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Why Is Health Care Reform So Secret in Washington?
Posted by Raven on March 15th, 2009
Barry promised a more transparent government. He touts this to this day. Recently he held a meeting of the minds on health care reform, and he proposed a “down payment” on universal health care.
Senator Kennedy formed a group that has been holding secret meetings for 9 months now, on this topic. He has made this his signature issue, we all know. 9 months worth of meetings and no transparency to date…in fact, Kennedy has made the group swear to keep quiet.
Some details have come out, this article is from February:
Taking part in these meetings, as was reported last week in the New York Times, are a diverse group of stakeholders: AARP, the insurer Aetna, the AFL-CIO, the American Cancer Society, the American Medical Association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Business Roundtable, Easter Seals, the National Federation of Independent Business, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
What? No real average people included here?
And now we learn of yet another set of secret meetings, parallel to the above mentioned meetings:
A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators, after meeting for nine months behind closed doors, is nearing an agreement on the broad strokes of a health care reform bill. The so-called Gang of Nine — though its number expands and contracts depending on the meeting — is hammering out the finer points as they prepare to enter the drafting phase of the negotiations, sources from three Senate offices involved in the talks tell TIME.
Why the secrecy? Why such a hushed tone? Why hasn’t Barry insisted all of this become open and therefore more honest? Do the members of these groups think they know what’s best? Could it be that the committees don’t want the people to know they have discussed rationing care by denying payments for treatments deemed (by some) not to be worthy of their costs?
I bet they do…Didn’t this happen many years ago with Shillary’s Task Forces on health care?
“You don’t need to know what’s going on in the secret meetings to know the two biggest challenges are the individual mandate and costs,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat…
Ahh..here we go. Secrecy because the fear of the masses learning the costs of this.
President Obama, I demand transparency here. The American people have a right to know what their government is up to- especially when it comes to such an important issue as their health care coverage. This isn’t a process unless everyone is included…and we the people most of all need to be included, since WE will be paying for all this.
March 16th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
The country’s not afraid of the cost. Heck, Congress just spent more than Bush ever did, and bragged about it.
No, what the donks are afraid of is that they’ll let some “facts” out of the bag so we commoners will have something to look at and , obviously, misunderstand the nuances of what we’re being fed. We might even conclude that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out socialized medicine is a way to screw us all, and that’s what the bureaucrats are trying to do. Might even have a problem with the timelines of socialized medicine delivery to its “customers”, ’cause folks just don’t seem to want to wait weeks or months to see a doc if they’re sick.
Maybe they’re afraid we’ll figure that out if they give us any info at all.