Category Archives: Health Care

Astroturf Mobs Disrupting Town Hall Meetings

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Here’s the memo that Wolffe and Axelrod discuss in the video. It was leaked by a volunteer for FreedomWorks. Essentially, it’s a plan for manipulating stupid, fearful people to create the appearance of a huge, grassroots opposition to health care reform.

I had read news stories about mobs disrupting the town hall meetings of U.S. representatives, mostly Democrats. But this bit from Countdown last night was the first I’d heard that people were being bused around to disrupt the meetings. I’m not seeing much more about that this morning.

I surfed around this morning, and in a few news stories I found mention of a group called Americans for Prosperity doing at least some of this mob organizing. According to SourceWatch, AFP is an astroturf 501(c) organization established in 2003 and originally affiliated with Citizens for a Sound Economy. Citizens for a Sound Economy is a “think tank” established by the Koch Family Foundations, a major player in the right-wing think tank biz. Koch throws money at most of the big-name think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, Cato, and the Manhattan Institute.

Citizens for a Sound Economy? According to People for the American Way,

FreedomWorks was formed with the 2004 merger of Citizens for a Sound Economy, headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, and Empower America, co-founded by supply-side pioneer Jack Kemp, to push for lower taxes— especially on investment and inheritance— smaller safety-net programs, and fewer regulations on business and industry.

Essentially, in 2004 Citizens for a Sound Economy split into two groups, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, and the FreedomWorks part merged with Empower America.

SourceWatch says that FreedomWorks has been accused of being a “mouthpiece for hire,” taking on any cause it is paid to take on.

The smaller spinoff, AFP, does not disclose the identity of corporate donors (wanna bet there’s insurance company money involved?), but SourceWatch says AFP has received substantive grants from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation.

Last year AFP sponsored a hot air balloon cross-country tour with the slogan, “Global Warming Alarmism: Lost Jobs, Higher Taxes, Less Freedom.” Before that, they campaigned to oppose smoke-free workplace bans and cigarette excise tax increases (during which time it was learned AFP was getting money from big tobacco companies). Now it’s organizing protests of Democratic representatives to oppose health care reform and also “cap and trade” energy reform. As part of this, it has begun a “patient’s first” bus tour.

One suspects AFP is an astroturf-organization-for-hire. Special interest groups and corporations can pay them to organize protests against whatever reform they are trying to stop. Interestingly, there may be a connection between AFP and the infamous Mike Castle-birther lunatics episode, according to Think Progress. In that case, it seems the mob was supposed to protest Rep. Castle’s vote in favor of “cap and trade,” and it went off script.

Apparently the meetings are getting frightening. The Associated Press reports that after a recent meeting Rep. Tim Bishop, D-N.Y., needed a police escort to get to his car. If this continues, sooner or later somebody is going to be hurt. I say in the interest of public safety, town hall meetings could be held on the Web.

Update: See also —

“FreedomWorks Orchestrates ‘Grassroots’ Movements To Serve Dick Armey’s Corporate Clients”

Update: More details on the “bus the mob” effort from Think Progress.

Health Care Reform and You

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The New York Times is running on its editorial page a rundown of the health care reform packaged called “Health Care Reform and You,” which explains very clearly exactly who wins and who loses if the bill in something like its present form becomes law.

Executive Summary

Who loses: The health insurance industry.
Who wins: Everybody else.

I really wish progressives who oppose the present bill because it’s not single payer would read this. People need health care reform to pass asap, and this bill really would make a huge difference to millions of Americans, including people who are already insured.

See also Paul Krugman, “Why Markets Can’t Cure Healthcare“; and Ceci Connolly, “Focus on Health Savings Obscures Other Issues.”

The Latest

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As near as I can tell, the Blue Dogs on the Energy and Commerce Committee are still being allowed to hold up health care legislation. Does anyone have a list of the E&C Committee Blue Dogs? I know that Mike Ross (Arkansas) is their “leader,” but I haven’t seen a list of all seven.

Meanwhile, I think Howard Fineman is wrong about the GOP not having a health care plan.

They have a plan; they just don’t want the public to know what it is. If you check in with all the major right-wing think tanks, they’re all pushing variations of this same plan:

  1. Scale back subsidies to, or else outright eliminate, government health care programs such as SCHIP and Medicare.
  2. Phase out employee benefit healthcare by eliminating tax breaks for employers who offer benefits and taxing the benefits as income.
  3. Encourage states to deregulate so that insurance companies are free to risk-rate at will, cranking up peoples’ insurance premiums as they get older and/or sicker.
  4. Write federal legislation that would allow people to purchase policies in another state. This would allow the insurance companies to set up shop in low-regulation states and market junk policies to the young and healthy with no pre-existing conditions. Everyone else would be left behind in higher-risk pools, meaning most people would be paying higher premiums.
  5. The “solution” for people who can’t afford insurance is to pay for medical expenses out of a Health Savings Account. Yes, people who can’t afford the premiums certainly must have plenty of disposable income to put aside into a savings account.
  6. The other “solution” for being priced out of insurance as you get older is Cato’s brilliant “insurance insurance” plan.

