Category: Joseph Markman
Sen. Shaheen Pitches New Cost-Saving Health Care Measures
New Bills
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
10/14/09
WASHINGTON – Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., introduced two bills Wednesday that she said would trim health care costs by limiting emergency room visits and expanding access to generic drugs.
“I think both of these bills are the kind of changes we need to make as we look at passing comprehensive health care reform in Congress,” Shaheen said in a conference call.
Shaheen said she will work to try to get the measures incorporated into a final Senate health reform bill. A number of lawmakers are offering a wide array of amendments to shape the legislation coming out of the finance and health committees.
“These two are going to be among those efforts to change the bill to accommodate both the cost-savings and the improvement in health outcomes that are implicit in both these pieces of legislation,” Shaheen said.
The senator was joined on the call by Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a Camden, N.J., doctor focused on reform of emergency room use,, and Gordon Johnston, vice president of regulatory sciences at the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
Shaheen said Brenner’s research helped illustrate the cost savings and improved outcomes that the type of program outlined in her bill can yield. The Generic Pharmaceutical Association is a supporter of Shaheen’s bill to close labeling loopholes.
Shaheen’s first bill, the REDUCE Act, would curb excessive emergency room visits by providing patients with more consistent and better coordinated care.
Brenner is the medical director of the Camden Coalition of Health Care Providers, which runs one of several programs throughout the country that provide frequent users of emergency services with a coordinated care management team.
Team members pick up patients at area hospitals, connect them with primary care and mental health workers, and pick up their prescriptions for them. Such programs have reduced emergency room use by high-use, Medicaid patients by as much as 61 percent, Brenner said.
“Every community across the country has high utilizers, in suburban communities and places like New Hampshire as well,” Brenner said.
Shaheen said estimates put nationwide unnecessary emergency room spending at $14 billion a year. Her measure would cost $150 million to institute nationwide programs similar to Brenner’s.
Shaheen’s other bill, the Access to Affordable Medicines Act, would institute a 60-day grace period for prescription drug label changes, while including protections in case changes are needed to ensure consumer safety. The Congressional Budget Office has yet to estimate its cost.
Current law requires labeling for generics to be identical to the labeling for the corresponding brand-name drug at the time of approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
Johnston used the example of a brand-name cancer drug whose patent expired in the spring to explain the generic prescription bill. Right before the patent expired, he said, the brand-name drug company changed a minor aspect of the drug’s labeling, forcing a delay in the generic release and ultimately costing consumers $15 million.
“The proposed legislation gives the FDA the flexibility to approve generic drugs on time, without delay,” Johnston said.
Last month Shaheen successfully pushed a Medicare cost-cutting pilot program that was included in the Senate Finance Committee’s health care reform legislation. That program would help senior citizens with follow-up care after leaving the hospital, significantly reducing the cost to Medicare of re-hospitalization.
“These are common sense ideas,” Shaheen said.
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Gregg Deplores Millions of Uninsured Under Finance Bill
Uninsured
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
10/08/09
WASHINGTON – Lawmakers of all stripes believe the country needs need some kind of health care reform. But tactical arguments about cost and structure often leave behind the reality of what happens if no change is made.
On the heels of the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that the U.S. Senate Finance Committee health care bill would cost $829 billion over 10 years, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., criticized the measure for leaving behind millions of uninsured, despite its high cost.
“Considering that 25 million individuals will remain uninsured under this proposal,” Gregg said in a statement, “it does not solve our health care issues… while radically growing the size of the federal government.”
Yet according to a new study, 70,000 New Hampshire residents, under a worst-case scenario, would be without health insurance by 2019 if reform is not completed. The best conditions would leave 25,000 people uninsured. The report was released last week by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.
“Compared to a lot of other states New Hampshire is doing pretty well,” said Brian C. Quinn, a research manager at the foundation. “But even in a place like New Hampshire, if we fail to enact health care reform … as much as 18 percent of the population could be uninsured over the next ten years.”
The foundation is a nonprofit focused on health issues and the Urban Institute is a nonpartisan social and economics research center started in 1968 under the urging of President Lyndon Johnson.
The report concludes that New Hampshire individuals and families, under the worst economic conditions, would pay nearly $1.5 billion more for health care over the next decade without insurance reform and more than $900 million under the best scenario.
