Debunking Health Care Reform Myths In The 11th Hour

Ron Callari
Inventor Spot
March 20, 2010


While this blog was written one day prior to a watered version of the health care reform act moving to its final vote, there are still many in the U.S. who continue to wade through the misconceptions. Far from following the health care  models of other countries and after over fifty years of fighting for some form of reform, if you're a 'dummy' like me, you may still not be as knowledgeable as you'd like regarding this revolutionary new legislation. However when dealing with the facts on some of the major issues, I was able to research some of the more topical myths that can be debunked.  

A Government Take-over. 
Dissimilar to Canada and Britain, the government will not take over hospitals or other privately run health care businesses - and physicians will not become government employees.  The U.S. government intends to help those who purchase insurance from private companies, but not pay all the bills like the system in Canada. Medicare and Medicaid will stay in tact, and the government would create health insurance exchanges for those who have tobuy insurance on their own. This will be done so that Americans will be able to comparison-shop. 

Employers Don't Need To Provide Insurance.
Employers will not be required to buy insurance for employees, but larger employers with more than 50 workers may be subject to fines if they don't provide insurance. Congress apparently wants to encourage employers to offer insurance to all their employees, Fines will be issued to larger employers if their employees buy insurance on the exchanges and qualify for a low-income credit. Fines will be based on a sliding scale according to the number of employees, 50 and above. 

Insurance Companies Will Refuse Certain Coverage. 
 By 2014, when the exchanges open, insurers won't be able to deny customers for pre-existing conditions. There will also be minimum services they must cover and they will have to pay out a certain percentage of premiums for patient care. This is not to say that insurance companies won't be able to charge more for thoseinsured that require pre-existing conditions.

Insurance premiums will continue to increase.
The bill will prevent health insurance from escalating at the current high double digit percentages. For the four out of five who get insurance through their employers, the savings would land in the 0 to 3 percent range by 2016, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Those who buy insurance on their own and don't qualify for government subsidies would incur a maximum increase of 13% (but the high end would be for policies that offer premium services).

Increase The Deficit.
The most recent estimate of the plan, released by the Congressional Budget Office, said that it would spend $940 billion over 10 years. But new taxes, penalties and cost savings would offset that spending, the CBO said. So overall  - the plan pays for itself, dropping the deficit by $138 billion over 10 years. Obama has said the plan will save more than $1 trillion in the second 10 years, but that estimate, according to the CBO, is highly speculative. 

Medicaid Will Be Restricted.
 Medicaid, a joint federal-state program for the poor, will cover all of the poor, instead of just a few groups. Right now, to qualify for Medicaid, a person has to be poor and also disabled, elderly, pregnant or a child. Under the new plan, all poor adults would qualify. 

Abortions Will Be Covered.
The government won't pay for elective abortions. But under the Senate plan, people will be able to buy insurance that covers abortion on the insurance exchanges, as long as the insurancecompany pays for the services with patient premiums, not taxpayer subsidies. Medicaid has an exemption for cases of rape, incest or the life of the mother. 

Creating Death Panels.
Numerous media outlets have now debunked right-wing claims that the House health care reform bill would encourage euthanasia of the elderly, including Sarah Palin's claim -- forwarded by the conservative media -- that the bill would create a "death panel" and the related claim -- initiated by Betsy McCaughey -- that the bill would "absolutely require" that seniors on Medicareundergo end-of-life counseling "that will tell them how to end their life sooner."Media Matters for America has identified more than 40 instances of media reporting that these claims are false.

A Universal Health Care Bill. 
Based on the final bill being watered down, what will become law is neither universal health care nor universal healthinsurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office:

    * Total uninsured in 2019 with no bill: 54 million.
    * Total uninsured in 2019 with Senate bill: 24 million.

Will Lead To Socialism. 
The same was said about Social Security back in the 40s and Medicare in the 60s. But what was proven over the course of the last 60 years, both of these programs were actually responsible for lifting millions of people out of poverty and have lived longer lives as a result.

Need To Start Over.
On March 17, MyBarackObama.comissued the following YouTube video, with the message, "if we fail to act on health reform, everything stays the same, right? Wrong. If we turn back now, the health care system we currently have will quickly start to unravel.

I am sure there are many other myths that can be debunked. So I ask the readers to post those that I have not covered in this blog. Whether you are on the right or left of this debate, it is important that we work with the facts versus 'scare tactic' mentality and politically-twisted logic. Health care has proven successful in countries that pay dearly for it - and at greater costs than the watered down U.S. bill that will be passed into law. I just hope that after we are on the other side of the vote, and the dust settles, these debunked myths will fade quickly and we can alldeal with the pressing matters of living longer and healthier lives.

Ron Callari
Society and Trends Writer

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The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

Frank Rich
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
March 13, 2010

THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.


But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
 
There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.
 
Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”
 
Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.
 
This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.
 
This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin
 
.In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.
 
What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.
 
Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.
 
The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidiaries until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.
 
Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.
 
If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.
 
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

The Up-or-Down Vote on Obama’s Presidency

Frank Rich
Op Ed Columnist
The New York Times
March 6, 2010


WEDNESDAY’S health care rally was one of President Obama’s finest hours. It was so fine it couldn’t be blighted even by his preposterous backdrop, a cohort of white-jacketed medical workers large enough to staff a hospital in one of the daytime soaps that refused to be pre-empted by the White House show.



Obama’s urgent script didn’t need such cheesy theatrics. At last he took ownership of what he called “my proposal,” stating concisely three concrete ways the bill would improve America’s broken health care system. At last he pushed for a majority-rule, up-or-down vote in Congress. At last he conceded that bipartisan agreement between two parties with “honest and substantial differences” on fundamental principles wasn’t happening. At last he mobilized his rhetoric against a villain everyone could hiss — insurance companies. In a brief address, he mentioned these malefactors of great greed 13 times.


