Unsilent Generation

Entries categorized as ‘health insurance industry’

Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm

March 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Some news outlets have described Obama’s speech at a health care rally in Pennsylvania this morning as “angry” or “”fiery.” As satisfying as it is to hear Obama say something nasty about the insurance companies, the details of his “vilification” of these bloodsucking middlemen are well in line with the tepid outlines of the Democrats’ current health care reform plans. As described by the Christian Science Monitor:

President Obama charged that insurance companies have made a calculation that they can deny coverage for preexisting conditions, drop coverage when people need it most, and make big profits “as long as they can get away with it.”

It was widely known from the start of the so-called health care debate that a baseline goal would be to stop insurance companies from denying people coverage because of pre-existing conditions, or knocking people off the rolls when they got sick. (The public option, as everyone should by now have realized, was never much more than a bargaining chip.) And that’s just what’s likely to happen.

It was also well understood that any health care reform must genuflect before the alter of the  free market. That has been a given since Reagan took office in 1981 and the Heritage Foundation came up with its health care reform plan–which quite resembles the one now being promoted by Obama and many other Democrats.  

The Heritage plan, as I and others have written before, is based on the Federal Employee Health Benefits program (FEHB). It supports a vending machine type “exchange” to sell private insurance across the country to one and all, thereby achieving a supposed twofer–affordable universal health care and preservation of the free market. The problem, of course, is that there is no free market when it comes to health insurance, and the FEHB is becoming more expensive by the day. So the exchanges will do nothing but bring mediocre and criminally overpriced insurance to slightly larger pool of people.

And if we are to believe the latest tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, this is pretty much what Americans seem to want–a timid, lukewarm reform that addresses some of the worst abuses of the health care system without rendering any fundamental change.  Here are some details from the poll: 

The public [is] still split on health care reform legislation, with 43 percent in favor and 43 percent opposed. However, the poll also finds that majorities of Americans of all political leanings support several provisions in the health reform proposals in Congress and most attribute delays in passing the legislation to political gamesmanship rather than policy disagreements….

[The] poll finds that at least six of every ten Republicans, Democrats and independents back at least some of the key provisions in the reform bills that have passed the House and Senate. They include measures that would: reform the way health insurance works, such as preventing insurers from excluding people because of pre-existing conditions; offer tax credits to small businesses to help their workers get coverage; create a new health insurance marketplace; help close the Medicare “doughnut hole” so that seniors would no longer face a period of having to pay the full cost of their medicines; and expand high-risk insurance pools for individuals who cannot get coverage elsewhere.

It is slightly more encouraging to learn that ”Providing subsidies to lower and middle income people also receives strong support from Democrats and independents and near majority support from Republicans.” The problem is that unless we take a meaningful bite out of the profits of the drug and insurance companies–which no one seems willing to do–there won’t be money left to subsidize anything other than junk insurance for those who can’t afford a decent policy. 

The liberal-minded will surely object to me saying this, but I’m inclined to think the Kaiser poll is pretty accurate–because when it comes down to real social and political change, the United States is basically a conservative nation. Anything more than the most incremental change has happened only when we had both a mass grassroots movement and strong political leadership–think of the Civil Rights Movement or the New Deal. 

Neither one of these things has surfaced when it comes to the current health care reform. So the best we can look forward to are a few tinkerings with the existing system, which are better than nothing–but not much better.

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · drug industry · health care · health insurance industry
Tagged: , , , , , ,

Obama’s New Health Care Plan

February 23, 2010 · 2 Comments

Readers whose heads already are spinning in an attempt to figure out the President’s new health care reform scheme might start with these basic facts: The plan essentially relies on middle-class tax cuts and supposed new-found competition through a system of exchanges along the lines now offered federal employees.

Of course, people with no health insurance often don’t have the insurance because they don’t have the money to buy it. These same people would need cash to purchase insurance, not tax credits on their nonexistent or drastically reduced income. And then, too, this exchange system and its supposed beneficial competition doesn’t mean lower costs. It just adds mind boggling confusion over what policies to pick. The exchange is like having to pick through a vast assortment of candy in a vending machine. Is a traditional Hershey bar a better deal than a bag of M&Ms?

Finally, it should be remembered the federal employees are nowadays  paying more for insurance, not less. Is this just another version of the game of smoke and mirrors the Congress and Obama administration are laying on us?

