Obama

HEALTH REFORM: Fired Up and Ready to Go Fix Health Care

Paul Testa — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:50:00 -0400

Speaking to a big enthusiastic crowd of workers at the AFL-CIO's Labor Day picnic in Cincinnati, President Obama looked to regain the momentum on health reform by recapturing some of the magic his campaign. (Full text here)

"In every debate there comes a time to decide, a time to act," the president said. For health care reform, "[T]hat time is now."

Responding to cries of "Yes we can" with "Yes, we will," the President prepared for what may be the biggest speech of his administration before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.

Laying out the goals of reform, Obama sounded confident in our nation's prospects for achieving them.

"We've never been this close. We've never had such broad agreement on what needs to be done," he said, "And because we're so close to real reform, the special interests are doing what they always do -- trying to scare the American people and preserve the status quo."

He hit back against those who would derail the debate with deceits and misinformation, asking "all those folks who say we're going to pull the plug on Grandma. What's your answer? What's your solution? And you know what? They don't have one. Their answer is to do nothing."

On issues of policy the president continued to offer his support for a public health insurance option "within the basket of insurance choices would help improve quality and bring down costs," while leaving the door open for compromise.

What those compromises will be should become clearer, as both Houses of Congress returned to session today from the August Recess. The biggest news so far, comes from the Senate Finance Committee, where Chairman Max Baucus released a "framework for comprehensive health reform." The 18 page document outlines a package of reforms which includes income subsidies up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level and proposes consumer run co-ops in place of a public health insurance option. The total cost of the overhaul comes in at $900 billion over 10 years. As of Tuesday afternoon, the rest of Baucus's Bipartisan Gang of Six senators negotiating on health reform had reserved judgment on Baucus's proposal, Politico reports.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post details the challenges ahead for House Democrats as they try to keep everyone from Blue Dogs to progressives on board with reform:

They are in almost the exact position they were in when they left the Capitol in late July. Conservatives are still leery of supporting a government-funded, or public, insurance option. Freshman lawmakers from suburban districts remain fearful of increasing taxes for their wealthy constituents to pay for the new measure and await alternatives from moderate Senate Democrats. And progressives, who are demanding the most far-reaching reform since the Great Depression, are still threatening to bring down the legislation if it does not contain a robust version of the public option.

That said, proponents of reform seem optimistic. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn has an excellent piece explaining why reform survived the August Recess and even conservative Charles Krauthammer, no friend of the administration, thinks we'll "pass some version of health insurance reform." What that something is remains to be seen, but we'll have a better idea after tomorrow night.

HEALTH POLITICS: Facts are Stubborn Things

Paul Testa — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:03:00 -0400

With health reform heating up, the White House is stepping up its efforts to dispel false claims and respond to the tidal wave of misinformation coming from foes of reform.

On Tuesday the White House posted a video (below) from Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House's Health Reform Office, responding to the claims of a particular video that had been making the rounds on conservative media.

Douglass explains:

You know the people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they're taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they're cobbling them together to leave a very false impression. The truth is that the president has been talking to the American people a lot about health-insurance reform and what is at stake for them.

She then lets the president's own words clarify his position on health reform, using two clips from recent events. In the first, Obama tells listeners at a recent AARP tele-town hall that if they like their insurance plan, or doctor, or both they will be able to keep them. In the second clip from the president's recent primetime press conference, Obama reiterates that point in the context of public health insurance option, which he described as "as important tool to discipline insurers."

Meanwhile, Media Matters goes straight to the source of the misinformation -- putting the misquoted statements (bolded) from Obama in the full context of his speech at a 2007 forum:

I would hope that we could set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort. But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out where we've got a much more portable system. Employers still have the option of providing coverage, but many people may find that they get better coverage, or at least coverage that gives them more for health care dollars than they spend outside of their employer. And I think we've got to facilitate that and let individuals make that choice to transition out of employer coverage.

We hope that viewers note that he's not talking about taking choice away from people. He's talking about giving them more of it.

IN THE NEWS: Follow the White House's National Discussion on Health Reform

Paul Testa — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:43:00 -0400

We'll be tweeting President Obama's national discussion on on health care reform this afternoon at 1:15 pm EDT. Hosted at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA, the event will feature questions from an audience of about 200, as well as those submitted online via YouTube and Twitter. The White House is streaming the event live here, and you can follow our coverage on Twitter (tags: #WHHCQ #HCR), and read our wrap up of the discussion later today.

HEALTH REFORM: Stories from America

Paul Testa — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:55:00 -0400

Over at The Washington Post's Daily Dose, Ceci Connolly has another excellent Monday morning update, laying out the state of play for health reform.

Connolly notes that with Congress out, "the White House is filling the health-care space with a series of events—in person and over the Internet—to keep the spotlight on the president's top domestic priority."

First, there was the national health care day of service, this past Saturday. Today, at 5 pm, Nancy-Ann DeParle, Director of the White House Office of Health Reform, will host a live-streamed, online discussion of health care reform. (Check the White House's Facebook page for more). Secretary of HHS Kathleen Sebelius will talk health care on MSNBC's Dr. Nancy at noon.

