Health Care For America Now

In case you missed it the first time around, the Bill Moyers Journal will be rebroadcasting Moyers' interview with former health insurance executive Wendell Potter on PBS tonight (with another rebroadcast on Sunday). The interview is powerful and infuriating, and it really shows what the health insurance industry is - a profit making, people killing machine. Be sure to tune in!

Click here for your local listings.

Last night on the Ed Show, Senator Rockefeller absolutely destroyed the idea of a co-op as a viable means of reforming our health care system. His main point: Co-ops are unproven ideas, with only a few examples that actually worked available throughout the country. What's more, no study has ever been done to figure out if these organizations work or affect the health care marketplace in any way. On top of that, there is no regulation on health care co-ops currently.

They are not a public health insurance option, and not a viable solution. Watch:

Scarecrow drives the point home:

It's telling that some Republicans have claimed to be open to the co-op idea. The GOP doesn't think the insurance companies should face competition — Senator Kyl said today the insurers don't need to be kept honest — or that Americans should be allowed to choose between private, for-profit insurers and a Public Option. So co-ops must be okay because they would be too week to provide meaningful competition. So how does a co-op stack up against a robust public option?

Co-ops are not a public option, because they are not nationwide and not accountable to voters and to Congress, and they will not keep insurance companies honest.

NEWS

Grassley promises not to sell out his party - The Hill

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, has assured his GOP colleagues that he will not sell them out and strike a private deal with Democrats on healthcare reform, according to Republican senators.

Liberal Democrats threaten to reject House healthcare compromise - LA Times

Reporting from Washington — After months of marching in line as senior Democrats worked with the White House to develop healthcare legislation, liberal lawmakers from solidly Democratic districts are threatening a revolt that could doom President Obama's bid to sign a major bill this year.

Industry Is Generous To Influential Bloc - Washington Post

On June 19, Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas made clear that he and a group of other conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs were increasingly unhappy with the direction that health-care legislation was taking in the House.

House panel prepares to wrap up health care bill - Associated Press

WASHINGTON — As recently as two weeks ago it might not have looked like much of a victory. But after a series of delays and some rancorous disputes over President Barack Obama's top domestic priority, final House committee action on a health overhaul bill is sure to be hailed as a big step forward.

Debunking The Myths Of Health Insurance Reform - Media Matters

As Congress heads home for the August recess, Media Matters Action Network wants to make sure members are armed with the facts regarding the myths about health insurance reform. Each of these statements shares the common bond of both being completely false, and having been spoken by Republican members of Congress during the past week.

Baucus Could Lose Chairmanship Over Stalled Health Care Negotiations - Think Progress

Four House and Senate committees have produced bills to reform health care, and a deal with conservative Blue Dogs in the House suggests that the final House committee involved in negotiations will release a bill shortly. Only Sen. Max Baucus’ (D-MT) Senate Finance Committee has been unable to reach a deal, with two key Republican Senators announcing today that they plan to delay progress even further until after the August recess. In light of the Finance Committee’s inability to move forward, several senators have decided to play hardball with the Committee’s chair.

OPINION

GOP Health Plan Is Modeled on Banking Deregulation - Think Progress

Apparently incapable of coming up with a single new idea, House Republicans plan to release a health plan today which is plagiarized almost entirely from the McCain-Palin health plan that voters soundly rejected last November. Amazingly, the “new” GOP plan even lifts McCain’s widely-panned proposal to deregulate the health insurance industry in exactly the same way the banking industry was deregulated over the last several decades.

The Fire Department: A Public Option - Matt Yglesias

Tina Dupuy had a nice item in the Huffington Post yesterday noting that urban firefighting in the United States was once a private for-profit industry. Then around the middle of the nineteenth century, cities began to decide that this system was too haphazard, corruption-prone, and unfair and thus began the dread big-government takeover of firefighting.

Health Care Realities - New York Times

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

What's Behind the Liberal Revolt on Health Care? - Ezra Klein

There's been some liberal discontent over the deal struck between Henry Waxman and the Blue Dogs yesterday. In particular, House progressives are angry that the public plan, which previously could use Medicare payment rates (with some exceptions) in its first three years of operation, now has to negotiate its own payment rates from the outset. Substantively, this isn't a particularly big deal. But then, it's not really about this.

