House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last Thursday unveiled the latest health care reform bill, the Affordable Health Care for America Act (H.R. 3962), with floor consideration possible even as early as Friday. Jennifer Ruben at Commentary reports the legal element, “A Gift for Lawyers“:

A friend points out a little nugget of absurdity and political mendacity in the Pelosi health-care bill. Remember Obama’s effort to try a “test” for tort reform? (We don’t actually need a test, since it has worked to lower medical malpractice coverage and help increase access to doctors in states that have tried it.) Well, Pelosi’s bill has an anti-tort-reform measure. On pages 1431-1433 of the 1990 spellbinder, there is a financial incentive for states to try “alternative medical liability laws.” But look — you don’t get the incentive if you have a law that would “limit attorneys’ fees or impose caps on damages.”… [This] will go a long way toward ensuring that tort lawyers remain rich, malpractice insurance remains high, and unnecessary defensive medicine remains a fixture of the health-care system.

• The Hill, “House healthcare bill cuts incentives to states that cap attorney fees, damages.”
• James Copland, Manhattan Institute, New York Post, “Tort-Bar Treat”
• Stanley Goldfarb, M.D., Weekly Standard, “The Malpractice Problem — We can’t have health care reform without tort reform.”
• Lawrence McQuillen, Pacific Research Institute, Wall Street Journal, “CBO Underestimates Benefits of Malpractice Reform.”
• Dennis Prager, “A Society that Venerates Lawyers More than Doctors”

Various items of interest on the Congressional debate over health care legislation.

President Obama met at the White House with doctors who support his push for changes in the U.S. health care system. Many attendees belonged to Doctors for America — website here — grew out of the campaign group, Doctors for Obama.  Members overwhelmingly support a public option.

Washington Examiner reports Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has canceled the Columbus Day recess to continue the work on health care legislation: “Senate Democratic leaders had hoped to begin debating a health care reform bill by next week, but that may slip to the following week because one version of the bill is still stuck in the Finance Committee. The panel had planned to vote on a bill by Tuesday, but it is awaiting cost estimates for the legislation from the Congressional Budget Office.”

U.S. News:”Frist Predicts Tax, Premium Hikes With Democratic Health Bill,” based on an interview with the former Senate Republican Leader, Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee:

“A plan that I would support would be a plan that would bring in 20 million uninsured, scaled back the benefits toward catastrophic care, and thirdly had incentives for a value-based rather than a volume-based healthcare system,” said Frist, who’s promoting his new autobiography, A Heart to Serve: The Passion to Bring Health, Hope, and Healing. However, he said, none of the current bills meets his requirements. As for the Senate Finance Committee bill, he added, “clearly without amending it, I could not vote for it.” His biggest complaint: “It doesn’t bend the cost curve sufficiently for me.”

The current Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is now on the Senate floor opposing not just the legislation but the process. He says the real focus should not be on the Senate Finance Committee, but on the House/Senate conference committee, which he predicts will move the health-care legislation to the left. The core of the bill is already wrong, he says, based on Medicare cuts, higher taxes, and more government. But the final legislation will be worked out “out of sight” of the American public.

We see The Wall Street Journal opinion section has now created a website with editorials and op-eds on the President’s health care plans (they’re opposed), “The WSJ Guide to ObamaCare.”

From last night’s speech:

Now, finally, many in this chamber — particularly on the Republican side of the aisle — have long insisted that reforming our medical malpractice laws can help bring down the cost of health care.  (Applause.)  Now — there you go.  There you go.  Now, I don’t believe malpractice reform is a silver bullet, but I’ve talked to enough doctors to know that defensive medicine may be contributing to unnecessary costs.  (Applause.)  So I’m proposing that we move forward on a range of ideas about how to put patient safety first and let doctors focus on practicing medicine.  (Applause.)  I know that the Bush administration considered authorizing demonstration projects in individual states to test these ideas.  I think it’s a good idea, and I’m directing my Secretary of Health and Human Services to move forward on this initiative today.  (Applause.)

In an open letter introducing the National Association of Manufacturers’ 2009 Labor Day Report, NAM President John Engler warned that a nascent economic recovery could easily be reversed. Below is the text of the John Engler letter, “Policies will determine whether U.S. will experience recovery or reversal,” and the full report is available here.

Labor Day 2009 arrives just as the U.S. economy shows signs of reviving from the deepest, lengthiest and most painful economic downturn since the Great Depression.

With this report, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) documents the harsh conditions that have plagued the U.S. and global economies during this financial crisis and recession. Consumer spending, business investment, housing and exports have dropped more than in any time since WWII. Unemployment has soared.

We naturally focus on the downturn’s impact on the manufacturing sector, which has lost nearly two million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Industrial production has plummeted 16.4 percent during the same period.

Still, the NAM’s 2009 Report is a forward-looking document, one that identifies many reasons why Americans can expect the economy to grow in 2010 and beyond. Whether it’s improvements in the housing market, rising activity in European countries, or new orders for capital goods, indications are that a recovery may be in the early stages.

Most strikingly, the analysis by the NAM’s chief economist, David Huether, finds that over 40 percent of the manufacturing jobs lost during the recession may be regained. There is legitimate concern about the possibility of a “jobless recovery,” but the projections estimate a return of 913,000 manufacturing jobs by 2014 – bringing total manufacturing employment back up to 12.7 million.

So there are grounds for optimism, but even greater grounds for caution – caution by officials at the local, state and especially the federal level. A recovery could stall out or even shift into reverse if Congress and the Administration enact policies that discourage investment, hamper flexibility, or raise the costs of doing business in the United States. Prospects for good jobs, a strong manufacturing sector and a growing economy depend on U.S. global competitiveness. (continue reading…)