Healthcare

You remember Harry and Louise, right? They were all over the tube after Clinton took the White House, just an average suburban couple whose minds were blown by Hillary's health care plan. Of course, they were actually top secret undercover foot soldiers for the insurance industry and are credited with helping to derail health care reform.

Well here we are 15 years later and Harry and Louise are back, and they appear to have changed sides. Older and a little grayer and decidedly non-partisan, now they're all about health care reform. Coming to a TV near you:

Yesterday, I wrote about a claim John McCain had made in a recent ad pledging to "battle big oil." While that claim seemed dubious, McCain, in the same spot, rightly boasted about taking on drug companies.

As Bloomberg News notes today, McCain teamed up with Sen. Chuck Schumer back in 2000, and helped introduce a bill to make it easier to bring generic drugs to market. Like Barack Obama, McCain also has declared his support for the idea of importing drugs from Canada, something the pharmaceutical industry is against.

Well, the industry McCain has labeled the "Big Bad Guys" (much to Mitt Romney's dismay), appears to see a disturbing pattern from the Arizona senator. To that end, it has donated more to his opponent. According to Bloomberg, the donation tally stands at:

Obama $450,094
McCain $132,575

For comparison's sake, Hillary Clinton received $314,557 from Big Pharma in her failed bid to become president. And therein might lie the clue as to why the drug companies are reversing course and shelling out more money to Democrats in a year when health care reform threatens their bottom line. It could be that they're simply going with the side they think will win in November:

For now, the drug industry is backing Obama because of a perception he is the likely winner and because of McCain's criticism, said Peter Rost, who was a vice president of marketing at New York-based Pfizer Inc. until he was fired in 2005.

If you're looking for a head-to-head comparison of the McCain and Obama health care proposals, have a look at the analysis at the Economic Policy Institute. While I prefer Obama's, McCain should be lauded for his willingness to -- as his ad correctly states -- take on the drug companies.

Via The Wall Street Journal we learn that Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, is feeling anxious. It seems that the company is afraid that Barack Obama is likely to be elected the next president. In fact, it's so spooked about the prospect that it's been summoning store managers to meetings in an attempt to scare them about the ramifications of a Democratic administration. The terrifying consequence? If Obama (who supports the Employee Free Choice Act) wins, Wal-Mart employees might unionize.

The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees who to vote for in November, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

Wal-Mart's antipathy toward unions is legendary. Over the course of its 48-year history, the company has successfully barred countless attempts by employees to organize for better pay and increased benefits. In fact, the company's aggressive tactics to thwart its employees from receiving better compensation have caught the attention of organizations such as Human Rights Watch, which, in an exhaustive study titled Wal-Mart Is a Poster Child For What Is Wrong With Labor Laws, declared:

Our message is that when the world's largest economy has labor laws that are so weak that it is unable to prevent the world's largest corporation from violating workers' rights to organize, it is troubling.

Indeed, the company is right to feel leery about Obama, who has made his views on Wal-Mart's anti-union stance known in this campaign.

In politics, it's always good to find points of agreement when they pop up. To that end, I could not agree more with John McCain's platform on sunscreen:



For more on the Arizona Senator's first hand knowledge of what the sun can do to your skin, there's the following reading:

McCain to get biopsy
McCain appears cancer free, healthy
New study shows alarming rise in melanoma in young women

As a resident of Florida, my family's monthly sunscreen bills are almost as high as those for gasoline, but it's an investment that far outweighs the alternative. Here's hoping McCain's biopsy comes back negative.

Sen. Ted Kennedy surprised his colleagues in Congress by showing up for a vote on Medicare legislation. It was his first appearance on the Hill since undergoing surgery for brain cancer two months ago. His family was worried the trip would be too much for the ailing senator, but Kennedy insisted on casting the vote because of a promise he made to seniors and veterans. (The measure, which blocks a cut in payments to doctors, moved past a procedural hurdle, 69-23.) Here's Kennedy's statement.

The floor erupted into cheers and applause when a smiling Kennedy arrived, walking under his own power and giving thumbs up. He was accompanied by members of his family and Sen. Barack Obama and greeted warmly by lawmakers from both sides of the aisle.

When Senator Ted Kennedy returns to the Senate he plans to pass universal health care legislation. The Boston Globe reports that Kennedy began laying the groundwork while in Massachusetts undergoing treatment for brain cancer.