A public health insurance option won't stand between you and your doctor, straight from the doctors' mouth. That's 450,000 physicians for real, strong health care reform with a public health insurance option:

As the wheeling and dealing of getting a health reform bill passed takes center stage in news coverage, one aspect of the debate is not getting the attention it deserves: the affordability of health care. To keep the cost of the bill and of health insurance down, Congress seems to be moving toward more cost sharing by patients even though mountains of research shows that higher out-of-pocket costs lead people to forego medically necessary care. That leads us further from the goal of guaranteeing everyone has access to quality, affordable health care when they need it.

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Tina Dupuy makes a good point:

Let's look at this reasonably: Firefighting used to be a private for-profit industry. In the 1800's, the early days of urbanization, in cities like New York and Baltimore, there were private "clubs" or "gangs" who were in charge of putting out fires. The infamous Boss Tweed started his illustrious political career at a volunteer fire company. The way it functioned was the first club at the scene got money from the insurance company. So, they had an incentive to get there fast. They also had an incentive to sabotage competition. They also often ended up getting in fights over territory and many times buildings would burn down before the issue was resolved. They were glorified looters. It was corrupt, bloated and expensive - but at least it wasn't the much maligned "government controlled."

Around the time of the Civil War, firefighting in big cities was reformed and taken over by the government. Currently firefighters in most major metropolises are trained by the government, employed by the government and given health care - wait for it - by the government.

Yet if we had to have the "conversation" about the firefighting industry today, we'd have socialism-phobic South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on the TV every chance he could get saying things like, "Do you want a government bureaucrat between you and the safety of your home?"

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio would hold press conferences and ask, "Do you want your firefighting to be like going to the DMV? Do you want Uncle Sam to come breaking down your door every time some Washington fat cat says there's a fire?"

There would be 30-second TV spots paid for by the powerful firefighting lobby featuring stars and stripes graphics and the national anthem playing softly in the background with a booming voice-over trumpeting, "Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were volunteer firefighters. Support traditional values and oppose government waste. Tell your representative you want a bi-partisan solution to fire reform."

News programs would be interviewing sobbing people whose homes fell through the cracks and burned to the ground. "I don't want to see the government take-over firefighting, but I sure miss Momma's oil paintings."

And President Barack Obama would relay his childhood experience with a fire then point out the failure of the for-profit firefighting industrial complex that "threatens to bankrupt this country." And then those most in need of firefighting services would foam about his birth certificate and confuse Karl Marx with Charles Darwin on misspelled protest signs at events put on covert firefighting lobbyists.

But instead, today firefighters are national heroes. They're organized, quick, competent and with few exceptions pillars of the community. Their duty is to protect people and their property and they do it. They make no profits, are part of the government and they help people 24-hours a day. They even let seniors live. No debate necessary. What started out as a shady gaming of the system where the general public's welfare was at risk is today something of national pride.

The private health insurance industry today is much like the private firefighting industry of the 1800s. Their incentives don't align with the purpose they ostensibly exist to serve. Private firefighters fought with each other instead of putting out fires. Private insurance companies throw bureaucrats at you to deny you care and to save their shareholders money instead of keeping you healthy.

Now, why again does the private industry not deserve a little competition from an entity that has only one goal in mind - your health?

The insurance industry, its business allies and its shills in Congress are doing their best once again to scare us away from real health care reform, just as they did 15 years ago. Using the same tactics and language they did then, insurers and their cronies are warning us that America will be sliding down a slippery slope toward socialism if the federal government creates a public insurance option to compete with the cartel of huge for-profit companies that now dominate the health insurance industry.

One of the false images they try to create in our minds is of long waits for needed care if our reformed health care system resembles in any way the systems of other developed countries in the world–systems that don't deny a single citizen access to affordable care, much less 50 million of them.

Here is a real image, and a very scary one, that I wish those overpaid insurance executives and members of Congress could have witnessed before dawn a few days ago: a thousand men, women and children standing for hours, in the dark, in a line that seemed to be endless, waiting patiently for a chance — a chance because the need is so great many are turned away — to get much-needed care from a volunteer doctor.

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Birther Roy Blunt has been on a rampage against Medicare, saying the other day the patent lie that "Medicare has never done anything to make people more healthy," despite the millions of healthy seniors on Medicare.

The anti-Medicare argument has been taking hold in other corners, with Rep. Tom Price, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, authoring an op-ed that mostly attacks Medicare as a reason the new Republican tax health care plan is a good idea:

Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare. Because of Washington’s one-size-fits-all approach, its flawed coverage rules and broken financing mechanisms, seniors are increasingly having care rationed while federal health spending spirals out of control.

