Courtesy of Mark Thoma at Economist’s View
Paul Krugman: Blue Double Cross
How will Obama react to the duplicitous actions of the medical-industrial complex?:
Blue Double Cross, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: That didn’t take long. Less than two weeks have passed since much of the medical-industrial complex made a big show of working with President Obama on health care reform — and the double-crossing is already well under way. …
The story so far: on May 11 the White House called a news conference to announce that major players in health care … had come together to support a national effort to control health care costs.
The fact sheet on the meeting, one has to say, was classic Obama in its message of post-partisanship and, um, hope. … But just three days later the hospital association insisted that it had not, in fact, promised what the president said it had promised… And the head of the insurance lobby said that the idea was merely to “ramp up” savings, whatever that means.
Meanwhile, the insurance industry is busily lobbying Congress to block one crucial element of health care reform, the public option — that is, offering Americans the right to buy insurance directly from the government as well as from private insurance companies.
And at least some insurers are gearing up for a major smear campaign. … The Washington Post reported that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina was preparing to run a series of ads attacking the public option. The planning for this ad campaign must have begun quite some time ago.
The Post has the storyboards for the ads, and they read just like the infamous Harry and Louise ads that helped kill health care reform in 1993. … “We can do a lot better than a government-run health care system,” says … one of the ads. To which the obvious response is, if that’s true, why don’t you? Why deny Americans the chance to reject government insurance if it’s really that bad?
For none of the reform proposals currently on the table would force people into a government-run insurance plan. At most they would offer Americans the choice of buying into such a plan.
And the goal of the insurers is to deny Americans that choice. They fear that many people would prefer a government plan to dealing with private insurance companies that, in the real world as opposed to the world of their ads, are more bureaucratic than any government agency, routinely deny clients their choice of doctor, and often refuse to pay for care…
The medical-industrial complex has called the president’s bluff. It polished its image by showing up at the big table and promising cooperation, then promptly went back to doing all it can to block real change. The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity.
It’s up to Mr. Obama to prove them wrong.
Full article here.
