Category: Uncategorized

Requirement

(D) MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN THE EXCHANGE—

(i) REQUIREMENT—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after the effective date of this subtitle, the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are—

(I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or

II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act).

(ii) DEFINITIONS—In this section:

(I) MEMBER OF CONGRESS—The term ‘‘Member of Congress’’ means any member of the House of Representatives or the Senate.

(II) CONGRESSIONAL STAFF—The term ‘‘congressional staff’’ means all full-time and part-time employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, DC or outside of Washington, DC.

Music to Lemkin’s ears. By forcing Congress and their staffs onto the exchange, you can be quite sure that there will be a broad array of choices there and that the price will be, er, right. I’ve long said that most of the problem with getting healthcare reform done is that members of Congress simply have no clue what it’s like on the outside: they and their families have nearly-free, 24/7 access to what’s essentially a private physician, fantastically complete coverage with a wide menu of choices for care, and low to no co-pays when something really hits the fan. Plus they cant’ be dropped. Why wouldn’t they persist in calling such a setup “the best healthcare in the world”? It pretty much is. The trouble is that almost nobody outside Congress has access to even a part of a plan like that.

What reform is about is allowing the rest of us access to some of that. And doing it in a way that, even projecting out 20 years, will only be costing the taxpayer 1% relative to doing nothing. Thirty million people will have access to care on the basis of that 1%. And, of course, those same projections show a half trillion dollar savings to the overall budget. Frankly, that’s amazing given the compromised nature and inherently “around-the-edges” approach of this plan so frequently (and nonsensically) derided as “government takeover.” Any plan with a total monetary outlay on the part of the government amounting to ~90 billion dollars a year isn’t a takeover of anything. The Pentagon budgeted

“$52.1 billion [for ancillary items] such as ammunition, portable generators, cooling equipment, field medical supplies, hospital equipment, and night vision goggles”

in 2009. Nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, but that’s a military outlay of $50B a year and doesn’t even get around to, oh, I don’t know, guns.
We’re wasting well north of $40B a year on the plainly idiotic War on Drugs. Don’t even get me started on how many times over our little foray into Iraq could pay for healthcare in this country. But such context never matters to the savvy reporter. Who won today’s political horse race? Who played their press releases better?
Never: who lied? Whose facts were more accurate? What is the broader context of this decision?

Even more importantly, though: people won’t be making career decisions based solely on maintaining their and their families’ access to healthcare. Even if it fails in every other way, signing these reforms into law will let a million startups bloom.

It’s marketing, Jake. Forget about it

In their respective races for total global domination of the ever-popular bland beer segment, SABMiller and Anheuser-Busch have a natural tendency to clash over events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup in South Africa. And why not? Just the fan parks segment of the operation (not the actual stadia where games are going on, mind you) account for a staggering quantity of beer:

40 percent of the 100,000 extra hectoliters of beer SABMiller expects to sell during and around the monthlong tournament, Hewitt said. That’s equivalent to 8 million half-liter (1.1 pint) glasses of beer or 12 million 340 milliliter cans of the beverage.

So why wouldn’t any brewery that could manage to brew that much want a piece of that action? Well, because it’s being sold brandless. “I’ll have a beer” will, for once, apparently be an entirely accurate way to order. Meanwhile, all the advertising in and around the stadia will be done by (you guessed it):

Anheuser-Busch, said by e-mail that his company decided “more than a decade ago to focus our beer presences in-stadium” during FIFA World Cup matches.

This means that SABMiller has scored the exciting prospect of being the vendor behind 12 million can-equivalents of beer like substance. Well played, well played. AB will surely go broke chasing after the rafts of folks who have a brand preference in their choice of beer-like liquids and who may, in fact, assume that (based on all the signage) they are actually drinking AB beer-like liquids.

Eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking: SABMiller (Coors) is gonna do what they say can’t be done: sell even more AB beer based on the perceived quality of SABMiller’s own products. Burt Reynolds better get going on those sit-ups.

