for
HEALTH CARE/STEELMAN
...www.bushwatch.com
for
HEALTH CARE/STEELMAN
...www.bushwatch.com
mentioned as a Bush cabinet-level player, married lobbyist Deborah Steelman calls insinuations "repugnant and sexist"
reverse chronology of the story...bush watch... roll call... village voice... bakersfield californian (8 stories)...
Author of GOP Health Bill Linked to Lobbyist
An unsettling story about a key Republican congressman's "intensely personal" relationship with a lobbyist involved in the health-care debate is being reported by the Bakersfield Californian. The paper claims that Bill Thomas, chair of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health, has a relationship with a Washington lobbyist for health-care firms that raises conflict-of-interest questions. Thomas, who has represented Bakersfield since 1978, was the chief architect of the Republicans' watered-down bill on prescription-drug benefits for Medicare recipients.
The lobbyist is Deborah Steelman, who represents a range of health-care firms, from drug companies to HMOs to nursing homes. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Steelman's lobbying income in 1997, representing firms such as Aetna, Cigna, Prudential, and Goldman Sachs, totaled $2 million. A former Reagan administration official, she serves as a health-policy adviser to George W. Bush and is a key fundraiser for Bush and for congressional Republicans. She has been mentioned as a possible appointee for secretary of Health and Human Services in a Bush administration.
Thomas and Steelman, both of whom are married, refused the paper's requests for interviews. According to the Californian, its stories were initially based on secondhand reports of conversations with Cathy Abernathy, Thomas's congressional aide, who told friends she was worried that a relationship between the congressman and the lobbyist would hurt Thomas as well as damage Abernathy's career.
"I have no conflicts of interest with any individuals or lobbyists or constituents who work with me," Thomas told the paper. "I've worked with Deborah Steelman closely for the past two years, [and] have known her for 10 years; she promotes the Republican position in health-care issues as well as anyone, [and] was instrumental to our efforts on the Medicare Commission."
Last week Steelman issued a statement, which said in part: "I have professional relationships with many members of Congress, including Congressman Bill Thomas. I was appointed by Senator Lott to the Medicare Commission of which Congressman Thomas served as co-chair with Senator John Breaux. I spent long hours on the Commission's work and met often with Congressman Thomas. The insinuations in the Bakersfield newspaper are repulsive. To suggest I would stoop to 'an inappropriate relationship' to achieve legislative results is repugnant and sexist." --James Ridgeway, VV, 7/5/00
In 1998 the Texas comptroller's office reported that "health conditions in the Texas-Mexico border are among the worst in the U.S., so distressful that reports on health conditions suggest a remote country in need of medical missionaries, not a part of Texas....Cases of hepatitis A, a gastrointestinal virus borne by contaminated food and water, are four times as common in the Rio Grande Valley as in the rest of Texas." (note) A story in the NYT concludes that Texas "ranks near the top in the nation in rates of AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis and teenage pregnancy, and near the bottom in immunizations, mammograms and access to physicians."
Yet, Texas Governor George W. Bush has never even given a speech on Texas' health care problems and his plans for dealing with them. "George W. Bush became governor in 1995, he has not made health a priority, his aides acknowledge. He has never made a speech on the subject, his press office says. His administration opposed a patient's bill of rights in 1995 before grudgingly accepting one in 1997, and fought unsuccessfully to limit access to the new federal Children's Health Insurance Program in 1999." For a man who is trying to convince the nation's voters that he is a new kind of Republican, a "compassionate" conservative, his actions are singularly lacking in compassion when it comes to the health needs of his fellow Texans, particularly Hispanics.
"The worst health in Texas, with disease rates at Third World levels, is on the Mexican border. Almost a fourth of the state's population lives in 43 border counties along the 1,264 miles of the Rio Grande from El Paso to Brownsville, and as far from the river as San Antonio, about 125 miles. Except for San Antonio, it is a poor area. El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville are four of the five poorest cities in the country. About a third of the population lives below the poverty level. All but two of the counties have a shortage of doctors."
Nearly all the leading health care professionals, administrators, and officials agree that the key to better health care for Texans is better insurance, and the statistics show that things have gotten worse under Bush. "Health insurance coverage in Texas has been stagnant for years. According to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, among Texans 19 to 65 years old, 27.5 percent were uninsured in 1998, compared with 19.7 percent for the nation. In 1994, before Mr. Bush took office, the Texas percentage was 27.8 and the national figure 18.6 percent. Among poor children the coverage was much worse. In 1998, 39.1 percent of Texans under 18 living at no more than twice the poverty level lacked insurance, compared with 25.7 percent nationally. In 1994, 36.7 percent of poor children in Texas and 22.8 percent of poor children nationally were uninsured."
