Date: 2/22/2009
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Now for the hard part.
Even if the national credit card is maxed out and partisanship remains the rule for Washington’s political tribes, President Barack Obama and Congress are plunging ahead with a health care overhaul.
In the week ahead, Obama will start the dialogue on how to increase coverage, restrain costs and improve quality.
Whether a bill can get through Congress and to Obama this year is uncertain. For half a century, the track record on health care has been one of missed opportunities, spectacular failures and hard-won incremental gains.
Obama plans to stress the need for major changes in his address to Congress on Tuesday, administration officials say. He quickly will follow up with a budget that includes a commitment to expand coverage for the uninsured. A White House summit on health care is being planned in coming weeks.
“They don’t intend to blink. They intend to plow ahead,” said health economist Len Nichols of the nonpartisan New America Foundation. “Health reform is seen as essential to balancing the federal budget and economic recovery in the long run.”
People in the U.S. spend $2.4 trillion a year on health care, or about $7,900 per person. That’s more than twice as much per capita as in other advanced countries. But few would claim those dollars are buying good value. The costs are a staggering burden for taxpayers, employers and families, and the recession is leaving more people without insurance.
Yet even a self-described optimist such as Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., says he has doubts about prospects for overhauling health care. “It needs to be done up front and quickly,” said Enzi, the senior Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “I’m not so sure that we haven’t already lost that, with so many other things coming in and weighing us down.”
In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton took the better part of a year to deliver a 1,300-page health care bill to Congress and later waved his veto pen at lawmakers who might have given him half a loaf. He got nothing. Obama has shown a tendency to be more pragmatic.
Administration and congressional officials say Obama will lay out a vision and see if Congress can make the details work. The Senate has gotten an early start and is shaping up as the proving ground for legislation.
“The Obama administration has said they are going to give the Senate a very wide berth,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who for years has tried to get Democrats and Republicans working together. “There are areas in which there is going to be spirited debate. But there are four or five major areas where there’s a lot of common ground.”
Polls show most people support coverage for all and believe government should help guarantee it. But what looks like consensus starts to break down once thorny details such as costs and the government’s influence on the doctor-patient relationship come into the picture.
Administration officials say Obama has made a down payment by expanding coverage for children of low-income working families and by providing subsidies to help people who lose their jobs keep health benefits.
As he moves forward, Obama will follow the plan laid out in his campaign.
It calls for government, employers, families and individuals to keep sharing financial responsibility for health care. The approach would overhaul the health insurance market, particularly for self-employed people and small businesses. It would set up a national insurance purchasing “exchange” through which people would be guaranteed access to private health insurance or the choice of a new public plan.
Obama sees coverage for all as a goal to be reached in steps. His plan would not require every individual to purchase insurance. The estimated cost is about $90 billion a year, to start with.
The plan might sound simple in a brief summary, but it’s not. Potential dealbreakers lurk at every turn.
Many liberals can’t get excited about doing battle for just a promise — not an immediate guarantee — of coverage for all.
Conservatives and insurance companies fear that a public plan offered to workers and their families could become the gateway for Canada-style government health care for all.
Employers, hospitals, doctors, and drug companies worry that the government’s already pervasive influence in health care will become stifling.
The initial work has fallen to the Senate, where Democratic Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts want to present a bill by the summer.
Baucus is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and taxes. Kennedy, who is under treatment for brain cancer, leads the Senate health committee. He has pursued the goal of coverage for all his entire career and doesn’t want this opportunity to slip away.
Baucus has already outlined a plan that differs in some key details from Obama’s. For example, it contemplates taxing some health insurance benefits to raise money for expanded coverage. That’s an idea Obama has rejected but one that certain Republicans favor.
It takes 60 votes to get a bill through the Senate, and Democrats don’t have them.
In the House, the effort seems to be moving more slowly. Senior aides from leadership offices and committees are talking. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is expected to take a leading role.
Some experts believe the issue is too complicated to try to accomplish in one year and one bill.
Watching and waiting are people such as Robyn Perry, 56, of Lake Worth, Fla., who recently lost a job with health benefits. She has struggled to find coverage now that she is self-employed. Private plans are either too expensive or won’t take her because she had a ministroke several years ago. A plan sponsored by local government accepted her, but won’t cover her outside her county.
