Posts tagged with 'single payer'
Daily Pulse: I Heart My Socialist Kidney [Audio Exclusive]
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Jennifer Nix: Listen here. Nix is a journalist and the publisher of Guernica Magazine. She published an essay in Salon this week about her personal and political history with single-payer health care titled “I Love My Socialist Kidney.” (more…)
Daily Pulse: Has Baucus Pulled Snowe’s Trigger?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), perhaps the only moderate Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, predicted that the committee’s forthcoming bill will not include a public option with a trigger. (Note that even if the Finance Committee’s bill doesn’t include a public option, one could still be added later in the legislative process, with or without a trigger.)
Still, the lack of a trigger in the Senate bill would be strange, says Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, because the trigger was Snowe’s idea.
A public option with a trigger is a compromise whereby a public system would only come into effect if private insurers failed to cut costs within a certain number of years. The alternative would be for the Finance Committee to pass a bill with no public option at all.
To progressives, adopting the “wait and see” approach is like giving Bernie Madoff another five years to run his Ponzi scheme, just to make absolutely sure he’s a crook. On the other hand, if the trigger is written fairly, we can be confident that we’ll get a public option eventually, given the insurers dismal track record for cost control and the lack of competition.
A triggered public option may also appeal to moderates looking for political cover. It lets them say “the public option if necessary, but not necessarily the public option.” If costs come down on their own, the public option won’t kick in.
If the Baucus bill doesn’t include a trigger, should we declare the idea DOA? Not necessarily, Benen explains:
So, what’s up? Is Snowe moving away from her own idea? Is the trigger done for? Not really. I did some digging on this earlier and it seems Snowe’s comments were only in the context of the Finance Committee bill, which was never likely to have a trigger anyway. Snowe brought up the idea as far back as the spring, and encouraged the Gang of Six members to consider it, but her Republican colleagues rejected it out of hand. No matter what the Finance Committee agreed to, the trigger wasn’t going to be part of the equation.
But the idea may yet gain traction, because the Finance Committee bill isn’t the be-all, end-all version of the reform legislation. More to the point, the White House is going to have a hand in the process, and if Snowe wants a trigger, and she’s the 60th vote, it may yet happen,
Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) announced that a strong public option would pass by Christmas. Harkin chairs the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), so he’s in a good position to make that prediction. As chair, Harkin vows to carry on the legacy of his predecessor Sen. Ted Kennedy (D- Mass). Harkin’s Senate HELP Committee provides a liberal counterbalance to Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mont) more conservative Finance Committee.
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.
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 Push for a Public Plan
Healthcare reform is back in the news, as legislators and interest groups spar over the promised public component of Obama’s healthcare plan.
In very simple terms, this is a fight between groups with a vested interest in expensive healthcare and everyone else. This week, the American Medical Association warned Obama that a public plan could restrict patient choice. But for millions of Americans, getting a choice between healthcare and no healthcare wold represent a 100% increase in their healthcare options. Obama’s public plan would also give people the choice of keeping their private health insurance. The public plan is an additional option, not a diminution of options.
The AMA is a powerful interest group, but it doesn’t speak for all physicians. Several prominent groups representing doctors and medical students, including the American Association of Family Physicians, co-signed a declaration supporting Obama’s push for a public plan this week.
Expect the health insurance lobby to fight the public option tooth and nail, says economist Dean Baker in AlterNet. It’s smart business from their perspective. Platitudes about the free market aside, no real capitalist welcomes competition. As Baker points out, a public plan represents competition to health insurance companies. For every dollar Medicare pays to providers, it spends two cents on administration. Whereas private insurers spend about fifteen cents on the dollar in administrative costs. Baker estimates that if a public plan were available, insurance profits would drop by 20-30%, all things being equal.
Former president Bill Clinton invited about 20 progressive bloggers to his Harlem office on Monday for a seminar-style discussion about the work of the Clinton Foundation. Several staff from Media Consortium member organizations were in attendance, including yours truly. Healthcare was a major topic of conversation. Emily Douglas of RH Reality Check, who also attended the meeting, writes:
Clinton said that he’s optimistic about the prospects for healthcare reform this year, but he encouraged Obama to drive a hard bargain with congressional Republicans. All things considered, the former president said, it would be better to pass healthcare with 60 votes for the sake of the Obama administration’s long-term relations with congress. The alternative would be to pass healthcare through budget reconciliation, which would require only 51 votes, but which would incur a lot of ill-will among Republicans. However, Clinton cautioned against writing a weak bill to avoid reconciliation. In Clinton’s opinion, if we don’t contain healthcare costs by moving to outcomes-based medicine and making our healthcare delivery systems more efficient, the system will be unsustainably expensive.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones has also been mulling the challenge of writing a bill that’s acceptable to enough Republicans to avoid a budget reconciliation fight. Ridgeway fears that sweeping structural reform will take a back seat to political expediency. He fears that by trying to please everyone, Obama could end up pleasing no one:
If the healthcare debate sounds vague and abstract, that’s because it is. There are several competing bills coalescing, but at this point, there’s no overall vision for reform. Everything is up for grabs. Never afraid to think big, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is circulating a petition for single-payer healthcare, with an assist from Chelsea Green.
