"Chamber: Speed health care up" was the headline from a USA Today blog post on our letter yesterday to Senate Finance Committee, a theme also pushed by several other news outlets. The exception was Jeffrey Young over on the Hill who did a good write up.  Actually the body of most of the articles generally did a fair job of explaining the letter, but the lead left some people confused. Let's go straight to the source, here is a quick narrative from the letter:

• the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a vigorous advocate of reforming our health care system for some time. The current health care system is inefficient, unpredictable, expensive and has become a competitive weight on small, medium, and large U.S. companies. To ensure the nation’s continued leadership in health care innovation and competitiveness of U.S. companies, it is important that Congress adopt real health care reform now.

• The Chamber is committed to improving our America’s health care system, in terms of restraining health care costs, improving the quality of care, and ensuring every American has access to affordable coverage.

• ...we believe that the legislation currently being considered in the House would not improve the system, but would jeopardize the parts of the system that currently work.

• The creation of a new government-run insurance plan is a step in the wrong direction. Employers already suffer a significant cost-shift from existing public programs. We do not believe that the government plan will be a fair competitor.

• We are further concerned with a proposal to mandate that employers either provide health insurance or pay huge fines or payroll taxes.

• Restructuring one-sixth of the U.S. economy is too important to pursue on a one-party basis. Unfortunately, the U.S. House has done just that.

• Some fear that broad-scale public support for health care reform will wane over the August recess because the only detailed legislative proposal that has been adopted is the product being considered in the House.

• The House proposal will not generate widespread public support and moves in the wrong direction.

• The Chamber encourages the Senate Finance Committee to focus on consensus areas that can accomplish the goal of comprehensive, bipartisan health care reform. Chief among these should be initiatives to improve quality and lower costs, introducing fair regulation of the insurance market, and facilitating a competitive marketplace for consumers.

• The Chamber also believes that it is important for the Committee to act promptly, preferably before the August recess, to approve a bi-partisan bill consistent with these principles, as it is now apparent that we will be forced to oppose the legislation being considered by the House.

• The business community vitally needs better policy alternatives to be proposed by Congress.

Or to sum up: we need responsible health reform; the House bill does not represent responsible health reform; if irresponsible reform is the only alternative available for discussion in August then support for the responsible reform we need will suffer; we need responsible health reform; let's add a responsible reform option to the August debate.