Tag: health care

V I C T O R Y !

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“This Was A Big Win

By Tom Hayden

Progressives For Obama March 24, 2010

This is not the time for progressives to mourn the defeat of single-payer or the public option, it is the time to cheer the health care victory as an important victory and prepare to stop the right-wing in their tracks and discredit their religion of market

fundamentalism. It’s the time to push further against that same fundamentalism by demanding such reforms as regulation of Wall Street and a rollback of the Supreme Court decision on campaign finance – all before the November election.

We did not achieve what was politically-impossible, Medicare for All. Insurance companies and Big Pharma will benefit from the health care legislation, but the Machiavellians always get their pound of flesh in exchange for conceding reform. We added new health protections for millions of Americans, opened possibilities for further health reforms, and avoided the beginning of the end of the Obama era, which frankly is what the unified right-wing is still trying to bring about.

It is the nature of social movements to fragment and decline when they achieve victories which fall short of their hopes and dreams. It is the nature of counter-movements to become more dangerous and unified when they feel threatened with decline.

There is plenty of analysis of how the public came out ahead in this final package despite all its flaws and chicanery. Let me add one fundamental point no one has mentioned:

Passage of a trillion-dollar health care package means a trillion dollars not available to the Pentagon for their long war.

In his book making the case for the US as a modern Goliath, the conservative political philosopher Michael Mandelbaum wrote of his fear that Sixties social programs will undermine the appetite and resources for empire, which he described as an American “world government.” [MM, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government for the 21st Century, Public Affairs, 2005]”Democracy [will] favor butter over guns”, Mandelbaum worried. As programs like health care expand and social security cutbacks are fought, “it will become increasingly difficult for the foreign policy elite to persuade the wider public to support the kinds of policies that, collectively, make up the American role as the world’s government. Foreign policy will be relegated to the back burner”, he groused.  We have no moral right or even competence to be “the world’s government”, of course. The more we invest in our domestic needs – health care, schools and universities, environmental restoration, green jobs – the more unsustainable become trillion-dollar wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond. The seeds of an alternative foreign policy lie in building an alternative domestic one. #

[Tom Hayden, a former California state senator, is the author, most recently, of The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm).

Senator Tom Hayden, the Nation Institute’s Carey McWilliams Fellow, has played an active role in American politics and history for over three decades, beginning with the student, civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.  Hayden was elected to the California State Legislature in 1982, where he served for ten years in the Assembly before being elected to the State Senate in 1992, where he served eight years.]

see: http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com/

emphasis mine

Transforming the political landscape

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Author RobertCreamernotes: (Monday Mar 22): “We wake up this morning surrounded by a new political world.

The House vote approving health care reform was without doubt the most significant congressional vote in the last four decades. That’s because it completely transformed the American political landscape. It certainly changed America’s health care system. But it altered the balance of political power in America as well.

  • Fundamental Reform. The House vote, together with the work the Senate will finish this week, will provide health insurance to 32 million Americans, rein in the power of the private insurance industry and end the terror that if you lose your job and get a serious illness you will no longer be able to get insurance. It will ultimately help stop tens of thousands of preventable deaths each year that are caused by the condition known as “no insurance.”
  • It brought us into the company of every other industrial nation by establishing that from this day forward in America – health care is no longer a privilege or a commodity but a right.
  • In the two-century-long battle between progressive and conservative values in our country, last night’s victory was momentous. Progressive values now define the fundamental frame of reference for a massive new sector of our economy: health care. After President Bush’s victory in 2004, the forces advocating conservative, social Darwinist values tried to take back the territory they had lost in the 1930’s by attempting to privatize Social Security. Progressives defeated their efforts – and began to push them back.

Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was like the Normandy invasion – the beginning of a forceful progressive counter-offensive. Today we have secured a whole new massive chunk of real estate.

I do not mean “government control” – far from it. I mean that the terms defining the distribution of health care in America will no longer be exclusively based on the interests of huge private insurance companies. Instead they will be defined by the fundamental understanding that health care is a human right.

