Obama Begins To Overhaul Health Policies

The recent economic downturn demands a complete overhaul of healthcare policies. U.S. President Barack Obama seemingly cannot disentangle his administrations health policies from the economic mesh.He began with a White House forum targeting cost-cutting measures for high-priced health care costs. This may be a distant goal to achieve as his predecessors have proven but theres not other way out for the fledgling administration: draw a solution now or suffer major drawbacks in the future.
Melody Barnes, Obamas senior domestic policy adviser, had already given a warning: “Our healthcare costs are exploding our economy.” But she was quick to add that the big boss is finding ways to solve the problem. “When he talks about getting spending under control … one of the primary things he is focusing on is bringing our healthcare costs under control,” she added.
Tempering healthcare costs, along with other segments receiving a sizeable chunk of budget, seems to be an indispensable tool in cushioning the impact of the global recession. Not that Obama seems to realize this. Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who was recently appointed by Obama as health secretary, launched a White House forum with a group of about 120 people comprising doctors, patients, health insurers, and lawmakers to fix U.S. health care. Despite spending about $2.5 trillion each year on healthcare, the government still has to expand its coverage on some 46 million uninsured. Actually they don’t have to, but apparently they want to. Matters are growing even worse as the country is lagging behind other Western countries on indicators such as infant mortality rates and gigantic fatness.
The president earlier promised (he did that a lot) to expand insurance coverage and impose more efficient cost-cutting measures though he has yet to pass a proposal detailing his health care plan to Congress, shockingly enough. Obama is more cautious to avoid what the Clinton administration dealt with in the 1990s when it submitted a detailed healthcare plan to lawmakers. Instead, Obama’s taking the more politically savvy route of saying “change” over and over.
“He’s articulated some of the principles that are important to him, but I think he also strongly believes that to get this done he’s going to have to … be open, pragmatic and listen and engage with Congress to get a bill done,” said Barnes but added that he isnt sending a bill up to the Hill.
Kenneth Thorpe, director of Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease, located the starting point of the policy reform in a proposal submitted last year by Max Baucus, Senate Finance Committee chair. “That really is the starting point,” he said. “It largely reflects candidate Obama’s healthcare reform proposals.”
The Baucus plan shares similar principles with Obamas unrealized proposal such as better management of high-risk ailments, effective means to boost preventive care, health insurance reform and improvement of healthcare delivery. Baucus, however, took a step further ahead of Obama in terms of its health care coverage. Nevertheless, Baucus remains supportive of the president asserting that his budget for 2010 revealed his very strong commitment. He also pledged to do all I can to make meaningful comprehensive health reform pass this year just this week.
But not everyone in the White House is in favor of the Obamas stillborn proposal, because some of us aren’t drunk on empty promises of change. Along with other members of the Republican party,Edmund Haislmaier, a health policy expert from Heritage Foundation, asserts that Obamas plan to allot $634 billion for healthcare reform was an error. “He just told every interest group that ‘I’m not really going to reform, I’m just going to expand,’” Haislmaier said.

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