From the Associated Press:

Obama promised Medicare beneficiaries that he’d veto any legislation asking them to sacrifice without also raising taxes on upper-income earners. But he didn’t issue them a complete pass.

Instead, he’s proposing to raise a range of costs for future retirees, while mostly shielding Medicare’s 48 million current beneficiaries. Under the president’s plan, starting in 2017:

_Upper-income beneficiaries would pay higher monthly premiums for outpatient and prescription coverage. Eventually about a quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries would be hit with the higher income-related premiums that only a small share of seniors now pay.

_Newly signed-up beneficiaries would pay a penalty if they also purchase private insurance that covers all or most of Medicare’s copayments and deductibles. Administration officials say such insurance encourages over-treatment.

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Patent Reform legislation is being championed in Congress by liberal Pat Leahy (D-VT) in the Senate and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) in the House. Its disturbing that Smith seems to have gone native – going so far as to write editorials with Leahy – the man who savaged Clarence Thomas and dozens of conservative judicial nominees before his committee.

There is nothing conservative about Patent Reform and Leahy knows it. Too bad Smith doesn’t. In fact, Smith is pushing the House to vote on Leahy’s bill this week.

The legislation is a direct affront to American constitutional values and precedents, violates the Constitution and contains massive giveaways to big banks and the other Wall Street finance companies – each of them TARP recipients.

The House Leadership – flush with corporate cash – appears willing to turn their back on Tea Party principles in order to reward their K-Street benefactors.  The legislation has some stalwart conservative opponents but some Republican Study Committee members appear to be sitting on their hands – or worse.

HR 1239 Turns American Patent Law into European Patent Law

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Now that elections are around the corner members of Congress who voted for the healthcare reform bill are spending a lot of time back-peddling, avoiding the topic all together or digging themselves in a deeper hole by claiming that Americans will have better healthcare with choice of doctors, and expanded coverage at an affordable price.

Let’s look at the facts:

• The bill was written by and for Big Pharma and the medical insurance industry. Senator Max Baucus a member of the congressional brain trust who brought us the healthcare reform bill admitted he never fully read it and has no idea what is even in it. Now he admits to having no clue what was in the bill he helped shove down our throats…. Unbelievable? Surprising? No just business as usual.

• Those on Medicare were told that they would see no change in their benefits and would be able to keep their physician. In fact, 11 million senior citizens will see premiums go up because of cost cutting including the removal of Medicare advantage. Furthermore, since there has been a decline in the number of physicians who currently are accepting new Medicare patients or who take Medicare at all, it is likely that seniors will not be able to keep their doctor and will pay more for less.

• The nomination of Donald Berwick to head CMS means a philosophical shift of our healthcare system to the British model of medicine that puts a premium on cost and not the needs of the individual. An example of this is the decision by the FDA remove Avastin from the medication available to treat advanced cancer because it is deemed that the good of extension of life is outweighed by the cost of the medication. Medicare has already stopped covering the use for Avastin to treat  ovarian cancer in Colorado.

It is clear that the relentless drive to reform the health care system was a cynical political push for a win at all costs. We were told what we wanted to hear and there was no attention paid to the consequences. Every single card was played – from the class card to the race card, and getting us to fight among ourselves achieved the goal of distraction. Now that the smoke has cleared it is pretty obvious that in the name of expanding healthcare to approximately 30 million more people, we have sacrificed what is best about our healthcare system – individualized patient care, the doctor patient relationship, and the drive towards innovation. However, the costs have not changed.

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Convicted felon Robert Creamer, who wrote the blueprint for the Democrats’ health care reform campaign, attended official health care signing celebrations in Washington, D.C. yesterday. He was joined by numerous activists and “community organizers” who have had their sights set on nationalizing health care and have finally achieved it. Creamer’s spouse, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, was one of the bill’s most vociferous proponents.

Creamer’s attendance was leaked by a fellow partygoer who blogged: “I just got back from the post-signing ceremony celebration at the Interior Department. It was like a family reunion–young Obama staffers mixing with warriors from the ’93-’94 health care fight. I sat next to Bob Creamer, with whom I had been attending organizing meetings back to the early 1980s on passing national health reform.”

