In a significant about-face for the administration, President Barack Obama apologized to Americans who have received notices that their health insurance will be canceled after assuring for years that if they liked their health insurance they could keep it. I say significant because for the past few weeks officials — from the department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid to Obama — have offered up a range of responses to this issue from indifference (blaming market forces beyond the government’s control) to mild sympathy to accentuating the positive (opportunities for better health insurance). They’ve taken those approaches rather than acknowledge that consumers felt misled, especially since health insurers canceled the policies based on Obamacare.
The Wall Street Journal’s blog Washington Wire ran a helpful timeline of the administration’s language shift on insurance since 2009 when Obama said at a town hall meeting:
“..if you are happy with the health care that you’ve got, then keep it. If you like your doctor, keep it. Nobody is going to go out there and say, you’ve got to change your health care plan.”
One suspects that the move was designed to help House Democrats who face re-election next year. About 15 met with the president to talk about constituent concerns about their health insurance and to get a progress report on HealthCare.gov.
The apology follows the resignation of CMS CIO Tony Trenkle who is leaving November 15 for a private sector job — a move widely believed to be a damage control move in the face of numerous problems with the HealthCare.gov website.
Obama has defended Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over calls for her resignation, emphasizing that she wasn’t associated with IT (unlike, say, the CIO).
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“Kathleen Sebelius doesn’t write code … she wasn’t our I.T. person. I think she’d be the first to admit that if we had to do it all over again, that there would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked, in terms of how this thing is working.”
