After eight years in a Bush coma, Congress is busy "working" again and proving it doesn't work. The health care debate is a classic of evasions, non-sequiturs, empty rhetoric and lobbyist lies to patch together reform that will look like a Frankenstein monster with a Dr. Strangelove deception at the heart.
Despite public support for a government insurance plan, House and Senate members are going through contortions to craft something to look like one but guaranteed to fail.
Even Tom Daschle, the President's derailed first choice for health czar, has had an opinion transplant. Last year, he wrote a book arguing that a single-payer health care system would be fair, effective and save billions of dollars. Now he has joined has-been Republicans Bob Dole and Howard Baker to oppose a federal insurance plan.
"We've come too far and gained too much momentum for our efforts to fail over disagreement on one single issue," Daschle now says.
This recalls the classic response of a general in "Dr. Strangelove" who, being asked how a system designed to avoid nuclear devastation has allowed a failure that is about to blow up the world, "Well, I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."
The military metaphor seems apt in the circumstances. As a nation, we don't outsource wartime safety of citizens to private contractors (with the exception of Blackwater, which proves the point). Why then has saving lives in peacetime become a for-profit enterprise that clearly isn't working for individuals and is endangering the whole economy to boot?
Is socialized medicine any more of a threat to the American way of life than a socialized Armed Forces?
Showing posts with label Tom Daschle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Daschle. Show all posts
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Medicare-for-All Goes Mainstream
The health care reform that dares not speak its name edged out of the shadows yesterday with a New York Times editorial suggesting:
"A new public plan--to offer consumers greater choice, keep the private plans honest and, one can hope, restrain the relentless growth in health care premiums and underlying medical costs--seems worth trying.
"Any new public plan would constitute only part of a much broader effort to provide coverage for 46 million Americans who currently are uninsured and many more who may soon join their ranks. Other major parts under discussion include strengthening employer-provided coverage, expanding existing public programs such as Medicaid and creating a national health insurance exchange where individuals without employer coverage, small businesses and possibly others could buy policies at inexpensive group rates from qualified private plans and, we hope, from a new public plan as well."
This tiptoe approach to what has been called Medicare-for-All is symptomatic of the political minefields surrounding what experts consider the best solution to health-care reform--a single payer system, which has been gaining the support of doctors, nurses and unions since Rep. John Conyers introduced a bill in the House last year but is not part of the Obama Administration's "incremental" approach to reform the system.
In fact, the downfall of Tom Daschle, the President's first choice for health czar, derailed the faint hope that such a solution would be considered, since Daschle had written a book advocating just that.
Meanwhile, private insurer profits and "administrative costs" keep draining one out of every three dollars spent, making US health care one of the most expensive and least effective operations in the world.
Getting Medicare-for-All on the agenda to compete with that system would be a start toward sanity.
"A new public plan--to offer consumers greater choice, keep the private plans honest and, one can hope, restrain the relentless growth in health care premiums and underlying medical costs--seems worth trying.
"Any new public plan would constitute only part of a much broader effort to provide coverage for 46 million Americans who currently are uninsured and many more who may soon join their ranks. Other major parts under discussion include strengthening employer-provided coverage, expanding existing public programs such as Medicaid and creating a national health insurance exchange where individuals without employer coverage, small businesses and possibly others could buy policies at inexpensive group rates from qualified private plans and, we hope, from a new public plan as well."
This tiptoe approach to what has been called Medicare-for-All is symptomatic of the political minefields surrounding what experts consider the best solution to health-care reform--a single payer system, which has been gaining the support of doctors, nurses and unions since Rep. John Conyers introduced a bill in the House last year but is not part of the Obama Administration's "incremental" approach to reform the system.
In fact, the downfall of Tom Daschle, the President's first choice for health czar, derailed the faint hope that such a solution would be considered, since Daschle had written a book advocating just that.
Meanwhile, private insurer profits and "administrative costs" keep draining one out of every three dollars spent, making US health care one of the most expensive and least effective operations in the world.
Getting Medicare-for-All on the agenda to compete with that system would be a start toward sanity.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Next Week: Health Care
In its first month, the Obama Administration has been on a Crisis-of-the-Week schedule--economic stimulus last week, mortgage bailouts now and apparently health care next week as the President prepares to name Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas to be Secretary of Health and Human Services and to highlight health care in his prime-time speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night,
After the Daschle fiasco, the President is turning to a staunch supporter who served eight years as her state’s insurance commissioner before becoming governor six years ago in a very red state and whose bipartisan credentials include Republicans as her running mates in winning two elections.