“There’s been a lot of discussion and disagreement about which policy options might work best and which ones would expand coverage the most and which ones would control costs,” Quinn said. “I think if you get caught up in that discussion you can lose sight of why it’s so important that we’re working towards health reform.”
Another study, released Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that promotes health care reform, rated New Hampshire’s health care system fifth best in the country, behind Vermont, Hawaii, Minnesota and Iowa.
Nationally, as many as 65.7 million Americans would be uninsured by 2019 without reform, compared to 46 million today, according to the Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute study.
“There’s not one member of Congress that I know of who thinks that the status quo is acceptable on health care,” said Robert E. Moffit, director of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies.
Like Gregg, Moffit argues that the way reform is being done is the problem, criticizing the Finance Committee bill for calling for “massive spending” while not effectively driving down the number of uninsured.
“It takes professionals to get a seven percent decrease in the number of uninsured and spend close to a trillion dollars doing it,” Moffit said.
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New Hampshire Woman Lobbies Congress for Increased Food Safety
Food Safety
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
10/07/09
WASHINGTON – It was the death of Barbara Kowalcyk’s son Kevin eight years ago from E. Coli-infected hamburger that spurred her to create a food safety advocacy organization, and brought her to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to push for more food safety regulation.
Several family members including Kevin’s great-aunt Carol Kintner, of Newton, N.H., also traveled to Washington to lobby for legislation that would empower the Food and Drug Administration to better prevent food-borne illness outbreaks and increase the frequency of safety inspections.
Representatives of consumer and industry groups, including Kowalcyk’s, form an association called Make Our Food Safe. The association met Wednesday morning for a breakfast planning session near the capitol building before heading out to encourage lawmakers to act swiftly on tougher food safety regulation.
Kintner, along with her sister Pat Buck, visited the office of Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H. Buck co-founded the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention in Pennsylvania after Kevin died at age three from a rapid E. Coli infection at a hospital in Wisconsin.
Kintner, an independent insurance consultant said it’s important to include a personal plea to lawmakers, but just as important to present the facts.
“I think that it’s tough for families going through this to say, despite their loss, ‘We’re helping other people’,” Kintner said. “But [the visit] is a benchmark that turns lives around.”
Pamela G. Bailey, the CEO of the Grocery Manufacturers Association which supports tougher standards, expressed confidence Wednesday that a bill would be signed into law by Christmas.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a food safety advocacy group, released a report this week on the top ten “riskiest” foods regulated by the FDA, which is responsible for all produce, seafood, egg and dairy products.
The authors used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to pinpoint the risky foods, which they said accounted for 40 percent of all food-borne outbreaks linked to FDA-regulated foods since 1990.
The number one most potentially dangerous food was leafy greens, involving 363 outbreaks and more than 13,000 reported illnesses over the past 20 years. In 2006, E. Coli found in bagged spinach caused the deaths of three people, according to the CDC.
This year's most famous culprit, peanut butter, did not make the list. Salmonella-infected peanut butter at a plant in Georgia sickened thousands in early spring and reportedly killed at least nine people.
The outbreak in Georgia sparked calls for greater oversight and highlighted the FDA's infrequent safety inspections.
Other food on the list, in order from second-most risky: eggs; tuna; oysters; potatoes; cheese; ice cream; tomatoes; sprouts; and berries.
In July, the House of Representatives passed the Food Safety Enhancement Act with broad support. Similar legislation, which Gregg co-sponsored, is pending in the Senate.
Both bills would, in part, require food processors to identify where contamination may occur in the food production process; increase inspection frequency; require imported food to meet the same safety standards as food produced in the U.S.; and improve coordination among federal, state and local governments.
Michael R. Taylor, senior advisor to the FDA commissioner, spoke at the meeting on Wednesday in support of the legislation, which he said “warms the hearts of bureaucrats” like himself.
“Society is finally ready to act on this problem,” Taylor said. “You have the ability over the next couple days to push it over the finish line.”
Lacking any apparent opposition aside from small businesses who may object to fees included in the House version, Taylor said the biggest obstacle is Congress’s busy calendar this fall.
Yet food safety is not an entirely different priority than health care reform, the main item on lawmakers’ minds, said Erik D. Olson, director of food safety at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit foundation focused on public policy.
“Both the economics and health impacts of this legislation are huge,” Olson said.
