In Health Fight, Government and Insurers Are Cast as Villains
Today is the first day of the White House Web page devoted to battling health care “misinformation” reported by concerned citizens. After collecting the emails forwarded from their helpers, the White House unloads with… some gauzy platitudes from no-name administration bureaucrats.
Modeled after the site that helped dispel the rumors that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim etc., the new site struggles because there are no clear answers available. Instead of a sentence explaining that the then-candidate is a Christian, the health site features blabby videos from the likes of Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform and long, long talking points about a plan that the president admits doesn’t exist yet. The site hardly seems worth scaring everyone by asking them to snitch on their neighbors for sending cranky emails.
Before the site launched, writer Naftali Bendavid looked at the new effort by Democrats to get off the hook by making the insurance companies the bad guys – a theme that runs through the new site.
The issue is that that is voters distrust government and insurance companies equally, which one would they rather have rationing their care.
“Conservatives trumpet a House measure that would let Medicare pay a doctor for counseling an elderly patient on end-of-life decisions. They say the government might encourage people to end their lives. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) said on the House floor that seniors would be “put to death by their government.”
At first Democrats defended their plans. But the Republican arguments began to resonate, and polls showed support falling for the Democrats’ approach.
Democrats are now saying that insurers are a far more malevolent force than government. ‘It’s always been the insurance companies that have inserted themselves between the doctor and the patient,’ said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio). ‘It’s not been the government.’
The back-and-forth obscures a truth acknowledged on both sides — that doctors and patients, left to themselves, often order unnecessary and costly treatments, contributing to soaring national health costs.
Key Democrat Feels the Heat After Voting for House Plan
Rep. Baron Hill’s Southern Indiana district is prime Blue Dog territory – a swing district in a swing state where the Democratic congressman knows five terms are no guarantee of reelection.
Hill helped break President Obama’s health-care deadline in the House, but in exchange , voted for the bill – “end-of-life counseling,” government-run insurance plan and all – in the House energy committee.
Hill, like other moderate Democrats, hasn’t said how he’ll vote on the bill when it comes to the floor in its final form.
Writer Peter Slevin headed to Bloomington and points south and found that the Hoosiers are restless and local conservatives have come out in force to oppose then plan. Hill isn’t holding public meetings but is instead sneaking from one small, unannounced gathering to the next to talk to local leaders and decision makers.
The stakes are high for President Obama who likely needs Hill and the 50 other Blue Dogs to check off on a fairly liberal final plan in order to win passage. Obama’s coalition of health industry and labor groups is putting plenty of pressure on Hill and others like him:
“The battle of Baron Hill is developing as Obama and national groups are mustering foot soldiers and advertising dollars. Advocates have bought $500,000 of television time in the Evansville, Ind., and Louisville, Ky., markets, with more than half coming from the drug industry and its allies, said Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group.
Allison Luthe, the Indiana coordinator for Health Care for America Now, which supports the Obama plan, said pro-reform labor unions have assigned 22 organizers to the state, including two who are hiring canvassers. In an e-mail to supporters last week, Obama declared that ‘this is the moment our movement was built for.’
Preparing for Swine Flu’s Return
The federal government faces the possibility of being the boy who cried swine as the first round of the Mexican flu was no big deal, but the second could be a big, mutated mess.
President Obama is in Mexico today to talk about that nation’s seemingly doomed efforts to battle narco-terror and establish something like a real economy. Canada’s prime minister will also attend, presumably to talk about how important Canada really is.
But the Swine Flu will likely dominate the talks, since the boomerang virus has been causing havoc during the southern hemisphere’s winter months. Vaccine swapping, border controls, health protocols, etc. will be worked out by functionaries while the heads of state pose for pictures and focus on their bilingual banalities.
In the U.S., Big Sister Janet Napolitano is preparing to deal with a potential swine riot when Americans unfazed by round one get bowled over by round two.
“The virus could cause nothing more than a typical flu season for the Northern Hemisphere this winter. But many experts suspect the second wave could be more severe than an average flu season, which hospitalizes an estimated 200,000 Americans and contributes to 36,000 deaths. Because the virus is new, most people are not immune to it.
‘This epidemic will transmit faster than usual, because the population is more susceptible,’ said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who has been helping the CDC project the severity of the upcoming wave. ‘It’s fair to say there will be tens of millions of illnesses and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths. That’s not atypical. It just depends on how many tens of thousands.’
Perhaps more important, in every country where the virus has spread, it has continued to affect children and young adults much more commonly than typical flu viruses.
‘In a pandemic where a greater fraction of illness and deaths occur in kids and young adults, that will be clearly noticeable to the public. There will be a sense that this is a greater severity of illness even if fewer people die overall,’ the CDC’s [Joseph] Bresee said.
Opposition Emerges to House’s Jet Spree
Democrats and Republicans alike are livid over a last-minute, $550 million appropriation for new executive jets to tote members of Congress around.
Eight new Air Force jets, rather than the four requested, were slipped into the recent defense bill by lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee. The argument for the outlay is like the one Joe Biden made about deficit spending in general – sometimes you have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt.
The unhappy spokesman for the committee (none of the actual members would show their faces) said the spending would produce future savings.
The issue is headed for the Senate, where lawmakers Like Sen. John McCain look to score some points on the fatheaded play by their colleagues in the House, who may be reminded of their Lear Jet ways in 2010.
But as writers Brody Mullins and W.T. Farnham point out opposing the planes doesn’t mean that lawmakers, like McCain, or the top House Republican, John Boehner, are passing up travel:
“The day after the House began its summer holiday, Mr. Boehner, the House Republican leader, and five other lawmakers departed for a two-week trip around the globe. They were Reps. David Camp of Michigan, the senior Republican on the Ways and Means Committee; Dan Boren (D., Okla.); Jo Bonner (R., Ala.); Tom Latham (R., Iowa); and Greg Walden (R., Ore.), according to a travel document reviewed by the Journal and an aide to one member.
The goal of the trip, which will include stops in Germany, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, was to discuss issues surrounding the global economic crisis and national security with government and private-sector officials in those countries. At least some of the lawmakers took their spouses, which they are allowed to do under House rules for ‘protocol’ purposes.”
Effort to Rein in Pay on Wall Street Hits New Hurdle
Writer Eric Dash looks at the coming showdown over financial sector pay as a Thursday deadline approaches for bailed-out companies to share their compensation strategies for their top earners.
The problem for pay czar Kenneth Feinberg is that his mandate – to make sure pay and bonuses reflect performance and don’t encourage irrational risks – may not match up with the actual political motivation behind the creation of his post: preventing embarrassing payouts from companies that got financial CPR from taxpayers.
With big profits on Wall Street and competition for top talent reemerging, Feinberg has tough choices to make. For example, the guaranteed bonus used to get top talent to switch forms and stay put. If he blocks the practice at the TARP firms, the brain drain to the real economy will only accelerate, leaving the government with more worthless paper. If he allows the practice, liberals in Congress will be screaming for blood.
“Some rivals of the bailed-out banks have already benefited from being out of reach of the government’s pay czar. Jeff Michaels, the head of Citigroup’s interest rate trading in the United States, found Nomura Securities knocking at his door in July with an offer that would guarantee him as much as $10 million for 2009 and 2010. That was nearly twice the $6 million bonus he received last year when he joined Citigroup from Lehman Brothers, according to a person briefed on the offer.”