The vetting process, it's safe to say, will be intense but, at the rate that crises are coming at him, Barack Obama is easily on track to become the most activist new president in US history since FDR.
Somewhere in the crowded schedule will be saving Detroit, but that may not rate a full week.
After the Daschle fiasco, the President is turning to a staunch supporter who served eight years as her state’s insurance commissioner before becoming governor six years ago in a very red state and whose bipartisan credentials include Republicans as her running mates in winning two elections.
The vetting process, it's safe to say, will be intense but, at the rate that crises are coming at him, Barack Obama is easily on track to become the most activist new president in US history since FDR.
Somewhere in the crowded schedule will be saving Detroit, but that may not rate a full week.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The Daschle Disappointment
When he left the Senate as Minority Leader in 2005, Tom Daschle was a man of modest means with a good reputation. Four years later, he is the wealthy and beleaguered Obama choice to overhaul America's health care system.
The verdict on his nomination is in doubt (the Senate has a tradition of taking care of its own), but the trajectory of his life over the past four years is deeply disturbing.
Barred by law from lobbying, Daschle went to work as a "special policy adviser" to a high-powered K Street law firm with 60 percent of its revenue from the health industry, in 2008 earning a reported $2 million.
He also took in at least $1 million a year (undisclosed details of profit-sharing may hide much more) from "long-time friend," Leo Hindery, a telecom tycoon with a history of befriending politicians, an operator whose method has been described as "buy low, pump it full of 'stardust,' and then dump it."
It was Hindery, who provided the limo and driver, services for which Daschle has now belatedly paid $140,000 in back taxes and interest.
But fellow senators such as Dick Durbin are sympathetic about this and other tax errors such as inflating charitable contributions that now plague the newly rich Daschle.
"He lost an election ending his public career," the Illinois Senator says. "His net worth was less than a million dollars at that point. And here he went out in the private sector, and now he's found himself having made a mistake and admitted to it...Now, that's the right thing to do."
Despite Daschle's promising public views on health reform (a recent book advocating a single-payer system), it will be hard to swallow his leadership after such blatant and careless enrichment from all this influence-peddling as usual, including $12,000 to $30,000 speaking fees from pharmaceutical companies and health insurers.
"Daschle is the quintessential Washington story. You leave a powerful position, and you leverage it to make a fortune," says the director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a nonprofit government watchdog group.
It's not a Horatio Alger story for the new era of Change in Washington.
The verdict on his nomination is in doubt (the Senate has a tradition of taking care of its own), but the trajectory of his life over the past four years is deeply disturbing.
Barred by law from lobbying, Daschle went to work as a "special policy adviser" to a high-powered K Street law firm with 60 percent of its revenue from the health industry, in 2008 earning a reported $2 million.
He also took in at least $1 million a year (undisclosed details of profit-sharing may hide much more) from "long-time friend," Leo Hindery, a telecom tycoon with a history of befriending politicians, an operator whose method has been described as "buy low, pump it full of 'stardust,' and then dump it."
It was Hindery, who provided the limo and driver, services for which Daschle has now belatedly paid $140,000 in back taxes and interest.
But fellow senators such as Dick Durbin are sympathetic about this and other tax errors such as inflating charitable contributions that now plague the newly rich Daschle.
"He lost an election ending his public career," the Illinois Senator says. "His net worth was less than a million dollars at that point. And here he went out in the private sector, and now he's found himself having made a mistake and admitted to it...Now, that's the right thing to do."
Despite Daschle's promising public views on health reform (a recent book advocating a single-payer system), it will be hard to swallow his leadership after such blatant and careless enrichment from all this influence-peddling as usual, including $12,000 to $30,000 speaking fees from pharmaceutical companies and health insurers.
"Daschle is the quintessential Washington story. You leave a powerful position, and you leverage it to make a fortune," says the director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a nonprofit government watchdog group.
It's not a Horatio Alger story for the new era of Change in Washington.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Health Care on the Back Burner?
Some Democrats are still gun-shy about health care reform, dating back to the Clintons' fiasco in the early 1990s, according to House Majority Whip James Clyburn who, in a C-Span interview Sunday, said he doesn't anticipate comprehensive healthcare legislation in 2009.
Despite President Obama's campaign promises of universal coverage, Clyburn pointed to recent expansion of S-CHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) and proposed additional spending on community health centers as going "a long way to building a foundation upon which to build a universal access healthcare program.
"I would much rather see it done that way, incrementally, than to go out and just bite something you can't chew. We've been down that road. I still remember 1994."
Clyburn's reticence is an echo of what now seems like ancient history--the early incompetence of the Clinton White House, the health insurers' "Harry and Louis" TV commercials and the debacle that gave Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America control of Congress in the midterm elections.