Surely the weirdest healthcare story of the week comes from Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon: An anti-choice blogger who claimed to be carrying a non-viable pregnancy to term out of pro-life principle was exposed as a hoaxster when an alert reader identified her “dead baby” as a doll. It’s not clear why the 26-year-old social worker perpetrated the hoax. Jessica Valenti of Feministing injects a note of compassion for the perpetrator, “Though as angry as this makes me, I’m with Sadie at Jezebel on this: ‘It’s tempting of course to use this as a chance to take an easy bash at anti-choice, and revel in anything that makes them look foolish, but frankly, I’m just sad for this woman.’ As am I.”
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 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: 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.
Weekly Pulse: Key Dems Back Public Health Insurance Option
The chairs of five key congressional committees have finalized a plan for healthcare reform, and their blueprint includes a critical public option. The chairs’ decision to support government-administered health insurance for everyone who wants it is sure to attract ferocious opposition from both the insurance industry and its patrons in the GOP.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) also put single-payer healthcare on the agenda by introducing the American Health Security Act (AHSA) of 2009. John Nichols of The Nation describes the bill as an important piece of legislation. If AHSA became law, it would create a federal health insurance system administered by the states. The insurance program would give patients an unlimited choice of doctors and hospitals because their insurance would cover them everywhere. The proposed program would be financed by redirecting current healthcare spending and supplementing the total with a modest tax increase that would cost most consumers less than their current health insurance premiums.
As Ezra Klein of TAPPED explains in his public insurance primer, single payer healthcare is a step beyond the public option. Under single payer, the government is the sole supplier of health insurance, whereas, under the public option, consumers are allowed to choose public or private insurance. Public insurance will be cheaper and more comprehensive because the government will be able to use its vast bargaining power to lower prices. Also, U.S. government administered health insurance plans like Medicare and SCHIP consistently spend a smaller portion of their budgets on administrative costs than private insurers. Republican Congressional leaders are opposed to the public option because they fear that the private insurance industry won’t be able to compete with government-administered insurance.
Dave Weigel, the Washington Independent’s crack conservatologist, interviewed Rick Scott, the founder and principle funder of Conservatives for Patients Rights. CPR has been running ads nationwide warning that Obama is plotting a government takeover of healthcare. Scott also resigned from Colombia/RCA, a for profit-hospital corporation, in the middle of a $1.7 billion fraud investigation. Weigel asked Scott if he was concerned that his past might color public perceptions of his current healthcare advocacy:
TWI: People can still say, “Look, this was the guy who resigned in the biggest fraud settlement in American history.”
RICK SCOTT: But, you know, we were the biggest company. If you go back and look at the hospital industry, and the whole health care industry since the mid-1990s, it was basically constantly going through investigations. Great institutions, like ours, paid fines. It was too bad.
With all the talk about healthcare reform, it’s easy to forget that there’s more to health than insurance or the medical care it can provide. Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! explored the bigger picture with Dr. Steven Bezruchka, a public health scientist who studies how inequality itself makes us sick.
Yesterday, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius had her first Senate confirmation hearing yesterday for the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services. As Emily Douglas of RH Reality Check notes, last week, Sebelius signed a bill into Kansas law that would force women to undergo medically unnecessary ultrasounds before obtaining abortions. The normally pro-choice Sebelius probably signed the bill to dodge controversy before her confirmation hearing, according to Dana Goldstein of TAPPED.
Agit prop ultrasounds are a favorite tool of anti-choice activists, who claim that the sight of the sonogram is necessary to informed consent. But women have been making decisions about abortions without sonogram assistance since the beginning of civilization. In practice, the ultrasounds are just another obstacle that anti-choicers throw in the path of abortion providers. It’s disconcerting that Sebelius was willing to sign a frivolous law to ease her own confirmation.
RH Reality Check’s Kay Steiger offers a first hand account of Sebelius’s first day of confirmation hearings. The governor said she supports a public option for health insurance and opposes conscience clauses for healthcare providers who seek to deny women abortion and contraception on religious grounds.
Finally, members of Congress are engaged in last minute wrangling prior to a vote on Obama’s budget. Democrats may try to use the budget reconciliation process to put healthcare reform to the Senate in a filibuster-proof format. (Due to an obscure rule, the Senate can pass a budget reconciliation with a simple majority, but only if the provisions in the budget are deemed to relate directly to spending and revenue.) Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports that Congressional Republicans are vehemently denouncing the reconciliation option. Surprise, surprise.
