With the debate over health care reform getting more heated on the left, Crooks & Liars reports on a White House conference call which answered some of the objections from liberal bloggers:
I started by asking about the recent maneuver to block imported drugs. I said it was “shameless,” not only because Candidate Obama ran on the issue of allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada, but because the FDA already does site inspections in those same plants they were calling unsafe. (Basically, in order to sell any drugs in America, your manufacturing facility must meet the same standards as an American plant.)
I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they would be submitting an HHS bill in the near future – they’d “just this week” gotten funding to address any safety concerns, but more importantly, to start putting an infrastructure in place to import drugs.
My other question (as a former reporter who frequently covered insurance corruption) was about using state insurance commissioners to enforce new insurance regulations.
I said that in many states, insurance commissioners were pretty much owned by the local insurance companies, and I was skeptical as to whether making them the enforcers would actually work.
DeParle said HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, a former state insurance commissioner, was not one of “those” commissioners, and she would be overseeing state departments. Sebelius already met with state insurance commissioners, she said, and having found a wide discrepancy in authority from state to state, got language inserted in the bill that would give them additional powers. (DeParle noted that the West Virginia commissioner didn’t even have the authority to see if insurance companies were solvent.)
DeParle said this was the widest expansion of insurance regulation in 20 years.
David Axelrod also chimed in, noting these changes were part of the reason why the insurance industry has opposed the bills so stringently. If this was a giveaway, he said, they wouldn’t be lobbying so hard to defeat the bill.
I have to give it to Axelrod on this: Without even a little exaggeration, I’d say that standardizing state oversight is probably the insurance industry’s worst nightmare. They’ve always taken advantage of a hodgepodge of weak state regulations, sprinkling generous political contributions along the way to buy off state legislators. So this bill is really what you want from federal regulation: Overriding weak state laws that trample consumers.
Other points:
Joan McCarter from Daily Kos wanted to know if the annual cap on expenses was left in the Senate bill. DeParle said they were working with CBO and Senate on improvements, and said a lot of what people thought was happening was due to “misinformation.” She said CBO said to put the qualifier “no unreasonable limits” in the bill language so they could score it, and said they’re working with the American Cancer Society in an attempt to make an enhancement to the system. She said at the very least, it will ban annual limits.
Open Left’s Chris Bowers wanted to know if the White House wanted the bill to go to the conference committee – or did they support “ping-ponging,” which would essentially mean the House would accept the Senate bill without changes. (DeParle said no, they want to get it to the conference committee.)
In response to a question from MyDD’s Jonathan Singer, Axelrod talked about having a daughter with a chronic illness while he was a reporter in an HMO plan. “I spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket that I didn’t have. The stress was extraordinary. This bill attempts to fix the system on the basis of the human costs on patients and their families.” He called it “wrongheaded to suggest these bills aren’t infinitely better than anything we have today. This is an extraordinary moment on which we can win.”