One Hand Washes the Other
WITH THE Journal’s nauseatingly obsequious ode to Sen. Jeff Bingaman when he announced his retirement fresh in my memory, I guess I should not be surprised to see one of the same reporters approvingly reprint the senator’s press release about seeking medication discounts for Medicare patients without any comment on the back story.
President Obama did negotiate with the drug companies in 2009 for $80 billion in discounts. It was part of the crony capitalism and political corruption used to ram through Obamacare, legislation fervently supported by Bingaman and the rest of the Democrats.
Although the mutual back scratching didn’t get a catchy name like the Cornhusker Kickback or the Louisiana Purchase, the drug companies agreed to the discounts and agreed to spend millions of dollars promoting Obamacare in exchange for assurances that pharmaceutical companies would be protected from further discount requirements, especially Medicare discounts. The White House explicitly acknowledged this agreement in a New York Times story (Aug. 9, 2009), “White House Affirms Deal on Drug Cost.”
It is instructive to note that the Democrats are just as untrustworthy about upholding their back-room deals as they are about keeping promises to the public like being able to keep the same health insurance, see the same physicians and pay decreasing rates.
ELIZABETH KEEN
Albuquerque
Share Pain From Top Down
OUR SEN. JEFF Bingaman wants to enact a new law forcing drug companies to discount their medicines to low-income Medicare patients and thus help cut the federal deficit.
The drug companies already have programs in place to help those in need pay for their medications, but with Bingaman, as usual, it’s somebody else who is volunteered to cut their earnings to pay for the ineptness and avarice of the federal government.
May I suggest another route. Bingaman and his wife have become multimillionaires in the “service” of this country. There’s nothing stopping him from donating his salary to the national treasury or them writing a check to the same.
It’s high time Bingaman gave some of his money back to the country, especially to pay for a deficit he helped to create.
GILBERT ARAGON
Albuquerque
Feeding the Pharma Beast
KUDOS TO Sen. Jeff Bingaman and Sen. Jay Rockefeller for attempting to reverse the U.S. Congress’ monument to corporate welfare by passing the Medicare Part D law in 2003.
Bowing to the Big Pharma lobby, Congress made it illegal for the government to negotiate discounts on drugs for Medicare patients (unlike Medicaid and VA Health System patients). In that context, the comment from the Big Pharma lobby that the proposal would “fundamentally alter the competitive nature of the program and undermine its success” is laughable.
The only thing the Part D corporate handout has “succeeded in doing” is adding to the potential insolvency of Medicare. Hopefully Sens. Bingaman and Rockefeller’s efforts will expose this Republican fiasco.
JEFF MITCHELL, M.D.
Albuquerque
Profit Model Makes Us Sick
IN RESPONSE to the commentary — “Most Americans Are Overinsured” — on necessary changes to Medicare: There will be no significant change to American health care until the system becomes less an investor-driven commodity in trade rather than a citizen’s right to health care as part of a social service network. Congress appears intent on dismantling what precious little remains of that “network.”
The problems with rising medical costs and insurance premiums go far beyond access to health insurance or being “underinsured.” Rising costs are directly Arelated to the overuse of services and the excess capacity of our health system.
As Arnold Reiman has argued in “Health Care: The Disquieting Truth” (September 2010 N.Y. Review of Books), overuse is the result of “unregulated entrepreneurialism by providers, in response to the incentives of a commercialized system.”
Most hospitals and nursing homes are now managed like businesses. Many of these facilities are investor-owned. When most doctors are paid on a piecework, fee-for-service basis, unnecessary expansion of services is inevitable.
Thus doctors and their providers have a vested interest in continually increasing the services they provide; and as they do so insurance companies will increase the premiums they charge, which includes extravagant salaries and bonuses for top management, shareholder dividends and retained corporate profit. …
In the end Reiman argues that “until we join other advanced countries in treating medical care as a right and not a business, we will have to wait for control of health costs.”
ROGER TURNER
Albuquerque
A Few Holes in the Argument
RE: “ONLY CHANGE Can Save the Medicare We Know” editorial:
Every change considered in your editorial makes Medicare less valuable to seniors, yet you ignore changes that could ease Medicare’s budget without lowering benefits.
