NEWS

Obama says any budget has to tackle health care - Associated Press

President Barack Obama says it will be impossible to balance the budget if the government doesn't tackle health care costs and boost economic growth.

Insurers offer to stop charging sick people more - Associated Press

The health insurance industry offered Tuesday for the first time to curb its controversial practice of charging higher premiums to people with a history of medical problems. The offer from America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is a potentially significant shift in the debate over reforming the nation's health care system to rein in costs and cover an estimated 48 million uninsured people. It was contained in a letter to key senators.

A Health Plan for All and the Concerns It Raises - New York Times

It is one of the most contentious health care proposals President Obama has floated: offer a federal, Medicare-like insurance plan to anyone, at any age. And let commercial insurers offer their private health plans alongside it.

Employers getting more strict on health-care eligibility - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Facing a difficult economy and running short of ways to reduce health-care costs, employers are becoming more aggressive about checking the eligibility of their workers' dependents.

Insurance groups pen letter against Obama health plan - The Hill

Representatives from the insurance industry drew a line in the sand Tuesday on the Obama administration’s proposed healthcare plan, after months of meetings and saying all the right things about finding common ground on reform.

Republicans will claim, like Judd Gregg has, that using the budget reconciliation process to pass things like health care reform is tantamount to fascism. (Nevermind that Gregg is a huge hypocrite.) It's not.

Bipartisanship, as I've argued previously, is one of those words that has so many definitions, it's come to mean whatever the user wants it to mean. For Republicans, bipartisanship chiefly means Democrats rolling over.

To me, if I get to use my own definition, bipartisanship means two sides working in good faith towards a solution. That does not mean each side has to tie themselves to the other's fate, or unilaterally disarm. And that's what taking budget reconciliation off the table would do.

The formulation that makes the most sense is the one promoted by Senator Max Baucus:

The goal here is to get results. And not just results for the sake of results but principled results. And that means working with the other side where you get principled results and means maybe going to reconciliation to get principled results.

In other words, Democrats will make good-faith efforts to work with Republicans to make health care reform (and other priorities) happen. If Republicans play ball, then great. Things will move through the normal Senate procedures. And if they don't play ball, then things will go through reconciliation.

Keeping the option of budget reconciliation on the table is very much in the spirit of bipartisanship. Democrats won the majority, and with it the right to things like reconciliation. Keeping the option open keeps us true to our democracy. This is the position Health Care for America Now has taken in a letter it sent to key lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

This precedent, too, has bipartisan support. After all, it's how George Bush passed his tax cuts, as well as measures related to oil drilling, trade, and others.

NEWS

U.S. workers getting sqeezed out of health care system - Associated Press

American workers – whose taxes pay for massive government health programs – are getting squeezed like no other group by private health insurance premiums that are rising much faster than their wages.

Health-Care Battle Set to Focus on Public Plan - Wall Street Journal

Congress is poised for a battle over whether an ambitious health-care overhaul should include a new government-run health plan to compete with private companies in the effort to cover the uninsured.

Groups push reconciliation option - Politico

An umbrella group of progressive organizations is pressing congressional budget leaders to keep the option of using expedited budget procedures to move President Barack Obama’s healthcare initiatives through the Senate – a move that would allow Democrats to pass a bill without Republican votes.

Not-so-easy money: Taxing health benefits comes with costs - EPI

The 50-Vote Senate - The American Prospect

Could an obscure Senate rule free Barack Obama from the filibuster and enable health-care reform?

On the road to passing health care this year, there are certain intersections that make all the difference. The budget is one of them.

The budget sets monetary priorities for the federal government for the next year. Items that are funded in the budget will become reality. Items that are not won't. It's really that simple.

President Obama presented an outline of his budget to Congress last month. In it, he laid out $634 billion for health care. While he made clear that this wasn't going to be enough money, and Congress would have to come up with more, it stands as an historic commitment to making quality, affordable health care available to all this year. Literally, as far as I can tell, this kind of commitment has never been made before.

And so, we've come to a crossroads. If this outlay is removed from the budget, or if the budget does not pass, we will not pass health care reform this year, because there will be no money to do it.

Health Care for America Now is in contact with legislators on Capitol Hill every day. We've been told that Members of Congress aren't hearing very much about the budget from their constituents. This isn't surprising - the budget is pretty boring. But the budget is also crucially important for health care reform.

