Posts tagged with 'HHS'
Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
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Weekly Pulse: Czar 44, Where are You?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire blogger
The Obama administration may be about to pull the plug on the health czar. The position has gone unfilled since Obama’s appointee-apparent, former Sen. Tom Daschle, withdrew his name from consideration for both czar and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in early February. Several serious candidates are emerging in the unofficial race to lead HHS, but there’s no corresponding shortlist for health czar.
The czar and his Office of Health Reform were initially touted as proof that Obama was really serious about shepherding a health reform package through Congress. But the Obama team may ultimately decide that the Office of Health Reform is an obstacle instead of an asset without Daschle and ditch it altogether.
As Erza Klein explains in the American Prospect, the position was created especially for Daschle and any other candidate might be worse than nothing as far as passing a healthcare reform package goes. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly agrees, and says that nixing the health czar doesn’t necessarily indicate that the Obama administration is any less committed to healthcare reform.
The purpose of the health czar was to create a single emissary to represent President Obama’s healthcare agenda to Congress. When the Clintons tried to reform healthcare in 1993, they discovered that various powerful administration officials were claiming to speak for the president.
The health czar was supposed to prevent future confusion as the president’s spokesperson. Many senior healthcare officials are already close to Obama and a similar situation could arise. Daschle would have been a credible health czar because he’s closer to the president than any of them, and a former congressional heavyweight to boot. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is a front-runner for HHS secretary and she has a very good relationship with Obama. But Gov. Sebelius is a Washington outsider who has never served in the U.S. Congress, which might make her a less compelling candidate for czar.
Ezra Klein, linked above, argues that if nobody can fill Daschle’s shoes, appointing a less compelling czar might just add to the din of executive branch officials vying for the attention of key Congressional leaders.
Maybe it’s a good idea to send as many Obama health officials to Congress as possible. If nothing else, they might cut into time the reps are currently spending with health insurance industry lobbyists, as Talking Points Memo reports.
Speaking of contenders for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Gov. Howard Dean recently published an article on AlterNet defending Obama’s comparative effectiveness research (CER) agenda against right wing critics like Rush Limbaugh. Dean draws on his experience as a doctor and a healthcare policy-maker to argue that CER is a way to put more scientific evidence in the hands of doctors, so they can choose the very best treatment for the money. Right wingers don’t like the idea. They’re literally afraid that if science determines that a treatment is bogus, the government will stop paying for it. Right wingers calls this “rationing.” Taxpayers might call it evidence-based policy. Last we checked, Medicare and Medicaid were not faith-based programs.
As Dean points out, the CER to be funded by the new economic stimulus bill is officially for doctors, not legislators. “Mr. Limbaugh and his cohorts would have you believe that this research will be used to deny needed care to your great Aunt May and be run by the politburo. But the Bill passed by Congress states right up front that the Government can not make coverage decisions based on this research,” Dean wrote. Realistically, though, that’s kind of a hollow assurance. Once the research is done, there’s no way to stop legislators from using publicly available research findings to make healthcare decisions.
In another corner of the healthcare reform-o-sphere, Katrina vanden Heuvel says that time is right to reform New York’s draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws in The Nation. These laws have been on the books 35 years. The laws essentially force judges to send drug possessors to jail based on the weight of the drugs they were caught with, whether the judge thinks imprisonment would be a good idea or not. New York’s budget crisis might be a blessing in disguise for drug reform, vanden Heuvel argues, because policy-makers are sick of paying to keep drug offenders locked up whether they need it or not.
And finally, some good news from RH Reality Check. Many people just wouldn’t feel right stepping out without a spritz of perfume, a blast of breath-freshener, or regrettably, a head-to-toe shellacking with Axe Body Spray. As Joe Veix reports for RH, another spray-on product may one day be added to the essential equipment list: contraceptive. An Australian company is currently testing a hormone spritz for women. The product is applied to the forearm. Like the contraceptive patch, the spray is designed to deliver hormones through the skin. Researchers hope that through-the-skin delivery can produce the same results as pills, but with lower doses of hormones and fewer side effects.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit
href=”http://healthcare.newsladder.net/” title=”Healthcare.NewsLadder.net” id=”so75″>Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, <a href=”http://economy.newsladder.net/”>Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
The Weekly Pulse: Good News and Bad News
There has been good news and bad news in healthcare this week. On the plus side, momentum continues to build for healthcare reform on both a national and state-by-state level. Unfortunately, those sneaky rules changes at the Department of Health and Human Services appear to be a done deal.
Let’s start with the bad new first to get it out of the way. It’s a done deal, folks. RH Reality continues its coverage of the eleventh hour rules changes at the Department of Health and Human Services which will give federal employees the unprecedented right to refuse to give out birth control based on their demonstrably false religious belief that hormonal contraception is abortion. Despite massive public outcry, the rules have reached the final stage before they officially take effect.