Nonetheless, some think the Obama plan spells real change–at least, enough to make it worth supporting.  Robert Greenstein,who heads the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington, DC-based think tank that tracks social safety net issues, released a statement this afternoon in support of the president’s  plan. Greenstein Makes these points:

  • It makes insurance more affordable than under the Senate bill for families and individuals with incomes… between $29,000 and $88,000 for a family of four. Most people with incomes below 133 percent of the poverty line would qualify for Medicaid, which does not charge premiums and requires only modest co-payments.
     
  • It extends important consumer protections to existing employer-based and individual market plans — for instance, giving enrollees the option of keeping their adult children covered under their policy until the children reach age 26, prohibiting annual and lifetime benefit limits, and, by 2018, requiring coverage of preventive services without co-payment charges.
     
  • It completely closes the gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage (the “doughnut hole”) over the next decade.
     
  • It fixes shortcomings in the Senate bill’s excise tax…..the vast majority of plans would not face any tax. 
  • It strengthens oversight of insurance companies, makes the “playing field” more level between firms that offer insurance and those that don’t, contains stronger mechanisms to reduce Medicare overpayments to insurance companies, adds new policies to fight fraud, waste, and abuse in both Medicare and Medicaid, and closes several egregious corporate tax loopholes.
  • It offsets the loss in revenue (relative to the Senate bill) from these excise tax changes by broadening the base of the Medicare tax — that is, by applying the tax to capital gains, dividend, and other investment income received by people with incomes of over $250,000 a year. This raises substantial revenue while affecting only about the top 2 percent of Americans. 
  • It increases federal financial support for state Medicaid programs and makes that support more equitable across the states.

You can read the full statement here.

Categories: Congress · Obama Administration · health care · health insurance industry
Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Obama’s Stealth Entitlement Commission

February 19, 2010 · 5 Comments

Less than a month after the Senate rejected a proposal for a bipartisan entitlement commission, President Obama has created his own version by executive order. It is not, of course, called an “entitlement commission”–that unsavory term has been banished from the political lexicon, since it clearly frightens the geezers. Instead, it is called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. (Who wouldn’t support that?) The shorthand names are the “deficit commission” and the “debt panel.” This last term is remarkably similar to the much-maligned “death panels”–which seems appropriate, since its primary purpose is to pull the plug on old-age entitlements. Despite protestations to the contrary, the commission exists primarily to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The commission’s slant is evident from the choice of its two co-chairs: former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, a long-time foe of entitlements, and Erskine Bowles, the middle- right former Clinton chief of staff. The rest of the 18-member commission will include 6 Republican and 6 Democratic members of Congress, and four more members named by Obama. They are supposed to make a report and recommendations to the president in December, after the fall elections, and Obama is expected to forward the recommendations to Congress.

In the best-case scenario, Congress will do the same thing it has done with all of Obama’s other proposed reforms–i.e. nothing. Because if it acts at all, it will almost certainly decide to pay down the deficit at the expense of the social safety net. While Social Security may be the proverbial “third rail” of politics, the other debt-reducing options–raising taxes on the rich, or making corporations pay their fair share–will be seen as even more deadly in the current political climate.

An aggressive move to cut entitlements is, of course, a long-cherished conservative goal. The Heritage Foundation has been promoting the idea for decades, and was a major cheerleader for creation of a Congressional entitlement commission. Billionaire anti-entitlement activist Pete Peterson has bankrolled a huge lobbying effort for a commission that could ready the cuts, then ram them through Congress on a fast track yes or no vote. When that idea ran into heavy opposition in the Senate, Obama came up with his comparatively toothless version.

The driving force behind the commission—in addition to Peterson’s determined lobbying– is a group of conservative Blue Dog Democrats, some of whom would most likely be just as happy to see Social Security privatized. They will likely join with Republicans to support cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

This same alliance will also be key to a scaled-back health care reform, which looks to bypass altogether the so-called liberals in Congress. Instead, it depends upon senior conservatives in the Republican party, led by retiring New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg. Gregg has said he thinks the health care system needs changing, and he wants to engage in “constructive dialogue” with the president on reform. But any plan Gregg champions will have to be relatively meager and inexpensive. The fiscally conservative Gregg  joined with Democrat Kent Conrad to support the Congressional version of a debt commission, and he now seems to making common cause with the perennial Democratic health care compromiser, Max Baucus.

The long and the short of this situation is that  the Democratic administration, along with a small group of conservative Democrats in Congress, may make considerable headway toward doing what neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush was able to pull off. They will likely make cuts to Social Security, while at the same time advancing Obama’s government-subsidized “automatic IRA” scheme, which would divert people’s earnings into 401K-style retirement accounts. These, of course, would be invested by Wall Street, helping to rebuild the finance industry. So in the end, we could see a de facto privatization of a portion of Social Security–the ultimate conservative dream, brought to us by the Democrats.