As the late Senator Kennedy wrote to President Obama before he died, what was at stake in the health care battle was not “the details of policy, but the character of our country.”

The exact structures of the health care reform bill may be modified – and I hope expanded — to include a robust public option. But the progressive value premise has been established and I do not believe it can be rolled back.

Before the Republicans execute their plan to run this fall on a “repeal the bill” platform, they should take a look at the fate of Alf Landon and the Republicans who, in 1936, ran on the platform of repealing Social Security. They lost big. In fact by the time the Republicans finally retook the White House (16 years later) with Dwight Eisenhower no Republican candidate uttered a word about “repealing” a program that had long sense become massively popular.

This victory has validated President Obama’s commitment to making serious change. He came into office promising real, transformative change and he has delivered it. He proved that he – and America – can make big change – address truly fundamental issues.

Many pundits had argued that he bit off more than he could chew. They had said that he should be satisfied with “small change” – shouldn’t tackle so many things at once – shouldn’t challenge the interests of so many powerful sectors of the American economy. Suddenly his Administration, and the forces that surround it, look a lot smarter than it did two days ago, when the dominant media chatter was about who was to blame for allowing the Obama Presidency to be stuck in the mud. Obama accomplished something that had eluded Presidents for a century – not bad.

With this victory the entire narrative of the Obama presidency has changed. Health care reform has repeatedly been declared moribund – completely dead after the Scott Brown election in Massachusetts. Obama has brought health care back – like a phoenix — from the dead. He did it through absolute persistence and clear, unflappable leadership – the same kind of leadership he and his organization exhibited when they were repeatedly counted out during the Presidential race.

He also demonstrated nerves of steel. He bet the political ranch on health care reform and won.

  • Last night’s vote demonstrated to the American voters that government can work. It has been a central Republican goal for years to show that government doesn’t work. Of course the incompetence of the Bush Administration helped validate their premise. But since the election of a Democrat to the White House they have had one key goal: gridlock. The lock has been broken.
  • Our victory demonstrated that a special interest as wealthy as the private insurance industry can in fact be defeated. The insurance companies and Chamber of Commerce have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to stop health care reform cold. They lied, they distorted the facts, they threatened. They have failed. That will embolden Democrats – and average Americans – to challenge the power of Wall Street and the Oil Companies, to challenge the power of every other special interest that seeks to promote their private interest at the expense of the public interest.
  • The House vote shows that hope can defeat fear. The entire campaign of the health insurance industry and the Right has been built on a foundation of fear – from death panels, to “government takeover,” to “socialized medicine,” to bogus “cuts” in Medicare. Hope won. That has enormous implications for issues like immigration reform.
  • The health care victory was a tribute to political courage – the courage of Barack Obama who bet his Presidency on the outcome – and the courage of many House Democrats who took, what they feared would be an unpopular vote.

In fact, I would argue, that by Election Day, there will be very few districts where a vote for health care reform is unpopular. But I would also argue, that this fall we will see clear evidence that courage itself is very popular….Willingness to stand up for what you believe – and unwillingness to be swayed by political winds – is good politics. People love candidates who are not what they conceive as “typical politicians” that always have their fingers in the air or decide what they believe based on the latest poll….Last night’s victory shows that great organizing works.

And ultimately victory also depended entirely on a tough, eloquent President to provide the leadership necessary to win.

The end game was particularly masterful. One commentator noted that the President had the Republicans for lunch when he spoke at their own retreat – and he had a seven hour banquet at the “bi-partisan” summit. He used the power of the Presidency to enormous effect to place the Republicans on the defense.

The rallies, the self confidence, and the sense of inevitability that he and Speaker Pelosi brought to the last several weeks – coupled with brilliant one-on-one work with Members of Congress and co-ordination with Administration allies sealed the deal….Perhaps the biggest political winner of last night’s victory was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi….

Finally, this victory will invigorate the base of the Democratic Party and greatly improve the chances of victory for all Democrats this fall. Let’s remember that Democrats lost control of the House in 1994 because Democrats didn’t come out and vote after the failure of health care reform earlier that year. Last night’s victory will have precisely the opposite effect.

