CAT | Health Care
Ed. Note: Watch video of the meeting in our section on the President's proposal.
Today’s bipartisan health care meeting offered something you rarely see in Washington: an open, honest, productive discussion between the political parties. Leaders from across the political spectrum gathered at Blair House to exchange thoughts about an issue that touches all of us: rising health costs and unfair insurance company practices.
The President doesn’t view today’s meeting as a campaign debate or piece of theater – and he didn’t approach it as if it were scored like an Olympic event. The President went to Blair House focused on the substance – not the process – and he left the meeting focused on substance: how we put the American people in control of their own health care.
The President remains committed to enacting meaningful health insurance reform that will lower costs for families and small businesses by providing the largest middle class tax cut for health care in American history. He wants to enhance insurance choices and promote competition with a new insurance marketplace where people and small businesses will be able to have the same choices that every member of Congress will have. His proposal will provide common sense rules of the road and basic consumer protections that keep insurance companies honest and he’ll fight to make sure that no American is denied coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition.
Throughout the day, both sides found areas of agreement on important issues like:
Preventing waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid Addressing medical malpractice reform Reforming the insurance market Giving individuals more choices in coverage, and giving small businesses the opportunity to pool coverage for their employeesBut there were also important areas of disagreement.
There was a fundamental disagreement about whether we should set some common sense rules of the road to protect American families and small businesses from insurance company abuses. The President doesn’t believe we can afford to leave those decisions about your care to the insurers alone.
The President believes that a problem this big cannot be addressed incrementally. And while insuring 30 million people is going to cost money, it’s important to remember that most of this money is going to tax credits that will reduce premiums and help people get better coverage.
And while the President appreciated the participation and input of everyone today, he doesn’t think we can just scrap a year’s worth of work and start over. The millions of Americans that are suffering can’t afford another year-long debate. There’s too much at stake.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
Walking back to the White House to grab lunch after the morning session of the bipartisan meeting at the Blair House, the President stopped in front of the gate on Pennsylvania Avenue to answer a quick question about progress so far:
Q. How is it going, Mr. President?
THE PRESIDENT: It’s interesting. I mean, I don't know if it’s interesting watching it on TV, but it’s interesting being part of it.
Q. Are you making progress?
Q. How is the progress?
THE PRESIDENT: I think we're establishing that there are actually some areas of real agreement and we're starting to focus on what the real disagreements are. If you look at the issue of how much government should be involved -- the argument that Republicans are making really isn’t that this is a government takeover of health care, but rather that we’re insuring the -- or we're regulating the insurance market too much. And that's a legitimate philosophical disagreement. We'll hopefully be able to explore it a little more in the afternoon.
The afternoon session has begun, watch it live with real-time updates.
While almost everybody has heard health insurance horror stories from stories in the local paper, from somebody they know, or even somebody closer to home, it’s easy to think it won’t happen to us personally. In many cases we never even see the worst of insurance company abuses until we get sick ourselves. But the rash of “jaw-dropping” premium increases, as the President put it in his Weekly Address earlier today, has shown that nobody is immune to bad practices from insurance companies as long as health reform is not in place.
As a recent report out of HHS documented, outrageous premium requests have hit every region of the country recently – up to 39% from one insurance company in California, 56% from another in Michigan, 24% in Connecticut, and 23% in Maine to name a few examples.
Yesterday we learned that our seniors are vulnerable as well. Seniors who remained enrolled in their Medicare Advantage plans – which are tied to private insurance — experienced rapidly increasing premiums, at 32 percent on average, between 2009 and 2010.
And today we learn that younger Americans can be just as vulnerable – indeed one California mother found that premiums for her kids were rising at a rate that makes even the other outrageous examples look modest. In what a MarketWatch headline calls a “health-care shocker”:
[Lori] Creasey, a Huntington Beach, Calif.-based attorney, said she received notices late last year for the two individual Anthem policies she bought for her college-age sons. For her 18-year-old son, Kyle, the monthly premium was climbing to $135 from $80, a 69% hike. Her 21-year-old, Walter, saw his premium jump to $139 from $84, a 65% increase.
"I was kind of shocked when I got [them]," Creasey said.
Lori and her sons aren’t the only Americans who have been shocked by their premium increases. And if we do nothing theirstories will become more and more common.
That’s why the President is committed to passing health reform and it’s why he has invited leaders from both parties in Congress to discuss the issue on Thursday. You can watch the meeting live here on our website.
We’re closer than ever to passing real health reform and stories like this show us how important it is to finish the job.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
This morning the Department of Health and Human Services released an alarming new report on health insurance companies looking to raise rates by double digits in states across the country. And in the ultimate irony, the insurers' lobby has now piped up to complain about being "vilified" – and say that the solution to the huge increases is to pass reform.
Let's get this straight: the insurance companies have spent millions and millions on television ads and lobbyists to block health insurance reform. You've seen the ads they’re running. They're pulling out all the stops to maintain that status quo.
They want to defeat reform, which means they will be able to continue to deny you coverage if you have a pre-existing condition and water down or eliminate your coverage when you need it the most. And as we saw in today’s report, they want to continue to raise your premiums by outrageous margins – often 5-10 times greater than health costs are rising. And all the while, they've been pulling down massive profits.
Of course the insurance companies don't like having the spotlight on their behavior. But at this critical juncture in our health reform debate, it's time to get beyond the TV ads and the press releases. This isn't "the politics of vilification," it's a sober look at the reality facing millions of hardworking American families and small businesses if we do nothing.
We’re going to continue to push for meaningful health insurance reform that gets control of skyrocketing costs, puts an end to insurance company abuses, extends coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, and lowers our deficit. Meanwhile, the insurers are defending their increases on American families by calling for passage of health reform, while running ads to defeat it... Imagine that.
Dan Pfeiffer is White House Communications Director
Keeping track of huge piles of paperwork is not an easy task for anyone. Imagine doing that for our entire health care system. In effect, that is what is going on with our current paper and pencil system of medical record keeping -- until now.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, part of our mission is to ensure quality health care for all Americans. And today I am excited to announce that we are delivering on this in the form of over $750 million in new grants that are part of a federal initiative to build capacity to enable widespread meaningful use of health IT, helping doctors adopt electronic medical records.
As part of the Recovery Act, the legislation President Obama signed into law last year to help strengthen the economy, these grants benefit both patients and doctors by cutting costs, eliminating paperwork, and helping doctors deliver high-quality, coordinated care. They also help eliminate errors that come with having a paper and pencil system and save patients from having to fill out the same form dozens of times.
You can find examples of this from across the country. At one health system, they used electronic health records to identify older women who hadn’t received an osteoporosis screening and mail them personal letters encouraging them to get screened. Screenings went up 300%.
At another health system, only a third of their diabetes patients were receiving the recommended foot and eye exams. They started tracking these patients using electronic health records, and within five months, the share of patients getting the recommended exams doubled to around two out of three.
Yet despite all these benefits, only 20 percent of doctors and 10 percent of hospitals have even basic electronic health records today. That’s because even though many doctors around the country can see the potential benefits, there are also obstacles.
That’s where these grants come in. We want to spread the benefits of health information technology to our entire health care system. Led by our National Coordinator for Health IT, Dr. David Blumenthal, our grants team has identified major areas where we can begin to implement new technology to make delivering health care more efficient and more effective. Read Dr. Blumenthal’s blog about it here.
Electronic health records will provide major technological innovation to our current health care system by allowing doctors to work together to make sure patients get the right care at the right time and want to be clear that in all our Health IT investments, patient privacy is our top priority.
Kathleen Sebelius is Secretary of Health and Human Services
On Tuesday the President discussed the upcoming bipartisan meeting on health reform, saying "Let's get the relevant parties together; let's put the best ideas on the table. My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say this is the right way to move forward, even if I don't get every single thing that I want."
Moments ago the invite (pdf) was sent out from Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius – here is the full text:
Dear Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, Senator McConnell, and Representative Boehner:
We are writing to ask that you join President Obama for a bipartisan meeting at the Blair House on February 25 to discuss health reform legislation.
We have seen again in recent days that when it comes to health care, the status quo is unsustainable and unacceptable. The proof is right in front of us: just last week, a major insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, announced plans to increase premiums for many of its policyholders in California by as much as 39 percent on March 1.
As the President noted this week, if we don’t act on comprehensive health insurance reform, this enormous rate hike will be "just a preview of coming attractions. Premiums will continue to rise for folks with insurance; millions more will lose their coverage altogether; our deficits will continue to grow larger."
Now is the time to act on behalf of the millions of Americans and small businesses who are counting on meaningful health insurance reform. In the last year, there has been an extraordinary effort to craft effective legislation. There have been hundreds of hours of committee hearings and mark-ups in both the House of Representatives and Senate, with nearly all of those sessions televised on C-SPAN. The Senate spent over 160 hours on the Senate floor considering health insurance reform legislation and, for the first time in history, both the House of Representatives and Senate have approved comprehensive health reform legislation. This is the closest our Nation has been to resolving this issue in the nearly 100 years that it has been debated.
The Blair House meeting is the next step in this process. The session will begin at 10:00 a.m. and be broadcast live in its entirety. Although it is impossible to include every House Member or Senator who has played a pivotal role in the health care debate, the President is inviting the most senior House/Senate bipartisan leadership, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of the committees that oversee health insurance reform legislation in both chambers. A complete list of this group is attached. The President would like each of you to designate an additional four Members to attend the meeting and be available to participate. It is also important that each of you have one staff member specializing in health care policy in the meeting.