By the same token, the Democratic-led health care reform is likely to bring about some cuts to Medicare and Medicaid–the only single-payer health care this nation has ever known. It will do so while preserving the power and wealth of the health care profiteers who are largely responsible for skyrocketing costs.  The corporations, once again, are set to emerge victorious.

Meanwhile, the old, sick, disabled, and poor, who rely on entitlement programs, will bear the weight of the national debt. The low- and middle-income people still reeling from the recession–who need more, not less, government spending–will be left out in the cold, victims of what the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls “the deficit hawks who distract the public and policy makers from the policies necessary to bring the economy back to full employment.” 

The people and policies responsible for running up the deficit look like the only ones who won’t be taking a hit. In a report released on Wednesday called “Where Today’s Large Deficits Come From,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities added up the numbers and found: “In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.”

Categories: 2010 elections · Bush Administration · Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · budget / tax policy · corporations · economy · financial crisis / recession · health care · health insurance industry · jobs / employment / unemployment · lobbying · pensions / retirement funds · poverty
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Health Insurers Rake in Mammoth Profits

February 12, 2010 · 2 Comments

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont reported today that the five largest health insurance companies posted $12.2 billion in profits last year, 56 percent more than 20008.

In a study of public records Health Care for America Now  found that WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group, Cigna Corp., Aetna Inc. and Humana Inc. covered 2.7 million fewer people than they did the year before.  Some of the insurers actually cut the proportion of premiums that went to medical care and put more into salaries and profits. 

WellPoint’s profit margin of 7.2 percent was the highest of the five big insurers.  Anthem Blue Cross, a California subsidiary of WellPoint, has come under fire for jacking up premiums by as much as 39 percent this year on some individual health policies.

Categories: health care · health insurance industry
Tagged: , , ,

States Launch Their Own Health Care Reforms

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

For those of you totally fed up with  health care reform–now threatening to drag on with Obama’s tiresome face-to-face debate theatrics–some small relief may come from the states, which have begun to take reform into their own hands. Some of these initiatives are for the good; some look pretty bad. In either case these initiatives are bound to make matters at the federal level more complicated, with members of Congress rushing around trying to harmonize state and federal policy–but at least they might make something happen.

The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report this morning posted a starting list of some initiatives, and they’re well worth taking a look at. They run the gamut from a Democratic proposal in California for a single payer system to self-insurance in Philadelphia.

Politico: “State lawmakers in at least three dozen states are pushing ahead with a series of measures aimed at pre-empting whatever might come out of Washington,” reports Politico. “On the left, Democrats in the California Senate recently approved a measure to establish a state-run, single-payer health care system favored by liberals on Capitol Hill. And on the right, conservatives in Virginia and other states are pushing legislation to stave off federal efforts to mandate that individuals secure insurance coverage or require businesses to provide it.” 

Columbia Missourian: “The Missouri Senate spent nearly all of its session time Monday on resolutions that would urge the state’s attorney general to sue the federal government for legislation that may never see the light of day in the U.S. Congress,” says the Daily Missourian. The legislation would urge the state attorney general to join with “other state attorneys general in threatening a lawsuit against the federal government if a version of the health care reform is passed into law. The attorneys general, led by Henry McMaster of South Carolina, have said they would sue over a provision inserted into the U.S. Senate version of health reform that was designed to win the support of conservative U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb.” That language would have exempted Nebraska on a permanent basis “from funding the expansion of Medicaid that would be required under the proposed bill.”

Modern Healthcare on the rise of uninsured residents in Minnesota: “Less than 60% of Minnesotans had health insurance through an employer in 2009, which contributed to a notable increase in the number of residents without insurance in a state that typically has rates of coverage higher than national averages, a new study indicates. Authors of the Minnesota Health Access Survey said the results likely will serve as a preview of other state and national surveys because Minnesota is one of the first states to report academic findings on the rate of uninsured people for 2009.” The survey “found that the number of Minnesotans without insurance increased by 106,000 between 2007 and 2009, leaving the state’s uninsured rate at 9.1%, compared with 7.2% two years earlier.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on efforts by the “Law Enforcement Health Benefits Inc., which oversees health-care benefits for Philadelphia police. LEHB and its administrator, Thomas Lamb, are roundly praised for aggressively reining in costs. … Even so, LEHB’s efforts cannot offset city health-care costs that are high relative to other employers’, mostly because Philadelphia employees pay little out of their own pockets. That leaves taxpayers shouldering health-care costs that jumped 123 percent from 2001 to 2008, a period in which city revenue rose only 38 percent. … Starting in July, Lamb will be at the forefront of a new effort to control medical costs known as self-insurance. Instead of paying a premium to its insurer, Independence Blue Cross, LEHB, using city funds, will now pay claims as they come in. The city hopes to save about $5 million in fiscal 2001 because of the switch to self-insurance.”