Not only that, but voters like to support winners. Last night the Democrats in Congress, President Obama and the progressive forces in America won big. The Progressive band wagon has been freed from the mud and is moving once again. It will attract more and more followers as we get closer to the Election Day.

There was another big loser last night — the “chattering class” of pundits. Turned out that health care, the Obama presidency, and the progressive movement weren’t so dead after all.
Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com.

see:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/house-health-care-vote-tr_b_507971.html

Emphasis mine

After the Summit: Progressives 1, Reactionaries nil

Here is a basic fact: If the House Democrats voted tomorrow to approve the Senate bill, health care reform would become the law of the land.

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From the 26 Feb 2010 NY Times editorial: ” The main lesson to draw from Thursday’s health care forum is that differences between Democrats and Republicans are too profound to be bridged. That means that it is up to the Democrats to fix the country’s dysfunctional and hugely costly health care system.  At the meeting, President Obama laid out his case for sweeping reform that would provide coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans and begin to wrestle down the rising cost of medical care and future deficits. The Republicans insisted that the country cannot afford that — and doesn’t need it. The House Republican leader, John Boehner, trotted out the old chestnut that the United States has the “best health care system in the world.”  N.B.: This is because we have poorly framed the issue as health care reform, rather than health care insurance reform, or improved access to health care.  “…Republicans stuck to their script and argued for small solutions, such as letting people buy insurance in other states that might allow skimpier — and thus cheaper — coverage. That is a formula for helping healthy people cut costs while driving up premiums for sick people unable to get similar coverage.

Republicans balked at any big expansion of Medicaid or any big subsidies to help middle-class Americans buy insurance on new exchanges. As a result, their plans would cover only three million uninsured over the next decade, a tenth of what the Democrats are proposing. That is not enough.

Mr. Obama should jettison any illusions that he can win Republican support by making a few more changes in bills that already include many Republican ideas. Republican speakers made clear that the only thing they would accept is starting over from scratch. That would be the end of sweeping reform.

The Republicans tried to wring a pledge from Mr. Obama that he would not resort to “budget reconciliation,” a parliamentary maneuver to sidestep a filibuster in the Senate and pass legislation by a simple majority. Reconciliation is a last resort. But Republicans and Democrats have both used it for major bills in the past. The president wisely refused to tie his hands.

Here is a basic fact: If the House Democrats voted tomorrow to approve the Senate bill, health care reform would become the law of the land.”

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/opinion/26fri1.html?hp

More: from Alternet, by Lindsay Beyerstein (see:http://www.alternet.org/story/145821/obama%27s_health_care_summit%3A_dems_find_common_ground%3B_republicans_not_on_board)

“President Obama presided over a six-hour televised summit on health care reform yesterday with Republican and Democratic members of Congress. The marathon meeting was billed as a last-ditch effort to get Republican input on the health-care reform package before Congress. But, arguably, the real purpose of the summit was to captivate the attention of the media while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., figured out how to push ahead with health care reform through budget reconciliation — a parliamentary procedure that would sidestep the filibuster and the 60-vote supermajority required to overcome it, allowing Democrats to pass Senate legislation by a simple majority of 51 votes.

Republican leaders made it clear from the outset that their members had no interest in modifying the bill that has already passed the Senate, but instead wanted to scrap the bill altogether. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, stated repeatedly in the days before the summit that the GOP would accept nothing less than a do-over.”

More, Kristoff, 26 Feb, NY Times:” If we’re lucky, Thursday’s summit will turn out to have been the last act in the great health reform debate, the prologue to passage of an imperfect but nonetheless history-making bill. If so, the debate will have ended as it began: with Democrats offering moderate plans that draw heavily on past Republican ideas, and Republicans responding with slander and misdirection. Nobody really expected anything different. But what was nonetheless revealing about the meeting was the fact that Republicans — who had weeks to prepare for this particular event, and have been campaigning against reform for a year — didn’t bother making a case that could withstand even minimal fact-checking….

