Tag Archives: health care

Continued Veterans Administration Failure

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Dr Dale Klein is, formally, on the Veterans Administration payroll—to the tune of a $250,000/yr salary—but he’s not employed by them, and so his pain management skills are actively denied our veterans who would benefit from them.  Klein blew the whistle on his proximate employer’s—Southeast Missouri John J Pershing VA facility—secret waiting lists and wait time manipulation practices.  Now he’s shunned by his employers and banished to a room by himself where he’s denied access to his patients and patients are denied access to him.

VA management is continuing to refuse to clean up its act, preferring to serve their employed bureaucrats rather than, and at the direct expense of our veterans.  This has to stop, and the only way is to disband VA and commit its budget—all of it, including overhead—to vouchers for our veterans with which they can see doctors, clinics, and hospitals of their choice.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

House Freedom Caucus of No

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Yesterday, the membership of the House Freedom Caucus of No forced the American Health Care Act, the first stage of a three-stage Obamacare repeal and replace program offered by the majority of the House Republican Conference, to be withdrawn from the day’s backup vote (recall that these No-ers already had forced a delay from Thursday’s vote over their demand to have their way or there could be no Act), and so there will be no AHCA.

As a result of the No-ers’ our way or nothing attitude, the American people now get nothing at all.  We’re forced to stay with Obamacare and the disastrous failure of that program. Of particular interest, included in those American people are these No-ers’ own constituents, whose interests these No-ers so loudly pretend that they’re protecting.  Yet, with their performance, they’ve ensured that their own constituents also get nothing; the No-ers have betrayed their own electorate.

I have to ask: on whose side are the No-ers; their tactics have led directly to the continuation of Obamacare?  Are they on the side of the Progressive-Democrats whose program Obamacare is?  Or are they in Congress for their own benefit?

They’re certainly not interested in the welfare of the American people, or of their own constituents.

For your reference in the 2018 election cycle, here are the members of the House Freedom Caucus of No, who put their demands ahead of the nation’s citizens’ needs:

  • Mark Meadows, North Carolina, Chair
  • Justin Amash, Michigan
  • Brian Babin, Texas
  • Ted Poe, Texas
  • Randy Weber, Texas
  • Rod Blum, Iowa
  • Dave Brat, Virginia
  • Tom Garrett, Jr, Virginia
  • Morgan Griffith, Virginia
  • Jim Bridenstine, Oklahoma
  • Mo Brooks, Alabama
  • Ken Buck, Colorado
  • Warren Davidson, Ohio
  • Jim Jordan, Ohio
  • Ron DeSantis, Florida
  • Bill Posey, Florida
  • Ted Yoho, Florida
  • Scott DesJarlais, Tennessee
  • Jeff Duncan, South Carolina
  • Mark Sanford, South Carolina
  • Trent Franks, Arizona
  • Paul Gosar, Arizona
  • David Schweikert, Arizona
  • Andy Harris, Maryland
  • Jody Hice, Georgia
  • Raúl Labrador, Idaho
  • Alex Mooney, West Virginia
  • Gary Palmer, Alabama
  • Steve Pearce, New Mexico
  • Scott Perry, Pennsylvania

Delays

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The House Republicans were forced to cancel yesterday’s scheduled American Health Care Act vote.  The Freedom Caucus, the Caucus of No, couldn’t be satisfied.  Congressmen like Jim Jordan (R, OH) and Caucus of No Chairman Mark Meadows (R, NC) refused late compromises, all the while insisting by implication from their refusals that constituents of other Congressmen, for instance Tom Cole (R, OK), worked for them and not that Cole worked for his Oklahoma constituents—and that those Oklahoma constituents might have different imperatives than those Congressmen of the Caucus.  So, no compromise from the No-ers.

Even after regulation changes that were part of Phase II of the overall three phase repeal and replace plan were offered to be brought into this Phase I AHCA, the No-ers refused.  Never mind that even the need to make such an offer displayed a monumental distrust by the No-ers of their ex-Congressional colleague, Tom Price, now Secretary of Health and Human Services and the gentleman who would have carried out those regulation rescissions of Phase II.  Even the No-ers’ plaint that they wanted those regulation removals written into law rather than merely rescinded makes no sense: that could have been legislated next year, by this same Congress, and that, as change to a done, deal would have thereby much easier to do.

Nor did a single member of the Caucus of No offer either any plan for getting the changed bill past a Senate filibuster from these too-large changes or any explanation of why their demanded changes would have permitted the bill still to go through via reconciliation and a majority-only vote.

It’s clear that the Freedom Caucus, this Caucus of No, is little more than a collection of yapping porch dogs, or alternatively just a bunch of right-handed virtue-signaling snowflakes, with little interest in actually improving our health provision system or restoring our health care to us constituents and our doctors.

Obamacare Replacement

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One aspect of the plan on offer in the House is this:

…whether it includes enough reform to arrest the current death spiral in the individual insurance market.

Notably, the bill includes a new 10-year $100 billion “stability fund” that allows states to start to repair their individual insurance markets. Before ObamaCare, it wasn’t inevitable that costs would increase by 25% on average this year, or that nearly a third of US counties would become single-insurer monopolies. With better policy choices, states can make coverage cheaper and more attractive for consumers and coax insurers back into the market, and the stability fund is a powerful tool.

Right idea, but it needs a tweak.  As with all Federal transfers to the States (even though nearly all of them do not have this), this transfer needs a sunset (ideally, but not as a deal breaker, on a declining balance to the sunset date) by which the transfer will cease to exist.  States need time to adjust their budgets as their addiction to Federal money is broken, but in the end the costs a State inflicts on itself must be the sole responsibility of that State.

Then there’s this:

The larger goal is to start to restore the traditional state regulatory authority over health insurance that ObamaCare supplanted for federal control. Local governments understand local needs best. With more flexibility, autonomy and accountability, the GOP hope is that reform Governors can pry open markets and help promote a larger and more dynamic business.

The larger goal still, and an even better one, should be to reduce regulation altogether to a great degree, and let the markets regulate health insurance products and costs.

In the end, too, local governments do understand local needs better than remote Federal, and State, governments.  But the greatest understanding is even more local: the patient and his doctor.  These are the participants in a free market for health insurance products—nation-wide and freely crossing State borders—whose “regulatory” activities should prevail.

Republican Gadflies

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Karl Rove talked about health care coverage prospects in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and that triggered a thought in my pea brain.

Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) has announced that the House plan on offer, a plan designed to be passable through reconciliation, with later phases of repeal and replace for completing the task, is dead on arrival, and the House shoe start over and produce a more comprehensive plan in this first phase.  But Cotton has chosen to not offer a plan of his own, or outline what a plan acceptable to him would look like other than to address taxes and to more fully repeal right damn now Obamacare, or even to offer the tactics he’d use to get the new plan—which could not be done through reconciliation—past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) similarly demands a broader bill right damn now, but he, too, has chosen to offer no tactics for getting his bill past a Senate Progressive-Democrat filibuster.  He’s just using the copout excuse that that’s the Senate’s problem.  Oh, and Jordan also declines to identify the value of a bill that can’t be passed.

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) at least has offered an actual plan, but he, too, has declined to identify how he expects to get his plan past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.

These gadflies keep demanding that everyone else put up (these three’s demands) or shut up.  It’s time these three put up; otherwise, they’re just porch dogs, yapping from the safety of their stoops.