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During the Senate floor debate on the health care bill, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calls out Republican hyprocrisy on their feigned concern for deficits and spending.
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Keith talks to Wendell Potter about the health care bill that came out of the Senate and how the insurance and pharmaceutical companies fared. Jon Walker has more over at FDL and expressed some similar concerns to those of Potter's with the bill-- Pretty Bad So Far: Eight Things Wrong With The Senate Health Bill.
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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was heckled by someone with a loudspeaker while announcing details of the House health care reform bill. It was not immediately clear what the hecklers were saying or who they represented but Pelosi seemed to have an idea. She turned to the protesters and replied, "Thank you insurance companies of America."
Talking Points Memo talked to some of the demonstrators outside the capital. All of them denied the protest was organized:
Joann Abbott, a grandmother from Northern Virginia, made the drive to the protest this morning after seeing the email sent by Tea Party leaders last night. When asked if she was part of the "flash mob," she laughed. "I'm here on my own," she said, looking around at the scattered protesters around her. "If this is organized, we suck."
Lisa Miller, another protestor, said she was an organizer with a D.C. tea party group. She insisted that the event wasn't organized by a national organization, despite yesterday's email which was signed by a group calling itself "Your Tea Party Patriots National Coordinator Team."
"People keep reporting we're a single group," she said. "But we're not -- we're all separate."
"It's like we're in different cars but we're all going in the same direction," Abbott explained.
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After defending the profits of the health care industry when a previous caller asked him if he thought health care should be a human right, Rep. Issa is then asked who his biggest individual campaign contributor is.
Issa: Ah, boy that's a good question. Ah...I guess I am. I put several million dollars of my own money over the years into my campaigns for the Senate, the House and recalling the Governor, so I'm probably at $11 or $12 million of my own money. After that there's probably somebody that's given me $20,000 or $30,000 over ten elections.
Here are some of Darrell Issa's recent top campaign contributors from from OpenSecrets.org.
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(Yes, even in the future - getting sick and paying for it will be painful)
It's always amazing to hear what the future is going to look like, as viewed from the past. Invariably, all manner of convenience will be commonplace, all menial labor will vanish, all worry about getting sick will still be around.
And who is going to pay for it? Even in 1956, they were scratching their heads. The writing was on the wall - more people on the planet, and more of them getting older and well . . .sicker. The good news was the leaps on modern medicine would be greater (that's happened), but people going broke over receiving those leaps would plague us seemingly forever.
In September of 1956, on the occasion of their annual convention, NBC Radio, via their Monitor series, hosted a panel discussion with members of the American Hospital Association (Albert W. Snoke, Lowell T. Codishall and Chicago Daily News Science Editor Arthur Snider), discussing just what this thing was going to be looking like in the future.
Arthur Snider (Chicago Daily News): “ I think foremost, is and has been for some time the matter of costs. For a considerable time people . . the anger was directed towards hospitals, but now with the introduction of hospital bill . . or hospital insurance plans, we have the matter of increasing premiums. And people now are being a little bit unhappy about that. They say, when they get their bills they could have enjoyed a nice couple of weeks at a fancy hotel for that price. I’m sure that argument is fallacious, I’m sure Dr. Snoke has a thought on that.”
Albert W. Snoke (American Hospital Association): “Everybody gets irritated over having to pay any kind of money for anything. They just don’t enjoy paying out money. I don’t blame them for being concerned about hospital costs and hospital charges. The thing that I’d like to first get clear is that there are two different problems we’re talking about. One is how much does it cost to run a hospital. And next, how much does the patient have to pay when he comes into the hospital. And cost and charges are two different things.”
Bear in mind in 1956 Health Insurance was a relatively new thing, but even in 1956 costs were spiraling out of control. Of course at the time no one thought to lay some blame at the feet of the insurance companies - they were still the new kids on the block.
So now that they've become the bullies of the neighborhood . . .
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For the second day in a row (Monday's show being so chockful o'wingnuttery that we didn't have time to post on it) Glenn Beck devoted two whole segments to the subject of net neutrality.
And for the second night in a row, the discussion featured a guy named Phil Kerpen from Americans For Prosperity, which has a long history of shilling for whatever right-wing corporate agenda it can suck out money for: tobacco interests, health-insurance companies, corporate polluters have all pitched in money so that AFP can variously promote tobacco, lobby against health-care reform (it was one of the original promoters of the Tea Parties) and push the idea that global warming isn't really happening.
And now he's out pushing the notion that somehow, regulating Internet providers so that they cannot determine or limit public access is the same thing as communism. Or something like that. When you have Glenn Beck as your No. 1 cheerleader, logic doesn't actually have to enter into it.
