OBAMA HEALTH CARE – MORE DUCKS IN A ROW

By Lee Bechtel, NHF National Lobbyist

April 22, 2009

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “President means chief servant.” The question with Presidents and elected officials is – as it has always been – whose interests are really being served?

Other than the President and the key Democratic Congressional leadership, there are important staff people and several key Executive Branch personnel who are the political-appointee lieutenants charged with carrying out the President’s pledge to pass government-run health care

On Wednesday, the President signed the Executive Order establishing the White House Office of Health Reform.  In signing the Order, Obama noted that health-care overhaul is one of the biggest priorities he has set for the first year of his presidency.

As previously announced, the Office will be headed by former Clinton administration health official Nancy-Ann DeParle. The Office will be responsible for working with executive-branch agencies and Congress.  The Order also created a Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Office of Health Reform to work directly with the White House and Congress at the staff level.

For Washington insiders, the political ducks-in-a-row relationships to accomplish the national health-insurance mission are notable and profound.  DeParle previously worked for the Clinton Administration as the head of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and also served on the Obama-Biden Presidential Campaign’s health-care reform task force.  On the campaign, she worked with Neera Tanden.  Mrs. Tanden currently serves as Counselor to the yet-to-be-confirmed DHHS Secretary, as well as being a member of the Council for Comparative Cost Effectiveness.  This is the group of 15 that includes 12 Federal bureaucrat MDs and PhDs from various agencies.  The Council will advise Congress on the forms of medical treatments and services deemed by them to be cost- and medically-effective, and to be covered under a Federal-government-mandated insurance benefits package.  The Council was formed as a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the so-called Economic Stimulus law.

As more important Congressional liaison Obama lieutenant is Bill Corr.  Although he has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Corr is serving as the DHHS Deputy Secretary, the No. 2 position there.  From 1977 to 1989, Mr. Corr served as Counsel to Henry Waxman, when he was the Chairman of the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  Waxman is now the Chairman of the full Energy and Commerce Committee and a key player on national health-insurance legislation.  During the Clinton Administration, Corr served as Chief Health Counsel for then-U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle.  Daschle was the first person nominated by Obama to be DHHS Secretary, until tax issues forced Daschle’s withdrawal.  During her time with the Clinton Administration, DeParle worked closely with Corr and other senior Democratic staff persons on health-care legislation.  Corr and DeParle have a long-standing relationship on government health insurance, and have close ties with current key Democratic Congressional leaders in both the House and Senate.  Like their boss, they also believe that more government control and intervention into freedom-of-health choices is better than less.

On the Congressional front of the “ducks-in-a-row” set of relationships, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY) has announced that the Committee will hold another hearing in the series of hearings on reforming the health-insurance market.  This hearing will take place on April 22nd.  The Ways and Means Committee has partial jurisdiction over the Medicare program, but full authority over federal taxation matters impacting persons and health insurance companies.  The Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate HELP Committee, under Chairman Ted Kennedy, and the Senate Finance Committee under Chairman Max Baucus, have had and will have hearings as well. While hearings are important for the public record, it is the relationships of the insiders that more closely impacts the power over decision-making at the staff and Member levels and over the votes when it comes to enacting a sweeping national health-insurance law.

The NHF opposes government-run health care, and hopes other health-freedom organizations will do the same by asking their members to contact their Senators and Representatives.  In the euphoria of believing that we will achieve better health care for all through a single-payer, government-run system, it is easy to forget that we will be creating nothing but a huge, monopolistic bureaucratic machine that will force everyone – inexorably and whether they want it or not – into the very conventional drug-crazy and anti-prevention health-care system that we have all been avoiding, or trying to avoid, for decades.  Under such a system, “universal health care” does not mean “better health care”; it is just a way for its proponents to sleep better at night while the recipients of this “beneficence” suffer the drug-laden, unhealthy consequences.

As the oldest and best-respected health-freedom group on Capitol Hill, the NHF continues to be the credible source of objective assessment of, and proactive actions on, Congressional legislation and FDA matters that have material impact upon our freedom-of-health choices and access to dietary supplements and nutritional foods.