And not everything is exciting. Sure, the campaign to elect Barack Obama was exciting, but now we've got to follow through, as thousands of volunteers with Organizing for America did this weekend:

As she headed into the morning sunshine to talk up President Obama's $3.6 trillion budget proposal, Althea Thomas counted herself a citizen and a partisan picking up where she left off Nov. 4, backing the president she helped elect.

"It's the change we all voted on," said Thomas, one of about 40 volunteers who fanned out from the Democratic Party headquarters here with clipboards, pledge cards and a sense of mission that flowed from their support of Obama when he was a candidate.

We must follow through, not just because we voted for this change, but because if we don't follow through, that sends a powerful signal to Washington that we don't actually want all that stuff Barack Obama promised during the campaign, like health care for all.

So, take a moment, call your Members of Congress, and tell them you support the President's budget and its historic commitment to health care.

NEWS

Battle lines drawn on health care - Politico

As health care reform moves from conceptual talks to detailed negotiations, what had been a conciliatory tone is turning more confrontational.

Going Abroad to Find Affordable Health Care - New York Times

WHEN Ben Schreiner, a 62-year-old retired Bank of America executive, found out last year he would need surgery for a double hernia, he started evaluating possible doctors and hospitals. But he didn’t look into the medical center in his hometown, Camden, S.C., or the bigger hospitals in nearby Columbia. Instead, his search led him to consider surgery in such far-flung places as Ireland, Thailand and Turkey.

Health insurers, NFIB find common ground on coverage pools - Business First

The National Federation of Independent Business and the health insurance industry have found common ground on how to make coverage more affordable for small businesses.

Dems Map Strategy to Pass Health Reform Without Republicans - Wall Street Journal

Even as President Obama talks up the need for a bipartisan effort to overhaul the health-care system, Democrats are readying a strategy for getting changes through Congress if Republicans don’t climb on board.

Obama proposes cuts to private insurers who cover Medicare patients - Dallas Morning News

One of the first political battles over health care this year will be fought on familiar ground.

This weekend, Health Care for America Now is going up on the air in Iowa with an advertisement, as Sam Stein at The Huffington Post reports:

The health care ad wars reignited on Friday with the release of a new spot urging Sen. Chuck Grassley to drop his opposition to a public plan for health insurance.

…

Titled "Iowa Health Care Choice," the ad doesn't mention the Iowa Republican by name. But the narrator of the spot, a registered Iowan nurse by the name of Teresa Cooley, does make the case that opposition to a public health insurance plan (which the Senator has expressed) would ultimately result in less coverage and higher costs for recipients.

…

The ad, which will air in Iowa from Saturday through Tuesday, comes a few weeks after Grassley, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, told President Obama at the White House Health Summit that he was against a public plan.

Here's the ad, which specifically pushes back against the lie that a public health insurance option would come between you and your doctor:

So, you know, we're really serious about this choice bit. It's not health care reform unless we give people in this country a choice between the private insurance that they have now and a public health insurance option open to all.

We're asking people in Iowa to send a message to their Members of Congress - including Chuck Grassley - in support of choice. You can help us get the message out a bit farther by clicking here and emailing your Members of Congress.

NEWS

Grassley to Limbaugh: Keep Distorting Health Reform - Columbia Journalism Review

Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and others recently launched a smear campaign against a provision in the stimulus bill designed to gather research that will help doctors and patients choose the treatments that work the best, and avoid unnecessary spending. This, said Fox, “appear [s]to set the stage for health care rationing for seniors, new limits on medical research, and new rules guiding decisions doctors can make about your health care.”

Zeke Emanuel, Obama's Health Care Alchemist - The Huffington Post

Ezekiel Emanuel has a fear of failure. Months into the administration, the prominent bioethicist and brother of chief of staff, Rahm, has emerged as an important player in President Barack Obama's efforts at overhauling health care. But with the elevated role has come an elevated responsibility. And as the White House pushes for the largest expansion of coverage in well over two decades, the eldest of the Emanuel brothers refuses to get ahead of reality.

Will Obama Bypass Senate GOP on Health Care? - ABC News

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that congressional Democrats and the Obama White House are likely to employ a parliamentary procedure - the budget reconciliation process - to win passage this year of comprehensive health-care reform, according to unnamed sources familiar with conversations on this subject.

