Bezos, Dell, Carey want health insurance dead

Laughter may be the best medicine, but comedian Drew Carey is also offering cold hard cash to help solve the country’s medical woes. The host of the Price is Right has formed an unlikely triumverate with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Dell Computer founder Michael Dell, all of whom contributed to a $6 million funding round for Qliance Medical Management, a Seattle-based startup that hopes to disrupt the healthcare industry by taking insurance companies out of the equation for primary care. This round brings the three-year-old startup’s total funding to $13.5 million.

The company charges patients a monthly fee–$44 for minors to $84 to senior–for basic primary care that includes check ups, vaccinations, x-rays, women’s health exams and other services, according to TechFlash. No copays, no insurance premiums, no health care statements.The money goes straight to the three clinics Qliance operates in Washington State. Time that the 13 doctors and nurse practitioners on staff would normally dedicate to insurance paperwork can instead go to patients.

Members will still want insurance for catastrophic events–anything that could require surgery or other specialist care, for example, but on the whole they save money, according to Qliance. CEO Norm Wu says that about 40% of the primary care costs at traditional healthcare providers go to processing insurance claims.

About 70 employers in Washington state have signed up since the company started accepting payments directly from business and self-insured plans that couple Qliance’s offering with insurance for catastrophic events. Wu says these corporate customers achieve 20 to 50% savings.

Bezos, Carey and Dell all came in contact with the company through connections to Nick Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist who was an early backer of Amazon. There involvement should help garner attention for the 60-person company.

One of Qliance’s clinics in downtown Seattle is operating at a profit, according to Wu, who plans to tap the buesiness acument of his new investors to help replicate that success elsewhere.

President Obama video on Health Care

The health care debate was not on C-Span. The main negotiations were behind closed doors. Brian Lamb wouldn’t of asked otherwise.

Real Clear Politics:

Brian Lamb has put President Obama on the spot. Lamb is the CEO of C-Span, and today he wrote a letter to the leaders of Congress asking them to allow cameras in the room for the final negotiations on the health care bill. Lamb wrote:

President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system. Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.

Worried White House Video

MSNBC:

RICHMOND, VA – As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to pass a health plan with important benefits for the average American. For the typical family, costs would go down by as much as $2,500 a year. Adults wouldn’t be required to buy insurance. No one but the wealthy would face higher taxes.

But a year later, the health care proposals in Congress lack many of those easy-to-sell benefits, which became victims of the lengthy process of trying to win over wavering lawmakers, appeasing powerful special-interest groups and addressing concerns about the heavily burdened Treasury.

“There’s nothing in it the average person could understand about why your costs would be lower,” says Robert Blendon, professor of health policy at Harvard’s School of Public Health. “They don’t even have good illustrations about how it would be cheaper. They did not find a way to save money for people with job-based insurance.”

In short, the broken promises represents the crap they have been trying to sell the American public, but we aren’t buying it.

This is actually a chance to redeem himself on the many other broken promises.  This will not cost money and his empty promises so far on transparency has been a load of crap.  President Obama’s words of  “Change we can believe in” have so far been in a word: unbelievable.

Real Clear Politics:

Brian Lamb has put President Obama on the spot. Lamb is the CEO of C-Span, and today he wrote a letter to the leaders of Congress asking them to allow cameras in the room for the final negotiations on the health care bill. Lamb wrote:

President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system. Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.

Indeed, this was one of Obama’s signature promises on the campaign trail:

Obama C-Span Promises

It’s hard to get more explicit than that.

But that was then. Today, when asked for the 3rd time whether President Obama believes that the “standard” he set during the campaign for transparency on health care negotiations is being met by the current process (which now appears to include bypassing the formal conference process), White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave a flaccid but telling response.

“I do not believe the American people have lacked for information on what’s in these bills – the political and policy arguments around different people’s positions – I think that’s been well documented,” Gibbs said.

With all due respect, the reporter did not ask Gibbs for his appraisal of what he thinks the public does and does not know about the health care bills. Rather, the question is very simple: will President Obama honor his campaign pledge and demand that the final health care negotiations are televised on C-Span? Judging from Gibbs’ response, the answer is an obvious “no.”

The Coming Deficit Disaster

The president says he understands the urgency of our fiscal crisis, but his policies are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg.

President Barack Obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems. He has exerted enormous political energy attempting to reform the nation’s health-care system. But the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. It’s the deficit. Recently, the White House signaled that it will get serious about reducing the deficit next year—after it locks into place massive new health-care entitlements. This is a recipe for disaster, as it will create a new appetite for increased spending and yet another powerful interest group to oppose deficit-reduction measures.

Our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.

Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the president’s budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms.

The planned deficits will have destructive consequences for both fairness and economic growth. They will force upon our children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption. Federal deficits will crowd out domestic investment in physical capital, human capital, and technologies that increase potential GDP and the standard of living. Financing deficits could crowd out exports and harm our international competitiveness, as we can already see happening with the large borrowing we are doing from competitors like China.

At what point, some financial analysts ask, do rating agencies downgrade the United States? When do lenders price additional risk to federal borrowing, leading to a damaging spike in interest rates? How quickly will international investors flee the dollar for a new reserve currency? And how will the resulting higher interest rates, diminished dollar, higher inflation, and economic distress manifest itself? Given the president’s recent reception in China—friendly but fruitless—these answers may come sooner than any of us would like.

Mr. Obama and his advisers say they understand these concerns, but the administration’s policy choices are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg. Perhaps the most vivid example of sending the wrong message to international capital markets are the health-care reform bills—one that passed the House earlier this month and another under consideration in the Senate. Whatever their good intentions, they have too many flaws to be defensible.

First and foremost, neither bends the health-cost curve downward. The CBO found that the House bill fails to reduce the pace of health-care spending growth. An audit of the bill by Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found that the pace of national health-care spending will increase by 2.1% over 10 years, or by about $750 billion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill grows just as fast as the House version. In this way, the bills betray the basic promise of health-care reform: providing quality care at lower cost.

Second, each bill sets up a new entitlement program that grows at 8% annually as far as the eye can see—faster than the economy will grow, faster than tax revenues will grow, and just as fast as the already-broken Medicare and Medicaid programs. They also create a second new entitlement program, a federally run, long-term-care insurance plan.

Finally, the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.

If there really are savings to be found in Medicare, those savings should be directed toward deficit reduction and preserving Medicare, not to financing huge new entitlement programs. Getting long-term budgets under control is hard enough today. The job will be nearly impossible with a slew of new entitlements in place.

In short, any combination of what is moving through Congress is economically dangerous and invites the rapid acceleration of a debt crisis. It is a dramatic statement to financial markets that the federal government does not understand that it must get its fiscal house in order.

What to do? The best option would be for the president to halt Congress’s rush to fiscal suicide, and refocus on slowing the dangerous growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He should call on Congress to pass a comprehensive reform of our income and payroll tax systems that would generate revenue sufficient to fund its spending desires in a pro-growth and fair fashion.

Reducing entitlement spending and closing tax loopholes to create a fairer tax system with more balanced revenues is politically difficult and requires sacrifice. But we will avert a potentially devastating credit crisis, increase national savings, drive productivity and wage growth, and enhance our international competitiveness.

The time to worry about the deficit is not next year, but now. There is no time to waste.

Mr. Holtz-Eakin is former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This is adapted from testimony he gave before the Senate Committee on the Budget on Nov. 10