Obama To Appoint Jeanne Lambrew As Deputy Director Of White House Office Of Health Reform»

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/12/11/jeanne-lambrew-announcement/

Obama To Appoint Jeanne Lambrew As Deputy Director Of White House Office Of Health Reform»



In just a few moments, President-elect Barack Obama will announce that another one of our friends and former colleagues, Jeanne Lambrew, will be named deputy director of the White House Office of Health Reform. In that position, she will work with HHS Secretary Tom Daschle to achieve “significant changes” in health care reform. Jeanne co-authored a book with Daschle entitled, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.”

Jeanne recently wrote, “Reforming the health system requires leadership and commitment that can come only from the White House.” Over on the Wonk Room, Igor Volsky takes a look at Jeanne’s philosophy on health care reform. Building on the two major existing sources of health coverage — the employer based system and Medicaid – Lambrew has advocated plans that allow Americans to keep their existing coverage, while offering affordable options to those who need them:

- Americans lacking job-based insurance, for instance, could purchase affordable coverage through a new national insurance pool that would offer “the same private health plans offered to federal employees and members of Congress.”

- While the plan does not include an employer mandate, “employers would have access to the Healthy America insurance pool.” Individuals offered coverage through an employer would be free to decline that coverage and enroll in a plan through the pool instead.

- The plan would simplify and extend Medicaid to cover all below a certain income level (for example, 100–150 percent of the federal poverty level).

While she was here at CAP, Jeanne also developed the idea of a Wellness Trust to “carve prevention out of health insurance and take responsibility for a new, outcomes-oriented system.” Writing on ThinkProgress, she explained:

The premise of the Wellness Trust is that disease prevention is more like homeland security than health insurance: everyone needs it, no one notices if it works, and it depends on persistent, strong leadership and systems. While change will come at a cost, this cost would be dwarfed by the lost lives, productivity, and public resources that will result from a failure to act.

The Wonk Room has more.

How can the unemployed, and the poor, and the homeless, and the bankrupt, afford ANY health insurance premium? "Affordable" to whom? And how can medical costs be brought back under control with the Big Insurance and Big Pharma corporations remaining the "middle men" ripping off the sick AND the government?

This is bullshit from the "Alice in Wonderland" world of the corpo/fascist wing of the Democratic Party leadership. That's how it strikes me. It posits a healthy economy, as we face Bushwhack-induced Great Depression II, and fantasizes from there, how our corporate rulers can continue to wildly profiteer from illness.

As with all corpo/fascist Democratic Party proposals, I hope to God that some of us receive some help--and likely some will--but this will not solve the fundamental problem of the system , which is this: With a couple of lines of 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushwhack corporations, the election system can produce a flip-flop back to the corpo/nazism of the Bushwhacks, who will proceed to loot everything in sight, including the corpo/fascist health system, in which millions of people will still using the hospital emergency rooms for ear infections and the flu. That's what these Democratic Party compromises with the corporate rulers result in.

I think I understand what we, the people, and our new, young, idealistic "good emperor," are up against, and why these anti-democratic compromises seem to be the only thing that is feasible and possible. But we should regard them with open eyes, and understand what they are, and what they mean. With the Bushwhacks conducting their final looting--with their recent Financial 9/11--there will be no money for us hard-working, destitute peons, who are the producers of their wealth. These Pollyanna compromises with the great big evil monsters of global corporate predation are from the unreal, fairy tale world that our national political establishment has become. We need dragonslayers, not "win/win" Pollyannas. But I know what the fate of dragonslayers would be, in this crushed democracy and country. And that knowledge is painful, but we need to face it, and understand it fully, if we are to successfully strategize our way back to democracy and prosperity. Maybe Barack Obama has made that calculation. I don't know. It's hard to tell. And he has not lied to us. I will give him that. Many of us flocked to his campaign partly because there was no other choice, and partly because of what we hoped he would do, not what he actually said he was going to do. His appointments and policies are thus far pretty consistent with what he actually said. Since I paid close attention to what he actually said, I am not among "the disillusion" (for the most part). I just think we need to understand what a compromise the whole election campaign was, from the get-go. No FDR could have been elected in this rigged system. Real reform is not possible until we unrig the voting machines and the campaign/lobbying money system.

And thus we get yet another half-assed proposal--this time on health care--that our corporate rulers can easily exploit. It is not exactly Obama's fault. I think he wants something better, actually. But "something better" cannot be done in current circumstances. And he would not be permitted to enter the White House, a month from now, if he advocated real reform.