Posts Tagged ‘national healthcare’
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
LibertyPen — November 01, 2009 — Economics professors Walter E Williams and Thomas Sowell discuss what citizens can expect from government-run health care. http://www.libertypen.com
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
[This story is older than the other posts but I posted it because it is insightful]
By MICHAEL TANNER
Last Updated: 1:57 AM, March 10, 2010
Posted: 1:21 AM, March 10, 2010
President Obama’s attempts to ram health- care reform through an increasingly reluctant Congress are starting to resemble a really eventful episode of “The Sopranos.”
Whether or not you believe former Rep. Eric Massa’s bizarre accusations of locker-room confrontations and conspiracies to drive him from office, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and its congressional allies are willing to use every trick in the book to get this bill passed.
They’ve already bought votes with pork and special deals — the “Louisiana purchase” ($300 million to bolster that state’s Medicaid program, which swayed Sen. Mary Landrieu); the “Cornhusker kickback” ($100 million to Medicaid there, sweetening the pot for Sen. Ben Nelson), and Florida’s “Gator Aid” (a Medicare deal potentially worth $5 billion, a hefty price for Sen. Bill Nelson’s vote). Plus the millions for Connecticut hospitals, Montana asbestos abatement and so on.
AP
Stupak: Dissenting Democrat being smeared by the left.
Nor were the Obamans willing to let a little thing like election laws stand in the way. They rewrote Massachusetts law to allow for an appointed senator to hold office for several months, hoping to get the bill through before the special election that Scott Brown ultimately won. Their plans spoiled, they even considered holding up Brown’s seating to let the appointed senator continue to vote on health care — until public outrage forced them to back down.
And, of course, there has been an unprecedented willingness to ignore congressional rules — from the failure to appoint a “conference committee” to negotiate differences between the House and Senate bills, to their current plans to use the reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster.
Expect the tactics to get even dirtier now.
Those who support the president can expect favors. No sooner had Rep Jim Matheson (D-Utah) suggested that he might be willing to switch his vote and support the latest version of ObamaCare than his brother was nominated for a federal judgeship.
Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) is also on the undecided list. And, purely by coincidence no doubt, the Justice Department just announced that it is dropping an FBI investigation that has been swirling about the congressman. Gosh, if only Charlie Rangel were one of the undecideds.
Those who oppose the president can expect the political equivalent of a horse head between their sheets.
Some of this is just traditional electioneering: On-the-fence Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln is getting a primary challenger with some backing from the national Democratic machine.
But some of it is much nastier. Massa’s story may have credibility issues, but other opponents of the bill are also starting to feel the heat. For instance, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), whose opposition to abortion funding has become one of the bill’s biggest hurdles, is now seeing attacks on his ethics.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently questioned the legality of the low rent that a conservative Christian group charges Stupak for his DC apartment. She even noted ominously that disgraced South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford stayed at the same building. The liberal blog Daily Kos has picked up on the charges and suggested that both the IRS and the House Ethics Committee investigate.
“Politics ain’t beanbag,” as Mr. Dooley noted. Presidents have always twisted arms and made deals. And when two-thirds of voters are opposed to your plans, you may have no choice but to play hardball.
But when Obama promised to change the way Washington does business, we didn’t think he meant making it a “family” business.
Michael Tanner is a Cato In stitute senior fellow.
New York Post
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, national healthcare, socialism, socialized medicine
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Democrats Stop Trying To Win Over Stupak, Pro-Life Dems
By Ed Carson Thu., March 11, ‘10 4:48 PM ET
Democratic leaders have given up trying to satisfy Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and the dozen or so House Dems who want strict language barring abortion funding in the health care bill, AP reports.
A break on abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change health care in the United States. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House.
***
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the leadership will press ahead without reworking the abortion provision, which opponents say falls short in restricting taxpayer dollars for abortion coverage. He predicted some of the anti-abortion lawmakers in the party will end up voting for the overhaul anyway.
Trying to find language that would satisfy the Stu-pack and make its way through Democrats’ convoluted reconciliation process may have proved too high a hurdle. Or maybe this is just a negotiating tactic.
However, without the dozen or so Stupak Democrats, it’s very, very hard to see how Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rounds up a majority. She’ll need to get roughly the same number of Democrats who voted no on the House bill in November to vote yes this time — without any other defections. But this is the one group of Democrats who can go to voters in the fall and say they never voted for ObamaCare. Many of them represent districts that John McCain carried in 2008. Several others hail from areas where President Obama’s approval ratings are likely under 50%.
IBD’s Sean Higgins e-mailed this possible reason for the move:
The Dem leadership doesn’t have the votes, knows it will fail and thus is setting up Stupak and Co. as the scapegoats.
At this point they have to throw somebody under the bus just to get this over with, so why not the few Dems that the feminists, abortion-rights lobby and the netroots already hate? Unlike the Blue Dogs, other more liberal Dems could probably win the Stupak crowd’s seats, right?
