Nearly two dozen advocacy organizations have teamed to oppose legislation that would limit patients' right to malpractice awards.

While public attention might be on this week’s second anniversary of healthcare reform — and next week’s legal challenges against it at the Supreme Court — consumer advocates already have moved onto the next battle for patients’ rights in Congress.

Nearly two dozen consumers’ groups wrote a letter Wednesday to GOP House Speaker John Boehner, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, and other lawmakers to object to H.R. 5, the Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-cost, Timely Healthcare (HEALTH) Act.

Although its supporters argue the legislation — which has been on the table since Republicans retook control of the House last year — would help contain healthcare costs, opponents say the opposite would be true.

The letter to congressional leaders signed by Consumer Watchdog and 21 other prominent public interest groups called the legislation “an outrageously broad proposal that covers not only cases involving medical malpractice, but also cases involving unsafe drugs and nursing home abuse and neglect.”

The organization calls on Congress to “focus on improving patient safety and reducing deaths and injuries, not insulating negligent providers from accountability, harming patients and saddling taxpayers with the cost, as H.R. 5 would do.”

H.R. 5 would cap non-economic malpractice damages at $250,000 per case.

The letter from the consumer groups cites an Institute of Medicine study more than a decade old, which found up to 98,000 deaths in hospitals due to medical errors. Experts agree that there has been no meaningful reduction in medical errors in the United States since then, the letter writers say.

For example:

• About 1 in 7 hospital Medicare patients experience a medical error, 44 percent of which are preventable. These errors cost Medicare $4.4 billion a year.
• Medical errors occur in one-third of hospital admissions, as much as 10 times more common than previously estimated.
• Lost lives and disabilities caused by medical error cost between $393 billion and $958 billion in 2006, equivalent to 18 percent to 45 percent of total U.S. health-care spending.

The medical malpractice liability limits in H.R. 5 are modeled after a California state law that failed to reduce malpractice insurance premiums or overall health costs, the purported aim of the federal bill, according to Consumer Watchdog, one of the signatories to the letter. Medical malpractice insurance premiums increased 450 percent in California in the 13 years after liability limits were enacted, the organization adds. California voters approved an insurance rate regulation law in 1988. In the first three years after the insurance regulation law was approved, malpractice premiums fell 20 percent and then stabilized even as premiums across the country continued to fluctuate, Consumer Watchdog says.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

The Senate's Democratic women are pressuring House Speaker John Boehner to drop his fight to restrict access to birth control.

In observance of International Women’s Day, all 12 Democratic women senators sent a letter Thursday to House Speaker John Boehner calling on him to rescind his pledge to push forward with efforts to restrict women’s access to contraception after the Blunt amendment was defeated in the Senate.

The senators’ letter comes in the wake of Boehner’s public pledge to continue efforts to limit birth control access in the House, where a similar version of the Blunt amendment has over 200 co-sponsors.

“Women are tired of being targets for a political strategy that endangers their health care and they want it to stop,” the senators’ letter says. “It’s time for you to put an end to the attacks on women’s health care and to work with the Senate to get back to the American people’s top priority: creating jobs and boosting our economy.”

Defeated last week, the Blunt amendment would have exempted nearly all employers from President Obama’s new rule mandating coverage of birth control for women. The amendment failed in a close 51-48 vote. Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine was the only Republican to vote against the measure.

Boehner’s promise to continue fighting also comes despite a national outcry from women, the overwhelming majority of whom have used contraception at some point in their lifetime.

“We are asking that you abandon the promise you have made to bring legislation to the House floor similar to the Blunt amendment, which was defeated in the Senate last week, and which would turn the clock back on women’s access to health care,” the senators write. “At a time when 99% of sexually active women in the U.S. have used birth control, its role in the lives of women and their families is hard to understate…. That is why the recent Republican attacks on birth control access have been so eye-opening for American women. For most American women, the battle over contraception was settled a half century ago.”

The letter was sent by Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

Voters Oppose Birth Control Restrictions

Meanwhile, the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner polling organization released results of a opinion survey which finds that nearly half of voters say that if their member of Congress supported the Blunt amendment (first introduced by Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri), it would make them less likely to support him or her. A near consensus exists that women should have access to birth control, that insurers should cover it, and that the decision to use birth control is a private one, the pollsters say.

By wide margins, battleground voters believe that Democrats do a better job on access to birth control, women’s health issues, and abortion. While they give the Republicans an advantage on protecting religious freedom, voters are split on which party would respect their individual religious faith, the pollsters say.

