When you let the losers dictate policy?
In the midst of the bitter 2009 battle to pass a law to provide health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, the United States Preventive Services Task Force announced in November that most women should not get routine mammograms until age 50 because the risks of the X-ray screens and surgical biopsies that often follow outweighed the benefits in younger women.Although the task force did not consider cost in its analysis, Republicans charged that its recommendation was the start of health care rationing, an accusation given prominent play on Fox News.
“That scared the bejesus out of everybody,” a top F.D.A. official said.
The Obama administration became extremely risk averse, fearing further controversies might jeopardize the passage of health care reform, agency and administration officials said. It refused many interview requests for agency officials and scientists until the health law passed.
“To the career people, that was disappointing,” a top F.D.A. official said. “Employees here waited eight long years for deliverance that didn’t come.”
A provision of the new law required chain restaurants and “similar retail food establishments” to post calorie counts on menus, a provision championed by consumer advocates and the restaurant industry, which favored standardized rules over a hodgepodge of state and local ones.
The F.D.A.’s first draft of the guidelines---approved by the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House---stated that movie theaters, lunch wagons, trains and airlines would be included. A report about the proposal in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 31, 2010, nevertheless caught the White House by surprise.
“This was the era of Glenn Beck, and the White House was terrified that Beck would get up and say this is all part of the nanny state,” a senior F.D.A. official said.
In politics, I think that's called pissing away your mandate. And boy, did this administration find every possible way to do it during their first two years in office.
I really, truly hope that the President's newfound progressive-populist voter pitch is sincere, that he's finally seen the folly of trying to placate these people and is willing to govern going forward without their participation, and that he's not simply mouthing a cynical appeal to his liberal base to stay the course until election day. I'll vote for him, obviously, since there's no palatable alternative out there, but on the larger question of motive, I think the jury is still out.
---Vitelius
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