Jonathan Kantrowitz

Chris Healy is the Chairman of the Republican Party in Connecticut. He takes atypically Republican view of the crisis in health care in America: Blame it on he victims.

He writes on his blog:

Everyone can get health care in this country. But too many people get it for nothing because they choose not to buy insurance or simply know they will never have to pay.

Many people, most people sadly, don’t take care of themselves. They get sick and stay sick and cost a fortune.

In other words, for those millions of people who lack health care coverage, it’s their own fault. They chose not to buy insurance.

If they get sick, that’s their fault too. They chose not to take care of themselves.

This kind of argument is beyond reprehensible. It ignores the fact that most uninsured would buy insurance if only it were available and they could afford it. And blaming illness on the victims defies credulity.

Republicans in Connecticut deserve to have a more responsible spokesperson than this.

Republicans in Connecticut deserve to have a more responsible spokesman than this.

The past few days have seen the usual proliferation of new studies on health benefits. Of particular interest have been two studies on how good eating curry may be for you.

A new study indicates that the Indian spice circumin, the main flavoring of curry powder, derived from the tumeric plant and not to be confused with cumin, helps prevent Alzheimer’s, confirming an earlier study.

The second study reports that circumin can help prevent cancer, also confirming an earlier study.

Here are some more recent reports of interest:

Naringen, a flavonoid derived from citrus fruit has shown tremendous promise for preventing weight gain. ( I may add this to my multitude of supplements!)

Reports on how good for you are

Exercise

Diet and Exercise

Vitamin D,
but only if taken as a supplement!

and Green Tea in fighting many kinds of cancer.

On behalf of the nation’s mayors, U.S. Conference of Mayors CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran today commended President Barack Obama, the House of Representatives and the Senate HELP Committee for taking a bold step towards passing comprehensive and transformative health care reform legislation.

“Working families are struggling during these difficult economic times because they are not able to afford health insurance and, for many, losing a job means losing their benefits. The recent legislation approved by the Senate HELP Committee and the House bill introduced yesterday are major steps toward offering Americans quality, affordable health care, changing the way of how care is administered in this country,” said Conference CEO and Executive Director Cochran.

In Providence at The Conference of Mayors’ 77th Annual Meeting, mayors adopted a comprehensive health care reform policy position that fully supports the healthcare reform principles outlined by President Obama as well as prevention and wellness.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Conference’s Task Force Chair on Healthcare Reform said, “I applaud the House Democrats for introducing a national health care reform bill that includes a public option. The only way to achieve true reform is by driving down the cost of health care and developing a public option that competes with private insurance. Through our Healthy San Francisco Universal Health Care Program, over 42,000 San Franciscans now have access to health care, proving not only that a public plan is possible, but that it works. I will do everything I can as chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors National Health Care Reform Task Force to build support for this bill and President Obama’s efforts.”

“The strong focus on public health, prevention and wellness in both bills is a good sign that healthcare reform is moving in the right direction,” stated Cochran. “The Conference of Mayors remains committed to work with President Obama and Congress to ensure that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care.”

The U.S. Conference of Mayors is the official nonpartisan organization of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. There are 1,139 such cities in the country today, each represented in the Conference by its chief elected official, the Mayor.

As lawmakers debate how to pay for an overhaul of the nation’s health care system, a new report from The Commonwealth Fund projects that including both private and public insurance choices in a new insurance exchange would save the United States as much as $265 billion in administrative costs from 2010 to 2020. Congressional leaders are attempting to keep 10-year federal budget costs of health care reform legislation under $1 trillion.

“Health reform can help pay for itself, but both private and public insurance choices are critically important,” said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis, who coauthored the new report. “A public insurance plan can help drive new efficiencies in the system that will produce large cost reductions. Without a public plan, much of those potential savings will be lost.”

The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System has put forward a comprehensive set of policy options to achieve near-universal health insurance coverage while reforming the U.S. health care system to achieve nearly $3 trillion in savings by 2020. Central to this proposal is the creation of a national insurance exchange that would largely replace the individual and small-group insurance markets, offering families and business a choice of private or public plans with a benchmark standardized-benefit package.

The new report, How Health Care Reform Can Lower the Costs of Insurance Administration, says that it is possible to achieve near-universal coverage, improve health care quality and efficiency, and lower the trajectory of health care costs through a comprehensive private-public approach to health reform. A Commonwealth Fund analysis of three paths to reform found that an approach that includes a public plan in the exchange that would pay providers at Medicare rates would save about $265 billion in administrative costs over 2010-2020. On the other hand, an insurance exchange that provided a choice of private plans only would increase administrative costs by $32 billion over the same period.

