 “Some of you won’t like what I will do all of the time.” In that statement President Obama is proving to be right. The reports of this behind the scene workings of his health care initiative are troubling. And if these reports are true Obama is playing with electoral fire. His base is beginning to loose faith in the sincerity of his health care effort and that is not helped by the fact that he has engaged in some actions that appear on their face to be downright duplicitous.
Of particular question is the deal the Whitehouse cut with the Pharmaceutical industry. The White House acknowledged that drug manufacturers agreed to contribute $80 billion in product discounts over 10 years to reduce the cost of brand-name prescription drugs. In turn, Big Parma stands to get some 30 million new customers and White House help in holding at bay congressional demands for further concessions.
Hospitals, on the other hand, agreed to kick in $155 billion over 10 years toward lowering healthcare costs, the White House confirms. The Senate Finance Committee, a key panel drafting reform legislation, worked out most of the deal’s specifics; the White House agreed to an amount. In return, hospitals got some assurances that government will adequately reimburse them for services.
The question is, are these the 235 billion reasons the administration is not aggressively pursuing the public option or the expanding Medicare to cover those from 55 and up the defeat of both to which they seemed to have conceded rather easily?
Right now more and more of Obama’s supporters are questioning where the President really stands on healthcare reform saying in the words of Howard Dean “the bill before the Senate is not true reform.”
Howard Dean got out in front on criticizing the current Senate bill to the Whitehouse’s somewhat vociferous discomfort. Former Presidential candidate, ex Governor of Vermont, a medical Doctor and one of the stoutest proponents of healthcare reform, he issued a passionate but reasoned statement to the Washington Post yesterday 12-17-09. The statement began
If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.
Real health-care reform is supposed to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 percent of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries -- in the range of $20 million a year -- and on return on equity for the company's shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.
Obama has always stated that a bill that has competition is the only way to keep the insurance companies honest. The current Senate bill does not have anything approaching competition for the insurance companies and their monopolistic exemption remains in tact.
One of the more interesting developments is the resistance of Senator Lieberman of Connecticut to anything in the legislation that compromises the leverage of the insurance companies, which are the biggest employers in the state of Connecticut. His most recent flip-flop rejecting his own earlier proposal to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55 was a classic case of moving the goal post once it was an easy target.. Lieberman has come across as an insincere hypocrite. Appearing on the Imus show he came up with the curious concern that the president was trying to do two good things at once.
Interestingly, Joe has received no criticism from the Whitehouse versus harsh criticism directed at Howard Dean to the consternation of the liberal bloc of democrats.
In another development, on Thursday, the nation's largest union group led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said that it will not support the Democratic health-care bill unless "substantial changes" are made to the current Senate version.
Earlier in the day, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern penned a letter to his fellow union members in which he called out President Barack Obama for abandoning his own principles of reform.
"President Obama must remember his own words from the campaign. His call of 'Yes We Can' was not just to us, not just to the millions of people who voted for him, but to himself. We all stood shoulder to shoulder with the President during his hard fought campaign. And, we will continue to stand with him but he must fight for the reform we all know is possible," Stern wrote.
President Obama is allowing a dangerous narrative to gain legs, which is that he is weak and incapable of strong-arming the situation. Or as Bill Press put it, “we need less Gandhi and more LBJ.” During both the run for the democratic nomination and the presidency Obama was constantly criticized for being to conciliatory and soft. In winning both the democratic and the presidency, he validated his approach at least for campaigning.
But now we’re talking governing and with a republican party unified in defeating his presidency he seems slow to recognize that these people are more concerned about winning and power versus the interest of the people. With few exceptions, the republicans have voted unanimously to oppose every piece of legislation the democrats have put before the Senate and the house.
If the weak narrative takes hold even Obama’s base may have second thoughts.
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