Blogger Susie Madrak "much calmer" & "pleasently surprised" after conference call with the WH

Clio the Leo

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Fri Dec-18-09 10:45 AM
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Blogger Susie Madrak "much calmer" & "pleasently surprised" after conference call with the WH

Edited on Fri Dec-18-09 10:52 AM by Clio the Leo

Note: You can hear the conference call at the link below!!!!
http://crooksandliars.com/node/33576

White House Blogger Call: Axelrod Answers Questions on Healthcare Bill

Information always has a soothing effect on me, and I'm feeling much calmer after tonight's White House conference call. Obama advisor David Axelrod and White House Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle took the time to answer our questions.

I started by asking about the recent maneuver to block imported drugs. I said it was "shameless," not only because Candidate Obama ran on the issue of allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada, but because the FDA already does site inspections in those same plants they were calling unsafe. (Basically, in order to sell any drugs in America, your manufacturing facility must meet the same standards as an American plant.)

I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they would be submitting an HHS bill in the near future - they'd "just this week" gotten funding to address any safety concerns, but more importantly, to start putting an infrastructure in place to import drugs.

My other question (as a former reporter who frequently covered insurance corruption) was about using state insurance commissioners to enforce new insurance regulations.

I said that in many states, insurance commissioners were pretty much owned by the local insurance companies, and I was skeptical as to whether making them the enforcers would actually work.

DeParle said HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, a former state insurance commissioner, was not one of "those" commissioners, and she would be overseeing state departments. Sebelius already met with state insurance commissioners, she said, and having found a wide discrepancy in authority from state to state, got language inserted in the bill that would give them additional powers. (DeParle noted that the West Virginia commissioner didn't even have the authority to see if insurance companies were solvent.)

DeParle said this was the widest expansion of insurance regulation in 20 years.

David Axelrod also chimed in, noting these changes were part of the reason why the insurance industry has opposed the bills so stringently. If this was a giveaway, he said, they wouldn’t be lobbying so hard to defeat the bill.

I have to give it to Axelrod on this: Without even a little exaggeration, I'd say that standardizing state oversight is probably the insurance industry's worst nightmare. They've always taken advantage of a hodgepodge of weak state regulations, sprinkling generous political contributions along the way to buy off state legislators. So this bill is really what you want from federal regulation: Overriding weak state laws that trample consumers.

(most of you probably know Axe's daughter has Epilepsy.)

In response to a question from MyDD's Jonathan Singer, Axelrod talked about having a daughter with a chronic illness while he was a reporter in an HMO plan. "I spent tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket that I didn’t have. The stress was extraordinary. This bill attempts to fix the system on the basis of the human costs on patients and their families." He called it "wrongheaded to suggest these bills aren't infinitely better than anything we have today. This is an extraordinary moment on which we can win."

<smip>

He talked about Obama watching his mother worry as she was dying of ovarian cancer, with her insurance company claiming she had a pre-existing condition.

"We're not here to look at our poll numbers, admire them and put them up on a shelf… we’re here to do something," he said.

Gina Cooper asked about when we'd see the president fighting for his vision.

DeParle responded, "He's fighting to get this done. You don’t know how many meetings, how many phone calls, how many hours he’s spent on this thing. I don’t mean to be chiding of you, but please appreciate how difficult this is."