Especially not facts. Because Beck appears to have no idea at all what Net Neutrality is actually all about.
And net neutrality is really the fundamental openness principle of the internet. Whenever you connect to the internet, net neutrality makes sure that you can connect to everyone else who’s on the internet. And this has been a tremendous engine for free speech, for economic innovation, for equal opportunity. And we are now fighting with some very prominent internet service providers, very powerful companies, to try to preserve that fundamental openness, so that whenever we go online we can choose, as users, where we go and what we do via the internet.
Somehow, Beck is able to transform this into an attack on "freedom of speech" -- when it obviously is precisely the opposite.
To guys like Beck, you see, the only threat to our liberties is from the government. Giant corporations that control our means of information, not so much.
Indeed, his argument boils down to a simple proposition: "Freedom" means letting powerful business interests control the public's access to the internet.
First Draft: The last time you trusted a politician
Greg Palast: "Medical Loss Ratio" [MLR] is the fancy term used by health insurance companies for their slice, their take-out, their pound of flesh, their gross - very gross - profit.
The Plum Line: GOP Rep again accuses gay Obama advisor of covering up child abuse - even though his office was infromed the charge is false
Corrente: Leading Blue Dog suggests opening up Medicare for everyone
TheZoo: GOP blocks another attempt to extend unemployment benefits
I had to make a less compelling but similar choice several years ago, when one of my cousins, who also had PKD, asked us all to get tested for possible transplant donation. I was out of work and uninsured, and I knew if I had any complications, I couldn't afford treatment. Even though I felt really bad about it, I didn't get tested.
Isn't it horrible that we're making moral decisions on such immoral grounds? The more I see of the disgusting horse-trading going on over the public option, the more convinced I become that a national (and probably single-payer) health care system is our only sane option.
So what would you do if your mom or dad, or perhaps your sister or brother, needed a kidney donation and you were the one best positioned to donate?
Most of us would worry a little and then step forward. But not so fast. Because of our dysfunctional health insurance system, a disgrace that nearly half of all members of Congress seem determined to cling to, stepping up to save a loved one can ruin your own chance of ever getting health insurance.
That wrenching trade-off is another reminder of the moral bankruptcy of our existing insurance system. It’s one more reason to pass robust reform this year.
Over the last week I’ve been speaking to David Waddington, a 58-year-old wine retailer in Dallas, along with his wife and two sons. I’d love to know what the opponents of health reform think families like this should do.
Mr. Waddington has polycystic kidney disease, or PKD, a genetic disorder that leads to kidney failure. First he lost one kidney, and then the other. A year ago, he was on dialysis and desperately needed a new kidney. Doctors explained that the best match — the one least likely to be rejected — would perhaps come from Travis or Michael, his two sons, then ages 29 and 27.
Travis and Michael each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting PKD. And if pre-donation testing revealed that one of them had the disorder, that brother might never be able to get health insurance. As a result, their doctors had advised not getting tested. After all, new research suggests that lack of insurance increases a working-age person’s risk of dying in any given year by 40 percent.
“At the time David needed a transplant, the people closest to him couldn’t even offer a lifesaving donation — for insurance reasons,” said Mr. Waddington’s wife, Susan.
Travis, who is living in New York and working toward a math doctorate, is anguished at having to weigh insurance obstacles against the chance to save his dad.
“Can you put a price on your father’s life?” he asked. “My brother and I talked it over privately, and agreed that we should both go ahead and get tested anyway. It seemed like the only course of action. We presented our plan to our parents, and of course Mom immediately shot it down, with Dad firmly behind her.
“We had to respect their right to want to protect us. But it was enraging to be in that situation, and to be completely impotent to do anything to help. I told myself a number of times that we would reconsider the issue of testing if Dad’s dialysis stopped working before he got a transplant.”
Again and again, these issues arise that could have been solved by a straightforward push for a single-payer, government-run system. But that, of course, would have required a political system that didn't have corporate sponsors. It's painful to watch them tie themselves in knots, trying to rationalize the death-for-profit system:
Any health-care overhaul that Congress and President Obama enact is likely to have as its centerpiece a fundamental reform: Insurers would not be allowed to reject individuals or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history.
But simply banning medical discrimination would not necessarily remove it from the equation, economists and health-care analysts say.
If insurers are prohibited from openly rejecting people with preexisting conditions, they could try to cherry-pick through more subtle means. For example, offering free health club memberships tends to attract people who can use the equipment, says Paul Precht, director of policy at the Medicare Rights Center.
Being uncooperative on insurance claims can chase away the chronically ill. For people who have few medical bills, it is less of a factor, said Karen Pollitz, research professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.
