Members of Congress have retreated to the security and comfort of their home states (where I hope you are visiting them with your concerns about the horrid Medicare Physician Fee Schedule proposal!). The ACC Board of Trustees followed Congress’ example with its own annual retreat that afforded time for an awesome policy discussion. But, whereas the BOT had time for serious reflection of health care reform objectives this week, members of Congress were treated to raucous and highly orchestrated anti-reform interruptions and jeers during their local ‘town hall’ meetings (doesn’t TV love to inflame these kinds of occurrences?).

Speaking for the People
Insightful and highly emotional pleas like “keep the government out of my Medicare’ reflect the highly educated points of view of some of their constituents. Of course, I think the Dems’ spokespersons kind of over-reacted too, with their conspiracy claims. This is mainly passionately partisan politics, and plenty more is coming. Misinformation and hyperbole will characterize at least 75% of all policy ‘discussions’ forthcoming, and it’s striking to me that whoever these ‘American People’ are, they’re apparently very schizoid about what they ALL allegedly want out of reform.

All constituencies claim to speak for the elusive American People. Big PhRMA and the White House really went back and forth a lot last week on whether the White House did or did not promise to preclude giving Medicare the option of negotiating drug prices in exchange for the $80 billion ten-year Rx cost reduction the industry agreed to. Liberal Dems (and the moderate Mr. Baucus in Finance) have said they weren’t consulted on and didn’t agree to any such deal. But some concessions must have been made, because after this week’s back and forth about what promises were made or not, PhRMA as an industry has agreed to spending $150 million on TV ads next month promoting health care reform. That’s a lot of advertising.

But, bottom line: there will be a major health reform bill passed this year. The Dems have too much at stake here not to have that happen. We should therefore try our best to make sure whatever inevitable huge flaws are in it mostly fixed this fall, rather than have to struggle to repair the damage(s) over the next 5 years.

*** Image from Flickr (wallyg). ***

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