The ever-optimistic Amanda Marcotte sees these tactics as the final stage in the anti-abortion movement’s battle to control women’s bodies.
Unable to enact large-scale bans of contraception and abortion, anti-choicers have declared a form of trench warfare against the women of America for possession of the uteruses of America. In real trench warfare, you “win” a “battle” by gaining a few feet of territory. In the trench warfare of reproductive rights, anti-choicers consider a few women inconvenienced, humiliated, or even forced to become pregnant or give birth against their will a victory worth savoring.
The good news is that either President Obama or Congress can repeal these rules.
Let’s refocus on the positive movement for serious healthcare reform. In a sign that Democrats are serious about the issue, Sen. Ted Kennedy has left the Judiciary Committee to focus on this issue. Kennedy has been fighting for universal healthcare since he was first elected in 1962 and describes the current political moment as the “opportunity of a lifetime” to win this battle. John Nichols notes in The Nation that Kennedy’s strong voice for civil liberties will be acutely missed on the Judiciary Committee.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein of The American Prospect dispels a misconception about Tom Daschle’s proposed health bank, an agency that would review treatment options and decide which were cost-effective targets for government insurance coverage. Some critics fear that the Federal Health Board would somehow interfere with consumer choice by throwing the massive buying power of the federal government behind some treatments and not others, thereby affecting the relative costs of treatments for everyone. Ezra notes that only 26% of the population is on public insurance and that even if Daschle’s plan passes in its strongest form, anyone who didn’t like the options available from public insurance could buy supplemental private coverage.
In a separate post, Ezra argues that increased federal government spending on state-administered programs like Medicaid and S-CHIP could be an important part of an economic stimulus package. In a recession, more people need their healthcare benefits because wages go down and jobs are lost, but fewer jobs and lower wages mean less tax revenue for the states. States can’t deficit spend like the federal government. So, without federal help, states are forced to either cut back health coverage or take money away from economically stimulating projects like infrastructure. An infusion of federal dollars could help people in need and help states avoid cutting beneficial spending.
However, Florida’s expanded Medicaid pilot project is being criticized by a group called Florida Community Health Action Information Network, who claim that the program has not lived up to its promise in part because patients are having trouble accessing the care and providers are dropping out of the program.
A group called Health Care for All Pennsylvania vows that their state will take the lead in achieving healthcare for all. They argue that single-payer healthcare is a “simple concept – health care would be provided privately at hospitals and clinics, but paid for publicly by the government. They contend the plan would eliminate the insurance “middle man.”
In one of today’s more bizarre health stories, we find tobacco giant Philip Morris likening itself to the NAACP in order to get out of paying compensation to smokers who were harmed while the company knowingly misled them about the health effects of tobbacco. Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones explains:
In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Philip Morris, America’s largest cigarette company, compared itself to the NAACP. And to a South Carolina death row inmate illegally denied due process. And to indigent criminal defendants not afforded adequate legal representation. And it did so to win a case against an elderly African American woman named Mayola Williams whose husband died from lung cancer in 1997, after smoking three packs of Marlboros a day for more than 40 years.
Over at AlterNet, Martha Rosenberg reports that meat industry advocacy groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association are sponsoring “scientific” studies that purport to show that eating meat is better than the rest of the scientific community seems to think, which are getting published in prestigious medical journals. In June, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study called “The Recommended Dietary Allowance of Protein: A Misunderstood Concept.”
In its Oct. 15 issue, it had to print a correction stating that author Sharon L. Miller was “formerly employed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association” and author Robert R. Wolfe received money from the Egg Nutrition Center, National Dairy Council, National Pork Board and Beef Checkoff through the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Do they graze their cows on Astroturf, too?
Kind of makes you wonder who’s funding the slew of new research purporting to show that high fructose corn syrup is no worse for you than sugar.
Here’s something that might cheer you up, if you’re feeling depressed about pseudoscience and creeping theocracy. In a special series, YES! Magazine explores various answers to the question: How can we have happy people and a happy planet?
The Secretary and the Czar: Obama Bets Big on Daschle for Healthcare
It’s official, former Sen. Tom Daschle will be Barack Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Daschle will also serve as Health Czar, which means he will be in charge of developing Obama’s healthcare program in addition to running HHS.
Ezra Klein writes in the Prospect: “This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don’t tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That’s not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress.”
Ezra argues that Obama has learned the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful attempt to reform healthcare in 1994. In Ezra’s view, the Clinton plan failed because its architects were so focused on crafting the perfect policy that they neglected to figure out how they were going to sell their plan politically.
The hope is that Daschle has the political skills to actually get a healthcare plan passed.
Greg Sargent agrees that the Daschle pick is a sign that Obama intends to act quickly on healthcare.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
