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.

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.

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.

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.

The Senate passed its version of the healthcare overhaul on Christmas Eve. Here are some questions about what's next as the legislation continues to work its way through Congress: What's going to happen this month? The Senate's healthcare legislation must now be merged with the House version -- and that could be tricky. Senate and House negotiators could choose to meet in a formal conference committee to work out the differences or instead work out a deal in a looser, give-and-take fashion.

In this season of good cheer and glad tidings, Congress has become one of the meanest places on Earth. Republicans recently angered Democrats by invoking a rarely used rule that required reading legislation aloud on the Senate floor for nearly three hours. Democrats infuriated Republicans by denying the customary courtesy of allowing a senator to speak on her amendment before it came up for a vote. When one senator was denied an additional minute to finish his remarks -- normally an unremarkable indulgence -- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.

As the Senate healthcare debate stretched through the weekend, President Obama made plans to visit Capitol Hill this afternoon to meet with Democratic lawmakers at a rare weekend caucus gathering. The move comes as Democratic leaders are pushing the Senate to complete work on its bill before Christmas, a deadline seen as crucial if Congress is to send the president healthcare legislation by the end of January. A month ago, Obama visited the Capitol to rally House Democrats just before they voted to pass their version of the overhaul, which the president has made a cornerstone of his domestic agenda.

After days of delay, Senate Democrats pushed ahead Thursday with their drive to pass a healthcare bill by Christmas, approving the first amendment to their giant bill: a measure to expand women's access to preventive services such as mammograms. The proposal by Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), which passed on a largely party-line 61-39 vote, would authorize the federal government to require insurers to cover women's preventive care and screenings without co-payments. The amendment is expected to cost about $940 million over 10 years.

Unilab Corp., one of several large medical-testing companies subpoenaed last month in a federal investigation of possible abuses of Medicare and Medicaid claims, got in trouble for its billing practices a year ago. But that trouble was with its shareholders. Unilab, which does everything from Pap smears to AIDS blood tests, had problems last year installing a new computerized billing system at its Northern California labs.

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.

Some reader questions about the healthcare legislation in Congress: If the Senate bill is estimated to cost $ 848 billion over the next decade, how can Democrats say it will cut the federal budget deficit by $130 billion? The Congressional Budget Office says that the government will take in more in revenues from taxes and fees -- and save money by trimming the fat out of Medicare -- than it will spend extending health coverage to more Americans. Under the Senate plan, a tax on high-cost insurance plans is expected to generate about $150 billion over the next decade.

Some reader questions on the national healthcare debate: How can we be sure that there will be no rationing of healthcare or pharmaceuticals under the bills being considered in Congress? Democrats argue that there is rationing in the current healthcare system, in part because insurance companies can rate consumers on the basis of preexisting medical conditions or drop them if they get sick. Those practices would be outlawed as part of the current legislation. As for pharmaceutical coverage, it's possible that some consumers could end up with more coverage for prescription drugs than they have now. -- Why is that?