We will have a representative from the Office of Management and Budget to provide technical assistance, and hope that representatives from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation will also be able to attend.
In addition to the President, attending and participating on behalf of the Administration will be the Vice President, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, Director of the Office of Health Reform.
The President will offer opening remarks at the beginning of the meeting, followed by remarks from a Republican leader chosen by the Republican leadership and a Democratic leader chosen by the Democratic leadership. The President will then open and moderate discussion on four critical topics: insurance reforms, cost containment, expanding coverage, and the impact health reform legislation will have on deficit reduction.
Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package. This legislation would put a stop to insurance company abuses, extend coverage to millions of Americans, get control of skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reduce the deficit.
It is the President’s hope that the Republican congressional leadership will also put forward their own comprehensive bill to achieve those goals and make it available online as well. As the President said earlier this week:
I’m looking forward to a constructive debate with plans that need to be measured against this test: Does it bring down costs for all Americans as well as for the Federal Government, which spends a huge amount on health care? Does it provide adequate protection against abuses by the insurance industry? Does it make coverage affordable and available to the tens of millions of working Americans who don't have it right now? And does it help us get on a path of fiscal sustainability?
These are priorities that we all share, and the President is looking forward to examining with you and your colleagues how we can best achieve the most effective reform possible.
Sincerely,
Rahm Emanuel
Assistant to the President
Kathleen Sebelius
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Click here to read the full list of invitees (pdf).
In our current health insurance system, too many Americans are at the whim of private, for-profit insurance companies who are raking in billions in profits each year, while policyholders struggle to make ends meet in this tough economy. Insurance companies can raise premiums or slash benefits, and there's not much families can do about it, especially if they have preexisting conditions that would make it hard to get other coverage.
That is exactly what is playing out right now in California, where Anthem Blue Cross recently announced that on March 1, many of its 800,000 policyholders could see a rate increase of up to 39 percent. What's more, Anthem also declared that it may adjust rates more frequently than once-a-year, making it impossible for families to anticipate and plan for such increases.
For many Californians, including two individuals profiled by the LA Times, this is devastating news. Keith Knueven, a graphic designer in California, is about to see his health insurance rates climb by 37%, from $297 per month to $393. Mark Weiss, a podiatrist, and his wife will see their annual policy rise from $20,184 to $27,336 -- a 35% increase. And if that weren't enough, as these Americans are facing dramatic rate increases, Anthem's parent company WellPoint reported $2,740,000,000 in profits during the last quarter of 2009.
What's happening in California can happen in any state. It's clear that we need health insurance reform that will give American families the secure, affordable coverage they need and put a stop to insurance company abuses and control out-of-pocket costs. We're closer than ever to reforming our health insurance system. Now is the time to finish the job.
In the meantime, I think Californians and the American people deserve an explanation, so yesterday, I sent a letter to the President of Anthem Blue Cross. While Anthem has made some comments to the press, they haven't given us the full answer we deserve. I am eagerly awaiting their reply.
The letter I sent to Anthem Blue Cross is below.
UPDATE: Read the invitation sent out for the bipartisan health reform meeting, as well as the invite list.
Following up on the unique conversation the President held with House Republicans at their retreat, the President invited bipartisan leadership from Congress to the White House to discuss job creation and the economy. Making a surprise appearance at the daily press briefing afterwards, the President relayed some thoughts on the meeting:
THE PRESIDENT: ...And at this critical time in our country, the people sent us here expect a seriousness of purpose that transcends petty politics. That's why I'm going to continue to seek the best ideas from either party as we work to tackle the pressing challenges ahead. I am confident, for example, that when one in 10 of our fellow citizens can't work, we should be able to come together and help business create more jobs. We ought to be able to agree on providing small businesses with additional tax credits and much needed lines of credit. We ought to agree on investments in crumbling roads and bridges, and we should agree on tax breaks for making homes more energy-efficient -- all of which will put more Americans to work. Many of the job proposals that I've laid out have passed the House and are soon going to be debated in the Senate. We spent a lot of time in this meeting discussing a jobs package and how we could move forward on that. And if there are additional ideas, I will consider them as well. What I won't consider is doing nothing in the face of a lot of hardship across the country.