There was only one problem. This finest hour arrived hastily and tardily. At 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, who was watching? Of those who did watch or caught up later, how many bought the president’s vow to finish the job “in the next few weeks”? We’ve heard this too many times before. Last May Obama said he would have a bill by late July. In July he said he wanted it “done by the fall.” The White House’s new date for final House action — specified as March 18 by Robert Gibbs, the press secretary — is already in jeopardy.


“They are waiting for us to act,” Obama said on Wednesday of the American people. “They are waiting for us to lead.” Actually, they have given up waiting. Some 80 percent of the country believes that “nothing can be accomplished” in Washington, according to anIpsos/McClatchy poll conducted a week ago. The percentage is just as high among Democrats, many of whom admire the president but have a sinking sense of disillusionment about his ability to exercise power.
Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts. And it won’t even be the opposition’s fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.


For the sake of argument, let’s say that Obama does eke out his victory. Republicans claim that if he does so by “ramming through” the bill with the Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They’d also have to contend with this country’s congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We’ve already forgotten about Afghanistan — until the next bloodbath.


The 2010 election will instead be fought about the economy, as most elections are, especially in a recession whose fallout remains severe. But that battle may be even tougher for this president and his party — and not just because of the unemployment numbers. The leadership shortfall we’ve witnessed during Obama’s yearlong health care march — typified by the missed deadlines, the foggy identification of his priorities, the sometimes abrupt shifts in political tone and strategy — won’t go away once the bill does. This weakness will remain unless and until the president himself corrects it.


Those who are unsympathetic or outright hostile to Obama frame his failures as an attempt to impose “socialism” on a conservative nation. The truth is that the Fox News right would believe this about any Democratic president no matter who he was and what his policies were. Obama, who has expanded the war in Afghanistan and proved reluctant to reverse extra-constitutional Bush-Cheney jurisprudence, is a radical mainly to those who believe a conservative Republican senator like Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is a closet commie.


The more serious debate about Obama is being conducted by neutral or sympathetic observers. There are many hypotheses. In Newsweek, Jon Meacham has written about an “inspiration gap.” He sees the professorial president as “sometimes seeming to be running the Brookings Institution, not the country.” In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta has raised the perils of Obama’s overexposure in our fractionalized media. (As if to prove the point, the president was scheduled to appear on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” to celebrate its 1,000th episode this weekend.) In the Beltway, the hottest conversations center on the competence of Obama’s team. Washington Post columnists are now dueling over whether Rahm Emanuel is an underutilized genius whose political savvy the president has foolishly ignored — or a bull in the capital china shop who should be replaced before he brings Obama down.


But the buck stops with the president, not his chief of staff. And if there’s one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. In the campaign, that narrative, of change and hope, was powerful — both about his own youth, biography and talent, and about a country that had gone wildly off track during the failed presidency of his predecessor. In governing, Obama has yet to find a theme that is remotely as arresting to the majority of Americans who still like him and are desperate for him to succeed.


The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do. He has variously argued that health care reform is a moral imperative to protect the uninsured, a long-term fiscal fix for the American economy and an attempt to curb insurers’ abuses. It may be all of these, but between the multitude of motives and the blurriness (until now) of Obama’s own specific must-have provisions, the bill became a mash-up that baffled or defeated those Americans on his side and was easily caricatured as a big-government catastrophe by his adversaries.


Obama prides himself on not being ideological or partisan — of following, as he put it in his first prime-time presidential press conference, a “pragmatic agenda.” But pragmatism is about process, not principle. Pragmatism is hardly a rallying cry for a nation in this much distress, and it’s not a credible or attainable goal in a Washington as dysfunctional as the one Americans watch in real time on cable. Yes, the Bush administration was incompetent, but we need more than a brilliant mediator, manager or technocrat to move us beyond the wreckage it left behind. To galvanize the nation, Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built from his bedrock convictions. His presidency cannot be about the cool equanimity and intellectual command of his management style.


That he hasn’t done so can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or, worse, a knee-jerk “liberal.” That is admirable in intellectual theory, but without a powerful vision to knit together his vision of America’s future, he comes off as a doctrinaire Democrat anyway. His domestic policies, whether on climate change or health care or regulatory reform, are reduced to items on a standard liberal wish list. If F.D.R. or Reagan could distill, coin and convey a credo “nonideological” enough to serve as an umbrella for all their goals and to attract lasting majority coalitions of disparate American constituencies, so can this gifted president.


He cannot wait much longer. The rise in credit-card rates, as well as the drop in consumer confidence, home sales and bank lending, all foretell more suffering ahead for those who don’t work on Wall Street. But on these issues the president, too timid to confront the financial industry backers of his own campaign (or their tribunes in his own administration) and too fearful of sounding like a vulgar partisan populist, has taken to repeating his health care performance.


And so leadership on financial reform, as with health care, has been delegated to bipartisan Congressional negotiators poised to neuter it. The protracted debate that now seems imminent — over whether a consumer protection agency will be in the Fed or outside it — is again about the arcana of process and bureaucratic machinery, not substance. Since Obama offers no overarching narrative of what financial reform might really mean to Americans in their daily lives, Americans understandably assume the reforms will be too compromised or marginal to alter a system that leaves their incomes stagnant (at best) while bailed-out bankers return to partying like it’s 2007. Even an unimpeachable capitalist titan like Warren Buffett, venting in his annual letter to investors last month, sounds more fired up about unregulated derivatives and more outraged about unpunished finance-industry executives than the president does.


This time Obama doesn’t have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company