A group calling itself the One Nation Health Coalition is one of the only health care advocacy organizations heaping praise on House Speaker Paul Ryan’s health insurance overhaul legislation. It released a statement on Monday hailing the American Health Care Act (AHCA) as “built on the ABC’s of success,” and calling it a proposal that will “lower costs, expand access and increase choices by putting you — the individual — in charge.”
The organization has scored multiple television appearances on cable television over the last week, including on MSNBC and CNN. A press release quotes a column by Wall Street Journal opinion writer Kim Strassel claiming that the “fast growing” coalition is comprised of “elected officials, staffers, grass-roots groups, think tanks, trade associations, donors and corporations.”
Last week, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer argued that his party’s health care proposal enjoys broad levels of support, he listed conservative groups that “have been very supportive” of the GOP health care plan. One Nation Health Coalition was one of the four he named.
But citing the coalition as evidence of broad support is pure fantasy. The group doesn’t appear to have much of a membership or a following beyond a small handful of former Republican staff members, think-tank pundits and vendors brought together just for Ryan and his plan.
The organization has not released a membership list, conceals its website registration using an anonymous proxy site, and its foundation documents were registered last Tuesday, within 24 hours of the public release of the GOP health plan.
Requests for comment to One Nation Health Coalition Senior Adviser David Hoppe, a former lobbyist to health insurance firm Aon Corporation and former chief of staff to Speaker Ryan, were not returned.
The about page of the One Nation Health Coalition provides virtually no information beyond a one-sentence description about its goal of promoting “the passage of health reform legislation that provides for the health, health care and wellbeing of all Americans,” with no information about those involved.
The page is illustrated with an image of men and women of various ethnicities and ages beaming huge smiles. The picture is a stock photograph from iStock Getty Images, called “Diversity People Group Team Union Concept – Stock image” that can be purchased for $12.
Strassel essentially unveiled the group with her gushing column in the Wall Street Journal last month, which came out even as many conservatives were splitting with Ryan because they feel it would not go far enough in repealing the Affordable Care Act.
“One Nation Health is a clearinghouse, a place for conservatives to meet, share notes, craft messages for the public, and unite on talking points,” Strassel wrote. “It will facilitate progress between Congress and the White House.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Moffit, a health care expert who praised then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s proposal of the individual mandate, is involved with the coalition. Another think tank expert, James Capretta, maintains an affiliation with the group. Louis Brown, an attorney with a Christian health organization, is also part of the effort. Brown appeared at the White House with President Donald Trump to support Trump’s health plan at a live-streamed press event.
The governing board of the group, filings show, includes David Wilson, the chief executive of Asset Health, a firm that provides insurance firms with employee health education management services, two officials from a law firm that specializes in setting up nonprofit organizations, and Daniel Perrin, a longtime GOP activist. According to his LinkedIn profile, Perrin is the president of the HSA Coalition, an organization that was previously backed by insurance companies to promote health savings accounts — a tax savings system vastly expanded by the GOP plan. In 2013, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington called on authorities to investigate one of Perrin’s groups for failing to file the required disclosure reports after engaging in election activity.
As we’ve reported, Republican leadership has found difficulty gaining support for their plan beyond a few select industries that gain financially from the proposal, such as health insurers and medical device companies.
In a press release unveiling conservative support for the American Health Care Act, Ryan cited only one right-of-center advocacy group endorsing the effort: Americans for Tax Reform. That organization, notably, has received funding from General Electric, a company that has long lobbied for a repeal of the medical device tax — a key provision of Ryan’s legislation.
On Tuesday, following the Congressional Budget Office’s report predicting the AHCA would have devastating impact on health insurance coverage, as well as hike premiums for low-income seniors, the coalition promoted an attack on the nonpartisan office, referring to a page that highlighting the CBO’s alleged “uneven reliability when it comes to providing estimates.”
This is it…
NSA “Project Dragnet Master Database”
This reminds me of how Obama had the secretive maneuvering
of Private Insurance profiteers in the white house to
set up the ACA and how they shut out other voices and ideas.
Their website HAS lowered costs, already!
How?
Kathy Sebelius’ website asked you for your life history so insurance agents could steal your identity and defraud you out of your cash in your bank accounts.
this seriously seems to have been taken from the plot of TV series called Braindead. amazing.
ha, ha, ha. Thanks for the humor.
Mike Coffman, the moronic Congressman from District 6 in CO, the one who fled from his constituents confronting him on healthcare during a Town Hall meeting in Feb. is now apparently running TV ads on how wonderful the AHCA is going to be for everyone. I’m betting he’s part of this “coalition” .
I love these AstroTurf groups, protests, think tanks, and supporters, ey?
