more ObamaCare updates ...

Obama’s Health Care Mess [Victor Davis Hanson]


Ironies abound in the health-care debate. Bush was pilloried by the Obamanians for (1) not planning for the postwar occupation of Iraq; and (2) not being able to articulate the ends and means of the administration’s war. Yet in the hubris of high ratings, Obama apparently felt that he neither had to present a comprehensive finished blueprint of health-care reform, nor that he or his associates should have to sum it up succinctly and clearly. The result is that most Americans not only do not know what the administration plan is, but sense that their president does not either.

Health care is stalled and insidiously undermining the presidency of Obama precisely because the public senses he has not leveled with the American people. Of the uninsured, how many millions are young people who feel no need right now to buy insurance, how many million are illegal aliens, how many millions chose to use their optional income for things other than a low-cost catastrophic health plan, how many millions still find care outside the insurance system?

Nor do most Americans feel their system is broken. They worry about redundant care, frivolous procedures, and lawsuits, but sense that all in all it can be improved rather than scrapped. They know that Americans with cancer and heart disease survive longer than anywhere else due to superior American care. And they know that longevity is influenced by factors well beyond medical care. The president just as easily could tackle the epidemic of homicides and youth violence, as well as automobile accidents, if his concern really were to ensure that Americans on average lived longer than any others.

Bottom line: too many Americans, whether rightly or wrongly, believe that Obama has other agendas that transcend simply ensuring American live longer, healthier, and better — such as growing government, enforcing an equality of result, and creating permanent constituencies that administer and receive expanding federal entitlements.

And what looms over the entire debate? Debt, debt, debt — both the recognition that one cannot expand those covered and save money at the same time without rationing or higher taxes; and the notion that all Obama’s new entitlements essentially involve borrowing money, much of it from Asia, as our indebtedness soars.


Whole Foods:

For writing a very sensible op-ed on health care reform, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has been rewarded with an attempted boycott of his stores. Ann Althouse is not amused. Progressive folks who are offended at the idea of a private firm opposing expanded government intervention in the economy are certaily free to boycott Whole Foods — but they're not entitled to be free from criticism for it. Others of us are also free to shop there more often.


Why cut off the foot... [Mark Steyn]

...when you can cut off the services?

Further to my weekend column on how a government health system inevitably means restricted access to treatment, a word from British Columbia:

The Fraser Health Authority confirmed Thursday it intends to cut surgeries, seniors' programs and services for the mentally ill to help deal with a budget shortfall of up to $160 million.
However, it said the emergency department at Mission Memorial Hospital will stay open.
That's awfully sporting of them, all things considered.

The board said 10 to 15 per cent of elective surgeries will be cut in the latter part of the 2009-10 fiscal year, with slowdowns already scheduled for the Olympic period.

That's how it works. You can elect to have the surgery but they won't elect to give it to you. And don't ask me why hosting the Winter Olympics should necessitate cuts in health care. Unless they're expecting an epidemic of two-man luge teams with buttocks frozen to the sled or men's ice-dancing teams felled by attempting a double-axle in a too tight bolero jacket, it would seem to be just one of those things that happens when governments of advanced wealthy nations decide they can run every aspect of life more "efficiently" than the citizenry.


Big Pharma Swallows Obama's Pill [Robert Costa]

When Big Pharma cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last week to help fund Obamacare via prescription-drug discounts, both the Left and the Right called foul. “Rancid,” moaned The Nation. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal blasted Billy Tauzin, PhRMA’s chief lobbyist, declaring the former congressman to be looking “less like Dr. Faustus and more like Jack, trading away his industry for magic beans.” NR’s Rich Lowry observed that “even if the deal holds, PhRMA will be at the mercy of a government system that will tend to squeeze out even those private players who have obligingly assisted in creating the predicate for their own destruction.”

Ken Johnson, a Tauzin adviser and PhRMA’s senior vice-president, acknowledged to NRO on Friday that he’s feeling the heat, though more from pharmaceutical-company leaders than from politicos. “There’s some angst right now, but we made it clear that this was never going to be easy. It’s a torturous process, with peaks and valleys,” he said. “We knew from the beginning that this was going to be a rollercoaster ride, with ups and downs and times where you close your eyes and hold on for dear life. At the end of the ride, are you smiling or sick to your stomach?”

Dyspepsia may already be here. On Thursday, Fox News reported that Big Pharma, though nodding along with the president on health-care reform, now finds itself fighting with the White House on “follow-on biologicals,” the industry’s innovative drugs that drive much of its business:
Congress has backed drugmakers who want to hold on to their data exclusivity for 12 years before letting other companies develop similar versions of their products. On Tuesday, the president called for drug companies to reduce that span to seven years. He has an ally in the AARP, the nation's largest seniors group.

The drug manufacturers, however, say companies should have a longer time to keep their product exclusive since they spent so much money on bringing the drug to market in the first place.

"On average it's about $1.2 billion a company spends to get a biologic on the market. And that's well before the cost of actually building a facility, to manufacture the biologic, which often times run anywhere from a quarter billion to half a billion dollars to get on the market," said Lori Reilly, vice president of policy for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.
Nonetheless, PhRMA, said Johnson, still believes its deal with Obama was a necessary compromise. “What we’re trying to do is move the debate closer to the center. That said, we need health-care reform but should not sacrifice medical progress or set us on a path towards a single-payer health-care system.”

And don’t try to tell PhRMA that the sky is falling on its industry. “We remain convinced that a commonsense, bipartisan bill will emerge in Congress that we can embrace wholeheartedly,” said Johnson. Still, “if the wheels come off the train, on issues like price controls, we’ll have serious concerns.” Johnson declined to get into specifics about what would trigger a derailment.

He was, however, more than ready to deflect media criticism. “People from both sides of the issue are going to say nasty things at times,” said Johnson, with regards to the Journal editorial. “The Wall Street Journal has long advocated free-market principles [and argued] that we have started down that slippery slope towards a single-payer system. Our argument is that we’re heading that way anyway, if we don’t work to rein in health-care costs.”

“The $80 billion in cost-saving we pledged is not loose change found in the sofa. It will force companies to make very tough decisions about which medicines to pursue. At the same time, it provides us with certainty that will help companies make long-term R&D decisions. We told the White House and Congress that we know our business model better than anyone else. One of the reasons that we want to be a participant is to avoid catastrophic job losses. By being at the table, we were able to have input in that we could offer $80 billion, without continuing down that road.”

Whether or not the $80 billion pill PhRMA is peddling to its CEOs is any good for its health will be determined over the coming months. One diagnosis, however, is already clear. As Ron Smith noted in the Baltimore Sun on Friday: “At least the health reform bill is good for somebody: lobbyists.”