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Posts Tagged ‘medicare’

Democrats Frustrated By Lieberman

Independent Senator Joseph Lieberman made a splash on Sunday after he announced he would not support a Medicare buy-in compromise intended to gain votes from a handful of moderate senators. Democratic leaders have been courting Lieberman for months — but he has not agreed to their terms.

And Democrats are angry. Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reports “More than 80 percent of Democrats say they believe Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn) should be stripped of his powerful chairmanship in the Senate if he ends up supporting a Republican filibuster of health care reform, according to a new poll.”

A frustrated Ezra Klein is definitely one of the 80 percent:

To put this in context, Lieberman was invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And if there’s a policy rationale here, it’s not apparent to me, or to others who’ve interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

Andrew Sprung on Andrew Sullivan’s blog says Lieberman’s announcement means “the Gang of 10’s compromise is dead and that a bill can’t get through the Senate with either a public option or Medicare expansion. Unless Lieberman makes one more grandstanding reversal. Or all of Barack Obama’s courting of [Maine Sen. Olympia] Snowe pays off somehow. Or Susan Collins has an epiphany. Or someone resigns abruptly and Santa is appointed to the Senate.”

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn picks out another reason Lieberman may oppose the compromise: “Lieberman isn’t waiting for CBO or anybody else to weigh in. He says he’s worried that the Medicare buy-in would be the first step towards a single-payer system–and that it would bust the budget. (At least, that’s his latest argument. As Steve Benen has noted, it’s changed a few times.) Ergo, it doesn’t have his support.

But Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey thinks Dems have been naive:

Why did this surprise anyone? Last Wednesday, Lieberman warned that he couldn’t support a Medicare expansion. A week ago, he appeared with Susan Collins for both of them to publicly oppose a government-run insurance option, reiterating the same position that he had publicly declared two days before Thanksgiving.

How can this be a “total flip-flop”? It sounds as if Lieberman’s colleagues have wax stuck in their ears.

The American Spectator’s Philip Klein notes things have just gotten tougher for Majority Leader Reid: “Either Reid will have to pull a new compromise out of his hat like magic or get liberals to accept all of Nelson and Lieberman’s demands, or this thing is going to spill over into next year, and the whole effort may collapse altogether. But before you get too excited, just remember that the media was declaring health care legislation ‘inevitable’ last Tuesday, so we shouldn’t assume it’s doomed today. The story keeps changing.”

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Tags: compromise, lieberman, medicare, reid, senate
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About That Compromise…

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced a cryptic compromise last night — providing just enough detail to send the blogosphere scrambling to eek out the rest.

Today they’ve unfolded this much — there will be some sort of option for those 55-65 to buy into Medicare, coupled with new national nonprofit plans and a “triggered” public option. The problem? No one seems very happy.

TPMDC’s Brian Beutler reports: “The picture, therefore, is decidedly mixed. Which means, after all this effort, 60 votes remains uncertain. That’s probably why Reid sent an array of options to CBO, and why nobody will know the nittiest, grittiest details of the compromise until it’s unveiled.” Beutler also rounds up Senators’ comments thus far.

There’s still a ton to figure out – The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn made a list of 10 wonky policy questions, including who exactly will be allowed into Medicare (all workers? only uninsurable?) and what kind of plan would appear, should it be triggered?

Bob Laszewski thinks Democrats have latched onto Republican ideas in terms of the national nonprofit plan — and he says it will fail: “an out-of-state health plan by definition isn’t going to have a local provider network and will have health care costs that are a lot more expensive than a local plan that does have discounts and managed care protocols negotiated with providers. Well, at least neither side–Democrats or Republicans–have the upper hand on this issue.”

And economist Austin Frakt sees flaws in the proposal to open Medicare to more people: “That is, Medicare for the 55-64 age range will probably only be available to those who meet certain tests of neediness, which is closer to the way it operates for disabled individuals than for the elderly. In effect, Medicare will likely be a dumping ground for bad risks, risks that the insurance industry is happy to transfer to the federal government. This version of Medicare for more will not lead to Medicare for all, it may only lead to Medicare for all bad risks. That’s also why it may pass.”

