RIP: Public Option
Posted: August 16, 2009 Filed under: Health care reform | Tags: cost and inefficiency of the American Health Care System, health care statistics, Public Option, universal coverate Comments Off on RIP: Public Option
In a yet another policy flip of epic proportion, nearly every democrat on the talking head circuit put to rest the idea that we might get even a small public option for health insurance. Fear tactics and greed in America are once again winning the health care debate. Evidently sixty isn’t enough when the majority of democrats in the senate prefer to join the Republicans in shooting down whatever hope we had of joining the rest of the industrialized and developed world in removing the burden of health care insurance from business and the poor and middle classes.
Carrie Budoff Brown at Politico reminds us what President Barack Obama said about a public option at the beginning of this public policy debacle.
It was only in June that Obama said in a letter to Senate Democrats that “I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest.”
A month ago, Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address that “any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans – including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest – and choose what’s best for your family.”
The reality on the ground today was delivered by via CNN.
A day after President Obama appeared to suggest that his administration might be open to health care reform legislation that does not include a public health insurance option, one of Obama’s top aides on the issue left the door open to accepting nonprofit health insurance co-ops, a proposal that has gained traction in bipartisan negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee.
“I think there will be a competition to private insurers,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, “that really is the essential part, that you don’t turn over the whole new marketplace [after health care legislation is enacted] to private insurance companies and trust them to do the right thing. We need some choices, we need some competition.”
At a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado Saturday, Mr. Obama seemed to downplay the necessity of having a public insurance option in the final version of any health care reform legislation presented to him by Congress.
“The public option – whether we have it or we don’t have it – is not the entirety of health care reform,” the President said. “This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it. And, by the way, it’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else . . .”
Echoing Mr. Obama’s Saturday comments, Sebelius also told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King that “what’s important is choice and competition.” A public option “is not an essential element,” the Cabinet secretary said Sunday.
No wonder they’re planning for windfall profits at United Health Care. They are getting exactly what they want. A bunch of new people at terms that were negotiated by the world’s biggest sucker. How can any one left standing in the Democrat corner possibly believe any thing this administration says from now on? How can we possibly support health care reform that is not about health care or reform. What we are seeing is another big industry payoff placed on the national credit card. I would have never thought I’d have seen the bonus class have so much to celebrate with a democratic majority controlling so much. The only thing that makes the Dubya handouts bigger is that they came with a war that not only cost treasury, but human lives.
I am waiting to see how any one in Left Blogistan can all this anything but complete capitulation. Complete capitulation is not 11th dimensional kung fu chess no matter what hallucinogenic you’ve taken.
Dear Progressives: You’ve been had …
Posted: August 15, 2009 Filed under: Health care reform, Surreality, Voter Ignorance | Tags: Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, Netroots Nation, Valarie Jarret Comments Off on Dear Progressives: You’ve been had …
Not at NetRoots but close
I’ve been busy getting the youngest back to University and entertaining a friend as well as trying to get my own stuff together for semester’s start so I didn’t go to Netroots and I haven’t followed it very closely. Just got back in from a day of driving way too many places to see two headlines that juxtapose nicely. First, is at HuffPo and the headline is “Valarie Jarret Heckled and Hissed at Netroots Nation”. The other is from Politico and that headline is “Party leaders prepare liberals to accept a health care reform deal”. Do you think we need to play connect the dots? Sure you do!!!
So, we’ve known for some time that this is the health care reform plan that really isn’t about health care or reform. Now, we’re being asked to bend over, open wide and … well, you catch my drift. I’m not about to take one for Howard Dean or the Gipper, Gypper, POTUS, whatever. I’ll admit to being a fully recovered Deaniac. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Here’s Politico’s story.
After the toughest week yet for health reform, leading Democrats are warning that the party likely will have to accept major compromises to get a bill passed this year – perhaps even dropping a proposal to create a government-run plan that is almost an article of faith among some liberals.
