Recently in Health Care Category
"Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out." This was buried in a story over a month ago, but now it gets its own lede: While endlessly touting her insurance mandate as the be-all, end-all of health care reform, Sen. Clinton's campaign hasn't been paying the insurance bills. (This is in addition to screwing over local businesses and charities whenever possible, because apparently struggling mom-and-pop operations don't need to be paid as quickly as corporate behemoths.)
The Senate bans waterboarding by a vote of 51-45 and, surprisingly enough, straight-talker John McCain votes against the bill. "McCain sided with the Bush administration yesterday on the waterboarding ban passed by the Senate, saying in a statement that the measure goes too far by applying military standards to intelligence agencies. He also said current laws already forbid waterboarding, and he urged the administration to declare it illegal." God forbid we take too strong a stance against torture, eh, Senator? For shame.
"'There’s a growing sense, a growing probability, that the next administration could be Democratic,' said Craig L. Fuller, executive vice president of Apco Worldwide, a lobbying and public relations firm, who was a White House official in the Reagan administration. 'Corporate executives, trade associations and lobbying firms have begun to recalibrate their strategies.'" As a Democratic presidency in 2008 looks increasingly likely, business lobbyists scramble for deals under Dubya. "Few industries have more cause for concern than drug companies, which have been a favorite target of Democrats. Republicans run the Washington offices of most major drug companies, and a former Republican House member, Billy Tauzin, is president of their trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America." Well, for them to be really concerned, we Dems have to show more backbone in the face of lobbyists than we have thus far in this Congress. And, as Simon Lazarus recently pointed out anew in The Prospect, no matter who wins in 2008, corporate lobbyists will still have the Roberts Court to back their play for some time to come.
"As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government's failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests -- corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so on -- that moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone's situation had become virtually impossible." Slate and Rutger University's David Greenberg summarizes the history of health care reform, and of the epithet "socialized medicine." "[T]he idea of government-run health care dates to the Progressive Era. Originally called 'compulsory health insurance,' it enjoyed favor in the 1910s among many quarters, including the American Medical Association...But as the debate heated up, doctors began to worry that it would hurt their incomes, and they banded with business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to oppose reform. American entry into World War I tabled consideration of the issue, and the postwar Red Scare, Starr notes, 'buried it in an avalanche of anticommunist rhetoric.'"
Some good news on the domestic policy front: Pushed forward by a veto-proof majority in Congress, Bush signs a Democratic Pell Grant increase into law. "The increase in financial aid is designed to come from cuts in subsidies that the government makes to banks, totaling roughly $20 billion...Bush at one point threatened to veto the bill on grounds that it included hidden costs and was an expensive expansion of federal programs." In addition, an expansion of the State Child Health Insurance Program is now on Dubya's desk after passing the Senate 69-30 and House 265-159, and also looks to become law despite the White House's original opposition. "Bush and GOP leaders said the measure would push children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed health care, while creating an 'entitlement' whose costs ultimately would outstrip the money raised by the bill's 61-cent increase in the federal tobacco tax. But Republican opposition is increasingly isolated."
And if passage of affordable college education and child health care bills by Dubya -- however reluctantly -- isn't through the looking glass enough for ya, check this out: "The world must cut emissions or sacrifice the planet, Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State, told a meeting of governments on Thursday, in the most strongly worded statement on global warming yet made by the US administration....Her words reflected how far US rhetoric on climate change has moved in the past six months."
Update: Ah, there's the Dubya we know and...know. Despite its bipartisan backing, Bush vetoes the child health insurance bill, arguing that it was an attempt to "federalize" medicine. "'I think that this is probably the most inexplicable veto in the history of the country. It is incomprehensible. It is intolerable. It's unacceptable,' said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who pleaded with Republicans to help overturn the veto."
"'Instead of having all of us pay our fair share, we've got over $1 trillion worth of loopholes in the corporate tax code,' he said. 'This isn't the invisible hand of the market at work. It's the successful work of special interests." In a speech at Washington's Tax Policy Center, Barack Obama unveils his tax plan. "The plan means billions in breaks by: nixing income taxes for the 7 million senior citizens making less than $50,000 a year, establishing a universal credit for the 10 million homeowners who make less than $50,000 annually and do not itemize their deductions, and providing 150 million Americans with tax cuts of up to $1,000...Obama proposes funding the tax cuts by closing corporate loopholes, cracking down on international tax havens and increasing the dividend-and-capital-gains tax for the wealthy, he said."
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton unveils her new health care plan. "A Clinton adviser compares the plan's 'individual mandate' -- which requires everyone to have health insurance -- to current rules in most states that require all drivers to purchase auto insurance...Clinton is the third of the front-running Democratic White House hopefuls to formally unveil her plan, following Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and former Sen. John Edwards." Said Edwards of the Clinton plan: "I'm glad that, today, the architect of the 1993 plan has another care proposal -- and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I'm flattered...The lesson Senator Clinton seems to have learned from her experience with health care is, 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.' I learned a very different lesson from decades of fighting powerful interests -- you can never join 'em, you just have to beat 'em."