And to avoid patients with costly, complicated medical conditions, health plans could include in their networks relatively few doctors who specialize in treating those conditions, said Mark V. Pauly, professor of health-care management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
(Note: I am a blogger fellow with Brave New Films and their Sick For Profit campaign. Visit us on Facebook)
It's important to understand what a bill without that public option would actually do. Brave New Films got Jerry Flanagan of Consumer Watchdog to explain the elements of Baucus-care without a public option, and it's not a pretty picture.
As Flanagan explains, without a public option, insurance companies can set their own rates, set their own level of benefits, and force the uninsured to pay them under penalty of law - you're talking about a forced market where people will be fined for not giving money to private health insurance companies. Max Baucus would say that there are safeguards to limit the amount of out-of-pocket spending or premium spending as a percentage of income, but he wants those rules to be set by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, an industry-friendly group without open meetings or public hearings, making the potential for loopholes and abuse very ripe.
Flanagan also takes on the bad employer provisions in the Baucus bill, which will allow them to drop health care for their customers and throw them onto the exchanges. He says that employers could pay only a couple hundred dollars a year per employee under this plan.
Flanagan further explains that the co-op alternative in the Baucus bill could lead to the gutting of state consumer protection laws on health insurance. This is a key point, and could lead to the insurance market looking like the credit card market, with every issuer moving to states with virtually no regulations or restrictions on how they manage their credit card business.
If you're looking for a quick, succinct way to explain the problems with the Baucus bill, pass along this video.
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David Gregory asks Dick Durbin if the public option is "buried and gone" and Durbin reiterates that the most important thing is controlling costs and assuring competition. Howard Dean says he agrees with Senator Durbin and they'd drop the public option in a heartbeat if we got some meaningful regulation of the insurance industry. Of course the ones taking all of their money aren't going to want to do either.
MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you about a key policy provision here, what's gotten so much--taken up so much oxygen in the room in this debate, and that is the public option, the idea of a government plan in these exchanges that would compete with private insurance plan. The president stood behind the idea of competition, keeping the insurance companies honest. But this is what he said about the public plan Wednesday night.
(Videotape, Wednesday)
PRES. OBAMA: The public option is only a means to that end, and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.
(End videotape)
MR. GREGORY: Senator, that was an important statement. Is the public option now buried and gone?
SEN. DURBIN: No, it's not. I support the public option, but I also think the president stated it correctly. What we're looking for is real competition. Understand, the health insurance companies hate this public option, as Dale Bumpers used to say, like the devil hates holy water, Because it means that there's going to be a force in place there that is going to put in competition and keep costs under control. The so-called Lewin Group that's been quoted by many senators on the floor about how this is going to get out of control happens to be an organization that is owned by the United Healthcare Group, a health insurance company. So they've been discredited. The fact is that we understand that putting in a public option means that people will have a choice in markets where there are only a handful of private health insurance companies and people have nowhere to turn...
MR. GREGORY: But, Senator, it can't pass the Senate, can it?
SEN. DURBIN: ...they have to have an affordable choice.
MR. GREGORY: It can't pass the Senate.
SEN. DURBIN: Well, it--I wouldn't go that far. I would say at this point that the House of Representatives includes a clear public option. I don't know what the Senate bill will look like coming out of the Finance and HELP Committee. But we've got to have--at least be true to the principle the president said: Make sure there's competition for these private health insurance companies. These companies do not want the competition, but if we don't have it the prices will not come down.
MR. GREGORY: All right. But, Dr. Dean...
DR. DEAN: Yeah.
MR. GREGORY: ...White House officials I've spoken to have been very clear, saying that the left in the Democratic Party has overshot the runway here, overstating the importance of a public option. Did the president put it away?
DR. DEAN: I don't think so at all. I'm, I'm with Dick on this. Look, the president said yesterday that if you can find another way around it to control the insurance companies' costs, that would be fine. There's another way. There's two countries in Europe that have universal health care without--and it's entirely run by insurance companies. But they treat the insurance companies like regulated utilities. If the insurance companies would prefer to be treated like regulated utilities, we'd drop the public option in a heartbeat.
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After Wednesday night's speech, Bill O was running with McCain's original idea to "fix" health care by opening up all insurance companies to compete in all states. The problem with that is that each state has its own laws governing health care and it would cause incredible conflicts that could not be resolved. BillO is actually stumping for the federal government to destroy states' rights and their laws. Wow.
BillO: Why wouldn't the president say, let's let everybody compete. Let's let all the insurance companies compete nation wide and that will drive the price down...
Axelrod: Well first of all we have a system of state regulation, you know that of the insurance industry that makes that difficult. What we want is these individual market places. Some markets have competition, other markets don't.
