Congressman Bruce Westerman, R-AR, may not sit on any health committees, but that doesn't mean he isn't game. While Democrats ride the popularity of Medicare for All, Westerman is offering a different approach to health care reform, presenting a bill that would aim squarely at hospital consolidations and cut costs.

Modern Healthcare reports that Westerman's 200-page effort has been in the works for more than a year, and that Westerman actually went to the Congressional Budget Office for input on individual pieces of the bill to be sure that cost and coverage issues were considered together.

“Going back to the early days, when I did a postmortem analysis of the American Health Care Act, I think what hurt it politically was the Congressional Budget Office score,” Westerman said. “So as we first discussed it, I said, 'We've got to have a bill that covers more people and lowers cost.' If it covers more people, who can argue with that? If it's lower cost, who can argue with that?”

Probably Democrats, actually, since those issues aren't the bill's only aims—in fact, now that Democrats have been sufficiently emboldened to broach the subject of single-payer/Medicare for All, the bill is one way for Republicans to once again present their own take on health care.

The bill has bipartisan undertones. It would also seek to push back against monopolies, something espoused by Reps. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, and David Cicilline, D-RI, and actually includes Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy's CREATES Act, which would promote generics and biosimilars.

Despite these, some of the bill's other provisions are anathema to Democrats. Those provisions include allowing Medicaid to offer states block grants for the traditional population while shifting everyone else to the exchanges—something that could result in higher prices as the individual market stands now; changing the rating band from a 3-to-1 spending cap ratio for older people to 5-to-1, as proposed in the GOP's American Health Care Act; a repeal of the employer mandate; and new short-term plan options.

In addition, the bill would let people with more than $10 million in lifetime reported salary earnings keep traditional Medicare Part A, though they would end up losing their eligibility for Parts B and D and also for Medigap.

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New GOP health care bill targets costs, consolidation

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