It was obvious how things would go as soon as the first Republican speaker, Senator Lamar Alexander, delivered his remarks. He was presumably chosen because he’s folksy and likable and could make his party’s position sound reasonable. But right off the bat he delivered a whopper, asserting that under the Democratic plan, “for millions of Americans, premiums will go up.”

Wow. I guess you could say that he wasn’t technically lying, since the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate Democrats’ plan does say that average payments for insurance would go up. But it also makes it clear that this would happen only because people would buy more and better coverage. The “price of a given amount of insurance coverage” would fall, not rise — and the actual cost to many Americans would fall sharply thanks to federal aid.

His fib on premiums was quickly followed by a fib on process. Democrats, having already passed a health bill with 60 votes in the Senate, now plan to use a simple majority vote to modify some of the numbers, a process known as reconciliation. Mr. Alexander declared that reconciliation has “never been used for something like this.” Well, I don’t know what “like this” means, but reconciliation has, in fact, been used for previous health reforms — and was used to push through both of the Bush tax cuts at a budget cost of $1.8 trillion, twice the bill for health reform.

What really struck me about the meeting, however, was the inability of Republicans to explain how they propose dealing with the issue that, rightly, is at the emotional center of much health care debate: the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.

One of the great virtues of the Democratic plan is that it would finally put an end to this unacceptable case of American exceptionalism. But what’s the Republican answer? Mr. Alexander was strangely inarticulate on the matter, saying only that “House Republicans have some ideas about how my friend in Tullahoma can continue to afford insurance for his wife who has had breast cancer.” He offered no clue about what those ideas might be.

In reality, House Republicans don’t have anything to offer to Americans with troubled medical histories. On the contrary, their big idea — allowing unrestricted competition across state lines — would lead to a race to the bottom. The states with the weakest regulations — for example, those that allow insurance companies to deny coverage to victims of domestic violence — would set the standards for the nation as a whole. The result would be to afflict the afflicted, to make the lives of Americans with pre-existing conditions even harder.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House G.O.P. plan. That analysis is discreetly worded, with the budget office declaring somewhat obscurely that while the number of uninsured Americans wouldn’t change much, “the pool of people without health insurance would end up being less healthy, on average, than under current law.” But here’s the translation: While some people would gain insurance, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most. Under the Republican plan, the American health care system would become even more brutal than it is now.

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/opinion/26krugman.html

More, Brooks, 26 Feb NY Times: “Most of the credit goes to President Obama. The man really knows how to lead a discussion. He stuck to specifics and tried to rein in people who were flying off into generalities. He picked out the core point in any comment. He tried to keep things going in a coherent direction.

Moreover, he seemed to be trying to get a result. Republicans had their substantive criticism of the Democratic bills, but Obama kept pressing them for areas of agreement.”

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/opinion/26brooks.html

More:Eddie Reeves: “This wasn’t a draw, and anyone who thinks so missed the brilliant strategy.

It’s been a fait accompli for months now that if health care is to pass, it will do so solely with Democratic support. So the whole game for the administration is to shore up those nervous swing Midwestern and Southern Democrats whose votes are crucial but in jeopardy. Solidifying the support of these two dozen or so Members was the true aim of the summit.

In one fell swoop, the President altered the trajectory of the health care debate. First, merely by announcing this summit, he calmed the tsunami of negative press coverage that deluged him and his party after the GOP Senate victory in Massachusetts.

Next, the announcement took the spotlight off Democratic congressional leaders and put it on the President himself. That was smart, since, despite his travails of the last several months, the President’s personal popularity still rates highly among the American people, while that of Reid, Pelosi et al. comes in just north of dirty gym socks.

The gambles that Barack Obama took with this summit were three-fold:

Gamble #1 – Could he strike the right rhetorical balance between big-picture statesman and deal-seeking negotiator?

Gamble #2 – Could he use the summit in effect to replace Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi as the leader of the health reform legislative push?

Gamble #3 – Could he count on the Republicans to continue to be the party of obstinacy and obstruction?

There is no question that the President won all three rolls of the dice.

