Nancy Watzman: Hi, welcome, everyone. I’m Nancy Watzman of the Sunlight Foundation representing BlogHer today and their community generalism initiative on healthcare policy.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency.

As CEO Lisa Stone announced, BlogHer has been sponsoring a bipartisan series of telephone conference calls to connect women bloggers directly with their legislators.

Today on the call we have Representative Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming and I’m going to turn it over to her to give a brief introduction and then we’ll do questions.

Cynthia Lummis: Thank you, Nancy. I appreciate the time you’re spending with me today and looking forward to your questions and your feedback about healthcare reform. I’m a Republican and I want you to know from the outset, Republicans are in favor of healthcare reform but we would do it differently than the Speaker of the House and the Democratic majority.

Among the things that we would like to do is take some of our 53-plus bills and borrow the best of the best ideas from them and individually debate them over time so we can come up with responses to some of the really targeted problems we have with healthcare including addressing pre-existing conditions, addressing how to protect the doctor-patient relationship, and how to deal with people who that truly are in need - people who are not well-served by our current healthcare system - while preserving the rights of people who like their insurance, like their hospitals, like their doctors and want to keep the programs they have.

Just a few minutes ago, the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rolled-out the latest bill on healthcare reform that she will be advocating in the next week. It is almost 2000 pages long. The word “shall” nearly 3500 times, that we know from just a quick word search of the bill.

What’s called the “Doc Fix” which is about $200 billion to adequately compensate doctors is not in this bill so that’s how they got it under a trillion dollars. If you add “Doc Fix” it is over a trillion dollars and it shifts many costs to states in the form of unfunded mandates meaning states will be required to provide services and come up with the money to do so.

An example of that is expanding Medicare to include more low-income people so it’s essentially shifting costs onto states who don’t have the ability to print money like the federal government does so I’m terribly concerned about the proposal and I’m an advocate of a number of Republicans alternatives.

Among the things that I like better are a bill that would fund high-risk pools in states and that would be to serve people who have pre-existing conditions now. Also I favor the ability of employers to receive a tax deduction to contribute to an individual’s health savings account.

That way the individual can go out and shop for the insurance they want and then when they leave that employer and go to another employer, it is portable so that addresses another significant problem with our current healthcare system that we can address without throwing out the baby with the bath water so to speak and producing a brand new system that is government run.

I am very concerned about the financial stability long-term of our Medicare program which of course serves people over the age of 65 so to have another government-run system that in the long run is financially unsustainable to me is very problematic.

One of the Democratic Governors in the United States - the Governor of Tennessee where they have something called “Ten Care” which is a state-run healthcare program - has called this bill the mother unfunded mandates.

So Governors, state legislators and people in states should be I believe very concerned about some of the shifts in obligations to fund healthcare that are in the Speaker’s bill.

And I’ll tell you that we just got the bill so we’re just beginning to analyze the Speaker’s bill. We will be given 72 hours then a big amendment will be added to the bill and we will be given another 72 hours to look at it.

And then we could be voting on the Speaker’s bill next Thursday, Friday or Saturday so this is a very short timeframe to digest a 2000-page bill. I’m not sure what the rush is to reform a healthcare system that serves about 85% of Americans very well.

I wish instead we were targeting on the 15% that is not well-served and addressing their specific issues. Now with that introduction, I would like to open it up for questions.

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