As the Senate Finance Committee passed a $829 Billion bill that reshapes the health care system today, sides squared off for the  mother-lode of battles: The White House vs The Health Care Insurance Lobby.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) was the lone Republican to cast her vote in favor of this reform.

According to the Washington Post:

…[A]ttacks on the leading Democratic reform plan this week by the insurance lobby left little doubt that two of the most powerful institutions involved in the debate — the White House and the nation’s insurance companies — have abandoned any real hope of forging a compromise. What was a tenuous truce has turned quickly into an all-out battle, with both sides ratcheting up the hostilities.

As the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday approved a 10-year, $829 billion bill to remake the health-care system, Obama’s top advisers and the insurers moved into a more intense stage of conflict.

“The insurance industry has decided to lead the charge against health reform, and everyone recognizes their motives: profits,” said White House deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer. “We are going to make sure they can’t sink this effort at the last minute.”

After watching all those commercials intended to scare the crap out of people, after listening to all those tea party people, after listening so many say that we have the best health system in the world, one has ask themself:  Why are we letting the people who have been cheating us and robbing us blind all these years dictate national policy?

Full Story in Washington Post

39 Thoughts to “Senate Finance Committee Passes Health Care Bill”

  1. Slowpoke Rodriguez

    Why are we letting the people who have been cheating us and robbing us blind all these years dictate national policy?

    We elected them to do just that!

  2. Second-Alamo

    Excuse me, but I recall a similar situation way back in the 1700’s. We didn’t stand for it then, and we shouldn’t stand for it now! Somewhere there’s a carnival running itself.

  3. Emma

    This bill still leaves 10-20 million uninsured? Isn’t that nearly the number of uninsured we’d been told the country has early on?

  4. Last Best Hope

    Emma, what you don’t understand is at this point, it’s not a question of whether the bill will provide universal coverage, keep premiums down, or even regulate the insurance companies dastardly and inhuman practices. The only thing that matters is a yes, or a no. If it’s a yes, Obama is reelected. If it’s a no, he may not be, and the 2010 election is a landslide.

    Both sides are going to spin this beyond recognition. The Fox News and Limbaugh crowd will continue to cry gloom an doom and death panels. This will drown out the reasonable dissenters who are concerned about another entitlement program that, once firmly implanted, becomes so popular that it is impossible to uproot, even as it grows many times larger than was promised. By the time the trigger becomes a public option and the public option becomes a government-run health care plan that looses trillions of dollars a year, no one will remember why we have the huge deficits we have now, or will have then. It will be blamed on defense spending.

    I only wish that a reasonable and fact-based argument had taken center stage in order to defeat this. Even if a reasonable and fact-based argument is harder to sell to deranged ignoramuses, and even if deranged ignoramuses are the easiest people to frighten, manipulate, and mobilize, the BETTER strategy would be to simply make an honest argument for fiscal responsibility in the face of economic uncertainty, and win or lose on the up and up.

    Cheating and losing is the worst way to lose.

  5. Moon-howler

    I actually don’t believe much of anything about it other than the insurance companies are now calling the shots and want to keep calling them. I also know they are out to make a profit.

  6. Starryflights

    Kudos to Senator Snowe for having the courage to stand up to the haters and demigods who want to deny healthcare to everyone.

  7. hello

    “I also know they are out to make a profit.” – uh, yeah, why would any company not be out to make a profit? I still don’t get that logic, the logic of ‘boo hoo they are only out to make a profit’. Duh…

    Look, I really don’t know why most people can bash this bill, or like Starryflights over here, give kudos for someone voting for it. There is no bill! There is nothing on paper, how in the hell can you vote for something that does not exist? What we do know of the ‘bill’ is that it will add almost 1 TRILLION to the debt, will leave 10’s of MILLIONS without insurance and will make cost go up for those of us that already have insurance. What the hell are we happy about, how does this help us in any way?

    Also, nobody ever talks about the fact the none of these bill go into effect until 2013 or so. Why? Why rush to pass these ‘bills’ if they don’t even start up for YEARS!?!

  8. hello

    I, hello, vote YES for bill HELL3404 which covers everyone, lowers cost for everyone and doesn’t add a dime to the debt. It obviously doesn’t exist but I’m voting YES for it.

    Now were are my kudos?

