Politics – Political News

Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) — Threats by President Barack Obama
and congressional leaders to push health-care legislation
through the Senate without Republican support may be undercut by
some Democrats whose support they need.

With bipartisan efforts stalled, Democratic leaders are
considering abandoning protocol to pass a measure with as few as
50 votes. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad and West
Virginia’s Robert Byrd, the longest-serving senator in history,
have warned against the idea. They aren’t alone.

Resorting to a budget procedure called reconciliation would
infuriate Republicans and force Democrats to settle for more
limited changes, said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at the
nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington.

“Both procedurally and politically, this may be a no-
win,” Duffy said.

Lawmakers are trying to extend coverage to millions of
uninsured Americans and rein in health-care costs that account
for about one-sixth of the economy. They are considering
mandates on employers to provide coverage, new rules for
insurers and creating a government-run program to compete with
private insurers such as Indianapolis-based WellPoint Inc.

No Republican has supported any of the plans passed so far
by four congressional committees. The Senate Finance Committee
is still seeking a compromise.

‘Not an Option’

“Failure is not an option,” Obama said in an interview
with MSNBC last month. He said that he would make an assessment
“some time in September” about whether his party should keep
working with Republicans. Senator Charles Schumer, a New York
Democrat, told reporters the deadline would be Sept. 15.

Under Senate rules, 60 members generally must agree to end
debate on an issue and hold an up-or-down vote. That would
require almost unanimous backing from Democrats, who control 59
votes in the 99-member Senate, and a few Republicans.

Democrats are looking at the reconciliation process because
it provides a way around the 60-vote requirement, allowing a
simple majority to pass measures aimed at cutting the federal
budget deficit.

While solving one problem, the process brings others. The
legislation would have to save the government money within five
years, which may require Democrats to “scale it back a lot,”
Duffy said.

To keep lawmakers from using reconciliation for legislation
unrelated to federal spending, Senate rules also forbid
provisions with only an incidental link to the budget.

Passing Test

Proposals that affect Medicare spending or offer subsidies
to help Americans buy insurance would likely pass the test;
regulatory changes may not, said James Horney, who’s worked for
the Senate Budget Committee and the Congressional Budget Office.

“It leaves a whole bunch of stuff in the middle,” said
Horney, director of federal fiscal policy at Washington’s Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Because health-care expenses are such a big part of the
budget, some experts say reconciliation can accomplish more than
lawmakers might think.

“You can easily come up with a budget justification for
doing virtually anything when it comes to health care,” said
Stan Collender, a former analyst for the House and Senate budget
committees. “It’s going to come down to judgment calls.”

What provisions can stay may be largely up to Senate
parliamentarian Alan Frumin. His rulings can be overturned with
60 votes.

Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat on the budget
committee, said in an Aug. 20 interview that, while the process
may narrow the legislation’s scope, “we’ve never stopped
talking about reconciliation.”

‘Swiss Cheese’

Conrad has repeatedly said the result would be “Swiss
cheese” for legislation. “It does not work very well,” the
North Dakota Democrat said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Aug.
23.

Conrad and Byrd warned against the procedure in April,
before the Senate on a 53-43 vote passed a budget with
nonbinding rules allowing for reconciliation.

“Using reconciliation to ram through complicated, far-
reaching legislation is an abuse,” Byrd said in an April 29
statement.

Besides Byrd and Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, one of the four
Democrats who voted against the budget was Pennsylvania’s Arlen
Specter, who said he disagreed with the provision allowing
reconciliation for health care. The fourth, Nebraska Senator Ben
Nelson, “opposes using reconciliation,” though he hasn’t ruled
out voting for it, said spokesman Jake Thompson.

‘Real Mistake’

Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, an independent who
caucuses with Democrats, told CNN on Aug. 23 the process would
be a “real mistake.” Leaders may not be able to count on votes
from Bayh and Democrat Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and
Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who prefer
bipartisan legislation.

“There are a number of moderate Democrats who are going to
feel uncomfortable voting for a bill that no Republicans
support,” said Andrew Laperriere, managing director of the
International Strategy and Investment Group in Washington.

Most aren’t tipping their hands. Aides to Bayh and Lincoln
said the senators are focused on bipartisan solutions. Officials
in Pryor’s and Landrieu’s offices weren’t available for comment.