U.S. names healthcare spending strategy advisers - Reuters

The Health and Human Services Department named a panel of 15 experts on Thursday to advise the government on how to spend $1.1 billion set aside to study which medical treatments work best.

Pharmaceutical, Medical Device Industries Concerned About Sharfstein as FDA Deputy Director - Kaiser Daily News

The pharmaceutical and medical device industries have praised the nomination of former New York City Health Commissioner Margaret Hamburg as FDA commissioner, but they are "nervous in varying degrees" about the nomination of Baltimore Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein as principal deputy commissioner of the agency, CongressDaily reports.

Democrats See Health Care Reform as Top Priority, Others Say Deficit Reduction - Rassmussen Reports

Of the four priorities outlined last month by President Obama, reducing the deficit and health care reform are now seen by voters as the most important. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 32% of voters believe cutting the deficit in half is most important while 29% say health care is the priority.

Some literally (as in, more schooling), and some figuratively (as in, more information). First, the literal example.

Sally Pipes is the latest in a series of health care opposition spokespeople, and she's no more credible than those who have gone before her. Pipes' main claim to fame is basically that she's in the media a lot.

Pipes was invited by Republicans on the House Subcommittee for Energy and Commerce to testify as an "expert" during a hearing on health care. Her testimony wasn't very enlightening, full of the same lies and distortions we've come to expect from conservative health care "experts." However, things got more interesting when Representative Bruce Braley (D-IA) questioned Pipes on her "expert" qualifications. Take a listen:

Here's a transcript of the conversation:

BRALEY: Have you published any peer reviewed treatises in a journal of economics on health care policy?
PIPES: Yes.

BRALEY: Can you give us some examples?

PIPES: I’ve done some things in Health Affairs over the past and –

BRALEY: But can you just identify the scholarly journal that’s a peer reviewed journal of economics?

PIPES: Well, Health Affairs is, I think. I don’t know whether you would say it is.

UNINDENTIFIED: It’s peer reviewed.

Turns out, Pipes only has a "BA with honors" in economics from some school in Canada (that was not identified, either during the hearing or on her official biography, which is long on media appearances but short on actual qualifications) and has never completed an advanced degree in health care or any form of public policy. She claims she's an "expert" and a "scholar" because she's published articles (read: opinion pieces) in the Wall Street Journal (certainly not peer-reviewed or scholarly) and has "done some things" in Health Affairs.

Well, then, what exactly has she done in Health Affairs? Well, she got a letter to the editor published, and that's it:

Searching ‘Pipes’ in the author field of the Health Affairs website yields one result — a Letter to the Editor titled ‘Piping A Different Tune.’ In the letter, Pipes responds to what she describes as a “hostile” book review of Who Killed Health Care: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem–and the Consumer Driven Cure:

The author of the review responds to Pipes, highlighting her not-so-academic approach to policy: “Sally Pipes’ riposte to my review of Regina Herzlinger’s book, Who Killed Health Care, offers rhetoric and faith-based posturing but little evidence. Whilst it can be intellectual fun and politically advantageous to repeat the principles of bottom-up, market oriented health care, the practice is usually inflationary, inefficient, and inequitable.”

So, let's get this straight. Pipes qualifications for being an "expert" on health care reform are she has a "BA with honors" in economics from an unnamed school in Canada and she writes op-eds for the Wall Street Journal?

NEWS

GOP Tries to Reassert Itself on Health Care - CQ

When a party loses the majority, it often goes “into the wilderness” to find itself and develop new policy ideas, anoint new political and intellectual leaders, and rebuild a brain trust to lead it back to power.

Drug benefit urged in health reform - The Hill

Big-time health reform may be high on the Democratic agenda, but advocates for expansions of Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit are scaling back their expectations.

OPINION

Focus on facts in health-care debate - The Des Moines Register

Late last year, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus released a blueprint on health reform that will likely guide lawmakers in drafting legislation. This committee has jurisdiction over Medicare, Medicaid and tax policy. As the ranking member, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley will be in the thick of the debate over reforming this country's health-care system.

For all the false alarm ringing over “socialized medicine” when a choice of public health insurance is discussed, little is said about the tens of millions of people in the United States who are currently—happily—getting their health care through a public health plan of one kind or another, and the tens of millions more who want to have that choice available to them.

Read more…