Former HHS Secretary nominee, and enthusiastic free rider Tom Daschle* has let slip that Obama cut a deal with pharma and insurers to kill the public option at the start of the healthcare reform process.
Eleventy dimensional chess, my ass. We are dealing with someone who has created faux reform because he does not want real reform.
*The great Matt Taibbi noted, when he talked about his lobbying activities, “Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.'”
It appears that Mr. Carter still cannot get over his hatred of Teddy Kennedy, so he’s going after a dead man, blaming Kennedy for killing his healthcare proposal.
Just as classy as ever, I see.
He still thinks that the Kennedy challenge in 1980 is what cost him the White House. It’s wasn’t.
What killed his chance for a 2nd term in 1980 was one James Earl Carter, was elected with much hope, but found to be a sanctimonious jerk.
I would note that this assessment does not include my opinion that Carter is a war criminal on par with Henry Kissinger because he and Zbigniew Brzezinsk decided to purchase a civil war in Afghanistan, knowing creating untold suffering in that nation and its neighbors.
They are having a blood drive in Ohio, where donating blood enters you into a competition for a brand new car, or, if you so choose, you can win a brand new custom made horse-drawn buggy:
During the traditionally slow summer months for blood donation, the Northern Ohio Blood Services Region of the American Red Cross offers an incentive: Donate a pint, get a chance to win a car.
It’s a tried and true promotion. From charity golfers to high school boosters to game show contestants, who wouldn’t want to drive home in a brand … new … car!
How about a culture that shuns such modern contrivances. Say, the Amish.
Turns out Amish people are faithful blood donors in this district, which encompasses Geauga, Holmes and Tuscarawas counties – all centers of Amish population.
The Red Cross doesn’t want to forget them, said spokeswoman Christy Chapman. So in addition to the car, donors can win a brand…new…buggy!
Seriously.
Obviously, this is a sensible and humane way to encourage blood donations by accommodating the needs of a supportive community, but I also find it a hoot.
What can I say, I’m not a good person.
Liz Fowler, who was a former staffer of Max Baucus, who went to work as a lobbyist for Wellpoint (vice president of public policy), and then came back to Baucus to kill the public option, has has been hired by the White House to implement the regulations for healthcare reform.
Yet more of the criminally naive concept of bringing enemies in to run programs that they did their best to destroy.
Additionally, it makes a joke of yet another of Obama’s promises, to shut down the revolving door between government and industry, because if Ms. Fowler were going through the revolving door any faster, it would look like a Cuisinart set to liquefy.
The same folks who bought you the draconian restrictions on abortion in Barack Obama’s healthcare bill are now lobbying to ban federal coverage for all forms of birth control.
Let’s be clear here, this is not about meaningful policy. They just want to punish women for having sex:
Polls suggest the majority of Americans would support such a policy. But the Daily Beast has learned that many conservative activists, who spent most of their energies during the health-care reform fight battling to win abortion restrictions and abstinence-education funding, are just waking up to the possibility that the new health care law could require employers and insurance companies to offer contraceptives, along with other commonly prescribed medications, without charging any co-pay. Now the Heritage Foundation and the National Abstinence Education Association say that, like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, they oppose implementation of the new provisions.
This why there is no meaningful space for discussion for these people.
They use terrorism against doctors, they are working to make birth control unavailable at pharmacies, and now they are trying to exclude birth control from prescription coverage.
Enough is enough. These people are not the opposition, they are the enemy.
H/t Atrios
On Thursday, Sharon* spent 6 hours in the emergency room with severe chest pains.
It turned out that it was her long-standing problems with acid reflux, so it was not a heart attack, it was heart burn.
Well, because of Sharon’s* sensitivities, allergies, and odd interactions between her body chemistry and drugs, there is currently only one drug on the market, the proton pump inhibitor Dexilant, on the market which can address this.
She’s tried all the other ones, and they don’t work, but the insurance company drones have decided that it’s a good idea to deny the authorization to save a few bucks.
We are appealing.
How many f$#@ing trips to the ER with symptoms of a heart attack, which they cover at 100% does it take to wipe out any savings?
Well, let me give you a hint,we have already blown through that with the first trip to the ER.
Not enough bullets.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
As I have mentioned a number of times, Harry Reid is polling horribly in his bid for reelection.
In fact, his poll numbers are so bad that it appeared that his only hope was that there was a possible teabagger 3rd party candidate.
Well, it looks like the the Republican front runner just threw a life line to the Senate Majority Leader, or more accurately, she threw herself an anvil.
You see, she made a statement about how barter should be an important part of healthcare.
When I first heard this, I assumed that this was someone misspeaking and confusing “barter” and “bargain”.
I was wrong. She really meant barter, as in chickens for MRI’s:
The feathers are flying in the political attacks over Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden’s declarations that people could control health care costs through the use of barter.
On Monday, Lowden doubled down on the barter idea. “Let’s change the system and talk about what the possibilities are. I’m telling you that this works,” Lowden said. “You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say I’ll paint your house.”
(emphasis mine)
So, not only is she eschewing healthcare reform, she is apparently opposed to the very concept of money, the center of our financial system.*
So, she’s not just a Republican, she is an Anarcho syndicalist, opposed to the very concept of money, or she’s a complete moron, or maybe both.