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-reeves/healthcare-summit-another_b_477820.html

Emphasis mine

Republicans vs. Medicare

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

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Krugman, NY Times:

Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.” So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis. And irony died.

Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What’s amazing, however, is that they’re getting away with it.

Why is this amazing? It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare — and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.

After all, you could explain this about-face by supposing that Republicans have had a change of heart, that they have finally realized just how much good Medicare does. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage-backed securities you might want to buy.

No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process of dismantling would begin with spending cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that’s more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.

What I’m talking about here is the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” the budget plan recently released by Representative Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. Other leading Republicans have been bobbing and weaving on the official status of this proposal, but it’s pretty clear that Mr. Ryan’s vision does, in fact, represent what the G.O.P. would try to do if it returns to power.

The broad picture that emerges from the “roadmap” is of an economic agenda that hasn’t changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years. In particular, Mr. Ryan offers a plan for Social Security privatization that is basically identical to the Bush proposals of five years ago.

But what’s really worth noting, given the way the G.O.P. has campaigned against health care reform, is what Mr. Ryan proposes doing with and to Medicare.

In the Ryan proposal, nobody currently under the age of 55 would be covered by Medicare as it now exists. Instead, people would receive vouchers and be told to buy their own insurance. And even this new, privatized version of Medicare would erode over time because the value of these vouchers would almost surely lag ever further behind the actual cost of health insurance. By the time Americans now in their 20s or 30s reached the age of eligibility, there wouldn’t be much of a Medicare program left.

But what about those who already are covered by Medicare, or will enter the program over the next decade? You’re safe, says the roadmap; you’ll still be eligible for traditional Medicare. Except, that is, for the fact that the plan “strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.”

If this sounds like deliberately confusing gobbledygook, that’s because it is. Fortunately, the Congressional Budget Office, which has done an evaluation of the roadmap, offers a translation: “Some higher-income enrollees would pay higher premiums, and some program payments would be reduced.” In short, there would be Medicare cuts.

And it’s possible to back out the size of those cuts from the budget office analysis, which compares the Ryan proposal with a “baseline” representing current policy. As I’ve already said, the total over the next decade comes to about $650 billion — substantially bigger than the Medicare savings in the Democratic bills.

The bottom line, then, is that the crusade against health reform has relied, crucially, on utter hypocrisy: Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/opinion/12krugman.html?em

Off Message on health care insurance reform

only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats’ bill

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From FiveThirtyEight:

“Polling in the last several days has carried some blunt reminders that the public isn’t nearly as well-informed as the Beltway conventional wisdom might hold.

We’ve repeatedly highlighted Kaiser’s health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats’ bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster — and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats’ health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for “95% of working families”, a fact which is probably true.

I don’t particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics “fans” probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren’t watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They’re developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.

But right now it’s Democrats who are behind the 8-ball — and the extent to which voters are disengaged from each twist and turn of the news cycle is not liable to change any time soon. And what these semi-informed voters have mostly seen from the Democrats is a series of mixed messages. On health care, between people attacking the policy from the right and from the left, very rarely have positive messages about the bill had the chance to penetrate through the media morass. On the economy, the Democrats have had to do a weird tapdance between highlighting, on the one hand, their sensitivity to the depth of our economic problems and the need for further stimulus, and on the other, the fact that many economic indicators (although not employment) do indeed show a recovery underway. On process issues, the public has mostly observed Democrats fighting with one another, and messages about Republican obstructionism were liable to fall flat when — until about 10 days ago — the Democrats had a 60-seat majority in the Senate, however dysfunctionally so. Lastly, the White House’s meta-message about “post-partisanship” is a difficult one to maintain in the face of actual policy-making, since in a rather literal sense, Republicans can brand any policy as “partisan” simply by opposing it, however moderate it might in fact be.

In contrast to the vapid media narrative about the “perpetual campaign”, the Democrats have perhaps not been sensitive enough to how their messaging might play with the sort of mainstream voters who might read a newspaper or turn on CNN once or twice a month, but not more often, or who consume news from only one or two sources, but not others — descriptions that apply to most of the people that will turn out to vote in November.

