government

Food safety rules in limbo

Food-safety rules in limbo at Office of Management and Budget

More than a year after President Obama signed a landmark food-safety bill, the key provisions are hung up at a unit of the White House that is in charge of reviewing proposed policy changes.

The delay at the Office of Management and Budget baffles consumer advocates and industry groups, which joined forces to lobby for passage of the legislation and press for its funding. The united front by this unusual alliance — and the president’s enthusiastic endorsement of the legislation in the past — makes the hold-up especially puzzling.

In recent letters to the administration, nearly half a dozen groups expressed frustration with the OMB.

“There’s no explanation for the hold-up,” said Erik Olson, director of food programs at the Pew Health Group, which co-wrote one of the letters with the Grocery Manufacturers Association. “Until this new package of safeguards is put into place, all the promise of the new food-safety law will not be met.”

OMB officials say the duration of this review is not unusual given the complexity of the regulations. “The administration is working as expeditiously as possible to implement this legislation we fought so hard for,” said Moira Mack, an OMB spokeswoman.

Obama signed the legislation in January 2011 after a string of food-borne outbreaks shook consumer confidence in the nation’s food supply. On many occasions, he has highlighted food safety as a top priority for his administration, which came in just as an deadly outbreak erupted involving salmonella-contaminated peanuts and peanut butter.

In March 2009, Obama declared that “food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president but as a parent,” and set up an inter-agency group to advise him on how to revamp food-safety regulations that had not been updated since 1938. The group’s key recommendations were rolled into the new law.

That law empowers the Food and Drug Administration to prevent food-borne illnesses instead of simply reacting to them. Its provisions require produce farmers, food-processing facilities and animal-food plants to adopt strategies that would help them spot and combat food-safety hazards. It also mandates that food imported into this country meet the same safety standards as food produced domestically.

To put these provisions in place, the OMB must approve draft rules, which are then submitted to the public for comment before being finalized. An executive order gives the OMB 90 days to review proposed regulations. The rule on imports was supposed to be finalized by Jan. 4 and the produce proposal was to be submitted for public comment by then. The others are supposed to be finalized by July 4.

It is possible for the OMB to extend its reviews and that often happens. The food-safety rules have remained at the office since late last year.

“People have been working hard to get these rules out for public comment as soon as possible,” said Mike Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods. “These are complex, ground-breaking rules and care is needed.”

In the meantime, the industry is in limbo and consumers are at risk, some groups said.

“The lengthy congressional debate over food safety combined with draft regulations that have missed the statutory deadlines create uncertainty and paralysis,” Bryan Silbermann, chief executive of the Produce Marketing Association, wrote in a letter to Obama last month. “It is much more difficult for companies to invest in additional food safety safeguards without knowing what the FDA rules will be.”

Some experts who are tracking the issue say that the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — run by legal scholar Cass Sunstein — has raised questions about the FDA’s analysis of the provisions’ costs and benefits.

via Food safety rules in limbo – The Washington Post.

President Obama’s Medicare slush fund

An $8 billion trick?

Call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department.

Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

Here is how it works.

The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters. More “flexibility,” he recently explained to the Russians.

Postponing the pain: The administration is temporarily restoring funds to Medicare Advantage so seniors don’t lose coverage before the election.

But certain voters would surely notice one highly painful part of the law before then — namely, the way it guts the popular Medicare Advantage program.

For years, 12 million seniors have relied on these policies, a more market-oriented alternative to traditional Medicare, without the aggravating gaps in coverage.

But as part of its hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts, the Obama one-size-fits-all plan slashes reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage starting next year — herding many seniors back into the government-run program.

Under federal “open-enrollment” guidelines, seniors must pick their Medicare coverage program for next year by the end of this year — which means they should be finding out before Election Day.

Nothing is more politically volatile than monkeying with the health insurance of seniors, who aren’t too keen on confusing upheavals in their health care and are the most diligent voters in the land. This could make the Tea Party look like a tea party.

Making matters even more politically dangerous for Obama is that open enrollment begins Oct. 15, less than three weeks before voters go to the polls.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.

This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.

Obama can temporarily prop up Medicare Advantage long enough to get re-elected by exploiting an obscure bit of federal law. Under a 1967 statute, the HHS secretary can spend money without specific approval by Congress on “experiments” directly aimed at “increasing the efficiency and economy of health services.”

Past demonstration projects have studied new medical techniques or strategies aimed at improving care or reducing costs. The point is to find ways to lower the costs of Medicare by allowing medical technocrats to make efficient decisions without interference from vested interests.

Now Obama means to turn it on its head — diverting the money to a blatantly nonexperimental purpose to serve his political needs.

A Government Accounting Office report released this morning shows, quite starkly, that there simply is no experiment being conducted, just money being spent. Understandably, the GAO recommends that HHS cancel the project.

Congress should immediately launch an investigation into this unprecedented misuse of taxpayer money and violation of the public trust, which certainly presses the boundaries of legality and very well may breach them.

If he’s not stopped, Obama will spend $8 billion in taxpayer funds for a scheme to mask the debilitating effects on seniors of his signature piece of legislation just long enough to get himself re-elected.

Now that is some serious audacity.

Benjamin E. Sasse, a former US assistant secretary of health, is president of Midland University. Charles Hurt covers politics in DC.

via President Obama’s Medicare slush fund—Benjamin E. Sasse & Charles Hurt – NYPOST.com.