Tag: health care

The New York Times is reporting today on the unusual cooperation between House committees on health care — which could mean real progress toward reform.

Such agreements, while no guarantee of success, could help build momentum for a bill. A united front could make it harder for lobbyists to derail legislation. White House officials welcomed the prospect of cooperation by House leaders, saying it increased the chances of passing a bill to expand coverage this year, a top priority for Mr. Obama.

Many issues, including the question of how to pay for it, are unresolved. But the House chairmen said they had informally agreed to plow ahead on the assumptions that individuals would be required to carry insurance and that most employers would be required to help pay for it.

This would appear to be good news, though I am concerned that by taking single-payer off the table we are starting from a weak position, creating the likelihood that the reforms that end up being crafted will fail to accomplish what should be the ultimate goal: universal coverage at a reasonable price that includes incentives for preventative care.

Taxing employer-provided health benefits — by removing considering them as income — was a bad idea when Republican John McCain proposed it during the presidential campaign and it remains a bad idea now.

And yet, here it is:

At a recent Congressional hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat whose own health plan would make benefits taxable, asked Peter R. Orszag, the president’s budget director, about the issue. Mr. Orszag replied that it “most firmly should remain on the table.”

Mr. Orszag, an economist who has served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, has written favorably of taxing some employer-provided health benefits and using the revenue savings for other health-related incentives. So has another Obama adviser, Jason Furman, the deputy director of the White House National Economic
Council.

They, like other proponents, cite evidence that tax-free benefits encourage what Mr. McCain called “gold-plated” policies, resulting in inefficient and costly demands for health care and pressure on employers to hold down workers’ pay as insurance expenses rise. And, they say, the policy discriminates against those — many of whom are low-income workers — who do not have employer-provided coverage.

When Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, advocated taxing benefits at a recent hearing of the Finance Committee, which he leads, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner assured him that the administration was open to all ideas from
Congress. Mr. Geithner did, however, allude to the position that Mr. Obama had taken as a candidate.

The fact that this has come up — and that some universal health care advocates are willing to consider it — shows that the various maneuvers needed to provide full coverage short of a single-payer system are not likely to work.

During the early post-war period, when health care first became a political issue, the medical industry wielded the socialism canard — socialized medicine — to defeat a single-payer system, forcing unions to fight for health insurance for workers. As health care costs have continued to rise, however, employers started cutting back on coverage, pushing costs back onto employees, with the end result being a hodge-podge of plans, unevenly distributed and administered, with far too many people lacking needed insurance.

Fixing the system will require more than the mandates President Obama has called for, more than the various piece-meal approaches being tossed around on Capitol Hill. It will require radical change.

Such change, however, is considered by the political people to be politically untenable, so the political people — who fund their political campaigns with political contributions from the insurance industry and others with connections to health care — fiddle with bureaucratic plans that can only result in political failure.

Hasn’t anyone learned anything from Harry and Louise?

I never thought Tom Daschle was a great choice for health secretary or President Barack Obama’s so-called “healthcare czar” — too many ties to too many lobbyists and too much time spent on Capitol Hill maintaining the status quo.

But I wasn’t opposed to the nomination, either, viewing his access to his former colleagues as something that might allow him to grease the wheels of reform.

Then came the tax problems and that limo and now he’s out. The problem is that his appointment was part of a larger ideological inertia in the Obama camp, one that has resulted in far too many Clinton hands making their returns at the expense of more populist Democrats.

David Sirota nails it with this post today on Leo Hindery, a business leader and Democratic fundraiser that was “one of the few business leaders to use his wealth to challenge deregulation, corporate trade deals and anti-worker policies.” Sirota says he “was blacklisted by the Obama administration”

because he dared to clash with the same Wall Street Democrats whose corporate-backed policies destroyed the economy.

Sirota goes on to remind us that

the Hindrey scalping is only one chapter in what has been one long narrative arc whereby economic progressives have been deliberatelyy shut out of top administration jobs. Amid a stable of eminently qualified and well-respected progressives like James Galbraith, Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Larry Mishel, Obama has chosen Rubin sycophants like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner to run the economy – the same Larry Summers who pushed the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, the same Geithner who masterminded the kleptocratic bank bailout, the same duo whose claim to fame is their personal connections to Rubin, a disgraced Citigroup executive at the center of the current meltdown. Indeed, the only movement progressive in a top economic position is Jared Bernstein, and he was relegated to an amorphous job in the Vice President’s office.

And now we see that’s not an accident. Though Obama won states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana on promises to challenge Wall Street and reform our trade policies, there has been a deliberate and calculated effort to stack the administration with the very Wall Street Democrats who created the problems he lamented, and shun those who have been fighting the good fight.

This may explain the president’s seemingly incomprehensible strategy on the stimulus, one that has him coddling Rrepublicans when he should be getting in their face and spending his political capital. After all, he is the guy with the high approval ratings.

But then, the approach he outlined in his campaign and the months since his victory does not match with the philosophy espoused over the years by Larry Summers.

The Daschle resignation offers Obama a chance to right (actually, to left) the ship, giving him an opportunity to appoint someone committed to a single-payer healthcare plan and not the noodling around the edges proposals being pushed.