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Tag Archives: Tom Price

Roy Bunt tosses the ball to Obamacare nemesis Tom Price

29 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by willykay in Uncategorized

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ACA, Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, Repeal and Replace, Roy Blunt, Tom Price, Trumpcare

In centuries past alchemists sought to turn dross into gold. Today’s Republicans practice a type of reverse alchemy wherein they turn gold into what we will euphemistically term dross. Case in point: The Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare.

It is now de rigueur for liberals and progressives – open minded creatures that we are – to open any discussion of Obamacare by noting that it isn’t perfect. Which is true. But there is real gold there, liberally distributed throughout all that silver and bronze. I personally am still alive – and not bankrupt – thanks to the preexisting conditions provisions in Obamacare, so I know what I’m talking about.

The past six months have seen a continuous effort on the part of the GOP to distill that gold – and the attendant silver and bronze — into the purest form of excremental dross via the congressional Obamacare dump (repeal) and dupe (replace) effort. Despite Republican efforts to relabel their stinky product as “freedom” or “access,” almost nobody was fooled. In the end, thanks to three brave Republicans who bucked the GOP Borg Collective and joined Democrats to save healthcare for Americans, we can breathe easier. For now, at least.

Unfortunately, Missouri GOP Senator Roy Blunt was not one of those brave Republicans who put our welfare above his party and its well-heeled patrons. And his response to the demise of Trumpcare does not bode well for those of us who depend on Obamacare:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) hoped that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price could use his authority to make beneficial changes to the law. Price has previously talked about some market stability measures and helping states apply for waivers for certain ObamaCare provisions.

“I think this ends this discussion for a little while and Tom Price is going to continue to look at all of the 1,400 places in the bill that his department is responsible for defining how this might work better,” Blunt said.

At the risk of running the alchemical metaphor into the ground, Blunt’s evocation of Price is the equivalent of calling on Doctor Alchemy, the evil alchemist of the DC Comics world, to keep the reverse transformation going.

And it just might work. Price, who ” has taken every turn possible to express his displeasure with the Affordable Care Act and has suggested he’ll do little to bolster its markets,” will be running the whole regulatory shebang:

As health chief, the former Roswell congressman has nearly unparalleled power to determine how health care gets delivered in America. Through special rule makings, guidance and regulatory tweaks at HHS, Price can make what are essentially unilateral changes to loosen the grip of the Affordable Care Act or tweak aspects of Medicare that could have a major impact on doctors and patients.

Sounds to me like Senator Blunt is giving a wink and a nod to cronies in the know, effectively telegraphing that there’s more than one way to win.

If Republicans can’t manage to legislate effectively and get their way on the up and up, it seems that they’ll resort to sabotage, the will of the majority imploring them to save and “fix” Obamacare be damned. Although President Orange Bully implicitly threatened sabotage when he declared that we should just “watch” as Obamcare implodes, he wasn’t as explicit as Blunt about how they were gonna rain on our victory parade. Blunt put a name on it, and that name is Tom Price.

Dubbed “Dr. Personal Enrichment” by David Leonharadt in a New York Times’ op-ed, Price’s well-publicized medical conflicts of interest have raised eyebrows almost stratospherically high – although not high enough evidently to inspire gotta-get–mine GOP Senators like Blunt to vote against his appointment. Add to personal corruption, Price’s willingness to lie to serve political ends – Media Matters outlines several of his worst recent whoppers on the topic of healthcare – and his “ardent hostility” toward any government role in healthcare, and it doesn’t look good for those of us who depend on Obamacare.

As to Senator Blunt’s smug reminder about who holds the cards in Washington – what to say? Seriously, what can we say about the members of a party that has, in the words of D. R. Tucker “declared war on every American not wealthy enough to afford his or her medical treatment?”

While I can’t answer this question, at least not here, on the  level it deserves, I can propose a micro-answer when it comes to the question of what to say right now – and who to say it to. We need to keep the pressure up on our Representatives and Senators – Roy Blunt and the GOP junior contingent in the House in this case – and let them know that we’re on to the sabotage dodge and we won’t stand for trading gold, sliver, or bronze for crap. Payback comes on election day.

Successful Medicaid innovation in Missouri may die thanks to AHCA

20 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by willykay in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

2703 Grant Program, ACA, AHCA, Community Health Homes, health care, Medicaid, Mental health care, missouri, Obamacare, SB28, Tom Price, Trumpcare

The Missouri Medicaid environment:

Missouri’s GOP legislature has been adamant that they will never take up the Obamacare offer to provide health care coverage for poor Missourians by expanding Medicaid coverage. In fact, they’re trying to jump the gun on Trumpcare’s not-so-stealthy attack on Medicaid with SB28, which  would request “a global waiver from HHS to transform the state’s Medicaid into a block grant program, which would be federally capped and adjusted for inflation, state gross domestic product, population growth and other factors.” This move would , according to health care advocacy groups, “cut necessary funding for healthcare services for Missouri’s most vulnerable citizens.”

