Republican Members of the House Ways and Means Committee will have only three days to read a health care reform bill that is being penned by Democratic staffers behind closed doors before a vote will be called. The bill will then be shuttled off to the House Rules Committee and sent to the floor for a full House vote.

"It has been a study in frustration watching this legislation being crafted on the House side," said Texas Rep. Michael Burgess, M.D., at a town hall-style meeting held Tuesday by the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. The seven participants at the event were both congressional Representatives and doctors. The town hall was broadcast to a questioning audience online and on CSPAN.

Burgess predicted that Republicans on the Senate side will be given a bill in the "middle of the night" and Senators will "have 45 minutes to vote on it" — an apparent reference to the vote called by House Democrats on the 309 pages of amendments added to the cap-and-trade bill at 3 a.m. the previous night.

The lawmakers brought up numerous other objections to the health legislation that is expected to cost more than the Pentagon's budget and create an unprecedented health care bureaucracy. House Democrats are scrambling to finish writing the bill by a self-imposed deadline of August 3 but have been locked in negotiations with health care lobbying groups.

Rep. Tim Murphy (Penn.) complained that a public option will follow in the footsteps of other government-run health care plans, which "will pay diabetic patient's legs to get cut off but will not pay endocrinologist to make a couple of calls a month" for preventative care.

Rep. Tom Price (Ga.) tied Murphy's concerns in to the President's recent reference to liability reform. If government mandates treatment guidelines, as is expected, doctors could avoid costly malpractice suits by following those guidelines to the letter. But that would put patients at risk.

If these guidelines "are the only defensible actions in court of law" then doctors could be "coerced into giving the wrong kind of care," said Murphy. Continued...