Sen. Gregg Reflects on TARP Anniversary
TARP
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
10/01/09
WASHINGTON -- Pushing a banking industry bailout through the Senate last fall may have seemed like an ideological switch for fiscal conservative Judd Gregg, but calamity, practicality and the likelihood of taxpayer profits made it palatable to the New Hampshire Republican senator.
The financial panic that pushed Congress and the Bush administration to create the Troubled Asset Relief Program slammed into high gear when Lehman Brothers failed on Sept. 15, 2008.
For Gregg, picked by the Republican leadership to help pilot the Senate’s effort to stave off further collapse, the next two weeks were a blur of negotiations.
“We were dealing with a situation the likes of which the world had never seen before in the financial markets,” Gregg said in an interview on Thursday. “There was absolutely no partisanship at that [negotiating] table.”
Despite a few bumps in the road, and one gigantic dip in the stock market when the House initially voted down the TARP bill, Gregg and his fellow economic point men shepherded through a bill that would ultimately make the federal government a major investor in banks throughout the country.
“It was in no way a conservative philosophical action, to have the government step up this way, but there was no choice,” Gregg said. “To wrap yourself around the wheel of ideology on this would have meant a massive breakdown in our financial system, and people on Main Street of America would have suffered.”
The question now is whether the Obama administration will let TARP end on Dec. 31 as scheduled, or extend it through next October, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has the authority to do.
Of the $700 billion Congress authorized the Treasury Department to use, $363 billion has been disbursed, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.
Originally the funds were supposed to purchase so-called toxic assets that were weighing down bank balance sheets, but soon after the legislation was passed, the Treasury, under then-Secretary Henry Paulson, decided purchasing stakes in the banks was a better way to keep them from going under.
Critics argue that the government should not have invested so heavily in the banking industry.
“It seems to me [TARP] should be terminated,” said Randall Holcombe, an economics professor at Florida State University and a fellow at the Independent Institute, a nonprofit that studies political economics. “I don't think it’s a benefit for the government to own the banks.”
Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, D-N.H., voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which included TARP. She argues that there was little oversight attached to it and that the money would have been better spent elsewhere.
“We would have been better off investing the money in people on Main Street,” Shea-Porter said in an interview Thursday.
The Senate approved the legislation by a substantial margin, and the House, on its second try, passed it by a narrower vote. Without the legislation, Gregg argues, “cataclysmic failure” would have been worldwide and immediate.
The focus this fall in Congress is on what TARP has accomplished and how much longer it needs to continue.
Banks have repaid $70 billion so far, and the government has received nearly $7 billion in interest payments, according to the Government Accountability Office report.
Gregg said that if Geithner chooses to extend the program, all of the money returned by the banks so far and likely to be returned in the future should go toward reducing the national debt.
“There are a lot of people that want to get their hands on the money that’s coming back,” Gregg said.
Meg Reilly, a Treasury spokeswoman, declined to comment on the extension possibility because Geithner hasn’t made a decision. She said an extension would not be a commitment of additional funds.
Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearings lately have centered, in part, on the Treasury’s use of TARP funds to bail out the automobile industry.
In creating TARP to be flexible in order to stave off whatever risks might arise, Gregg said, the legislation made automaker bailouts possible, a step he strongly disagrees with.
Robert Hansen, senior associate dean at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, called the use of TARP funds to bail out carmakers a “complete betrayal” of the program’s purpose.
“The car industry [crisis] was not because of the credit crisis,” he said. “That was a long-term problem. And they went bankrupt anyway.”
Still, for many economists, there is no arguing that enacting the TARP program was better than doing nothing at all.
“Something had to be done,” Hansen said.
“TARP was, in my judgment, heroic,” said Terry Connelly, a former investment banker and dean of the Ageno School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. “It's not a pretty thing for the government to do, but they stopped a nightmare for everybody.”
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Sen. Shaheen Urges Congress to Extend Unemployment Benefits to all States
UNEMPLOYMENT NH
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
09/25/09
WASHINGTON – A bill Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., has co-sponsored would extend unemployment benefits for those states, including New Hampshire, that do not qualify under legislation passed in the House of Representatives earlier this week.
The Assistance for Unemployed Workers Act, introduced in August by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., would extend benefits in all 50 states, even those that do not meet the 8.5 percent unemployment threshold prescribed in House legislation passed Tuesday.
