Robert Reich, the U.S. secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, told a conclave of healthcare executives in San Francisco Thursday afternoon that President Barack Obama needs to “start knocking heads” on health reform if he intends to get a major bill through Congress this fall.
Reich said Obama learned from some of Bill Clinton’s errors, which is why he didn’t send a detailed bill to Congress that would have been dead on arrival, like the Clinton reform proposals of the early 1990s.
But Reich, the keynote speaker at a Leadership Summit conference sponsored by Health Forum and the American Hospital Association, added that Obama probably should have started knocking heads two weeks earlier, and now risks having Congress adjourn without having settled on a bill, which could give the proposed package’s opponents more time to come up with attack plans.
Nonetheless, Reich, predicted that “you will see an Obama bill” when a joint House and Senate conference committee takes up the legislation. “That’s when Obama will play his cards,” said Reich, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a frequent commentator on economic, policy and political issues.
Reich also predicted that Obama would insist on adding some controls on medical malpractice insurance, if that’s not part of the legislation when he steps into the picture more directly, and that the president and his allies are becoming more interested in “capitation” (HMO-style pre-paid health-care) and accountable care by integrated systems like the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, as they become aware that providing coverage to the uninsured is just one key piece of the puzzle facing would-be reformers.
“The pressure, the momentum is building” to add such features to an overall reform package, Reich said, even though the American public doesn’t like HMOs, and hasn’t shown an interest in these issues.
Chris Rauber of the San Francisco Business Times, an affiliated publication, compiled this report.
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