The strategy also risks alienating Republicans, who could
retaliate by slowing work on other legislation or blame
Democrats for any future problems with their plan.

“They’ll be sorry if they do it in a partisan way,” said
Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who’s working on a
compromise, in an Aug. 26 interview.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Kristin Jensen in Washington at
kjensen@bloomberg.net .

WASHINGTON – U.S. military authorities in Afghanistan have terminated a contract with a company that was producing profiles of reporters seeking to cover a war that’s becoming increasingly unpopular with the American public.

The media analysis work being done by The Rendon Group had become a “distraction to our main mission here,” Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, director of communications for U.S. Forces Afghanistan, said Monday in an e-mailed statement.

Smith and other U.S. military officials have denied that the Rendon profiles were used to rate the coverage of individual reporters as positive, negative or neutral and that those scores influenced decisions on whether a journalist would be embedded with a military unit.

The termination is effective Sept. 1, states an information paper on the $1.5 million contract prepared by Smith’s office. U.S. Forces Afghanistan “has never denied access to any reporter based upon their past stories,” the paper says.

Rendon handled a broad range of media services, including writing press releases and analyzing coverage of U.S. operations in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said. The reporter profiles were background information on the journalist that would help commanders know more about reporters assigned to their units and what topics they’d likely ask about, they said.

Media accounts were very different, however. The latest installment of the contract was awarded to Rendon in January, but the company has done work in Afghanistan before.

Stars and Stripes, a newspaper funded partly by the Defense Department, said the profiles had been used as recently as last year to keep reporters whose prior coverage had been negative from traveling with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

With public doubts about the war in Afghanistan growing, the implication was that the military was trying to reverse the trend by giving plum embed spots to reporters who have written favorably about the war.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that just over half the respondents said the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting.

“I can’t represent the allegations made by (Stars and Stripes), since they all predate my arrival,” said Smith, who took over as communications chief in early June. “What I can tell you is that we used the contract in a manner which was absolutely appropriate.”

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman confirmed the contract had been terminated, but referred additional questions to Smith and U.S. military officials in Afghanistan. “This was their decision,” he said.

He said he was unaware of any other Pentagon contracts that screens the work of reporters.

Rendon has said that a small part of its contract involved preparing profiles of reporters preparing to travel with U.S. troops. These reviews were done only upon request, according to Rendon.

In a statement posted on its Web site, Rendon said it provides analysis of news content focused on themes such as stability and security, counterinsurgency and operational results.

“The information and analysis we generate is developed by quantifying these themes and topics and not by ranking of reporters. The analysis is not provided as the basis for accepting or rejecting a specific journalist’s inquiries, and TRG does not make recommendations as to who the military should or should not interview,” it said.

Rendon came under heavy criticism for its public relations work for the U.S. government before and during the Iraq war. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., and other critics claimed Rendon helped create a campaign aimed at convincing the public and Congress that Iraq was an imminent threat.

A 2007 investigation by the Defense Department inspector general found no evidence to support the allegations. But the classified review, made public in 2008, revealed how extensively the Pentagon has relied on Rendon for communications advice and training.

Jones, a member of the House Armed Services oversight and investigations subcommittee, said Monday that he plans to contact the inspector general’s office to determine if another review of Rendon is necessary.

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Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

The Rendon Group: http://www.rendon.com/

WASHINGTON – Five months after President Barack Obama ordered a dramatic increase in American civilian experts in Afghanistan to undergird a new military push, the so-called civilian surge is moving too slowly, U.S. officials and outside experts warn.

In place are fewer than one-quarter of the extra civilians expected to provide expertise in law, agriculture, engineering and other areas deemed vital to stabilizing Afghanistan. At that pace, according to military and political leaders, the U.S. risks losing a critical opportunity to boost the war effort amid a resilient Taliban insurgency, waning public support and the deployment of thousands more American troops.

Obama administration officials often promote the idea of linking civilian and military tools of influence, calling the strategy “smart power.” However, Anthony Cordesman, a civilian military analyst who spent July in Afghanistan advising Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander there, said the intention to beef up the civilian side does not match reality.

“We need to stop talking about ’smart power’ as if we had it,” Cordesman said at a Brookings Institution forum last week. “We don’t have the civilians in the field.”