The Good News

Given this anti-Medicaid predisposition in the state, it’s all the more surprising to learn that, thanks to Democratic former governor Jay Nixon, Missouri took aggressive advantage of the provision in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (a.k.a. Obamacare), the 2703 grant program, that allocated funds so that 25 Missouri community medical centers could experiment with providing a wide range of coordinated – mental, physical, dental and counseling – services in a community “health home” environment. The results in Missouri have been wildly successful:

According to a review by the Missouri Department of Mental Health, the results of the 2703 grant program in that state have been impressive. The more than 23,000 Missourians who have received care under the health home initiative met or exceeded six of nine benchmark goals for disease management after the ACA-supported expansion. For patients with diabetes alone (America’s most costly disease, at approximately $332 billion a year), the number with controlled blood glucose levels rose from 18 percent to 61 percent. The percentage of patients with hypertension and cardiovascular disease who controlled their blood pressure went from 24 to 67 percent, and their good cholesterol levels soared from 21 to 56 percent. On the cost side, hospitalizations and emergency room visits for this group dropped 14 percent and 19 percent respectively. This saved the state $31 million just in the first year of the program, and the savings have continued, according to Natalie Fornelli, manager of integrated care at Missouri’s Division of Behavioral Health. In 2015, Missouri’s health home program won the American Psychiatric Association’s Gold Achievement Award for community health services. The program is now considered a national model.

The Bad News:

Under Trumpcare, the funding that supports these programs is likely to disappear:

At the national level, the fate of the 2703 program is also in doubt. It’s possible that, as Republican lawmakers in Washington and the Trump administration wrestle with the complexities of repealing and replacing Obamacare, they’ll conclude that failing to continue the 2703 grants will likely cost more in tax dollars than it saves, even as it would deprive hundreds of thousands of poor, mentally ill Americans the coordinated treatment that can save their lives. But, as Sidney Watson, a professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law and an expert on health care access for the poor, observes, Trump’s new Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, “has expressed a lot of skepticism about the Medicare and Medicaid demonstration centers.”

Tom Price? Skepticism? No kidding. They guy believes in freedom. Freedom to die, that is. As Politico notes, Price’s “vision for health reform hinges on eliminating much of the federal government’s role in favor of a free-market framework built on privatization, state flexibility and changes to the tax code.” He’s a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a far right fringe medical group that declares Medicare “evil” and “immoral.” You can bet that they and their most prominent member, Tom Price, don’t think much of Medicaid either. The better a federal health program does, the more these fools believe it saps our moral fiber, inculcates dependency and undermines physician freedom – the  whole right wing drill, in other words..

Those of you who are calling your representatives and senators and begging them to save our health care, forget about the truly awful AHCA and maybe just fix Obamacare’s relatively minor problems, might also want to bring up the 2703 program and its proven success here in Missouri. Surely the Republicans can’t be so stupid that they’ll argue with success.  Or, on second thought, maybe they will.There is that whole Dump and Dupe AHCA effort. If that isn’t arguing with success – Obamacare increased the ranks of the insured by 20 million, after all – then I don’t know what is.

McCaskill did good today – let her know you appreciate her.

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by willykay in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cabinet, Claire McCaskill, Confirmation hearings, Democrats, Finance Committee, missouri, Senate, Steve Mnuchin, Tom Price

I just called the office of my Missouri Democratic Senator, Claire McCaskill, to thank her – and you should too. Her Washington number has been busy (a good sign?), but I got through to her St. Louis office with no trouble (numbers for her Washington and regional offices can be found here).

Why did I want to thank Senator McCaskill so urgently? Today she stood up for Americans who are revolted by the cabinet nominations of the rabid circus MC that the Russians put into the American presidency. She along with all the Democratic members of the Senate Finance Committee boycotted the Committee meeting where votes on the nominations of Goldman Sachs financier Steve Mnuchin to be Secretary of the Treasury, and of Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) to head Health and Human Services, were slated. This maneuver deprived the Republican majority of the quorum necessary to ram the two manifestly unfit nominees through the committee.

McCaskill is a cautious woman who represents a state that went for Trump by 19 points – a fact that seems to weigh heavily on her mind – and for good reason since she’s up for reelection in 2018. Standing up to the bullies who’ve tried to pressure her to go along to get along – making big local ad buys targeting her, for instance –  can’t be easy. She deserves a little love for putting principle before comfort.

