Today, Sen. Mitch McConnell and I make our case against ObamaCare in the Wall Street Journal:

A little over a year ago, when President Obama first took up health-care reform, Republicans reached out to him in the hopes of working together on solutions that would lower health-care costs for families and small businesses. A bipartisan bill focused on lower costs could have been sent to the president’s desk last year, and it would have received the support of the American people.

For instance, this month the president announced his support for additional reforms to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. This is something we can and should be doing already. Do we really need to pass a $2.5 trillion spending bill, raise taxes, and slash Medicare to implement it?

In other areas, Democrats have taken solid Republican reforms—such as putting an end to junk lawsuits and allowing patients to purchase insurance across state lines—and watered them down to a point where they cannot be effectively implemented. Still, we could have used this common ground as a foundation for a bipartisan, step-by-step approach to health-care reform.

Unfortunately, the White House and congressional Democrats are still insisting on their massive, 2,700-page bill that includes higher premiums, $500 billion in higher taxes, and $500 billion in cuts to seniors’ Medicare. That’s not reform.

If there’s one thing the American people didn’t want, it was for us to make health care more bureaucratic and expensive.

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Andrew Sullivan posted the following chart, which he found in National Geographic, and he noted, with considerable justification, that this was evidence of an insane and inefficient healthcare  system in America.

Sullivan-Healthcare –

The chart shows that America spends a lot more than other nations without a concomitant increase in life expectancy. Let’s set aside whether the right side of the chart is a bit misleading because American life-expectancy numbers are influenced by things that have nothing to do with the quality of the healthcare system, such as highway fatalities, homicides, and obesity, and focus on Andrew’s claim that Obama’s proposal will make things better because of its “cost-control measures.” Since the Administration’s own experts have predicted that Obama’s proposal will increase total healthcare spending, one can only wonder what he’s talking about. Does he actually think a new government entitlement program will lead to lower costs, when all the evidence suggests otherwise?

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