If health care reform is to survive in the economic stimulus debate, Tom Daschle and the Obama Administration will have to depend on the Senate where Ted Kennedy and others seem more determined to keep Americans from suffering and dying "incrementally."
Despite President Obama's campaign promises of universal coverage, Clyburn pointed to recent expansion of S-CHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) and proposed additional spending on community health centers as going "a long way to building a foundation upon which to build a universal access healthcare program.
"I would much rather see it done that way, incrementally, than to go out and just bite something you can't chew. We've been down that road. I still remember 1994."
Clyburn's reticence is an echo of what now seems like ancient history--the early incompetence of the Clinton White House, the health insurers' "Harry and Louis" TV commercials and the debacle that gave Newt Gingrich and his Contract With America control of Congress in the midterm elections.
If health care reform is to survive in the economic stimulus debate, Tom Daschle and the Obama Administration will have to depend on the Senate where Ted Kennedy and others seem more determined to keep Americans from suffering and dying "incrementally."
Friday, January 09, 2009
No Revolution for the Health Czar
As Tom Daschle was explaining his goals as the new "health czar" at a Senate confirmation hearing, one metaphor for the failed system was looking down at him from the dais.
If Ted Kennedy had been an average citizen with a brain tumor last July, he would most likely not be alive now to take part in what seems a serious attempt to confront the health-care mess that has been decades in the making.
Last summer, some medical ethicists were suggesting that Kennedy decline expensive end-of-life treatment in a system where health insurers consume one out of every three dollars for their overhead and profit. But Kennedy had the personal wealth and motivation to fight for his life, and in the coming months, will be a strong ally for the Obama Administration with Daschle leading its efforts to overhaul American health care.
In the Obama bipartisan mode, Daschle had Bob Dole at his side for the confirmation hearing and, despite his sound analysis of what’s wrong, will be trying to patch up the current system rather than scrap it and start fresh.
Unlike banks and auto makers, health insurers have not been not asking for taxpayer bailouts because they already have them. A report from the Government Accountability Office on Medicare Advantage plans shows, according to the radicals at the Wall Street Journal, that "privately administered plans are merely taxpayer-subsidized profit centers for insurers," raking in $3.36 billion in 2006.
Throughout the health care system, inefficiency and fraud are pervasive, and evidence keeps piling up not only about the uninsured but the underinsured who are going untreated in what is still the most prosperous nation in the world.
With all the upheaval over government intervention in hitherto sacredly private areas of the economy, it's well past time to take another long look at the only sane solution to health care, a single payer system that will direct dollars to doctors, hospitals and other providers rather than pencil-pushing profit centers devoted to denying treatment.
If Ted Kennedy had been an average citizen with a brain tumor last July, he would most likely not be alive now to take part in what seems a serious attempt to confront the health-care mess that has been decades in the making.
Last summer, some medical ethicists were suggesting that Kennedy decline expensive end-of-life treatment in a system where health insurers consume one out of every three dollars for their overhead and profit. But Kennedy had the personal wealth and motivation to fight for his life, and in the coming months, will be a strong ally for the Obama Administration with Daschle leading its efforts to overhaul American health care.
In the Obama bipartisan mode, Daschle had Bob Dole at his side for the confirmation hearing and, despite his sound analysis of what’s wrong, will be trying to patch up the current system rather than scrap it and start fresh.
Unlike banks and auto makers, health insurers have not been not asking for taxpayer bailouts because they already have them. A report from the Government Accountability Office on Medicare Advantage plans shows, according to the radicals at the Wall Street Journal, that "privately administered plans are merely taxpayer-subsidized profit centers for insurers," raking in $3.36 billion in 2006.
Throughout the health care system, inefficiency and fraud are pervasive, and evidence keeps piling up not only about the uninsured but the underinsured who are going untreated in what is still the most prosperous nation in the world.
With all the upheaval over government intervention in hitherto sacredly private areas of the economy, it's well past time to take another long look at the only sane solution to health care, a single payer system that will direct dollars to doctors, hospitals and other providers rather than pencil-pushing profit centers devoted to denying treatment.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Health Care in a Sick Economy
As jobs disappear and economic anxiety spreads, the incoming Congress is showing signs of getting serious about health care reform, and the entrenched health insurers are signaling their willingness to negotiate.
Two trade groups, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, are saying they would guarantee coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, if they can get a mandate for individual coverage by everyone, sick or well.
This "concession" comes as seven senators responsible for health legislation met yesterday and promised to work together--Democrats Max Baucus, Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller IV along with Republicans Michael Enzi, Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch.