St. Paul Pioneer Press:  A legislative effort “to rescue a state-run health care program for the poor took its first hesitant step Monday toward becoming law.” The measure, advanced by Sen. Linda Berglin, DFL-Minneapolis, is estimated to cost roughly $320 million and “would restore coverage, now set to expire at the end of March, for those earning less than $7,800 a year.” A companion measure is moving through the House. “The bill is on a fast track as one of the big early tests of the 2010 session. It passed out of the Senate’s Economic Development and Housing Budget Division on Monday, will be heard in the Senate’s Finance Committee today and is headed toward a vote Thursday on the floor of the Senate.” Kansas Health Institute: “Kansas is going to need more doctors to meet the growing needs of an aging population, officials here say. Meanwhile, the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita has been successful training doctors who choose to remain in the state. Almost half its graduates have stayed in Kansas; the national average for retaining medical school graduates is 29 percent. With the aim of turning out more graduates, university officials here have long wanted to convert the Wichita campus to a four-year school. It’s a two-year program, now.”

Categories: Congress · Obama Administration · health care · health insurance industry
Tagged: ,

David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers

February 3, 2010 · 7 Comments

David Brooks wants to pull the plug on us greedy, grasping old folks. Or more accurately, he wants us to pull the plug on ourselves, by giving up our generous “entitlements” and submitting to Social Security and Medicare cuts. We should be more than happy to do this, he says, out of an altruistic urge to rescue younger generations from misery and penury. Too bad Brooks fails to mention that what really needs rescuing is the nation’s system of social inequality and corporate greed.

In his Monday New York Times column, called “The Geezer’s Crusade,” Brooks zeros in on one of the increasingly popular straw men of our times–that enemy of the people known as the Greedy Geezer.

Dripping with condescension, Brooks runs through a list of all the wonderful things that come with old age in the 21st century. Instead of sinking into dimwitted oblivion, the modern geezer–lo and behold–is actually able to think and function. “Older people retain their ability to remember emotionally nuanced events. They are able to integrate memories from their left and right hemispheres. Their brains reorganize to help compensate for the effects of aging.” Brooks even has scientific proof for his claims: “A series of longitudinal studies, begun decades ago, are producing a rosier portrait of life after retirement,” he writes. According to these studies, old people “become more outgoing, self-confident and warm with age.” We “pay less attention to negative emotional stimuli,” and are just plain happier than the middle-aged.

Yet despite all these bountiful gifts (which undoubtedly offset such minor inconveniences as not being able to walk, see, screw, or control our bladders), we old coots just can’t shake the selfish idea that we ought to get a little help from society in our golden years. After working, raising and educating our kids, and paying taxes all our lives, we Greedy Geezers now want to sit back and rake in our “entitlements”–Social Security and Medicare. Can’t we see that in doing so, we are actually stealing  from the young, denying them a future, and worse, driving the nation into bankruptcy? Brooks writes:

Far from serving the young, the old are now taking from them. First, they are taking money. According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.

Second, they are taking freedom. In 2009, for the first time in American history, every single penny of federal tax revenue went to pay for mandatory spending programs, according to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute. As more money goes to pay off promises made mostly to the old, the young have less control.

Third, they are taking opportunity. For decades, federal spending has hovered around 20 percent of G.D.P. By 2019, it is forecast to be at 25 percent and rising. The higher tax rates implied by that spending will mean less growth and fewer opportunities. Already, pension costs in many states are squeezing education spending.

In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away.

Brooks doesn’t specify the exact reforms necessary to correct this cancer on society, but we all know what they are: We need only reduce the entitlements, along the lines Pete Peterson has been strenuously advocating. That can be accomplished by setting up an Entitlement Commission to impartially hand down “fast-track” cuts to old-age entitlement programs, tell Congress what it has to do, and get the economy back on course. When Obama sees the happy-times oldster lolling about on his houseboat in the Florida Keys, he ought to react the way Reagan did when he observed the “welfare queen” who was supposedly ripping off  taxpayers: Cut off the supply of federal funds, and stop letting the Greedy Geezers feed at the public trough.