Heritage’s Conn Carroll thinks the deal “reveals how desperate Reid is” and thinks the process continues to violate Obama’s promises: “When President Barack Obama gave one of his first national health care addresses in June, he instructed Congress: ‘As we move forward on health care reform, it is not sufficient for us simply to add more people to Medicare or Medicaid.’ But after months of debate in Congress, that is all Obamacare has turned out to be.”

And Cato’s Michael Tanner says “No wonder Senator Reid wants to keep it a secret,” and gives “afew reasons to believe this is yet another truly bad idea.”

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Tags: medicare, public option, reid, senate
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Beyond the Senate Debate

Bloggers are mostly immune to the specific’s of today’s Senate debate, instead plugging away at topics of their choice, including a proposed Medicare commission, right-leaning ideas for health reform and a new CBO report.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein is concerned that that recent changes have “seriously weakened” the proposed new independent Medicare commission. “The big problem is that the commission is now barred from submitting reform proposals when Medicare’s five-year spending growth average is lower than the health-care system’s more generally. But Medicare’s five-year average is almost always lower than the health-care system’s. Medicare is better at containing costs. But better, in this case, is not good enough.” Klein credits The Concord Coalition’s Joshua Gordon.

John Goodman responds to criticism of right-leaning health policy ideas, noting, “there is probably no other public policy area on which there is so much diversity of right-of-center opinion than there is right now on health policy.” (emphasis his) He lists 12 different right-leaning proposals, saying the main area of agreement is Health Savings Accounts.

Louise Norris was “struck by the negativity” of the Chamber of Commerce’s proposal: “It seems that they have devoted so much time and energy to criticizing the proposed reforms that they forgot to focus on solutions of their own. It makes me wonder if they’re seeing the same problems as the rest of us: problems like 62% of bankruptcies being attributed to medical debt, and the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance at all.”

Also in the news is a Congressional Budget Office report on “promotional spending” of pharmaceutical companies that found they spent about $20.5 billion in 2008. Director Douglas Elmendorf says, “To place those figures in context, in 2008, promotional expenditures equaled 10.8 percent of the U.S. sales reported by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, in line with most years since the early 1990s, during which time that share has remained between 10 percent and 12 percent.”

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

Tags: cbo, health savings accounts, hsas, medicare, phrma, prescription drugs, rx, spending
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Another Wrench In Health Overhaul Debate, This Time From CMS

A new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report has sparked a renewed wave of attacks and defenses of Democrats’ plans to overhaul the health care system. The report found the House-passed health bill would increase health costs by $289 billion over 10 years and could cause reduced access to services for Medicare beneficiaries. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein says, like much in politics, “What they found depends on who you ask,” though he acknowledges “the report may prove very important in the coming negotiations between the House and the Senate.”

Heritage’s Conn Carroll says the report “blows the lid off of every one of Obama’s claims” about the health bill, and calls it a “deathblow for Obamacare.”

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey writes, “In other words, the warnings about the Canadianization of the American health-care system have proven correct, especially as far as Medicare enrollees are concerned. We already have a crisis in providers for the government-run network. Thanks to unrealistic compensation schedules, many providers have stopped taking new Medicare patients, forcing them to fewer providers and into longer waits for care. The CMMS [sic] study shows that the massive cuts proposed by the Pelosi plan in the House and the Reid plan coming to the Senate floor would — not surprisingly — make a bad situation worse.”

Michelle Malkin reacts, “Ho-hum. Nothing to see here except another massive act of generational theft.”

Reason’s Peter Suderman on CMS’s estimate of the Medicare cuts: “Now, I think we ought to resist the idea that Medicare should be untouchable, and I think Republicans (who ordered the report, presumably expecting to find this outcome) have done themselves a disservice by pushing that notion. But I also think it’s pretty disingenuous to sell a plan based on the idea that you can make massive cuts to the program without substantially altering or reducing benefits in ways that beneficiaries won’t like.”

Meanwhile, over on the left…

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum argues that the report itself is pessimistic:

What CMS is saying is that the healthcare sector tends to be labor intensive, and thus won’t be able to improve its efficiency as rapidly as the broader economy. Which might be true. Still, it’s worth noting that this is basically a counsel of despair. It suggests that controlling the growth of healthcare spending is hopeless, and any attempt to try it won’t work. We’re just going to have to pay doctors and hospitals as much as they want. I don’t buy that. It’s plain that eventually we’re going to have to control healthcare spending one way or another, and the sooner we give it a serious try the better.

