Sen. Mark Warner talks about…

… a number of things.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Senator Mark Warner Tuesday afternoon. He called me from the road, as he traveled from Amherst County to Charlottesvlle, after having spent the morning in Lynchburg and in Bedford at The National D-Day Memorial.

Despite the fact that health care is the number one issue on seemingly everyone’s minds these days – not to mention that the Senator was on his way to a Small Business Health Care forum – I didn’t want to talk about health care. There are a lot of other things going on in Washington that I happen to think are pretty important and while health care is near the top of my own list, I really wanted information about other things. Fortunately for me, the Senator mostly obliged.

Sunday evening the Senator was in Virginia Beach for an event for Joe Bouchard. Something he said struck me: being a “radical centrist” is difficult in Washington. I asked him to expand on this. What he told me should ring true for those of us here in Virginia, looking at our state Senate: that moderate Democrats have replaced moderate Republicans in the Senate, leaving only those Republicans who are much further from the center. “It’s been much harder to form a more ongoing coalition,” he said. “I think the Republican leadership is, unfortunately, putting a lot of pressure on their fellow Republican members not to reach deals. They do everything through the partisan prism.”

Warner spoke at length about where his ideology of what it means to be a radical centrist. “Most Americans,” he said, “don’t follow politics that closely.” As the result, he believes that when a bill has bipartisan support, the public is more willing to accept it. “People believe it to be more in the country’s best interest.” He would like to form a coalition in the middle. It took him time to build these kinds of coalitions when he was governor and he’s not going to give up trying to do the same in the Senate. “Frustrating, but not totally unexpected.”

That Warner would find the Senate frustrating would be no surprise to me. He is, after all, a CEO type, a leader, not a follower. As he said Sunday, he is ranked #91 out of 100.  So I asked him about it. “There is a rhythm there that I’m not used to,” Warner said. “I like things to get done quicker.” Even so, Warner is unwilling to allow his first few months in office to determine what he thinks about the Senate. “The last two months for me have been much better than the preceding few months.” He then went on to discuss the input that he has had on various topics, including financial re-regulation, the appearance of his op-eds in various newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Financial Times, and his work on cost containment issues related to health care.

While I had said we were going to skip health care, I did ask about end-of-life counseling, which had been a major policy point of the Senator’s and which has now been dropped from consideration. ” I was real disappointed,” Warner said. He pointed out that for years,  many of the Senators who have lead on this issue are Republicans. He said he raised the issue himself because of quality of care, not cost. “It’s about respecting people enough to let them make their own decision about how they want to age.”

I can’t think of another issue that’s had more misconception and more outright deception going on ..  some of the far right crowd who’ve tried to call this Democratic death squads and euthanasia .. trying to euthanize seniors. It’s just plain outrageous. It’s some of the worst stuff I’ve seen in politics.

Warner believes that the facts can be used to overcome some of this misinformation. But he thinks that the Democratic leadership has been caught off-guard by the vehemence of the opposition. He thinks that the issue was not positioned well.

Seniors, of course, are concerned about not only “death panels” but also Social Security and what amounts to a reduction in their benefits, due to the increase in Medicare Part D premiums increasing while benefits remain flat. “You’ve just made the case,” the Senator said, “why doing nothing is not a sustainable answer.”  Saying that health care costs will continue to rise while their benefits stay the same, Warner said that he believes the entire discussion on health care started from the wrong place. Instead of starting with covering more people, he thinks we should have started with the reality that if we do nothing, the current system, with 85% of the people insured, ” is going to bankrupt the Federal government and it’s going to bankrupt most American families, because they are going to see their insurance premiums double over the next ten years.”

Warner then discussed the some of the issue surrounding the financial incentives built into our health care system, such as paying for more tests and more drugs, and multiple visits to multiple specialists. These should be addressed to contain the costs of health care. “Medicare Part D is a classic case,” he said,  “of where we put a program in place without, in my opinion,  appropriate cost management.” According to the Senator, the program is expected to cost $800 billion over the next ten years, “all straight in red ink, because there’s not a dollar of that paid for.”

This lead me to the issue of the deficit, which I find troubling.  Some of the promises of last year’s campaign were designed to address the deficit. In particular, there was a lot of talk about rolling back the Bush tax cuts, yet it seems to me that such issues are off the table.  I asked the Senator about this. He told me he doesn’t think the President is putting this off, but there are a couple of things at work here. First, the bulk of the cuts are scheduled to expire in 2010, anyway, so taking those on can be delayed. Second, the President has already been accused of taking on too much too soon.

Warner said a big part of the deficit is, of course, tied to health care via Medicare and Medicaid. Reducing those costs will reduce the deficit. He said that he wished that health care had been done in conjunction with entitlement reform.

We’ve got an aging society. Certain things like looking at phasing in a higher retirement age, looking at removing some of the caps around Social Security – these are all ideas that have been kicked around for a while that, at some point, are just going to have to be addressed. I think you could have paired health care reform with entitlement reform and maybe it would have been more successful. But I’m still very optimistic that we are going to get something done.

The Senator discussed a little bit of the reasons behind why we have to do all of these things now: for eight years, not a lot was done. As the result, other countries got ahead of us. “China is making massive investments in alternative energy,” he said. Business people are telling Warner that they just want something done, simply so that the uncertainty is reduced. Warner says that he doesn’t expect that whatever we do will be perfect, but it will be a step in the right direction.

I remain concerned that with all the efforts we are spending on health care (this conversation, which, despite my best efforts, still ended up being about health care), we have lost sight of some other pretty important stuff. The re-regulation of the banking system is a critical piece that has dropped off the radar. The Senator says that the committee that is working on this is expected to come out with something after the recess. He said that he thinks there are going to be some significant reforms in the bill, including some consumer protection. I asked about the separation of the various financial institutions – banks from brokerages, from insurance companies, etc – that we used to have. He said he didn’t think we would see “an unscrambling of the egg” but we would be some significant oversight.

Winding down our conversation, I asked Senator Warner if he were king for a day and could get one piece of legislation, what would his number one goal be.

I guess my number one goal would be a health care reform bill that really brought our health care costs more in line with the same kind of costs that other industrial countries in the world have – without sacrificing quality. If we could get that done, that would give us such an economic boost, it would be so important terms of in driving down our federal deficit, and I think it would be the spark that would dramatically relight this economic recovery.

I appreciate Senator Warner taking the time to talk about issues that I think are pretty important. I look forward to our next such conversation, by which time, I can only hope that the health reform bill has been passed.