Nancy-Ann DeParle heads a White House office that originally was designed for Tom Daschle. She is sometimes referred to as the White House Health Czar. Her twenty minute interview with Judy Woodruff, shown below, explaining the administration’s view of the progress of health care reform, is well worth the time to watch. Judy Woodruff asks good questions and Ms DeParle shows great poise and insight.
Deparle says that President Obama spends two or three hours each day working on health care reform and that she feels confident that a health care bill will be approved this autumn. She says that there is a wide consensus that the present health system is not sustainable.
Deparle has an interesting history. Her father was Chinese, from Shanghei. But she was raised by her mother in a small (6000 population) eastern Tennessee town named Rockwood. Her mother tragically died of lung cancer when Deparle was only 17, and did not live to see her daughter’s great successes.
The New York Times wrote this about DeParle: “In picking Nancy-Ann DeParle to champion an overhaul of the nation’s health system, President Obama selected someone with deep roots in the Washington bureaucracy, an intimate familiarity with health policy and respect on both sides of the political aisle — not to mention degrees from Harvard Law School and Oxford University.
“But in putting Ms. DeParle in charge of an issue that has bedeviled presidents for decades, Mr. Obama also chose to overlook Ms. DeParle’s business ties to companies that have a direct stake in the health care debate.
“In announcing her appointment Monday as the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, Mr. Obama expressed ‘absolute confidence’ in Ms. DeParle, who ran the agency that oversaw Medicare and Medicaid during the Clinton administration. But the White House instantly faced questions about whether her appointment was skirting the spirit, if not the letter, of the president’s tough conflict-of-interest policy.
“Since leaving the Clinton administration, Ms. DeParle has been managing director of a private equity firm, CCMP Capital, and a board member of companies like Boston Scientific, Cerner and Medco Health Solutions. White House officials said Ms. DeParle was severing ties with those companies and would recuse herself from participating in any matter that was “directly or substantially” related to former clients or employers.
“Allies of Ms. DeParle described her work in the private sector as a plus, because her familiarity with the industry would enable her to lean on companies to make tradeoffs essential in expanding access to the uninsured.”
We need health care reform but it is probaly not going to happen because of the thing in the bill . I am one of the sick people there are millions of us so called hard to insure people . But I don’t want couselled as to how to commiitt suicide every five years starting at age 65 this is what is worring people plus how do we fund it will it replace regular insurance everyone else has ? They need to take things out of the bills that are like this and maybe it will pass .