Health Care Heavyweights

[babylonsister]

Health Care Heavyweights

By appointing Tom Daschle and Jeanne Lambrew, Obama isn't just signaling that he is serious about health care, he's putting it in the hands of people who will get it done.


Ezra Klein | December 12, 2008 | web only



(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)


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You can't pass health-care reform without understanding Congress anymore than you can win a race without knowing the route. Congress is where health-care reform happens. If you don't have the votes, you don't have reform. And so Barack Obama and Joe Biden -- the first dual-senator ticket to win since John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson -- asked former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to serve as secretary of Health and Human Services.

But, as Mike Allen reported, Daschle "did not want to be HHS secretary -- or at least was lukewarm on it -- unless he was given a health-czar role." Health and Human Services is an administrative position with a heavy load of bureaucratic responsibility. The agency's leader must oversee the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Indian Health Service, and dozens more. Worse, it's far from the Oval Office. There's no guarantee of regular contact with the president. Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services during the 1994 health-reform fight was a peripheral player at best.

Negotiations produced a new White House agency named the Office of Health Reform, which Daschle will also direct. Daschle chose for his deputy Jeanne Lambrew, a longtime government health expert, survivor of the 1990s battles, and Daschle confidante (they even co-authored a book together: Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis). "This is a way for Daschle to institutionalize his pre-eminence," says Len Nichols, director of the New America Foundation's health-policy program, "so when he's on the Hill, he's speaking for health reform. It's a reaction to the Clinton structure and shows the world he's in the White House on a daily basis."

If the Office of Health Reform is Daschle's reaction to the marginalization of Shalala, Daschle is Obama's effort to inoculate his administration against the personnel mistakes of Bill Clinton. Magaziner and Clinton may have known policy. But Tom Daschle knows legislative politics.

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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=health_care_heavyweights

[annabanana]

1. I will be impressed in direct proportion to their support for a

single payer universal health care system. The closer it is to that the more impressed I will be.

If they can't do that, show me the avenue TO that from whatever they CAN do. .