This meeting was also in advance of a bipartisan summit on health reform that the President convened for February 25th. This meeting has already garnered significant attention, with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs making clear that while the meeting is very much about inviting valuable ideas from Republicans, it is by no means about backing away from the challenges facing the American people. The President laid out his expectations for a constructive conversation:
Q After meeting with you, John Boehner came out and told us, "The House can't pass the health care bill it once passed; the Senate can't pass the health care bill it once passed. Why would we have a conversation about legislation that can't pass?" As a part of that, he said you and your White House and congressional Democrats should start over entirely from scratch on health care reform. How do you respond? Are you willing to do that?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, here's how I responded to John in the meeting, and I've said this publicly before. There are some core goals that have to be met. We've got to control costs, both for families and businesses, but also for our government. Everybody out there who talks about deficits has to acknowledge that the single biggest driver of our deficits is health care spending. We cannot deal with our deficits and debt long term unless we get a handle on that. So that has to be part of a package.
Number two, we've got to deal with insurance abuses that affect millions of Americans who've got health insurance. And number three, we've got to make health insurance more available to folks in the individual market, as I just mentioned, in California, who are suddenly seeing their premiums go up 39 percent. That applies to the majority of small businesses, as well as sole proprietors. They are struggling.
So I've got these goals. Now, we have a package, as we work through the differences between the House and the Senate, and we'll put it up on a Web site for all to see over a long period of time, that meets those criteria, meets those goals. But when I was in Baltimore talking to the House Republicans, they indicated, we can accomplish some of these goals at no cost. And I said, great, let me see it. And I have no interest in doing something that's more expensive and harder to accomplish if somebody else has an easier way to do it.
So I'm going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote these goals. What I will not do, what I don't think makes sense and I don't think the American people want to see, would be another year of partisan wrangling around these issues; another six months or eight months or nine months worth of hearings in every single committee in the House and the Senate in which there's a lot of posturing. Let's get the relevant parties together; let's put the best ideas on the table. My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say this is the right way to move forward, even if I don't get every single thing that I want.
But here's the point that I made to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell: Bipartisanship can't be that I agree to all the things that they believe in or want, and they agree to none of the things I believe in and want, and that's the price of bipartisanship, right? But that's sometimes the way it gets presented. Mitch McConnell said something very nice in the meeting about how he supports our goals on nuclear energy and clean coal technology and more drilling to increase oil production. Well, of course he likes that; that's part of the Republican agenda for energy, which I accept. And I'm willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway. But there's got to be some give from their side as well. That's true on health care; that's true on energy; that's true on financial reform. That's what I'm hoping gets accomplished at the summit.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs just responded to a letter sent today from House Republican Leader John Boehner and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor regarding the proposed bipartisan health care summit:
The President is adamant that we seize this historic moment to pass meaningful health insurance reform legislation. He began this process by inviting Republican and Democratic leaders to the White House on March 5 of last year, and he’s continued to work with both parties in crafting the best possible bill. He’s been very clear about his support for the House and Senate bills because of what they achieve for the American people: putting a stop to insurance company abuses, extending coverage to millions of hardworking Americans, getting control of rising premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reducing the deficit.
The President looks forward to reviewing Republican proposals that meet the goals he laid out at the beginning of this process, and as recently as the State of the Union Address. He’s open to including any good ideas that stand up to objective scrutiny. What he will not do, however, is walk away from reform and the millions of American families and small business counting on it. The recent news that a major insurer plans to raise premiums for some customers by as much as 39 percent is a stark reminder of the consequences of doing nothing.
Read HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' letter to Anthem Blue Cross calling on them to publicly justify their extreme premium hikes at the same time their parent company sees soaring profits.
One year ago today, within weeks of taking office, President Obama signed into law a reauthorization of the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This legislation, along with provisions in the Recovery Act strengthening Medicaid, brought much-needed health coverage to millions of families.
The expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program and the strengthening of Medicaid helped ensure 40 million kids from all across America could see a doctor if they got sick. It meant that, in the face of a recession, their parents did not have to choose between the health of their kids and paying rent or the heating bill. These programs have been critically important for families.
Taking a closer look at the last year, we found that millions of children's lives were changed as a result of these federal programs. An additional 2.6 million children gained coverage through Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program during the 2009 fiscal year.
While we are proud of how far we've come, we think we can do better. There are millions of children who are eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, but don't have coverage.
That’s why we're challenging states, local governments, community-based organizations, health centers, faith-based organizations, as well as other federal departments to help enroll the 5 million children who are eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program but do not currently have coverage. To do our part, we've already issued outreach grants, launched a new website, and brought together 500 people at a National Child Health Summit, and we will be doing much more to reach out to federal agencies and states on ways to cut out the red tape in enrollment and renewals. We will also be closely monitoring progress on all fronts.
We've compiled resources and information, both in English and in Spanish, in one website called www.InsureKidsNow.gov. This website offers state-specific information about the Children's Health Insurance Program and Medicaid for families and professionals.
Nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children. We are determined to build on our existing efforts to cover kids and to make sure that no child goes without health care in America.
Kathleen Sebelius is Secretary of Health and Human Services