New York Times — Experts Dispute Some Points in Health Talk
One of the things that President Obama’s supporters once raved about was his willingness to deal with complex issues in a direct, in-depth fashion. With his health plan listing badly as it tries to steam into port, the president threw all that out the window and went for the cheapest, easiest answers on health care possible. In sometimes shockingly facile answers he said that his plan would mean no sacrifices except for among millionaires and only changes to the good.
Writers Robert Pear and Peter Baker went through and looked at the little fibs and exaggerations that the president used to back up his facile answers on health care.
But one of his biggest whoppers came in his effort to pile on blame to his predecessor for the exploding deficits:
“The president continued to take credit for deficit reduction by making a claim that has been challenged by many experts.
‘If we had done nothing, if you had the same old budget as opposed to the changes we made,’ the deficit over the next 10 years would be $2.2 trillion greater, the president said.
In fact, $1.5 trillion of those ‘savings’ are mainly based on an assumption that the United States would have had as many troops in Iraq in 10 years as it did when Mr. Obama took office. But before leaving office, President George W. Bush signed an agreement with Baghdad mandating the withdrawal of all American forces within three years.
So Mr. Obama is claiming credit for not spending money that, under the policy he inherited from Mr. Bush, would never have been spent in the first place.
Wall Street Journal — Replicating Cleveland Clinic’s Success Poses Major Challenges
President Obama heads to Cleveland today to sell his health care plan at the famous Cleveland Clinic, which he lauded at length for its cost and quality of care in his press conference.
Writer Vanessa Fuhrmans looks at how the Clinic achieves the savings by being an elite destination for doctors and patients:
“The Cleveland Clinic stays profitable by offsetting its losses on Medicare patients with payments from private insurers and thousands of foreign patients who often pay its full list prices. Those prices can be two to three times higher than what U.S. insurance plans negotiate with the clinic. The clinic also pulls in significant revenue from philanthropy; it collected $183 million in 2008.
Even if the clinic’s organization and culture can’t be easily replicated, its practices can, it argues. Its electronic medical records, for instance, let patients upload their health information, such as weight-loss or blood-sugar data, directly from scales or devices at home. That, in turn, gets patients more involved in their health and keeps them in better touch with their doctors, the clinic says.”
Washington Post — Abortion Opponents Criticize Health Reform Bills
A time-honored tradition in the Democratic Party is fiscal liberalism combined with social conservatism. Black, Catholic, and rural leaders have brought the sensibility to the party since before the days of the New Deal.
So the insistence among some Democrats that the health plans being considered in Congress cover abortion is creating another division in an already divided party. Losing votes like Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania – who would be a natural vote for a government health plan – over abortion could be debilitating.
Writers Dan Eggen and Rob Stein explain that Democratic leaders, mostly tolerant of abortion themselves, are hoping for a compromise measure that would increase funding for adoption services and other pro-life causes but keep the status quo on federal funding of abortion – restricted by state preferences for Medicaid spending — will be a solution. Conservative Democrats, though, argue that increasing the volume of federal health spending under the existing terms will still make more money available for abortions and subsidize the procedure for middle-class women.
As is increasingly the case, the White House would punt the question to an unelected board:
“White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said this week that decisions on specific benefits such as abortion coverage should be “left to medical experts in the field,” referring to a proposed advisory board that would recommend minimum levels of coverage for private insurers.”
New York Times — With Vigor, Obama Wades Into a Volatile Racial Issue
President Obama has been getting into the racial divide in America quite a bit lately after dodging the issue rather thoroughly in the wake of the Rev. Wright debacle. His fiery denunciations of the oppression that he says still affect blacks and other minorities in his speech at the NAACP conference caught some attention. But compare his first answer about a question on race at a presidential press conference, in which he said he didn’t consider being African-American as part of his presidential duties, to his stem-winder of an answer about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.
No doubt the fact that Obama will soon be passing part of his summer on Martha’s Vineyard where Gates is also a seasonal resident helped spur him to greater indignation over Gates’ arrest. But his decision to wade into a local police matter, lay blame on the arresting officer for “stupidly” detaining the Harvard scholar and make clear that he thinks being black in America is still a substantial handicap shows that Obama is looking to accentuate his special status after downplaying it in the past.
Count writer Katharine Seelye as one who agrees in a deep double standard, since she thinks only black intruders at the White House would get shot by the Secret Service.
“‘Here, I’d get shot,’ Mr. Obama said, referring to his new address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The statement was a bit of political jujitsu that acknowledged the intense security that surrounds any president while letting sink in the image of what would happen to a black man who might seem to be breaking into the White House.”
Washington Post — Senate Narrowly Defeats Conceal-Carry Measure
Sen. John Thune, new head of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, made his first play since ascending in the party leadership to really squeeze Democrats with an amendment that would have required states to respect weapons laws from other states when residents travel.
It’s in keeping with his South Dakota constituents’ attitudes, but the amendment also proved to be a litmus test for the increasingly gun-tolerant Democratic Party.
The Emanuel model of candidate recruitment – get the numbers and disregard ideology – has moved the Democrats to the right in Congress. So much so that it is considered cause for celebration when the party can defeat anything – even one amendment – supported by the NRA.
Thune’s bill will help the NRA make it’s next list. While 20 Democrats broke ranks to support the bill, many from pro-gun states, like Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, voted against the bill.
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