“Something has to be done,” said Perry. “I work. I make decent money. But I still can’t get coverage. I would really like to find a normal health insurance plan that would cover me wherever I get sick, not just in Palm Beach county.”
___
On the Net:
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/health_care/
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
The recovery plan: shock & awe for a shaken nation
Date: 2/14/2009
By NANCY BENAC and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It’s the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets — and right out again.
The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.
The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn’t slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed.
“The one thing we’ll never know is what would have happened if we didn’t do it,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight.
It’s not FDR’s deal and these aren’t his times.
No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt’s day.
No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new.
“We’re not reinventing government,” said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling “Don’t Know Much About” series. “We’re modifying things that exist.”
Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington’s place in people’s lives.
“The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it,” says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. “It’s become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can’t do.
“If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do.”
To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the “Europeanization of America.” Others call it “Rooseveltian” or “generational theft” in reference to the debt passed on to the future.
They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers.
Obama said it’s about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt’s administration.
“We adapted, we changed,” he said about those days — and these. “President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity.”
In his radio address Saturday, Obama said he believed the country “will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future.”
Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress — three — saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape.
Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20.
Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early.
The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package’s costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.
It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, “you would make a blanket for Jupiter.”
The stimulus wasn’t just about throwing cash at the economy, though.
The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail — renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas.
“There are seeds in this bill for long-term change,” says Zelizer. “There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives.”
Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn’t need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was — and could become.
Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they’ve got solid grounds for their pessimism.
The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.
The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time.
Ready to buy another home?
Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing.
Buying a first home? You’re still in luck — the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November.
A new car? You’ll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not — as was initially proposed — your loan interest as well.
One day, the government proposed to pay 65 percent of the cost of health coverage for a year for jobless people who lose their workplace insurance. Days later, it was down to half. Ultimately, the subsidy zigzagged back up to 65 percent, but it expires before the end of the year.
Obama declared an end to pork-barrel politics, but legislators still managed to look out for favorite projects.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to point out that a big chunk of the $8 billion set aside to construct high-speed rail lines could go to a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., helped make sure $10 billion was set aside for the National Institutes of Health, a priority of his.
Long after the dust has settled from the horse trading, the government will be seen to have moved with unaccustomed speed on policies normally subjected to years of deliberation and gridlock.
Deficit hawks found their wings clipped as both parties reached for the treasury. Democrats mainly wished to spend; Republicans, mainly to cut taxes.
After last November, guess who got their way?
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly: “We won the election; we wrote the bill.”
The debate was both large and small. Negotiators considered the proper role of government — and how fast a business can depreciate its equipment.
Entering the 1930s, Americans mainly saw the national government as the entity that fought wars, ran post offices and enforced a ban on liquor. Federal spending was only 3.4 percent of the economy.
That more than tripled during the New Deal, topping 10 percent, because of the explosion of public works and other labor programs, rural modernization, bank support, and farm and industrial aid.
“It was a transformation of society in a way that hadn’t been done since the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery,” Davis said.
The government became the entity that guaranteed a minimum wage, controlled farm production, supported artists, set workplace standards, insured deposits in regulated banks and cast the first national safety net for the elderly and handicapped under Social Security.
“The whole scope of what Roosevelt was trying to do is different but the intent is clearly the same: relief and recovery during a time of economic stress,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The package won by Obama offers “very important but more subterranean changes in the way the economy works,” he said.
Federal spending as a share of the economy shot above 40 percent during World War II and has hovered around 20 percent most of the years since. That share was already projected to approach 25 percent before Obama’s stimulus plan.
To be sure, there’s still considerable disagreement about how much the New Deal helped to end a depression finally crushed by the humming factories of World War II.
Even FDR’s transformation of the federal government was not universally recognized at the time for what it was. It may be years before the full measure of Obama’s efforts are taken, too.
In 1936, The Economist magazine pronounced the New Deal a “striking success” in improving conditions that existed when FDR took office three years earlier.
But what of the legacy?
What legacy?