What can Democrats do differently? Unfortunately, this is not such an easy question to answer. But from the White House’s perspective, the most obvious solution would be to behave more decisively. Don’t let policies like the public option twist in the wind: embrace them, or press forward without them, but either way, remind the House and the Senate that having a 3-month fight about the issue will leave the Democrats as a whole much worse off, regardless of how the dispute is resolved. Endorse some relatively specific version of financial reform, a policy that polls overwhelmingly well in the abstract but which the details of which are banal and which will easily bore and confuse the public.

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, that sometimes the message isn’t going to sink in until the sixth or seventh time that you repeat it. Before Tuesday’s State of the Union, for instance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that the stimulus contained a huge tax cut — they shouldn’t expect the public to believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton of people to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertising it 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now. You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don’t neglect the golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0 against a jobs bill? It’s probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent — more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympathetic groups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever the Republicans cast a vote like this.

With respect to the economy, the Democrats are still largely at the whim of the business cycle, since they may lack the political capital to pass policies through the Congress which could substantively impact the numbers by November. But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It’s not that I expect these messages to be winners now; rather, it’s that you want to plant the seed with the public for the fall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when the employment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe that the recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

If Democrats have any skepticism about this, they need only look back to the year or two that have just elapsed. Republicans were crowing about socialism and government takeovers way back in the summer of 2008, and opposing virtually every policy that the Democrats put forth from the first meeting of the 111th Congress last January — a time when Obama’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those messages weren’t working for them — they were particularly ineffectual, for instance, for the McCain campaign, and there were lots of stories in the spring about the number of people who identified as Republican slipping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their messaging strategy, and it has allowed them to frame everything that has come thereafter in ways that are more resonant with the public. Had the economy recovered sooner, perhaps this would have been a spectacular failure. But they at least did a very, very good job of poising themselves to take advantage of the downside case.

Now it’s incumbent upon the Democrats to poise themselves to take advantage of the upside case. Political time is moving faster and faster, and it goes without saying that a lot could change between now and November. But precisely because the public is so bombarded with information, it may be all the more important to develop a proactive rather than reactive messaging strategy, and to implement it sooner rather than later.

(Emphasis mine).

Health Care Insurance reform

“Last month the Senate voted to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the most meaningful improvement to our health care system since enactment of Medicare and Medicaid four and a half decades ago.

chasdarwin1 Comment

From Sherrod Brown:

“Last month the Senate voted to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the most meaningful improvement to our health care system since enactment of Medicare and Medicaid four and a half decades ago.

The Senate and House of Representatives are now merging their respective bills and expect to deliver a final piece of legislation to President Obama in the coming weeks. While the negotiations continue, I wanted to provide an update on how health reform would help Ohioans.  The bill passed by the Senate, with my support, would lower costs for middle-class families with insurance, while providing help to 31 million Americans who lack it – including the 1.4 million Ohioans who are currently uninsured.

It would eliminate the $1,100 hidden tax that Ohioans with insurance now pay to help cover the costs of caring for the uninsured. It would also prohibit insurance companies from using huge portions of your premium dollars for advertising, corporate retreats, executive salaries, and unheard-of profits instead of providing coverage for your medical care. And it would give more than 118,000 Ohio small businesses an immediate tax credit to help them afford health benefits for their workers.

The bill would curb insurance company abuses – like denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, charging women more than men for the same policy, and imposing arbitrary annual and lifetime caps on benefits.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would end the shameful insurance practice of rescission, which retroactively cancels your insurance when you get sick. It would close the prescription drug coverage gap (the “donut hole”) for seniors and provide them with free annual checkups and preventive services for the first time. The bill would also extend the financial security of Medicare by nearly a decade.

This bill means insurance companies will have to play by a new set of rules – that will lower costs and expand coverage. It means you will no longer be denied medical care because of a pre-existing condition, age, gender, or medical history. It means health security for you and your family, whether you’re uninsured or have health insurance that could be eliminated with a job loss or illness. It means Ohio’s seniors will be able to afford prescription drugs and access much needed medical care. And, this bill means Ohio small business owners can do right by their employees and no longer face double-digit premium increases year after year after year.