But resisting the Trump-GOP combine as McCaskill  did today – and, we hope, continues to do – is essential. In this particular case the two men slated for leadership positions in government are not only ideological disasters, they, in the words of the ranking Committee member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), “misled the public and held back important information about their backgrounds.” He added that:

Until questions are answered, Democrats believe the committee should not move forward with either nomination. […] This is about getting answers to questions, plain and simple. Ethics laws are not optional, and nominees do not have a right to treat disclosure like a shell game.

We may not be able to stop the nominations when all is said and done, but Democrats have got to be clear that they won’t support corrupt and unfit nominees for any office.  Republicans may be scared spineless by Trump’s Twitter, but Democrats had better not be if they want to survive as a party.

Price is not only guilty of capitalizing on his privileged position as a congressman to violate insider trading laws, but is accused of explicitly lying about the nature of his questionable financial ventures during the Committee’s initial hearings. Mnuchin was part of the financial cartel that employed illegal robo-signing practices to made big bucks off the 2008 foreclosure crisis, but when called on the practice during the hearings, he gave false testimony about his bank’s use of the abusive practice. In essence, we have a president who comes from the dregs of the business world and who has dredged up some more bottom-feeders to run government agencies for him.

But worse is coming – tonight President Carnival Barker will announce his nominee for the Supreme Court. All three putative favorites are horrible. Not only are the stakes high, but the nomination of anyone other than Merrick Garland cannot be accepted by Democrats given the fact that inexcusable GOP stonewalling stole the office from this well-qualified candidate.  We can only pray that Democrats will be willing to take up the burden of possibly  prolonged opposition. We need to show them that we’re on their side when they do – and we can do that starting now by  letting our Missouri Democrat, Claire McCaskill, know that we appreciate what she did today. Make that call.

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (r): Oops.

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Michael Bersin in social media

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

4th Congressional District, Donald Trump, drain the swamp, Ethics, Health and Human Services, HHS, missouri, nominee, social media, Tom Price, Twitter, Vicky Hartzler

About those ethics.

Praise from Representative Vicky Hartzler (r) via Twitter on January 4, 2017 for Representative Tom Price’s (r) nomination by Donald Trump (r) to become the next Secretary of Health and Human Services:

vickyhartzler010417

Rep. Vicky Hartzler ‏@RepHartzler
.@RepTomPrice is an exceptional leader w expertise on healthcare & budget issues. Liked & respected by all. He will be a great Sec. of HHS!
2:08 PM – 4 Jan 2017

Today:

First on CNN: Trump’s cabinet pick invested in company, then introduced a bill to help it
By Manu Raju, Senior Political Reporter
Updated 4:44 PM ET, Mon January 16, 2017

…Rep. Tom Price last year purchased shares in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing legislation that would have directly benefited the company, raising new ethics concerns for President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary…

Oops.

Yeah, sure, drain that swamp.

The latest attack on Social Security: Can we count on Claire?

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by Michael Bersin in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Claire McCaskill, Disability insurance, missouri, Mitch McConnell, privatization, social security, Tom Price

Current and future Social Security beneficiaries, which is to say almost all of us, owe Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill our thanks – and that fact comes as a big surprise. In the past, McCaskill’s support for the program, measured by her actions at least, has been iffy. Her overweening desire to impress the boobwazie with her fiduciary chops has led her in directions that could have had disastrous consequences. She used to be one of the most vocal Democrats voicing support for the Republican ruse to “reform” entitlements such as Social Security- positions that she now seems to eschew, at least officially. Her ill-considered effort to enact a federal spending cap would  have had disastrous results for Social Security and Medicare, forcing what the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities described as “draconian cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and many other programs while making it harder for the nation to recover from recession.”

Which is why my mouth dropped open when I heard that McCaskill was one of the senators who put pen to paper and signed a letter opposing the the first volley that the newly resurgent GOP has fired in the War on Social Security that has raged both covertly and overtly since the program was enacted:

After Republicans in the U.S. House voted to allow drastic cuts to Social Security benefits for millions of Americans with disabilities, including veterans and children, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill and several Senate colleagues have appealed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues in the Republican leadership, urging that they not pursue the measure.

The cuts, which could be as high as 20 percent, would impact nearly 250,000 Missourians with disabilities, their children, and their spouses.

“We are deeply concerned that the rule change in the House will impact millions of Social Security beneficiaries,” McCaskill and her colleagues wrote in the letter. “According to its actuaries, the Social Security Disability Trust Fund will be unable to pay full disability benefits starting as early as 2016, meaning that legislative action will be necessary to protect the benefits of nearly 11 million Americans. Instead of taking responsible action to address this issue, House Republicans acted according to their extreme ideology and put these benefits at risk by adopting a legislative rule change that creates a point of order against simple bipartisan technical corrections (called reallocations) to adjust the financing of the Social Security Disability Trust Fund.”