“If the criterion be Utopian, the achievements of the New Deal appear to be small,” the editors sniffed. “The great problems of the country are hardly touched.”
___
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
By NANCY BENAC and CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — America is bringing shock and awe to the home front, using dollars instead of bombs.
It’s the military doctrine of lightning force — fast and brute, or as brute as the shaken country can manage — applied to the campaign for economic recovery.
With a record-busting stimulus plan, the U.S. is marshaling resources against economic catastrophe in ways not seen since Franklin Roosevelt put the New Deal in motion.
President Barack Obama is going with the best deal he could get. The stimulus bill is a landmark legislative achievement for a new president who inherited economic spoilage along with the spoils of power. Now the nation anxiously waits to see if it works.
Undermining federal balance sheets that were already deeply in the red, Obama and Congress settled on a nearly $800 billion plan that aims to spend more on the crisis at hand than the government has spent waging the Iraq war for six years.
The idea: fast cash, and lots of it, but with a strategic view to the future.
Some dollars will flow quickly into wallets — and right out again.
The stimulus plan will mean thousands of dollars in tax breaks for first-time home buyers and people buying new cars. Lower- and middle-income taxpayers will get an extra $13 a week in their paychecks this year, and about $8 a week next year. Unemployment checks will go up $25 a week, and keep coming longer. Food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans will rise. Short-term health insurance will become more affordable for many losing their jobs.
The success of the stimulus package may be measured less by visible achievements than by what does not happen — the home that is not foreclosed, the family that doesn’t slip into poverty, the disease that does not go undiagnosed.
“The one thing we’ll never know is what would have happened if we didn’t do it,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight.
It’s not FDR’s deal and these aren’t his times.
No federally subsidized artists will paint murals glorifying the muscle of American workers or the progress belching from smokestacks, as they did in Roosevelt’s day.
No grand compact is to be formed between generations like the one that promised everyone a federal pension. No institutions will rise to try something brand new.
“We’re not reinventing government,” said historian Kenneth C. Davis, author of the best-selling “Don’t Know Much About” series. “We’re modifying things that exist.”
Yet as the share of the economy taken up by federal spending rises to an anticipated 30 percent, the nation is grappling again with big questions about Washington’s place in people’s lives.
“The stakes are so high now, this is such a big bill, average Americans are following it,” says Princeton historian Julian Zelizer. “It’s become a bill that is an argument about what government can or can’t do.
“If there is no effect and in six months we are talking about the same economy or a worse economy, I think it would be a devastating blow to the president, Democrats, and to liberal claims about what government can do.”
To critics such as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the package is the “Europeanization of America.” Others call it “Rooseveltian” or “generational theft” in reference to the debt passed on to the future.
They might envision murals glorifying little more than filled potholes, insulated windows, depreciated computers.
Obama said it’s about more than that, and drew parallels with FDR in speaking Friday to the Business Council, formed by corporate leaders in the 1930s to advise Roosevelt’s administration.
“We adapted, we changed,” he said about those days — and these. “President Roosevelt understood the new role of government in this new world, that while extraordinary actions on its part might be the source of recovery, no action on the part of government, no matter how extraordinary, would alone be the source of our prosperity.”
In his radio address Saturday, Obama said he believed the country “will turn this crisis into opportunity and emerge from our painful present into a brighter future.”
Democrats and just enough Republicans in Congress — three — saw the package as the best chance to tamp down the economic wildfires breaking out across the landscape.
Obama came into office saying he wished to be judged on his first 1,000 days instead of the usual benchmark of 100. In some ways he will be judged on his first 10 or 20.
Not even Roosevelt, fast off the mark to deal with a bank crisis, was as fast as this in achieving something so sweeping, so early.
The enormity of the package left politicians grasping for concrete ways to convey its size.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., spoke of a stack of hundred-dollar bills 689 miles high, and of bills wrapped side-by-side that would encircle the Earth nearly 39 times. House Republicans predicted that the package’s costs — with interest on the necessary borrowing — could total more than a trillion dollars, enough money to buy about 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies for every American.
It was enough to prompt comic Jon Stewart to riff that if you sewed the $100 bills together, “you would make a blanket for Jupiter.”