Voters strongly oppose the Blunt amendment. A majority believe that religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges should not have a religious exemption. Nearly half say that they would be less likely to support a candidate for office if he or she supported the Blunt Amendment, including a majority of independents, the pollsters say.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted the opinion survey on behalf of EMILY’s List and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund to explore the impact of the birth control debate on voters in eight battleground Senate states.

The poll was conducted between February 27 and March 1, among 800 likely voters in Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It has a margin of error of +/- 3.46 percent.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Image: Democracy Corps

For the first time since the 2010 election, Democrats have taken the lead in the congressional vote and this poll shows that third-party defections on the presidential ballot could prove devastating for the Republicans, according to a new poll out Friday.

Moreover, the intensity gap has shifted in the Democrats’ favor and Democrats have moved to parity on the economy after 28 months in deficit, the Democracy Corps poll finds.

More than half of all voters (53 percent) say that the more they watch the Republicans in Congress, the less they like what the Republicans have to offer; only 39 percent say they like it more — a 14 point margin. The country is equally repelled by the Republican presidential contest (53 to 38 percent). The style of their politics and governance is driving away independents. And more than half of white non-college voters, who were key to Republicans’ wins in 2010, do not like what the Republicans in Congress are offering — a staggering result, the pollsters say.

Key findings:

• For the first time in two years, Democrats are winning the congressional ballot (47 to 44 percent), the result of a major shift among independents. Democrats are now winning independents by 2 points — a net 9-point shift among independents since October and a net 19-point shift since August. In June, Democrats were losing independent men by a margin of 29 points. That gap has closed to just one point. In 2010, Democrats lost seniors by a 23-point margin. That gap has closed to just 7 points.
• The Republicans have lost their advantage on the economy. The parties are now even on which party would do a better job on the economy, a net 7-point shift since October. While most improvements in this poll are due to Republicans faltering, here Democrats have gained 5 points on trust to handle the economy.
• John Boehner’s favorability has fallen off significantly — 44 percent now give the House Speaker a negative rating with three in 10 voters giving him a very negative rating (under 25 on our 100-point scale.)
• Two-thirds of all voters now say they disapprove of this Republican Congress and its approval rating has hit a new low in our tracking — 26 percent. The decline has come from a complete drop-off of those who “strongly approve” of this Republican Congress — down to 8 percent, also the lowest in our tracking.

The Presidential Contest Full of Peril

The race for president remains very close, though showing the first signs of improvement for Barack Obama. With his approval rating at 44 percent and vote at 47 percent, you have a close contest. But Obama’s strong support is up 5 points, has more winnable voters than Romney and has made some important recent gains with key swing groups. Obama is now winning 40 percent of white-non college voters, his highest total among that group in a year. Among independents, Obama now trails by just 3 points—cutting his deficit in half since October.

Romney is not popular -– only 31 percent of all voters, and only 27 percent of independents, give him a warm, favorable rating. Obama, on the other hand, remains personally popular, with nearly 50 percent giving him a warm, favorable rating. As a result, Mitt Romney has not been able to energize voters. Voters, especially Republicans, are ready to bolt to independent candidates in large numbers — indeed, remarkable numbers.

This new poll shows that as a third-party candidate, Republican Ron Paul would take 18 percent of the vote in a match-up against Obama and Romney. Almost all of this comes at Romney’s expense. Nearly tied in a head-to-head match-up against the president, Romney’s vote plummets when Paul is added to the ballot, losing 12 points of his vote share.

The libertarian-leaning Texas congressman, Paul has neither announced any plans for a third-party campaign if he should lose the GOP nomination, but neither has he entirely closed the door on the idea.

The poll results are based on a national survey of 1,000 likely 2012 voters conducted January 8-11, by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for Democracy Corps. Its overall margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

The proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline runs through a sensitive aquifer in Nebraska.

Congressional Republicans, starting with House Speaker John Boehner, clearly want to exploit disagreement on the left over the controversial Keystone XL project to help force President Obama to reverse course and give the proposed transnational pipeline a quick go-ahead.

Obama last month announced that his administration would put off, until 2013, a decision to approve the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

The president delayed action on the pipeline after the independent State Department inspector general launched an investigation of possible conflicts of interest in the project’s environmental review process.

(You can read a complete explainer of the Keystone XL pipeline, and its controversies, online here.)

Republicans began howling over the delay almost immediately, with GOP lawmakers in both the House and Senate introducing bills to force Obama to approve the Keystone KL pipeline before the inspector general probe is complete. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a key opponent of the pipeline project, called such legislation to short circuit the review “completely inappropriate.”

