Healthcare Heats Up

Barack Obama opened the March 5 White House forum on healthcare on a promising note, describing action on the issue as a moral and fiscal imperative. "Our inability to reform healthcare in the past is just one example of how special interests have had their way, and the public interest has fallen by the wayside," he cautioned. "And I know people are afraid we'll draw the same old lines in the sand and give in to the same entrenched interests and arrive back at the same stalemate we've been stuck in for decades."

Ironically, Obama delivered this message to a room of "stakeholders," many of whom represent those "same entrenched interests." House Republican Joe Barton was there to brag about blocking reforms in the 1990s. Big Pharma CEOs were accorded prime speaking slots. So was the president of America's Health Insurance Plans, the trade group that battered reform proposals in the '90s with those noxious "Harry and Louise" ads. (See also Christopher Hayes on prominent opponent Rick Scott, on page 4.)

Meanwhile, the doctor who heads Physicians for a National Health Program--which would replace the for-profit model with the single-payer, publicly run program Obama has said he'd prefer if he were "designing a system from scratch"--was let in only after intense lobbying and was kept far from the microphones.

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