President Obama’s approach to reforming healthcare is to obtain minimal cost growth slowdowns from insurers and providers with one hand while doling back enormous amounts of cash with the other.
David M. Herszenhorn and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, writing for the New York Times, report that while the healthcare industry has promised to slow the growth of healthcare costs—not cut costs, but slow the growth of increases—by 1.5%. The story that’s not being told is what these companies will be receiving in return.
The pharmaceutical companies, for example, get an agreement from Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), chair of the Finance Committee, to keep Democrats in the US House of Representatives in line with regard to reducing what the government pays for drugs for Medicare patients previously covered by Medicaid. The doctors, meanwhile, get a revocation of federal law limiting the growth of Medicare reimbursements worth a hefty US$250 billion. Hospitals get dinged with lower reimbursements but a simultaneous guarantee that more patients will be paying their bills because they’ll be insured. Wal-Mart gets an exception to mandatory health coverage for large company employees.
And for the insurance companies? Well, Baucus has conveniently failed to include a government-run insurance program intended to compete with private insurers.
It’s not for nothing that Baucus has cut these deals. He’s received US$1,182,613 from the insurance industry; US$1,031,276 from health professionals; US$740,605 from the pharmaceutical industry; and US$568,491 from hospitals and nursing homes.
And now, the Obama administration seems to be backing away from a government-run insurance program. Rahm Emanual, Obama’s chief of staff told the Wall Street Journal, “It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option.” Emanual proposes triggers, “a mechanism under which a public plan is introduced only if the marketplace fails to provide sufficient competition on its own.”
The American citizenry doesn’t want this two-handed shuffle, this pay-no-attention-to-the-other-hand misdirection. Americans overwhelmingly—a whopping 72%; only 20% were opposed—want a “government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans,” according to a 21 June 2009 New York Times/CBS News poll.
The American citizenry clearly wants a single-payer universal coverage healthcare system. What part of that is so hard to understand?
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