While the Keystone project has sparked great outrage among many on the left, drawing thousands of demonstrators to the White House to oppose any approval of the pipeline, that opposition isn’t universal, however.

Organized labor has consistently supported approval of the pipeline for the jobs it would create. One union leader, for instance, called Obama’s decision to delay action on the pipeline based on “political expediency, rather than a decision based on facts and the national interest.”

Republicans want to use that discord to their advantage to push the pipeline to approval.

Boehner’s office published a blog post titled, “Labor Unions Blast White House Delay of Job-Creating Keystone XL Project, House GOP Plans Action.”

Although organized labor typically has been a stalwart ally of Obama’s, and of Democrats generally, several union representatives complained about the delay of the Keystone XL project at a Republican-led House hearing on the matter.

Boehner has used the pipeline delay to swipe at Obama’s push to create jobs.

“President Obama says ‘we can’t wait’ to act on jobs, and yet that’s exactly what his decision on the Keystone energy project has out-of-work Americans doing: waiting,” the speaker says. “That’s unacceptable. The American people have already waited years for President Obama and Washington Democrats to deliver on their promise of economic growth and job creation, to no avail.”

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Thousands of protesters demonstrated near the White House to oppose the planned Keystone XL pipeline.

President Obama has come under increasing criticism, largely from Republicans, for the decision to delay approval of a massive and controversial transnational pipeline.

More than 50, mostly Republican, members of the House sent the president a letter decrying his administration’s decision to put off a decision on the proposed 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

The Obama administration earlier this month pushed back action on the pipeline to 2013 at the earliest after a huge outpouring of opposition to the project. Thousands of protesters had converged on the White House to demontrate against it.

Because the project would cross the U.S. border, it requires a permit from the State Department.

Connie Mack (R-Fla.), along with 56 other members of the House, signed a letter recently demanding the president reconsider his decision to delay approval of the pipeline.

That letter followed earlier criticism from GOP House Speaker John Boehner, who opened fire against the delay after a meeting with the premier of Alberta to discuss the project.

“President Obama says ‘we can’t wait’ to act on jobs,” Boehner says. “And yet that’s exactly what his decision on the Keystone energy project has out-of-work Americans doing: waiting.”

However, opponents cite potentially great environmental harm from the pipeline, particularly in a key aquifer along its planned route through Nebraska.

The process by which the administration had been considering Keystone also became a flashpoint due to the influence of corporate lobbying.

Paul Elliott, who worked on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, actively lobbied the State Department and Congress about the project for a year and a half before he officially registered as a lobbyist, according to State Department email messages which later were made public.

(Read a complete explainer of the Keystone XL pipeline, and its controversies, online here.)

In fact, the administration only agreed to delay consideration of the pipeline after a number of left-leaning lawmakers, particularly Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), asked the independent inspector general of the State Department to investigate the matter. Sanders and others asked Obama to hold off any decision on Keystone until the probe was complete.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Just how Democrats on the so-called supercommittee approach deficit reduction could be an early test of Occupy Wall Street's growing influence.

To the consternation of some, and the joy of others, the ballooning Occupy Wall Street movement has so far resisted injecting itself into the nation’s political debate.

Even without a concrete list of policy goals or demands, however, there is a growing sense that, by simply existing and persevering, the month — old movement already is exerting a new influence. President Obama, for instance, has appeared to be taking a more forceful, populist, and progressive tone in recent weeks. And Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) has explicitly given Occupy Wall Street credit for the renewed energy on the left: “We’re coming together. Maybe the protesters unified the Democratic Party.”

If Occupy Wall Street is indeed exerting a new gravitational pull leftward, and it continues to do so in the coming weeks as seems likely, a sign of just how strong that pull is could come soon. A new confidence of Democrats to tilt leftward could affect the outcome of the ongoing deficit-reduction talks of the so-called bipartisan supercommittee. The supercommittee, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, is tasked with developing a plan by Thanksgiving that finds ways to reduce the federal budget deficit by more than $1 trillion over ten years.

Despite the protestations of the likes of GOP House Speaker John Boehner, the panel could well recommend reducing the deficit by raising federal taxes, not just further cuts to federal spending. The Occupy movement likely will have no effect on the six supercommittee Republicans. Led by hardline conservative Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, they also include Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who once headed the anti-tax group, Club for Growth. Occupy could, however, embolden the supercommittee Democrats to stand up to the Republicans with more vigor.

Scott Nance has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade. Capitol Idea is his regular column from Washington. This article originally was published as “Occupy vs the Supercommittee: How the Movement Could Soon Impact the Debate,” on Blogcritics.