I’VE GOT SOME ‘60s music blaring in the background as I write this. I’m having a nostalgia moment.
For a brief spell in mid-July, I was having flashbacks to my youth in Chicago, when the apex of musical fun was going to a battle of the bands and dancing your heart out for hours.
It was a great concept. Line up a bunch of semi-well-known garage bands and have them all show up in one place on one night and strut their best stuff. Really, everyone was a winner – the organizers of the event, the hosting site, the bands, the attendees. And a month later, you could go to another battle and some other band would win.
I enjoyed this moment of reverie on July 8, when the healthcare reform plans were coming in waves. I’m sure each has its own cadre of groupies, waiting for the last notes of the previous band to die down before wildly applauding their faves.
Perhaps making the biggest splash was Health Care for America Now, which revved up the fans with political rallies and press conferences in more than 50 cities nationwide. This is not your typical garage band – organizers claim the coalition will spend $25 million in marketing to try and get legislators to move on healthcare reform.
While not saying it’s tied to a particular genre of reform, a consistent drumbeat could be discerned in the comments of campaign director Richard Kirsch on the coalition’s Web site.
“The insurance companies and their political allies will do everything they can to hold onto the profits they make by denying people care and shifting costs to families and businesses,” he wrote in a blog on the site.
Next on stage was America’s Health Insurance Plans, which offered its own variation on a theme with its universal access plan. It possibly was a coincidence that AHIP also announced its plan on the exact same day as the coalition, but after all, what would you expect from a battle of the bands?
After AHIP cleared out, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association weighed in with a statement, its moderate beat contrasting with both the tone of the coalition and AHIP. The Blues said the coalition’s demand that the next Congress and administration act on reform was pleasing to the ear, but the melody line blasting insurers was not harmonious. “Health Care America Now is attacking health insurers, which does nothing to help build a consensus on how to address the problem of the uninsured,” it crooned.
And its statement did a reprise of its own smash hit, “The Pathway to Covering America,” a comprehensive reform proposal that it offered on a release last year. That, of course, was a somewhat different tune than offered by the American Medical Association, which offered some other variations on the reform theme last year.
Pity the poor Congressman and his staff, in the audience for this battle of the healthcare reform bands. Their choice isn’t just picking a favorite of six garage bands; it’s trying to sort out the dizzying array of options from the cacophony of reform suggestions. They’re likely to dismiss each reform plan as being self-serving, turf-protecting, prejudiced and only a one-perspective approach to a complex multi-faceted puzzle.
Perhaps that’s what makes reform seem “So Far Away,” as Carole King used to sing in the early ‘70s. Reform plans from diametrically opposed groups that cast only one group as the villain are destined to fail.
But suppose there is a different tack? Suppose AHIP says, “You know, we know that one version of the Senate bill that would eliminate physicians’ cuts hinges on reductions in payments to Medicare Advantage plans. We voluntarily accept a 5 percent reduction in those payments to increase physicians’ payments 5 percent.”
Whoa, that would be different.
It would be a step toward payers and physicians working together. It’d suggest that the two groups might be able to work together to craft a reform plan with a consistent voice and unified objectives.
OK, I’m far away from reminiscing. This is more like hallucinating, which I didn’t experience in the ‘60s.
Well, anyway, I can’t wait for next month’s battle of the healthcare reform bands. I’m sure it will be a doozie, even if it’s just more of the same.