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.

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.

In the tense hours Sunday leading up to the House vote on a historic healthcare bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took time to call the former president of Notre Dame, Father Theodore Hesburgh. The House Democrats' leader was not seeking spiritual guidance. What she wanted was Hesburgh to help lock up the vote of Rep. Joe Donnelly, a Democrat from South Bend, Ind., who was wavering over the abortion issue. Donnelly ultimately pressed the "yes" button late Sunday night. The incident, one of scores on the road to the Democrats' healthcare victory, illustrates that Pelosi -- long the target of Republican attacks -- is beginning to play the game as well as powerful former speakers such as legendary Masters of the House "Tip" O'Neill and "Mr. Sam" Rayburn.

As the office phones buzzed, party leaders hectored and protesters outside roared, several undecided House Democrats this weekend faced an unpleasant and all-too-realistic prospect: that voting for the healthcare overhaul could doom their careers. Some bit their lips and went ahead, perhaps saying a silent prayer along the way. But others begged off, declining to support the bill for a number of reasons, including its effect on state Medicaid budgets and concerns about its effect on seniors.

After a frenzied push to nail down final commitments and resolve lingering disputes in their ranks, House Democrats are poised Sunday to pass the most sweeping change to the nation's healthcare system since the creation of Medicare nearly half a century ago. Democrats will now proceed with a straight up-or-down vote on the healthcare bill that passed the Senate last year. Party leaders, facing the possibility of failure, decided Saturday to scrap plans to use a controversial procedural maneuver to approve Senate legislation.

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.

President Obama and Democratic leaders gathered momentum for their sweeping healthcare overhaul Wednesday, picking up support from Democratic factions where defections were most feared: liberals, abortion opponents and backbenchers. Working into the night to put the finishing touches on the legislation, Democratic leaders said they continued to expect the balloting to be a cliffhanger. But a cascade of developments buoyed supporters of the bill, which would cap Obama's drive for legislation to reduce the ranks of the uninsured, offer new protections for those who have medical coverage, and try to curb skyrocketing healthcare costs.

The healthcare summit that convenes Thursday in Washington has emerged as a high-stakes gambit for President Obama and opposing Republican lawmakers, carrying risks for both sides that could not only alter the outcome of the healthcare debate but also November's midterm elections. By this point in the calendar, the White House had thought its healthcare overhaul would be completed, allowing Obama to swivel to the near 10% unemployment rate that has Americans so unnerved. Republicans had hoped the plan would be dead -- a casualty of the Democrats' loss last month of the 60-vote Senate margin needed to end filibusters.