“This is a national economic crisis, and unemployed workers in New Hampshire should be treated the same as workers in any other state,” Shaheen said in a statement. “I am working with my Senate colleagues to make sure New Hampshire workers are able to receive unemployment compensation while they get back on their feet.”
Unemployment in New Hampshire stood at 6.9 percent in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.9 percent a year ago. The bureau reports that 51,000 New Hampshire residents are unemployed, out of a workforce of 738,000.
The House bill, which passed easily on Tuesday, applies to 27 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, all with unemployment rates of 8.5 percent or higher.
Of the six New England states, Vermont (6.8 percent) and Connecticut (8.1 percent) would also be covered under the proposed measure. Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island all have unemployment rates above 8.5 percent, according to the bureau. Rhode Island, at 12.8 percent, is surpassed only by Nevada, Michigan and Puerto Rico.
Nationwide unemployment in August was 9.7 percent.
Unemployment compensation was extended under the federal stimulus package, but for many Americans these benefits are set to expire at the end of September and for many more at the end of the year.
The bill Shaheen supports is currently before the Senate Finance Committee.
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New Census Form Simplier but Spurs Citizenship Controversy
CENSUS
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
09/23/09
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Census Bureau may soon have new friends among privacy advocatesand new enemies among those who favor asking immigrants about their legal status.
Next year’s decennial census includes 10 questions for each member of each household in the country, and should take only 10 minutes to complete, according to the bureau. In 2000, one out of every six households received a form with more than 50 questions.
Bureau director Robert M. Groves said at a press conference Wednesday that the newly simplified survey should increase responses and save money by decreasing the need for in-person follow-up interviews.
Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said that in recent decades the census survey had grown to include questions that some people consider extraneous or invasive. The 2000 long-form questionnaire, for instance, included questions about education, work history and home finances – topics not covered on next year’s form.
“The less information requested the better from a privacy standpoint,” Stephens said.
Of particular interest to some conservatives in Congress and the public is the lack of a question about residency status. Sen. Robert F. Bennett, R-Utah, has introduced legislation that would document legal and illegal residents on the survey, but Groves said it was too late to include such a question.
“That train has left for the 2010 census,” Groves said.
Groves said that he constantly fights partisan pressure, but that federal law prohibits his agency’s getting into the “political fray.”
“This is an organization that is explicitly apolitical,” Groves said.
Bennett’s spokeswoman said that it will be a challenge at this point, but that the senator will continue to work to include residence status to determine reapportionment of the House of Representatives.
One way would be to get population figures for reapportionment from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey of 3 million people that includes a legal residency question, rather than the 2010 census numbers. But that strategy is unlikely to succeed on legal grounds, said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“I think the court would look at the American Community Survey with a little more hesitancy because you’d have to extrapolate the data,” von Spakovsky said.
Grove’s status update on the 2010 census came on the heels of the 2008 American Community Survey, which keeps tabs on annual changes in population, income and other demographic data.
According to the survey, New Hampshire’s demographics changed little from 2007 to 2008. The state’s total population remained steady at a little over 1.3 million. The percentage of foreign-born residents stayed at 5 percent and the high school graduation rate hovered above 90 percent.
Groves said the Internet would finally become a census tool in 2020, when the bureau expects to offer follow-up questions online. In the meantime, the bureau plans to hire 1.4 million temporary employees nationwide, many of whom will be knocking on the doors of those who don’t return their questionnaires.
In 2000, one-third of the country’s population did not mail back forms. The federal stimulus package included $1 billion for marketing efforts aimed at driving up the number of returned questionnaires.
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HUD Bill Would Send Millions of Federal Dollars to New Hampshire
HUD Bill
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
09/17/09
WASHINGTON -- What's the best way to get $1 million for your community project? Take a day trip to Washington, D.C.
That's what Carter Siegel did. She is the campaign chairwoman for Squamscott Community Commons, a planned multi-purpose center in Exeter that is set to receive $1 million from the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill the Senate passed Thursday, 73-25.
Several projects in New Hampshire are expected to receive federal money if the bill, which the House has already approved, is signed into law.
In May, with what she described as a "mature" construction plan in hand, Siegel, along with Commons executive director Robin Drunsic, flew to Washington to meet with a lobbyist hired to guide them through the application process and help them get meetings with the state’s congressional delegation.
Sen. Judd Gregg was the only New Hampshire lawmaker who actually gave them face time in his office, but they also were able to pitch their project to legislative aides for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Rep. Carol Shea-Porter.