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.
Weekly Pulse: Drugs, Sex, and the Single Payer
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
This week, we bring you news of drugs, sex, and single-payer health insurance, including a fun video clip on Obama’s new drug czar from the Rachel Maddow show. Now that Obama has chosen his top healthcare advisers, the administration is beginning to chart a course for healthcare reform. Not surprisingly, there is vigorous debate about what our a new healthcare system would look like, and how to pay for it.
Single-payer health insurance was a hot topic for independent media this week. The private health insurance industry has failed to contain costs and cover the majority of Americans. The strain of the employer-funded health insurance system is crippling American competitiveness and leaving consumers unsatisfied. Universal, publicly-funded health insurance would be a better and cheaper alternative, explains Ramón Castellblanch in the Progressive. Castellblanch, an associate professor of health education at California State University, says that single-payer is simply a government-administered insurance program for everyone, not government-administered healthcare.
There’s also broad consensus that fixing the healthcare system must involve more than providing health insurance. Insurance is a tool for spreading risk and sharing cost, but it won’t fix the deeper problems that made healthcare unaffordable in the first place. In Salon, Rahul K. Parikh, M.D. describes the carrots and sticks built into Obama’s plan to motivate doctors to practice evidence-based medicine more efficiently. Evidence-based medicine means treatment supported by the best scientific research. It has been estimated that up to one third of medical treatment is unnecessary and ineffective. Some reformers believe, therefore, that making medicine more evidence-based will improve quality and cut costs.
Maggie Maher argues in AlterNet that such cost-saving reforms are well and good, but we will still need to raise taxes in order to pay for healthcare reform.
Opponents of healthcare reform often try to frighten consumers with claims that government intervention will remove their ability to make choices about treatment. As political scientist Scott Lemieux explains at TAPPED, Obama’s healthcare plan would increase choice:
First of all, many people who have insurance are seriously restricted in their choice of physicians. There’s nothing about private insurance that guarantees that patients will have wide discretion in choosing who will perform their medical care. For example, Canada’s single-payer system would even provide more patient discretion. And then, of course, people without insurance effectively have no choice at all. Obama’s plan will at least give many of them more options than they have now. People who can afford to pay out of pocket for the doctor of their choice can still do so.
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is doing his best to convince the public that reforms like comparative effectiveness research would amount to “rationing” of healthcare. As Scott Lemieux argued in his TAPPED post, linked above, rationing is the status quo, as the main rationing criteria is the patient’s ability to pay.
Delivering care based on what works, as opposed to who can pay, would be change we can believe in.
If there’s one thing we love to write about at the Weekly Pulse, it’s czars. All kinds of czars. This week, president Obama picked a shiny new drug czar: Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske. In the following clip, Rachel Maddow discusses the implications of the pick with Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Institute. Some activists are concerned that choosing a cop to run the Office of National Drug Control Policy is a mistake, but Mirken argues that Kerlikowske’s record as a pragmatic urban police chief is cause for cautious optimism:
In legal drug-related news, Martha Rosenberg of AlterNet explains why the multi-billion dollar merger between pharmaceutical giants Merck and Schering-Plough is a marriage made in hell, though the two firms do have many common interests: Scientifically dubious research designed to “prove” the efficacy of their latest blockbuster drugs, and questionable “awareness” campaigns to promote their products, to name a few. “Many are saying the drug companies need a new business model, having dealt themselves out of the game with their crash-and-burn blockbusters and with third party and Medicaid benefits managers saying “You’ve got to be kidding” about extravagant patent drugs,” Rosenberg writes.
At TAPPED, Beth Schwartzapfel weighs the pros and cons of making birth control pills available over the counter. Some reproductive health activists believe that making the pill more readily available would help more women manage their fertility with few risks, but some medical professionals caution against the change because they worry that women will miss out on other kinds of care, like pap smears, if they can just buy pills at the pharmacy.
Finally, Kimberly Whipkey of RH Reality Check writes that the FDA has approved the next generation of female condom, and not a moment too soon: Air America reports on an alarming new study that shows the rate of HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. is on par with those of West Africa. Speaking of AIDS, what medical school did Pope Benedict go to? The pontiff made his first unequivocal pronouncement against condoms this week, sparking pointed criticism from various outlets, including Marissa Valeri of RH Reality and Miriam Perez of Feministing.
Americans are finally realizing that our corporate, profit-driven healthcare system isn’t working. (Democracy Now! reports on the formation of the new activist group, Single Payer Action, an organization dedicated to advocating direct action to demand a single-payer health insurance system.) There is widespread political will for sweeping change, even if questions remain as to how to supply high quality healthcare for everyone at an affordable price.
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.