IWV Director Heather Higgins discusses the healthcare debate.
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IWV Director Heather Higgins talks about her experiences with the healthcare debate.
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With Democrats poised to enact something, opposing forces are in full battle gear.
For more, see “Activists Step Up Health Care Fight” by Congress.org’s Ambreen Ali.
IWV Director Heather Higgins joined The Steve Largent Show to discuss healthcare reform.
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By Ambreen Ali
Activists are getting ready for the final showdown on health care.
As Democrats renew their push on health care this week, advocacy groups on both sides have stepped up their efforts to energize their bases and influence lawmakers.
President Obama’s health care plan — released ahead of Thursday’s bipartisan health summit — resembles the Senate bill (HR 3590) with a few concessions that could get House Democrats to pass the overhaul with a simple majority.
That strategy gives Democrats an advantage, since they hold the majority in both chambers.
But opponents of the overhaul are doing everything they can to ensure that won’t happen. They have started e-mail, robocall, and advertising campaigns telling members to pressure lawmakers against the President’s plan.
“We’re trying to go gangbusters this week,” said Carrie Lukas of Independent Women’s Voice. The conservative group has been using radio ads and phone campaigns to target specific Congressional districts.
“There’s a lot of Members of the House who have to be nervous about making this leap,” Lukas said, noting that some Democrats are nervous about midterm elections after Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) won in Massachusetts.
The House health care bill (HR 3962) passed by five votes, 220-215. The conservative groups are trying to identify the handful of Representatives who may be easiest to peel away from the majority.
Americans for Tax Reform has been using the plan’s tax provisions to sway lawmakers against the bill. The group said the President’s proposal includes a net tax hike of $748 billion over the next decade.
“We’re going to try to make Members profoundly uncomfortable if they were going to vote for it,” Tax Policy Director Ryan Ellis said.
The group used similar analyses of the House and Senate bills to lobby lawmakers, making them well prepared for what Ellis called the “the third round.”
But it also works to the activists’ disadvantage that the health care debate has dragged. Grassroots bases that were energized around health care last year have waned over time.
“We’re trying to bring the energy level and engagement level of our activists back up to where it was last year,” Phil Kerpen, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, said.
The group is holding a counter-event to the health summit to get some of that excitement back.
“We’re likely near the end one way or the other,” Kerpen said. “Either they’ll succeed in getting something very unpopular through or they’ll move on.”
As for the summit itself, some groups are adopting a wait-and-see approach.
The Chamber of Commerce, a powerful opponent of the Democrats’ proposals, sent the President a letter yesterday asking him to drop the House and Senate bills in favor of “a fresh approach.”
Others, including the Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, have already written it off the event as “kabuki.”
“This is a last-ditch effort by the President to restart the debate and take hold of the narrative,” spokesman Brian Burgess said.
The group has been targeting the public option through radio and television ads that ask voters to get in touch with lawmakers. It’s a “trickle-up” approach to which Burgess said lawmakers respond.
If it works this time around, conservative activists may prevail.
“We’re at the point where if [the summit] doesn’t work, there’s really not a lot of time to reboot before elections,” he noted.
Ambreen Ali writes for Congress.org.
In anticipation of this week’s White House Summit, many are offering their ideas for how policymakers can improve upon the current system. IWV would like to highlight a few reforms that would be particularly important for women.
In particular, women face unique challenges in the existing health care system: Today, health insurance is tied to employment, which means that women (who frequently take time out of the workforce and work in part-time positions that don’t include health benefits) often face disruptions in their coverage. Buying health insurance on the individual market (instead of through an employer) can often be costly and difficult.
Before considering how best to address this problem, it’s important to consider why the problem exists in the first place. Why is it that in the U.S. health insurance—unlike many other types of coverage, including car, life, and home/renters insurance—is linked to employment status?
The current, flawed system is largely the product of ill-conceived government policy. Right now, employers purchasing health insurance receive tax breaks while those purchasing in the individual market don’t. This is at the heart of the problems that plague today’s health care system. Those with employer-provided health insurance are shielded from the full costs of their coverage, encouraging the over-consumption of medical treatment and driving up costs for everyone. Those without coverage through employers are forced into the more expensive individual market, which discourages the healthiest from obtaining insurance on their own, which further drives up prices.
There are a number of ways that policymakers could address these problems and make the health care system work better for women. Here are three simple solutions that IWV believes should be seriously considered during the health care summit:
•End the Bias In Favor of Employer-Provided Care: Policymakers should reform the tax laws so that individual and employer-provided health insurance operate on a level playing field. This would make it easier for women to continue coverage when taking time out of the workforce, and make insurance more affordable for those who don’t receive health benefits through work.
• Allow Inter-State Competition for Health Insurance: Under current law, people can only buy health insurance from a provider within their state. Opening up the insurance market so that insurance could be purchased across state lines would provide individuals more options and lower costs.
• Eliminate—Don’t Add To—Costly Mandates: Individuals have different needs and preferences when it comes to insurance. Instead of new government mandates about what insurance policies must contain (which drive up costs), the government should allow insurance companies to offer a wide variety of options, from high deductible catastrophic plans to specialized, full-service plans.
What women don’t need is a trillion-dollar government plan that strangles private health insurance, discourages much-needed medical innovation, puts government in charge of determining the medical treatments, drives up the price of premiums, and adds to our already exploding deficit.
Policymakers often talk about embracing big government reforms in order to help women. Yet women have much to lose in a one-size-fits-all, government controlled health care system and much to gain from moving toward a system of greater choice and more portable insurance. Our Representatives should focus on moving us in the right direction.
On February 19, 2010, Heather Higgins particpated on the panel, Saving Freedom From ObamaCare: It Isn’t Over Yet, at CPAC.
Congressional Quarterly Healthbeat
| By Jane Norman, CQ HealthBeat Associate Editor |
| Conservative opponents of Democrats’ health care overhaul plans touted their success in Massachusetts and vowed at a Washington political conference Friday to continue their drive to ensure the demise of a “big government takeover” of the system.
“They are not giving up, and we must not either,” said Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, as she introduced a panel on “Saving Freedom from Obamacare: It Isn’t Over Yet” at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a longtime event gaining new attention this year with the growth of the tea party movement. Much of the anti-overhaul action described by the panelists has come not in Washington, where Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, but in the states. Heather Higgins, director of the conservative advocacy group Independent Women’s Voice, said it was involved in building support for the candidacy of newly minted Republican Sen. Scott P. Brown in his surprise victory in a Massachusetts special election in January to fill the seat of the late Edward M. Kennedy. Brown gave Senate Republicans the 41st vote they needed to successfully mount filibusters. Independent Women’s Voice ran radio ads in Massachusetts on health care targeted at women and independent voters and placed thousands of recorded telephone calls featuring two physicians opposed to the overhaul, said Higgins. Polling after the election found a majority of those who heard the group’s message backed Brown, she said. “Small, independent efforts actually matter,” said Higgins. Both of the physicians on the recorded phone calls “had total strangers track them down and thank them” for the calls, she said. Eric Novack, an orthopedic surgeon and chairman of Arizonans for Healthcare Freedom, described how his advocacy group gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures and pushed to include on the Arizona ballot in 2008 a constitutional amendment that would block any state plan for universal health coverage. Known as the Freedom to Choose Act, it stated, “Because all people should have the right to make decisions about their health care, no law shall be passed that restricts a person’s freedom of choice of private health care systems or private plans of any type.” While the amendment narrowly lost, voters will consider a new version in this fall’s election and Novack said lawmakers in more than 30 states now are proposing similar initiatives. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, those include proposed constitutional amendments, changes in state laws and proposals for prohibition of unfunded federal mandates. “We have made unbelievable progress — we can’t let up on this,” said Novack. “We can make a difference at the state level.” Hal Scherz, a pediatric urologist in Atlanta who is president of Docs 4 Patient Care, a group opposed to the “government takeover” of health care, said his physician members believe an overhaul should target lower costs, improved access and changes in malpractice laws. They’d like to see consumers able to purchase insurance over the Internet and across state lines, for example. Scherz, who blasted the American Medical Association for its endorsements of Democratic bills, said that when he meets with the parents of his young patients, he takes two minutes at the end of the conversation and asks to talk with them about the health care overhaul. “Most of them say yes and thank me for doing this,” he said. Source: CQ HealthBeat |
IWV Director Heather Higgins discusses the healthcare debate.
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Carrie Lukas joins The Martha Zoller Show to discuss Obama’s State of the Union address.
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