At today’s House Republican retreat, President Obama emphasized the Republican ideas in the House and Senate health care bills and called on the party to abandon their harsh rhetoric and work on reform in a bipartisan manner. “[F]rom the start I sought out and supported ideas from Republicans, I even talked about an issue that has been a holy grail from a lot of you and said I would be willing to work together as part of a comprehensive package to deal with it. I just didn’t get a lot of nibbles,” Obama said before listing 3 or 4 Republican policies that are part of both health care reform bills.

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During the question and answer session, however, the GOP still insisted that all of their ideas had been ignored. Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) — who just this summer engaged in a misleading campaign to trick physicians into opposing health care reform– accused Obama of “repeatedly” saying “that Republicans have offered no ideas and no solutions” and touted the health care solutions offered at GOP.gov. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) even provided the President with a book of GOP solutions.

So what do these ideas entail? Like Democrat proposals, Republicans solutions would prohibit health plans from setting arbitrary annual or lifetime spending caps, eliminates rescissions, allow insurers to sell policies across state lines, and require insurance plans to cover dependents up through their 25th birthday. The Democratic health care bills incorporate some of these ideas in modified form. As Obama explained of the “across-state-lines” idea, “we include that as part of our approach. But the caveat is, we’ve got to do so with some minimum standards, because otherwise what happens is that you could have insurance companies circumvent a whole bunch of state regulations about basic benefits or what have you, making sure that a woman is able to get mammograms as part of preventive care, for example.”

Republican solutions promise to “take meaningful steps to lower health care costs and increase access to health insurance coverage” “without (1) raising taxes; (2) cutting Medicare benefits for seniors; (3) adding to the national deficit; (4) intervening in the doctor-patient relationship; or (5) instituting a government takeover of health care.” In short, Republican solutions take small steps towards regulating insurers, but do very little to lower health care costs for sicker Americans or control overall health care costs. In practice, their policies simply shift the costs and risks of insurance onto individuals and fragment the insurance market into low-cost plans for the healthy and high-cost insurance for the sick. Below is a summary of the plan House Republicans introduced in the House: Read more

This afternoon, during a conciliatory visit with the House Republicans, President Obama suggested that the party’s bitter political attacks prevented any possibility of negotiation or compromise on health care reform. “If you were to listen to the debate, and frankly how some of you went after this bill, you’d think that this was some Bolshevik plot,” Obama said:

If the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me. I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you — if you voted with the administration on something — are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own Party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion. Because, what you’ve been telling your constituents is: this guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that is going to destroy America.

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Obama described the health reform legislation as “a plan that is pretty centrist” and pointed out that it already incorporated modified versions of Republican proposals. He said that the legislation reflected the basic elements of a plan introduced in June of last year by a bipartisan group of former Senate majority leaders and reminded Republicans that they would have to negotiate with Democrats to add their ideas to the final legislation. “Most independent observers would say” it is “similar to what many Republicans proposed to Bill Clinton,” Obama added. In 1994 then Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole proposed alternatives that included an individual mandate, subsidies for lower income Americans and benefit standards “at least equal to those offered federal employees.”

Throughout the health care debate, House Republicans have resorted to sensational rhetoric and deceitful attacks. In July, Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) said that “last week Democrats released a health care bill which essentially said to America’s seniors: Drop dead.” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) predicted that “People die when they’re in line [for health care services]” and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) famously said that the Democrats health care reform would “put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

Inside Health Policy is reporting that Senate Finance health subcommittee Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is considering “using the jobs bill under discussion in the Senate to extend enhanced federal Medicaid matching funds, the first provision to be carved out of the health reform effort even as Democrats vowed to continue fighting for a comprehensive reform bill.” The additional federal dollars would help struggling states meet the demands of increasing enrollment and reduce the need for tax increases or cuts to other essential state services.

In 2008, states reduced Medicaid payments to hospitals and other health care providers to compensate for budget shortfalls even as enrollment in Medicaid grew 2.6%, up significantly from 0.7 percent in 2007. The Recovery Act increased the federal government’s Medicaid contribution to help states maintain their health programs during the recession, but that extension expires on December 31, 2010 “in the middle of most states’ fiscal years.” Many states are already struggling to keep up with the exploding growth in safety net programs, due to rising unemployment and increasing health care costs.

In Kentucky, Gov. Steve Beshear’s proposed budget “calls for spending an additional $782 million on Medicaid over the next two years.” However, Beshear is also calling for $108 million in cuts to the program over two years, and 2-percent nearly-across the board cuts to Cabinet for Health and Family Services program.” Vermont would have to invest $53 million “to close the gap between available revenues and expenditures next year” in its human service programs and New York is contemplating cutting Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals and nursing homes to reduce Medicaid spending by a $1 billion.

It’s not clear that Rockefeller’s proposal will garner significant Congressional support. The Hill reports that “some of his colleagues are skeptical of his proposal, arguing the funds would not be used directly to create jobs.”