Tags: Abortion, Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
By: David Freddoso
Online Opinion Editor
03/11/10 4:25 PM EST
 |
| Bart Stupak, D-Mich, has been leading pro-life efforts to change ObamaCare, but Democratic leaders won’t play ball. (AP photo) |
House Democrats have given up on fixing the Senate ObamaCare bill’s abortion problem, the Associated Press reports:
Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said Thursday that the leadership will try to secure the necessary 216 votes to pass the bill without reworking the divisive abortion provision.
The Senate version of health care reform would loosen current rules about federal money going to pay for abortions. The House version did not, and as a result a number of pro-life Democrats supported it. Because abortion cannot be fixed through an accompanying reconciliation bill, it looks like pro-life Democrats are out of luck with three bad options. They will either kill ObamaCare with their “no” votes, go back on their word and disappoint constituents by voting “yes,” or else watch it become law without their support.
Read more at the Washington Examiner
Did you know that the HC bill would force half of the newly insured 15 million into Medicaid? Which most doctors don’t accept!
Tags: Abortion, Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
The Editors
March 11, 2010 4:00 A.M.
National Review Online
President Obama recoils when his adversaries call his health-care plan a “government takeover” or suggest it will lead to bureaucratic rationing of care. He insists it would do nothing of the sort and dismisses such criticism as unfounded partisan rhetoric.
The president’s defensiveness is understandable: He knows that his plan is unpopular, in large part because the public deeply distrusts the federal government he wants to put in the driver’s seat. Among voters’ greatest concerns is that a health-care bill approved by Congress would lead to arbitrary government cost-controls that would make it more difficult for patients to get care when they need and when they want it.
Which is why the president’s latest health-care gambit is puzzling.
At the eleventh hour, President Obama has put yet another new idea on the table — the so-called federal Health Insurance Rate Authority — which will only deepen the fears of an anxious electorate, and rightfully so, because the express purpose of this authority is to give the federal government final say over the premiums private health insurers can charge their customers.
Perhaps the president simply could not resist the short-term political value that endorsing such an idea would open up for him. His “closing argument” for passage of his health-care plan certainly gives credence to this theory: His latest stump speech can be summarized as a demagogic harangue against the profits of private health insurers, which he now blames for practically every failing in American health care.
Or perhaps he felt he needed to shore up enthusiasm among House liberals. After all, he is asking them to support passage of the Senate bill, and many liberals find that measure insufficiently activist for their taste.
But whatever the motive, rolling out this idea at this time will almost certainly make the average voter even more suspicious of what Democrats are up to.
Once upon a time, the president seemed to believe that the rise in health-care costs was a function of many complex forces in the health sector. And that is why he hailed last year’s “deal” with doctors, hospitals, medical-device companies, drug companies, and insurers as a milestone in his “bend the cost-curve” drive.
Now, however, he is saying that the solution to costs is much simpler than that. All that’s needed is a federal authority to set insurance-premium rates, and painless cost control will soon follow.
But what happens if the premiums the government allows are insufficient to cover the medical costs of an insurer’s enrollees? After all, the federal government isn’t saying that insurers can diminish their coverage. To stay solvent, insurers will almost certainly argue that the government has to do something about the underlying costs of care. And, given the track record, the government’s predictable response will be to extend price controls even further into the health sector, perhaps by allowing all insurers to piggyback on Medicare’s regulated rates for doctors, hospitals, and others. But these kinds of price controls aren’t painless. They only work to hold down costs by driving out willing suppliers of services. Demand would be unchanged — if anything, demand will be stronger than it would have been without artificially deflated prices. The natural outcome is that, in time, there would be fewer hospitals, clinics, and physicians willing to take care of patients at the government’s arbitrarily low reimbursement rates.
The worst fears of the American public would then be confirmed. Government cost-control — even in the form of harmless-sounding “premium caps” — leads inexorably to waiting lists and inferior care.
The president and his allies are not principally on a mission to improve Americans’ health care — they are on an ideological mission to expand the power of government over Americans’ lives. This latest presidential power grab confirms that fact.
Tags: Barack Obama, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
By Philip Klein on 3.11.10 @ 2:57PM
The Senate parliamentarian has delivered a blow to Democratic efforts to pass health care legislation by ruling that President Obama would have to sign the Senate health care bill into law before the Senate could modify it through reconciliation, according to a report by Roll Call, citing Republican sources.
While this wouldn’t make it impossible for Democrats to pass a health care bill, if the report is accurate, it would make the route to passage more difficult, because House members would have to take a leap of faith in voting for a Senate bill that they don’t like, based only on the assurances from the Senate that they would act to fix the bill once it gets signed.
Tags: Congress, Election 2010, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Politics and Markets Blog
Club Med: Are Dems Using Medicare Payments To Silence Doctors? It’s an annual Capitol Hill tradition: Automatic Medicare physician rate cuts loom, lawmakers suspend them for another year. But with a 21% cut set for March 1, Democrats only delayed it for a month. And Senate Dems only plan to extend that through August. What’s going on? Some Republicans and doctors say Democrats are using the “doc fix” to keep the AMA supporting the health overhaul.
