Billy Tauzin, head of PhRMA, scored today when he revealed that he had struck a secret deal with the White House when he negotiated an agreement that the pharmaceutical industry wouldn’t have to give up more than 80 billion dollars in profits. This came about when it was revealed that the House was discussing a plan to (gasp) give the government the right to negotiate drug prices in any new public option healthcare plan.

Billy Tauzin, head of PhRMA, strutting his stuff.

Anyone who can go from negotiating the Medicare Prescription Drug Act as a congressman, a huge windfall for pharma that eliminated the right of the government to negotiate prices, to a bonus of 2 million dollars as head of PhRMA, without a federal enditement, deserves some kind of prize.

Why we have to negotiate with these guys who probably should be behind bars for how they have screwed the American public over the past decade or two is beyond me.

However if you take away the right to negogiate prices then sooner or later you are going to get runaway medical costs.

Meanwhile, those large crowds of chowder headed peoples that are being herded onto buses to mob Congressman and shout out angry statements about healthcare are being organized in part by convicted criminal Rick Scott who as head of the for profit hospital chain HCA had to pay 1.7 billion in fines for fraud. He now heads the healthcare industry front organization Conservatives for Patient Rights.

Karen Ignagni, head of the American Insurance Health Plans (AHIP), the health insurance lobby, gets the Golden Greed award for electing to make no concessions and choosing to go full bore against public option healthcare insurance. Why we should continue to pay bloated and ineffecient healthcare insurance companies just because, well, they want us to, any more than we should pay Chrysler to make cars we don’t want, is beyond me. They use a lot of bogus rhetoric about stopping socialized medicine and innovation in healthcare but it is all just a bunch of nonsense. They have the gravy train going and they don’t want it to stop.

Karen Ignagni, head of AHIP health insurance lobby

 Karen my dear I think you may find yourself out in the cold and all your friends may have run off with all of the yummies. Obama is not gonna wanna play with you anymores. Especially when you wouldn’t give insurance coverage to his momma when she was dying of cancer. Oops.

Amidst all the bluster and misinformation here was an interesting piece on cbsnews.com called “Top 10 myths about healthcare reform”

1. The House Health Care Bill Mandates or Encourages Euthanasia

At a tele-town hall meeting with members of the senior advocacy group AARP last month, President Obama could not help but describe one question he received as “kind of morbid.”

“I have been told there is a clause in (the health care bill) that everyone that’s Medicare age will be visited and told to decide how they wish to die,” said a caller named Mary from North Carolina. “This bothers me greatly, and I’d like for you to promise me that this is not in this bill.”

There is nothing in any health care reform bill before Congress that would require people to “decide how they wish to die.” Conservative talking points from activists and legislators, however, would suggest otherwise.

In fact, section 1233 of the House bill would allow Medicare for the first time to cover patient-doctor consultations about end-of-life planning, including discussions about drawing up a living will or planning hospice treatment. Patients would, of course, seek out such advice on their own — they would not be required to. The provision would limit Medicare coverage to one consultation every five years.

2. Americans Will Lose Their Private Insurance

A prevalent conservative talking point is that the proposed government-sponsored health insurance plan, or “public option,” could drive private insurers out of business and that millions of Americans would lose their current health insurance.

 

In fact, that figure represents Americans who would presumably change their plans voluntarily. The bill does not force private insurers out of business or force people onto the public plan.

 

 

 

3. You Will Be Able to Keep Your Plan

 

 

 

“Here’s a guarantee that I’ve made,” the president said at the AARP tele-town hall conference. “If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance.”

Democrats would indeed compel employers to continue to shoulder some of the cost burden of health care by creating a “pay or play” mandate, requiring companies to either provide insurance for their workers or pay a fine. However, employer coverage would have to meet certain requirements; for example, plans would not be allowed to charge co-pays for preventive care. It is possible some companies would have to alter their coverage, or would instead choose to drop their coverage all together and pay a fine.

4. The Blue Dogs Are Primarily Interested in Cutting Government Costs in Health Care Reform

“I think, rightly, a number of these so-called Blue Dog Democrats — more conservative Democrats — were concerned that not enough had been done on reducing costs,” Mr Obama said in an interview with CBS News.

Indeed, the Blue Dogs convinced their Democratic colleagues to cut government costs by reducing the amount the government will spend in subsidies to make health care more affordable for low- and middle-income Americans. The compromise also shifts some of the cost of expanding Medicaid from the federal government to the states.

However, the compromise also would require the government-sponsored health insurance option that would be created to negotiate its own payment rates, rather than using Medicare payment rates. This would create a more level playing field for private insurers, Blue Dogs said. The compromise also exempts more small businesses from the “pay or play” mandate, giving businesses a smaller share of the cost burden.

“Allowing doctors and other health care providers to negotiate rates with the government under a public option would cost the government about $60 billion, according to a preliminary CBO estimate,” Politico reported.   “And exempting small businesses with a combined salary of $250,000-a-year to $500,000-a-year would cost the government $30 billion, according to the same estimates.”

5. The Health Care Legislation Mandates Taxpayer Dollars Pay for Abortions

Anti-abortion rights advocacy groups and legislators alike have complained that the health care legislation includes a “hidden abortion mandate,” as some congressmen have put it.