Savings from the mixed private-public reform approach would be realized through less marketing and underwriting, reduced costs of claims administration, less time spent negotiating provider payment rates, and fewer or standardized commissions to insurance brokers.

“A public plan would create an incentive for competitive private plan premiums with streamlined operations,” said Davis. “Savings from these new efficiencies can be used to extend health insurance to people who can’t afford it and to improve benefits.”

The United States leads all other industrialized countries in the share of national health care expenditures devoted to administration. The cost of administering the U.S. health care system totaled nearly $156 billion in 2007, and that figure is expected to double—reaching $315 billion—by 2018. In addition, costs incurred by physicians in their transactions with health plans are estimated to be as high as $31 billion a year.

About 12.4 percent—or $96 billion—of the $775 billion in privately insured health care spending went for administrative costs in 2007. That $96 billion—representing what insurance companies received in premiums, minus what was paid in medical claims—included claims processing, advertising, sales commissions, underwriting, and other administrative functions; net additions to reserves; rate credits and dividends; premium taxes; and profits. By contrast about 6.1 percent—or $60 billion—of the $974 billion in public program health care spending went for administrative costs in 2007. That includes federal, state, and local governments’ administrative costs for public health programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Medicare prescription drug coverage, provided by private plans, has high administrative costs but is included in public program administration figures. Private Part D plans averaged 11.3 percent in administrative costs as a share of total drug spending.

The absence of underwriting and profits has kept the administrative costs of public insurance programs relatively low. However, between 2005 and 2006, Medicare’s annual administrative costs jumped from $12 billion to $20 billion, largely because of increased payments to cover the administrative costs of private health and drug plans participating in the program. By contrast, administrative costs in traditional fee-for-service Medicare actually declined slightly over the same period.

“Health care reform represents a significant opportunity to reduce administrative complexity in the current system,” said Sara Collins, a vice president at The Commonwealth Fund and a coauthor of the new report. “These findings indicate that such simplification will help lower premiums and reduce the cost of extending affordable coverage to everyone.”

Rob Simmons doesn’t think Sotomayor has done enough for Connecticut:

“I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, but I am not an enthusiastic supporter,” Simmons said. “I’m from Connecticut, so I tend to judge a person on how they might have interacted with the people of my state.

That’s a pretty ridiculous standard to apply to a Supreme Court justice.

Like most Republicans who supposedly oppose activist judges, he thinks she should have been more of an activist here in overturning existing law:

Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.) is similarly skeptical. He emphasized that Sotomayor deserves a fair hearing but said he is concerned about her ruling in the case of the New Haven, Conn., firefighters who were denied promotions because few minorities passed the promotional exam. Sotomayor affirmed the ruling in the circuit court but was recently overturned by the Supreme Court. The case has been front and center in the GOP’s early questioning.

… When I look at the New Haven firefighter case, I think her involvement was weak.”

Simmons had a centrist record in the House but faces a tough GOP primary for the nomination to face Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), so the pressure could be on him to go right.

Sam Caligiuri sounds like he might support her.

“As long as I were convinced that Judge Sotomayor respected the letter and intent of the Constitution and wouldn’t be unreasonably expansive in her reading of the Constitution, then she’s someone I’d be happy to support,” Caligiuri said.

I checked in with Will Gregory, who is exploring a run as a Republican against Jim Himes. Here is his response:

Thanks for reaching out.

Our campaign is progressing incredibly well. We’ve been doing a large number of low and medium visibility events over the past month or so and plan to put out a new set of materials over the next few weeks (I will be sure to send them along when they are released). We have also scheduled high profile events which will be made public at a later point.

In terms of the response, we’ve exceeded our best projections. People have been reaching out not only from across the district, but across the country. Beyond that, however, we’ve received an outpouring of support from groups and individuals from every perspective along the political spectrum.

I think people really want a new kind of leader who isn’t just going to fall in line and go along with the people at the fringes of their party. Whether we’re Republicans or Democrats, we can all agree that to get our country back on track, we can’t just be content to sit around and allow things in DC to continue in a business-as-usual fashion.

Last Thursday, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer announced that the Senate’s climate change bill won’t be ready until some time after lawmakers return from August recess, a month later than previously planned. The delay raises doubts about whether the current bill can garner the votes to pass.

The House bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, passed by only the slimmest of margins (219-212) after last-minute deal-making further weakened its provisions and ballooned the legislation to over 1,400 pages. The vote on the bill, authored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), broke along partisan lines, with only eight Republicans supporting the measure, and several progressive and environmentally-oriented Democrats voting against the weakened measure.