The Rs have the messaging machine down pat, but this might not fly if the amoral loyal opposition does its part – and quickly.
For some reason, this story brings to mind the scene in Capitalism: A Love Story, where employers take out life insurance on low-level employees and benefit from their deaths. The old “dead peasant” or janitor insurance.
Thank you, Lee Fang.
What? No message telling me this seems to be a duplicate.
My apologies.
I love these AstroTurf groups, protests, think tanks, and supporters, ey?
The Rs have the messaging machine down pat, but this might not fly if the amoral loyal opposition does its part – and quickly.
This reminds me of the scene in Capitalism: A Love Story, where employers take out life insurance on low-level employees and benefit from their deaths. The old “dead peasant” or janitor insurance.
Thank you, Lee Fang.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/14/republican-health-care-plan-breaks-all-of-donald-t/
Looks like the same ole wall street lobbyist that have ripped us off for decades! If they can pull off the HSA
(health savings accounts) scam to pay for it ….watch ….it will also soon be in the “Medicare Reform Bill”.
When Ryan and Associates say reform, they mean ….. reform it from your pocket to the pockets of wall street fat cats.
the SFB racist repubs think like –
“Well, we do own and control all the food supply and of course the prices only seem sky high to the people who cannot afford what most people can. People have the freedom of choice – buy food or not buy food, complete freedom.”
But God put food and water and land here for all people.
Genocide has many forms.
according to ryanistic repubes, the nazi labor death camps were Employment Re-Training Centers.
Here is what it is folks. Sanders and Dore FTW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxoXtDjtgn8
This hilarious blog post points to Americans sneaking into Mexico to get access to free health care.. .
https://morenewyorknews.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/mexican-border-guards-catch-579-americans-sneaking-into-mexico/
Other than that, what’s the best plan for those who get seriously injured or ill? One option is to rob a bank; if you get away with it, you can use the money to pay for your health care; if you’re caught, well you might get some health care while in jail or prison, probably more than you’d get out on the street.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/14/shannon-hurd-got-a-life-sentence-for-stealing-14-then-he-died-in-prison-from-untreated-cancer/
Ahem, …/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/…
Not surprising that a foreign journalist is unfamiliar with the long storied history of the One Nation Health Coalition probably the most important force in American history in regards to reforming healthcare to benefit all Americans the mostest.
I wonder if the Air Force knows that they have Air Force One based in a foreign country. ;^)
It’s a very big, beautiful coalition. It’s the BEST coalition. It’s gonna stop that failing Obamacare and replace it with Something Terrific and the dishonest FAKE NEWS media won’t even know what it’ll be because it’ll be a secret nobody knows, like the amazing plan I have to defeat ISIS and the rest of those illegal Muslims.
Believe me.
“conceals its website registration using an anonymous proxy site”
“an anonymous proxy site” or checking the “Add Domain Privacy” box in Dreamhost, their web hosting company? not everything is a conspiracy. just most things.
If you use domain privacy to conceal the identity of entities behind an organization that is, effectively, a lobbying enterprise, it’s a fuckin’ conspiracy.
So, add this one to your list of “most things.”
Lee, we’re gonna nickname you “Fangzilla the Dissector*.” You’re just too good at this stuff.
*I’d go for “vivisectionist,” but it might convey the right impression. ;^)
I love Fangzilla.
Lee Fang is the greatest.
Where are Dems pushing for medicare for All?
A single payer bill introduced in California is not even mentioned by Pelosi a rep. from California, while Dems are crying for horrible Obamacare. What a hypocrisy.
It is the money in medicine paid by Obamacare sham of bailing out Wall Street Medical Insurance companies or other sham before that kills people and will continue if a profit motive is not eradicated from medical field. The money is the problem number one;
An excerpt from: https://contrarianopinion.wordpress.com/random-thoughts/
MEDICAL SLAUGHTERHOUSE part 1.
All those issues of utter deterioration or collapse of medicine in the US are well known and what is shocking is suppose continuous opposition of medical profession to the universal healthcare in a form of “Medicare For All”, (as they historically opposed Medicare or FDR universal health insurance) which would be a lifeline for the decaying profession being killed for profit skimmed by medical field corporates and allowing for return of medical doctors to their appropriate role of noble servants to society, officers on duty of fundamental national interests of healthy population.
Doctors and other medical professional are not without blame. In reality in the US and unfortunately in some other countries, “successful” physicians’ true professional objective and purpose of their education, even if they deny it, has become to effectively seriously to moderately injure their heavily insured patients to the degree that would still allow them to cover exuberant fees and enormous drug costs, through private insurance or government or desperate family selling off all they got. Dying poor are left in pain to die, thrown out on the street pavements like dogs according to doctors Hypocritical, not Hippocratic oath as it was well documented on LA Skid Row few years ago.