  9. Rick Bentley

    “I actually don’t believe much of anything about it other than the insurance companies are now calling the shots and want to keep calling them. I also know they are out to make a profit.”

    As are the drug companies that Obama has struck a devil’s bargain with.

  10. Last Best Hope

    Let’s at least face the reality that our government is hostage to big business interests like the drug companies and health insurance companies. They can fund an insurrection if they choose to, and they nearly did over the summer. I don’t like it, but that’s the government we have because there is no regulation of lobbying, and thus there is no limit to their profits or their corporate abuses, and thus there is no limit the the lobbying dollars.

    The thing is, I don’t like paying twice. Just like the Immigration Resolution was making me pay both federal taxes, and a whopping increase in county taxes, both to fail at the same thing, this government option will make me pay twice, because I will keep my private insurance but my taxes will subsidize a public plan for others.

  11. hello

    “Let’s at least face the reality that our government is hostage to big business interests like the drug companies and health insurance companies” – lets not also forget corrupt labor unions…

  12. Moon-howler

    LBH, you are paying for others now. We are all covering the write offs and those who walk on their bills.

    Rick, I have not seen proof that deals were cut with drug companies. However, that is another area that needs to be cleaned up big time.

  13. Rick Bentley

    Proof? They’re quite open and honest about it. You expected a PR release?

    Billy Tauzin is on record bragging about the deal he brokered.

  14. Moon-howler

    What deal did they broker? What was in it for the admin?

  15. Rick Bentley

    We covered this before … I linked to front-page stories the New York Times and elsewhere on the deal. The deal is, for 20 billion to 80 billion dollars of giveaways to senior citizens, the Obama Administration agrees to leave the issue of drug reimportations, i.e. the issue of drug pricing, off the table in “health care reform”.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/health/policy/06insure.html

    Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion.

    Drug industry lobbyists reacted with alarm this week to a House health care overhaul measure that would allow the government to negotiate drug prices and demand additional rebates from drug manufacturers.

    In response, the industry successfully demanded that the White House explicitly acknowledge for the first time that it had committed to protect drug makers from bearing further costs in the overhaul. The Obama administration had never spelled out the details of the agreement.

    “We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,’ ” Billy Tauzin, the former Republican House member from Louisiana who now leads the pharmaceutical trade group, said Wednesday. “Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don’t keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead.”

    A deputy White House chief of staff, Jim Messina, confirmed Mr. Tauzin’s account of the deal in an e-mail message on Wednesday night.

    “The president encouraged this approach,” Mr. Messina wrote. “He wanted to bring all the parties to the table to discuss health insurance reform.”

    The new attention to the agreement could prove embarrassing to the White House, which has sought to keep lobbyists at a distance, including by refusing to hire them to work in the administration.

    The White House commitment to the deal with the drug industry may also irk some of the administration’s Congressional allies who have an eye on drug companies’ profits as they search for ways to pay for the $1 trillion cost of the health legislation.

    But failing to publicly confirm Mr. Tauzin’s descriptions of the deal risked alienating a powerful industry ally currently helping to bankroll millions in television commercials in favor of Mr. Obama’s reforms.

  16. Rick Bentley

    So, the price of drugs will remain UNBOUNDED and assuredly several times more than other nation’s citizens pay, in exchange for giveaways to senior citizens.

  17. Rick Bentley

    Apparently part of the deal is for PhRMA to pay for 150 million dollars worth of pro-“reform” commercials, I suppose those are the ones we’re watching right now.

    Tauzin himself makes a 2 million dollar a year salary to broker deals like this for PhRMA.

    “Change we can believe in”.

  18. Rick Bentley

    http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nypost.com%2Fseven%2F08122009%2Fpostopinion%2Fopedcolumnists%2Fobamas_drug_deal_184080.htm

    Tauzin cut a deal with the White House that is keeping PhRMA out of its customary place in the pantheon of Democratic hate groups — for now. President Obama goes out of his way to praise the drug industry. Tauzin has visited the White House half-a-dozen times and has committed to a $150 million advertising campaign on behalf of ObamaCare. He’s become the “good German” of the health-care debate — that is, the good $2 million-a-year drug-industry lobbyist.

    Tauzin agreed to pass along $80 billion in savings over 10 years. It wasn’t clear what exactly PhRMA had gotten in return until Democrats began to run afoul of the unacknowledged provisions of the deal.