John McCain openly pushed for most of these ideas during last year’s presidential campaign, but since then the GOP mostly has kept its lipped zipped on most of these details except for the “purchasing insurance across state lines” idea.

If I were a reporter I’d be running all over Washington with some of the think tank studies and pinning down GOP legislators on whether they endorse or reject these “ideas.”

Surgical Bypass

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Rep. Henry Waxman is telling the Blue Dogs that if they don’t stop holding back the health care bill he’s going to let the bill bypass his Energy and Commerce Committee and let it go right to the floor.

By all means.

Ian Swanson and Mike Soraghan write for The Hill:

Waxman is now playing a game of legislative chicken with the Blue Dogs. He’s hoping the inclusion of a study on Medicare reimbursement rates in the healthcare overhaul will be enough to placate the centrist Democrats, who say the government program short-changes hospitals and physicians in their rural districts.

If that’s not, the seven Blue Dogs could join with the committee’s Republicans to “eviscerate” healthcare reform, and that’s something Waxman will not tolerate.

“I won’t allow them to hand over control of our committee to Republicans,” Waxman told reporters.

Matt Yglesias:

Something a lot of progressive legislative leaders seem to have forgotten until this Congress actually got under way is that historically congressional procedure is a challenge to be surmounted when you want big change to happen. It’s not actually a fixed feature of the landscape that people “have to” accommodate themselves to. For years you couldn’t get a decent Civil Rights bill because segregationists controlled the Judiciary Committee that had jurisdiction. This problem was “solved” by just deciding to bypass the Judiciary Committee. When you decide you want to get things done, you find a way to get them done.

Do it, Henry.

Update: Related — H/t to Mahareader David Rickard — conservative columnist Thomas Sowell explains at National Review Online why the system of paying for health care through private health insurance has to end:

Insurance companies are another distraction and a scapegoat, because they do not insure “preexisting conditions.” Stop and think about it: If you could wait until you got sick to take out health insurance, why would you buy that insurance while you are well?

You could avoid paying all those premiums and then — after you got sick — take out health insurance and let the premiums paid by other people pay for your medical treatment. …

…When Obama makes the insurance companies the villains for not insuring preexisting conditions, that gives him another distraction and enables him to be another escape artist, like Houdini.

The fact that Sowell doesn’t see his own argument as an admission that private health insurance simply can’t do the job says something, too.

Sowell’s basic argument is that we’d better keep our health care decisions in the hands of the for-profit insurance industry, because we can’t trust the government.

Katrina in Slow Motion

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Steven Pearlstein, business columnist for the New York Times Washington Post, writes,

Among the range of options for health-care reform, there’s one that is sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant.

That’s the option of doing nothing, letting things continue to drift as they have for the past two decades as we continue to search in vain for the perfect plan that would let everyone have everything they want and preserve everything they already have while getting someone else to pay for it.

So the next time you hear someone throwing a hissy fit because health reform might raise taxes on some people, or steer people into managed care, or require small businesses to contribute $2 a day for each employee’s coverage, just remember to ask yourself: And that’s compared with what?

I’ve seen projected costs for the status quo that are much higher than the projected costs of what the Right derides as “Obamacare,” yet somehow the people one sees on cable news are not worked up into a lather about the status quo costs. Just the costs of reform.

Meanwhile, one in six adult Americans have no health insurance. That doesn’t tell us how many millions more have insurance policies that will fail them if they get sick. I read about the Blue Dogs in Congress and Democratic obstructionists like Max Baucus, dithering around and picking the President’s plan to death because they are afraid of political fallout, and I want to break heads.

It’s like New Orleans after Katrina, when people were waiting on roofs to be rescued and the Bush Administration was preoccupied with how the hurricane might be used for political advantage. The lives of millions of Americans are forfeit to the whims of the insurance industry, and Baucus worries about “bipartisanship.” There are parents who daily watch their children struggle with health impairment without proper treatment, and the Blue Dogs dither. People are stuck in dead-end jobs and even marriages because they’re afraid of losing health benefits. And the Republicans scream that a national health care plan would deprive people of “liberty.”

It’s Katrina in slow motion, and we’re all New Orleans.

Bobby Jindal, Insurance Industry Shill

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Since Bobby Jindal has about as much hope of being POTUS as I have of being Pope, I hope the insurance industry gave him a good tip for the pack of lies Jindal published in the Wall Street Journal today. He writes,

The left in Washington has concluded that honesty will not yield its desired policy result. So it resorts to a fundamentally dishonest approach to reform. I say this because the marketing of the Democrats’ plans as presented in the House of Representatives and endorsed heartily by President Obama rests on three falsehoods.

However, what Jindal doesn’t tell you is that he gets his “facts” about the Democrats’ plans from UnitedHealthcare, a health insurance company. Yep, the Lewin Group, which Jindal cites as the “study” claiming the public option will drive private insurance out of business, is a subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, a fact Jindal does not disclose. The study was commissioned by the Heritage Foundation.

Jindal is especially pathetic, considering that the Lewin Group was outed by McClatchy as an insurance company front a couple of days ago.