"Snow has also been a chief spokesman for the Bush administration's domestic agenda, forced to argue continually that the typical American is doing just fine, and bravely pushing the unpopular elements of Bush's vaunted 'ownership society'...And yet Snow's own life in many ways symbolizes the downside of the ownership society -- and suggests how much a government role in health and retirement benefits is necessary." Slate's Daniel Gross explains how the unfortunate plight of Tony Snow exemplifies the problems with Dubyanomics.
"'We're sitting on the doorstep of a definitional moment,' said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus." Faced with their own low poll numbers, the Democratic Congress readies a flurry of late-term legislation involving homeland security (implementing most of the 9/11 commission recommendations), ethics (gift bans and increased disclosure requirements), and child health care (expanding insurance coverage for children of the working poor.) "Republican leaders plan to stand in the way...But against such philosophical stands, there is a stark political problem: How many Republicans are really going to oppose legislation expanding insurance coverage for children, tightening ethics rules and bolstering homeland security?" More than one might think, I'd wager.
As y'all probably know by now, Dubya -- so eager to exploit and enlargen executive power in other arenas -- vetoed his first bill in five years yesterday, when he decided to capitulate to the sad remnants of his base, set back medical science a few more years, and nip stem cell research in the bud once again. While Dubya said the bill would have forced "American taxpayers...for the first time in our history...to fund the deliberate destruction of human embryos," he made no argument for criminalizing fertility clinics, where similar embryos get tossed away unused every day. "'If that's murder, how come the president allows that to continue?' asked Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). 'Where is his outrage?' Harkin called the veto 'a shameful display of cruelty, hypocrisy and ignorance.'"
"If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well." Perhaps overplaying the Hartzian "America is liberal and liberal only" card just a bit, Boston College professor Alan Wolfe argues convincingly why conservatives can't govern, and explains how, despite the emerging right-wing consensus to the contrary, Dubya's many failures and Boss DeLay's corruption aren't a betrayal of conservative thinking, but a culmination of it. (By way of Blivet.)
"This is certainly not the first time that politics has trumped science at the FDA. Another recent example: the agency's decision to block over-the-counter availability for emergency contraceptives in the face of overwhelming evidence that the treatment is safe and effective...From my standpoint as a doctor, the question is this: What do you do when federal agencies become so politicized that their recommendations can't necessarily be trusted?" In Slate, pediatrician Sydney Spiesel begins to doubt the FDA's credibility these days, particularly after their recent and apparently blatantly political decision against medicinal marijuana. "Marijuana as a medicine -- whatever its risk and benefits are eventually determined to be -- may turn out to be much less important than the question of whether we can count on agencies like the FDA to be honest in their dealings."
"'We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance,' Romney said in an interview. 'And cars are a lot less expensive than people.'" In a new tack on ameliorating the problem of the uninsured, Massachusetts passes a law mandating that all citizens buy health insurance. "As simple as the idea sounds -- buy insurance or else -- the proposal is complex and, in some cases, still unfinished. For instance, it leaves the task of determining exactly how much some low-income residents will pay for their new, more affordable policies to a new agency that would serve as a liaison between the government, policyholders and private insurance companies."
"Shoplifters of the World, unite and take over"...After resigning under strange circumstances last month, former Dubya administration domestic advisor Claude Allen is arrested and charged with felony theft -- i.e., shoplifting, with approximately 25 counts involving $5000 worth of merchandise.(His particular con -- Refund Fraud.) When I first heard the story, I felt kinda bad for Allen -- I mean, couldn't he get on board with Safavian, Federici, and the other Dubya administration crooks and at least make some Casino Jack-levels of swag?
Then I read a little more about him: A former aide to notorious race-baiter and national embarrassment Jesse Helms (No, not yet), Allen accused Helms rival Jim Hunt in 1984 of connections to "'queers,' 'radical feminists,' socialists, and unions." (In Senate testimony in 2003, he claimed -- under oath -- that by "queers" he meant "odd" people.) Moreover, fiercely pro-life and anti-contraceptive, Allen has been one of the administraton's foremost advocates of promoting abstinence programs as the sole way to combat the spread of AIDS and other STDS. ("In February [of 2003] a hundred CDC researchers on sexually transmitted diseases were summoned to Washington by HHS deputy secretary Claude Allen for a daylong affair consisting entirely of speakers extolling abstinence until marriage. There were no panels or workshops, just endless testimonials, including one by a young woman calling herself 'a born-again virgin.'") Well, while we're preaching, Mr. Allen, can I get a witness for the Eighth Commandment? Update: Dubya reacts.
"Spawned by a White House under the influence of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, rubber-stamped in a Congress bought by lobbyists for those interests, and imposed on the nation with prevarication, duplicity and outright bribery, the drug bill represents everything Americans hate about the federal government today." Iraq, Abramoff, Plamegate, and the NSA wiretaps aside, Joe Conason sees the seeds of GOP doom in their Medicare fiasco, particularly since it's become clear that they've been lowballing the price tag to the tune of $600 billion.