Yet, when Bush had an opportunity to reverse the trend of more uninsured Texans, he actively fought against providing insurance to the needy. "Of the 1.4 million to 1.5 million children without health insurance, the number may drop sharply in the next year when Texas finally starts enrolling children in the children's health insurance program, known as CHIP, which was enacted by Congress in 1997. Mr. Bush let the question wait until the 1999 legislative session, and fought to limit its coverage to children with family incomes up to 150 percent of the poverty line, although the federal law allowed covering children up to 200 percent of the poverty level. The Bush approach would have excluded 200,000 of the 500,000 who became eligible when the legislature insisted on the higher level."
"The reason given at the time for the Bush position, legislators said, was a fear that a big new program would be costly by itself and turn up a "spillover" of many thousands who were already eligible for Medicaid, which has an income ceiling of 100 percent of poverty." This scenario suggests Bush sacrificed uninsured Texans to his tax-cut package, which gives the state's surplus to his wealthy, property-owning financial backers rather than to poor Hispanics in the Texas border counties. Another reason offered by legislators at the time was that the Theocrats didn't want federal health care money to include care for teen age pregnancies, including abortions, and Bush supported their position.Even after the Dems in the legislator insisted on a 200 percent CHIP rate, the Bush-Theocrat faction attempted to split the rate, keeping the 150% rate for kids between 11 and 18 years old. This scenario suggests Bush sacrificed uninsure Texans to satisfy his Christian conservative backers.
When it became time to appoint a new state Commissioner of Health in 1997, Bush found an anti-abortion advocate, Dr. William Archer, who was willing to assert that, in spite of Texas' terrible health statistics, providing insurance to the uninsured would not change anything. "Archer, the son of retiring U.S. Rep. Bill Archer, R-Houston, has been a longtime proponent of abstinence-based sex education. As a midlevel federal official under former President George Bush, he was the chief defender of a now-defunct regulation -- the so-called gag rule -- that barred workers at tax-supported health clinics from discussing abortion with pregnant clients," writes Scott Greenberger
Archer was the perfect do-nothing appointee for Bush, because his past record suggested he was more interested in calming the fears of the anti-abortion Theocrats than getting the uninsured better health care through insurance. As Archer recently said, ""If I were to go to a Hispanic community and say, `Well, we need to get you into family planning,' they say, `No, I want to be pregnant.'. "It doesn't work very well." Archer's sub-text to this comment is don't bother to spend money on a culture that doesn't use it as he sees fit. "Society values pregnancies in teen-agers as bad, but certain communities within society may feel differently," he said. Apparantly, Bush's idea of a health care czar is one who worries about health care spending for abortions and family planning, rather than for health care needs across the board.
Bush's national health care plan promises more of the same--a plan that is created by economists after the tax-cut budget is in place, a plan that has been formulated by those who represent the financial interests of the wealthy Bush backers. (see Kondracke10/6) . Deborah Steelman, his major health care adviser is a lobbyist for the health care industry. Ms. Steelman earns a living as a Washington insider, a lobbyist representing the interests of Cigna, Pfizer, Aetna, United Healthcare Corporation, the Healthcare Leadership Council, and Prudential. Her interests dovetail nicely with Bush's, since he has received maximum campaign contributions from many executives at Prudential, Cigna, and Aetna, and he has many close friends with close financial ties to the Health Care industry, such as Richard Rainwater, his billionaire friend and number one financial mentor.
Steelman identifies herself as his "senior advisor" on the five member Bush dream team. In a story in the Albion Monitor, Jeremy Breningstal describes the other members: "The team is composed of John Goodman, from the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank; R. Glenn Hubbard, a market-leaning economics professor at Columbia University; Donald Moran, president of a health care consulting group, Timothy Muris, a law professor and recently a consultant for Aetna in an anti-trust case; and William Roper, senior vice president at Prudential HealthCare before becoming dean of the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. None are practicing physicians or consumer advocates, and their philosophy is decidedly not patient-oriented." (more)
Steelman chaired a Medicaid committee for Poppy during his presidential tenure. Even then, consumer groups chided her selection because she so clearly favored the industry over the consumer. As one GOP observer recently said about a report she made to the House Republican Conference, she was like, "the NRA coming in and writing gun legislation, except with her there was no disclosure." Breningstal: "Bush is staying miles away from any sweeping reform of the health care industry, and the needs of 45 million uninsured Americans -- a number expected to rise to as high as 60 million in the next decade." ---Politex, 4/11/00
Note The Comptroller's report referred to was "Bordering the Future: Challenge and Opportunity in the Texas Border Region," researched by John Sharp's staff and written by Kelly Fero. Among other things, the analsysis found that if the 43 Texas border counties (in itself, a new way to define the border region) were the 51st state, it would rank first in poverty, first in unemployment, first in adults without a high school degree, second in death rate from hepatitis per-capita personal income. Lt. Governor Rick Perry's response when "Bordering the Future" was released? "It should be called 'Bordering on the Obvious.'" Indeed... which makes it even more unfortunate that the report's 50+ specific recommendations have thus far been ignored.