Additionally these parasitic doctors lie to their rich patients about diagnosis, making it potentially worse, just to make experiments on humans to charge extra fees, to patent the procedure or push another useless drug. Those heavily insured patients are purposefully misdiagnosed with certain diseases such as cancer and offer surgical removal of whole organs, breasts, uterus, ovaries etc., just to make money.
Even worn out Hollywood starlets undergo televised self-mutilation for commercial propaganda purposes to insidiously entice millions of potential victims of medical crimes to be maimed or disfigured without any shred of evidence of any disease. The transplantation industry is even worse, dealing with body parts obtained through mutilation or murder of poor and abandoned children of the streets, terrorist captives or prisoners all over the world.
Unnecessary, harmful and painful testing involving hired doctors, which amounts to torture, highly addictive, with unverified or phony efficacious drug regiments are common examples of the abuse of young and elderly unaware of the purpose of procedures and often done against published research results condemning such tests, therapies or drugs as extremely injurious.
It’s that simple. Most doctors, if they intend to financially survive, want you to be sick so he/she could suck up blood from you and your family and share it inequitable manner with big corporate pharma and medical industry. And after you dead they want your body sold for profit.
Cheap preventive medicine, with 95% success rate of early intervention is practically abandoned since there is no money in it for doctors or pharma. Entire commercial food industry and tobacco conspire with medical establishment, hospitals and insurance companies to destroy health of our nation. To make us sick. Such act would amount to treason during old cold war years.
Few doctors who focus of homeostatic/homeopathic physiological balance of human organism and developed successful therapies which restore the balance no matter what disease they are dealing with are persecuted, prosecuted and/or threaten with jail and have their medical licenses revoked.
While there are charlatans in official medicine as much as in alternative medicine the truth is that except for direct physical trauma no drugs or “doctor’s authority” is really needed since our organism immune system and family social support is fully capable for “curing” 95% of our illnesses. And hence most of hard homeopathic drugs are not needed either except for placebo like auto-suggestive effect while true cure comes from within us and from family, human support.
Pushing for healthy immune system capable to handle most of the common diseases is not some crazy anti-medicine ploy, since the modern medicine s has it role but this role has been abused for money destroying most of its benefit to the people in medical need.
In fact, the long known in the alternative medicine circles and Chinese medicine, importance of restoration of healthy immune system before cancer is even treated is a hot topic right now in the government and corporate cancer research field, where researchers now are focusing on the assisting the immune system in killing the cancer cells by itself.
Just read Prof. Eugene Strauss, of State University of New York, College of Medicine, who died April 2, 2011, book “Medical Marvels” (no, it is not about bio-tech) and other books to understand the whole, as he put it “controversial, political issue” of healing” of a human being as an expression of humanity of the social order.
The healing power is within us and there is nothing magical about it, we just have to escape prejudice and illusions peddled by those who use medicine as yet another tool of social control for profit.
To the extent that there is any truth here, it is limited to the most conservative segments of the medical profession, such as those represented by the AMA — a dinosaur among docs and decidedly not representative of physicians generally.
As for the rest of the pasted screed, it is both semi-literate and (at least) borderline libelous of an entire profession.
As to the “semi-literate” accusation, could you understand it?
Fuck libel.
Actually, “semi-literate” was an attempt at kindness. It’s a bunch of near-word-salad gobbledygook and trying to understand it would be a silly waste of time.
Does that answer your question?
Yes.
https://contrarianopinion.wordpress.com/about/
Nice unhinged? rant. Next time though, just leave the URL to your blog so we can ignore it and pass on the diatribe. We’re here to read TI, not your site.
Here, let’s make up a group and we will call it the One National Save Obamacare Coalition and provide virtually no information beyond a one-sentence description about our goal of promoting “the salvation of Obamacare legislation” thus providing for the health, health care and wellbeing of all Americans,” and offer no information about those involved.
Oh, I forgot we do not own the crooked politicians or the corporate media so that won’t work. It would even serve them in that we would be following their lead in not even addressing what the citizenry really wants that being single payer and to hell with the bloodsucking middlemen.
“The organization has not released a membership list, conceals its website registration using an anonymous proxy site, and its foundation documents were registered last Tuesday, within 24 hours of the public release of the GOP health plan.”
It’s also interesting looking at the number (and types) of businesses – Bizapedia, for example, lists 28 of them – sharing the organization’s stated, registered physical address, and then tracing all the happy connections.
Yes, interesting.
Thanks for that