If it isn’t politically expedient to cut us off (because we darned geezers insist upon voting), then convince us to do it to ourselves. What Brooks calls the Geezer’s Crusade is an imagined “spontaneous social movement” by elders to reduce their own benefits. He writes:

It now seems clear that the only way the U.S. is going to avoid an economic crisis is if the oldsters take it upon themselves to arise and force change. The young lack the political power. Only the old can lead a generativity revolution — millions of people demanding changes in health care spending and the retirement age to make life better for their grandchildren.

Brooks has audacity, I’ll give him that. Too bad his premise is as phony as a three-dollar bill. But Brooks is far from alone in advancing what I call the Myth of the Greedy Geezer, in which old people’s selfish attachment to their entitlements is the primary cause of the nation’s economic woes, and entitlement cuts are the only solution. The myth is circulated by pundits of all political stripes, and graces the editorial pages of some of the nation’s largest newspapers.

This fabrication serves a myriad of purposes. It substitutes a phony intergenerational conflict–a phantom battle between young and old–for the real conflict in American society: the conflict between the interests of poor and middle-class people, who pay more than their fair share, and the corporations and wealthy elite, who get an easier ride in America than they do anywhere in the developed world.  

In the past 30 years, according to Congressional  Budget Office data, the income of the top 1% of Americans has risen 176%, while the middle fifth have seen a 21% growth in income, and the poorest fifth just 6%. But hey–why talk about taxing the rich when you can balance the budget on the backs of those Greedy Geezers?

Wall Street had to be bailed out to the tune of $1 trillion, and they’re back to business as usual. But why take measures that might “stifle” the “freemarket” when we can just cut Social Security instead? (And never mind that the Greedy Geezers saw their retirement savings decimated and their home values plunge; they’ll manage.) 

Millions of Americans suffer and even die from inadequate health care, and medical costs drive thousands into bankruptcy every year. But why should we expect the drugmakers and insurance companies to reduce their hefty profits, when we can just reduce Medicare payments to those Greedy Geezers? After all, does grandma really need that hip replacement when it means taking money out of the hands of her grandchildren? Should grandpa have a triple-bypass, just to get a few more years of life, when it means bankrupting the country?

What we have here is a classic bait-and-switch. Politicians are talking about the urgent need to cut Medicare because Democrats and Republicans alike won’t take on the real enemies of affordable health care–the insurance companies, Big Pharma, and other providers of medicine for profit. They’re saying we have to “reform” Social Security (a program which, compared to Citibank and Goldman Sachs, is a model of financial solvency) because they are unwilling to really take on Wall Street. They’re devising ways to skim off of entitlements, which have lifted millions of old people out of dire poverty, because they won’t consider a more “socialist” tax structure–like, for example, the one we had in the United States during the Nixon Administration.

In the long run, the Myth of the Greedy Geezer also serves one of the most cherished items on the conservative agenda: permanent cuts to core social safety net programs that date back to the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Commenting on Pete Peterson and the other right-wing ”granny bashers” last year, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote: “It should be evident that the granny bashers don’t care at all about generational equity. They care about dismantling Social Security and Medicare, the country’s most important social programs.” 

This quest just got a potentially big boost from David Brooks and his “Geezer’s Crusade.” I just hope we geezers don’t fall for it.

(For another take on Brooks’s piece, I recommend this post by FireDogLake’s pithy “Earl of Huntingdon.”)

Categories: Congress · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · budget / tax policy · corporations · drug industry · economy · financial crisis / recession · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry · media · pensions / retirement funds · poverty · right wing
Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block

February 2, 2010 · 1 Comment

For many people, the constant flow of news about the end of the recession and rebound of the economy, along with the President’s pledge to create new jobs through  drizzle-down tax cut economics, seems like a bad joke. Not only are jobs not coming back, but the states, which supply the basic safety net in hard times, are cutting back their budgets. Within those budgets low income people, who are searching for jobs while living day to day on unemployment and perhaps food stamps, also face growing health care problems.

In a recent report the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Washington, DC-based think tank which tracks social programs, wrote:

The worst recession since the 1930s has caused the steepest decline in state tax receipts on record. As a result, even after making very deep cuts, states continue to face large budget gaps. New shortfalls have opened up in the budgets of at least 41 states for the current fiscal year (FY 2010, which began July 1 in most states). In addition, initial indications are that states will face shortfalls as big as or bigger than they faced this year in the upcoming 2011 fiscal year. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years.

New gaps in 2010 budgets. An increasing number of states are struggling to keep their 2010 budgets in balance as the mid-point of the fiscal year approaches. Because revenues have fallen short of projections, mid-year shortfalls have opened up in 41 states — some of which have already addressed them — totaling $35 billion or 6 percent of these budgets.