Kennedy's strategy for passing the legislation, which would be introduced shortly after Barack Obama is inaugurated if he wins the November election, would depend on finding common ground among a variety of groups such as political parties, business and labor interests. The strategy is based on the perception that previous attempts to pass major health care reform, especially during the Clinton administration, suffered from lack of consensus building.

If politics and his health allow, Kennedy will likely be a central figure in propelling healthcare reform. AARP policy director John Rother has been involved in the process and he told The Boston Globe, "You have got to think this will be the Ted Kennedy Health Reform Act, because he's a beloved figure and he's championed the issue for so long."

Obama is also expected to also work with former rival Hillary Clinton on the issue. The Obama campaign recently hired Neera Tanden, who was Senator Clinton's Senate legislative director and campaign policy director. Her title with the Obama campaign is domestic policy director but Tanden is expected to work on helping to develop the campaign's plans for health care reform.

John McCain gave a speech a few weeks ago detailing his healthcare plan, and I immediately went to work on this story. I got as far as the headline, which I have since changed, and no further.

Although gleeful at the prospect, his plan is so bad, I didn't know where to start. I was like a kid in a candy store.

The candy store is a good metaphor for McCain's plan. Imagine yourself as a child, and you have a huge pillowcase full of Halloween candy. The candy is your health plan. McCain comes along and snatches that enormous sack, and instead gives you a $5 bill and a trip to the candy store. "Now, you have choice! This candy is available to all!" he says, cackling through the glistening remnants of your Tootsie Rolls stuck to his teeth.

The best part is, in order to give you that grandfatherly fin, he had to do away with Trick or Treating.

Let's take a closer, but not boring, look at McCain's healthcare "plan."

In a vote which contemplates a brave new world, Congress has passed a law which prohibits health insurance agencies from "discriminating" on the basis of information revealed through genetic decoding. That is, insurance providers are not allowed to take into consideration a person's genetic predilection for illness (i.e., heart disease, diabetes) in the issuance of terms and policies.

On the one hand, this legislation passed with only a single dissenter in either house. Such uniformity of consent is usually reserved for empty patriotic expressions or vulgar legislative pandering. This vote seems to be the latter. People have a true fear of "genetic discrimination." They see it as a potential path toward a big-brother society divided between classes of genetic superiors and inferiors. Genetic undesirables would lose their health coverage, they would be denied employment, their maledictions would be broadcast to the world so that they could not marry or produce children - they would be condemned from birth to stray on the borders of civilization. (Sounds like a great movie, doesn't it?)

Two stories from The New York Times concerning the subject of healthcare are not good news for Hillary Clinton. The first details what might be termed a self-inflicted wound. It involves a story that Clinton has woven into her stump speech. From the Times:

Over the last five weeks, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has featured in her campaign stump speeches the story of a health care horror: an uninsured pregnant woman who lost her baby and died herself after being denied care by an Ohio hospital because she could not come up with a $100 fee.

The woman, Trina Bachtel, did die last August, two weeks after her baby boy was still born at O'Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio. But hospital administrators said Friday that Ms. Bachtel was under the care of an obstetrics practice affiliated with the hospital, that she was never refused treatment and that she was, in fact, insured.

"We implore the Clinton campaign to immediately desist from repeating this story," said Rick Castorp, chief executive officer of the O'Bleness Health System.

The second item, while not as directly linked to Clinton herself, also bears consideration when voters ask whether or not mandatory universal health care is, as Clinton claims, the only real way to go. As many readers know, Barack Obama favors a more market-driven approach, a combination of lower costs for adults and guaranteed access for children. Indeed, though each candidate agrees that we have a problem and that it needs to be fixed, the way each would do so represents a rare policy example of how these two Democrats are different. The Times piece in question looks into how the state of Massachusetts is doing with its first-in-the-nation universal heath care law. The results are decidedly mixed. Read here.

And for further comparison and contrast:
Clinton's plan is here.
Obama's plan is here.

At an annual meeting of health care journalists, Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, claims that she and John McCain both would struggle to find health insurance if they had to rely on his health care plan for coverage, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. McCain is a melanoma survivor. Edwards is currently battling breast cancer.

Insurance companies under McCain's plan, Edwards pointed out, "wouldn't have to cover preexisting conditions like melanoma and breast cancer." Critics of McCain's plan are concerned because the plan does not require insurers to provide coverage and does not regulate how much they are allowed to charge.

The Wonk Room takes a look at McCain's plan.