Republicans and conservatives spotlighted their ideas for “less government” in a proposed overhaul of the U.S. health care system at a forum Tuesday at the Capitol, stressing a need for greater personal responsibility on the part of patients and better tax breaks for individual health insurance plans.

The discussion came as the GOP looks for a way to express its priorities as lawmakers move ahead on health policy on both sides of the Capitol. “Republicans need to talk more about their ideas in regards to health care reform,” said Rep. Michael C. Burgess, a Texas Republican and a physician. “In fact there are some ideas out there, there are some ways of looking at this process, of bringing some affordability and some sanity into the system, without turning it all over to the government.”

Burgess said he started the Congressional Health Care Caucus, which sponsored the forum, and wrote a primer to help educate his colleagues. “This should be a Republican issue, it’s fundamentally a freedom issue,” he said, and to the extent the Republican message may be perceived as missing in action, “I want to be certain to register I’m doing my part to get our message out there.”

Republicans need to be united behind a plan that would work, and then take it to the American people, said Burgess. President Obama said at a meeting on health policy with lawmakers at the White House he’s open to all input on the plan and Burgess said he is taking the president and committee chairmen at their word when they say that Republicans will be involved. “This appears to be a different product that’s coming through as opposed to the stimulus bill, where we were shut out from start to finish,” he said.

Also at the forum was Rick Scott, chairman of Conservatives for Patients Rights, who left the giant hospital company Columbia/HCA in 1997 when he was ousted by the board of directors. He has gone on to found a chain of 24 urgent-care clinics in Florida where three levels of prices are posted on a board, Starbucks-style, and to launch a campaign against any overhaul plan that would involve “government-run health care.”

The pillars of a GOP alternative plan should be to preserve patients’ rights to choose their own doctors, competition, the right to shop for health care options, accountability and personal responsibility, said Scott. He said he helped finance and soon will release a documentary featuring Gene Randall, a former anchor and correspondent at CNN, that examines national health systems in the United Kingdom and Canada and their impact on patients. “The wait lists are ridiculous,” said Scott.

Democrats have expressed interest in a public plan component for the health care overhaul, without specifics, but there does not appear to be much momentum behind a single-payer system identical to those overseas. Both supporters and opponents of the public plan, though, see the public plan as possibly opening the door to an expanded public presence in health care.

Another panelist was Gene Scandlen from a group called Consumers for Health Care Choices at the Heartland Institute, a Chicago think tank that advocates free-market solutions to public policy issues. Scandlen said that lawmakers can adopt a top-down approach that empowers a “health-care czar” or a bottom-up approach that emphasizes preventive medicine and rewards people for reducing costs of their own care by choosing generic drugs or avoiding visits to emergency rooms. Scandlen said some 18 to 20 percent of workers, depending on the survey, are now enrolled in high-deductible health plans.

Surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation have confirmed the growing popularity of high-deductible plans but also warn of shifting a large burden of health-care costs to working people.

The discussion came at the same time the Senate Finance Committee launched a roundtable discussion in preparation for writing legislation that would be marked up by early June. On the House side, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., plans to meet this week with three committee chairmen to plot strategy on health care.

The forum was the second organized by the Congressional Health Care Caucus, with Web casts and a live audience invited to participate through Twitter, the social networking Web site.

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