BillO: The Feds can override the states...
Axelrod: Excuse me?
BillO: The Feds can override the states, you know that. You can make it so that all health insurance companies compete nationwide.
Axelrod: This is a historic moment with you calling for the feds overriding the states. I didn't realize you had that...
O'Reilly: Federal jurisdiction, you know federal jurisdiction takes precedence in almost every legislative area...
Axelrod was so shocked that he had to ask BillO to repeat himself. O'Reilly is a socialist now.
This is another example of how disingenuous conservatives are. If they want something---everything goes....Now he can't complain about anything the federal government does from now on because what he's saying is far more radical than anything that has been put forth by the Obama administration. Can you imagine the uproar that would take place if the president said he was going to override the states?
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In a speech to Congress Wednesday, President Barack Obama may come out for a public health care option that would be triggered only if health insurance companies don't provide affordable solution in a predetermined time frame. One Republican Senator, Olympia Snowe, has expressed support for this idea. Gov. Howard Dean told Fox News' Chris Wallace that it was a mistake to craft a bill just to get a single Republican vote Sunday.
"The problem is it won't work. It doesn't add anything. If you're going to do that, just do the insurance reform," said Dean. "There's no point in spending $600 billion and giving it to the insurance industry. We know what they'll do with it. I'm hopeful he'll stick to his guns and we'll have the reform we were promised in the campaign."
(Disclosure: I'm working with Brave New Films on their Sick For Profit campaign, exposing insurance industry practices. Check us out on Facebook.)
The New York Times published a very nice press release from the desk of Humana, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies. The reporter interviewed a bunch of employees at Humana, all of whom were horrified to see themselves depicted as "villains" in the health care debate. I agree with Yves Smith, this is an absurd angle for a story, an extreme example of selection bias. The people who work at Humana probably have a sense that their employer, um, pays their salary, and thusly, what's good for the employer is probably good for them. Similarly, most people hold a favorable opinion of themselves just as a matter of getting through the day. Not to mention the fact that their understanding of the functioning of Humana is limited to their job description. It is not possible to gain much of a perspective on the health care debate or industry practices by asking a midlevel manager "Do you think you're the worst person alive?"
Since when is it legitimate, much the less newsworthy, to get a company's perception on its embattled status, at least without introducing either some contrary opinion or better yet, facts, to counter the views of people who will inevitably see what they are doing as right? I hate to draw an extreme comparison to make the point, but staff in Nazi concentration camps also thought they were good people. It is well documented that for all save the depressed, people's assessments of their own behavior is biased in their favor.
There is some revelatory stuff in the article, however. David Sirota flags one employee saying that Humana believes in keeping down costs by "controlling utilization":
Now, I know we're supposed to think that private for-profit health care companies don't ration care, while government-run programs like Medicare do - but as the insurance industry admits right here for all to see, that's just not the case. The obvious truth is that the health insurance industry works hard to "control utilization" - that is, it works hard to make sure that when you need a costly medical service, you are "controlled" (read: prevented) from getting it.
Sure, we're all against excessive testing - and there are good ways to deal with those inefficiencies. But that's not what the insurance industry is talking about. It is talking about its practice of rationing care - and now that reality is right there in black and white for all to see.
The truth of the matter is that many of the charges that insurance companies like WellPoint level at the public option and regulatory changes sought in the health reform bill mirror accepted industry practices. WellPoint, which emailed its own customers yesterday attacking the Democratic plan, claimed that health reform will “increase the premiums of those with private coverage.” Yet WellPoint routinely hikes their own premium prices by close to double digits annually, leading to ever-increasing profits. The email stated that millions of Americans would lose their private coverage and be forced onto a government-run option if the Democratic bill passed (nothing could be further from the truth); yet WellPoint routinely uses the practice of rescission to drop their own customers from coverage if they ever try to use it, and they've admitted they would continue doing so unless forced to stop by law.
The email is an example of the astroturf practices from the industry, including, no doubt, pitching to the New York Times a story putting the human face on insurers. Many of these astroturf efforts spring from the same sources as the corporate lobby groups activating the tea party protests at town hall meetings throughout the country this August. They're trying to change the subject, away from facts, like how they're spending less of their premium revenue on medical care over the years, from 90% in the early 1990s to around 80% today. Or how they use rescission and pre-existing condition to make profits off cherry-picking the healthy and denying everyone else care. House and Senate leaders have requested more and more information about insurance company practices; Dennis Kucinich has joined that effort. But the insurance industry, while nominally siding with reform, wants to keep the focus on efforts against it, in service to de-fanging it.