With August dominated by angry faces and raised voices at town hall meetings, influential Democrats began laying the groundwork for the fall, particularly with the party’s liberal base, saying they may need to accept a less-than-perfect bill to achieve health reform this year.
“Trying to hold the president’s feet to the fire is fine, but first we have to win the big argument,” former President Bill Clinton said Thursday at the Netroots Nation convention, a gathering of liberal activists and bloggers who will prove most difficult to convince. “I am pleading with you. It is OK with me if you want to keep everybody honest. . . . But try to keep this thing in the lane of getting something done. We need to pass a bill and move this thing forward.”
“I want us to be mindful we may need to take less than a full loaf,” he said after recounting the political troubles that followed his failed reform effort in 1994.
It won’t be an easy sell. Even former national party chairman Howard Dean this week threatened Democrats who don’t support the public insurance plan with the prospect of primary challenges – the first rumblings of what could devolve into a Democratic civil war over health care.
So, how’s that sitting with the Netroots folks? They may have been polite to the Big Dawg and the Big Scream, but Valarie Jarett didn’t fare too well. It was a hootin’ and hollerin’ time up there in Pittsburgh! Why, you’d have thought it was just another town hall meeting with a bunch of Beck and O’Reilly acolytes! Do you suppose there were some sino-peruvian-lesbian plants up there or has some one finally awakened to the smell of bad milk in their cafe latte? Again, this was reported by HuffPo.
On Saturday morning, one of the president’s closest advisers, Valerie Jarrett addressed the Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh. And while attendees were largely supportive throughout the question and answer session, the reception was warm at best. The defining moment, in fact, came when Jarrett was hissed and heckled.
Roughly midway through the session, Jarrett was pressed to explain why the President was “continuing so many of [Bush’s] policies many of which he criticized as candidate Obama.” Knowing the mood and makeup of the audience – largely progressive activists from across the country – she acknowledged off the bat that it was “a fair question.” But from there, things grew a bit rough.
Jarrett defended the work Obama has done outlawing torture, and releasing Office of Legal Counsel memos detailing how such interrogation practices came to be. At that point, a protester in the audience screamed out a question about why the White House was trying to keep additional photographs of detainee abuse from becoming public.
“I heard somebody shout out about the pictures,” Jarrett replied. “Everybody knows what’s in those pictures. And this is where it gets very delicate and I know it is a touchy subject for this audience. But what he is trying to balance as president, is keeping us safe, not giving ammunition to people who already have ample ammunition from what they’ve seen before to be adverse to us.”
More shouts and protests followed. “I can’t hear you,” Jarrett said. “You know what you’ve got to do? You’ve got to figure out a way to get your question on here [pointing to the computer on stage that was receiving emails from questioners]. We are not going to have shout outs from the audience.”
Wow! Are the folks at Netroots part of the mob now? Have some of them finally realized that if they don’t cooperate with the current meme there’s a place for them under that big ol’ bus the rest of us were thrown under during the primary last year? Are they really willing to sell out every single item on the liberal/progressive agenda for enhanced status quo? Are these possibly those chickens we kept hearing about? Are they finally coming home to roost? And, do you think it’s too late to get some REAL health care reform out while we’re at it?
Listen, Netroots, POTUS said he wouldn’t sign anything that didn’t include a public option. Are you going to join us to hold him accountable for those words or are you going to cave into this pressure to win one for the Gipper or is that the Gypper?
Drink up and make room for Netroots Nation Under the Bus!!!!
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Shoot the message and the messenger
Posted: August 14, 2009 Filed under: Health care reform, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, president teleprompter jesus, Surreality, The Media SUCKS, Voter Ignorance | Tags: Big phRMA, healt care town hall meetings 1 Comment
For some one who was supposed to be the nation’s hip professor with that smooth oration style holding us all rapt and breathless, President Barack Obama sure has turned into to the teacher who has lost control of the classroom. I can’t recall any president–other than LBJ on Vietnam–that has rolled out a major policy and lost the conversation so quickly. It’s not that great of a leap to see remnants of “Hey, Hey LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?” in the faces of seniors who have some how been convinced that discussing living wills puts them in danger of being set out on the ice floes by their government. How did this administration lose control of this conversation so rapidly?
