A series of reports from Roll Call magazine, a publication that focuses on Congressional news, points to several things, all of them bad for the Democrats’ healthcare “reform” efforts. It shows that agreement is sparse, that the Senate is not working with the House, that deals struck by the President with industry could easily be ignored or dispensed with by Congress and that the president is no longer a guiding force in the debate. It also shows that Republicans have been allowed no part whatsoever in the ongoing debate.
Let’s start with the possibility that the president’s deal making with healthcare industry representatives will likely be ignored by powerbrokers in the House of Representatives. For those paying attention, this sidelining of Obama’s grand deals is evidence that he has little power over the very bill he claims to be pushing and that his word is meaningless to the business sector that imagined he spoke for eventual government policies.
The three House chairmen writing the chamber’s health care bill are warning the White House, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and industry groups that they are not on board with deals struck behind their back.
Charlie Rangel (D, New York), House Ways and Means Chair, apparently said he “didn’t care” what agreements Obama negotiated with industry reps and that he’d carry forward with his own ideas regardless. And it looks like his ideas are to punish industry, not try to work with it.
Henry Waxman (D, Calif.) Energy and Commerce Chair, also looked to be ready to slap healthcare businesses saying that since he wasn’t involved in negotiations, he wasn’t bound by Obama’s deal making.
For his part, Waxman wants to force drug companies to accept lower payments for pharmaceutical products because, in his words, he didn’t want the industry to ” keep a windfall.” Where Waxman sees this “windfall” as coming from, he didn’t say, but presumably he imagines that any government payment, even at half the process of the market, constitutes a “windfall” for the evil drug companies.
Finally, Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) concurred with the other two that since his committee wasn’t involved in Obama’s wheeling and dealing, why those agreements are meaningless to him.
All this says that Obama’s showy dealmaking is, in the end, a smoke screen, a meaningless show off fluff, and will not help business get any favor in the destructive policies determined in Congress. It also seems to show that all Obama’s “czars” and “study groups” are just as meaningless as the non-binding agreements reached. Business and industry reps will be left holding the bag regardless of the flourish and pomp with which the president announced these purported mutual agreements.
In the Senate things are also not running smoothly on the healthcare debate for Democrats. Some major bones of contention in that chamber have been tax hikes and the public option — the later a government run insurance plan. Conservative Democrats and the few pliant Republicans that are willing to accede to the Democrat’s demands on healthcare (like Olympia Snowe of Maine) are still against the inclusion of the public option.
Senate Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid (D, Nev.) seemed to be softening on demanding the public option be included at the outset, another set back for president Obama’s insistence that it be a key feature of any bill. Softening or no, however, it might be likely that Reid is just trying to call the public option something else, making it seem as if he’s softening on the issue. time will tell.
Another key stumbling block are taxes.
According to knowledgeable sources, the proposals discussed during Thursday morning’s closed-door meeting of the full Finance Committee included an income-tax surcharge of as high as 5 percent on wealthy earners, a sugar tax and some sort of additional tax on dividend earnings.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine), among the Republicans working with Baucus to try and reach a bipartisan compromise, noted the difficulty in coming to an agreement of any kind that involved taxes. Snowe declined to divulge details from Thursday afternoon’s negotiating session, although she did offer that implementing a value-added tax as a means to pay for health care was off the table.
This issue will be a tough nut to crack unless Snowe and conservative Democrats just give in to left-wing, tax raisers in the Democrat power structure.
And lastly we see a minor revolt by the conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House that are strongly against the public option policy.
Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), the chairman of the fiscally conservative Blue Dogs’ health care task force, warned leadership in a Thursday night meeting that lasted more than two hours that the vast majority of the group could not support the bill unless major changes were made.
Forty Blue Dogs signed a two-page letter communicating a series of demands ranging from more aid to rural areas to more cost-cutting to protections for small businesses.
But the fiercest opposition is to a public plan option based on existing Medicare reimbursement rates.
One of the suggestions being floated by Speaker Pelosi’s leadership is that a public option be pegged to Medicare reimbursement rates. Ross said that this was unacceptable and he seems to be one of the few Democrats acknowledging the stark truth that Medicare chases doctors out of business.
”We cannot accept a public option based on Medicare rates,” Ross said. Ross said regional disparities in Medicare would have to be fixed for Blue Dogs to consider such an idea, because payment levels are too low in many parts of the country.
‚”We are losing doctors,” he said of his own hometown, which used to have six doctors and now has three.
”We could give people a real shiny insurance card, but that‚” not going to matter if they don‚” have access,” Ross said.
Just so, Mr. Ross. What we will see with Obamacare is rock bottom reimbursements doled out to doctor’s offices at such low rates as to cause thousands of doctors to retire and give up their practices. Worse, fewer new doctors will bother to take up the dropped baton because they will realize that all the schooling, education loans, and the decades of training necessary to become a doctor won’t be worth the effort so fewer people will chose to become a doctor. This will, as Mr. Ross stated, find fewer and fewer doctors available for more and more patients. Which will, in turn, drive up waiting times, drive down doctor to patient attention, lower service and hurt the very people in the lower income brackets that this whole mess is supposed to be helping.
Finally, I just want to reiterate that all this news tends to prove that all Obama’s flowery rhetoric and stern promises are utterly meaningless to the nuts and bolts of legislation. The public option is embattled despite Obama’s claims as to how important it is to success, Obama’s agreements with industry reps is being summarily ignored, and despite the claim that this “reform” is essentially agreed to by all concerned, there is no real agreement on how to get there.
Republicans have a lot they can exploit to stop this runaway healthcare train. But they better get cracking.
Tags: dailydose, The Winning Line