Let us leave aside for the moment the question of why federal departments are spending taxpayer dollars to throw parties celebrating the largest expansion of government in two generations, or why felons who failed to pay federal taxes are on the guest list. The real question is how America could have allowed itself to be led to this point, and what can be done to stop it from traveling further down the road to self-destruction.

Even from a sincere lefty point of view–if I can think myself back into the mindset of my teenage years–the bill is a travesty.

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From Tim Carney in today’s Examiner:

With Democrat Martha Coakley in trouble in the Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat, Democrats could lose vote No. 60 for President Obama’s health-care bill. In response, an army of lobbyists for drug companies, health insurance companies, and hospitals has teamed up to throw a high-dollar Capitol Hill fundraiser for Coakley next Tuesday night.

COAKLEY –

Of the 22 names on the host committee–meaning they raised $10,000 or more for Coakley–17 are federally registered lobbyists, 15 of whom have health-care clients. Of the other five hosts, one is married to a lobbyist, one was a lobbyist in Pennsylvania, another is a lawyer at a lobbying firm, and another is a corporate CEO. Oh, and of course, there’s also the political action commitee for Boston Scientific Corporation.

All the leading drug companies have lobbyists on Coakley’s host committee: Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Sanofi-Aventis, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Astra-Zeneca, and more. On the insurance side of things, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cigna, Humana, HealthSouth, and United Health all are represented on the host committee.
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The American people were promised transparency under Democratic Party rule.  President Obama told the American people no less than eight times that legislative deliberations would be aired on C-SPAN, not behind closed doors. The call for reform and transparency became a rallying cry for the Obama campaign.

This process that produced the House and Senate health care legislation has been anything but transparent.

But what can be expected when the conversation starts with back door deals between the White House and both Big Health Insurance and Big Pharmaceuticals?  The health insurance industry received from Democrats, in exchange for their complicity and financial support, legislation that forces all Americans to buy their product regardless of want, need or ability to pay.  Talk about a massive transfer of wealth from younger, healthier, poorer individuals to an older, less healthy, more wealthy population.  PhRMA demanded that Obama keep certain things kept out of the health care bill in exchange for spending $150 million to support Democratic health care reform legislation.  Specifically:

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If you want to see how Obamacare will hit you and your family in the wallet, look no further than the inside of your medicine cabinet.  Open the cabinet door and you may see an antihistamine such as Claritin for allergies, pain relief medicine such as Tylenol or Excedrin, Pedialyte to prevent your kids from becoming dehydrated when they are sick, and prenatal vitamins if you and your spouse are expecting another one.

All of these items in your cabinet have two things in common.  One is that they are classified as “over the counter” (OTC) medicines and available without a doctor’s prescription. The other is that if you pay for any of these items with money in your flexible spending account (FSA) or health savings account (HSA) – and according to this guide from FSA administrator Benesyst , all of these are eligible expenses  — you will face an effective tax increase of up to 40 percent on these items in the health care bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is poised to pass the U.S. Senate.

Both bills restrict individuals with these pre-tax accounts to buying a “medicine or drug only if such medicine or drug is a prescribed” one. And ironically, this tax that will raise health care costs substantially by creating incentives for the use of more expensive prescription drugs even when OTC drugs are just as safe and effective.

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From today’s Politico:

At a meeting last April with corporate lobbyists, aides to President Barack Obama and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) helped set in motion a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, primarily financed by industry groups, that has played a key role in bolstering public support for health care reform. 

The role Baucus’s chief of staff, Jon Selib, and deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina played in launching the groups was part of a successful effort by Democrats to enlist traditional enemies of health care reform to their side. No quid pro quo was involved, they insist, as do the lobbyists themselves. 

The result has been a somewhat unlikely alliance between an administration that came into power criticizing George W. Bush for his closeness to Big Business and groups such as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the American Medical Association.

Read the whole thing here.