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In case you need a reminder of just how horrible the Senate bill is, the House Republican Policy Committee has put together this list of all of the “new boards, bureaucracies, and programs” this legislation would create.
It’s worth noting that among this list are FIVE new entities related to women’s health: the Centers for Disease Control Office of Women’s Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Office of Women’s Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration Office of Women’s Health, the Food and Drug Administration Office of Women’s Health, and, of course, the Health and Human Services Coordinating Committee on Women’s Health. Yes, the last sounds like another bureaucracy that’s sole purpose is to manage and oversee the many other bureaucracies.
Does anyone seriously think that this kind of massive government expansion is going to help women? It seems much more likely that each entity will create more rules and regulation and protocols that will further gum up the works of our medical system.
The naïve may shug their shoulders and say well surely the President’s revised legislation with pare down all of this unnecessary bureaucracy. Be warned: once the Senate bill is passed, it very well could become law of the land. Promised amendments and changes may very well not make it through Congress. And don’t count on the President’s proposal to improve the bill anyway. One of his chief contributions was to propose another major federal regulatory entity.
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The Financial Times reports that the President has given the House of Representatives a deadline of March 18 to pass the health care bill.
Who knows how seriously to take this new deadline (I believe the first presidential health care deadline was last August?), but it suggests that some Democrats recognize that this issue is doing them no favors in terms of their electoral prospects in November, and want it over with, one way or the other. It also means that many House Members will be facing intense pressure to switch their votes from no to yes… Opponents of this legislation should be looking at a 10 day push to keep this bad bill from becoming law.
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National Review Online
It’s counterproductive to worry about why an organization opposes the president’s latest iteration of health-care reform. At least for now, anyone working to defeat this monstrosity is an ally.
The National Organization for Women (NOW), for example, has just released a new statement by their president, Terry O’Neill, which says that the White House reform bill “denies women’s basic rights” and is “a giant leap backward for women.” NOW supports a single-payer, Canadian-style health-care system. They’re disappointed current proposals don’t contain strong enough “public options,” and worry the bill restricts coverage for abortion. They also believe current proposals don’t go far enough in eliminating insurance companies’ ability to consider risk factors like gender and age in setting premiums.
I’d argue NOW has it exactly backwards. A single-payer system would be far worse for women because it would result in rationed care, lower quality care, and greater government control of what procedures are allowed. And that’s just a few of the “fundamental differences” the president has referred to.
Yet there’s another reason to reject this legislation that should unite NOW and free marketers: It would discourage companies from hiring lower-income workers, particularly those with dependents, which especially would disadvantage single moms.
Section 4980H (under Title 1, Subtitle F, Part II, Section 1513) of the Senate’s bill stipulates large employers that fail to provide employees and their dependents access to insurance meeting the government’s “minimum essential coverage” definition face penalties if at least one full-time employee obtains insurance using a government subsidy. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein explains (while calling the provision “the worst policy in the bill, and possibly in the world”), the penalties could be considerable, and will create disincentives for hiring poor parents.
Rather than a simple employer mandate that forces every employer over a certain size to provide health-care insurance or pay a small fee, the free rider approach penalizes employers for hiring low-income workers who are eligible for subsidies. That will create an incentive to do one of two things: Don’t hire low-income workers (hire a teenager looking for a job rather than a single mother, or hire a housewife looking for a second job rather than an unemployed breadwinner), or hire illegal immigrants.
And it actually gets worse. The employer pays more if the low-income worker needs subsidies for his family as opposed to just himself. So it not only discriminates against low-income workers, but it particularly discriminates against low-income parents. Single mothers will get the worst deal, as they have lower incomes, and as you might expect, children who need health care.
Surely legislation penalizing the hiring of single moms meets NOW’s definition of “anti-woman.” Defenders could argue the intent is not to penalize hiring, but to encourage companies to provide benefits to employees. Yet these are the kinds of unintended consequences inevitable in a bill that tries to micromanage so many aspects of a very complicated system. Mandates are supposed to ensure adequate coverage, but inevitably drive up costs. Cost-cutting measures are supposed to encourage efficiency, but will inevitably reduce the quality and quantity of care that’s available. Expanding health-insurance coverage helps the uninsured, but means that as a nation we’ll be consuming more health care and paying more for it.
NOW has its own reasons for opposing the health-care bill, and that’s fine. A little more digging, though, and it might uncover other ways this legislation would — and big government regularly does — fail the women NOW claims to represent.
— Carrie Lukas is the vice president for policy and economics at the Independent Women’s Voice and a contributor to National Review Online.