This is, as we say in Washington, bull. Medicare covers virtually the entirety of our senior population, and does it at lower cost and higher quality.

And, that bull is just about the entirety of the Republican argument against health reform it seems: No health reform, because Medicare is awful.

Of course, the plan Price is pushing isn't so much of a plan and more of a John McCain retread, with lots of talk about taxes and no new ideas for how to lower our health care costs or provide more coverage at an affordable price.

But it's good to know Price hates Medicare. That puts him at odds with 86% of seniors, people who are actually on Medicare.

Update:

A friend reminds me it's Medicare and Medicaid's birthday today, too! On July 30, 1965, President Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law, providing a lifeline to millions of elderly Americans and low-income families who would otherwise not have been able to afford health care.

I'm sure Blunt isn't celebrating, but millions or seniors and low-income Americans are.

NEWS

Family Research Council Ad: Fear, Not Facts - Media Matters

One of the several emerging misleading arguments against health insurance reform is that the reform legislation will allow taxpayer dollars to fund abortion. Now, the Family Research Council has released an ad that implies that Planned Parenthood's funding of reproductive services will somehow prevent another individual from undergoing surgery.

A look at health care plans in Congress - Associated Press

A look at health care legislation taking shape in the Democratic-controlled House and Senate as President Barack Obama pushes to overhaul the system, cover nearly 50 million uninsured Americans and contain rising costs. Many of the details are still being negotiated and any final health care bill would have to meld proposals from the House and Senate.

House Democrats End Impasse on Health Bill - New York Times

Efforts to pass sweeping health care legislation took a big step forward on Wednesday as House Democratic leaders reached an agreement with fiscally conservative party members that would cut the bill’s cost and exempt many small businesses from having to provide health benefits to workers.

Health deal sparks fury on the left - The Hill

A House leadership deal with Blue Dogs and an aggressive marketing push by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) shifted the healthcare debate sharply toward centrist positions Wednesday, sparking threats of rebellion from the left.

There may be a new Republican health care plan floating around. It's just about the same as all the other half dozen we've seen. It's a redux of John McCain's defeated health care plan, and it's mostly about taxes or other forms of government money, not health care, which is all Republicans seem to be concerned about.

Here are some of the provisions:

The Republican proposal would extend the income tax deduction on health care premiums to those who purchase coverage in the individual market.

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In the Republican plan, low-income consumers would also be eligible for advanceable, refundable tax credits, provided on a sliding scale, to purchase coverage in the individual market.

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To promote the employer-based health insurance system, the Republican plan proposes giving small businesses tax incentives for auto-enrolling employees in a plan.

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Republicans are also proposing to expand the individual market by creating pooling mechanisms such as association health plans and individual membership accounts. Consumers would also be able to shop for insurance across state lines.

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The Republican plan also proposes reforming Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) by giving beneficiaries the option of getting a voucher to purchase private insurance.

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The Republican health care proposal would require that none of the suggestions from the Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research be finalized unless done in consultation with and approved by medical specialty societies. It would also establish performance-based quality measures endorsed by the Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI) and physician specialty organizations.

The Republican plan also addresses the issue of medical liabilities that doctors face — something Democrats have not addressed. It would establish in each state administrative health care tribunals, also known as health courts, and add affirmative defense through provider established best practice measures. It would encourage the speedy resolution of claims and caps non-economic damages.

Let's see here…

• Tax credits that don't add up? John McCain's plan.
• Cutting Medicaid and SCHIP? John McCain's plan.
• Insurance across state lines, blowing past consumer protections? John McCain's plan.
• Not outlawing denial for pre-existing conditions? John McCain's plan.
• Tort reform? John McCain's plan.

The country voted on John McCain's health care plan. They didn't want it. It's good to see that Republicans still have no new ideas.

A note on comparative effectiveness research. The House bill currently up for discussion takes great pains to make sure research on treatments would not be used to mandate treatments. On page 524 of the House bill it specifically states "Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Commission or the Center to mandate coverage, reimbursement, or other policies for any public or private payer.’’

So the grandstanding by Republicans that the House bill would ration care, and thus we need this Republican alternative, is utterly untrue.

There you have it. Another failed, do-nothing idea from Republicans, which talks a lot about taxes, but does nothing to end the health care status quo.