Wonk Room’s Igor Volksy thinks the report is a “wake-up call to for reformers as much as it is a full and complete rejection of critics who argue that the House bill will undermine the existing health care system.” He writes, “The report is not without its positives, and lawmakers must accept the bad with the good. If the CMS analysis suggests that reform legislation should adopt robust cost-containment provisions, it also applauds the bill for expanding coverage by building and strengthening the current public/private system.”

Lastly, more from Ezra Klein, who recommends next steps for Democrats:

It seems like the smart path forward is to give these cuts a credible shot, and if they don’t work, either ease the cuts or reform Medicare to save money in other ways, perhaps by going after fee-for-service more aggressively.

But Medicare cuts are a crude tool. The more damning conclusion from the CMS report is that the House bill has little else to control costs, and that’s largely accurate. This report shouldn’t lead reformers to abandon efforts to trim Medicare, but it should convince them that the bill can do more on the cost control front.

The Senate now has the advantage of reading this report, questioning CMS about its methodologies and tweaking its bill to ensure a better verdict. But it’s already part of the way there. The Senate Finance Committee’s bill has two cost-control measures the House … doesn’t: Super MedPac and the excise tax. Alongside that, it has a much more aggressive package of delivery-system reforms.

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Tags: benefits, cms, costs, entitlements, house bill, medicare, reform
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Taxing and Saving?

Yesterday we looked at Ezra Klein’s list of ways Democrats could avoid a filibuster, and today abortion rights supporters might see a benefit to using a different way of bypassing the Senate tradition: Politico’s Jonathan Allen reports that “Democrats will almost certainly kill the anti-abortion Stupak amendment in the process if they go to Plan B on passing health care — using a filibuster-proof reconciliation bill — budget experts say.”

There’s been another theme emerging during this recess week besides more back-and-forth over the Stupak amendment: controlling costs and raising taxes.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey is unhappy with a proposal to increase the capital gains tax, saying, “The Pelosi Plan would strangle the economy.”

Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky makes a table that compares increasing the Medicare payroll tax (currently being floated in the Senate) versus the House’s surtax on high income earners.

Robert Laszewski expands on his nod toward an independent commission to look at health care costs. He thinks the fate of a bill “might just hinge more not on how ‘robust’ the public option would be but on how ‘robust’ an entitlement commission would be.”

Perhaps there’s another reason for a commission: Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier is unconvinced that Congress will make the future cuts to Medicare that it is proposing: “Enacting H.R. 3961 would mean that Congress has thrown in the towel on its previous attempt to control Medicare spending. It will also mean that no rational person can believe that Congress will actually enforce any new Medicare spending cuts included in pending health care legislation. That, in turn, would mean that new health care legislation would actually result in further, massive increases in either Federal borrowing or taxes.”

Lastly, a key architect of Massachusetts’ reform plan and an economic adviser to many Dems, MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, offers his thoughts on the amount of cost control in the bills. It’s not necessarily a ringing endorsement (via an interview with Ezra Klein):

Here’s how I think about this: Do you know Pascal’s wager? Why not believe in God? I think of health-care reform similarly. We don’t know if we’ll really bend the cost curve. But if we do this and we don’t do anything, we still go bankrupt in 100 years. We don’t lose much. But if we do it and it works, then it’s a savior.

It also moves the conversation on cost control in a way that’s impossible without this bill. It does real things on cost control, and then it does real things to make cost control more politically viable. It lays the groundwork for doing more. To kill this bill for not doing enough on cost control would be like criticizing the Yankees for not winning the Super Bowl. They won the World Series! They did what they could do!

Friday, November 13th, 2009

Tags: abortion, costs, house bill, medicare, reid, senate bill, spending, taxes
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House Calls?

Bloggers are rushing to put in their two cents before the House’s scheduled vote on a landmark health overhaul bill late Saturday afternoon. But questions remain on whether leaders have enough votes, and Majority Whip Steny Hoyer admitted to reporters that a delay was possible.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey calls the scheduling of the vote a “Hail Nancy play. She couldn’t afford to wait too long for the vote after dropping 2,000 pages on members last week, and having them see the results of the elections this week. Pelosi and Hoyer thought that rushing a vote would allow them to bully recalcitrant moderates into support.”

