Posts Tagged ‘health care reform’

UIL – DEMS COMMITTED TO PUSHING HEALTH CARE FORWARD – OBAMA’S POLITICAL CAPITAL IS KEY

NEW YORK TIMES 1-23-2010

DEMS MUM ON HOW TO KEEP PUSHING HEALTH OVERHAUL, AP

Obama has used immense political capital to advance the health care overhaul and remake a system that has frustrated past administrations, most recently Democrat Bill Clinton’s in 1994. Whether he can succeed where others have failed is now unclear.

”Here’s the good news. We’ve gotten pretty far down the road, but I have to admit, we had a little bit of a buzz saw this week,” the president said.

”I understand that, why after the Massachusetts election people in Washington were all in a tizzy, trying to figure out what this means for health reform, Republicans and Democrats: What does it mean for Obama? Is he weakened? Is he, oh, how’s he going to survive this?” Obama said. ”But I want you to understand, this is not about me. This is about you.”

Despite Dodd’s comments, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., insist the health care legislation will go forward. They just haven’t said how.

U – HEALTH CARE – AT BROWN*** [ MUST READ ]

BROWN’S ELECTION SAYS NOTHING ABOUT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE REFORM – IN FACT IT PROVES THAT IT WOULD BE MASSIVELY POPULAR

WASHINGTON POST 1-21-2010

BROWN’S VICTORY IN MASS. SENATE RACE HARDLY A REPUDIATION OF HEALTH REFORM, MACGILLIS

While many are describing the election to fill the lateEdward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat as a referendumon national health-care reform, the Republican candidate rode to victory on a message more nuanced than flat-out resistance to universal health coverage: Massachusetts residents, he said, already had insurance and should not have to pay for it elsewhere.

Scott Brown, the Republican state senator who won a stunning upset in Tuesday’s election, voted for the state’s health-care legislation, which was signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and has covered all but 3 percent of Massachusetts residents. That legislation became the basic model for national health-care legislation. Brown has not disavowed his support for the state’s law, which retains majority backing in Massachusetts.

Instead, he argued on the campaign trail that Massachusetts had taken care of its own uninsured, and it would not be in the state’s interest to contribute to an effort to cover the uninsured nationwide.

“We have insurance here in Massachusetts,” he said in a campaign debate. “I’m not going to be subsidizing for the next three, five years, pick a number, subsidizing what other states have failed to do.”

In a news conference Wednesday, he said, “There are some very good things in the national plan that’s being proposed, but if you look at — and really almost in a parochial manner — we need to look out for Massachusetts first. . . . The thing I’m hearing all throughout the state is, ‘What about us?’ ”

Brown’s message underscores a little-noticed political dynamic in a country where rates of the uninsured vary widely, from Massachusetts to Texas, where 25 percent are uninsured. Seeking national universal coverage means sending money from states that have tried hard to expand coverage, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, to states that have not, mostly in the South and West.

Supporters of the national legislation say this transfer is an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of expanding coverage. But, they argue, the nation is misinterpreting expressions of self-interest in Massachusetts as grand opposition to universal health insurance.

“Massachusetts’s reforms continue to be popular in Massachusetts — sufficiently popular that Brown did not repudiate them,” said Paul Starr, a Princeton public affairs professor. “Here is a state that has enacted a similar reform and it is popular. That should encourage people that if it’s done at the national level, that it would work as policy, and that it would be popular.”

Conservative analysts disagree, saying the Massachusetts law has been less successful than advertised and that this helped motivate residents to cast a vote they knew would set back national reform. In a new report from the libertarian Cato Institute, Michael Cannon argues that the law has covered fewer people than state data suggest and that it has cost residents and businesses more than supporters say. “Things are not as hunky-dory as people have been saying,” he said.

Divining voters’ motivation is difficult. In a Boston Globe poll taken in October, 59 percent of state voters said they supported the state law, a drop of 10 percentage points from the prior year, and only 11 percent said they wanted the law repealed. There were no exit polls Tuesday to gauge voters’ views on health-care reform.