In any case, Senator Reid, it’s better to be lucky than good, and you just got lucky.
*OK, money and greed……†
†……OK, money, greed, and fractional-reserve banking……‡
‡…………OK, money, greed, fractional-reserve banking, and a well defined system of contract law ……………… Oh, never mind.
He has issued an order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to mandate that hospitals extend visitation rights to gay partners, as well as requiring hospitals to recognize power of attorney for same sex couples.
Of course, the actual rule is still months away, but my guess is that John Aravosis’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Give donor boycott has finally developed critical mass, and the fund raisers are beginning to notice.
So, now we know, that, if absolutely backed into a corner, Barack Obama is willing to take the most timid steps for LGBT civil rights.
3 cheers.
It appears Orrin Hatch, who voted against the healthcare bill, and is claiming that the healthcare bill is unconstitutional, still managed to insert ¼ billion in funding for abstinence only education.
Great.
These programs don’t work, and in fact the only effect appears to be encourage higher risk behavior, like anal sex, but the Republicans have gotta pay off a constituency, and for some reason, the Dems have let them.
F%$# that.
You know, if I didn’t share this with you, I’d be most negligent in my duties.
What can I say? It’s a big f%$#ing joke,
The House of Representatives just approved the minor changes to reconciliation side car.
Note that, once again, the public option got left on the sidelines.
The Senate said that they had more than 50 votes for it, and the House is supposed to have more than 217 for it, and with the tweak, it could have been put in, but it wasn’t.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Barack Obama agreed to kill the public option very early in this process:
For months I’ve been reporting in The Huffington Post that President Obama made a backroom deal last summer with the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure there would be no national public option in the final health reform legislation. (See here, here and here). I’ve been increasingly frustrated that except for an initial story last August in the New York Times, no major media outlet has picked up this important story and investigated further.
John Walker at FDL notes the shifting reasons for killing the public option, and draws what I think is the accurate explanation:
It is foolish to believe that a President, Senate Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House with historically large majorities couldn’t get a public option–which roughly 65% of the country supported–if they really wanted one. Clearly, if they all really wanted to include a public option, they could have done it using reconciliation. To accept their many different excuses of powerlessness requires one to completely suspend reality.
Occam’s razor teaches us the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Here, the simplest explanation is that, months ago, Obama promised to kill the public option as part of a secret deal with the for-profit hospital lobby, and that for months he lied to the American people about supporting the public option while working behind the scenes to stop it.
So, when exactly does that changing the way Washington works thing start again?
(emphasis mine)
Indeed.
Charles Grassley, who took less than 24 hours to take credit for the good parts of the healthcare bill:
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has long been a vocal critic of the Democrat’s health reform efforts, but today he started taking credit for some provisions of the bill, and talking up his own role in crafting the legislation.
In a release sent out by his staff to reporters today, Grassley says the bill will “hold tax-exempt hospitals accountable for the federal tax benefits they receive” thanks to his work.
If you recall, Grassley bought into the whole death panel bullsh%$, and spread every lie possible in an attempt to kill the bill, and now he is trying to take credit for the good parts.
Full statement after the break:
M E M O R A N D U M
To: Reporters and Editors
Re: tax-exempt hospitals provisions in new health care law
Da: Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Committee on Finance, with
jurisdiction over taxes, has worked to hold tax-exempt hospitals accountable for the federal tax benefits they receive. The health care legislation signed into law yesterday includes provisions Grassley co-authored to impose standards for the tax exemption of
charitable hospitals for the first time. The bill requires that a hospital complete a community needs assessment once every three years and adopt and publicize a financial assistance policy; prohibits billing those who qualify for financial assistance the top rates; and prohibits a hospital from taking extraordinary collection actions if the hospital has not made reasonable efforts to notify patients of its financial assistance policy.The bill also requires the IRS to review the tax-exempt status of each hospital every three years; requires Treasury and Health and Human Services to submit an annual report to Congress on the level of charity care, bad debt expenses and the unreimbursed costs of means-tested and non-means-tested government programs; and requires Treasury and HHS to provide a report in five years on the trends on the items reported on an annual basis.
Grassley made the following comment on the advancement of these provisions.
“Tax-exempt hospitals don’t have many measures of accountability for their special status. The law hasn’t given them much direction, and so they’ve defined standards for themselves. Sometimes that’s resulted in providing very little charitable patient care or other community benefits, failing to publicize charitable care to patients, charging
indigent, uninsured patients more than insured patients, and using very aggressive collection practices. The Government Accountability Office and others, including the former IRS commissioner, have said for a long time that there is often no discernible difference between the operations of taxable and tax-exempt hospitals. These new provisions are modeled after principles and polices that the Catholic Health Association has had in place for years. I appreciate the association’s willingness to have honest, forthright conversations about charitable hospitals’ activities. The provisions take steps to differentiate tax-exempt hospitals from for-profit hospitals and provide further transparency about tax-exempt hospitals’ fulfilling their charitable mission. Congress, the IRS, and the public will now have additional tools and information to ensure that charitable hospitals act charitably.”The provisions enacted in the new health care law are the result of
Grassley’s leadership on tax-exempt organizations’ accountability and
transparency, including hospitals. In 2005, he sent letters of inquiry to some of the nation’s largest tax-exempt hospitals. In 2006, he convened a hearing and released a summary of the hospitals’ responses. In 2007, he released a staff discussion draft of potential legislative reforms and convened a roundtable of experts to discuss the potential reforms. In 2008, he followed up with letters of inquiry to more hospitals and received a report he’d requested from the Government Accountability Office. In 2009, he drafted legislative reforms and succeeded in persuading the Democratic majority to include several of the reforms in the new health care law.
