THE WHITE House recently held a summit to discuss health-care reforms. Present around the table were six major industry players that have been, in one form or another, part of the problem health care has had in this country. I will refrain from using the analogy of a fox guarding the hen house but instead will try to put the issue in a proper light.
The faces around the table represented the American Health Insurance Plans, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Service Employees International Union, and the Advanced Medical Technology Association.
Of great interest and amusement is a gentlem
an representing the pharmaceutical industry. Former congressman Billy Tauzin played a pivotal role in bulldozing the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 - the prescription drug benefit - through Congress. Shortly after the bill was passed, he became the highly paid president of PhRMA.
Of interest also is the participation of the American Medical Association. A pale reminder of its previous robust past, the AMA represents merely one third of American doctors. It is more in tune and comfortable with what medicine once was than what it is now.
The genesis of this extraordinary meeting in the White House is interesting. According to published reports, the major insurance companies approached the Obama Administration and offered to squeeze $2 trillion from health-care expenditures over the next 10 years. The White House, to its credit, did not salivate over this significant offer but insisted that the proposal would have to have a broad acceptance by all the major players in health care.
Why all of a sudden the pangs of conscience among those who have in the past thumbed their noses at any effort to reform health care in this country? For one, the mood of the country has changed since Hillary Clinton's ill-fated effort to reform health care at the beginning of her husband's first term as president in 1993. Health care has become very expensive and increasingly out of reach for a good number of Americans. Coupled with the fact that President Obama is determined to overhaul the antiquated system and deliver on his campaign promise, the usual villains have very little choice.
They are adamantly against any kind of government-sponsored public health plan that would be available to middle-class Americans. Health insurers are fearful that such a plan would cut into their profits and just might drive them out of business. A great majority of Republicans and quite a few Democrats are against a government-sponsored plan. They are quick to point an accusing finger at the single-payer plans that are in place in most industrialized countries. In reality, this is nothing but fear mongering.
Ours is the only industrialized country that spends $6,102 per person on health care every year, or 15.3 percent of the U.S. economy. Other industrialized countries spend a little more than half that amount and people in those countries live longer, have better health, and are generally more satisfied with their health care. And they do not have a whopping 16 percent of their population without health coverage as we do.
According to World Health Organization, we are 37th in health care among 191 countries of the world; Italy and France get the top spots. We are 33rd in death rates for children under the age of five and we rank lower than some Saharan Africa countries for immunization. It is, simply put, a national disgrace.
Already, interest groups are getting active to thwart any effort at reforming the system. A new group, Conservatives for Patients' Rights (with an amusing abbreviation of CPR), is touting "free choice" in health care. This is akin to appointing Genghis Khan to oversee human rights. In a previous incarnation, this group was behind the notorious Harry and Louise television ads that helped sink Hillary Clinton's 1993 efforts. They would certainly like to swift-boat any effort to reform health care.
President Obama has called the recent White House meeting a watershed event in the long and elusive quest for health-care reform. I hope he is right, but so far no specifics have emerged from deliberations. We will have to see if the group coming to the White House brought some real gift for the American people or merely another bunch of new and improved Band-Aids.
Our President will be best advised if he would brush up on Virgil's Latin epic on the Trojan War and a particular wooden horse of the same name.
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