Joan McCarter at DailyKos succinctly describes the rule change that McCaskill refers to in the excerpt above as the first step in a ploy to decimate the program:

The 114th Congress has begun with a Republican party that is emboldened and as determined to cripple Social Security as they have been since President George W. Bush’s disastrous 2005 effort to privatize it. Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price has taken over the House Budget Committee from Rep. Paul Ryan, and has even bigger ambitions to destroy the program than his predecessor, now even talking about privatization, something Ryan would only extend to Medicare. Price told the Heritage Action for America “Conservative Policy Summit” on Monday that he wants to “begin to normalize the discussion and debate about Social Security.” By “normalize, he means cut it:

“[W]hether it’s means testing, whether it’s increasing the age of eligibility […] whether it’s providing much greater choices for individuals to voluntarily select the kind of manner in which they believe they ought to be able to invest their working dollars as they go through their lifetime.”

Price and his fellow Republicans in leadership have set the stage to begin this effort, and as usual did it with some hostage taking. This time the hostages are about 11 million people who receive Social Security disability benefits. That program is expected to hit a shortfall next year, and benefits will be automatically cut unless the program gets an influx of cash. This has happened in the past, in both the retirement and the disability programs. What has always happened in the past-with no big controversy-is that Congress has authorized the transfer of funds from one of the programs to the other. But last week the House passed a new rule that says Congress can’t do that any more unless they also take some action to “fix” (read slash) the Social Security system.

What this could mean, if folks like Claire McCaskill don’t stay firm, is disaster for many if not most older Americans. In 2010, The New York Times reported that Americans over 65 got 40% of their income from Social Security. Subsequent studies showed that our Social Security system sustains our elderlly and provides “the one income stream that is secure and does not fluctuate with the marketplace.”

And, discounting efforts to manufacture crises, and claims previously made by folks like Claire McCaskill, Social Security will be fully solvent until 2033, at which time it will still be able to meet 77% of its obligations. That’s eighteen years, plenty of time to fix what is essentially a revenue problem – it could be fixed right now by raising the cap on FICA slightly. No need for means-testing, raising the eligibility age or, God forbid, throwing seniors on the mercy of a wildly fluctuating private investment market.

That Social Security is a vital program that protects the prosperity of the American middle class is not, however, an important consideration for members of the Republican party. There are, to be sure, many varieties of ideology and personal interest that underly the hostility that animates efforts to weaken and destroy such successful government programs, but at the deepest level, the mindset reflects an ugly, every-man-for-himself ideology. The dominant strain of conservative thought, which has captured the GOP almost entirely, is expressed in such retrograde books as Rooseveltcare: How Social Security is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance, which Amazon.com summarizes as follows:

Today we are at a crossroads. America’s entitlement state is threatening to bankrupt us, and new schemes such as ObamaCare are hastening the collapse. What should we do? In this provocative look at America before and after Social Security, Don Watkins argues that the answer is as simple as it is controversial: Abolish the entitlement state, starting with the retirement program that created it. This is not another book for policy wonks about the financial trouble the entitlement state is in. This is the story of the role that Social Security has played in eroding the eagerness, energy and optimism that once defined America. And it is a guide for fighting back.

WhooHoo! Battle lines have been drawn and we’ve got to hope that Claire McCaskill has seen the error of her past ways and will help hold the line. It is not reassuring that she is widely viewed as part of the wedge that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will wield to destroy progressive Democratic resistance:

For now, the grouping of senators deserving the most attention is the “centrist seven,” the cluster of Democrats who stand out as the likeliest to get behind aspects of the new Republican majority’s legislative program. And they may be joined once in a while by as many as five others in their party who’ve shown flashes of moderation in the recent past, yielding a universe of potential aisle-crossers who could be dubbed the “dispositive dozen” of the 114th Congress. They are the centrist Democrats most essential to Mitch McConnell in his debut as majority leader.

[…]

Operatives in both parties identify the senators in the current secondary circle of centrists as Michael Bennet, who will be pressed to move toward the middle ahead of his 2016 campaign for a second full term in swing-state Colorado; Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, and three others who have until 2018 before running again in potential tossup states: Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who announced Monday that she planned to continue her political career in the Senate rather than run for governor next year.

No matter what, though, we’ve got to thank her for standing up for Social Security this week and helping expose the GOP stealth attack. But what’s the story going forward? Can we count on Claire – especially in the light of her past history? Do we believe that she’s turned a corner and is beginning to understand that no matter how politically palatable her “moderation” may be, as Barry Goldwater put it, “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”?

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