Lobbyists Deal Death Blows to Health Care Cost Cuts

Having KO'd most cuts, they're aiming at Cadillac tax and Medicare commission

By Caroline Miller, Newser Staff

Posted Oct 11, 2009 6:50 AM CDT

Copied

Lobbyists Deal Death Blows to Health Care Cost Cuts — Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., holds up notes for photographers, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009, before the start of the afternoon session of the committee's continuing hearing on health care reform legislation. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Who's winning the health care battle? Lobbyists, says the New York Times, who've succeeded in blocking virtually every avenue for cutting health care costs that has been put on the table. They've killed proposals that would pinch doctors, hospitals, insurers and employees who are the beneficiaries of so-called Cadillac health plans. Now they're aiming at the last two measures still standing: a scaled-back Cadillac tax and a nonpartisan Medicare cost-cutting commission.

Both labor and business lobbyists have brought out the big guns on the Cadillac tax, managing to get 157 House Democrats to sign a letter to speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing it. And drug lobbyists have won a cost-cutting agreement with Sen. Max Baucus that appears to exclude drug price negotiations through a Medicare commission. A parallel White House deal with hospital lobbyists also appears to have excluded negotiation by such a commission, and that's causing other constituencies to cry foul.
(More health care reform stories.)

Report an error