Siegel said that they had to squeeze into the offices of Shaheen and Shea-Porter because of the many other constituents in Washington that day. It was so packed, she said, that they were forced to make their presentation standing in a circle with the aides.
"We ended up in the hallway; it was the only place we could talk," Siegel said.
Siegel and Drunsic flew home that same afternoon, feeling optimistic, she said, despite Gregg's sober assessment of their possibly slim chances.
"Sen. Gregg was telling us how it is," Siegel said. "But we left with the overall feeling we had done our very best. We had done everything we could to promote the merit of the project."
Later, after keeping in touch with the congressional district offices, the Squamscott group found out their project had been offered as part of the bill by both Gregg and Shaheen. But the real celebration didn't come until July 31, when Shaheen announced that the Senate Appropriations Committee had approved $1 million for the community center.
Squamscott Community Commons was originally established in 1998 as a charitable organization. The center, to be built on the 10-acre site of the old Junior High School in Exeter, has already been 10 years in the making. It will include as tenants a full-service YMCA and several other nonprofit agencies which will provide programs in health, nutrition, arts, recreation and child care.
The center would create 100 full- and part-time jobs at the YMCA and employ 200 during construction, project leaders said.
With $3.4 million raised so far in private contributions and a goal of $16 million the group has a ways to go. Siegel said she is looking at two to four years before a ground-breaking.
"We're doing something that's very important for our community. So for us the use of a lobbyist was key to our success," Siegel said. "This appropriation is a very smart allocation of taxpayer dollars."
Additional New Hampshire projects in the bill include infrastructure investment and money to ease the current credit crunch.
Nashua will get $500,000 to add sidewalks to Broad Street and the Nashua River Bridge, Berlin is looking to rebuild part of a main trucking route with $800,000 and the non-profit Northern Community Investment Corp. would receive $500,000 for a loan program. The corporation also has $1 million in the bill to expand affordable and reliable broadband service in the North Country.
The process of getting federal money was much simpler for Berlin City Manager Patrick MacQueen. There was no flight to Washington, no squeezing into congressional offices. MacQueen filled out a grant application a year ago and then just waited.
Berlin’s $500,000 will relocate and improve a much-used artery. The road supports heavy truck traffic, including vehicles headed to the new federal prison construction site, but its condition resembles "a poor country road," MacQueen said.
Kristi Scarpone, campaign manager for the Squamscott project, said such federal money not only creates jobs, it also provides a psychological boost to people who may consider donating their own time and money. Despite the group's lobbying effort, Scarpone said, with so many projects competing for limited funds the Squamscott advocates were surprised by their selection.
"We were not expecting it," Scarpone said. "This definitely helps boost our numbers."
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Senate Medicare Amendment Could Save Billions
Finance Amendment
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
09/16/09
WASHINGTON – Taxpayers could save billions in Medicare costs under a measure Sen. Jeanne Shaheen sponsored that was included in the health reform bill Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus, D -Mont., unveiled Wednesday.
Shaheen and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, successfully pushed for a three-year pilot program that would help senior citizens with follow-up care after leaving the hospital, significantly reducing the cost to Medicare of re-hospitalization.
A New England Journal of Medicine study conducted earlier this year found that almost one-third of Medicare patients who were discharged from a hospital were re-hospitalized within 90 days largely as a result of lack of such care.
Medicare spent an estimated $17.4 billion in 2004 on unplanned re-hospitalizations. The pilot program, which will be considered by the full Finance Committee next week, would cost $500 million over three years.
Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., expressed support for the program.
“It’s an important issue,” Gregg said in a telephone interview. “This is certainly part of the puzzle in getting health care costs under control.”
“Health care costs are too high for families, businesses and the economy, and we must find ways to keep what works in our system and fix what doesn’t,” Shaheen said in a statement Wednesday after Baucus presented his 10-year, $856 billion health care reform proposal.
“Addressing growing health care costs must be at the center of any health care reform legislation,” Collins said in the same statement.
President Obama, in addressing the nation on health care reform last week, called for such waste-cutting to help pay for extending insurance coverage to most Americans. Shaheen emphasized that some Medicare spending may be unnecessary or may need to be trimmed.
“The Finance Committee was right to include this type of measure so that we can keep what works in our system and fix what doesn’t,” Shaheen said.