The stimulus wasn’t just about throwing cash at the economy, though.
The package is filled with billions for some of the same goals that Obama preached about on the presidential campaign trail — renewable energy and green jobs, computerized medical records, broadband Internet service for underserved areas.
“There are seeds in this bill for long-term change,” says Zelizer. “There are things that can develop out of the research that can change our lives.”
Obama sounded a drumbeat of warnings about the consequences of failing to act. But Americans didn’t need their president to tell them how grim the economic situation was — and could become.
Forty percent of Americans already have been affected by some sort of job problem in the past year, be it unemployment, underemployment, layoffs, reductions in pay or hours, or job losses by members of their households, according to a poll released Friday by the Pew Research Center. Fifty-six percent expect things to be worse or about the same a year from now — and they’ve got solid grounds for their pessimism.
The country could well suffer a net loss of 2 million to 3 million or more jobs this year, economists believe. And the unemployment rate, now 7.6 percent, could top 9 percent by spring of 2010.
The stimulus pull-together was a colossal game of winners and losers shaped and reshaped by the latest set of hands on the package. The fortunes of people, schools, towns and other varied interests rose and fell in blinks of time.
Ready to buy another home?
Poof — you just lost $15,000 that legislators had considered providing.
Buying a first home? You’re still in luck — the government plans to give you an $8,000 credit if you buy by the end of November.
A new car? You’ll be able to deduct the thousands in sales taxes from your income tax but not — as was initially proposed — your loan interest as well.
One day, the government proposed to pay 65 percent of the cost of health coverage for a year for jobless people who lose their workplace insurance. Days later, it was down to half. Ultimately, the subsidy zigzagged back up to 65 percent, but it expires before the end of the year.
Obama declared an end to pork-barrel politics, but legislators still managed to look out for favorite projects.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., was quick to point out that a big chunk of the $8 billion set aside to construct high-speed rail lines could go to a proposed Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas route. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., helped make sure $10 billion was set aside for the National Institutes of Health, a priority of his.
Long after the dust has settled from the horse trading, the government will be seen to have moved with unaccustomed speed on policies normally subjected to years of deliberation and gridlock.
Deficit hawks found their wings clipped as both parties reached for the treasury. Democrats mainly wished to spend; Republicans, mainly to cut taxes.
After last November, guess who got their way?
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly: “We won the election; we wrote the bill.”
The debate was both large and small. Negotiators considered the proper role of government — and how fast a business can depreciate its equipment.
Entering the 1930s, Americans mainly saw the national government as the entity that fought wars, ran post offices and enforced a ban on liquor. Federal spending was only 3.4 percent of the economy.
That more than tripled during the New Deal, topping 10 percent, because of the explosion of public works and other labor programs, rural modernization, bank support, and farm and industrial aid.
“It was a transformation of society in a way that hadn’t been done since the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery,” Davis said.
The government became the entity that guaranteed a minimum wage, controlled farm production, supported artists, set workplace standards, insured deposits in regulated banks and cast the first national safety net for the elderly and handicapped under Social Security.
“The whole scope of what Roosevelt was trying to do is different but the intent is clearly the same: relief and recovery during a time of economic stress,” said John Halpin, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The package won by Obama offers “very important but more subterranean changes in the way the economy works,” he said.
Federal spending as a share of the economy shot above 40 percent during World War II and has hovered around 20 percent most of the years since. That share was already projected to approach 25 percent before Obama’s stimulus plan.
To be sure, there’s still considerable disagreement about how much the New Deal helped to end a depression finally crushed by the humming factories of World War II.
Even FDR’s transformation of the federal government was not universally recognized at the time for what it was. It may be years before the full measure of Obama’s efforts are taken, too.
In 1936, The Economist magazine pronounced the New Deal a “striking success” in improving conditions that existed when FDR took office three years earlier.
But what of the legacy?
What legacy?
“If the criterion be Utopian, the achievements of the New Deal appear to be small,” the editors sniffed. “The great problems of the country are hardly touched.”
___
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
HHS candidate best known for health care cuts
Date: 2/10/2009
By KEVIN FREKING and ERIK SCHELZIG
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — Few governors know the pitfalls of soaring health costs better than Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, which helps explain why President Barack Obama is reportedly considering the Democrat for health secretary.
