Tennessee will miss U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander when he retires in January 2021 because many in the Volunteer State believe, like the state's senior senator, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
It would be easy for Alexander to bloviate and pontificate, like many on the left and right in Washington, D.C., who are locked into the darkness of hyper-partisanship. It's the easier way out but hardly the road to achievement.
He no doubt would prefer Republicans had bullet-proof majorities in the Senate and House and a Republican president - even boisterous one - in the White House. But that's not all the case, so in order to attempt any legislation to help the American people, both Republicans and Democrats must be involved in the discussion.
We're thinking today of legislation Alexander proposed this week with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, that would temper the surprise of high medical bills, try to lower drug prices, authorize a national campaign to promote vaccination, help set up a grant program for improving medical care for pregnant women, broaden consumer access to information from their health plans and take steps to promote disclosure of contracting information in the health care industry.
No, none of those is a full new plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. In fact, one might call some of the measure's tenets pretty small potatoes. But what are the chances of a replacement health care plan passing Congress this year?
That's right - zero, zip, nada.
But Alexander, who has helped author other compromise legislation as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee like the Every Student Succeeds Act (which replaced the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act) and the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, believes in seeing what can get done, what actually might pass a bipartisan Congress.
The signature tenet of the health care legislation, though still a work in progress, would limit the financial responsibility of insured patients to their own plan's in-network rates when they receive emergency care at an out-of-network hospital or by an out-of-network clinician at an in-network facility.
Alexander's legislation may not be a landmark bill, but passing a good bill to help Americans in a partisan Congress would be landmark in itself.