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Gregg’s Amendment to Ban Stimulus Signs Fails
Stimulus Signs
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
09/16/09
WASHINGTON – Seeking to curb what he called unnecessary spending in an already wasteful stimulus bill, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., unsuccessfully offered an amendment Wednesday that would have banned the use of taxpayer money to advertise stimulus projects.
The amendment, offered to the Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill, was voted down largely along party lines, 45-52.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., was one of the few Democrats to vote in favor of Gregg’s proposal. “I don’t think these signs are a good use of taxpayer money,” Shaheen said.
“It makes no sense at all that taxpayers should be spending millions of dollars to put up signs to tell them their money is being spent well,” said Gregg when presenting his amendment on the Senate floor.
President Obama signed into law the $787 billion stimulus package in February. At the time Gregg voiced strong opposition and voted against the measure because of its effect on the deficit. Later, after considering a nomination to be Commerce Secretary, Gregg stepped aside, citing displeasure with the stimulus plan as a significant reason for his reversal.
The green metal “This project funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” signs, often found on the side of roads and highways, have gone up all across the country since federal money began flowing to the states.
Facing heavy opposition from Democratic lawmakers, Gregg argued passionately for the ban on Wednesday afternoon, calling for an end to at least some of the waste he said is prevalent in the stimulus package.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., countered Gregg, arguing that some taxpayers may support certain projects and some may not, but that it’s important to keep people informed.
“It’s about transparency and openness,” Boxer said.
Gregg disagreed, saying that taxpayers should not have to fund political public relations.
“It has to be extraordinarily frustrating to most taxpayers to see that happening and it’s certainly not a good use of their money,” Gregg said. “It’s self-congratulatory, it’s political and it’s inappropriate. These truly are the signs to nowhere.”
Sen. Shaheen Supports Public Option in Health Care Reform
Reform
New Hampshire Union Leader
Joe Markman
Boston University Washington News Service
09/10/09
WASHINGTON— Headed to a meeting yesterday with President Obama to discuss health care reform, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said the so-called public option is the best choice for providing secure and reliable health insurance to all Americans.
“I support the public option. It’s one of the ideas that makes sense,” Shaheen said.
She and 15 other moderate Democratic senators met with Obama at the White House yesterday afternoon.
Many of the proposals Obama outlined in his speech to Congress Wednesday night, such as outlawing coverage denial because of pre-existing medical conditions, are contained in each of the various bills before Congress and have received bipartisan support. But how to cover the uninsured while lowering health care costs remains a thorny issue, even among Democrats.
“How do we get the votes we need to get health care reform done in a way that’s going to help so many families in New Hampshire and across the country who are worried about the rising cost of their health insurance, their deductible and their co-pays?” Shaheen said.
In the past, Shaheen has said she would not rule out the possibility of voting for a bill without a public option. After Obama’s speech, she said that a public option is the best alternative.
Republicans, including Sen. Judd Gregg, have said that the public option is not the right choice for reform and that it would limit free-market competition while driving up the federal budget deficit.
“You’d be creating a massive new entitlement program,” Gregg said. “That is not affordable for us as a nation.”
Nina Owcharenko, deputy director of The Heritage Foundations Center for Health Policy Studies, said despite the President’s promise that no one would be required to change his or her insurance, a public option could force people to switch coverage.
Owcharenko cited a report Heritage commissioned from the Lewin Group, a nonpartisan health care policy and management consulting firm. The report estimated a so-called public option would cause nearly half of privately insured Americans to choose that option, resulting in increased costs for the government.
Shaheen said Republican criticism of the public option misses the point of fixing a broken system. Instead of focusing on particulars, Shaheen said, her colleagues should focus on accomplishing long-overdue reform.
Gregg said that Obama’s speech lacked specifics; he added that “the devil is in the details”. Still, Gregg said, despite the Democrats overwhelming majority in the Senate, there is a strong working coalition that may reach a compromise.
New Hampshire House Democrats said the President successfully bridged the partisan divide and clearly stated his framework for reform Wednesday night.
Rep. Paul Hodes said that details are always being worked out, but that the response from his constituents has been extraordinarily positive.
“I think the President clarified his fundamental positions in his approach to health care reform in a very effective way,” Hodes said.
Rep. Carol Shea-Porter agreed, saying that unless people would have liked to stay up 12 hours listening to policy details, Obama did as best he could with the complex issue of health care.
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