Health Care

Obama pleads for health Rx – for sake of presidency

Written By: GEOFF EARLE

President Obama yesterday pushed wavering House members to OK health-care legislation for his own political standing and for theirs, as the battle came down to a bare-knuckle brawl for votes.

Obama met with groups of liberal and more conservative Democrats in the White House to try to assemble a winning coalition.

“To maintain a strong presidency, we need to pass the bill,” Obama told the liberals, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who attended the meeting.

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Boehner says he expects health bill to hit House floor ‘within days’

Written By: Michael O’Brien

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday he expects Democrats’ healthcare bill to hit the House floor “within days.”

Boehner said he expects the debate over healthcare to begin, in earnest, as Democrats in the House prepare to take up the health bill passed by the Senate last Christmas Eve.

“I think we’re within days of this bill coming to the floor of the House,” Boehner said during an appearance on Fox News. “It’s pretty clear that the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid want to do everything they can to jam this bill through the House and the Senate to get it to the president’s desk.”

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SEIU Wants to Unionize Doctors

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Kathryn in Colleyville, Texas. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s great to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I was calling about Medicare and the slow erosion of freedom within the doctor community. Basically over the past two or three months, cardiology has been taken incredible pay cuts, which are impacting the practice of medicine.

RUSH: Medicare and Medicaid particularly, you mean, right?

CALLER: Medicare, yes.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Specifically, a couple of months ago the imaging that is performed in cardiologists’ office took a 40% pay cut, and that was followed up this past Monday with a 20% pay cut to all physicians. It’s really affecting how patients are getting taken care of. We had to lay off some employees, and it’s really touch and go whether we’ll be able to continue to see Medicare patients.

RUSH: I was just going to say: Your only hope is to get out of the program.

CALLER: Well, there is an out, which a lot of cardiologists — about, probably, 30% — have already accepted. Hospitals are buying out cardiology practices, only to become employees of hospitals.

RUSH: Yeah. I know.

CALLER: Huh. And that’s (garbled).

RUSH: But once you opt out of Medicare you can’t take a Medicare patient ever again, right?

CALLER: I’m not sure all the rules. I’m probably out of my territory there, but there are specific rules for not taking care of Medicare patients. But the problem is that once you’re an employee of a hospital you’ve lost your freedom, and some practices that have been bought out have already been told by the hospitals that, “Oh, well, we’re going to have to cut your pay 15%, and you have no recourse.”

RUSH: All right. I want to try to put what you’ve said here into an understandable context for the audience.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush.

RUSH: No, no, no. Stay on the line here because I need you to tell me if I’m right or wrong on this.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: The odds are I’m right (I’m very seldom wrong) but I still want you there to correct me. Now, the very people who just yesterday in a big dog and pony show said, “We’re going to expand coverage, we’re going to insure 31 million more people, we’re going to lower costs,” the same people are reducing what they are paying you and your husband, cardiologists, to the point that you cannot keep your practices going?

CALLER: That’s basically it. It’s a huge part of this. Probably 50% of local cardiology business is Medicare.

RUSH: Well, of course it is.

CALLER: It’s a very successful business. Let me tell you that over the past ten years… You know, heart disease was the number one killer ten years ago. But do you know that in the last ten years the mortality has dropped 30% because of cardiology care?

RUSH: Yeah. Oh, I’m not surprised. Despite all these horrors like childhood obesity, the life expectancy just continues to edge upward in this country.

CALLER: That’s right.

RUSH: But my point with you, Kathryn, is that the very people who claim they know how to fix this are breaking what we have now.

CALLER: Exactly. What we have now is already so broken that basically insurance companies and government have doctor groups fighting among ourselves for what’s left of our 8% of the Medicare dollar. About 8% of what goes through Medicare actually makes it to doctors. Everything else is wasted.

RUSH: Thank you, Kathryn. I want to make another point about this, ladies and gentlemen. I want to go back to my old buddy Howard Fineman and his piece earlier this week in Newsweek in which he wondered, “Where’s all the money going?” Where’s all the money going if they’re cutting the doctors? Well, the money isn’t there. We don’t have it. We have a $1.5 trillion deficit. The money is owed. The money is going to debt. But this is the real point. You listen to this doctor. I could do this all three hours any day I wanted. I could take calls from doctor after doctor after doctor who would tell the same story: Medicare payments, copayments are being cut back to the point that they can’t continue to keep the office open on what the government is paying them.

You have cardiology patients, heart patients, going in to get treated, and some far-off bureaucrat somewhere… Not an insurance company. We’re talking Medicare here, not some evil insurance company. Some federal bureaucrat is deciding what the cardiologist is going to get paid. That’s not a free market. There’s no relationship to Kathryn’s patients and the price of Kathryn’s service. The patient isn’t paying diddly-squat, or very little on Medicare and even less on Medicaid if we lump that in. We’ll leave Medicaid out of it for now. There’s absolutely no relationship. These people walk in with a heart problem. The service and the fee attached to it by Kathryn and her husband the cardiologists is not based on that woman’s ability to pay or the patient’s ability to pay or the patient’s level of care that’s needed, treatment, what have you.

Some bureaucrat that nobody knows, sitting far away in some dank federal office, is using a computer with printouts and models — formulas and so forth — to determine what the doctor rendering the service is going to be paid. This is price fixing. This is government control. We already have this. This is why it’s messed up. Now, we can get lost in the details here of the doctor’s only getting reimbursed this or they’re having their payments bundled here or what have you. That’s not the point. The problem is, imagine if you had to check into a hotel this way and the room is 400 bucks a night, and some federal bureaucrat says, “We’re only going to pay the hotel a hundred bucks for this,” and the hotel has to give you the room! It can’t be sustained.

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Charles Krauthammer: For Obama, health care show must go on

Written By: Charles Krauthammer

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’ devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’ devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.
…
…even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett [went] public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down and the bill doesn’t do it. Buffett’s advice would be to start over and get it right.

Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation’s seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington’s wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of “budget reconciliation.” The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

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Hundreds of NHS wards to be shut in secret plans

Written By: Robert Winnett, Holly Watt and Christopher Hope

Plans that could lead to the closure of hundreds of hospital wards are being drawn up but will not be made public until after the general election, opposition parties have said.

Last year, the Government asked NHS authorities to come up with proposals to reorganise the service to save money as a result of the recession. Details have started to emerge of what is likely to be a rolling programme of cuts that contrasts sharply with assurances from Labour and the Tories that the NHS was “safe”.

So far, only the plans for London have come to light. Campaigners claimed the proposals threatened services such as casualty and maternity units at 13 out of 36 hospitals in the capital.

The failure of health authorities in other areas to disclose their response has prompted allegations that proposed closures, which could be politically damaging to the Government, will not be published until after polling day.

The scale of the cuts has caused a rebellion among Labour ministers who have openly defied the Government by publicly protesting at closures at their local hospitals.

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