Congressman Pete Stark of California fired back (page very slow to load):

“The Lewin Group is paid to produce estimates favorable to each client’s position. As a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealthcare, the country’s largest private insurance company, the Lewin Group’s so-called ‘analysis’ is suspect. The Heritage Foundation got the study they paid for, but it is pure fiction.

“The Congressional Budget Office found that H.R. 3200 increases employer-sponsored insurance and less than 10 million people would choose the public health insurance option by 2019.”

Here’s a point-by-point comparison of the Lewin Group claims versus the CBO estimates.

The rest of Jindal’s carnival pitch is the usual right-wing blah blah blah — giving the poor “help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit,” for example. His solution for motivating insurance companies to provide more coverage for people with pre-existing conditions is “Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick.” Segregating people into high-risk pools is going to help them get affordable insurance, how?

Basically, Jindal’s op ed is all word salad; lots of the right buzzwords, but nothing that you could string together to make a coherent policy.

Update: see “Health Insurance Industry Spins Data in Fight Against Public Plan.”

Insurance Insurance

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I have discovered a proposal for “fixing” health care on the Cato Institute website that is an absolute hoot.

The plan (see PDF) is to eliminate employee health benefit insurance and all government health care support, and throw everyone into the private insurance market. Insurance companies would be allowed to risk-rate premiums, so that as people got older and/or sicker their premiums would go up.

However, Cato says, this doesn’t have to be a problem. The solution is … wait for it … insurance insurance. They call it “health status insurance,” but essentially it’s insurance insurance. It’s a separate policy you take that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance.

I’m not kidding. That’s the brilliant plan.

Of course, the insurance insurance would only be reasonably priced if young and healthy people are willing to pay for it along with their regular health insurance premiums. And Cato is against any kind of mandates. But young people are certain to be willing to pay for two separate insurance policies to pay for health care, even if the second one isn’t something they think they will need for years. Wouldn’t they?

You can’t make this stuff up.

All Liberals Are the Same

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Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher with a lot of provocative ideas. I don’t always agree with his ideas, although I don’t always disagree, either. He’s the sort of fellow who generates a perspective that’s interesting to think about, but I think sometimes he likes to say outrageous things just to stir the pot. He is alleged to have postulated that maybe it’s OK to euthanize handicapped infants, for example. I don’t know if that’s exactly what he said, and at the moment I’m not interested enough to check it out. However, one may be grateful he’s an academic and not actually in charge of anything.

Anyway, Singer wrote an op ed for the New York Times titled “Why We Must Ration Health Care.” The op ed is a philosophical exercise, not a policy proposal — Singer’s no economist or policy wonk — and he’s basically saying, here’s another way to think about this. His essential point is that people ought to own up to the reality that health care is a commodity with limits and is rationed. He makes the observation that U.S. health care is rationed now, by ability to pay.

Dr. Art Kellermann, associate dean for public policy at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, recently wrote of a woman who came into his emergency room in critical condition because a blood vessel had burst in her brain. She was uninsured and had chosen to buy food for her children instead of spending money on her blood-pressure medicine. In the emergency room, she received excellent high-tech medical care, but by the time she got there, it was too late to save her. …

…When the media feature someone like Bruce Hardy or Jack Rosser, we readily relate to individuals who are harmed by a government agency’s decision to limit the cost of health care. But we tend not to hear about — and thus don’t identify with — the particular individuals who die in emergency rooms because they have no health insurance.

This is an excellent observation. I have quibbles about some of Singer’s reasoning, and how he presents his ideas, but still, it’s thought-provoking. However, my first reaction to his headline was “Why Pete Singer Should Shut Up,” because I knew this would enflame the passions of the Right and throw them into a cage-rattling, feces-throwing fit. We don’t need any more of that now. And sure enough, a number of rightie bloggers are having hysterical fits about the headline, although so far none I have seen seem to have actually read Singer’s op ed.

For example, A.J. Strata writes, “Americans Have Succeeded Without Rationing Health Care.” Singer gave one example after another of the way Americans do ration health care, and in fact, ration it even more than the awful European countries with “government run” health care.

Far more Americans reported forgoing health care because of cost. More than half (54 percent) reported not filling a prescription, not visiting a doctor when sick or not getting recommended care. In comparison, in the United Kingdom the figure was 13 percent, and in the Netherlands, only 7 percent.

I take it A.J. didn’t get that far into the article, as he makes no attempt to address Singer’s point.

My favorite example of teh stupid, however, is American Power, which turned Singer’s headline into “Obama Will Ration Health Care,” because, you know, all liberals think alike. So whatever some Australian philosopher says must be what Barack Obama intends to do. Brilliant.

Keep in Mind

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I have another rant on health insurance in the works, but in the meantime, take a look at what Joshua Holland writes at AlterNet. As we clamor for “single payer” — and I’ve done as much clamoring as anyone, I suspect — keep in mind that very few of the nations with national health care have pure “single payer” systems. Most of them, including France, have systems in which a private health insurance market still functions, I suppose for people who want the hospital suite with gold-plated bathroom fixtures. Whatever.

Anyway, Holland argues there should not be a war between single payer and public option advocates.