In 2005, Bredesen cut 170,000 adults from Tennessee’s Medicaid program, called TennCare. He reduced benefits for thousands more.
Critics describe Bredesen’s actions as the biggest cuts in public health insurance in the nation’s history. They believe he’s the wrong person to lead an effort to expand health insurance coverage, and they’re throwing support behind other candidates, including Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, widely viewed as near the top of Obama’s list of candidates to run the Health and Human Services Department.
However, some say Bredesen’s stand shows he’s willing to tackle the toughest of problems.
Before the cuts were made, TennCare’s growth rate was making it harder to pay for education, roads and other critical services. Tennessee led the nation in the percentage of its population on Medicaid and the percentage of its budget going to Medicaid. However, on a per-person basis, Tennessee ranked 48th in state and local tax collections.
Dennis Smith, now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was in charge of Medicaid at the federal level in 2005. He said Bredesen’s actions were “necessary and appropriate” because the program was out of control.
For example, almost every state has some type of system that allows it to approve the amount and types of prescription drugs that beneficiaries get. Tennessee didn’t have such controls. Eligibility rules were also much broader than those of other states, allowing for enrollment of adults who would not have been eligible for Medicaid elsewhere.
The most praise for Bredesen comes from conservatives. Obama has shown a willingness to consider their views in his appointments so far, while many of those on the left of the issue say Bredesen is the wrong choice.
Bredesen emphasized in an interview Tuesday that he hasn’t applied for the HHS job or campaigned for it. But he has launched a counterattack against health care advocates for what he calls a distortion of the events that led to the TennCare cuts in 2005.
“Your name comes out and the next thing you know, people are dumping cans of garbage on you,” he said. “So I’m interested in, first of all, setting the record straight.”
Bredesen said the move to cut the number of TennCare enrollees came after advocates “absolutely pushed me to the brink” by blocking other proposals to rein in the costs of the program that was expected to grow by $680 million in just one year.
“Their mantra was, you can do anything you want, but you can’t reduce any benefits and you can’t remove any people,” he said. “They fought me every step of the way on ideological grounds, and basically pushed us to the point where we had no alternative to take some drastic action.”
The governor also downplayed the potential problem of having to work with groups who so vigorously opposed him. More important players will include pharmaceutical companies, hospital, doctors and medical equipment manufacturers, he said.
“What’s going to have to happen is not putting together a coalition of liberal advocacy groups for health care, but a coalition of real people who are sitting here on one-sixth of the U.S. economy and try to find some common ground,” he said.
In some respects, Bredesen sounds like former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt when describing his philosophy for reforming health care.
“I certainly believe there’s an underlying right and the federal government ought to be financing a basic level of health care for everybody,” Bredesen said.
Bredesen’s emphasis is on the word basic. Leavitt repeatedly stressed the same emphasis. He listed as his top priority that “every American has access to basic health insurance at an affordable price.”
Bredesen met with Obama for the first time in his Washington office shortly after Obama announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2007.
Bredesen in 1980 founded a health maintenance organization called HealthAmerica Corp., which became the country’s second-largest HMO before he sold it in 1986 for about $400 million.
___
Associated Press writer Erik Schelzig reported from Nashville, Tenn.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
By KEVIN FREKING and ERIK SCHELZIG
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON (AP) — Few governors know the pitfalls of soaring health costs better than Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, which helps explain why President Barack Obama is reportedly considering the Democrat for health secretary.
In 2005, Bredesen cut 170,000 adults from Tennessee’s Medicaid program, called TennCare. He reduced benefits for thousands more.
Critics describe Bredesen’s actions as the biggest cuts in public health insurance in the nation’s history. They believe he’s the wrong person to lead an effort to expand health insurance coverage, and they’re throwing support behind other candidates, including Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, widely viewed as near the top of Obama’s list of candidates to run the Health and Human Services Department.
However, some say Bredesen’s stand shows he’s willing to tackle the toughest of problems.
