Republican solutions to healthcare reform (Morning Read)

Current medical news and unique business news for anyone who cares about the healthcare industry.

GOP ideas on US healthcare reform legislation. The conventional wisdom is that Republicans only try to repeal healthcare reform instead of offer solutions. But that is not the case.

One Republican health reform idea, of course, is RomneyCare. Though perhaps, considering the recent Republican presidential debates, it should be call RomneyCareRevised. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health legislation is said to be a blueprint of Obama’s. But that’s not what the former Massachusetts governor says now.

“Our approach was a state plan intended to address problems that were in many ways unique to Massachusetts,” he said. “What we did there as Republicans and Democrats was what the Constitution intended for states to do – we were one of the laboratories of democracy.”

Then he laid into the new federal law.

“One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover,” he said. “ObamaCare is bad law constitutionally, bad policy, and it is bad for America’s families…. I would repeal ObamaCare, if I were ever in a position to do so.”

Then there is their one-year-old proposal – which began the chants to repeal Obamacare – which relies largely on tort reform, allowing people to buy health insurance in other states, restrict health insurers and allowing small business to buy insurance in groups.

Plus, you could argue the recent Wyden-Brown opt-out approach incorporated by President Obama comes in large part from Republican ideas.

The bigger problem isn’t that there aren’t ideas in the GOP. Instead, it’s virtually no one on the Republican side can get enough of a consensus around healthcare reform to make anything big happen. So they continue to rally around unique ways to defund Obamacare. Taking that tack while offering no solution seems even more unpopular than Obamacare itself.

Vaccines still banned in Japan. A somewhat encouraging statement: “The expert panel found no clear direct link between the vaccines and the deaths but said further studies were needed.”

A win for cell therapy. Researchers grew urethras from the tissues of their patients.

Elsevier in Arabic. Elsevier has translated its dental publications into Arabic and will move on to nursing, pediatrics and emergency medicine, among others. A Syrian university was the first to to receive the translations.

[Photo courtesy of of Flickr user DonkeyHotey]