On Wednesday, the President will host another town-hall discussion in Annendale, VA, with Americans able to submit questions online via YouTube and Twitter (hash tag: #WHHCQ). See the president's message below:

Finally, Vice President Joe Biden sent out an email this morning touting Health Care Stories for America. Designed by Obama's political arm, Organizing for America, the site has collected hundreds of thousands of stories of how the health care crisis has affected Americans personally (You can submit your story here). In another example of social networking meets social change, visitors to the site can share stories through the usual channels (Facebook, Digg, Delicious, etc.) and vote to amplify the particularly moving stories, increasing the chance others will see it.

Particularly neat is the ability to type in a location and find stories from the surrounding area. It's important to put a human face on a debate that can devolve into complicated minutiae. Like Brian, whose father had to take on a second job to provide health insurance for his family of six, or Linda who avoids going to the doctor because she can't afford the high costs that remain her responsibility under her high-deductible plan . As Vice President Biden writes, "For folks who don't yet understand why health care reform is such an urgent priority, these stories make the case far better than any statistics ever could."

HEALTH REFORM: President Gives Debate Extra Time on Prime Time

Health Policy — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:13:00 -0400

In 90 minutes, it seems anything is possible.

Just hours after the U.S. soccer team shocked the world Wednesday, upsetting Spain, 2-0, in the semifinals of FIFA's Confederations Cup, President Obama took the health reform debate to prime time, in an hour and half town hall discussion hosted by ABC News. (Video here.)

Answering sometimes skeptical questions from an ABC-selected audience of providers and patients, CEOs and at least one auto mechanic, the president showed both a grasp of the issues and a plan for addressing them. Following a somewhat tough week for the health reform process, Obama restated the case for reform, reiterated his commitment to paying for reform—and explained that we as country can finally make reform happen.

Describing how we could fix the system in a fiscally responsible way, Obama said we can reallocate existing health care dollars and find new revenues. He restated his own preference for capping the itemized deduction for high-income individuals, but also signaled a willingness to hear out proposals in Congress to cap the employer tax exclusion for so-called "Cadillac Plans." He was very clear to distinguish such proposals from what John McCain proposed during the campaign. (RWJF just put out a new paper on the tax exclusion.)

Obama, who disappointed some backers of the public plan by seeming to waver on the option earlier this week at his news conference, argued strongly in favor of a public plan. He framed the issue in terms of broader insurance market reforms, "stressing that lot of the objection to the public option idea is not practical. It's ideological."

Many of the questions focused on the issues of choice and cost. As TNR's Jonathan Cohn notes, Obama took the opportunity to reiterate why the status quo was untenable:

On at least three separate occasions, Obama pointed out rising costs—left unchecked—are going to destroy the health care system. You might like your current insurance arrangements, Obama suggested, but there's no reason to think they'll be in place a few years from now.

At best, your plan will simply become less comprehensive and/or more expensive. At worst, it will no longer be available to you.

Or to put it more simply, change may be scary, but no change is even scarier.

Cohn seemed surprised that the plight of uninsured did not figure more prominently in the night's questions. We'd like to believe that part of the explanation is that covering all Americans has become a point of consensus, rather than contention. How you accomplish (and pay for) such an expansion remains open for debate, but most stakeholders and policymakers agree you have to start with covering everyone. It is a moral imperative and economic prerequisite for delivering high value health care to all Americans.

How to Engage the Electorate in a Constitutional Convention?

Joe Mathews — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:59:00 -0500

Several speakers at the convention summit have raised the following program: how would such a convention engage a California public that is famously disengaged?

No one has a great solution. (There was a little talk about the Internet and Obama-style organizing). But the difficulty of engaging citizens is itself a strong argument for a constitutional convention. The convention itself would be so novel that, with a little bit of show biz (some ceremony, and you know your blogger's weakness for powdered wigs), it would attract attention and might, at the very least, teach people about their state and how it currently works. For the educational value alone, a convention might be worth having.

HEALTH REFORM: President Obama Outlines the Message and the Mission

Joanne Kenen — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:54:00 -0500

President Obama, with Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist at his side in a bipartisan example that maybe some folks in Washington might want to pay attention to, held a town meeting in Fort Myers on Tuesday and told the crowd how and why health reform was part of his economic recovery agenda. He made the connections between the cost to families and the cost to the whole strained economic system, and pointed out the waste and frustration that could be reduced if we moved from massive paperwork to streamlined computerized health records. Here's the exchange:

QUESTION: Welcome to southwest Florida. In light of the fact that you've inherited an economic crisis, where does your priority lie with health care reform?

OBAMA: Well, it's a great question.

And I think it is — there are some people who are making the argument that, well, you can't do anything about health care because the economy comes first. They don't understand that health care is the biggest component of our economy and, when it's broken, that affects everything.

