Apr ‘11
27
President Obama on Bending the Health Care Cost Curve
President Obama is now known as “President Whatever” in D.C. The president who was elected on the hope that he can lead to “change we can believe in” seems a victim of forces beyond his control. And the leadership for “change” has passed to Republicans, Tea Parties and voters who want someone to “shellack.”
I want to defend the president based on the size of the problems he was handed by the Republicans. The audacity of Wall Street, Rupert Murdoch (WSJ)and Roger Aeiles (Fox), Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians, Israelis, Chinese, Russians, Sunnis and Shia, and Arab Autocrats and social media. And the abysmal failure of the leadership of the Senate he left to help him do what he believed needed to get done in his first two years.
What I don’t understand, however, is how a president could get Congress to pass the kind of health policy reforms that no other president could accomplish in much less turbulent times. And then show so little commitment to the historic opportunity he provided us to drive down the cost of every “entitlement” program in the country by expanding health care coverage and reducing its costs.
Republicans were of one mind in opposing health policy reform and are of one mind in repealing Obamacare and President Obama himself because of it. Until mid-April, the president never once expressed to the public the fervor for change that got the law passed. Neither the White House nor Health and Human Services (HHS) has any strategy for convincing the public of what the health system already knows about the need for and benefits of change. So how can we believe in something we don’t understand?
What you see of a strategy is 1,000 “waivers” from the law leading opponents to change that they are being granted to “friends” of the law or of the administration. The FY2011 budget deal even included a GAO audit of the waivers!
The launching of a “national health care quality strategy” led by Don Berwick at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and supposed to be backed by major American employers, got lost somewhere in Congressman Paul Ryan’s premium supports and block grants solutions to the health care cost problem.
In his April 13 speech, President Obama did remind Ryan and others that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) provided all the tools we need to begin to bend the cost curve. And that he has come up with more that could save $1 trillion over 10 years. That was all lost to the GOP/media message that President Obama was launching his re-election campaign (because he had). And that an Independent Payment Advisory Board (more government in health care) could help reduce the costs of Medicare and Medicaid more quickly than private health insurance and state health reform encouraged by federal block grants.
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