Posts tagged with 'insurance'
Weekly Pulse: Finance Committee Passes Health Bill
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee finally passed its health care bill. John Nichols of the Nation reacts:
If every kid in class finishes their homework except for one, guess which kid will get the most attention. That’s right, the slacker.
And, when the slacker finally does turn in the assignment, it is invariably a slapdash job that fails to meet minimum standards.
So it is in the U.S. Senate, where the Finance Committee finally got around to finishing its health care reform assignment. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Oh, That Filibuster-Proof Majority
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
This week’s biggest health care story shouldn’t even be making headlines: Democratic leaders in the Senate are finally pressuring the entire caucus to help bring a health care bill to the floor by sticking with the party on procedural motions. Astute readers will ask: “But aren’t Senators supposed to stick with their party on procedural motions?” Yes, of course they are. (more…)
Daily Pulse: Happy Public Option Day!
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Today, the Senate Finance Committee will consider amendments that would add a public option to the highly contested bill. Committee members Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) seek to force their colleagues into an up or down vote on the public option. (more…)
Daily Pulse: Uncharted Territory
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The public option remains in limbo. The Senate Finance Committee is fine-tuning the bill it unveiled last week, which does not include a public option. However, Brian Beutler of TPM reports that Democrats have already submitted three separate amendments that might add a public option.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) submitted what he calls a “level playing field” amendment, which would, incongruously, create a public option that couldn’t set its own rates. A second amendment submitted by Schumer and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) would create a public option much like that outlined the HELP Committee bill. Finally, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) submitted an amendment that would create a robust public option, much like the one originally drafted in the House.
It’s pretty clear that no bill containing a public option in its first draft will get 60 votes in the senate. However, as Beutler reports in a second TPM piece, the Democrats are seriously revisiting the prospect of using budget reconciliation to get a health care bill through the senate with a simple majority. However, Beutler explains that Democrats are reluctant to go the reconciliation route because senate rules restrict the kind of bill that can be passed through reconciliation. For example, only provisions that “materially affect” spending can be passed through reconciliation. But what qualifies as a material effect?
Meanwhile, President Obama continues to insist that the public option isn’t dead yet, Steve Benen reports in the Washington Monthly.
In other news, women’s health remains a hot topic in health care reform. To understand why health care reform is especially critical for women, Public News Service interviewed Dr. Susan Wood, a scientist who famously resigned from the Bush-era Food and Drug Administration over the politicization of the approval of Plan B. Since leaving the government, Wood has returned to academia to study women’s health. Some of her key findings include:
About 20 percent of women under the age of 65 have no health care insurance; in some states, women are denied coverage if they have experienced domestic violence; and when women do have coverage, they are charged higher premiums and often see a long list of preexisting conditions that are excluded, with pregnancy sometimes on that list.
If there is a public option, will it cover abortion? Rep. Lois Capps has written an amendment addressing that question. She explains her proposal in her own words at RH Reality Check.
Uncertainty remains high as the senate inches towards a bill.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Daily Pulse: Week in Review
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
This week, the president attempted to regain control of the health care reform debate with a speech before a special joint session of Congress. Did he succeed? In the video clip, above, Paul Jay of the Real News Network sits down with whistle blower Wendell Potter, a former health insurance industry exec who now fights for a public plan with the Campaign For America’s Future. Potter calls for progressives to put insurance companies under a microscope, to “shine the light on public scrutiny on the horrors of the private insurance system.”
Everyone is buzzing about the obscure congressman who heckled the president during the address. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), a former aide to Strom Thurmond, screamed “You lie!” when Obama truthfully pointed out that his health plan excludes illegal immigrants. More’s the pity. At Working In These Times, I argue that it would be in the best interests of the U.S. taxpayer to let any resident buy public insurance, regardless of immigration status.
Eligibility for the public plan might be a moot point. In the Nation, Eyal Press wonders if the public option will survive at all. The president dutifully mentioned the possibility of a public option but took every opportunity to stress that he won’t insist on it.
The speech signaled that Obama is finally rolling up his sleeves. He needs to pass a bill, and there’s every reason to think he will do so. The question is whether he has sacrificed too much substance for the sake of a legislative victory.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Daily Pulse: Baucus Coughs Up a Bill
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Big news broke over the weekend: Evidently, the president lit a fire under Max Baucus (D-Mont) and the Senate Finance Committee by unexpectedly announcing last week that he’d be laying out his own vision for health care reform this Wednesday. Just weeks ago, committee member Kent Conrad (D-ND) predicted the Finance Committee wouldn’t have a bill until November. But Baucus circulated a legislative framework over the weekend.
Baucus’s bottom line: There will be no public option. Instead, the government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize the same old expensive, inadequate private insurance system that health care reform was supposed to reform. The insurance companies get 46 million new customers, and in return, they will pay higher taxes to offset the cost of the subsidies—a kickback to Uncle Sam.
Last week Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo and I sat down to discuss some burning questions in health care reform: What’s the president’s thinking on the public option? What leverage does he have over the progressives in the House who demand single payer and/or the Blue Dogs in the senate who reject it? Why is Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) the last best hope for bipartisanship? (The transcript of our discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Weekly Pulse: Public Option on Life Support
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
Will healthcare reform include a public health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance? President Obama campaigned on the promise of a public option, but over the past week he and his top advisers have repeatedly signaled that they aren’t willing to fight for it.
On Saturday, Obama told a town hall meeting in Colorado: “Whether we have it or we don’t have it, [the public option] is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” an unnamed senior White House official gripes in this morning’s Washington Post.
The White House is sorely mistaken if it thinks that the public option belongs in the “nice but not necessary” category. Josh Holland of AlterNet explains why the public option is the pillar of healthcare reform. Without it, there’s little hope of containing costs or reigning in the power of insurance companies:
It may be just one “aspect” of health reform, but without it, the legislation promises to be a massive rip-off; a taxpayer give-away of hundreds of billions of dollars to an unreformed ‘disease care’ industry.
The industry would get millions of new customers thanks to generous government subsidies and a law requiring that (almost) everyone carry insurance. And that windfall would come without the structural changes needed to bend the medical “cost curve” in years to come — without any provisions that might endanger the industry’s bottom line.
In Salon, Robert Reich agrees. Competition between private insurance companies and the public option is the only hope to controlling costs. A public plan could bargain with providers to reduce costs and pass the savings on to taxpayers. The private insurance industry would have to slash its prices to compete.
Without a public option, “reform” would likely involve subsidies to private insurance companies, temporarily dulling the pain as premiums rise unchecked. That’s the worst of both worlds.
Progressives shouldn’t be surprised at the White House’s noncommittal stance, though. Obama campaigned on a public option, but he has always framed it a darned good idea, not as a non-negotiable demand.
Why is it so difficult to get a healthcare bill through the Senate with the supposedly filibuster-proof majority? The simple answer is that the Dems need 100% of their delegation to cooperate in order to break a filibuster. So, the Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate but no way to advance their agenda without capitulating to the conservative Blue Dogs. The Republicans can be counted on to filibuster whatever the Democrats come up with. Which means that conservative Democrats like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) hold the balance of power.
As Ari Berman of The Nation explains, Baucus and his Republican counterpart Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also rule over the powerful and conservative Senate Finance Committee, which has been tasked with writing the Senate version of the healthcare bill.
Also in The Nation, Tom Geoghegan argues that it’s time to break the stranglehold by abolishing the procedural filibuster. Unlimited debate in the Senate is enshrined in the constitution. In an old school filibuster, senators simply refuse to shut up until the session ends and the bill dies without a vote. In 1975, a group of liberals wrote a rule of Senate procedure that effectively allows senators to “filibuster” simply by saying they want to. In the old days, a filibuster was a grueling public ordeal. Senators slept on cots and spelled each other off. Today, “filibustering” means signing a form. It’s private, easy and cost-free. The Republicans can, and will, filibuster all major Democratic legislation without having to stand in public and risk being branded as obstructionists.
As a result, 60 is the new 50 in the Senate. Since it’s just a rule, the procedural filibuster could be abolished by a simple majority vote. Friends of the filibuster defend it as a bulwark against tyranny. Abolishing the procedural filibuster would discourage frivolous obstructionism, but keep the old school filibuster for cases when legislators actually care enough to lose sleep over it.
Ever wonder why the strongest public option, single-payer, was never on the table? Maybe because even the strongest proponents of the public plan are taking money from the insurance and biomedical industries. Mother Jones Rachel Morris wants to know why UNITEDHealth consultant Tom Daschle was on Meet the Press Sunday. A former Democratic senator, Daschle is a senior adviser to Obama on healthcare reform and a leading advocate of a public plan. However, he recently resumed a private consulting arrangement with UNITEDHealth, America’s largest health insurer. Even public plan champion Howard Dean is a strategic adviser on healthcare policy to the lobby firm of McKenna, Long, and Aldridge. Dean won’t disclose his clients, but McKenna represents a number of clients in the biomedical and health science industries.
The prospects of a public option are dimming, but not necessarily because of any rapid about-face by the White House. The Senate bill is in the hands of the Blue Dogs, who say they won’t have legislation until November. Obama won’t put the screws to the Blue Dogs, but there’s still plenty of time to for citizens to make their voices heard.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Mob Scene
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
This week’s edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.
Here’s the latest news on the healthcare front: Republicans and their allies are pressuring Democratic healthcare reformers at townhall meetings around the country. Addie Stan has a blockbuster piece in AlterNet that exposes the network of corporate funders and lobbyists behind the mobs.
The Progressive’s Ruth Conniff explains the mobs’ marching orders, as spelled out in a memo by Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer for the Tea Party Patriots, an anti-reform group with ties to former Republican Rep. Dick Armey’s pressure group Freedom Works. MacGuffie instructs town hall protesters to shout at lawmakers and attempt to throw them off their game as they try to make the case for health care reform. So much for reasoned discussion.
As I reported in In These Times, the teabaggers are trying to scapegoat organized labor as the instigators of confrontations at town hall meetings. On August 6, a scuffle broke out in front of a town hall meeting in St. Louis. The below video clip shows the last 10 seconds of a scuffle in which a man in an SEIU t-shirt lies prostrate on the ground. A 38-year-old conservative activist claims to have been severely beaten, but the video shows him apparently uninjured, darting around to different cops and trying to convince them that he was attacked. The man’s lawyer claims that he saw his client get punched in the face and kicked in the head by SEIU members.
A spokesman for the St. Louis County police told me that the police hadn’t reviewed the video because nobody had submitted it to them, despite a call to the public to turn over evidence for the investigation. The fact that the videographer hasn’t turned over the video kind of makes you wonder if the teabaggers really take the “evidence” as seriously as they claim.
How’s this for irony? According to Talking Points Memo, the activist was asking for money to pay his hospital bills because he’s uninsured.
Finally, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that Kansas Now is calling upon AG Eric Holder to restore the Federal Marshall security detail of prominent late-term abortion provider Dr. Leroy Carhart, a friend and colleague of the late Dr. George Tiller. Carhart was placed under protection after Tiller was shot. But the feds didn’t even wait for the trial of Tiller’s alleged assassin to wrap before pulling Carhart’s detail. Now he’s on his own, just as the alleged killer’s links to a broader coalition of violent anti-choicers are coming to light.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: The Rocky Road to Reform
by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
Healthcare is dominating domestic politics this week, as Congress and President Obama outline their visions for reform. The president is pushing Congress to pass a bill that keeps healthcare costs in check before the August deadline. Obama must have been disappointed when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced last week that the Dem’s healthcare bills won’t cut spending. The president won’t sign a bill that doesn’t contain cost cuts, so legislators know they’ll have to tweak the bill.
Obama’s strenuous efforts to pass healthcare reform have invited comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which created the American social safety net. In Salon, Michael Lind argues that Obama’s insistence on tying health insurance to employment actually betrays the legacy of the New Deal:
We decided that when it came to benefits our guiding principle should be a “citizen-based social contract.” We chose this phrase, not to discriminate against non-citizens, but to express two ideas: first, that benefits like healthcare ought to be not a privilege but rather an entitlement of all citizens in our democratic republic, and second, that all benefits should be detached from employers and follow individuals through their lives. In thinking about healthcare, we rejected various options that would not move us toward a citizen-based social insurance system. Unfortunately, the health plan being promoted by Obama and Congress is based on one of those bad options.
Special interests are sparing no expense in their final campaign to influence healthcare reform. Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., was charged with crafting a public plan for a bipartisan seal of approval, but raked in more than $3 million from healthcare lobbyists and industry groups between 2003 and 2008, according to Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent. Baucus announced that he was swearing off healthcare bucks after June 1 in order to avoid the “appearance” of conflict of interest.
Aides for Baucus told The Post that the Finance chairman stopped accepting contributions from healthcare PACs after June 1 to eliminate the appearance of conflicts of interest. But he’s not doing a very good job following through. On June 15, according to the Federal Election Commission, Baucus accepted $5,000 from the Schering Plough Corporate Better Government Fund.
Baucus’s staff say the Schering Plough money has since been returned. No word on whether the money got sent back before or after the story hit the media.