I mean, we've got a system right now where the average person has seen — even if they've got health insurance, the average family has seen their premiums double over the last eight years. Folks are paying twice as much. Co-payments have gotten higher; deductibles have gotten higher. And now, with people losing their jobs, they're also losing their health care.

Businesses are also less competitive because of the fact that, here in the United States, we spend more than anybody else does. Any other nation on Earth per capita we spend more on health care, but we don't get better results, and companies are paying for that.

So when they're competing against —you know, if a U.S. carmaker is competing against a foreign carmaker, they've got all these extra health care costs that they've got to deal with.

And, finally, Medicare and Medicare— or Medicare and Medicaid are draining state budgets and federal budgets in a way that's unsustainable over the long term. So health care has to be part of the solution.

Now, in the recovery package, there are a couple of things that we do immediately. Number one, we're providing some help to Governor Crist and the state, because now they are getting more Medicaid claims and we've got to make sure that they can just meet the basic needs of citizens here in Florida.

Number two is, what we have in this bill is a mechanism so that we will subsidize people to keep their health care even if they lose their job. How many people here know what COBRA is?

All right, now, COBRA is the law that says that, if you lose your job, you can keep your health care and you go through COBRA. Here's the only problem: If you've lost your job, who can afford $1,000 a month or $1,200 a month for health care? You can't afford it.

(APPLAUSE) So part of this plan says we will subsidize a significant portion of what your health insurance costs so that you can actually afford to keep your health care. That's number two.

Number three —and this is an example of using a crisis and converting it into an opportunity. One of the problems with our health care system, it is so inefficient, you go into the hospital, and what's the first thing you've got to do? You've got to —even if you've got insurance, what do you have to do? You've got to fill out so many forms, and there's paperwork, and there's this, there's that.

Then you go and you get your examination, and they've got a clipboard with all this paper on it. And then the doctor's writing out something and the nurse can't read it.

And, you know, the fact is, is that it causes huge amounts of medical errors. We've got all this bureaucracy. One of the simplest, most effective things that we could do is to convert from a paper system to an electronic data system.

Now, think about it. Health care's the only area where we still use paper. I mean, the banks, that's all computerized. So if you've got a credit card, that's all on a computer so they can find you any time you don't make a payment, and that computer's calculating every dime of interest you've got to pay and — right? It's all very efficient.

But when it comes to health care, it's a disaster. So what we did is — in this plan, in the House bill that— that passed, one of the things that we do is we say we are going to computerize our health care system, institute health I.T. That creates jobs right now for people to convert from a paper system to a computer system, but it also pays a long-term dividend by making the health care system more efficient.

So, now, those are things that we're doing immediately. We are also then— got to deal with the long-term problem of both cost and coverage. You've got over 45 million people who don't have health insurance and people who do have health insurance are seeing their costs rise too fast.

OBAMA: And so, in addition to—to computerizing the health care system, we've got to emphasize prevention. We've got to make sure that people have regular checkups.

We made a down payment on it this week— and I did it, by the way, with the help of a lot of these members of Congress -- by passing a new SCHIP— that's the children's health insurance bill— that provides millions of children, who didn't have health insurance, health insurance.

(APPLAUSE)

My hope is, over the course of the year, I'm going to be able to work with Congress to move forward a bill that gets us on track to every single person in America being able to get affordable, decent health care coverage.

We are a wealthy enough country to do it, and that's going to be one of my top priorities as president of the United States.

Chavez and His Plebiscite

Joe Mathews — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:00:00 -0500

Venezuealan president Hugo Chavez has employed direct democracy of a fashion, backing a series of plebiscites to enhance his own power. (His defenders point out that he has allowed himself to lose one of these plebiscites--so there). The latest referendum, scheduled for next month, would lift term limits and allow him to run for re-election. But it's not going well. Chavez, without evidence, is accusing President-Elect Obama of interfering in the vote. The Venezuelan president also wants tear gas used on his opponents, according to this Reuters story.

With Obama in White House, Denver ET Initiative Put On Hold

Joe Mathews — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:10:00 -0500

It appears that even those who believe in space aliens are optimistic about President Obama.

Readers of this blog know your blogger has been closely monitoring the effort to qualify a ballot initiative in the city of Denver to establish an extraterrestial commission. It's being pitched as a sort of civil defense thing--preparation for attack (and Denver is at some altitude, so the aliens would probably go their first).

Now the initiative's sponsor, Jeff Peckman, says he's putting the measure on hold. He tells the Rocky Mountain News that the initiative isn't needed because he's confident Obama will take the ET threat seriously. Perhaps this is part of the new Obama diplomatic strategy of engaging our adversaries.

Same Sex Marriage Advocates May Boycott Obama Inauguration

Joe Mathews — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 13:16:00 -0500

Many same-sex marriage advocates in California are furious at President-Elect Obama for giving the Rev. Rick Warren, who was a strong advocate of the Prop 8 ban on gay marriages, a role in his inauguration. One prominent member of the No on Prop 8 campaign team has declined his invitation to attend the inauguration ceremony as a result.