US Person believes some people got a little hot under their collars when he referred to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as a "Chicago machine politician" some time back {Bellwether County, Colorado, 11/06/09}. Offered for your consideration: 44 had to call back home from his summit in Russia to quell progressive concerns about ditching the public option. The White House stealth lobbyist for business told reporters that Team 44 would be OK with a public health plan that only triggered in if private competition did not improve. The idea is similar to the one the Regime instituted with Medicare drug prescription plan in 2003. You know how well that benefit works. Since then private competition has been judged to be sufficient and the public drug option has never "triggered". According to a source quoted at Huff Post, Emanuel has been floating the "trigger" sell-out since January. Dr. Howard Dean says public option health insurance is needed to control costs because a public option that looks like Medicare--which has worked since its inception in 1965--"won't engage in the kinds of things that private insurance companies do...they don't pay extraordinary amounts of money for repeat procedures. They don't pay chief executives in seven, eight or nine figure range for their salaries. They don't have to advertise...a trigger mechanism is one version of what I call the fake public option"The private health industry definitely sees the latest effort for health care reform as having a chance to succeed. More than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress have been hired to influence their former colleagues at a cost of $1.4 million a day. The amount of money being thrown into the fight is mind boggling even by the cynical standards of Washington, DC. Health care companies spent more than $126 million on lobbying in the first quarter, more than all other industries.In return for the largest the health industry gets access to key legislators. In a June 10th meeting with aides to Finance Chair Senator Baucus (D-MT), the industry lobbyists present included two former Baucus chiefs of staff, David Castagnetti whose clients are PhRMA and the insurance industry's lobby front, America's Health Insurance Plans, and Jeffrey A. Forbes who represents PhRMA, Amgen, Genetech, Merck and others. Also present was AMA lobbyist Richard Tarplin who worked for Senator Chris Dodd.
One bright spot in the morass that is Capitol Hill, is the offer by American hospitals to forego $155 billion in future Medicare and Medicaid payments to help pay for the cost of health care reform. Vice President Joe Biden announced the deal today. But the offer is tied to Senator Baucus' efforts to negotiate a bipartisan plan with the pols who say "no". The proposal to tax high end health insurance benefits provided by employers is meeting resistance among Democratic senators. Without the tax the prospects for a bipartisan deal seem remote.