Wonk Room’s Igor Volksy compiled a table comparing amendments on two key issues holding up votes: abortion and immigration.

Cato’s Michael Cannon in the National Review Online calls the bill a “$1.5 trillion fraud,” zeroing in on the off-budget costs of an individual mandate.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein says House leadership is “mired in negotiations with three different types of Democrats who are proving restive at the eleventh hour.” According the Klein, those groups are the “controversialists” (lawmakers concerned with “electric” issues like abortion and immigration), “centrist skeptics” (general concerns about ideas like taxes or a public option) and lawmakers “worried about the process” (they don’t want to vote for a more liberal bill then the Senate.)

And Erin Kanoy of the Heritage Foundation looks at what might be happening in the Rules Commiteee: who set the guidelines for tomorrow’s debate: “The rule being debated today will not only cover HR 3962 but will also apply to HR 3961, the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act, also known as the Doc Fix. This is a procedural gimmick that allows the costly Doc Fix bill to be combined with H.R. 3962 after the bill passes the House. This allows Congressional Leaders to avoid a stand alone vote on Doc Fix in the Senate.”

Stay tuned to KHN this weekend for more coverage of the House vote.

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Tags: abortion, cost, doc fix, house bill, immigration, mandate, medicare, pelosi
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New Negotiations, Same Objections

New negotiations have begun as lawmakers work to create one bill in the Senate.

Brian Beutler of TMP DC reports: “what went on behind closed doors will be the focus of a Democratic caucus meeting today, where health care leaders will brief their colleagues on the early stages of negotiations as they merge two competing pieces of health care legislation.”

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, referring to Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus as “more Mr. Magoo than Machiavelli” notes: “I’ve been pretty hard on Max Baucus for a while, especially as he spent months and months negotiating fruitlessly while Democratic political capital rotted away. But it’s worth pointing out that his plan, assuming he had one, worked perfectly.” The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein agrees, but points out where Baucus was truly successful was in keeping conservative Democrats from defecting:

If you imagine that Max Baucus was given responsibility for keeping conservative Senate Democrats committed to health-care reform (and that’s how his role was often described at the beginning, with Kennedy and then Dodd playing the same role for liberals), it appears he has succeeded. Indeed, if Baucus’s schedule partly led to the long month of August, you also have to give him credit for not losing a single Democrat in its aftermath, and for having the savvy to use the release of his bill and CBO score to change the media’s narrative and refocus the conversation on the advancing legislative process.

But not all reviews are so rose-colored. James Capretta of the New Atlantis argues, “the plan sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus would almost certainly lead to a death spiral in many private health insurance markets.” Capretta is concerned about adverse selection, or the idea that without a stiff mandate that everyone to purchase insurance, a disproportionate number of unhealthy and more costly individuals will sign up for a plan and affect the risk pool.

Others have concerns about the Democrat’s big picture approach to health care costs. AEI’s Stephen Parente says he’d “find it far more credible that the administration will bend the cost curve down if a CMS administrator had been appointed nearly 9 months post inauguration (a record), and if 70 percent of other CMS posts weren’t vacant (also a record). Assuming nearly $800 billion spent on Medicare and Medicaid for an annualized 2009, each day past the president’s inauguration, $2.2 billion has been spent (with 55%+ for Medicare alone) without a leader. The civil service running such an endeavor deserve gold stars. Yet, it is inconceivable that an enterprise that is larger than any Fortune 500 firm in terms of cost outlays, let alone the revenues of No. 1 Wal-Mart and No. 2 ExxonMobil combined, is running without a chief.”

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey takes issue with comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who downplayed the savings of tort reform legislation. Morrissey writes: “The overall savings come to at least $110 billion over that same period, perhaps as high as $135 billion, or about 0.5% of the entire cost of the industry — which may still be a small percentage, but is significant in terms of actual money spent. It would come to over $1000 per family in the first ten years.”

Bob Laszewski is not happy about the news that Congressional Dems are trying to fix a scheduled reduction in Medicare payments to physicians separate from health overhaul legislation, though the pay cut and its cost were long deemed something that a health reform bill would address. He writes that Democrats are about to try “peeling out one of the biggest components of health care and quickly spending $245 billion to bolster physician fees over the next ten years, doing it separate from the ‘deficit neutral’ health bill, and just adding the $245 billion cost of this to the deficit!”