From IBD’s Thursday issue
“Doctors have been held hostage to get them to play ball on the broader health care reform package,” said Sage Eastman, spokesman for Michigan’s Dave Camp, ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee. “As health care reform has been delayed, so has the doc fix.”
“It’s being used as a club to get the AMA to keep endorsing reform,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons, which opposes the overhaul.
The AMA endorsed Democratic health plans last year, when there seemed to be a quid pro quo to back ObamaCare if Congress permanently repealed Medicare payment cuts that lawmakers annually suspend.
But that repeal is a budget buster, so Democrats dropped it from the overall health bill to make the numbers seem to work. Anti-deficit fervor makes a long-term stand-alone fix especially tricky in an election year.
“A 21% cut would be a terrible mistake,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D. “But this is largely a matter of being fiscally responsible. A permanent doc fix would require us to come up with a lot of money.”
Democrats may have decided that a stick works better than a carrot — and is a lot cheaper.
Tags: Congress, Election 2010, Houston Voters, medicare, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
March 10, 2010
Congressman Paul Ryan explains the true costs of the health care bill.
Under the Constitution, the vice president is President of the Senate.
I didn’t think Obama had the authority to order the congress to pass a bill by a certain date so I looked it up. See if you agree. Actually the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, controls the agenda.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Small steps toward a much better world.
[Answer 0 ]
Megan McArdle has an excellent post on that question and here is her column. Here is one startling bit:
To my mind probably the single most solid piece of evidence is this: turning 65–i.e., going on Medicare–doesn’t reduce your risk of dying. If lack of insurance leads to death, then that should show up as a discontinuity in the mortality rate around the age of 65. It doesn’t. There are some caveats–if the effects are sufficiently long term, then it’s hard to measure, because of course as elderly people age, their mortality rate starts rising dramatically. But still, there should be some kink in the curve, and in the best data we have, it just isn’t there.
And this:
The possibility that no one risks death by going without health insurance may be startling, but some research supports it. Richard Kronick of the University of California at San Diego’s Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, an adviser to the Clinton administration, recently published the results of what may be the largest and most comprehensive analysis yet done of the effect of insurance on mortality. He used a sample of more than 600,000, and controlled not only for the standard factors, but for how long the subjects went without insurance, whether their disease was particularly amenable to early intervention, and even whether they lived in a mobile home. In test after test, he found no significantly elevated risk of death among the uninsured.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, health insurance, Healthcare Availability, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Table Of Iatrogenic Deaths In The United States
(Deaths induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures)
| Condition |
Deaths |
Cost |
Author |
| Adverse Drug Reactions |
106,000 |
$12 billion |
Lazarou (1) Suh (49) |
| Medical error |
98,000 |
$2 billion |
IOM (6) |
| Bedsores |
115,000 |
$55 billion |
Xakellis (7) Barczak (8) |
| Infection |
88,000 |
$5 billion |
Weinstein (9) MMWR (10) |
| Malnutrition |
108,800 |
— |
Nurses Coalition (11) |
| Outpatients |
199,000 |
$77 billion |
Starfield ( 12) Weingart (1, 12) |
| Unnecessary Procedures |
37,136 |
$122 billion |
HCUP(3, 13) |
| Surgery-Related |
32,000 |
$9 billion |
AHRQ(85) |
| TOTAL |
783,936 |
$282 billion |
We could have an even higher death rate by using Dr. Lucien Leape’s 1997 medical and drug error rate of 3 million. (14) Multiplied by the fatality rate of 14 percent (that Leape used in 1994 (16) we arrive at an annual death rate of 420,000 for drug errors and medical errors combined. If we put this number in place of Lazorou’s 106,000 drug errors and the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) 98,000 medical errors, we could add another 216,000 deaths making a total of 999,936 deaths annually.
| ADR/med error |
420,000 |
$200 billion |
Leape 1997(14) |
| TOTAL |
999,936 |
Annual Unnecessary Medical Events
| Unnecessary Events |
People Affected |
Iatrogenic Events |
| Hospitalization |
8.9 million(4) |
1.78 million(16) |
| Procedures |
7.5 million(3) |
1.3 million(40) |
| TOTAL |
16.4 million |
3.08 million |
The enumerating of unnecessary medical events is very important in our analysis. Any medical procedure that is invasive and not necessary must be considered as part of the larger iatrogenic picture. Unfortunately, cause and effect go unmonitored. The figures on unnecessary events represent people (”patients”) who are thrust into a dangerous health care system. They are helpless victims. Each one of these 16.4 million lives is being affected in a way that could have a fatal consequence. Simply entering a hospital could result in the following (out of 16. 4 million people):
- 2.1 percent chance of a serious adverse drug reaction (186,000) (1)
- 5 percent to 6 percent chance of acquiring a nosocomial [hospital] infection (489,500) (9)
- 4 percent to 36 percent chance of having an iatrogenic injury in hospital (medical error and adverse drug reactions) (1.78 million) (16)
- 17 percent chance of a procedure error (1.3 million) (40)
All the statistics above represent a one-year time span. Imagine the numbers over a 10-year period.
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, Election 2010, Healthcare Availability, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
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