Once President Obama signs this important bill into law, I’ll be certain to provide you an update on this historic step toward a health care system that works for all Americans. ”

Sincerely,
Sherrod Brown www.brown.senate.gov.

(Emphasis Mine).

Socialist Health Care System

American medicine is superb–for those who can get it

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By Paul Abrams, HuffPost:

“According to Rush Limbaugh, the health care reform that may be passed by Congress is socialism. Yet, it bears a striking resemblance to the universal healthcare system that just treated him in Hawaii that prompted his remark: “there is nothing wrong with the American health care system. I received no special treatment.”

Yes, Rush. That’s the point! American medicine is superb–for those who can get it. And, in Hawaii, no one gets special treatment, because everyone can get it.

[Er, by the way, just to help you out, Rush, a fair percentage of your listeners do not know Hawaii is part of the United States, so clarify that for them…otherwise, they will wonder about you]

By accepting socialist medical treatment in Hawaii, therefore, Rush Limbaugh has shown that, when one is ill, what matters is the availability of quality health care, even if it is socialist.

Rush follows a long litany of conservatives, such as all Members of Congress that have a medical office paid for by taxpayers available in the Capitol, by Dick Cheney who had socialist pacemakers implanted paid for by the government, and George W who had a government-paid socialist colonoscopy while in office. Members of Congress over 65 get single-payer socialist medical care from Medicare.

Hawaii has had nearly-universal employer-mandated health insurance since 1974. Although its Pacific Island location makes the costs of everything–from gasoline to milk to ice cream to housing–the highest in the nation, health care premiums in Hawaii, for comprehensive care with small co-pays and deductibles, are nearly the lowest and their costs per medicare beneficiary are the lowest in the nation.

Why? There are a variety of reasons, most traceable to universality. With everyone covered by primary care, emergency room visits tend to be for real emergencies, not the non-emergent care mainland ERs dispense for people without coverage. That reduces the costs of ERs and the costs of non-emergent medicine since patients can be handled less expensively and more effectively by their primary docs. Hospitals have not overbuilt, acquiring expensive machines to compete with their neighbors for patients. Insurance companies have instituted screening and other measures to improve wellness among their covered populations.

We can all be pleased that Rush appears to have survived his encounter with socialist medical care. He seems to be very happy himself, commenting on the results of a socialist angiogram that showed no disease in the arteries that feed his heart muscle.

Now, of course, Rush does not live in Hawaii and so his costs are not covered by the Hawaiian insurance system, but having that “socialist” system for more than 3 decades has not reduced the quality of the care he received. Who would have thunk it!

If Hawaii-style medical care is good enough for Rush Limbaugh, it is good enough for me.

Thanks Rush, and with it my hopes that your medical insurance covers all your costs and that the greatest country in the world can make that same care available to everyone.

Happy New Year!

”

see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-abrams/limbaugh-lauds-socialist_b_409378.html

I still support our President.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Jacob S. Hacker is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

From the New Republic:”…Since the first campaign for publicly guaranteed health insurance in the early twentieth century, opportunities for serious health reform have come only rarely and fleetingly. If this opportunity passes, it will be very long before the chance arrives again. Many Americans will be gravely hurt by the delay. The most progressive president of my generation–the generation that came of age in the anti-government shadow of Ronald Reagan–will be handed a crippling loss. The party he leads will be branded as unable to govern….

The public option was always a means to an end: real competition for insurers, an alternative for consumers to existing private plans that does not deny needed care or shift risks onto the vulnerable, the ability to provide affordable coverage over time. I thought it was the best means within our political grasp. It lay just beyond that grasp. Yet its demise–in this round–does not diminish the immediate necessity of those larger aims. And even without the public option, the bill that Congress passes and the President signs could move us substantially toward those goals.

As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms.

