Health Care Round-Up: The Post Office, PowerPoint and Twitter

Had I but world enough and time, I could probably write a post an hour and still not keep up with everything going on in health care right now.  Although much of the content this week has been frustrating, it’s also exhilarating, and a lot more positive overall than in the parallel universe where President McCain is putting health care on the backburner yet again.  In an attempt to “catch up,” here are three mini-posts – all for the price of one!

1.)    The Daily Show:  “Heal or No Heal”




Absolutely hysterical.  You’ll notice I don’t write a lot about Rep. Boehner’s semi-daily tirades against the push to reform health care in Congress.  The primary reason is he seldom, if ever, is actually pushing a few concrete ideas from the GOP perspective.  (When they do – like with the Patients Choice Act – I tend to write a lot about them).

But the secondary reason is I usually just don’t get his talking points.  I know making fun of the post office was the cool thing to do 25 years ago, but let’s get down to brass tacks:  I put my Father’s Day card in the mail tonight, going to one of the busiest post offices in Manhattan, and waited maybe two minutes total.  As a bonus, my dad will get his card hundreds of miles away on Saturday morning.  And all it cost me was a little under $9 for a book of 20 stamps.

Seriously, I would be lucky if my next trip to the hospital was half that efficient!

2.)    Senate Finance Committee Legislation – now in PowerPoint!

Ezra Klein scores the big exclusive with a pirate copy of the current draft of Sen. Max Baucus’ bill after he went on a “cutting the cost of the plan by 40%” spree.  Honestly, it never occurred to me that Senators would need to have their complex legislation proposing a reform of $2.4 trillion in combined public and private spending reduced to PowerPoint bullets.  Although it makes sense.  I’m dying to see if this sucker had animated transitions or not.

Ezra thinks the bill is not good but not terrible.  I think it’s basically Massachusetts – let’s just look at the subsidies for those who cannot afford premiums in the Health Exchanges.  Finance was never going to propose subsidies up to 500% of the poverty line (although it’s working just fine in San Francisco despite the worst fiscal crisis in California state history), but 400% was a realistic goal.  To accomplish nothing in particular except the satisfaction of gutting their own proposal, they’ve scaled subsidies back to 300%, which means a sizable chunk of the uninsured will have to be exempted from the individual mandate, like they are in Massachusetts, because there are no affordable options.  They might have been able to afford the strongest versions of the public plan (Medicare that you can buy into), but Finance leaves out a public plan entirely.  So the uninsured above 300% of poverty get nothin’.

The Walker Report isn’t far off the mark when he writes, “the health insurance industry wrote a better proposal than the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee.”  But did they use PowerPoint?

3.)    Media ignorance, explained in six words

Mark Halperin on TIME’s The Page is usually a bastion of conventional wisdom, and has a good sense of the current group-think pack mentality that so dominates the mainstream media.  He lists 5 reasons to bet on health care happening this year, and 5 reasons to bet against it.  Reason #3 to bet against it?

“The public is not demanding action.”

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read a news story that says, “Wow, where did these grassroots people come from?” or “Obama is mobilizing his army” or “Single-payer is mounting an offensive to get into the conversation.”  Ditto the polling, which consistently shows strong support for health care reform, and the new poll that shows overwhelming support for a public health insurance option.

But this translates to us not demanding action.  They see what they want to see – which perhaps explains why the Senate Finance Committee is hell-bent on giving Chuck Grassley what he wants and the American people very little of what they want.

I guess we’re just not speaking the same language, so please accept this note to reporters covering health care and to the members of the Unites States Senate: When you are a "hammer" u think evrything is NAIL American ppl r no NAIL!