Those at the highest levels of the U.S. military are concerned, too.

“Our ability to bring civilians in and surge those civilians … has not moved at a pace that probably we would like it to,” Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in July.

Administration officials heading the civilian buildup insist the program is on pace but acknowledge they have sprawling logistics issues. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the head of coordination of the effort at the State Department, says critics don’t appreciate the difficulties.

“We have hundreds of people in the pipeline,” Holbrooke said a month ago. “Many people have already arrived.” He added: “Most importantly, you can’t have civilians go out (into the field) unless there’s security.”

According to figures provided Monday by Holbrooke’s office, between 90 and 100 of the approximately 450 extra civilians expected to be dispatched to Afghanistan by the end of this year have already arrived. That includes 56 sent in advance of the Aug. 20 elections to staff hybrid civil-military teams working with Afghans at the local and provincial levels on development and governance.

Most of the rest of the team is to arrive in October and November. They are mainly from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Agriculture Department.

The time-consuming process of adding civilian officials in Afghanistan, officials said, begins with identifying the expertise in greatest need, then recruiting, vetting and hiring people to fill the positions.

That is followed by weeks of training for work that poses unusual challenges, including language barriers and security risks. Their deployment to Afghanistan must also be coordinated with military advances on the battlefield, so that the extra civilians do not arrive before their expertise can safely be put to use.

When Obama announced his revamped Afghan-Pakistan strategy on March 27, he said it would take more than a reinforced military effort to defeat the Taliban and establish stability in the region.

“This push must be joined by a dramatic increase in our civilian effort,” the president said. The greatest need is for agricultural specialists, educators, engineers and lawyers, he added.

The idea is to synchronize the military push with a more effective U.S. and allied civilian effort to support local and national Afghan moves to counter the Taliban. But the military push already began last month and is now intensifying in the volatile southern part of Afghanistan.

Initially, Holbrooke had planned to get the approximately 450 additional civilians there by March 2010. He has sped up that goal to December 2009. In addition to the 90-100 who have already arrived in Afghanistan, many others have been hired. They are undergoing training by the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute as well as civil-military training at the Indiana National Guard’s Camp Atterbury.

“We are on track,” insisted Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

The additions by the end of the year will approximately double the number of U.S. civilian officials in the country, Hayden said.

“We will likely need even more in 2010 and 2011,” she said, but that has yet to be settled in Washington.

In the view of Cordesman and other observers, those numbers may amount to too little, too late.

“Thus far the civilian ’surge’ has not taken place,” said Mark Schneider, senior vice president of the International Crisis Group, an independent advisory group that has a full-time representative in Kabul.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, wrote in a blog on her Web site while visiting southern Afghanistan in mid-August, “It appears to me that we don’t have enough civilians from America and other countries to work with the Afghans to provide security, basic services and governance structures once the Marines clear out the Taliban.”

McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy is hinged to close military-civilian cooperation, Collins noted, adding: “But it looks to me like the civilian side is severely understaffed for the mission.”

It’s also true that some elements of the military reinforcements that Obama identified in March have deployed more slowly than he originally envisioned.

For example, in his March announcement the president said that about 4,000 additional U.S. soldiers would be sent “later this spring” to help train Afghan security forces. That timeline quickly changed, and in fact the Army brigade designated to perform that training mission is only now arriving; it is scheduled to become fully operational on Sept 20.

John Koogler, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer who shifted in July from an office in Kabul to a civil-military unit called a Provincial Reconstruction Team in the eastern city of Gardez, said part of the civilians’ challenge is to learn how to work effectively with U.S. military partners.

“There’s a lot of room for cooperation, but that also means there’s a lot of room for people stepping on people’s toes,” he said. “There is a lot of aggravation that comes with the relationship.”

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Associated Press writer Heidi Vogt in Kabul contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
Democrats leading the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee widened their probe of the health insurance industry on Monday, seeking information on companies' policies for small businesses.

In letters sent to several insurers, including Aetna Inc, UnitedHealth Group Inc, WellPoint Inc and Humana Inc, Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman sought information on policies sold to businesses with 100 or fewer workers, citing concerns that insurers were terminating coverage when workers got sick and their claims increased.