In the George W. Bush lexicon the word "reform" means to pass whatever bill he's pushing. Here's how he would use the word in a sentence: "I'm going to reform that bill when it comes to my desk." When he tells the Washington Post's Terry M. Neal that he's "the reformer with the results," Houston citizens start laughing but end up coughing. The way Bush "reformed" Houston's air, making it ground zero of the nation's smog center, is he called in lobbyists and other representatives of Texas' pollution causing energy corporations, who happen to contribute a lion's share of cash to the governor's political campaigns, and had them help draft a new energy bill for possible passage in the next legislature. The resulting bill grandfathered in the offending polluters so that they would not have to follow the most recent environmental guidelines and jawboned them to do better in the future, but in the long run it was up to them. Since it was up to the polluters to clean the air, the air remained dirty, thrusting Houston into the lead as the nation's smoggiest city. Now Bush wants to do the same thing with the nation's health care system. Deborah Steelman, his major health care adviser is a lobbyist for the health care industry.
Ms. Steelman earns a living as a Washington insider, a lobbyist representing the interests of Cigna, Pfizer, Aetna, United Healthcare Corporation, the Healthcare Leadership Council, and Prudential. Her interests dovetail nicely with Bush's, since he has received maximum campaign contributions from many executives at Prudential, Cigna, and Aetna, and he has many close friends with close financial ties to the Health Care industry, such as Richard Rainwater, his billionaire friend and number one financial mentor. Steelman identifies herself as his "senior advisor" on the five member Bush dream team. In a story in the Albion Monitor, Jeremy Breningstal describes the other members: "The team is composed of John Goodman, from the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank; R. Glenn Hubbard, a market-leaning economics professor at Columbia University; Donald Moran, president of a health care consulting group, Timothy Muris, a law professor and recently a consultant for Aetna in an anti-trust case; and William Roper, senior vice president at Prudential HealthCare before becoming dean of the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. None are practicing physicians or consumer advocates, and their philosophy is decidedly not patient-oriented."
Bush's Texas record of Health Care in Texas is market-driven and rewards those with the money. As Professor Hubbard has said, ""We have the best health care in the world and we pay a lot for it." Answering attacks from Democrat Gary Maura in the last governor's race, Bush said he felt every citizen had the right to go outside his HMO for the doctor of his choice if he had the money to pay for it. Meanwhile, Texas has one of the highest uninsured health care rates in the country. And there are 600,000 uninsured children in Texas who are eligible for Medicaid. It's only a matter of proper administration, since the money comes from the feds, not Texas. Hospitals throughout Texas are cutting their services and closing their doors because of Federal cutbacks, and Texas has not picked up the slack. Yet, Bush brags about his $2 billion tax cut, a tax cut that has not reached most citizens in Texas. He also brags about the Texas Patient Protection Act, which was passed during his watch, but Texas observers say that his input was negative.
And what Health Care "reform" does Bush propose on the federal level? Bush's " limited list of goals -- privatizing Medicare, providing pharmaceutical drug benefits, and limiting a patient protection legislation -- all mesh closely with policies Steelman has been advocating in her lobbying capacity on the Hill all year," writes Breningstal. A National Observer article had Bush proposing that tax cuts be given to the poor who can't pay for insurance, but Breningstal reports that Poppy suggested the same thing during his administration and it didn't work, partly because the tax reduction in the income bracket of the poor hardly covered medical costs.
Getting back to Dubya's Health Care Senior Advisor, it turns out she chaired a Medicaid committee for Poppy during his presidential tenure. Even then, consumer groups chided her selection because she so clearly favored the industry over the consumer. As one GOP observer recently said about a report she made to the House Republican Conference, she was like, "the NRA coming in and writing gun legislation, except with her there was no disclosure." Breningstal: "Bush is staying miles away from any sweeping reform of the health care industry, and the needs of 45 million uninsured Americans -- a number expected to rise to as high as 60 million in the next decade." Bush is a reformer? You've got to be kidding. ---Politex, 2/9/00
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