Advocates of single payer did score a victory last week. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) managed to pass an amendment to the House bill that gives states the option of creating their own single payer healthcare systems. John Nichols of The Nation explains that the Kucinich amendment opened the door to single payer. As Nichols points out, Canada didn’t start with a national single payer system. The province of Saskatchewan created its own healthcare program that became the model for Canada’s celebrated Medical Services Plan.
Josh Holland of AlterNet says the Kucinich amendment may salvage healthcare reform. That sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it’s definitely a step forward. For additional background, check out Truthdig’s interview with Kucinich.
Abortion was back in the news this week. The Prospect’s Dana Goldstein notes that the White House appears to be vacillating as to whether abortions will be covered by national healthcare. Health and budget guru Peter Orzag danced around the issue on the last Meet the Press. This kind of equivocation is part of a pattern: Back in March, senior Obama domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes, a former Planned Parenthood board member, insulted the intelligence of viewers of the Christian Broadcasting Network by claiming that she hadn’t even discussed the issue with Obama.
Should the anti-abortionist zealot accused of gunning down Dr. George Tiller be charged as a domestic terrorist? I weigh the pros and cons in my new piece at RH Reality Check.
Finally, Laura Miller of Salon favorably reviews Ryan Grim’s new book, This is Your Country on Drugs, an offbeat social history of America’s twin love affairs with drugs and moral panics over drugs.
With the August deadline looming, legislators will be scrambling to get their respective bills in shape in time to pass healthcare reform through the budget reconciliation process. Odds are that the bills will be further scaled back and watered down in the process.
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. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: The Bill the House Built
The House Democrats unveiled their eagerly anticipated healthcare bill on Tuesday. That’s right, three key committees managed to agree on a single bill. Beltway insiders think this show of unity is a big deal. But remember, the House Dems can be expected to pass whatever legislation is put in front of them because they have a healthy majority and no filibuster. The real challenge is getting the bill through the Senate.
The House bill would create an insurance exchange where the self-employed and small employers could order off a “menu” featuring a public plan and various private options. The hope is that insurance companies would offer better rates in order to put their plan on the national menu. Private options would also compete against the public plan.
Healthcare reform could look very different by the time the Senate gets through with it, but that’s not slowing down the prognosticators. In the Prospect, Dana Goldstein considers what the new bill might mean for reproductive healthcare. One of the most important questions is whether the public option will cover abortions. Under the new bill, an independent medical commission would decide what’s covered, so abortion wouldn’t become a political football. Goldstein calls this a victory for reproductive rights.
Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports that the progressive Healthcare for America Now supports the House healthcare reform bill.
Feministing’s Miriam Zoila Pérez has an update on the newly-appointed surgeon general, Regina Benjamin. Benjamin, an African American from Alabama, has as strong background in clinical medicine and rural healthcare. Like so many of Obama’s nominees, Dr. Benjamin has an engaging personal story. She’s the past president of the American Medical Association, and the recipient of a McArthur Genius Grant for her work on rural healthcare.
But after Hurricane Katrina, Benjamin bartered with patients who couldn’t pay cash, exchanging checkups for oysters and homemade goodies. A former colleague told the New York Times that she routinely prescribed birth control, but that the clinic didn’t have abortion facilities. As Steve Benen notes in the Washington Monthly, Benjamin’s track record of working with the poor and the uninsured sets her apart from early favorite Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and chief medical correspondent for CNN. The job of the Surgeon General is largely symbolic. Obama may be hoping that Benjamin’s record of altruism will lend credibility to the administration’s call to doctors to temper their self-interests in the name of the public good.
Phillip Longman argues in the Washington Monthly that open source code could make the difference between a triumph and a boondoggle in the race to digitize America’s health records. Longman contrasts two hospitals, one which used open-source code and another that chose a closed, copyrighted program. The former could be modified and improved by tech-savvy doctors and nurses who actually used the software, so it got steadily better. The latter, an expensive solution devised by a private contractor, started bad and stayed that way. Unfortunately, according to Longman, the Obama administration is leaning towards the closed option.
And finally, Terry Allen of In These Times reports on the massive homeopathy FAIL that robbed untold numbers of people of their sense of smell. A zinc-containing preparation called Zicam was marketed as a homeopathic cold remedy. The FDA doesn’t require homeopathic remedies to be tested for safety and efficacy. Homeopathic tinctures are generally so heavily diluted as to no traces of the ostensible active ingredient. However, Zicam contained enough zinc to damage the olfactory nerves.
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. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.