Before the cuts were made, TennCare’s growth rate was making it harder to pay for education, roads and other critical services. Tennessee led the nation in the percentage of its population on Medicaid and the percentage of its budget going to Medicaid. However, on a per-person basis, Tennessee ranked 48th in state and local tax collections.
Dennis Smith, now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was in charge of Medicaid at the federal level in 2005. He said Bredesen’s actions were “necessary and appropriate” because the program was out of control.
For example, almost every state has some type of system that allows it to approve the amount and types of prescription drugs that beneficiaries get. Tennessee didn’t have such controls. Eligibility rules were also much broader than those of other states, allowing for enrollment of adults who would not have been eligible for Medicaid elsewhere.
The most praise for Bredesen comes from conservatives. Obama has shown a willingness to consider their views in his appointments so far, while many of those on the left of the issue say Bredesen is the wrong choice.
Bredesen emphasized in an interview Tuesday that he hasn’t applied for the HHS job or campaigned for it. But he has launched a counterattack against health care advocates for what he calls a distortion of the events that led to the TennCare cuts in 2005.
“Your name comes out and the next thing you know, people are dumping cans of garbage on you,” he said. “So I’m interested in, first of all, setting the record straight.”
Bredesen said the move to cut the number of TennCare enrollees came after advocates “absolutely pushed me to the brink” by blocking other proposals to rein in the costs of the program that was expected to grow by $680 million in just one year.
“Their mantra was, you can do anything you want, but you can’t reduce any benefits and you can’t remove any people,” he said. “They fought me every step of the way on ideological grounds, and basically pushed us to the point where we had no alternative to take some drastic action.”
The governor also downplayed the potential problem of having to work with groups who so vigorously opposed him. More important players will include pharmaceutical companies, hospital, doctors and medical equipment manufacturers, he said.
“What’s going to have to happen is not putting together a coalition of liberal advocacy groups for health care, but a coalition of real people who are sitting here on one-sixth of the U.S. economy and try to find some common ground,” he said.
In some respects, Bredesen sounds like former HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt when describing his philosophy for reforming health care.
“I certainly believe there’s an underlying right and the federal government ought to be financing a basic level of health care for everybody,” Bredesen said.
Bredesen’s emphasis is on the word basic. Leavitt repeatedly stressed the same emphasis. He listed as his top priority that “every American has access to basic health insurance at an affordable price.”
Bredesen met with Obama for the first time in his Washington office shortly after Obama announced he would seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2007.
Bredesen in 1980 founded a health maintenance organization called HealthAmerica Corp., which became the country’s second-largest HMO before he sold it in 1986 for about $400 million.
___
Associated Press writer Erik Schelzig reported from Nashville, Tenn.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
Obama reverses Bush effort in pollution case
Date: 2/6/2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is reversing a previous Bush administration effort on pollution, pulling back legal arguments in a lawsuit over mercury.
The case was soon to come before the Supreme Court. The Obama administration submitted papers Friday to the court asking for the appeal to be dismissed.
An appeals court last year rejected a Bush administration plan for regulating mercury emissions. It said the plan should not have included allowing utilities to purchase emission credits instead of actually reducing emissions.
Scientists fear mercury pollution leads to neurological problems in infants.
The power industry still has a separate petition challenging the appeals court ruling, which is unaffected by the Obama administration’s action.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is reversing a previous Bush administration effort on pollution, pulling back legal arguments in a lawsuit over mercury.
The case was soon to come before the Supreme Court. The Obama administration submitted papers Friday to the court asking for the appeal to be dismissed.
An appeals court last year rejected a Bush administration plan for regulating mercury emissions. It said the plan should not have included allowing utilities to purchase emission credits instead of actually reducing emissions.
Scientists fear mercury pollution leads to neurological problems in infants.
The power industry still has a separate petition challenging the appeals court ruling, which is unaffected by the Obama administration’s action.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
Video: President Obama: Economic Recovery
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UxZNjqVT9M]
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
Obama pitches his plan to reverse economic slide
Date: 1/24/2009
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama took to the airwaves Saturday to promote his economic aid plan in what’s-it-mean-to-me terms: thousands of better schools, lower electricity bills, health coverage for millions who lose insurance.
