Progressive Breakfast: Whither The Blue (Cross) Dogs

Will Senate Listen To 3/4 of US on Health Care?

Second major poll finds huge support for public plan option. NYT: [1] "72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65 — that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed ... the proposal received broad bipartisan backing, with half of those who call themselves Republicans saying they would support a public plan, along with nearly three-fourths of independents and almost nine in 10 Democrats."

Bloomberg: "President Barack Obama will take his case to the American people this week on a plan to overhaul the U.S. health-care system [2] ... Obama invited the ABC television network to broadcast from the White House on June 24 and will take health-care questions from the public in the East Room. Three House panels will hold hearings during the week, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus is rushing to finish draft legislation before Congress starts a weeklong recess on June 29."

Leading House Democrats introduce bill with public health plan option. NYT: [3]

The three House committees plan to hold as many as six hearings on the bill next week. Mr. Waxman said lawmakers were committed to considering all ideas, even a proposal to tax some employer-provided health benefits, which he opposes ...

...Under the bill, the public plan would be run by the Department of Health and Human Services and would offer three or four policies, with different levels of benefits. The plan would initially use Medicare fee schedules, paying most doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates, plus about 5 percent. After three years, the health secretary could negotiate with doctors and hospitals ...The public plan would receive an unspecified amount of start-up money from the federal government. After that, it would have to be self-sustaining.

The bill would require drug companies to finance improvements in the Medicare drug benefit. Drug companies would have to pay rebates to the government on drugs dispensed to low-income Medicare beneficiaries. The bill would expand Medicaid to cover millions of people with incomes below 133 percent of the poverty level ($14,400 for an individual, $29,330 for a family of four). The cost would be borne by the federal government. The government would also offer subsidies to make insurance more affordable for people with incomes from 133 percent to 400 percent of the poverty level ($43,300 for an individual, $88,200 for a family of four).

Change.org's Tim Foley praises House: [4] "...it’s nice to see the people in power actually ask for what they want, and what they promised they’d deliver this year, rather than start compromising before the plan has hit the desk."

Sen. Diane Feinstein undercuts President Obama on CNN's State of the Union: [5] "Well to be candid with you, I don't know that he has the votes right now. I think there's a lot of concern in the Democratic caucus. Senator Lugar's point about the economy, the trillions of dollars that have gone into buttressing the economy, now we're going to be dealing with regulation of the financial sector. What all of the impact of this is not yet known. Ergo, you have enormous problems in my state. California's bigger than the populations of 21 states and the District of Columbia put together. We have an enormous health care industry, 350 hospitals. University of California alone has 34,000 health care workers, has health care worth $4 billion a year. So it's complicated. Additionally, the state is in a state of financial catastrophe. I think that's clear. So, if you change the Medicaid rate, for example, it has an impact on California between $1 billion and $5 billion a year. Now, how could I support that? Because it would take down the state"

While Sen. Bob Casey backs the president: [5] "I believe one of those choices should be a public option, which, in the paper today, the New York Times survey shows 72 percent of the American people favoring it. I know that's not the universal opinion in Washington. But I believe we can get this right. It's going to be difficult, but our committee is actually moving and voting on amendments, and that's the way it should be."

On ABC's This Week, Sen. Lindsey Graham asserted [6], "The CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan," even though the CBO estimate did not address public plan option.

Sen. McCain flunks math on CBS' Face The Nation, disingenuously extrapolating CBO estimate [7] and ignoring ideas like public plan option that would expand coverage while reducing cost: "A real devastating blow to their plans was a Congressional Budget Office report last week that said the present plan --the one we're considering in the health committee --would only ensure one-third of the uninsured and would cost $1 trillion. Now, you do the math, it comes up to $3 trillion."

Time raises questions on attempt to derail public plan with series of co-ops: [8] "Despite no public debate on the issue and scant knowledge about how health cooperatives could be set up — not to mention what they would cost, how many people they could insure and, most importantly, how they could bring down the overall cost of health care — the Senate finance committee appears to have tentatively signed on to the concept ... But apart from Group Health and Health Partners, the history of non-profit HMOs is littered with failures."

Joe Paduda smacks scaled-back Baucus draft proposal: [9] "The draft of the Baucus bill is a clear indication that some of the Senators ostensibly driving the health reform process have very little appetite for taking on the health care industry; the bill is all about coverage with almost no meaningful effort at controlling cost."

Economist View's Mark Thoma asks: [10] "What's with the Blue-Cross Dogs?"

Big Pharma gives a little, keeps seat at reform table. AP: [11] "[Sen.] Baucus' announcement said drug companies would pay half of the cost of brand-name drugs for seniors in the so-called doughnut hole — a gap in coverage that is a feature of many of the plans providing prescription coverage under Medicare. In addition, the entire cost of the drug would count toward a patient's out-of-pocket costs, meaning their insurance coverage would cover more of their expenses than otherwise."

GoozNews adds more context: [12] "...not much of the money will be available for health care reform. The donut hole is by definition out-of-pocket costs for seniors. Cutting those expenses will not free up money in government budgets for helping the uninsured. That means the Congressional Budget Office will score the offer at much less than the $80 billion."