    It turns out the White House had committed not to impose more than that $80 billion in savings, not to have the government set prices in the Medicare prescription-drug program and not to import cheaper drugs from Canada. Obama had strongly endorsed the last two measures in last year’s campaign.

    Of course, little that Obama said last year bears on how he governs. But his turnabout on insider dealing would be hilarious if Obama’s shifts hadn’t become so commonplace that they’ve lost their capacity to amuse.

    In an ad last year called “Billy,” Obama explained that “the pharmaceutical industry wrote into the prescription-drug plan that Medicare could not negotiate with drug companies.” Obama noted Tauzin shepherded the legislation to passage before going to work for PhRMA. “That’s an example of the same old game-playing in Washington,” Obama intoned. “I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to end the game-playing.”

    Tauzin explained to The New York Times: “We were assured: ‘We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal.’ ” The implication? Play ball, or pay the price. The insurance industry thought it had responded to the same implicit threat by telling Obama it would stop excluding people with pre-existing conditions from coverage. It has been savaged anyway as “villains” by Democrats who figure they need to vilify at least one industry group, lest their health-care pitch lose its populist edge.

    So who got the best of the PhRMA deal? Tauzin is nothing if not slick. PhRMA will charge half price for drugs to those seniors caught in the “doughnut hole” of Medicare coverage, when they have to pay 100 percent out of pocket. As a result, seniors may pass more quickly from the doughnut hole to the phase where the government picks up almost the entire price of drugs. Tauzin’s generosity may end up costing the federal government more money.

  19. hello

    Also Rick, don’t forget about the weekly SEIU meetings with the White House on not just health care but on immigration and other issues as well. You have to ask yourself, why is the White House meeting with a labor union on policy such as heal care and immigration?

  20. Rick Bentley

    Cue that old song “Money money money money … money”.

  21. Moon-howler

    Rick, thanks for the lengthy explanation. I am sorry you had to repost it. Can you further illuminate the 80 billion bux for medicare? Is that to come or was that in past deals?

    Obama can say what he wants, and Congress can come in and fry their arses also. I wouldn’t mind seeing the drug companies fried also. They make huge profits and are guilty of excessive profit taking just like many of the health care companies.

  22. Moon-howler

    Go to google finance and under quotes type in wlp
    This is the ticker symbol for wellpoint. I got the following story:

    Wednesday, October 14, 2009

    Max Baucus and Liz Fowler (picture)

    Conducting the nation’s business on Capitol Hill involves more than just the members of Congress. Behind every senator and representative are staffers upon whom lawmakers rely heavily to make decisions on important issues, such health care reform. In the Senate, one of the most important members is Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which passed the reform plan on Tuesday. Helping Baucus craft the plan is Liz Fowler, the committee’s senior lawyer—and former vice president of public policy for WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance company.

    Although many polls show a majority of Americans favor a public option for health care to create competition for private industry, this component is not part of the Senate overhaul. Instead, Fowler has helped her boss and other senators push forward a plan that may increase insurers’ profits without enduring a government-run alternative.

    Baucus’ connection with WellPoint doesn’t stop at Fowler. The senator’s top health advisor before Fowler was Michelle Easton, who left to join a lobbying firm that now counts WellPoint as a client.

  23. Moon-howler

    Wellpoint just hosed its own employees last week. The CEO makes $10 million or just under it.

  24. Rick Bentley

    “Can you further illuminate the 80 billion bux for medicare? Is that to come or was that in past deals?”

    Apparently the deal is, for Seniors in the gap in Medicare coverage who are paying 100% for drugs, they get those drugs half-price.

    For that, any ability to control prices or to strike a deal like other nations do, where they pay much less than us, is given away.

    Who do it? Just to try to broker SOME kind of deal and claim that “reform” happened this year.

  25. Moon-howler

    Rick, thanks. I think it all depends on who is looking. A senior in the gap would certainly think it was reform. Just the fact that 80 billion dollars is on the table tells how badly a break is needed for some seniors.

    On the other hand, it isn’t enough. That is probably a drop in the bucket to what is wasted with gifts to doctors, purchasers and office staff.

    I would like to see the Canadian border opened up. Drugs are far cheaper there.

  26. hello

    Couldn’t agree with the more Moon about opening the boarder for RX. However, Obama has thrown that option out of the window.

