Category: Healthcare

What a Moron

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I came across an article in the Washington Post yesterday….No really in the paper edition, about the problems with healthcare in China.

In a rather extensive article, they show how the increasingly private healthcare system is bankrupting ordinary Chinese:

China’s health-care system is in disarray, a side effect of the market reforms that have spurred private enterprise and rapid growth since 1980. Before then, state-owned companies offered cradle-to-grave care, part of a system based on danwei, or work units, that provided health, education, pensions and other benefits. But as the economy has grown more diverse, an increasing number of Chinese have had to fend for themselves, with only a porous government insurance program to help.

While there are some problems with a shortage of medical facilities, particularly in the rural hinterlands, the problem is that people are having their lives destroyed by the costs that they must bear under an increasingly spotty system of healthcare access.

Nonetheless But further down, for reasons known only to God, reporter Steven Mufson feels compelled to bring in a complete idiot as an “expert”:

China’s State Council is eager to improve the situation but can’t decide how. The government currently fixes the prices of all medical services, and doctors are treated — and paid — like public officials. But that has contributed to a shortage of doctors as many talented Chinese choose better-paid professions.

Some experts say more private spending and investment would improve the system. Gordon G. Liu, a professor of economics at Beijing University’s Guanghua School of Management, said he would let people with means spend more money on care, which he said would increase the availability of care by giving doctors incentives to work harder and by luring more Chinese into the medical profession.

So this guy’s solution is to raise prices, when the problem is not that there aren’t enough doctors, but that it’s already too expensive, because this will have doctors clamoring to treat all those rich people farming in rural areas?

Why on earth does the reporter feel compelled to bring this in to begin with? It has nothing to do with the problem described, and it is precisely the wrong thing to do.

Details on Healthcare Bill

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PDF link to house bill. (1990 pages)

I don’t read that fast, but here is a my summary based on reading the Wonk Room’s summaries:

  • Bill won’t really phase in until 2013 (stupid, you need the benefits to become apparent sooner, rather than later).
  • Adds a high risk pool for the time between the enactment and when the benefits kick in.
  • Public option is not the “strong” (based on Medicare reimbursement) option.
  • Requires large (how large?) employers to provide health insurance.
  • Makes the medicare doctor reimbursement permanent, eliminating the annual reimbursement rate Kabuki in the Congress.
  • Kills insurer antitrust exemption.

It’s better than anything likely to come out of the Senate.

Breaking: House Dems Announce Their Bill

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Listening on CSPAN.

Pelosi is giving her House leadership is giving their press conference on the steps of the Capitol.

Pelosi:
10: 38 am — Will close “Doughnut Hole” on prescription drugs.

10: 39 am — Will have public option and end preexisting condition exclusion.

Hoyer:
10: 39 am — No specifics

Other folks:
10: 46 am — Carole Shea Porter brings out the “Petting Zoo”: a medicare recipient from New Hampshire to talk about Doughnut hole.

10: 49 am — Doughnut hole will be phased out between 2010 through 2019.

10: 52 am — More “petting zoo” with a small business owner.

James Clyburn:
10: 56 am — Just introduces Mary Joe Kilroy, who has MS.

10: 52 am — Changes on caps, pre-existing conditions, etc.

11:03 am — More petting zoo.

11:11 am — We’re just into soundbites now, bye.

D’oh!!!!

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You know, when you are an insurance company, like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, it is not a good idea for you to include a request for your customers to contact their Congressman to oppose the public option along with a notice of a rate increase:

First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.

Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.

“No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it’s a slippery slope to a single-payer system,” the BCBS flier read. “Who wants that?”

Plenty of people, it turns out.

Indignant Blue Cross customers have rebelled against the insurer’s message, complaining that their premium dollars have funded such a campaign.

They’ve hit the Internet in a flurry of e-mails to friends and neighbors throughout the state. They’ve called Hagan’s office to voice support for a public option. They’ve marked through the Blue Cross message on their postcards to instead vouch support, then dropped them in the mail — in at least one case taped to a brick — to be paid on Blue Cross’ dime. Or dimes.

(emphasis mine)

As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*

*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.”

House Moves Against Insurance Company

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We have the House Judiciary Committee voting to strip insurance companies of their antitrust exemption, and the the House leadership is aggressively pushing an expansive model for the public option for health insurance.

This may very well be a winner. I would note that 3 ‘Phants crossed aisle in the HJC vote to strip the antitrust exemption, which is an indication of how unpopular the insurance companies have become.

When ¼ of the Republican members committee of the “party of no” vote for this, it is an indication of just how unpopular they are.

I am still not optimistic about the prospect for meaningful healthcare reform, but I am more optimistic, and is largely because the Democrats have largely found their feet, largely on the (largely true) message that insurance companies are evil.

Maybe it’s Not “No Balls”

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Yesterday, I posted that the folks in the White House had no balls because of their hands off attitude toward the public option in healthcare reform.

Scarecrow at FDL has an alternate theory, and current behavior does not make it seem far fetched, that the White House is actively opposed to a public insurance option, either because they cut a secret deal with the insurance companies, or because these people are profoundly afraid of real change:

It is hard to avoid the fear that this White House has now become a principal obstacle to getting meaningful health care reform. It claims it wants major cost reductions in Medicare, via a semi-autonomous cost-cutting commission. But the White House has already bargained away the savings it can achieve from most of the major providers: PhRMa ($80 billion), hospitals ($155 billion) so they can give it back to the doctors (for whom AMA is demanding $240+ billion more over ten years in relief from automatic Medicare reductions).

