From TPM LiveWire:
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), formerly of the ill-fated Gang of Six senators on the Senate Finance Committee that had been charged with crafting health care reform legislation, said on Fox News this morning that his committee's health reform bill might have to be scrapped and created again from scratch.
We're expecting a preliminary cost estimate on the package from the CBO later this afternoon. But Grassley said that if CBO's analysis shows that the health care package won't be deficit-neutral and won't reduce health care inflation, then the proposal is in trouble.
"If we get figures back today that don't do that, then we're going to have to go back to the drawing board as a committee and make changes that accomplish both of those things, otherwise we've wasted a whole six months."
Grassley also took a shot at the White House, saying the Obama administration broke up the Gang of Six.
"The White House pulled the rug out from under us," Grassley said.
The bipartisan "gang of six" senators who helped craft the health care reform bill going before a key Senate committee Tuesday represent less than 3 percent of the U.S. population - but they hold a lot of power at a crucial policy-shaping moment in Congress. Three Republican and three Democratic senators in the group, all of them members of the Senate Finance Committee, received an average of $74,600 from health industry lobbyists, according to The Chronicle's analysis of records through June.
That is about 25 percent more than the average of $59,632 in such donations that the gang's other Senate colleagues raked in from lobbyists for the pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance and nursing home industries, according to the analysis, which was based on records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit watchdog group.
"Money buys access," said Henry Brady, a professor of public policy and dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Six Senate Finance Committee members who negotiated a health reform plan that goes before the committee Tuesday represent about 3 percent of the nation's population but received 25 percent more in campaign funds from health care interests than their Senate colleagues through June 30.
- Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa - $223,600
- Max Baucus, D-Mont. - $141,000
- Kent Conrad, D-N.D. - $51,000
- Mike Enzi, R-Wyo. - $18,000
- Olympia Snowe, R-Maine - $9,000
- Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M. - $5,000
Read it all at the San Francisco Chronicle.
In this letter, he states:
health insurance co-ops are not a real alternative to private health insurance and they are not a substitute for a strong public plan option, and we should not suggest to the American people that they would be.
Sen. Rockefeller did research on the history of coops and the applicability to the heath insurance field. He wrote letters to the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Government Accounting Office (GAO) requesting detailed information about the current role of insurance coops in the heath care field.
In his letter to Baucus and Grassley, he describes what he found out as "astounding." Read it all at Daily Kos
The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.
The tactic is so widespread that three of every four major health-care firms have at least one former insider on their lobbying payrolls, according to The Washington Post's analysis.
Nearly half of the insiders previously worked for the key committees and lawmakers, including Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), debating whether to adopt a public insurance option opposed by major industry groups. At least 10 others have been members of Congress, such as former House majority leaders Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), both of whom represent a New Jersey pharmaceutical firm.
The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. And even in a city where lobbying is a part of life, the scale of the effort has drawn attention. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million. Read it all at washingtonpost.comYou know that all that lobbying money comes from premiums paid to deliver health care - and they have it by denying care. Why are they still in the game?
During a townhall in Waukon, IA Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was asked by a constituent of his: “Why is your insurance so much cheaper than my insurance and so better than my insurance?” When Grassley struggled to explain the details of his own health care plan, the elderly man followed up, “Okay, so how come I can’t have the same thing you have?” Grassley said, “You can. Just go work for the federal government.”
Grassley has been at the forefront of railing against Obama’s health care plan, declaring, “We need to make sure that there’s no public option.” As Igor Volsky notes, there is an irony in government workers like Grassley complaining about “government-sponsored health care.” If Grassley wants to stand on principle, he could abandon his government-sponsored insurance and try his luck in the individual health insurance market. Source with video: Think Progress
As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.
In other words, the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.
The peculiar argument that 119 million Americans must be denied the public option that they prefer has been made most notably by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which is one of two panels that has jurisdiction over the health insurance bill.
“As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage to the government plan,” Grassley wrote in a column for Politico.com. That migration, Grassley said, would “put America on the path toward a completely government-run health care system. … Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire market.”
Grassley’s logic is that so many Americans would prefer a government-run plan that the private health insurance industry would collapse or become a shadow of its current self. That, in turn, would lead even more Americans entering the government plan, making private insurance even less viable.
Rarely has an argument more dramatically highlighted the philosophical question of whether in a democracy, the government should represent the people’s interests or an industry’s. Read More...: "
Earlier today, the giants of the health care industry delivered to the White House their plans to trim the nation’s skyrocketing medical costs — strategies they say will save a cool $2 trillion over the next decade.
A few minutes ago, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) issued a two-sentence statement reacting to that plan, which can be translated like this: I’ll believe it when I see it.
I’m skeptical that these proposals will add up to anywhere near $2 trillion. In the legislative process, proposals rise or fall based on what [the Congressional Budget Office] says about them, and the same will be true here.