UIL – HEALTH CARE REFORM IS ON TRACK FOR PASSAGE SOON – OBAMA’S PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT AND POLITICKING IS KEY

KATZ 1-15-2010

OBAMACARE FOR REAL THIS TIME, NEWSTEX WEB BLOGS, ALAN KATZ HEALTH CARE REFORM BLOG

This is no longer the case. According to the Associated Press oeHouse and Senate negotiators resumed marathon talks with Obama at the White House around 9 p.m. Thursday. The president left the Cabinet Room meeting shortly after 1 a.m. Friday and the session ended about 25 minutes later. The Washington Post reports on President Obamas personal involvement in working out a critical compromise with labor leaders. (The compromise, according to the Post, exempt union members from a proposed surtax on expensive insurance plans until 2018, five years after the legislation would take effect. This was not the Presidents first oemarathon negotiating session with legislative leaders. Nor was it the first time he negotiated with interest groups. But its clear President Obama is now deeply engaged in fashioning health care reform legislation.

While Presidents usually do not get personally involved in drafting legislation, health care reform is far from typical legislation. Were talking about impacting one-sixth of the nations economy and a legislative effort decades in the making. The chances of President Obama simply accepting whatever health care reforms Congress came up with was nil. Earlier involvement might have saved lawmakers a lot of pain ” what will be the political cost for House Democrats who voted for a government-run health plan running for re-election in moderate districts? ” but there was no doubt he would be actively at the table before the bill was finalized.

Health care reform will move quickly now. The Associated Press, in the story cited above, says its only a matter of days, if not hours. President Obama would like to have the health care reform bill signed into law prior to his state of the union address later this month or early February. Since Democratic leaders have pledged to put the legislation online for at least 72 hours before a vote is taken, that doesnt leave a lot of time.

Congress is back in action very soon and the agenda is already being set behind the scenes.

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IMPACT – HEALTH CARE REFORM BAD – COSTS / DEFICITS

ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF HEALTH CARE REFORM ARE A MYTH – REPEAL OF SGR MAKES MASSIVE COSTS INEVITABLE AND MORE THAN OFFSETTS ANY SAVINGS – THEIR EVIDENCE OBSCURES THE TRUE NUMBERS

WEISS 1-12-2010 – MD AND MBA, NEUROSURGEON AND HEALTH CARE WRITER

THE TRUE COST OF HEALTH REFORM, FORBES

A little background review is helpful here. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 implemented a new methodology for targeting and containing Medicare expenditures, known as the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR). The SGR basically limits the reimbursement to physicians based on the rate of growth of the economy. If payouts to physicians exceed targeted spending in one year, fee schedules would be adjusted downward the following year, with no room for negotiation. Following the legislated reimbursement calculations, fees for physicians are scheduled to decrease by 21% in 2010, 23% in 2011 and 40% in 2016. These are decreases in real dollars, not adjusted for inflation, and they reduce payments to below their 1980 value. Seniors who have been staunchly protective of their Medicare benefits have serious cause for alarm.

Why haven’t most people heard about this before? It’s because physicians are actively lobbying on behalf of their patients. On an annual basis physicians, including myself, meet with legislators and fight to prevent the physician shortage, decreased quality and limited access to care that would result from enacting this formula. Since the Sustainable Growth Rate is, in fact, unsustainable, the rate cuts have repeatedly been blocked over the last decade by annual, urgent, temporary Congressional action. While this has been good news for patients and physicians, the fleeting nature of these measures mandates yearly pilgrimages by physicians to Washington, D.C., taking us away from our patients, costing time and money, and distracting us from providing medical care.

As it stands now, reimbursement cuts initially scheduled for Jan 1, 2010, have been deferred to Feb. 28, 2010. Once again, however, the Senate has chosen not to repeal the SGR. Permanent repeal was passed by the House in 2009, but it has no authority without Senate backing. The timing here is noteworthy. The need to keep the SGR ball in play at this time stems from the desire to mask the true cost of health care reform. The bills could only be passed under the guise of deficit reduction if the CBO calculation included the huge theoretical cost savings implied by the widely disregarded SGR. At the same time that the House passed its health reform bill, it also passed its separate, contradictory SGR-repeal bill, which would directly increase national costs but would not be counted as “reform-related” costs. The Senate stayed more consistent, declining to pass a permanent repeal but acknowledging that a temporary freeze on cuts will be again granted.

The CBO initially estimated the additional direct costs of health care as a result of this shady math at $250 billion, which dropped to $210 billion after physician-administered drug costs were shifted to another fund. Moving drug benefits, however, added another $78 billion to total costs. The CBO concludes that it simply cannot make any realistic estimates about the total impact of these maneuvers, “…as uncertainties involved are simply too great … a wide range of changes could occur … that are likely to be significant but are very difficult to predict, both under current law and under any proposal.” This information is not being honestly presented to voters by their legislators or the media.