You praise a higher eligibility age, higher premiums, means-tested payments and co-pays. You neglect to mention that the Rep. Paul Ryan plan voted for by every Republican in Congress would leave seniors with vouchers that would not come close to buying adequate coverage. This is destroying Medicare, not saving it.
Nowhere do you mention allowing the government to bargain for better drug prices. The Veterans Administration pays much less for its drugs because of its access to bulk rates. Not so for Medicare; every prescription it buys is retail price, by law.
Nor do you address the holes in coverage that make Medicare Advantage plans seem attractive. The drug coverage so-called Doughnut Hole is a prime example. Many people buy Advantage insurance mainly to avoid this multithousand-dollar risk. Advantage plans cost Medicare 14 percent more than providing the coverage itself, essentially a subsidy for insurance companies and a multibillion-dollar hole in Medicare’s budget.
Addressing these issues would benefit Medicare without harming the level of service. Even better would be to follow the model of large insurance companies and include as many people as possible in the pool by lowering, not raising, the age of eligibility to include younger, healthier people. This would drop the average cost of care and strengthen Medicare.
You say you want all ideas on the table. Please include ones that protect seniors.
ROXANNE ALLEN
Albuquerque
That’s a Lot of Foie Gras
IN 2010, THE Congressional Budget Office predicted that extending the 2001-2003 tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 through 2020 would add $700 billion to the national debt, a figure ignored in the current hysteria over the cost of entitlements.
Looking at how the last decade’s windfall for the super rich has been spent, we see millions for art and memorabilia ($2.3 million for a tintype of Billy the Kid), jewelry ($1 million in accounts at Tiffany’s for a noted political figure), and other luxury items.
How many jobs did these purchases create? How many homes were saved from foreclosure? How much nutrition did growing bodies and developing minds receive? How many families received basic health care? How much safer did it make the food we eat or the air we breathe? How many schools were built or highways repaired?
Tax breaks for the wealthy? …
ADELE E. ZIMMERMAN
Embudo
Houston, We Have a Problem
WHILE I empathize with Jon Syferd’s lament of the failure to replace the Space Shuttle, President Obama, despite his many shortcomings, is not to blame.
The responsibility rests with both NASA and Congress; NASA, for failing to propose an acceptable replacement in a timely manner, and Congress for placing the country in an untenable economic position to support an aggressive space exploration and exploitation program.
In addition, NASA has failed to provide the rationale for continued manned space flight. The cost to transport humans to low earth orbit is now approaching $8,000 per pound, which is in stark contrast to the $118 per pound that NASA promised President Nixon in 1972. It is absurd to continue in the manner that we have for the past 30 years.
The shuttle, in many respects, was a marvelous tool that allowed humans to experience the journey into space at a relatively low 3-G acceleration environment as opposed to 8-Gs that the previous “expendables” exerted on their occupants. This also allowed sensitive payloads like the Hubble to be built to specifications that are more reasonable. However, poor NASA management decision-making cost the United States 14 astronauts, two shuttles and the fiscal creditability of reusable spaceships.
Several technological alternatives were put forth over the past 25 years including President Reagan’s “New Orient Express” in 1985 that would offer passenger service from New York to Tokyo in 2.5 hours and provide the basis for a “single-stage-to-orbit” space plane.
But none of these survived the high development cost estimates and limitations of their proposed technologies. Until low-cost access to low earth orbit can be achieved, manned spaceflight will continue to be the province of large, bloated, government-funded programs. Will the “commercial” Falcon-X or Virgin Galactic find a way? Highly unlikely, as they essentially use the same technologies as NASA, although they may provide a means to bypass the huge bureaucratic wasteland that NASA has become.
The nation that achieves “low-cost access to low earth orbit” (assuming that phrase is not an oxymoron) has the potential of becoming the dominant player on earth, as well as in space, for the foreseeable future. Will it be a “Walmart-funded” China that seeks to undermine the United States, using the same corporations that American capitalism and consumerism has enabled?
TED SPITZMILLER
Rio Rancho