Or is it a beginning?†
Joe Biden says, “It’s a fucking big deal.”
I think that it is clear that there is a lot more that needs to be done, and I am reasonably sure that Barack Obama won’t do much.
I think that he has to create the appearance of support on the side-car, because otherwise, he will have the every Democrat in House of Representatives out for payback, but beyond that, I think that he has his paper to sign, and he won’t do much beyond this.
His strategy, as it has been in finance reform, has been to buy off the market malefactors, and so I think that attempts to further improve the system, whether it is Grayson’s Medicare buy in, or Kucinich’s elimination of ERISA preemption will likely be opposed.
Of course, it will be sold as the, “time not being right,” much as he has done with the repeal of DADT, the ENDA, the EFCA, etc.
I would note that my predictive record sucks, and perhaps he will surprise me.
If this is all that Obama will do with healthcare, than we have just seen him make his own flight suit speech, but if he supports further improvements, then, as the fucking* Vice President of the United States accidentally said into a live microphone, “This is a big fucking deal.”
BTW, one of my predictions is coming true: when I said that the preening narcisists in the Senate would find a way to make the bill worse, for the same reason that a dog marks his territory, I was right, case in point, Jim Baucus claiming that there would have to be minor changes to the bill to accommodate Senate rules:
Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus told reporters today that there may be “one or two” changes to the health care reconciliation bill, meaning it could be sent back to the House for another vote.
“Anything is possible. We’ve constructed this thing so well … maybe one or two but they’re so minor they’re almost not even worth mentioning,” Baucus said.
Any changes to the bill, even minor, will send it back to the House for another vote there before it can go to the president’s desk.
But it seems that either he got the face time on camera that he wanted, or someone threatened to disembowel him with a rusty spoon:
Late update: But Conrad now says he’s confident there won’t be changes.
“We’ve found additional precedent that supports our view that nothing is Byrd-able,” he said, referring to the Byrd rule on which legislation may be passed under reconciliation.
Kudos to whoever put a horse’s head in his bed.
*I consider myself to be a fairly profane writer, though mu rule is to %$# out my swear words, but fuck it, if the Vice President can drop the F-bomb today, than so can I.
†Yes, this T-shirt is for sale from Zazzle.com.
He takes the general case, and makes it too specific when he says, “Democrats discover the benefits of taking a stand on health reform.
The reality is that American voters favor audacity, even when the policies are things that they do not support, one need only look at Reagan and Bush, who achieved their popular support despite pushing policies that the American public generally opposed.
The route to electoral success is to tell the Republicans to go Cheney themselves, and then include things in the bill that jam them up with the voters when election time rolls around.
Simply put, while I understand and appreciate his desire tosay, “In your face,” to Republicans, who have now appeared to lose the vote, this over-steps the basic bounds of humanity.
Seriously man, you use the music of ABBA to chastise Republicans?
You do know that doing so is but one step away from napalming baby kittens!
Baby Kittens, do you hear me, Napalming Baby Kittens!!!!
You’ve done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you NO sense of DECENCY?
They still need to do the reconciliation fix, since they dropped the self-executing rule.
The vote was 219-212.
They shouldn’t have dropped the rule: The only people who cared about the rule were the ‘Phants, and they have long since moved from being the opposition to being the enemy.
Not sure who flipped from no to yes for the 2nd vote.
And now we see how the narcissists in the Senate screw this up.
I still think that it is a crappy bill(s), though a clear improvement over the status quo, and that any move for improvements will be fought against tooth and nail by Obama, but I would happy to be wrong on this.
The fact that they were screaming “f****t” at Representative Barney Frank, and screamed, “n***er” at Representative, and civil rights icon, John Lewis:
Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”
………
And that wasn’t an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed “Barney, you faggot”–a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter.
They are doing this because they can, and they have wanted to for years, but feel that the level of social disapprobation involved in such an act in different contexts will be too great.
Post racial society my ass.
Well, this is better than a kick in the teeth, though I’m sure that Rahm Emanuel,* will do his best to prevent either a vote, or an actual law for the creation of such an entity.
*But remember, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
Because, as per Pelosi’s promise, there is 72 hours from the CBO report, and the unveiling of the bill, and when the vote is taken.
Well, the report is out: $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years.
Personally, I’m dubious, simply because either this is an end, which means that insurers find loopholes to screw us, or it’s a path to something more akin to European style healthcare, in which case, it gets a lot better.
In any case, it looks like a vote will occur after 2:00pm on Sunday.