I like to think that elected leaders are smarter than I am, but the news today points to the exact opposite. I’m now convinced that Washington clowns are taking orders from the ringmaster lobbyists in this circus. Furthermore, Democrats are building their own coffins and writing their own eulogies. And they don’t even know it.
Consider the following:
- The Washington Post reports that senators wrote loopholes sought by the health-insurance lobby that would allow them to continue operating outside the proposed insurance marketplace (public option and insurance exchanges) intended to protect consumers from inequities in the current system. One Senate bill would allow insurers to tailor policies to draw healthy individuals out of the new markets, leaving coverage less affordable for those who stay behind. The same requirements applied to basic reforms, such as requiring insurers to accept people regardless of preexisting medical conditions and banning annual and lifetime limits on coverage, would not apply to host of other requirements intended to help consumers compare health plans on an apples-to-apples basis and force insurers to compete more directly on price. For example, the bill written by the Senate health committee would not require insurers operating outside the marketplace to provide standardized disclosures about what they cover. It would not prohibit health plans outside the exchanges from using marketing practices that discourage the seriously ill from enrolling, as the bill requires of insurers inside the exchanges. Just to conjure up a couple of sleazy tactics that insurance marketing consultants get up in the morning to invent and hone, companies would be free to hold recruitment and enrollment events late at night, when only young, healthy people are awake, or on second floor walk-ups where no one with any difficulty climbing stairs can access.
- The New York Times reports that lobbyists employed by Genentec, a subsidiary of Roche, and two Washington law firms, ghostwrote House floor speeches and entries in the Congressional record for both Democrats and Republicans. Of course, when busted, congressmen started shoveling it with statements such as “I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was.” Likewise, in response to inquiries about the connection between huge campaign contributions to many House members and the privilege of ghostwriting statements, Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, joined the bull fest by saying, “There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.” The few emails obtained by the Times exposing this abrogation on the part of representatives of the responsibility to actually represent voters begs the question, is this just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to corporate influence over the reform bill?
- Even the New York Times editorialists are hoodwinked into believing that the nonsense being tossed around in Washington reflects the best and brightest ideas. In their Sunday, November 15 lead editorial, they state, “…no one has an easy fix for rising medical costs. The fundamental fix — reshaping how care is delivered and how doctors are paid in a wasteful, dysfunctional system — is likely to be achieved only through trial and error and incremental gains.” Among the important proposals in the House and Senate bills that try to address this problem, the Times lists as fifth Reform of the Delivery System. Here they state that, “Most agree that the solution is to push doctors to accept fixed payments to care for a particular illness or for a patient’s needs over a year. No one knows how to make that happen quickly.”
Really? HealthAccessRI has known for several years how to make this happen immediately.
What all this means is that the eventual bill will emerge as a hodge podge of secondary and tertiary level reforms masquerading as primary which might over time provide minor alleviation of a thoroughly broken non-system. Maybe. But more likely insurance companies will find ways to undermine any public option or exchange and eventually drive it into the ground. Republicans will then call reform a cataclysmic failure. They will be right. They will then amplify by orders of magnitude their mantra that government is the problem, not the solution. Republicans will regain a legislative majority and probably the presidency and hold it for decades.