White House continues tradition of confusing everyone
Image by aflcio2008 via Flickr
If you have no idea how President Obama’s healthcare reform plans (or the euphemistic health insurance reform plans) will affect you, the White House’s latest continuation of confusing statements should feel familiar. All the opaque, backdoor deliberations, and protean definitions of what reform will mean to America’s healthcare system give “Mission Creep” a bad name.
On Saturday, President Obama appeared to be readying his Progressive constituents for some bad news when he downplayed the significance of a public option, telling a town hall meeting in Grand Junction, Colorado: “All I’m saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”
The following day, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said a public insurance option was “not the essential element” of any healthcare reform. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs immediately rushed in to perform damage control on “Face the Nation” and emphasized that the White House still supports a “public option,” and The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote that an administration official told him that Sebelius “misspoke” in underplaying the importance of the “public option.”
Either the White House is back-peddling after testing the waters on pulling the public option, and officials now understand that Progressive constituents are gravely serious about keeping that teeny, tiny “sliver,” or the healthcare reform team is so uncommunicative that they can’t even pull together a basic message like “We Support The Public Option.”
Meanwhile, the message resonating from pro-reform supporters is strikingly uniform: pulling the public option would be disastrous. Former healthcare insurance industry executive Wendell Potter told me that President Obama appears to be “caving bigtime to the insurance industry. It’s really tragic” when I asked him to comment on Sebelius’s statement that the public option was “not the essential element” of reform.
I asked Stan Brock, founder of Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit group that provides medical care to people living in remote areas of the United States and the world, if he supported the public option. “Yes, I do,” Brock quickly replied. This week marked the first time RAM has gone to a major metropolitan area. The group set up their free expedition in Los Angeles, and saw thousands of patients who queued in the middle of the night for medical care.
HBO’s Real Time coorespondant, Dana Gould, featured RAM and Stan Brock in a fantastic segment on the healthcare debate:
On Bill Moyers’ Journal, veteran health care and consumer issues reporter Trudy Lieberman voiced her skepticism regarding the likelihood that a meaningful public option would ever emerge from Congress:
We don’t know what a public plan will look like. And even if there’s going to be a public plan. The insurers don’t want it. It’s not clear that the doctors want it. And the pharmaceutical companies don’t want it. So my question is, are they working behind the scenes to make sure this doesn’t happen? My guess is– my answer is, they probably are.
Dr. Marcia Angell, editor-in-chief of the highly respected New England Journal of Medicine, and Moyers’ other guest, concurred.
A lot is said about how the public wants to cling to what it has. What I’m finding is something that confirms the polls that have been done. Showing that something like two-thirds of the public would favor a Canadian style or a Medicare for all style single payer system. The same is true of physicians, now. About 60 percent of physicians favor Medicare for all, or a single payer system. So, what is against it? The pharmaceutical and the insurance industries are the biggest lobbies in Washington. They spend millions and millions on influential members of Congress.
While the White House continues to struggle to define what reform means for average citizens, pro-reform supporters are clear about one thing: the public option is essential, but under constant assault from the private healthcare and insurance industries, which are doing everything in their power to permanently sink it.
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First they keep single payer out of the debate then they drop the public option. If you would like to take a stand now and help pressure Congress to pass single payer health care in a democratic and constructive way please join our voting bloc at:
http://www.votingbloc.org/Health_Bloc.php
Thanks for the link. Congress and the White House’s behaviors on this matter have been really shameful. Backdoor deals with private healthcare and insurance corporations have no place in a democracy.
In response to another comment. See in context »Thanks Allison, and pontesisto. It may take a lot of voting blocs to keep the public option from disappearing, but the stakes are too high to quit trying.
The T/S front page link to this article says, “What is the White House’s message on health care?”
I’d say the message to progressives is pretty clear – The Dems are saying, “Bite me! What are you going to do about it?”
Fix healthcare by throwing self-serving politicians out of office
Why did Barack Obama attack pharmaceutical companies before and now he has teamed up with them to promote his health care plan? Why are all the tort lawyers big democratic supporters and multi-millionaires? Obama’s true intentions are so obvious that even the left is starting to express concerns. For example, on August 10, CBS Evening News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson filed a report stating that “the White House agreed not to seek price controls on drugs for seniors on Medicare and would not support importing cheaper drugs from Canada.” According to Attkisson, “The pharmaceutical industry is now so firmly in the President’s camp it’s developing plans to spend up to $150 billion promoting it with TV ads.”
According to the acting president of Public Citizen and founder and director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, “An all sort of off the record deal was reached that is very bad for the American public.” Other experts say that for their cooperation, Obama is allowing pharmaceutical companies to charge $50 for a $2 pill and is assuring them that there will be no changes to the laws that make it near impossible for less expensive generic drugs to reach the American market.
Unless tort lawyers, the pharmaceutical lobby and other special interest groups like the AMA, ADA and the AARP are dealt with to preserves the Constitution and the free market system, while also protecting the medical provider and consumer, no healthcare plan can work. Please view http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe2bpV1QlkE
Cybercorrespondent
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