Beat The Press' Dean Baker skewers W. Post for attacking Obama, praising Big Pharma, on costs: [13] "The first paragraph of a Washington Post piece on a drug industry commitment to lower drug prices described his health care plan as 'expensive and ambitious.' One can certainly describe our current health care system as 'expensive' although the Post almost never does. It is less clear that President Obama's plan, which is intended to rein in costs, should be described this way. It would also have been helpful if the article had put the projected $80 billion in savings in context. This is equal to a bit more than 2 percent of the $3.8 trillion that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project the country will spend on drugs over the next decade. The Post quotes its unnamed source as saying: 'this is real money on the table.'"

Reuters has the latest data on US health care crisis: [14] "Americans are struggling to pay for healthcare in the ongoing economic recession, with a quarter saying they have had trouble in the past 12 months, according to a survey released on Monday. Baby boomers -- the generation born between 1946 and 1964 -- had the most trouble and were the most likely to put off medical treatments or services, said researchers at Center for Healthcare Improvement, part of the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters (TRI.N). The study ... found that 17.4 percent of households reported postponing or delaying healthcare over the past year."

CBO Backs Up EPA on Carbon Cap Cost

TNR's Brad Plumer on the new CBO report on the Waxman-Market climate compromise: [15] "For some time, the GOP has been insisting that the cap would cost upward of $3,000 per family per year. And they may have been hoping the CBO would agree. But the report's now out, and the CBO estimates that the cap will actually cost Americans just $175 per household—or $70 per person—by 2020."

EARLIER: "The Environmental Protection Agency ... said the contentious plan would cost households less than $150 a year. [16] That’s a far cry from some of the dueling price tags that have been bandied about."

Change.org's Emily Gertz notes "The bottom fifth of households by income would see a net benefit of $40 a year [17] ... households in the second highest fifth, about $340 ... That's less than $1 a day per family to create a safer future."

Ezra Klein adds: [18] "That number is for 2020. And it's pure cost. The CBO's analysis does not 'encompass the potential benefits associated with any changes in the climate that would be avoided as a result of the legislation.' Furthermore, the bill will actually be cheaper for consumers in the years after that."

Climate Progress' Joe Romm puts a sharper point on additional savings: [19] "energy efficiency measures alone will save nearly as much as this estimated cost."

Ryan Avent on global impact: [20] "...critics might counter that W-M isn’t expected to have much of an effect on temperatures through 2050, but that outlook sort of assumes that American climate policy never changes beyond what’s in W-M, which is highly unlikely, and it ignores the effect an American climate law will have in Copenhagen and in negotiations with other emerging markets."

CQ on the ongoing protracted House negotiations: [21] "House Democrats acknowledge that energy and climate change legislation is now unlikely to move to the floor this week before the July Fourth recess, as talks aimed at striking a deal within their caucus continued ... Still unresolved was how to manage a program to provide farmers with credits for special projects that offset greenhouse gases, such as planting trees. Agriculture Chairman Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., wants the Agriculture Department in charge of overseeing the projects, while the bill as it stands would give the EPA that authority."

Politico notes deadline lapse for other committees to alter bill: [22] "Critics of the Democrats’ energy and climate change package lost another opportunity to tweak the bill when the deadline passed for committees to act on the controversial measure. Passage of that critical deadline Friday allows backers of the bill to avoid another nettlesome hurdle — after skipping a difficult subcommittee vote during its turbulent path through the Energy and Commerce panel earlier this year — because the legislation faced dim prospects among Democrats on the Agriculture Committee, which had claimed the right to alter the measure. Instead, any additional changes will be made when the bill comes up for a vote on the House floor or in negotiations with the Senate, according to a Democratic leadership aide."

Mother Jones looks at the split in the environmental movement over the Waxman-Markey climate compromise: [23] "Hoping to underscore public support for a stronger bill, the Sierra Club has unleashed what may be the largest grassroots organizing effort in its history. In the run-up to next week’s vote the club and other groups are spending $5 million on television ads, phone banking, and activating their networks in key congressional districts. MoveOn.org recently began blasting similar messages to its 3.2 million members. 'I think progressives are starting to wake up to this bill,' says FoE’s director of domestic policy, Erich Pica. 'Is it in time? I don’t know.'"

Breakfast Sides

Bloomberg on effort to regulate derivatives: [24] "Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd is holding a hearing today on how to rein in a [derivatives] market that grew almost seven-fold since 2000 and complicated government efforts to assess the risk of banks’ interconnected trading when credit markets froze two years ago ... Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, is pushing his own legislation that would require all over-the-counter derivatives trades be cleared through a regulated exchange. Such an arrangement would subject the contracts to margin and collateral requirements. Harkin, who endorsed Obama’s proposal to move some trades to an exchange and regulate all dealers, still plans to press forward."

Christian Science Monitor checks in on Obama trade policy: [25]

The administration's trade policy is a work in progress, they say, and will emerge over the coming months through a number of venues:

•As US officials pursue discussions with Panama over how to make that agreement more palatable to Congress.

•With international trade partners on completing the Doha Round of global trade talks.

•Maybe even in global climate talks, where trade and agriculture are seen as key issues in achieving a new accord on limiting greenhouse gases.

•In a major presidential speech laying out "a new framework for trade policy," say administration official

FT: Bankers’ pay soars in attempt to halt exodus [26]: "Wall Street names that have been among the most buffeted in recent months – Merrill Lynch, UBS and Citigroup – are hiking pay for their top investment bankers in an attempt to stop an exodus of talent."

Time sees stimulus helping high-speed rail [27], while Salon finds stim not helping bus and light-rail. [28]

Terrance Heath contributed to the making of this Breakfast