“The political weakness of Waxman-Markey is actually a positive sign for the climate,” said Marshal Saunders, president of Citizens Climate Lobby. “Cap-and-trade is a very tough sell in the Senate. If Congress has any hope of passing meaningful climate change legislation, it will have to consider Plan B – a revenue-neutral tax on carbon pollution. Waxman-Markey stalling in the Senate could be a turning point towards something that will actually work.”

“The Senate must do better than the House,” said Tom Stokes, Coordinator of the Climate Crisis Coalition. “Cap-and-trade tries to hide the carbon price, which gives opponents license to make outrageous claims about its cost. In contrast, the cost of a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be clearly known. With unemployment at 9.5% and consumer spending down, using carbon revenues to boost every worker’s take-home pay will help address both the climate and the economic crisis.”

“President Obama stresses the need for open, rigorous debate to develop sound policy. Supporters of the Waxman-Markey bill maintain that it is the most important piece of environmental legislation ever, yet they cut off discussion of direct carbon pricing: a simpler, more effective policy supported by most economists and a growing spectrum of concerned citizens. Not a single hearing addressed or explored revenue-neutral carbon pricing as the principle mechanism for containing greenhouse gases,” Stokes said.

“The compromised and fundamentally flawed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade would lock-in an ineffectual approach that would accomplish little, while blocking effective action for years,” said Daniel Rosenblum, co-director of the Carbon Tax Center. “The main beneficiaries would be Wall Street and polluters who want to be protected from having to take prompt action. The Senate should start over with a simpler and more understandable carbon pricing system that will do what cap-and-trade won’t: encourage energy efficiency, clean renewable energy and prevent catastrophic climate change.”

A leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, has argued the Waxman-Markey approach would fail to reduce CO2 emissions enough to prevent catastrophic warming. “Continuing to increase burning coal, oil and gas will soon drive atmospheric CO2 well over 400 ppm and ignite a devil’s cauldron of melted icecaps, bubbling permafrost, and combustible forests from which there will be no turning back,” Hansen said. “The Waxman-Markey bill locks in fossil fuel business-as-usual and garlands it with a Ponzi-like ‘cap-and-trade’ scheme… It sets meager targets — 2020 emissions are to be a paltry 13% less than this year’s level, far short of the trajectory needed to return atmospheric CO2 to safe levels — and the bill sabotages even these by permitting unverifiable ‘offsets,’ by which other nations are paid for projects, most of which would have been undertaken anyway. A far superior alternative to cap-and-trade is a rising carbon fee, which provides the best incentive to move to ever higher energy efficiencies and carbon-free energy sources. As engineering and cultural tipping points are reached, the phase-over to post-fossil energy sources will accelerate.”

Robert Shapiro, former Under Secretary of Commerce, has pointed out that the trading component of cap-and-trade — buying and selling permits to release CO2 — would also create a trillion-dollar market in carbon futures and derivatives that could crash financial markets again. As he wrote in April, “The unavoidable volatility of the prices of emission permits… would attract furious financial speculation, since speculators live off of volatile prices. And we now know the risks that we all run when rampant speculation occurs in financial instruments tied to our economic foundations, such as housing — or energy.”

Jim Amann scoffs at the idea that his staff would quit because his campaign has no money to pay them:

CT News Junkie had this report on June 10th:

Patrick Scully, who joined former Speaker of the House James Amann’s gubernatorial campaign in January, says he is no longer working for the campaign.

“I am no longer employed by the Amann campaign because of lack of funding,” Scully said in a phone interview Friday. “I don’t have time to work for free.”

Scully said he is working on building his consulting company and his departure in no way “negates my thoughts of the candidate.”

Scully’s departure does raise questions about the viability of Amann’s campaign, although Amann scoffed at that idea on Friday. Amann said the campaign dismissed Scully for reasons he refused to discuss on the record, not vice-a-versa.

Scully said the campaign owes him “five figures,” which could conceivably be a problem because, based the campaign report filed at the end of April, Amann’s campaign had $4,110 cash on hand.

And in the comments to that article:

Mr.Scully is only one of three campaign veterans to choose employment elsewhere. In the past week, Amann campaign has received a resignation of their campaign web site/technology director and the Field Director and scheduler left the campaign.

I don’t think a campaign should be judged just on how much money it has raised, but on its overall approach to the issues and its core competencies. In Amann’s case, given his background, this campaign is ludicrous.