While alarming under any circumstances, this sort of juggling is downright deceptive in the context of the proposed health care legislation. Any merger of the House and Senate bills will lead to a massive expansion of federally administered health insurance, be it Medicare or Medicaid, even in the absence of a public option. The White House would have us believe that increased governmental intervention would streamline our health care delivery. But even under the current system our highly regulated system is unsustainable.

HEALTH CARE BILL PASSAGE MARKS THE DEATHKNELL FOR TRUE REFORM AND REPRESENTS A PROFOUND LOSS FOR ACCESS TO CARE IN AMERICA

COMMONDREAMS 12-24-2009

SENATE HEALTH BILL PASSES, FIREDOGLAKE.COM, WALKER

It was loss for the country. Our broken health care system will remain broken and costs will continue to rise at an alarming rating. Things like drug re-importation and a robust public option, which would have helped bring down prices for millions of Americans, were stripped from the bill at the request of powerful industry lobbyists.

It was also a big loss for the progressive movement. We were out-gunned by industry lobbyists, and many of our movement “allies” failed us. A woman’s right to choose was thrown under the bus just to get something passed. The supposed “progressives” in the Senate refused to go all-out and use every tool to achieve the most progressive reform. Lawrence O’Donnell is right, most importantly,this bill will give liberalism a very bad name.

This is not progressive reform. This is a perverse Democratic version of Regan style trickle down economics. Hundreds of billions will be given to poorly regulated private health insurance companies in the hope that they spend roughly 80% of that money on actually providing people with health care. It forces millions of people to buy very expensive insurance that they cannot afford to get actual health care, so that Democrats can proudly say millions more people are “covered.” Private health insurance companies are what have ruined our current system and are dramatically less efficient than public insurance programs, yet Democrats will use them almost exclusively. It is a massive reward for a history of terrible performance. Instead of reining in the insurance companies, it only enriches, empowers, and entrenches them further. The only “check” on the industry will be new regulations, but with extremely weak to practically non-existent enforcement, it is basically no check at all.

This program is not even a good foundation on which to build later reform. It will be a wasteful, expensive, and probably unpopular program for only a small subset of lower income Americans. That is a recipe for making it a target for cuts by conservatives, not expansion by progressives. This bill could easily discredit the move for true universal health care by being such a poorly designed failure.

Senate is really on a tightrope to pass health care reform. The timeline set is very specific and requires key events in order to pass meaningful reform by Christmas:

Here’s the timeline Democrats have set. Lest this be considered final, we offer one caveat that it’s possible, even probable, that Republicans can extend the process and lengthen debate for an additional day.

10 a.m. Saturday: Reid introduces manager’s amendment, substitute amendment and the underlying bill. Republicans immediately file to have the 383-page manager’s amendment read aloud, which ends at 4 p.m.

1 p.m. Sunday: The Senate reconvenes to continue debate, alternating between parties until 11:30p.m., when the Senate will adjourn for half an hour.

1 a.m. Monday: Cloture vote on the manager’s amendment. Senators will begin debating substitute amendment.

7 a.m. Tuesday: Cloture vote on substitute amendment. Debate begins on underlying health care bill (which, fun fact, doesn’t contain a whole lot, most of the meat is in the amendments).

1 p.m. Wednesday: Cloture vote on underlying health care reform bill, followed by a final vote (requiring only a simple 51-vote majority) on the full measure.

What effect would the plan have?

In the waning hours of Friday, Harry Reid finally found a compromise option that would commit Nelson’s vote to support Health Care Reform.

In response to this, the GOP required Reid to have the amendment read OUT LOUD, wasting 10 hours of Congress’ time and risking passage by Christmas, a White House priority.

Republicans, who vowed to use every procedural weapon to stop the bill, immediately forced a reading of the Mr. Reid’s, which was expected to take 10 hours and had to be done by midnight to keep Democrats on track for a final vote on Christmas Eve.
Mr. Reid’s amendment includes tighter restrictions on insurance coverage for abortions sought by Mr. Nelson. Health insurance plans would not be required or forbidden to cover abortions, but states could prohibit the coverage of abortions by plans that are offered for sale through new government-regulated marketplaces.
The amendment also includes a special extension solely for Nebraska: increased federal contributions to the cost of an expansion of Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for the poor.

Maybe if Congress hired some debaters to read bills out loud in situations like this, they’d get a bit more done…Wonder if the GOP can yell “clear”? Oh well – no speaker points in the Senate!

Only the first section gets read in this video, but I bet the whole thing would take less than 10 hours.

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