Why should we not also believe that the White House has a deal to shield insurers from competition by preventing the creation of a public option in exchange for the insurers agreeing to reforms on guaranteed issue and limited community ratings (with the flexibility Baucus provided) and to support this framework with tv ads? (Read Ignagni’s WaPo op-ed today; while defending the PwC study, she says they made a deal, but Baucus broke it; she didn’t say the deal’s off.)

The White House isn’t taking up most of the chairs in Harry’s Reid’s meetings just to watch him make decisions on his own. They’re there to make sure Harry Reid doesn’t undo the White House deals and wander off the reservation.

(emphasis mine)

If the White House sees healthcare reform as an electoral tool, i.e. that if Barack Obama signs a bill that he can call comprehensive healthcare reform, he can run on in in 2012.

The problem is that the natural result of this, forcing people to buy overpriced health insurance from the insurance parasites, will kill the Democratic Party for a generation.

Karl Rove did not manage to create a permanent Republican majority, but, if this analysis is accurate, it looks like Barack Obama might.

No Balls

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The word is that the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill will have the public option, but only if Barack Obama actually asks for it:

There is a growing sense on Capitol Hill that the White House’s refusal to weigh in more forcefully in the health care debate could come at the cost of a public option for insurance coverage.

Democratic aides said that a “handful” of senators who are skeptical of a public plan likely could be persuaded if not to support it then at least to oppose a Republican filibuster, if the administration were to apply a bit more pressure — or even guidance.

(emphasis mine)

Barack Obama has two problems here:

  • He is desperate to sign something, anything, as in keep him away from toilet paper, into law that he can call “healthcare reform”.
  • He still wants everyone, including the Republicans, to like him.

So he is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because he does not have the guts to even try to win, even though it appears that Harry Reid is pretty much begging him for some backup on the public option.

I know that it is only 9 months into his term, but it’s already screaming “1 term wonder” in my ear.

You Can Take the Clue Train

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Someone else can filk the rest of the song, but it appears that even the Blue dogs are starting to get a clue:

At this moment, all Democratic politicians, even the most conservative, are realizing that their voters will blame them, not the insurance companies, if the policies the voters are required to buy are so expensive that premiums consume over 20 percent of those voters’ annual incomes. Suddenly, more generous tax subsidies to cover middle-class premiums seem like a good idea. And if the public option can bring down the cost of premiums those subsidies have to pay for, then the overall size of the reform price tag can be kept under control – a long time demand of moderate Democrats.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah. It took a while, but the Blue Dogs now realize that most people hate their insurance companies.

Hoocoodanode?

Barack and Rahm Need to Get Over Themselves

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So, as a result of putting Republicans (Olympia Snow) and insurance whore DINOs in the driver’s seat in the Senate, the White House is getting flack from Gerry McEntee, the president of AFSME, and the Obama and His Stupid Minions™ are describing this behavior as, “gratuitous slaps.”

Tough noogies, kids. The Obama administration has been running the process on healthcare reform, and pretty much everything else as a war on the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party”, and somehow they are surprised when a Union President, would oppose what is literally a tax on his members just because Obama is desperate to put his name on something … anything … that he can call health care reform.

We need more of what Mr. McEntee is doing, not less.

H/t AMERICAblog.

Alan Grayson Leans on Reid

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I’m really starting to like this guy.*

He’s just delivered a petition with over 90K signatures to Harry Reid telling him to do his f$#@ing job and lead:

I’m told Dem Rep. Grayson will hold a press conference this afternoon in D.C. to unveil a petition to Reid bearing more than 90,000 signatures, collected by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, insisting that “any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles.”

While it is clear that Harry Reid could not do this on his own, he would need backing from other people in the senate leadership, as well as the White House, if he can’t keep Democrats from filibustering healthcare reform, why should we pull the lever for Democrats?

*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.

Not Just Stupid, Not Just Wicked Stupid, but Wikkid Stoopid

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Click for full size

Let’s Send a Senator a Package of White Powder! That’s the Ticket!

John Cole reads Redstate, so the rest of us don’t have to, and he comes across one of the stupidest things yet written this millennium, by Eric Erickson, the “editor” of Redstate.

Yes, he is actually suggesting that people mail packages of a white powdery substance to a US Senator.

Un-dirtyword-believable. Was he dropped on his head at birth or something?

H/t Atrios.

Baucus Piece of Sh%$ Healthcare Proposal Passes Finance Committee

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The vote was 14-9, with President Olympia Snowe voting with Democrats, but she said very clearly that she is only voting this way today.

You know if a couple of Dems had voted against the bill, like Rockefeller, who has been leading the charge for a real public option, and Wyden, who got screwed by Baucus, the measure would still have passed by 12-11, and a shot would have been fired across the bow of morons like Baucus and the Nelson twins.

Of course, now the press is wringing its hands at the likelihood that Snowe may not get Huchison’s position as ranking member of the Commerce Committee, when Kay Baily Hutichison leaves to run for governor against Rick “Goodhair” Perry….My heart bleeds. It’s clear that she has no interest in voting for real healthcare reform.

In the least surprising news of the day, it turns that the insurance industry’s biggest bitch in Congress, Senator Joe Lieberman, is taking the insurance companies’ line, and supporting the status quote.

If You Want to Have an Opinion On Spending, Pay Some Damn Taxes

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So, the Conference of Catholic Bishops is saying that it would be , since they don’t like them, but somehow or other they don’t say a single word on the millions of dollars spent every year on capital punishment that the Pope also says is immoral, or the bank bailout, when the Pope condemns the excesses of capitalism, or the fact that our current system of healthcare victimizes the weak and helpless and kills them.

How about calming down, and drinking a nice warm glass of shut the F%$# up?