  27. Rick Bentley

    This is worth posting I think, excuse the length. This part of what’s been bargained away – the other part being the ability to contain drug prices by allowing reimportation.

    http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/08/what-was-billy-tauzin-thinking.html

    And if a dismal scientist from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) tries to tell you that Medicare’s bureaucrats will never be able to score significant discounts, I would suggest that he take a look at the bargains that the Veteran’s Administration (VA) has secured. On average, the VA pays 58 percent less than Medicare for prescription drugs.

    “But, but,” skeptics sputter—to be able to bargain with Phrama Medicare would have to be willing to say that it won’t include some drugs in its “formulary” (a continually updated list of preferred medications, representing the judgment of physicians, pharmacists and other experts.)

    That’s exactly right. The Veterans Administration has a formulary—a list of drugs that it is has approved for its patients. The Mayo Clinic has a formulary. Why shouldn’t Medicare have a formulary?
    Formularies protect patients. When Mayo saw that Vioxx was no more effective than other pain-killers for most patients—(and recognized that because doctors knew less about the new drug, it might well be riskier) Mayo stopped giving it to most patients—as did the VA. They both acted more than a year before the manufacturer was forced to pull it product from the market. This is how an efficient medical system creates a formulary that puts patients first.

    And this, in the end, is the goal of the Comparative Effectiveness Research funded by the administration’s fiscal stimulus package. Unbiased physicians and medical researchers will sift through head-to-head comparisons of various treatments, and assess which work best for patients who fit a particular medical profile.

    If a new drug isn’t any better than existing medications, why include it in Medicare’s formulary? (If it is better, it would be included, even if it’s more expensive. Though Medicare might well balk at paying 500% more for an arthritis drug that is only 5% more effective than existing treatments. At that point, the negotiations would begin.)

    Consider another scenario: what if the new product is as good as older products? Medicare and a public sector insurer might well agree to include it in the formulary–if the manufacturer is willing to sell it for less. That’s what we call free market competition: one company makes a product, another comes along with a similar, equally effective treatment product, and offers it at a lower price. That’s how efficient markets keep quality high and prices down.

    But someone has to have the power: first to make a disinterested comparison of the two products, and secondly to say, “no we won’t pay that much.” Cancer patients don’t have that clout. They can’t wait for a cheaper drug to come down the pike. Private insurers don’t fight for the deep discounts that the VA manages to secure. Insurers simply pass exorbitant prices on in the form of higher premiums and co-pays. We need a large government insurer, like the VA, who can say: “We represent millions of people. We are protecting their interests.”

  28. Rick Bentley

    “A senior in the gap would certainly think it was reform.”

    Yes, well … not only will the rest of us pay more to cover those seniors, but we will also pay ever-increasing arbitrary prices set by the drug companies, with no one looking out for our interests and the stock market swelling with every drug bottle sold.

  29. Moon-howler

    The problem with the rx plan is rather simply to fix. get rid of the doughnut. What brainiac thought of that one?

    So Rick, do we take a little or hold out for the whole enchillada? Things look different when one is paying out of pocket. I figure I might be paying out of pocket forever.

  30. Moon-howler

    I swear I just thought I heard my BFF Glenn Beck suggest that Obama and Letterman had a sexual relationship. Very bad taste!

  31. Last Best Hope

    It is not Conservatism that is dead, what has died is our ability to communicate Conservative principles to the public without hateful demagogues, scare tactics, and easily disprovable smear campaigns.

    This is what we get for enabling Bush I suppose. Underneath it all, I believe, is a collective conclusion that the principles of Conservatism should now be questioned in the wake of the economic collapse under Bush.

  32. Rick Bentley

    “So Rick, do we take a little or hold out for the whole enchillada?”

    As with immigration, we should take discrete steps that make sense, and understand that anyone selling us “comprehensive reform” is trying to take advantage of our sense of urgency to sell us something we don’t want at the price they’re selling it for.

    And when they give us the tried-and-true used car salesman pitch “You have to act right away or you’ll never see a deal like this” we should laugh, not cry.

  33. Slowpoke Rodriguez

    Last Best Hope :
    collective conclusion that the principles of Conservatism should now be questioned in the wake of the economic collapse under Bush.

