Health Care Reform

Comprehensive health-care reform is in big trouble. Here's the reason: President Bill Clinton has lost the support of a crucial political ally--the middle class. Without the support of the middle class, the odds are against the President on health care. Those odds worsened considerably last week with Clinton's stunning defeat in the House of Representatives on the crime bill. Members of Congress weren't afraid of the President. They figured there was no price to pay for defying him.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) attacked Republicans on Thursday for their repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare, saying threats to shut down the government or limit the debt ceiling are irresponsible and ineffective. “The big problem we have are Republicans,” she said, speaking at a health center in North Hollywood. “They are the obstacle.” Despite the continued discussions about repeal, Boxer said the states and federal government are moving forward with the Affordable Care Act and plan to begin enrolling people in new coverage options in October.

A town hall meeting on health-care reform with an array of state, local and federal officials will be held Tuesday by the Burbank Chamber of Commerce at Woodbury University. About 200 business people from San Diego to San Francisco are expected to attend the conference, as well as Rep. Carlos Moorhead (R-Glendale) and representatives of U. S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. The conference, being held from 7:15 to 9 p.m.

The blurry vision began early last year. Roy Lawrence ignored it as long as he could. But after falling off a ladder at his construction job, he knew he had to see a doctor. He went to a community health clinic in South Los Angeles, where doctors determined he had diabetes and cataracts. The clinic could manage his illness but referred him early this year to the county health system for eye surgery. Nearly a year later, Lawrence, a Jamaican immigrant without insurance, still is waiting for the operation.

"Pay or play," a phrase that sounds like a new game in Las Vegas, is the catchy nickname for a health-care reform proposal that has been introduced by Democrats in Congress. Advertised as a simple way to get more people insured, it's really a back door to national health care, which would be a cumbersome bureaucratic system. The idea is simple--deceptively so.

While no one knows for sure what's coming in President Clinton's health-care reform, most everyone agrees that the changes will step up the shift toward health maintenance organizations. That bodes well for many Southern California health-care companies because, unlike most other parts of the country, this region is already thriving in HMOs. In Los Angeles County, one-third of the population is now enrolled in HMOs, compared with one-sixth of the population nationwide.

The doctors for the 21st Century have arrived in force at Los Angeles County/Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, armed with their spanking-new medical degrees and eager to begin treating patients. Yet many of the young physicians starting their internships this summer are doing so on a note of trepidation, unsure what awaits them in the brave new world of health-care reform.

Washington, take note: While Congress and the White House play political poker over how much national health care reform there should be and how soon, the nation's most populous state isn't waiting to play its high-stakes hand. On the November state ballot is an ambitious but ill-advised initiative called the California Health Security Act. More than a million signatures were collected in order to bring the Canadian-style health care proposal up for a vote.

During the last week of September, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell officially declared what had been evident for weeks: For health care reform, the future is not now. Recriminations have already begun in earnest. But more important than assigning blame--of which there is more than enough to distribute--is drawing sensible lessons for the future. After all, the problems health-care reform was supposed to address--escalating costs and eroding coverage--have not suddenly disappeared.

The health-care reform plan proposed Tuesday by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell reflects Mitchell's political dilemmas. He knows he can't muster enough votes in the Senate to approve either the President's original bill or the bill likely to pass the House of Representatives. And he believes, sadly but accurately, that if he doesn't get a bill out of the Senate, the reform process will expire for this year or longer.

In today's world of 24-hour news and 15-second sound bites, every policymaker knows that managing the message is the key to winning over the public. So why has the messaging on behalf of one of the most dramatic public reforms of our lifetimes, the federal Affordable Care Act, been so incompetent? Provisions of the 2010 healthcare reform have already changed the lives of millions of Americans for the better. It has brought insurance coverage to more than 2.6 million previously uninsured young adults, cut prescription costs by a total of $3 billion for millions of seniors, eliminated co-pays on preventive services such as child immunizations and cancer screenings and eliminated annual and lifetime claims caps for more than 80 million policyholders.

POP MUSIC Hot Hot Heat Post punk impresarios from British Columbia, Hot Hot Heat returns with "Future Breeds," its first album since 2007's "Happiness Ltd." The dudes have been burning up the Bootleg Theater every Wednesday this month, and Wednesday they'll be closing out their residency with Voxhaul Broadcast and the Union Line supporting. Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd. 8:30 p.m. $12. www.foldsilverlake.com. Damien Jurado With his ninth album, "Saint Bartlett," misty-eyed troubadour Damien Jurado has turned in a steadily affecting batch of rustic songs made lush with unexpected instrumentation and a wider sense of space.

Reporting from Charlottesville, Va., Murrieta, Calif., and New York -- The congressional battle over healthcare may have ended, but not the political fight. With Congress in recess, members trooped home over the last two weeks to discuss what, for many, could be the most consequential vote of their careers. They explained, defended and sometimes distorted the content of the mammoth bill, now federal law, and what it means for their eager, anxious and often just plain confused constituents.

Although the recently passed healthcare legislation will most dramatically affect Americans who don't have health insurance, most nonelderly Americans -- about 160 million -- are expected to keep getting coverage through their employers. But workers could see some changes as a result of the new healthcare law. Will my employer have to offer any new benefits? Yes. Beginning as soon as this fall, companies that offer health plans will have to allow employees to keep their children on their plans until the children are 26 years old. Employers will also be prohibited from putting lifetime caps and some annual caps on benefits for their employees.

A San Francisco man was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of making threatening phone calls to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi because of her support for healthcare reform. Gregory Lee Giusti, 48, was arrested at his home in the city's Tenderloin district after an investigation by federal authorities, said Joseph Schadler, spokesman for the FBI's San Francisco office. Schadler said Wednesday afternoon that the criminal complaint against Giusti was under seal and would not be made public until he appeared Thursday morning in San Francisco federal court.

About the only thing Dr. Philip Schwarzman can be sure of under the national healthcare overhaul is that he is adding his daughters, ages 23 and 25, to his health plan immediately. Much less clear to Schwarzman is how the sweeping law will affect the emergency department at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where he is medical director. "It's incredibly complicated," said the white-haired physician, whose department sees 50,000 patients a year. "It's hard to predict what's going to happen."

As the debate over health-care reform rages in the hallways of Capitol Hill, the folks over at Children's Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) have decided to make their own statement about how the complicated issue will affect kids. In a quarterly newsletter called The Human Side of Health Care Reform, CHOC features stories of children who are former patients. The third issue was printed last week.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed herself Monday for the failure of health-care reform last year and said she had been politically "naive and dumb," a newspaper reported. Speaking to a group of women writers invited to lunch at the White House, Mrs. Clinton also said she is surprised by how she sometimes is perceived, the New York Times reported.

On March 23, President Obama signed into law the most sweeping healthcare overhaul in generations. Some questions and answers about the new law: How will this bill affect me this year? Many of the changes will take effect in the coming months. Insurers will no longer be allowed to place lifetime limits on coverage or drop customers without cause. Plans must cover preventive services, and insurers must disclose how they use premium dollars. By next year, insurers will be required to provide rebates to customers if less than 80% of premium dollars is spent on actual care and improving quality.

California voters have a generally positive view of the massive federal healthcare package signed into law by President Obama last month, providing a potential boost statewide to the Democrats who pushed it through Congress, according to a new Times/USC poll. Republican leaders, campaigning against the bill, have warned Democrats that their votes would weigh them down in November's elections. Although that may be true in more conservative parts of the country, the opposite appears to be developing here.