Two things to keep in mind here: (1) Grassley, as the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, will be on the front lines of the looming health reform debate, so his skepticism could easily translate into policy. And (2) claims of “savings” in Washington often don’t mean savings at all, but instead indicate a reduction in projected growth. The balance these industries are trying to locate is how to pull in as much money as they can without bankrupting the entire system. Source: The Washington Independent
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., may be the most important single lawmaker when it comes to healthcare reform. He chairs the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over many aspects of health care reform, which President Obama is pushing for hard.
This all makes it noteworthy that his former chief of staff, David Castagnetti, has been hired by GE Healthcare this Spring to lobby on 'Health care reform issues ... including reimbursement for imaging services,' according to a federal lobbying filing posted last week. Castagnetti is a partner with the firm Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti.
To even things up, Colette Desmarais, the health policy advisor to top Finance Committee Republican Chuck Grassley, is also on the account. Source: Washington Examiner
Gene Fenderson - Flathead Beacon
Ezra Klein, a prominent health care and political journalist-blogger, was recently interviewed by Mike Dennison, a reporter with Lee Newspaper’s Montana State Bureau. The interview addressed the hearings on health care reform being held by Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Baucus is the chairman and Grassley is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. The most important question in the interview was, 'Shouldn't a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system of universal coverage be considered?' Klein replied: 'When the politicians say, 'We're going to take what you have now away and you can trust the federal government to do this [health care] now' – that scares the hell out of people.”
If Congress won't even consider a single-payer health care system, what kind of a "system" will our nation and we, as individuals, end up with? I am convinced the outcome will be even more complicated and detrimental than what we have now, a hodge-podge on top of an already existing hodge-podge of insurance plans. In other words, no plan and certainly no "system.”
There will continue to be for-profit and not-for-profit insurance companies that you will receive through your employers, which will continue to make them less then competitive in world markets, or you will be forced to buy it individually and, if you can not afford it, we will be given a public assistance to do so – not bad so far (don't get excited taxpayer, you are already paying for it). You must remember that you will probably change jobs seven times like most Americans and have to buy some kind of bridge coverage in between those jobs and, if you're broke, prove it to the system you need some financial help.
But wait, we will still keep children's health care for kids when some employer won't cover them. If you make too much money, you will have to buy through a private insurance company to get coverage. Then we will still want to have veterans’ coverage and their hospitals, and rightly so, along with Indian health care. Your spouse may not have veterans or Indian coverage; will they have to get coverage through there employer, maybe on the open market? Will these plans have to be changed when you move across the nation, the region? Maybe only the state you live in? Will it be the same type of coverage as you move across the nation? Then in order to keep the profit margins up for the insurance industry, once you hit 55, and you become unemployed and sick you loss your coverage, you can buy in to Medicare at the full price around $1,200 per month. You get the picture. There's a million more hang ups to make life a little more confusing.
A Medicare type plan, Single-Payer for all, with everybody in and nobody out, is the most efficient. It will save $400 billion for the American tax payer every year. That’s less than the $700 billion Sens. Baucus and Grassley are going to spend, money they helped to set aside in the last budget. The Single-Payer savings could be used to help cover the 50 million uninsured. The Single-Payer would concentrate on prevention, free choice of doctors and hospitals, no more in-network, out-of-network, deductibles, exclusions, and co-pay. According to recent polls, the majority of the American people, doctors and nurses and health economists want Single-Payer. Why don't Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley?
Call them, e-mail them and write them. Tell them America needs Single-Payer.
Sen. Max Baucus, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member of the same, have put together an ambitious schedule dedicated to producing a health care reform bill by the summer. Their next wave of roundtable discussions is set to begin April 21.
Curiously, despite the fact that the VA has shown far more success managing patients with chronic diseases and comparative effectiveness research, as well as Health IT, no one from the VA will be present. No one representing coordinated care – not even from the Mayo Clinic. No one to talk about the medical home. No patient advocates. Only one “activist” group in the National Partnership for Women and Families (a great advocacy group, but hardly the first name you think of in the health care reform community.) However in the group of 12 invited participants, there will be 4 (FOUR!) individuals working for the insurance industry in some form or fashion. There’s Dr. Allan M. Korn, Chief Medical Office for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. There’s Roy Williams, CEO of Aetna. There’s Glenn Hackbarth, who is currently chair of MedPac, the payment advisory committee tasked with analyzing cost and quality of care in Medicare. What prepared Mr. Hackbrath for being able to advise Medicare on, say, how much we should pay the private plans that make up Medicare Advantage? How about some time as an executive for Harvard Community Health Plan? There’s also Dr. Glenn Steele, also with a background as a surgeon, who’s president of the Geisinger Health System in Danville, PA, a network of provider physicians and hospitals, complete with … yes, surprise, the Geisinger Health Plan, selling HMO and PPO products since the 1970s. ACTION ITEM:Write to Baucus and Grassley and demand a fair debate and a fair balance of speakers as they work towards universal health care. Make sure they know we are paying attention. Tell them that their job is to help create a plan that best help American Citizens, not the insurance industry. And I hope you will add that you really want to have a spokesperson for single payer at the table. Click here for more information.Click here to send an email.
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