A lot of people are noting that Orwell was a socialist and Gingrich doesn’t know what he’s talking about [in his CPAC address], but I’m much more appalled that Gingrich thinks a dystopic piece of fiction was “proof” that “that centralized planning inherently leads to dictatorship” and an argument against health-care reform. That’s like me saying “The Shawshank Redemption” is proof that prison walls are too weak and we should invest serious money into reinforcing them against extremely small rock picks.

Ezra Klein

Hanford is Closed

ryking:

And now something adorable to take my mind off the fact that Barack Obama has just restarted America’s nuclear weapons development program.

What part of this is so hard for you to understand (emphasis added)?

the new strategy commits the United States to developing no new nuclear weapons, including the nuclear bunker-busters advocated by the Bush administration.

There will indeed be proposed budgetary increases in funding for basic high energy research via NSF and, yes, also through the various government labs tasked with development and upkeep of the nuclear arsenal, as well as through other funding mechanisms. All of this is aimed at understanding the ongoing implications of long-term storage of existing warheads (which were never designed with shelf-life in mind), and is a very different thing than “restarting” nuclear weapons development. That long-term storage part being the thing we’ve already done with weapons we already have. Bush policy was to simply replace all these weapons with something entirely new and/or also updating and using the existing physics packages of existing weapons to sidestep laws, treaties, and/or funding limitations that are and were preventing the development of new weapons.

Let’s review: Obama’s administration is, on the basis of this review, moving to radically and unilaterally (and finally) reduce the number of extant nuclear weapons the United States has in inventory, reduce or remove tactical weapons from Europe and other locales, and the Obama administration is, in fact, stopping new nuclear weapon design and development started under Bush. Other than those minor quibbles, though, you’re right on with your concerns.

Comprehensive health care reform will not work through reconciliation. But if the House passes the Senate bill, and wants certain things improved on, like affordability, the Medicaid provisions, how much of Medicaid expenses are paid for by the Federal government, that is something that could be done through reconciliation.
A sidecar would be a good candidate for reconciliation depending on what’s in it,
The only thing that works here is the House has to pass the Senate bill, then the House can initiate a reconciliation measure that would deal with a limited number of issues that score for budget purposes.

Kent Conrad (~D, ND) and (clearly) a friend to Lemkin

The Democrat has spent (at least) two full days “scrambling” over what to do about this. Here’s an idea: make him talk. Relentlessly. 36, 72, 176 hours: whatever it takes until he collapses. Then hold the fucking vote by asking for unanimous consent to do so. Dare Republicans to let it “marinate.” Dare them. This is how you earn respect.

All the while, you scream on microphones outside the Senate chambers about how this is all 100% indicative of the Party of No.

Is this so hard to understand? Apparently it is.

If I had to guess, I’d say [the Chilean earthquake] must have to do with Chile’s persecution and attempted prosecution of their great former leader, and a personal hero of mine, Augusto Pinochet – who, it should be noted, had never been convicted of a crime when the Lord called him home three years ago. General Pinochet not only assisted the CIA in the overthrow of Chile’s Marxist government, but is widely credited with personally arranging the meetings of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his countrymen with Jesus.

Pat Robertson.
Presumably he means these folks literally got to meet Jesus through Pinochet’s direct and focused intervention. Must. Resist. Godwin’s. Law.

MicroReconciliation

Memo to the media: healthcare reform has already passed. Both houses of Congress. It is done.

However, the two houses passed marginally different versions of the legislation. Thus, the House will likely pass a modified version of the Senate bill. The Senate, then, will reconcile their already passed bill with that “final” output. The order of the action may flip, but that’s really just window dressing. The point is that reconciliation will only be in use for the points of disagreement between House and Senate, which are few.

There is not and will not be any attempt to “pass the healthcare reforms package” via reconciliation. What there may be is an attempt to reconcile House and Senate versions of the bill through the rather aptly named reconciliation process instead of through a joint House/Senate conference committee and normal order.

Once more: if and when healthcare reform reaches Obama’s desk for signature, it will have passed through normal order. Period. Minor differences will have been ironed out through a kind of “sidecar” bill using reconciliation; it will functionally amend previously passed legislation. But the bulk of the reform: already passed through normal order.

Perhaps a six-hour televised summit on this is necessary to pound it through Our Media Overlords’ heads. I know they find it bore-ing, but that’s life in the big city.