Inside the Beltway

REFORM SCHOOL

Confused by health care reform? Rep. Tom Price has a little prescription for the Obamacare-challenged.

“Thanks to confusing media coverage and the ways of the White House, Americans are no longer looking at the particulars of legislation. The public is trusting those folks who have been entrusted to actually read the particulars. And they’re not reading them,” the Georgia Republican tells Inside the Beltway.

Indeed, just 101 lawmakers have pledged to read the 1,018-page legislation so far, according to the conservative grass-roots group Let Freedom Ring, which is tracking the trend.

Mr. Price is both a physician and chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, which introduced “The Empower Patients First Act” on Thursday. It equates increased patient control over personal health decisions with better care.

“We’re in a system now where we find ourselves adopting laws that no one has bothered to vet - like the stimulus bill, for example. I hope that health care reform does not join the list,” Mr. Price said.

His suggestions on how to become enlightened?

“The public has to decide what is acceptable and what is not. What about access, availability, quality of care, responsiveness and innovation? What about choices? This is a practical way to frame all this information, to manage it. Does the legislation meet these principles? That’s the bottom line,” Mr. Price continues. “And if you ask me, the Democratic bill meets none of these criteria.”

MEOW (PHFFT, PHFFT)

Catfight, catfight.

Conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin have questioned the legitimacy of the question that set off “Gates-gate” and Thursday evening’s White House “Beer Summit,” posed to President Obama by Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times during a July 22 White House press conference. What did the president think of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ms. Sweet asked. Hoopla followed.

Ms. Sweet denies the White House put her up to it.

“Ann, Michelle, can we get a beer on this? I’ll pay. I’ll take an Amstel Light. What are your brews? Because gals, you need to look elsewhere for a new conspiracy,” Ms. Sweet says on her AOL blog. “The Obama White House did not have a clue what I would be asking. The idea that the Obama media machine would try to plant that question - or any question - with me is nutty.”

She continues, “If they had, my story would have been about their effort to plant a question. And again, why would they have even tried to orchestrate such an off-message query? Obama is trying to take a lemon and make it, well, to paraphrase another famous quote, a beer. Ladies, can we do the same?”

ALE AND FAREWELL

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