    Collective??? Uh NO. And I think you mean economic collapse under the last two years of Democratically-Controlled Congress. (Bush didn’t actually do anything but sign off on what Pelosi and Reid did).

  34. Slowpoke Rodriguez

    Moon-howler :
    I swear I just thought I heard my BFF Glenn Beck suggest that Obama and Letterman had a sexual relationship. Very bad taste!

    Can’t figure out who that would be insulting!

  35. Moon-howler

    The innuendo was in bad taste; again, disrespect to the President of the United States. Sort of shoe-throwing with words. I am not worried about Letterman. He is a comedian/host and is fair game. He doesn’t command the same level of respect.

  36. Heads up–

    County signs on to agreement with ICE
    By Uriah A. Kiser
    Published: October 14, 2009
    » 0 Comments | Post a Comment

    The Prince William County Board of Supervisors authorized the county police chief to enter a new agreement with the U.S. Department of Immigration on Tuesday.

    Under the agreement, police will target illegal aliens who have committed serious “type 1” offenses, like murder, rape and robbery. When a person has been arrested and processed at the jail, and has been determined to be inside the country illegally, police will issue a detainer and refer them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    Officials at the Prince William County jail have issued 2,041 detainers and have delivered 1,923 prisoners to ICE since the original 287(g) agreement was signed in 2007, said jail superintendent Col. Peter A. Meletis.

    The 287(g) accord between the county and the U.S. Department of Immigration allows local law enforcement officers to enforce certain immigration laws in an effort to “combat specific challenges in their communities,” according to the ICE Web site.

    The agreement mirrors a previous agreement signed with federal immigration authorities three years ago.

    “Operationally, this will not change or make any significant changes in the way this police department has been operating,” said Prince William police Chief Charlie T. Deane.

    Under the current system, if an illegal immigrant is convicted of a crime, that person completes their sentence and then is transferred into ICE custody.

    Those who commit “type 2” or other offenses will not be referred to ICE unless they have had previous dealings with immigration officials. ICE would identify those suspects as illegally entering the country for a second time.

    The newly signed agreement comes as the jail began fingerprinting inmates with a new process on Tuesday which will allow them to immediately identify criminal aliens.

    Now when jail officers take fingerprints, the records will simultaneously be checked against both FBI criminal history records and a records database kept by the Department of Homeland Security, according to press release from U.S. Customs and Immigration spokeswoman Cori W. Bassett.

    The initiative, called Secure Communities, is administered by ICE and is now offered to more than 12 state and local law enforcement agencies in Prince William County that use the Prince William-Manassas Regional Jail, Bassett stated.

    The program has already been implemented in 80 counties, including Fairfax, and is expected to be offered nationwide by 2013.

    Staff writer Uriah A. Kiser can be reached at 703-878-8065.
    http://www2.insidenova.com/isn/news/local/article/county_signs_on_to_agreement_with_ice/45184/

  37. Second-Alamo

    First healthcare for all, then heat for all, air conditioning for all, car insurance for all, clothing for all, cable TV for all, internet for all, autos for all. Hey, I’m on a roll here. Why, with this train of thought I could become president some day! So why stop at healthcare? Talk about your slippery slopes (a favorite topic for liberals).

  38. Moon-howler

    2nd, what got in to you? Why do you have to think in labels?

    I am all in favor of health care for all. I would rather thing someone was paying something than walking on their bills like happens now. I want everyone to have car insurance or not drive. I think everyone in this area should have heat. I try to donate a couple bucks every month when I pay mine. AC yes for the elderly, not necessary for young folks. Cable TV, nah. Internet? nah. Let them go to the library.

  39. Elena

    Second-Alamo :First healthcare for all, then heat for all, air conditioning for all, car insurance for all, clothing for all, cable TV for all, internet for all, autos for all. Hey, I’m on a roll here. Why, with this train of thought I could become president some day! So why stop at healthcare? Talk about your slippery slopes (a favorite topic for liberals).

    Second Alamo,
    I wonder, have you ever struggled with providing basic health care for yourself or your children (if you have children, I don’t know for sure)?

    Did you see that a four month old baby was DENIED coverage because he was considered obese? He was in the 99 percentile in height and weight, and insurance company said he was uninsurable! My son was 17 lbs by the time he was four months old and not even in the 99% if height. He was incredibly healthy and happy! THIS is why insurance needs reform!

    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,564501,00.html

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