These new shortfalls are in addition to the gaps states closed when adopting their fiscal year 2010 budgets earlier this year. Counting both initial and mid-year shortfalls, 48 states have addressed or still face such shortfalls in their budgets for fiscal year 2010, totaling $194 billion or 28 percent of state budgets — the largest gaps on record.

The crimp in  funds is forcing cutbacks in basic social services like health care in certain states. Kaiser Health News in conjunction with USA Today, has run down some of these states:

The recession is forcing states such as Washington to pare back health insurance programs for low-income people, even as growing joblessness boosts demand for help. Five of six states that use state funds to assist adults not covered by Medicaid are considering cuts, barring new enrollment or raising fees.

The more than 250,000 people in the state programs are adults who don’t qualify for the joint federal-state Medicaid program, either because they don’t have children or earn more than the tight limits states impose on Medicaid eligibility. They represent a tiny fraction of people who get government health insurance, yet the state programs are often their sole option for coverage.

States facing serious problems, according to thise article, include:

Washington: Basic Health — the first state-subsidized program of its kind when it began more than two decades ago — will fold by July unless lawmakers find $160 million in new revenue. About 300 people a day are added to its waiting list.

Tennessee: CoverTN , which subsidizes insurance for workers at certain small businesses and for adults earning less than $55,000 a year, halted new enrollment in December.

Connecticut: Charter Oak , which offers residents insurance for $93 to $296 a month on an income-based sliding scale, must freeze enrollment this year, Republican Gov. Jodi Rell says, unless lawmakers find more money.

Pennsylvania: The state’s adultBasic will double fees for doctor visits in March to $10-$20 and add a $1,000 maximum annual charge for hospital care. The wait list more than doubled in 2009, from 165,318 to 353,301.

Minnesota: The General Assistance Medical Care program, which covers adults earning less than $8,000 a year, will end in March unless lawmakers find an alternative.

Categories: economy · financial crisis / recession · health care · health insurance industry · jobs / employment / unemployment · poverty
Tagged: , , , ,

Obama’s Disappointing State of the Union

January 27, 2010 · 4 Comments

Obama’s State of the Union message offered little that was new, bold, or inspiring. He spoke about the need for jobs, but avoided any specific proposals for creating them. While the unemployment rate runs 10 percent overall, and over 15 percent for blacks in some states, Obama is focused on tax credits for the middle class. Just how an unemployed worker can benefit from such tax breaks is a mystery.

The president’s economic plans eschew dramatic government action in favor of the market and the private sector. The administration is proposing the Heritage Foundation’s automatic IRAs to encourage savings by workers. To make this idea more appealing, the administration has suggested that the government might put $500 into each individual account to jump-start the program. As I wrote earlier, this scheme promises to be another boon to Wall Street. If the Democrats were willing to to ignore Republican attacks on big government, they might choose to put the $500 into Social Security instead.

Continuing the government-cutting theme, Obama proposed a freeze on spending, starting next year. The freeze wouldn’t include Medicare or Medicaid. But in another proposal, Obama said he would create by executive order a commission that would propose cuts in entitlements. That’s how, in Washington, you can support one program by undercutting it at the same time.

As for health care reform, it looks like what’s in store is a further weakening of an already weak bill, perhaps reducing it to a ban on some of the worst abuses by insurance companies, such as denying benefits to people with pre-existing conditions. There is likely to be no meaningful reining in of the insurance or pharmaceutical industries, and no control over costs. All in all, a lackluster, disappointing speech.

What would I like to have heard the president say tonight? Earlier this week, I wrote about FDR, and the ambitious initiatives he undertook in his first year. I thought about his insistence–which today sounds almost quaint–that the government exists to help its people, and when they need more help, the government should do more, not less. I thought about this particular historical moment, when the ruthlessness of Wall Street and the folly of conservative economic policymaking have been laid bare. It was a moment that might have been siezed for the purpose of real change. But tonight’s speech tells us, once and for all, that the moment has come and gone.