The imminent appointment of Tom Daschle as Obama's point man on the issue is another sign that the failing economy is putting more pressure on Washington to create a health care safety net for everyone just as the 1930s produced Social Security for the old.
Without limits on predatory premiums and safeguards against fraud by providers, guaranteed coverage would do nothing to solve the crisis in which one out of every three dollars spent on health is going to insurers' overhead and profits.
But at least the issue is on the table, and the Wall Street Journal is sounding the alarm about a "slow-motion catastrophe" that might "add tens of millions more people to the federal balance sheet. Because the public option will enjoy taxpayer sponsorship, it will offer generous packages to consumers that no private company could ever afford or justify. And because federal officials will run not only the new plan but also the 'market' in which it 'competes' with private programs--like playing both umpire and one of the teams on the field--they will crowd out private alternatives and gradually assume a health-care monopoly."
Sounds something like the approach of a single-payer system, which rational observers have been urging all along, but nothing could be worse than what we have now
Two trade groups, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, are saying they would guarantee coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, if they can get a mandate for individual coverage by everyone, sick or well.
This "concession" comes as seven senators responsible for health legislation met yesterday and promised to work together--Democrats Max Baucus, Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy and John D. Rockefeller IV along with Republicans Michael Enzi, Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch.
The imminent appointment of Tom Daschle as Obama's point man on the issue is another sign that the failing economy is putting more pressure on Washington to create a health care safety net for everyone just as the 1930s produced Social Security for the old.
Without limits on predatory premiums and safeguards against fraud by providers, guaranteed coverage would do nothing to solve the crisis in which one out of every three dollars spent on health is going to insurers' overhead and profits.
But at least the issue is on the table, and the Wall Street Journal is sounding the alarm about a "slow-motion catastrophe" that might "add tens of millions more people to the federal balance sheet. Because the public option will enjoy taxpayer sponsorship, it will offer generous packages to consumers that no private company could ever afford or justify. And because federal officials will run not only the new plan but also the 'market' in which it 'competes' with private programs--like playing both umpire and one of the teams on the field--they will crowd out private alternatives and gradually assume a health-care monopoly."
Sounds something like the approach of a single-payer system, which rational observers have been urging all along, but nothing could be worse than what we have now
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Rivals, Retreads and Other Irrelevance
As he picks Rahm Emanuel, Eric Holder, Tom Daschle and flirts with the former First Lady, there is a predictable chorus of criticism that going back to the Clinton years is not the change Barack Obama promised in his campaign.
Some of that was heard when he chose Joe Biden as his running mate, but Obama's goal all along was to persuade voters wary of his inexperience that the best of the past would not be swept away in rhetorical enthusiasm for the new.
He is fulfilling that promise and concentrating on the real change from the Bush-Cheney years, bringing competence back to Washington, wherever he finds it--in the over-touted Lincolnesque "team of rivals" or in the best of the 1990s.
Holder, the new Attorney General who served under Janet Reno, will have the monumental job of restoring Justice to its pre-Ashcroft, pre-Gonzales stature, as he indicated in a speech last June, citing that "disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism."
"Our government," he said, "authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants, and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution."
Obama's apparent willingness to consider keeping Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense is based on Gates' capable performance following Don Rumsfeld's ideological reign in the Pentagon, and there may well be places in the new administration for Colin Powell, Chuck Hagel and other able Republicans.
So far, Obama's choices have reflected well on his judgment about the judgment of those who will be helping him, regardless of their resumes. January 20th can't come a minute too soon.
Some of that was heard when he chose Joe Biden as his running mate, but Obama's goal all along was to persuade voters wary of his inexperience that the best of the past would not be swept away in rhetorical enthusiasm for the new.
He is fulfilling that promise and concentrating on the real change from the Bush-Cheney years, bringing competence back to Washington, wherever he finds it--in the over-touted Lincolnesque "team of rivals" or in the best of the 1990s.
Holder, the new Attorney General who served under Janet Reno, will have the monumental job of restoring Justice to its pre-Ashcroft, pre-Gonzales stature, as he indicated in a speech last June, citing that "disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism."
"Our government," he said, "authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants, and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution."
Obama's apparent willingness to consider keeping Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense is based on Gates' capable performance following Don Rumsfeld's ideological reign in the Pentagon, and there may well be places in the new administration for Colin Powell, Chuck Hagel and other able Republicans.
So far, Obama's choices have reflected well on his judgment about the judgment of those who will be helping him, regardless of their resumes. January 20th can't come a minute too soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)