First, it creates a new framework, the “exchange,” through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health insurance that workers in large companies take for granted.  Second, it makes available hundreds of billions in federal help to allow people to buy coverage through the exchanges and through an expanded Medicaid program. Third, it places new regulations on private insurers that, if properly enforced, will reduce insurers’ ability to discriminate against the sick and to undermine the health security of Americans.

These are signal achievements, and they all would have been politically unthinkable just a few years ago….So a bill must pass. Yet it must be a better bill that passes. And  it must be understood by the President, the Congress and every American as only a step–an important but ultimately incomplete step–toward the vital goal that the campaign for the public option embodied: good affordable health care for every American.”

(Emphasis mine)

see: http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/why-i-still-believe-bill

On The Bill: Politics is the Art of the Possible

Politics is the Art of the Possible

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Krugman, 25 Dec 2009, the New York Times:

“…”…the legislation that passed the Senate on Thursday and will probably, in a slightly modified version, soon become law will make America a much better country.

So why are so many people complaining? There are three main groups of critics.

First, there’s the crazy right, the tea party and death panel people — a lunatic fringe that is no longer a fringe but has moved into the heart of the Republican Party

A second strand of opposition comes from what I think of as the Bah Humbug caucus: fiscal scolds who routinely issue sententious warnings about rising debt. By rights, this caucus should find much to like in the Senate health bill, which the Congressional Budget Office says would reduce the deficit, and which — in the judgment of leading health economists — does far more to control costs than anyone has attempted in the past.what really motivates them is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is receiving social insurance.”

Finally, there has been opposition from some progressives who are unhappy with the bill’s limitations. Some would settle for nothing less than a full, Medicare-type, single-payer system. Others had their hearts set on the creation of a public option to compete with private insurers. And there are complaints that the subsidies are inadequate, that many families will still have trouble paying for medical care.

Unlike the tea partiers and the humbuggers, disappointed progressives have valid complaints. But those complaints don’t add up to a reason to reject the bill. Yes, it’s a hackneyed phrase, but politics is the art of the possible.

The truth is that there isn’t a Congressional majority in favor of anything like single-payer. There is a narrow majority in favor of a plan with a moderately strong public option. The House has passed such a plan. But given the way the Senate rules work, it takes 60 votes to do almost anything. And that fact, combined with total Republican opposition, has placed sharp limits on what can be enacted.

If progressives want more, they’ll have to make changing those Senate rules a priority. They’ll also have to work long term on electing a more progressive Congress. But, meanwhile, the bill the Senate has just passed, with a few tweaks — I’d especially like to move the start date up from 2014, if that’s at all possible — is more or less what the Democratic leadership can get.

And for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle — even if it falls somewhat short in practice — that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.  (N.B.: This is what I call a ‘beachhead’.)

Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008 — an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism. (For what it’s worth, the reform that’s being passed is closer to Hillary Clinton’s plan than to President Obama’s). This made health reform a must-win for the next president. And it’s actually happening.

So progressives shouldn’t stop complaining, but they should congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big win for them — and for America.”

(Emphasis mine)

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/opinion/25krugman.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1261753212-RwiQATMIBUa+By+dIKRN/A

A national scandal, not involving sex, celebrities, or corruption

45,000 die every year due to a lack of health insurance.

chasdarwinLeave a comment
“With malice toward none, with charity for all…” spoke Abraham Lincoln at his second inaugural address. While some act as if our health care insurance reform legislation is a disease, a joke, or an onerous burden, a new study puts a deadly face on the consequences of the failure of the U.S. to offer universal health care to its citizens: 45,000 die every year due to a lack of health insurance. This figure has increased about two and a half times since 2002. (In addition the US ranks low internationally in measures such as life expectancy and infant mortality, all at more than twice the average cost.) The authors of the Harvard-based study noted that the U.S. is the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t provide guaranteed health care to its citizens: a subject for serious thought at a time of year when charity and good will receive so many words, if not so much attention.

see: chattahbox.com/us/2009/09/18/study-lack-of-health-insurance-kills-45000-people-annually/ and

see: http://www.tophealthinsurancecompanies.info/study-lack-of-health-insurance-kills-45000-people-annually/