The historian and humanitarian Howard Zinn, who died suddenly today at age 87, said this in a speech made a few days after the 2008 election, and broadcast by Amy Goodman earlier this year: 

Why is all the political rhetoric limited? Why is the set of solutions given to social and economic issues so cramped and so short of what is needed, so short of what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands? And, yes, Obama, who obviously is more attuned to the needs of people than his opponent, you know, Obama, who is more far-sighted, more thoughtful, more imaginative, why has he been limited in what he is saying? Why hasn’t he come out for what is called a single-payer system in healthcare?…

I was really gratified when Obama called for “Let’s tax the rich more, and let’s tax the poor and middle class less.” And they said, “That’s socialism.” And I thought, “Whoa! I’m happy to hear that. Finally, socialism is getting a good name.”…But still, you know, he wouldn’t come out for a single-payer health system, that is, for what I would call health security, to go along with Social Security, you see, wouldn’t come out for that; wouldn’t come out for the government creating jobs for millions of people, because that’s what really is needed now. You see, when people are—the newspapers this morning report highest unemployment in decades, right? The government needs to create jobs. Private enterprise is not going to create jobs. Private enterprise fails, the so-called free market system fails, fails again and again. When the Depression hit in the 1930s, Roosevelt and the New Deal created jobs for millions of people. And, oh, there were people on the—you know, out there on the fringe who yelled “Socialism!” Didn’t matter. People needed it. If people need something badly, and somebody does something for them, you can throw all the names you want at them, it won’t matter, you see? But that was needed in this campaign….

You know, I like him. I’m for him. I want him to do well. I’m happy he won….But when I saw Obama and McCain sort of both together supporting the $700 billion bailout, I thought, “Uh-oh. No, no. Please don’t do that. Please, Obama, step aside from that….I’m sure something in your instincts must tell you that there’s something wrong with giving $700 billion to the same financial institutions which ruined us, which got us into this mess, something wrong with that, you see.” And it’s not even politically viable. That is, you can’t even say, “Oh, I’m doing it because people will then vote for me.” No. It was very obvious when the $700 billion bailout was announced that the majority of people in the country were opposed to it. Instinctively, they said, “Something is wrong with this. Why give it to them? We need it.”…

Obama should have been saying, “No, let’s take that $700 billion, let’s give it to people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s create jobs, you know.” You know, instead of pouring $700 billion into the top and hoping that it will trickle down to the bottom, no, go right to the bottom, where people need it and get—so, yes, that was a disappointment. So, yeah, I’m trying to indicate what we’ll have to do now and to fulfill what Obama himself has promised: change, real change. You can’t have—you can say “change,” but if you keep doing the old policies, it’s not change, right?

Categories: Great Depression · Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · budget / tax policy · drug industry · economy · financial crisis / recession · health care · health insurance industry · jobs / employment / unemployment · pensions / retirement funds
Tagged: , , ,

Health Care Industry Stocks Up As Democrats Go Down

January 20, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Courtesy of Kaiser Health News, here’s a roundup of this morning’s reports on how the Republican victory in Massachusetts–and its ominous implications for health care reform–affected the stocks of the heath care profiteers. This, of course, is what it’s really all about.

Health shares rose Tuesday as traders considered the prospect that a Republican victory in the special Senate election in Massachusetts could jeopardize the health reform legislation. The Boston Globe reports that “traders placed bets that the outcome of an election in Massachusetts would make it harder for President Obama to overhaul health care. … Rising health care stocks led the market higher as the prospect of a logjam in Washington eased concerns that profits at companies like insurers and drug makers would suffer” (Paradis, 1/20).

BusinessWeek/Bloomberg: “The potential demise of the legislation cheered investors who feared the plan may limit revenue in the health-care industry, said Takeru Ogihara, who helps oversee $27 billion as chief strategist at Mizuho Trust & Banking Co., in a telephone interview from Tokyo.” Although the legislation could add millions of customers for health care businesses, analysts said it also “carried the risk of higher fees, increased regulation and narrower profit margins, said Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, a Washington-based research group. Health-care companies in the MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose 1.4 percent as a group, the largest advance among 10 industries. Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Asia’s biggest drugmaker, and Astellas Pharma Inc., which derives 24 percent of revenue from North America, both climbed. In Europe, GlaxoSmithKline Plc of London and Sanofi-Aventis SA of Paris, which get 40 percent and 31 percent of sales, respectively, in the U.S., led gains. (Nussbaum and Tirrell, 1/20)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Merck and Pfizer stocks jumped “on hopes for more concessions to be made to health-care legislation. Broad gains across other sectors came as investors bet that compromises may be likely for other issues such as corporate taxes and financial-services regulation” (Kardos Yesalavich, 1/20).

BusinessWeek: “Options traders boosted bullish bets on U.S. healthcare stocks, lifting volume for contracts to buy the shares to six times the four-week average, on speculation that Republicans will block an industry overhaul. More than 64,000 calls giving the right to buy shares of the Health Care Select Sector SPDR Fund, or XLV, changed hands as of 4 p.m. New York time, almost seven times the level for puts to sell shares. The exchange-traded fund tracking 52 drugmakers, health insurers and hospital operators climbed 2.4 percent to $33 for the biggest advance since June” (Kearns, 1/19).

