While totally ignoring the plague of drugs in our nation, both legal and illegal, the administration's document pointed with great pride to a 148 percent increase in childhood immunization funding over the past two years. Reform of antitrust laws would be sought to protect doctors operating in a peer review capacity. ICA views this as a serious defect in the president's plan, one that adds to the disease, not the cure, by limiting patient choices to the most expensive medical options and excluding alternatives such as chiropractic. In addition to advancing its own proposals, the Bush administration has used this document to attack various competing reform proposals as unworkable and economically destructive. There is clearly no congressional consensus in support of the Bush proposal.
Critics outnumber advocates on both sides of the political aisle.
However, no health reform plan has won the support of a majority in either house of Congress and the Bush proposal has become simply one more proposal on a list of initiatives going nowhere. Until a strong consensus emerges on the shape of health care reform and on how much we as a nation are willing to spend, including where that money is going to come from, no action on national health insurance or any other dramatic reform of the way we deliver, administer, or fund health care in this country is likely. As a political issue, it has yet to have the impact on the presidential campaign that many observers thought it would. As an economic challenge, all would-be reformers seem stumped by the massive funding needs even modest proposals require. The Bush proposal does have a few committed advocates.