 

In late June, 19 Democrats sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling the issue a deal-breaker. “Plans to mandate coverage for abortions, either directly or indirectly is unacceptable,” they wrote.

6. Health Care Reform Will Be Paid For

“Health insurance reform cannot add to our deficit over the next decade, and I mean it,” Mr. Obama has said on numerous occasions.

Lawmakers are still grappling with ways to pay for the large cost of expanding health care to all, but they will use at least one accounting trick to make the legislation appear deficit-neutral over 10 years. As part of the proposed reform package, Democratic legislators want to reform projected Medicare payments to avert a 20 percent pay cut to doctors — creating $245 billion in new costs that have not been accounted for.

Democrats argue it does not have to be paid for because they already exempted it from congressional “pay-as-you-go” rules, the AP reported.

Furthermore, while lawmakers focus on trying to create a bill that is deficit-neutral over 10 years, the longer-term costs may be even more difficult to predict. The Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that the legislation under consideration in both the House and Senate would not control costs.

Mr. Obama has said that there will be savings from the efficiencies implemented into the nation’s health care system through the legislation, but those savings are impossible for the CBO to score.

7. Cuts to Medicare?

Republicans have blasted Democrats for planning cuts to Medicare, a program that benefits millions of seniors. President Obama has insisted that there will be no reductions to benefits.

Technically, Republicans are right that health care reform plans include cuts to Medicare’s projected budget; however, Mr. Obama has given specific examples of how cuts can be made by rooting out waste from the program.

The House bill reduces projected increases in Medicare payments to providers by more than $500 billion over 10 years, the Associated Press reports, but puts nearly $300 billion in new provider payments back into the program (as explained in myth No. 7). That creates a net cut of $200 billion.

 

 

“What we hear from our members is that to them Medicare savings sounds like cuts,” Nora Super, AARP’s chief health care lobbyist, told the AP. “Our members over 65 really value their Medicare program … and numbers like $500 billion are huge numbers, so that is really scary to our members.”

Mr. Obama said at the AARP tele-town hall meeting in July that there is no discussion of cutting Medicare benefits.

“Nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits,” he said. “What we do want is to eliminate some of the waste that is being paid for out of the Medicare trust fund that could be used more effectively to cover more people and to strengthen the system.”

8. Americans Don’t Want a Government-Run Health Care Plan

 

Republicans have consistently berated the proposal for a government-sponsored health insurance plan, or “public option,” as unpopular.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/05/politics/main5215880.shtml

 

“The American people oppose a government takeover of health insurance, and they know if the Democrats and the administration get their way and create a new government-run plan, tens of millions of Americans will lose their health insurance,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), chairman of the Republican Conference, said on Fox News Sunday.

In fact, a CBS/New York Times poll  from late July shows that, even though doubts have grown in recent months about Mr. Obama’s health care proposals, 66 percent of Americans still want the government to provide a health insurance plan like Medicare to compete with private health insurers.

9. Rationing of Care

One of the misleading buzzwords in the health care debate is “rationing” — the idea that patients will have limited treatment options if the government becomes more involved in health care delivery.

In fact, Americans will not face “rationing” in health care any more than they do now. While a public plan would not be able to cover all procedures, private insurance plans do not either.

“We don’t want to ration by dictating to somebody, ‘Okay, you know what? We don’t think that this senior should get a hip replacement,’” Mr. Obama said at the AARP tele-town hall. “What we do want to be able to do is to provide information to that senior and to her doctor about this is the thing that is going to be most helpful to you in dealing with your condition.”

10. A Health Care Bill Will Bring Quick Changes

Democrats have created a misleading sense of urgency over health care reform. The president has spoken about suffering Americans who need help right away. It is a talking point more commonly used by liberal grassroots groups rallying support.

However, significant provisions of the health care legislation under consideration — including the federal health insurance exchange, the public option, subsidies and the employer mandate — would not go into effect until 2013.

Mr. Obama addressed this fact at an Ohio town hall.

“Most of these changes would be phased in over several years,” he said. “So it’s not as if you’re going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly the health care system is all changed completely. We are going to phase this in, in an intelligent, deliberate way.”

The letter specifically referred to the “essential benefits package” a Health Benefits Advisory Committee and the Secretary of Health and Human Services would be responsible for defining. Nothing in the legislation, however, has “mandated” that abortion services be included in the benefits package.

In fact, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday adopted an amendment, proposed by Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.), that would prohibit taxpayer dollars from funding abortions. The amendment would not allow the federal government to either require or prohibit abortion coverage by private insurers. It requires at least one plan from the federal health insurance exchange in each region of the country to cover abortion, and at least one of the plans to not cover abortion.

“Private health care providers are free to cover abortion, but not with federal funds,” reports Dan Gilgoff of U.S. News and World Report. “The public plan would cover abortion, but not with federal funds; a Capitol Hill aide tells me money for abortions would come from what participants pay into the public plan.”

It has yet to be determined how this issue will finally be settled.

Mr. Obama told CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric in July that “I’m pro-choice, but I think we also have the tradition in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.”