It was the latest appeal from the new president for a massive spending bill designed to inject almost $1 trillion into the economy and fulfill campaign pledges. As lawmakers consider an $825 billion plan and Obama woos them with an eye toward a second economic package, he used his first radio and Internet address from the White House to update the public about his goals.
“Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. And we could lose a generation of potential, as more young Americans are forced to forgo college dreams or the chance to train for the jobs of the future,” Obama said in a five-minute address.
“In short, if we do not act boldly and swiftly, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.”
Obama aides have refused to rule out that the administration would seek a second economic recovery plan — even before Congress approves the first — to patch an ailing economy. Some are considering a sequel to assuage members of their own Democratic Party who fret that too little of the money is going toward public works projects that would employ their constituents.
“Look, let’s get one done, and start seeing that impact on the economy before I get into hypotheticals about what we might do later on in the year,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.
Along with the speech, Obama’s economic team released a report designed to outline tangible benefits of the plan and shore up support. Aides said they wanted people to understand exactly what they could expect if Congress supported the proposed legislation.
The United States lost 2.6 million jobs last year, the most in any single year since World War II. Manufacturing is at a 28-year low and even Obama’s economists say unemployment could top 10 percent before the recession ends. One in 10 homeowners is at risk of foreclosure and the dollar continues its slide in value.
That harsh reality has dominated Obama’s first days in office that brought his top economic advisers to the White House on their first Saturday in power to talk about the proposed stimulus package and the federal budget.
A day earlier, he invited Democratic and Republican leaders to the White House to hear their ideas on the economy. At that visit, he did not share the details he released Saturday.
“We presented President Obama with our ideas to jump start the economy through fast-acting tax relief — not slow-moving government spending programs,” House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said in the weekly GOP address. “We let families, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and the self-employed keep more of what they earn to encourage investment and create millions of new private-sector jobs.”
Boehner said the Republicans would cut taxes for every taxpayer, dropping even the lowest income tax rates. “That’s up to an extra $3,200 per family every year — money that can be saved, spent or invested in any way you see fit,” Boehner said. He also proposed a tax credit for home purchases, an end of taxation of unemployment benefits and tax incentives for small businesses to invest in new equipment and hire new employees.
“We cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity,” Boehner said.
Obama also plans to travel to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with Republican leaders, his latest move to bring along his rival party to pass an economic package that has GOP support. On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden and economic adviser Larry Summers were to appear on the morning talk shows, as was Boehner.
Many of the goals in the speech and report were familiar from Obama’s two-year campaign, such as shifting to electronic medical records and investing in preventive health care. Other parts added specifics.
Obama’s recovery package aims to:
—double within three years the amount of energy that could be produced from renewable resources. That is an ambitious goal, given the 30 years it took to reach current levels. Advisers say that could power 6 million households.
—upgrade 10,000 schools and improve learning for about 5 million students.
—save $2 billion a year by making federal buildings energy efficient.
—triple the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships in science.
—tighten security at 90 major ports.
The plan would spend at least 75 percent of the total cost — or more than $600 billion — within the first 18 months, either through bricks-and-shovels projects favored by Democrats or tax cuts that Republicans have pushed.
There is heavy emphasis on public works projects, which have lagged as state budgets contracted. Governors have lobbied Obama to help them patch holes in their budgets, drained by sinking tax revenues and increased need for public assistance such as Medicaid and children’s health insurance. Obama’s plan would increase the federal portion of those programs so no state would have to cut any of the 20 million children whose eligibility is now at risk.
Obama’s plan would also provide health care coverage for 8.5 million people who lose their insurance when they either lose or shift jobs.
“It’s a plan that will save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years” and recognizes “there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there’s so much work to be done,” he said.
But Obama cautioned again against expecting instant results: “No one policy or program will solve the challenges we face right now, nor will this crisis recede in a short period of time.”
___
On the Net:
Obama video: www.whitehouse.gov
Obama economics report: http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/Documents/recover
y_plan_metrics —report.pdf
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.
By PHILIP ELLIOTT
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama took to the airwaves Saturday to promote his economic aid plan in what’s-it-mean-to-me terms: thousands of better schools, lower electricity bills, health coverage for millions who lose insurance.