And last but not least, Insure Blog hosts Health Wonk Review, a biweekly compendium of health policy blogging. According to host H G Stern, there’s several new faces this week.

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Tags: baucus, finance, medicare
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Blog Wars: Administrative Costs Edition

This week’s National Review issue illustrates (somewhat, ahem, uncomfortably) the emergence of increased conservative attention to the health reform debate. The issue features articles from key thinkers like Ramesh Ponnuru and John Goodman on issues under consideration by Congress, and the cover story by Marl Steyn begins:

“The government annexation of health care will prove impossible to roll back. It alters the relationship between the citizen and the state and, once that transformation is effected, you can click your ruby slippers all you want but you’ll never get back to Kansas.”

Correspondingly, right-leaning blog commentary has lit up, engaged in a back-and-forth on public versus private costs in a potential health care overhaul.

Economist Greg Mankiw kicked things off by publicizing a new Heritage Foundation report by Robert A. Book on Medicare’s administrative costs. Book argues that Medicare’s administrative costs are higher than private insurance on a per-person basis, and says but this isn’t well-known because of the way the program estimates its adminstrative expenses.

Paul Krugman challenged Mankiw/Book by saying, “this is an old argument, and has been thoroughly refuted” by liberal economist Jacob Hacker, who says that Medicare Advantage has higher costs than Medicare fee-for-service plans.

Book, the author of the study, responded in Krugman’s comment thread, saying, “Krugman’s criticism of my repo and rt consists of an ad hominem attack on my employer, and a quote that doesn’t refute my point based on a report that doesn’t say what he says it says.”

Other bloggers eagerly took up the issue, diving into what services, exactly, comprise administrative costs. Libertarian economist Megan McArdle of the Atlantic illustrates the question:

But the more important point is that I doubt this is the majority of their administrative costs, or even the difference between their administrative costs and Medicare’s…Rather, private insurers have costs that Medicare doesn’t have within the agency. Private insurers bill. Medicare does too, but the IRS has its own budget–hell, its own courts–which don’t show up on Medicare’s balance sheet. Private insurers negotiate with suppliers. Medicare does too, but most of the negotiation takes place between lobbyists and Congressmen who again, do not show up on Medicare’s balance sheet. The Federal government has all sorts of these little items which relieve government agencies of reporting certain costs. But the costs remain.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein says he had been researching administrative costs over the last few weeks and found that the variation in research methods (i.e., what activities count as administrative) what was being studied (did the researchers look at a large or small group market) make it difficult to estimate administrative costs not only for Medicare but private insurers as well. Klein concludes:

But administrative costs among payers — that is to say, insurers — are only part of the story. And they may not even be the most important part. The hospitals and physicians who have to deal with these payers are spending tremendous sums of money too. (Emphasis his)

Economist Tyler Cowen weighs in with a slightly different point. Cowen thinks the private sector has lower administrative costs in general , but in the case of public programs with a broad scope of coverage, “the lesson is that sometimes the public sector can be more effective when you don’t wish to discriminate in supplying a particular kind of service.”

The argument hasn’t been settled, but these bloggers might want to listen to academic Rick Kronick (quoted on Ezra Klein’s blog) who has a real-world rejoinder:

The main question..is why are health care costs going up at 2.4 percent a year faster than GDP? And most of the answers to that question have nothing to do with administrative costs. The answers are that we do more stuff and have more technology. Even if we could wring administrative savings out of the system, which I’m all in favor of and would be a good thing, we’d still be facing the question of how to slow the rate of cost growth.

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Tags: administrative costs, blog wars, medicare, public plan
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Debate intensifies as Senate hearing begins

By Kate Steadman

It’s the start of another busy day here in the nation’s capital as the Senate HELP Committee prepares to hold a public hearing on the draft of the American Health Choices Act (pdf). There’s a decent probability of protesters, present at a number of Finance Committee hearings (several were arrested), as the committee debates the inclusion of a public plan option — and how much muscle they might grant one.

POLITICO PULSE is reporting that Chris Dodd would consider delaying the markup of the bill, set for Tuesday. According to POLITICO, Dodd said:

My goal is to start a markup on Tuesday… But, look, if we are making a lot of progress on resolving some matters by conversing with one another, if I am achieving that result, then I will stick with that for awhile — meetings and conversations with each other. … Once you get into markup, it is my amendment versus your amendment, yes or no, roll call votes, people come and go.

In the meantime, advocates and stakeholders keep pushing their agendas. The Heritage Foundation’s Marguerite Higgins blogs a speech from Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who cautioned against a greater government role in health care. Blackburn’s concerns come from her home state’s TennCare plan, the Medicaid program which tried to expand coverage to more low-income children and adults and subsequently faced huge deficits.

In the other chamber, House leaders are staking their territory. Tuesday the “Tri-Committee Health Reform Draft Proposal” was released, revealing an outline that was less liberal than many commentators had been expecting. POLITICO PULSE is reporting that Nancy Pelosi told MSNBC yesterday afternoon, “A bill will not come out of the house without a public option,” ratcheting up pressure on lawmakers.

Besides the ever-present question of the public plan, Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky reports the Tri-Committee bill is also setting a goal to “reform Medicare payments to doctors in such a way as to discourage doctors from over-prescribing treatments and lower overall health care spending.” They’re currently considering two options to either alter or repeal the Sustainable Growth Rate formula, which is supposed to reduce payments to physicians by about 4 to 5 percent a year to help constrain cost growth in the popular federal program.

Interesting Elsewhere:

Slate’s Timothy Noah has compiled a handly list of “must-reads” to follow the health reform debate (including a nice shoutout to KHN);

The Los Angeles Times’ Booster Shots reports on a new Kaiser Family Foundation study examing racial and ethnic health disparities among women;

Cato’s Michael Cannon takes on Ezra Klein’s explanation of “socialized medicine”;

Colorado Health Insurance Insider looks at the makeup of health insurer profits;

Former Surgeon General Richard Carmona discusses the new CDC Director Thomas Freiden on the Health Affairs Blog.

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Tags: Dodd, HELP Committee, medicare, pelosi, public plan, SGR, Tri-Committee
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Blue Dogs and a Public Plan: Let’s Make a Deal.

Here’s our Friday roundup:

A group of politically moderate but fiscally conservative Democrats known as the “Blue Dogs” received attention today as bloggers pondered their newly announced stance on a public plan option. Blue Dogs said they could support a public plan based on several conditions including a trigger mechanism under which a public plan would be created only if there weren’t enough private plans and paying providers more than Medicare does. Matthew Yglesias says, “both the trigger mechanism and the prohibition on using Medicare rates are ‘moderate’ ideas, but they’re not ideas that promote the coal of fiscal austerity. ” And the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Igor Volsky asks, “After all, if the public plan is forced to pay prevailing market rates and act like a private insurance plan, then why have it?”

Also, the Heritage Foundation has sponsored a new site, fixhealthcarepolicy.com, that’s promoting a tele-town hall with House health leader Paul Ryan, R-Wis. The townhall is the only thing on there so far…but the site’s URL indicates it could easily turn into a site that feature arguments opposing the Democratic plan.

Virginia Postrel, who calls a new Council of Economic Advisers report (pdf) on health reform “disingenuous” writes, “[You] do have to wonder why a report that claims that Medicare is wasting 30 percent of its spending thinks it’s making a case for making the rest of the health care system more like Medicare.”

Health Care Renewal, a blog that serves a watchdog-type role on physician and industry conflicts of interest, has a post titled: “If The Military Can’t Get Electronic Health Records Right, Why Would We Think Conflicted EHR Companies And Incompetent Hospitals Can?” The author, MedInformaticsMD, is keying off a Washington Post story on the influence of health IT lobbying groups and news stories describing problems with the Department of Defense’s electronic health record system, AHLTA. He says, “I feel the AHLTA project is an illustration of what will be reproduced, thousands or tens of thousands of times over, in hospitals and physician practices all over this country as we proceed in a national EHR initiative based on false premises borne of the health IT lobby.”

To round off this week, WhiteHouse.gov live-blogs today’s health care stakeholder roundtable meeting with women’s groups. White House Office of Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle, Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes and Office of Public Engagement Director Tina Tchen participated.

See you next week, everyone.

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Tags: blue dog, HIT, medicare, public plan
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KHN: Kaiser Health News

Topics: