Dems look to health vote without abortion foes

Written By: ERICA WERNER

House leaders have concluded they cannot change a divisive abortion provision in President Barack Obama’s health care bill and will try to pass the sweeping legislation without the support of ardent anti-abortion Democrats.

A break on abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change health care in the United States. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House.

Democratic leaders are working to rally rank-and-file members around last-minute agreements on several sticking points, health insurance taxes and prescription drug coverage among them, and dozens of other complicated issues – all as Republicans stand ready to oppose the overhaul en masse.

“We will finish the job,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote in a letter to his Republican counterpart describing the path ahead.

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Senate Health Bill Would Up Costs for Millions in Middle Class, Analysis Finds

A nonpartisan study is casting new doubt on President Obama’s campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class.

The Senate health care bill crucial to saving President Obama’s signature domestic initiative will hit the wallets of a quarter of all Americans making less than $200,000 per year, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee that assessed the way the bill would hit taxpayers directly through new taxes and fees and indirectly through taxes levied on health care providers and passed on to consumers.

The committee also determined that the bill would subsidized insurance premiums for 7 percent of taxpayers — about 13 million people — while some 73 million people would face higher costs from the new fees and taxes.

The potential tax increases in the bill could pose significant problems for the president as he makes his final push for health care reform because he promised to protect middle-class Americans from any tax hikes. Republicans already are pouncing on the committee’s analysis.

“For every family that gets some benefit from this program, in other words, a premium subsidy, three families are going to get a tax increase and those three families obviously include the bulk of people you’d call middle class America,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News.

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Nancy Pelosi: Health care was ‘hijacked’

Written By: ANDY BARR

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concedes that Democrats allowed the health care reform debate to be “hijacked” by insurance companies and other interests set on killing the bill.

Pelosi, in the second part of an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose that aired Wednesday, said that early Democratic messaging attempts were plagued by the fact that the House and Senate had yet to come to any agreement about what would be in the bill.

“When you don’t (have) a bill yet, anyone can characterize it any way you want,” the California Democrat said. “I think that while there’s some well-intentioned people who have concerns about budget and this and that, a lot of that sentiment was hijacked by a concerted effort on the part of the insurance companies and their supporters to make sure we don’t a bill.”

“They could characterize it any way they wanted,” she added. “They could focus the debate.”

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Sick man faces bankruptcy — or death

Written By: MARK BONOKOSKI

Kent Pankow lives in Edmonton, in a province and a country that is trying to either kill him or bankrupt him.

No sense mincing words.

Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow was literally forced to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for lifesaving surgery — at a cost to family and friends of $106,000 — after the health-care system in Alberta left him hanging in bureaucratic limbo for 16 crucial days, his tumour meanwhile migrating to an unreachable part of the brain, while it dithered over his case file, ultimately deciding he was not surgery worthy.

Now, with the Mayo Clinic having done what the Alberta Cancer Board wouldn’t authorize or even explain, but with the tumour unable to be totally removed, the province will now not fund the expensive drug, Avastin, that the Mayo prescribed to keep him alive and keep the remaining tumour from increasing in size — despite the costs of the drug being totally funded by the province for other forms of cancer.

Kent Pankow, as it turns out, has the right disease but he has it in the wrong place.

Had he lung cancer, breast cancer, or colon cancer, then the cost of the drug — $4,555 per treatment, two times a month — would be totally covered by Alberta’s version of OHIP.

But he doesn’t.

And so he is not only a victim of brain cancer, he is also a victim of arbitrary discrimination.

Full disclosure. Kent Pankow, a 40-year-old Red Seal sous chef, is a son of the man who married the spouse of my late brother. And it was while vacationing with them at their winter home in Los Cabos, Mexico, recently that this story began to unfold back in their home province of Alberta.

But do not think, even for a moment, that this could never happen in Toronto or other parts of Ontario.

Our supposedly universal federal health care system, the pride of most Canadians and the political struggle of America, is only as good as the length of the waiting line and whether you have the right disease at the right time.

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