WASHINGTON (The Dissociated Press) - A group of health care industry leaders claimed Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their pledge earlier in the week to reduce costs.
Last Monday, Mr. Obama stood at the White House with a group of executives and lobbyists from hospitals, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers, and announced that they'd committed to cut costs by $2 trillion over the next ten years. Three days later, however, the company leaders issued a joint statement saying they'd only agreed to voluntary cost controls, and in the range of two to three hundred dollars annually, which they said they could probably realize by buying their yacht accessories in bulk.
Then, in an extraordinary move Thursday (although, not really for a Democratic administration), the White House Director of Health Care Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, told reporters she agreed with the companies that the President had "misspoken" on Monday. But, one hour later, DeParle returned to the White House briefing room --- visibly shaken, with a black eye, a split lip, and a basketball lodged in her ear --- to confirm that President Obama's comments Monday "accurately reflected the plans formally adopted by the industry groups."
The meeting at the White House, and the resulting concessions --- if, they in fact were made --- are largely seen as part of the industry's attempt to stave off a single-payer (that is, publicly financed and guaranteed) universal health care system, with which, it fears, it could not profitably compete. Virtually every other industrialized country in the world guarantees health care for its citizens through a single-payer system.
Mr. Obama embraced single-payer health care early in his presidential campaign but has since been seen as moving away from it. Many believe that this has been a necessary move by the President in order to find a "workable compromise" with the majority of members in Congress, who (surely through sheer coincidence) have received tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the health industry, and who strongly favor a plan requiring all (increasingly unemployed) U.S. citizens to obtain private health care coverage through their country clubs or personal asset managers.
But Obama protested in a recent television interview that he was not abandoning the effort to switch to a single-payer health care system but simply postponing it until he had finished implementing the country's new, single-payer banking system.
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Montana Democrat Max Baucus --- who, from 1962 - 1967, played Thurston Howell III on the popular TV sitcom "Gilligan's Island" --- held hearings last week on the future of U.S. health care. Dozens of invited speakers, purported experts, from around the country came to render their opinions to the committee on the best ways to provide health care to Americans. But, despite numerous polls showing that roughly two-thirds of Americans favor a single-payer system, the committee did not invite testimony from a single advocate of the publicly-financed universal model, which left many questioning why Baucus, or any senator from a state in which people are outnumbered three-to-one by wall-mounted moose heads, should play such a pivotal role on so critical an issue to so many Americans.
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