Medica and Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield also received letters, which seek the information by September 14.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
Democrats leading the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee widened their probe of the health insurance industry on Monday, seeking information on companies' policies for small businesses.

In letters sent to several insurers, including Aetna Inc, UnitedHealth Group Inc, WellPoint Inc and Humana Inc, Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman sought information on policies sold to businesses with 100 or fewer workers, citing concerns that insurers were terminating coverage when workers got sick and their claims increased.

Medica and Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield also received letters, which seek the information by September 14.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

MEXICO CITY – Mexico is preparing for a second wave of swine flu, looking at what worked and what didn’t last spring when it banned everything from dining out to attending school in an effort to control the virus.

As the Northern Hemisphere flu season begins, the rest of the world is also studying Mexico’s experience, looking for measures to replicate and costly mistakes to avoid.

So what worked? Public awareness; rapid diagnosis, treatment and quarantine; and a near-compulsive outbreak of hand-washing.

What didn’t? Travel bans, school closures, overuse of antibiotics and those flimsy paper face masks that tangled hair, slid down necks and hid the beautiful smiles of this gargantuan city.

When swine flu first flared up in Mexico in April, the government erred on the side of caution, closing schools and museums, banning public gatherings, playing soccer games to empty stadiums and telling people not to shake hands or kiss one another on the cheek. This bustling city of 18 million became eerily hollow.

Mexican health officials say they made the right call.

“Since we were the first country affected by the flu, we didn’t know the possible magnitude and severity, so we took measures that we now know can be (focused),” said Dr. Pablo Kuri, the health secretary’s special influenza adviser.

In hindsight, Mexico’s most effective action — one now emulated around the world — was immediately telling its own citizens when the new virus was detected.

Not every country has been so candid when facing an epidemic: China was heavily criticized for its slow response to SARS in 2003, while Argentina refused to declare a national public health emergency when swine flu flared there in July.

But Mexico’s openness didn’t come cheap: Economists say the outbreak cost the country billions of dollars, mostly in losses from tourism.

“Mexico shared information early and frequently,” said Dr. Jon Andrus at the Pan American Health Organization’s headquarters in Washington. “Mexico did this at great cost to its economy, but it was the right thing to do.”

At the height of the epidemic in March, you could hardly make it a block in Mexico City without a masked public health worker, maitre d’, bus driver or store owner squeezing a dollop of antiseptic gel onto your hands.

Health experts say hand-washing offered the best defense — while the masks probably did little to stop the virus from spreading. Masks are now advised only for health care workers and people who are already infected.

Fear also left behind a cleaner city: Crews now regularly scrub subways and buses, park benches and offices — something almost unheard of before the epidemic.

“Clearly, millions of Mexicanos wore masks this spring everywhere they went, but H1N1 continued to spread,” said Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “It now seems clear that the best personal protections are regular hand-washing, avoiding crowded places, and — when it is available — vaccination.”

Many Mexicans wait until they suffer full-blown symptoms before going to a doctor, if at all. Often, people self-diagnose and go to a pharmacy to treat themselves since few drugs require a prescription. Since April, however, certain anti-flu drugs are distributed only at hospitals.

Millions of uniformed Mexican children were greeted with a dash of anti-bacterial gel as they returned to school Monday. Classes were postponed until mid-September in southern Chiapas state because of an uptick in swine flu cases in the past month. Chiapas has had 3,400 swine flu cases to date, the most in the country.

Schools nationwide are checking for possible signs of swine flu among children and teachers and are sending home anyone who seems sick. They also have added new curriculum guidelines to ensure children learn about personal hygiene and basic sanitation.

But this time, schools will be closed only if so many sick children or teachers get sick that education is compromised. Plans are already under way to continue lessons at home.

“We aren’t going to panic, but we are being more careful here this year,” said Cecilia McGregor, spokeswoman for Colegio Ciudad de Mexico, an 1,100-student private school in Mexico City.

Janitors are required to wash doorknobs every two hours, she said, and an on-campus doctor was performing checks.

Despite all the precautions, Mexico’s health advisers say the most important lesson they have learned about swine flu is that in most cases, it’s fairly mild.

Swine flu caused 164 deaths in three months in Mexico, where tobacco-related illnesses kill that number every day.

“So now we can put into context what actually happened,” Kuri said.