Posts tagged with 'AHIP'
Weekly Pulse: Abortion Doctor’s Assassin Goes On Trial
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The man who admitted to gunning down Dr. George Tiller in church last May went on trial in Kansas on Friday. Tiller was one of a small number of doctors performing late term abortions in the U.S.
Scott Roeder admitted to shooting the Tiller, but he is pleading not guilty to murder, as Robin Marty reports in RH Reality Check. Yesterday, Judge Warren Wilbert shocked observers by allowing Roeder’s lawyers to argue that their client is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not premeditated murder.
Kansas law allows the accused to plead “imperfect self-defense” if he had an “honest but unreasonable belief” that deadly force was necessary to protect innocent third parties. Roeder says he killed to protect the unborn. Pro-choice activists are alarmed that the judge allowed Roeder to use this defense. If he beats the murder rap, Roder could face just five years in prison. In the unlikely event that his legal gambit is successful, the precedent could be tantamount to declaring open season on abortion providers.
No doubt Nidal Hasan sincerely believed that he was protecting innocent lives when he murdered 12 soldiers at Fort Hood last November. Somehow, I doubt the Army will be as deferential to Hasan’s crazy religious ideas as Judge Warren Wilbert has been to Roeder’s.
In other health care news, Robert Reich of TAPPED asks whether the rich or the middle class will pay for health reform:
There’s only one big remaining issue on health care reform: How to pay for it. The House wants a 5.4 percent surtax on couples earning at least $1 million in annual income. The Senate wants a 40 percent excise tax on employer-provided “Cadillac plans.” The Senate will win on this unless the public discovers that a large portion of the so-called Cadillacs are really middle-class Chevys—expensive not because they deliver more benefits but because they have higher costs.
Reich cites a shocking statistic: Less than 4% of the variation in the cost of insurance coverage is based on differences in benefits provided. Most of the difference in price is based on the perceived riskiness of the beneficiaries. So, if you’re in a high risk pool comprised of, say, retired autoworkers, you’re going to pay a lot more for the same benefits than someone in a younger, healthier risk pool. When you look at it that way, it seems unfair to pay for reform on the backs of people who are already paying more for the same thing due to circumstances beyond their control.
President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are meeting with top labor leaders on the “Cadillac tax,” as Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports. Obama and Sebelius are trying to hash out a compromise that would be acceptable to the unions, who so far, have been implacably opposed to taxing expensive health care plans. The unions are reluctant to give any ground on this issue because so many of their members have accepted expanded health care benefits in lieu of wage increases over the years. Taxing those benefits now would effectively erase some hard-won gains by workers. Obama and the unions are reportedly discussing some kind of grandfather clause proposal that would exempt existing plans and only tax new plans.
Elsewhere in our high-deductible democracy, it turns out that health insurers secretly steered more than $20 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose health reform while publicly professing to support the effort, according to Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones. The bagman was America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). While AHIP was soliciting donations to run attack ads, AHIP’s top lobbyist, Karen Ignagni penned an op/ed in the Washington Post assuring the public that AHIP supported reform.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly hopes that the scandal will give ammunition to Democrats in the last big push to pass health care reform: “Policymakers struggling to resolve differences on the final reform bill may want to keep a simple adage in mind: Don’t let AHIP’s duplicitous campaign win.”
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Weekly Pulse: Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer
This week, the White House teamed up with healthcare industry giants for a two-day PR blitz on health reform. A coalition of industry leaders sent a letter to president Obama over the weekend, pledging to help contain healthcare costs. The signatories include PhRMA (drug makers), Advamed (device manufacturers), the AMA (doctors), the AHA (hospitals), AHIP (health insurance), and SEIU’s Health Care project. The corporate signatories are the very same interest groups that have fought U.S. healthcare reform for generations. AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans, helped torpedo the Clinton plan in the 1990s with the infamous “Harry and Louise” TV spots.
Progressive healthcare writers are divided as to whether Obama’s rapprochement is a good sign. One school of thought is that the interest groups have finally seen the writing on the wall. Arguably, the industry realizes that some kind of healthcare reform is inevitable and they hope to get the best possible deal by cooperating. Another perspective, not necessarily incompatible with the first, is that this kind of “cooperation” will ultimately co-opt Obama’s reform program.
Mike Madden summarizes the main thrust of the industry charm offensive in Salon:
The letter itself offers few details as to how the industries will actually go about saving money. More to the point, there’s nothing forcing these groups to follow through on anything they’ve pledged to do.
Still, if you parse the platitudes, the industry is diverging slightly from Republican anti-reform rhetoric. The GOP has been crusading against comparative effectiveness research (CER) ever since the stimulus bill set aside a billion dollars to fund it. CER is just research to discover which treatments give the best outcomes for the money, but the GOP would have us believe that it’s a stalking horse for rationing. Whereas, the industry coalition’s letter talks about cutting costs by “aligning quality and efficiency incentives” and “adherence to evidence-based best practices”–basically, big words for “studying the evidence” and “trimming the fat”–the core of the CER agenda.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly thinks the new conciliatory posture is encouraging evidence that the Republican opposition to reform is in such disarray that the industry is prepared to make nice with the Obama administration:
Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), also secured a seat at the table. As Ezra Klein suggests in the American Prospect, the fact that Stern is in the room is a testament to his skill as a coalition builder. SEIU represents millions of Americans, including many healthcare workers. Stern told Klein that the group had set itself a June 1 deadline to put forward concrete proposals that can be assigned dollar figures. The Finance Committee’s first bill drops in June, so the committee will have to work fast if they want to see their suggestions incorporated.
Josh Holland of AlterNet says we should beware of the healthcare execs’ blandishments. Holland notes that they promise to reduce the growth in costs to “only” 4.7% a year:
In Mother Jones, James Ridgeway agrees that the initiative is a mere publicity stunt, seeing as there’s nothing but the threat of public embarrassment to hold the group to any of its pledges.
Even if we do get healthcare reform this year, what would the end product look like? In the Nation, Trudy Lieberman, director of the health and medicine reporting program at CUNY, takes a hard look at the messages the president has sent so far. She foresees a package that’s congenial to Obama’s corporate allies:
It’s becoming clearer that reform will include some or all of these options: requiring everyone to carry health insurance (an individual mandate à la Massachusetts); subsidizing a portion of the 85 percent of the uninsured who can’t afford to buy a policy; taxing some of the health benefits workers now get from employers to pay for insurance for the uninsured; letting people keep the coverage they have even though it’s likely to cover less as time goes on; shoving more people onto Medicaid; and trying to get insurers to insure sick people. There may or may not be a public insurance option–maybe like Medicare, or maybe not–that would compete with private insurers and theoretically reduce the cost of insurance.
All this conciliation is not cost-free. In the following video, economist Richard Wolff tells The Real News that Obama risks a grassroots backlash if he caters to corporate interests on healthcare. People want better healthcare, not just a choice of bad options. If the result of “reform” is an inferior public plan alongside the private system, employers will have an incentive to push their workers onto the public plan, and we’ll all be worse off.
The president may not support a true national healthcare plan, but don’t count the friends of single payer out yet. Doctors and other advocates for single-payer healthcare crashed a Senate Finance Committee meeting this week to protest their exclusion from a series of roundtable discussions on healthcare policy, as Laura Flanders reports on GRITtv. “Every lobbyist in America is at the table, when are the American people going to be heard?” shouted one activist. A handful of activists were arrested when they refused to come to order.