I would speculate that the major players in the debate did not want a repeat of the “HillaryCare” episode so they may have concentrated a bit too much on not repeating a similar process. There were no blue ribbon panels meeting all over the country and no attempts to set up a health care czar. Instead there was this via Bloomberg: “Six Lobbyists Per Lawmaker Work on Health Overhaul” and this from Jane at FDL : Memo Confirms Deal Between phRMA and White House. With this White House–as with Richard Nixon’s–it’s always about following the money. Before the bill even hit the Congress and the people, it was morphed into something that is said to be setting up windfall profits for the people who profit grandly already from the ill among us. Given that, now we’re supposed to buy it as a foot in the door to the real thing. Excuse me for my lack of trust. I’m just not buying that passing this thing will lead to anything but corporate windfall profits and a win in the Obama column.
That’s six lobbyists for each of the 535 members of the House and Senate, according to Senate records, and three times the number of people registered to lobby on defense. More than 1,500 organizations have health-care lobbyists, and about three more are signing up each day. Every one of the 10 biggest lobbying firms by revenue is involved in an effort that could affect 17 percent of the U.S. economy.
These groups spent $263.4 million on lobbying during the first six months of 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group, more than any other industry. They spent $241.4 million during the same period of 2008. Drugmakers alone spent $134.5 million, 64 percent more than the next biggest spenders, oil and gas companies.
“Whenever you have a big piece of legislation like this, it’s like ringing the dinner bell for K Street,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group …
We now have a botched roll out, a messy misunderstood plan, and rooms filled with shrieking constituents of all shapes, sizes, and flavors. Is any one buying this as a national conversation?
Business Week Declares the Winners in Health Care Reform
Posted: August 7, 2009 Filed under: Health care reform, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, Voter Ignorance | Tags: Health care reform, health insurance industry, UHC 2 Comments
Business Week suggests you get to know your Insurance CEOs and I agree... UHC's Hemsley (a high flying member of the bonus class)
And guess what… it isn’t you and me. Here’s the front page story from August 6th, 2009.
All this back and forth on rw/lw blogs about whose grass roots are nuttier or meaner or better organized is cute, but while this debate on how many wingers can fit on the tip of a town hall meeting goes on, the real health care anti-reform is happening on K Street. The circus only stops you from looking at the men behind the curtain. Not one teabagger or ACORN rent-a-protester or you or the rest of us are part of the real conversation. Shouldn’t our focus be on why the Health Insurance is happy about what’s going on? Uh, maybe while you’re all throwing memes at each other, some one should be watching the pile of money on the floor that’s disappearing before our very eyes? The Democrats have the votes to make this pass. BUT, wtf are they passing? You really think this is an obsequious foot in the door?
As the health reform fight shifts this month from a vacationing Washington to congressional districts and local airwaves around the country, much more of the battle than most people realize is already over. The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Aetna (AET), and WellPoint (WLP). The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Health reform could come with a $1 trillion price tag over the next decade, and it may complicate matters for some large employers. But insurance CEOs ought to be smiling.
Executives from UnitedHealth certainly showed no signs of worry on the mid-July day that Senate Democrats proposed to help pay for reform with a new tax on the insurance industry. Instead, UnitedHealth parked a shiny 18-wheeler outfitted with high-tech medical gear near the Capitol and invited members of Congress aboard. Inside the mobile diagnostic center, which enables doctors to examine distant patients via satellite television, Representative Jim Matheson didn’t disguise his wonderment. “Fascinating, fascinating,” said the Democrat from Utah. “Amazing.”