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What will happen if the health care reform bill becomes law? It will be a first step in the push toward a single-payer system. That’s what President Obama is suggesting to Progressives when trying to get their support for this bill, and I think we should take him at his word on this one…
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Can Speaker Pelosi gather enough votes to force the health care monstrosity to the President’s desk? That’s the real question that will decide the fate of this whole health care battle. There are a number of good analysis of where the House stands today. Slate has this run down, and Timothy Noah concludes that the Speaker has an uphill battle ahead of her. He writes:
…when the bill passed the House quite narrowly, 220-215, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost three votes. John Murtha, D-Pa., died; Robert Wexler, D-Fla., resigned to become president of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation; and Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, resigned to run for governor. Balanced against these yeas is one nay, Nathan Deal, R-Ga., who just resigned effective March 8 to run for governor. That narrows health reform’s victory margin from five votes to three (217-214). …We will assume, then, that Pelosi starts with a victory margin of three.
Take away from that three Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich, and Joseph Cao, R-La. Stupak is the author of a House amendment on abortion that has the imprimatur of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops…
Stupak and Cao aren’t the only pro-lifers in the House who will change their vote from yea to nay if health reform doesn’t include the Stupak amendment.
Take away a dozen votes and the House health-reform bill fails by a 25-vote margin before the special elections (203-228). …
Pelosi needs to pick up a baker’s dozen votes to pass health reform. Where will she get them?
It’s heartening to read the specifics of how difficult it will be to get this bill through the House, but it shouldn’t make anyone comfortable: All that stands between the passage of a bill that will fundamentally reorder one-sixth of the U.S. economy is a dozen House votes. You can be sure that Congressional leaders and the President are doing everything they can to pressure Democrats leaning toward voting no to change their minds. We need to make sure that there is equal pressure coming from our side.
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I’m glad yesterday’s health care summit went well for Republicans. Democrats hogged the time, used too many anecdotes that say nothing about the merits of their proposals, and did little to assuage the many concerns that Americans have about their trillion-dollar health care legislation. Republicans were able to show that they aren’t just the party of no. They want to improve the health care system, and have real ideas about how to do so. The President must have hoped to make Republicans look like ogres so barely-paying-attention Americans would root for health care’s passage; he failed.
But what does that mean for the prospects of health care reform? Probably very little. Here is what the WSJ’s Kim Strassel says about the effect of the summit and coming political battle to pass a bill.
The Summit Show was designed by Democrats for Democrats, to give Mr. Obama an all-day stage to inspire and exhort his party to charge once more into the health fray. It’s about “altering the political atmospherics,” admitted one senior Democrat. Yet for all the talk of “jump-start,” there’s little to suggest the ugly politics of passage have changed. …
The strategy is somewhat bully for Mr. Reid, who can afford to lose eight of his own members. It’s meaningless for Mrs. Pelosi. If the speaker had the votes post-Brown to pass the Senate bill, we’d be living under ObamaCare. She didn’t have them then, and yesterday’s summit was a sideshow to the problems she has getting them now.
A few numbers: Mrs. Pelosi passed her health-care bill in early November, with three votes to spare. The one Republican yes has since bailed. On the Democratic side, one vote has left Congress, one has died, and one retires this week. A smaller Congress means Mrs. Pelosi only needs 216 votes. If all were equal to November, she’s at 216.
Only it isn’t November. It’s nearly March, and the speaker is being asked to pass a bill vastly different from her own, in the wake of a crushing electoral defeat and in light of dire public-opinion polls.
While it’s heartening that the road looks tough for Pelosi and Reid, no one should take for granted that they can’t put enough pressure on wavering Members to get this done. That’s why those Members need to keep hearing from us to remind them that voters—their real bosses—don’t want this health care bill to become law.
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The potential use of the reconciliation process continues to hit road bumps: this bump is the very important Budget Committee Chairman, Senator Kent Conrad. As Politico reports:
Conrad, who has been open to reconciliation as long as the fixes are limited, said the order must be reversed. The House must pass the Senate bill first — before either chamber considers the reconciliation package, he said.
“I don’t know of any way, I don’t know of any way where you can have a reconciliation bill pass before the bill that it is meant to reconcile passes,” said Conrad, who would be a central figure on the Senate floor if Democrats embark on the complicated process. “I don’t know how you would deal with the scoring. I don’t know how I could look you in the eye and say this package reduces the deficit. It’s kind of got the cart before the horse.”
When reminded that House Democrats don’t want to do health care in that order, Conrad said bluntly: “Fine, then it’s dead.”
We can only hope he’s right. (Hat Tip: Critical Condition)
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So much for “new” health care legislation. What the President has proposed doesn’t change the essential problems with the old health care bills: it is still a move toward one-size-fits-all, government-run health care, which empowers bureaucrats to decide what kind of health insurance all Americans must have and costs taxpayers trillions.
Surprisingly, the new bill does what might have seemed impossible—it makes the old legislation even worse. It raises more taxes, spends more taxpayer money, and creates more debt (though no one knows exactly how much since the CBO says it lacks so many details it can’t be scored). It also creates another government agency. This one is called the “Health Insurance Rate Authority,” and essentially it will be involved in imposing price controls on the insurance industry. Yes, this bill offers new layers of regulations and is an even more pronounce lurch toward government-controlled health care.
Grace-Marie Turner has a great sum up of the legislation:
The much-awaited health-care reform plan the White House released this morning is little more than an amalgamation of the taxing, spending, mandating, and regulating policies of the bills that passed the House and Senate last year.
Instead of offering a genuinely fresh approach, Mr. Obama split the difference between two bad bills that are hugely unpopular with the American people. He would continue to mandate that both individuals and employers pay for health insurance or face fines and penalties. He would expand Medicaid, the most dysfunctional health program in the country. And he would increase fees on insurers and other health companies — fees that will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher premiums.
The big new idea in the president’s plan is to federalize regulation of health insurance, creating a Health Insurance Rate Authority to conduct “reviews of unreasonable rate increases and other unfair practices of insurance plans.” This reflects the overall strategy to give more and more control over the health sector to Washington…
The Obama plan is not an improvement, and it offers Republicans little upon which to build a conversation that could lead to genuine compromise at Thursday’s summit.
The public needs to tell their representatives once again to kill this terrible bill and go back to the draw board to create real positive change in our health care system.
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On realclearpolitics, Jay Cost has an interesting discussion on the use of reconciliation. Anyone wondering what tactics Republicans will have available if Democrats try to use this path to push through their unpopular health care legislation must read this piece. Here is one Senate rule to know about, since it may be critical to the outcome of this legislative battle. Cost writes:
The Byrd rule, named after Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), was implemented in the 1980s because the Senate had used reconciliation to pass items that were not related to the budget. In other words, Senators were getting around the filibuster, that ancient device which is either the final protection against an extreme majority or the last recourse of a discredited minority (depending upon which side one finds oneself!). The Byrd rule puts limits on what reconciliation can be used for. Extraneous provisions are stricken from reconciliation bills, and have to be passed through the typical procedure. Here are several relevant definitions of “extraneous” (quoting a report from the Congressional Research Service by Robert Keith and Bill Heniff, Jr.):
A provision is considered to be extraneous if it fails under one or more of the following six definitions:(1) It does not produce a change in outlays or revenues…
(4) It produces a change in outlays or revenues which is merely incidental to the non-budgetary components of the provision.
(5) It would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure…This suggests why smart Democrats never seriously discussed using reconciliation to pass an entire health care bill. If a provision does not alter spending or tax revenues, does so only “incidentally” (an unimportantly ambiguous word!), or adds to the deficit – it can be stricken.
The Byrd rule will set the parameters of the legislative battle, should the Democrats take this path. In that case, the Democrats will write a reconciliation bill that resolves the differences between the two chambers and, so they hope, does not include extraneous measures, as defined by the Byrd rule. The Republicans will test how well the Democrats have drafted their legislation – raising points of order in the hopes of striking provisions that they argue are extraneous.
It’s important to know what Members of Congress can do to stop the bill, but it doesn’t change what the public can do, and that’s keep talking to your elected representatives and educating your friends and colleagues about the importance of defeating this government take-over of medicine.
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According to the White House’s website, the President used his weekly address this weekend to “call on Democratic and Republican leaders to attend next week’s health care meeting in good faith to find reforms that work for American families and small businesses.” It’s a little hard to swallow given all the reporting on how Democrats plan to ram through their unpopular plan through Congress using legislative maneuvers that subvert traditional Congressional rules.
The President’s address repeats what’s been contained in just about every speech he has given on health care. He highlights all the problems with the status quo. Yet that’s really besides the point. Yes, everyone knows that the current system is flawed. The question is what to do about it. And the American people overwhelming recognize that a trillion dollar government initiative to micromanaging the health insurance of all Americans will not make things better, but much, much worse.
The most interesting part of this address was when the President said that he considers Republican proposals to “allow Americans to purchase insurance from a company in another state to give people more choices and bring down costs” a “good idea.” Certainly, that sounds like bipartisanship and like the President is open to using reform to encourage real competition.
Yet don’t be fooled: in the very next sentence he stipulates that we should “pursue them in a way that protects benefits, protects patients, and protects the American people.” Sure, President Obama and Congressional leaders may consider allowing inter-state purchase of health insurance, but they are also going to so heavily regulate the insurance industry–dictating exactly what each policy can and cannot contain and at what price–that it really won’t matter who you buy your insurance from anyway, since they’ll all be selling the same government created product.
The President claims that he doesn’t want the summit to be merely “political theater,” but it’s clear that’s exactly what this will be. Today, the White House will release its new proposal and then will focus on forcing it through Congress by any means necessary. They see the summit as a chance to preen about bipartisanship, which they presume the obsequious media will dutifully cover as an actual good faith meeting, before returning to business as usual.
The good news is that the American people increasingly recognize these tricks for what they are, and will remain committed to defeating the Democrats’ abomination of a health care bill.
