House, Pensions, and Labor Committee (HELP) officially released the “Affordable Health Choices Act,” the committee’s health care reform legislation.

[Read the 600+ page bill HERE or a summary HERE]

In a press release touting the proposal, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) described the bill as “legislation that will strengthen what works and fix what doesn’t”:

If you like the insurance you have today, you can keep it. If you don’t like what you have today, we’ll give you better choices, including a public option for health care. This does not symbolize the end of the game or even the end of the first quarter. We still have a lot of work ahead of us and are looking forward to working with our colleagues on a bipartisan basis to resolve the remaining issues and move forward with a mark-up of this legislation next week

The bill, which does not include financing options, closely reflects the ‘draft of a draft‘ proposal circulated last week and a summary released earlier today. The legislation aims to improve access to coverage by regulating insurers — they would no longer be able to deny coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions — expanding Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and building state-sponsored insurance Gateways (or exchanges) to help Americans find affordable coverage. [Read an analysis of the bill HERE]

The most controversial details of health reform — the employer mandate and the structure of a new public option — have yet to be ironed out, however. According to the press release, “Democrats and Republics on the Committee will meet to discuss outstanding legislative options such as the public option and employer mandate” on Wednesday, June 10 and Thursday, June 11.” The ext of the available legislation leaves the public option and employer-mandate sections blank:

A public hearing is scheduled for Thursday, June 11 at 3 p.m. in Dirksen 430. Mark-up will begin Tuesday, June 16 at 2:30 p.m. in Russell 325.

This afternoon, in response to my question about the public option on POLITICO’s The Arena, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) closed the door to compromising on the public health option:

12:18
[Comment From Igor Volsky]
Rep. Ryan — are you open to considering any kind of compromise on the public health care plan? Would you be open to modeling the open on state-based employee plans? And why can’t we design a level playing field but also allow the new public option to use its inherent advantages to get better rates? Isn’t that what WalMart does today?

12:20
Paul Ryan:  I am not open to creating any policy architecture which puts the gov’t in the position of competing with the private sector. The deck will always be stacked, and can never be ‘fair’ competition. If the goal is a truly level playing field, than it should be done through the non-profit sector, not the government.

Ryan supports competition with a non-profit because such an entity would not be able to use Medicare rates or Medicare’s leverage to secure lower prices. Currently, “insurer and hospital markets are increasingly dominated by large insurers and provider systems.” Private insurers rarely negotiate with dominant hospital systems and typically pass on the higher costs to beneficiaries in the form of higher premiums. In fact, non-profit insurers (like the Blue Crosses) and non-profit hospitals have done little to lower health care spending.

A public health care plan would do something a non-profit cannot: use Medicare’s leverage and Medicare-like prices to negotiate lower prices and — through the miracle of head-to-head competition with private plans — push insurance companies to negotiate more aggressively with providers and dramatically lower health care spending.

It’s the same way WalMart or Home Depot operate — negotiating lower rates with suppliers and passing on lower prices to customers — but Ryan is content with preserving a non-competitive health market that props up inefficient systems and providers. He prefers allowing large hospitals and insurance companies to continue setting prices.

The Hill’s J. Taylor Rushing quotes Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) as rejecting the notion that bipartisanship always leads to better policy. If we believe that a public health care plan will reduce health care costs, then we should include it in health reform, whether the Republicans like it or not:

“If we have a few people who just want to block it, but we have a majority of the Senate that wants this bill, we can do it,” Harkin said. “We just can’t have a majority of the Senate, and a substantial number of Republicans, support something that one or two people want to stop.” Harkin said Republicans are simply pushing the “government-run” phrase on the advice of pollsters, suggesting that the party cares more about politics than policy. “But the polls really show the American people want a public plan, overwhelmingly,” Harkin said Monday while promoting draft legislation that the committee began circulating earlier this month that includes the public option.

Indeed, just yesterday, the Republican senators of the Senate Finance Committee — save Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — penned a letter rejecting a public health insurance option. “Washington-run programs undermine market-based completion through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchases,” the senators wrote. “Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition.”

As the first legislative language trickles out of Congress, Republicans are drawing lines in the sand, appearing on cable news stations and penning op-eds misrepresenting the public option as a Trojan horse for single payer health care. There is very little truth to these sentiments. In fact, if anything, Obama’s hybrid approach — he builds up existing system of private coverage, while also expanding public programs — represents a compromise, not an ideological push.

But if some Republicans are more interested in dividing the debate with ideological buzzwords rather than reaching consensus or even debating policy that could improve the health care system, then why bend-over backwards to consult them? Since the election, they’ve been screaming about the threats of a ‘government takeover’ and applying that rhetoric to any and all Democratic proposals. As GOP word-smith guru Frank Luntz admitted, Republicans will label Obama’s reform effort a “government takeover” of health care, regardless of the actual proposal. Here is Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the Republican leader in the House, characterizing the Democratic proposal as a “government take-over” and defining the Republican alternative as the antithesis of “government” health care:

With more and more details becoming available, it is evident that the forthcoming plan from Democratic leaders will make health care more expensive, limit treatments and ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions rather than patients and doctors. More than 100 million Americans could be forced out of their current health care plan and onto the government rolls. It amounts to a government takeover of health care, and the middle class will get a raw deal once again. Our alternative will expand access to affordable, quality care regardless of pre-existing conditions. It will protect Americans from being forced into a government-run plan, making certain that medical decisions are made by patients and their doctors, not Washington bureaucrats.

Rather than engaging in the substance of the actual policy — that is, designing a public option in such a way that it would reduce health care costs while protecting the coverage Americans currently have — Republicans, as Harkin correctly points out, are recycling poll-tested talking points.

Policy makers have a choice between passing a ‘bipartisan bill’ and passing a good bill. In some cases the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but given the Republicans’ resistance to engage in a health policy debate, Democratic lawmakers would be smart to do the latter.