Okay, did you take a deep breath long enough to read that highlighted line? Do you realize that all we’re doing with the current format is giving these guys new customers to fleece with their 30% mark-up? Is that a good deal? That’s worth a symbolic vote for single payer and an inkle of a public option? A few more folks in 2013 join the fleecing of the ill while it’s paid for by throwing children off SCHIP and removing benefits from Medicare? Are liberals really fighting for THAT? Are conservatives thinking THAT’s socialism?
What fresh hell is this?
De-linking an American Myth
Posted: August 2, 2009 Filed under: Health care reform | Tags: blue dog democrats, employer based insurance programs, Financial Times., Insurance Industry, Insurance Lobby, Matt Miller, Nancy Pelosi, provider choice, single payer Comments Off on De-linking an American MythThere are so many thin
gs wrong with the current conversation on Health Care Reform that it makes it difficult to catch a whiff of civility on the topic. Most of the problems come from good old fashioned ignorance. Why do we continue to see this debate more in mythic terms than fact-based? It’s enough to make this Cajun country economist round up a few alligators to go after her blue dog pols. This reform should save the country and businesses beaucoups bucks if done right. Every other industrialized/advanced nation has gone before us! There are examples we can learn from! Most of them include way more provider choice than we have now!
Still, all we get are canards of epic proportion. Moses did not come down from the Mount with employer based insurance programs inscribed on the tablets. We can do much better! The continuing screed from the right claiming that a single payer insurance option is complete nationalization of the delivery system that will lead to huge wait times and ice floe ends for the elderly is probably the most obvious example of making policy based on myth rather than common sense and data.
I continue to have to remind people that while that story about some one’s Aunt Sally that died in Canada while awaiting hip replacement surgery is touching, it is an anecdote. Anecdotes are just specific data points in a population that may or may not be representative of what goes on for the most part within that population. You need a database to get the complete picture. That explanation even gives the anecdote the benefit of being true since many are just those viral things passed around the internet as urban myths. One data point is not the proper reference for any kind of policy decision. Try, however, to tell that to the general population and some depressingly dim witted pol like the majority of mine from Louisiana.
There are so many myths surrounding the health care debate that Nancy Pelosi has sent fact sheets to Democratic Congress critters to help them fight off the disinformation. (Yeah, like people are going to take THAT source as the best messenger for the program. What’s her approval rating? Some where in vpResident Evil range?)
House speaker Nancy Pelosi returned home to San Francisco this weekend carrying a red, white and blue pocket card that will help guide her through the August recess. The card lists talking points she hopes will convince everyday Americans of the benefits they could receive under the health-care reform plan she hatched with other House Democrats last week.
Pelosi distributed the cards to all 256 of her caucus members, arming the unruly Democratic majority for battle in their disparate districts across the country. After laboring for weeks in Washington to reach a compromise between liberal and conservative factions of her caucus, Pelosi is taking the fight outside the Beltway, where polls show that her popularity is faltering. She plans to stump for health-care reform in San Francisco, Denver and other cities.
At stake is legislation that could define her legacy as speaker and shape President Obama’s political future. Pelosi called health-care reform with a public insurance option “the issue of an official lifetime.”
“August will be a month of inoculation against the negative message of the insurance industry,” Pelosi said in an interview, resting in a yellow armchair in her stately office, which has sweeping views of the Mall. “It will be a month of education in terms of what is in our bill. It will be a month of communication — listening, listening, listening to what constituents have to say.”
In this particular debate, I’m not sure we need to listen to everything constituents have to say because they’re getting their data from viral email anecdotes and TV infomercials from the insurance industry. I’d say it’s more about at looking at what the facts on the ground say and helping constituents make sense of what various options with health care reform would mean to the American people. We need to debunk the myth that we have this great functioning system now. We also need to de-link from the US pathology that makes our health care system unique, costly, and deadly.
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