Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Today a bunch of healthcare industry executives will announce that they plan to go shoulder to shoulder with President Obama in his quest to cut healthcare costs.  Paul Krugman is cautious but supportive.  Jon Cohn is cautious but enthusiastic.  Ezra Klein is just cautious.

Count me in Ezra’s camp.  The healthcare folks are promising initiatives that will cut the growth of healthcare spending by 1.5 percentage points a year.  Here’s Jon Cohn on that:

That may not sound like a lot of money. But it is. If indeed the industry could produce such savings, according to the White House, it’d be worth around $2,500 a year to the typical family — which, it just so happens, is what Obama promised during his presidential campaign. (Amazing coincidence, no?)

….This doesn’t mean the groups are acting out of altruism. The five big industry groups are the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA) and Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). And they’ve made no secret of their opposition to proposals for creating a public insurance plan, into which anybody could enroll. Monday’s gesture may simply be an effort to cut a deal that leaves out the public plan.

Ya think?  My problem here isn’t that the industry folks haven’t proposed detailed plans or enforcement mechanisms.  That’s to be expected.  My problem is that they’re apparently planning to argue that things like streamlined billing and “encouraging” the use of evidence-based guidelines will be enough to entirely meet Obama’s cost goals.  Cost effectiveness research?  No need!  A public plan?  No need!  It’s just like 1993, when the HMO revolution was going to change medical care so dramatically that there was no need for Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform.  That didn’t work out so well.

Anyway.  Jon argues that the optics are good even if we should continue to watch these guys like hawks.  Ezra just thinks we should just watch them like hawks.  I’m with Ezra.  Their incentives here are simply too clear to believe they want to genuinely be of help.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias offers a comment:

Whatever kind of backstabbing these industry groups may or may not do in the future, they won’t be able to take back the fact that once upon a time they stood beside the White House in agreeing that it’s possible to achieve massive cost-savings without compromising patient care. That argument may well prove hugely important, politically, to getting a package through congress.

True enough.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate