What Do You Think About Health Care Reform? Let Us Know…

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: As ABC News announced this week, Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson will be moderating a conversation with President Obama next Wednesday evening about health care reform.

The goal is to include divergent viewpoints from audience members and experts alike, challenging the president to answer questions from various stakeholders who agree and disagree with his proposals.

So what would you ask the president?

ABC News has been reading your questions submitted HERE and is partnering withDigg.com — engaging their 36 million user community — to learn more about what questions people have about how to mend the nation's health care system.

To submit a question, click HERE. Digg up the questions you like and bury the ones that just don't cut it.

Charlie and Diane will ask the president at least one of these submitted questions.
Tune in to ABC for “Questions for the President: Prescription for America” on Wednesday, June 24th at 10 pm ET, and “Nightline” at 11:30 pm ET, and see if your question was asked.

And we’re planning on asking some of the other questions the next day on ABCNews.com’s political Webcast, “Top Line.”

‘Top Line’ — Is Sticker Shock Snagging Health Care Reform?

ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: Democrats’ bid to remake the nation’s health care system is hitting major snags in the Senate, where the first day of mark-ups in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee has Republicans accusing Democrats of supporting runaway government spending.

At the same time, the Senate Finance Committee is delaying consideration of its own health care bill until after the Fourth of July congressional recess, amid growing concerns among members of both parties about the plan’s cost.

On ABCNews.com’s “Top Line” today, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a senior member of the HELP committee, said that while it’s impossible to know the full impact of a bill that’s only partially written, he’s estimating that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s bill would cost between $2 trillion and $4 trillion over 10 years.

“See, we don’t even have the whole bill,” Alexander told us. “We don’t have the part about the employer mandate. We don’t have the part about expansion of Medicaid — that’s several hundred billion dollars. We don’t have the part about a government insurance program. And if you take the Congressional Budget Office letter that they sent to us, and you go out three or four years until the part that we do have is actually in place, it’s more like a $2 trillion addition to the debt. So, the Kennedy bill is probably $2-to-$4 trillion on top of the debt we already have, which is absolutely impossible for us to do as a country.”

The Congressional Budget Office this week estimated that Kennedy’s bill would cost $ 1 trillion over 10 years. That estimate prompted the White House to point out that President Obama is not endorsing any specific measure.

On “Top Line,” Alexander ruled out support for a public option, which he said “would lead us to a Washington takeover of healthcare.”

He also dismissed a proposal from former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, and Howard Baker, that would include a new fee on larger businesses that don’t offer health coverage to their employees, in an effort to pay for health reform.

“I don’t like the idea of a tax on businesses,” Alexander said. “I mean, Tennessee’s a big auto state. We have a lot of auto suppliers. They do in Michigan and the Midwest as well, and every one of them is trying to think about, ‘How can I keep my costs down to keep my jobs from moving to Mexico?’ So if we put a big cost on the top of employers, we’re going to lose jobs in this country. We already saw what happened to the auto industry in the Midwest.”

Watch our full interview with Sen. Alexander, where we also get his take on Judge Sonia Sotoyayor and the scandal involving Sen. John Ensign, HERE.

Also today, we talked with liberal blogger Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake.com about her efforts — working alongside prominent conservative bloggers — to block additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Could President Obama’s plan to remake financial regulations offer another opportunity for this kind of unlikely teamwork?

Watch the interview with Jane Hamsher HERE.

Obama Aide Outlines Health Reform Strategy

ABC News’ Teddy Davis reports:

The Obama White House thinks it can win congressional approval of a government insurance option, a major element of the president’s health-care plan, by assuring lawmakers that it does not have to operate the same way as Medicare, the government insurance program for Americans over 65.

“There are policy ways of getting around the objections people have,” said Nancy Ann DeParle, the director of the White House Office of Health Care Reform.

“You don’t have to use Medicare prices, you can use something else,” she added.

DeParle, who ran Medicare in the Clinton administration, floated the possibility of using something other than Medicare reimbursement rates while participating in a roundtable with reporters sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, DC.

DeParle conceded that a public plan will not be able to win over people who have a “philosophical” objection to government involvement in health insurance. She expressed optimism, however, that a public insurance option could be crafted in such a way that it overcomes the objections of those who worry about the cost shifting which comes when the government underpays health-care providers.

Creating a government insurance option that would operate alongside private insurers has emerged as a major flashpoint in the nascent health-care battle. Obama endorsed a public option during his presidential campaign and leading Democrats want to make sure that it survives.

“The thing that’s worth going to the mat over is the public entity because that is what the bill lives or dies on,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told ABC News in an interview last month. “If the health insurance industry gets to write the bill, it will not be in there, and if that happens, we will not have done health reform.”

Because Medicare pays less than private insurance companies for some treatments in some places, conservatives worry that letting Americans enroll in a government insurance option would drive private insurers out of business and make it more difficult for Americans to find a doctor.

As recently reported by National Journal magazine, a Medical Group Management Association survey found that 24 percent of physicians’ group practices already limit the number of Medicare patients they accept.

While some progressives want Obama to make a government insurance option a non-negotiable element of health-care reform, DeParle reiterated the Obama view that the lack of a government insurance option would not automatically trigger a veto.

“I would never get into talking about vetoes,” said DeParle. “I wouldn’t do that.”

After being peppered with a series of questions about the government insurance option, DeParle quipped: “You guys are really interested in the public plan, aren’t you?”

UPDATE: The Insurance Industry Weighs In

An insurance industry spokesman, Rob Zirkelbach of America’s Health Insurance Plans, reacted to DeParle’s roundtable with reporters by saying that he appreciates that “there is a growing recognition of the significant impact that cost shifting has on consumers and employers.”

He added, however, that Obama’s openness to paying providers more than Medicare does currently will not protect providers and consumers in a budget crunch. He also expressed concerns about the market power that a government insurance provider would exercise.

“There’s always a concern when someone can be both a player and the referee,” said Zirkelbach.

Geithner calls for comprehensive regulatory reform

ABC News’ Matt Jaffe & Rick Klein report:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Tuesday will ask for new regulatory powers for the federal government to address financial institutions whose failure could threaten the stability of the nation’s financial system.

“This is an extraordinary time and the government has been forced to take extraordinary measures,” Geithner says in an excerpt of his prepared testimony for this morning’s House Financial Services Committee hearing. “We will do what is necessary to stabilize the financial system and, with the help of Congress, develop the tools that we need to make our economy more resilient and our system more just…”

“We must ensure that our country never faces this situation again. To achieve that goal, the Administration and Congress have to work together to enact comprehensive regulatory reform and eliminate gaps in supervision,” he is expected to state. “All institutions and markets that could pose systemic risk will be subject to strong oversight, including appropriate constraints on risk-taking. Regulators must apply standards, not just to protect the soundness of individual institutions, but to protect the stability of the system as a whole.”

Today’s hearing will focus on AIG, the embattled insurance giant that has received over $170 billion in government bailout funds. A “resolution authority”, the administration believes, would have enabled the government to intervene with AIG to prevent the current predicament.

The new resolution authority would give the government the ability to sell or transfer assets and components of a company. The government would have the power to renegotiate or dissolve executive compensation deals, as well as deal with risky derivatives portfolios. The goal is to make sure the country never has to confront a situation like AIG in the future.

Geithner has been vocal in recent weeks about the need for more tools to protect the nation’s economy.

“It’s a terrible, tragic thing that this country came into this crisis with such limited tools for trying to protect the economy itself from the kind of distress that’d come as the system came back down to Earth,” Geithner said Monday night at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Finance Initiative in Washington.

“Our system basically failed its most fundamental test,” he stated. “It was too fragile. It was too vulnerable to shocks. It did not adequately put in place a set of checks and balances on risk-taking that had systemic consequences. You had failures in consumer protection at the basic level cause grave systemic consequences for the system as a whole. And we have a great obligation to get this right.”

“I mean, the world is watching us,” he noted. “They’re looking at what happened in our markets. And we have got to figure out — we have got to get ourselves to the point where we put in place a stronger, more stable system that provides a better balance between efficiency and stability. We just have not gotten that balance right. And we have a great obligation as a country to move to try to restore that.”

Geithner said Monday that the government has the opportunity to turn the nation’s frustrations with the current crisis into implementing an improved regulatory framework.

“You want to take that frustration and channel it to a credible reform agenda that people can look at and say, “That has the prospect of producing a more stable system,” that preserves capacity for innovation, still does what our markets do better anywhere in the world, which is we still have the system that does the best job in the world of taking the savings and investments of people around the world and channeling them to help finance putting an idea into a growing business. We are excellent at doing that.”

“Our judgment is that that the credible solution is going to have to have a bunch of elements,” he said, previewing the government’s plans. “We’re going to have to bring a stronger form of basic oversight with better designed constraints on leverage applied to those institutions whose stability is really critical to the functioning of the system. We’re going to have to bring a better oversight framework over the markets that are so critical to how the system works.”

The financial regulatory reform framework is the latest in a series of sweeping moves made by Geithner and the Treasury Department to address the current crisis and prevent future ones. On Monday, he unveiled the administration’s plan to rid banks of the toxic assets weighing down their balance sheets, a move that sent the markets soaring by almost 500 points, the fifth biggest gain in history.

– Matt Jaffe & Rick Klein