Categories: Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Obama Administration · corporations · drug industry · health care · health insurance industry · lobbying
Tagged: , , , ,

Aging Right Wingers Revolt Against AARP

December 21, 2009 · 1 Comment

Today is the day that over-50 Tea Partiers across the country are supposed to burn their AARP cards to protest the group’s support for health care reform. At least, that’s what one right-wing blogger is encouraging them to do. As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, self-described “Tea Party Patriot” Sam Mela announced the “1st Tea Party Winter Fest for Health Care Freedom & AARP Card Burning”:

The Tea Party Movement is initiating a nation-wide AARP Card Burning, on the first day of winter, December 21, 2009. This is in response to AARP’s duplicitous stance in support of Congress’ attempted thievery of ample health care away from the American people. This response is being called for due to the fact that Congress has turned a deaf ear to the will of the American people, one of the most vulnerable groups of our society, our American Seniors….

Don’t forget your lighters, AARP cards and any other AARP printed material/mailings; home made cards a/or signs…you could even dress up like Santa, or his elves, Scrooge, Tiny Tim, whatever your favorite Christmas character…don’t forget your cameras & video recorders! If YOU don’t send this message NOW, the die will be cast!

It seems unlikely that more than a few stragglers will turn out in Santa suits today to torch their membership cards (and a good thing, too, since as one of my readers pointed out, the cards are plastic). When a West Virginia Tea Party organizer called for a day of AARP card burnings earlier this month, the only reports were of a half-dozen protesters huddled around a fire in the state capital.

That hasn’t stopped Republican politicians from picking up the battle cry. John McCain recently urged AARP members to trash their cards both in Arizona speeches and on the Senate floor. (To his credit, he told them to cut the cards in half and send them back to AARP, rather than burn them.) 

Though AARP has lost tens of thousands of members over the health care reform issue, that’s a tiny fraction of its 45 million total. President Obama and Democratic senators have been making much of AARP’s support for the reform legislation, leading Sam Mela, in a post yesterday, to lament the fact that “in terms of Public Relations and Public Perception, the AARP has been able to steamroll over the Tea Party movement, without encountering even token resistance, although it would have been a simple matter for the Tea Partiers to neutralize them at any time.”

Yet the behemoth group itself seems worried about losing the PR war in what they say is the most divisive issue it has ever encountered. At a press briefing in October, one AARP executive said that despite expending significant resources, it had been unable to unite its membership, while another declared, “We face a communications challenge.” A conservative  group, the American Seniors Association, is exploiting the opportunity, offering half-price memberships to anyone who mails in their cut up AARP card. And polls consistently show the strongest opposition to health care reform comes from the over-65 crowd. 

Although, unlike most reporters covering the subject, I am a member of the age group in question, that doesn’t mean I get what this resistance is all about. Or rather, I understand there being resistance–but it’s for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been critical myself of AARP for their cozy, lucrative partnership with the health insurance industry. And I get testy when I hear about big cuts to Medicare, knowing that the “reform” will only increase the profits of insurance and drug companies. But the reform bill throws seniors a few crumbs, which is about all it does for anyone else. And it’s no threat at all compared with the Republican dreams of remaking Medicare on a privatized model, along the lines of Bush’s Part D prescription drug program. 

Beyond these details, there’s the strange fact that all this resistance comes from right-wing old folks, who enjoy the only single-payer health care program this nation has ever known. As another reader of my previous post pointed out, ”Courage would require that they burn their Medicare Cards and renounce that socialism rather than a meaningless protest against a non-governmental organization.”

Like the now-famous town hall geezer who told his Congressman to “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” there’s some pretty nutty self-contradiction in the comments I’ve seen on the AARP revolt. One response to Sam Mela’s card-burning blog post attacked the organziation for being both a left-wing front and a corporate stooge: “I never have trusted this socialist orgainization that makes it money off of insruance commissions on its members.”

There’s half a grain of truth in this analysis. But somehow, it’s the red menace part that always seem to stick, while the real enemies of decent, affordable health care get a free pass.  In the end, I guess, it all boils down precisely the way it usually does in America: While a divided citizenry haggles over crumbs, the private companies take the cake.

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Congressional Republicans · Medicare · Obama Administration · corporations · drug industry · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · health insurance industry · media · readers write back · right wing
Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,