It was the latest appeal from the new president for a massive spending bill designed to inject almost $1 trillion into the economy and fulfill campaign pledges. As lawmakers consider an $825 billion plan and Obama woos them with an eye toward a second economic package, he used his first radio and Internet address from the White House to update the public about his goals.
“Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. And we could lose a generation of potential, as more young Americans are forced to forgo college dreams or the chance to train for the jobs of the future,” Obama said in a five-minute address.
“In short, if we do not act boldly and swiftly, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.”
Obama aides have refused to rule out that the administration would seek a second economic recovery plan — even before Congress approves the first — to patch an ailing economy. Some are considering a sequel to assuage members of their own Democratic Party who fret that too little of the money is going toward public works projects that would employ their constituents.
“Look, let’s get one done, and start seeing that impact on the economy before I get into hypotheticals about what we might do later on in the year,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday.
Along with the speech, Obama’s economic team released a report designed to outline tangible benefits of the plan and shore up support. Aides said they wanted people to understand exactly what they could expect if Congress supported the proposed legislation.
The United States lost 2.6 million jobs last year, the most in any single year since World War II. Manufacturing is at a 28-year low and even Obama’s economists say unemployment could top 10 percent before the recession ends. One in 10 homeowners is at risk of foreclosure and the dollar continues its slide in value.
That harsh reality has dominated Obama’s first days in office that brought his top economic advisers to the White House on their first Saturday in power to talk about the proposed stimulus package and the federal budget.
A day earlier, he invited Democratic and Republican leaders to the White House to hear their ideas on the economy. At that visit, he did not share the details he released Saturday.
“We presented President Obama with our ideas to jump start the economy through fast-acting tax relief — not slow-moving government spending programs,” House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio said in the weekly GOP address. “We let families, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and the self-employed keep more of what they earn to encourage investment and create millions of new private-sector jobs.”
Boehner said the Republicans would cut taxes for every taxpayer, dropping even the lowest income tax rates. “That’s up to an extra $3,200 per family every year — money that can be saved, spent or invested in any way you see fit,” Boehner said. He also proposed a tax credit for home purchases, an end of taxation of unemployment benefits and tax incentives for small businesses to invest in new equipment and hire new employees.
“We cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity,” Boehner said.
Obama also plans to travel to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with Republican leaders, his latest move to bring along his rival party to pass an economic package that has GOP support. On Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden and economic adviser Larry Summers were to appear on the morning talk shows, as was Boehner.
Many of the goals in the speech and report were familiar from Obama’s two-year campaign, such as shifting to electronic medical records and investing in preventive health care. Other parts added specifics.
Obama’s recovery package aims to:
—double within three years the amount of energy that could be produced from renewable resources. That is an ambitious goal, given the 30 years it took to reach current levels. Advisers say that could power 6 million households.
—upgrade 10,000 schools and improve learning for about 5 million students.
—save $2 billion a year by making federal buildings energy efficient.
—triple the number of undergraduate and graduate fellowships in science.
—tighten security at 90 major ports.
The plan would spend at least 75 percent of the total cost — or more than $600 billion — within the first 18 months, either through bricks-and-shovels projects favored by Democrats or tax cuts that Republicans have pushed.
There is heavy emphasis on public works projects, which have lagged as state budgets contracted. Governors have lobbied Obama to help them patch holes in their budgets, drained by sinking tax revenues and increased need for public assistance such as Medicaid and children’s health insurance. Obama’s plan would increase the federal portion of those programs so no state would have to cut any of the 20 million children whose eligibility is now at risk.
Obama’s plan would also provide health care coverage for 8.5 million people who lose their insurance when they either lose or shift jobs.
“It’s a plan that will save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years” and recognizes “there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there’s so much work to be done,” he said.
But Obama cautioned again against expecting instant results: “No one policy or program will solve the challenges we face right now, nor will this crisis recede in a short period of time.”
___
On the Net:
Obama video: www.whitehouse.gov
Obama economics report: http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/Documents/recover
y_plan_metrics —report.pdf
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Attorney Gordon Johnson
Past Chair Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group, American Association of Justice
g@gordonjohnson.com :: 800-992-9447 :: Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr.