Category: Uncategorized

El Dorado

As the Obama administration merrily dispatches with that part of healthcare that the public broadly (and, the WH would add: inexplicably) favors, the Public Option, they still stand pat on the part that will really get the folks screaming: the individual mandate. Marc Ambinder chanels the latest (and inevetiably a self-loathing Clinton administration alum) “anonymous source” from inside the Obama administration who chooses to leak this sort of self-damning pablum:

The president continues to operate under the belief that liberals will warm to the bill when presented with a goodybag that includes includes an individual mandate, community rating, guaranteed issue, and a minimum required package. There’s no chance, really, that a bill WON’T feature these reforms. Quietly, to secure and keep Democrats on board, the White House is going to bargain, providing inducements, like more money for favored projects, etc., in order to secure individual votes.

Let’s get Rahm in order on something right now: Without a robust public option there can be no individual mandate. Without strict cost controls and the much-longed-after downward bend to the cost curve, all you’re left with is today’s overpriced, low-choice coverage which, under new laws anybody can get…and they’d have to. That’s sort of why the insurance lobbies favor a plan with no public option and/but an individual mandate; especially if their buddy Max Baucus manages to use the legislation to increase their profit margins to 35%. Oh, and we’d be ditching the employer mandate as well. So there’d be impetus for employers to ditch the matching coverage schemes of today to cut their costs in favor of kicking you out on your own…where you’d be required by law to pay ever more since you’d have no access to the sort of pooled coverage groups and bargaining power that might actually, you know, contain costs. This is really sounding like a wonderful plan they’ve got going.

You can ditch the public option, but with it has, HAS to go: the individual mandate. You then rely on slow growth of acceptance (the campaigning Obama said as much: people will buy healthcare if they can afford it. They want to buy in, but often can’t in the current setup that’s too heavily weighted towards certain “good” jobs with plans attached or the occasional large coverage pools.) It would be a bad outcome, and would extend the period of suffering for all of us; but it’s not nearly as bad as losing the public option and the employer mandate and yet inexplicably keeping the individual mandate along with none of the potential consumer choice and provider competition-oriented benefits. Now you’re forced to buy insurance that too few folks can afford anyway.

Instead, we’re being told to quit being smelly hippies and get on board with the wonderful program of force-fed shit sandwiches, and could we please all agree it’s the best of all possible worlds? Uh, no. We can’t. Lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way.

Short Attention Span Theater

John Boehner is really, really pushing the lack of ‘Mericans to store and recall any fucking fact, no matter how recently the were exposed to said fact:

“It’s a shame that the White House and their liberal allies are now trying re-write history. From the beginning of this debate, Republicans have tried to work with the President and Democrats on real health care reform that reduces cost and expands access for the American people. Instead, Democrats played the old Washington game, bribing and log-rolling special interests to produce a plan that will cost at least a trillion dollars and just won’t work.”

I see. So this is some other group than that GOP whose second-in-command in the Senate had said that “almost all Republicans” were likely to oppose reform, no matter how bipartisan its sourcing, up to and including a bill that the Republican members of the committee might (theoretically) have written themselves. Indeed this is entirely the fault of the Democrat. And that’s certainly good news for Republicans.

The Grassley’s Always Greener

Emphasis added to these collected statements:

[John Kyl], the Senate Republican whip, speaking to reporters on a conference call from his home state of Arizona, said that even if the Democrats do away with a government-run insurance option, the GOP most likely won’t support the bill that’s being written in the Senate.

“I think it’s safe to say that there are a huge number of big issues that people have,” Kyl said, referring to Republican senators. “There is no way that Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill.”

Asked if he’d support a bill if it were deficit neutral, Kyl said Dems may find a way to pass reform without adding to the debt, “but that doesn’t mean the Republicans will support it.” Asked if he could tolerate a nonprofit insurance cooperative instead of a public option, Kyl added that a co-op is “a step towards government-run health care in this country.” The Senate Minority Whip added that “almost all Republicans” are likely to oppose reform, even if it’s the result of a bipartisan compromise.

So, let’s summarize: the GOP will not support a bill if it adds to the deficit or is deficit neutral. They will not support a bill that includes public options, co-ops, or anything like them. Kyl calls all of that a “Trojan Horse.” They furthermore will not support a bill that is the product of any bipartisan compromise. John Kyl is specifically saying that the GOP will not support a bill that they themselves create through the ongoing Baucus committee process with the Democrats.

Really, the only question left on the table is: would the GOP support a bill they themselves write? I think we all know the answer to that one. The party has repeatedly shown zero interest in governing. Even when they’re in charge of the government. So why should we expect anything to change now?

Way Down in the Hole

Chuck Grassley, when directly offered the hypothetical “Chuck, go write whatever you want into the bill” counter-factual responded thusly:

Chuck Todd asked Grassley whether he’d vote for the bill if it was a good piece of policy that he’d crafted but that couldn’t attract more than a handful of Republican votes. “Certainly not,” replied Grassley.

[…]

“I am negotiating for Republicans,” he said. “If I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good negotiator.”

Implicit in this statement are two facts: a) Republicans are not going (and never planned ) to vote for health care reform, even if they write the bill, and b) Republicans are negotiating in bad faith because of (a), this meaning either they hope to kill the bill by negotiating it to death, or they just like talking to salesmen.

And yet, which party keeps on coming back up to the table, hoping this time they’ll manage to “negotiate” a bipartisan solution? Each time offering up a few more sacrificial lambs in the hope that, this time, the GOP will finally love them and offer true forgiveness? Exactly when does the GOP give up something? Exactly when do the Democrats stop giving in? (Answers visible only in the Teacher’s Edition: Never and Never.)

“Bipartisan” in the current situation means: that to which the Blue Dogs will acquiesce. Full Stop. You get those votes, you have achieved a bipartisan outcome. Period, the end. There is no bill sufficiently milquetoast to achieve a 75-80 vote margin that Grassley seems to implicitly claim is what’s required to “earn” his precious vote. To assume any health-care bill is going to achieve that kind of margin is utter lunacy. But this is the baseline at which “negotiations” are happening. Tells you a lot about the current fecklessness of the Democratic Party in the Senate.

True progress will only come when Harry Reid (and, for that matter, Rahm Emaneul) realizes this and begins to enforce fealty at cloture votes accordingly. You vote out of line on the cloture issue of a key policy initiative like this one, you lose all seniority, all committee assignments, and suddenly find yourself out working the boats with McNulty. You also find that you’re facing a well-funded primary challenge in the next round. Simple as that.

The Next Generation

Obama gets close to something in this closing paragraph he used recently:

Nearly fifty years ago, in the midst of the noisy early battles to create what would become Medicare, President Kennedy said, “I refuse to see us live on the accomplishments of another generation. I refuse to see this country, and all of us, shrink from these struggles which are our responsibility in our time.” Now it falls to us to meet the challenges of our time. And if we can come together, and listen to one another; I believe, as I always have, that we will rise to this moment, we will build something better for our children, and we will secure America’s future in this new century.

You take that, and combine the sense of it with this:

Think about this. You do the responsible thing. You pay your premiums each month so that you are covered in case of a crisis. And then that crisis comes. You have a heart attack. Or your husband finds out he has cancer. Or your son or daughter is rushed to the hospital. And at your most vulnerable – at your most frightened – you get a phone call from your insurance company. Your coverage is revoked. It turns out, once you got sick, they scoured your records looking for a reason to cancel your policy, and they found a minor mistake on an insurance form you submitted years ago.

The final product begins with paragraphs like those and ends up more like this:

I refuse to see us crush what will be the accomplishments of the next generation, to hang a stone around the necks of our own children, through the intransigence and short-sightedness of a small group vigorously defending the discredited ideas and failed programs of the last generation. We won’t saddle our children, my children, with the crushing debt and continual uncertainty of the current mishmash of a tangled, outmoded, and all-too-frequently unresponsive insurance system that was underpowered to address even the simpler medical system of yesteryear. Those days are over. We’re better than that. The time to fight for our future is now. The time to fight for our children’s future is now.

All Hands On the Bad One

And so we hear that the so-called Public Option is probably heavily weighted towards “option” and rather more lightly so toward “public.” We’ll end up with the Co-Ops, a watered down version of the already rather watery Public Option of so much debate. It’s too bad that thousands of grannies have already gone to their deaths at the behest of the various death panels that had yet to hear of these operative changes.

But I think Yglesias has it right:

Given that adding a robust public option into the mix would reduce costs, if you set up a system without a public option wouldn’t you be able to add the public option in later years as an uncontroversial application of the reconciliation process? It seems to me that doing so would count as a 100 percent legitimate deficit reduction play. The public option concept also polls substantially better than does health reform as a whole. Under the circumstances, the odds for securing 50 senate votes for adding one strike me as pretty good.

Yep. Follow the MA model more or less exactly. Get most of everyone insured, giving up cost-controls to the GOP as you go. Then you find: hey, without those cost controls, costs aren’t, uh, controlled. And you revisit cost controls because, what do you know, the program itself is damned popular. Even assuming the 60-vote majority has by then evaporated or diminished, you can ram it through on a Reconciliation basis because it’s absolutely 100% budget related and finally brings the costs under control.

Sunset

Free advice to the Obama administration: the various health care bills wending their way through the House and Senate will ultimately see the floor, and just getting that done is a lot of work. But, like Steve Jobs, you need that “oh, one more thing.”

We need one other bill passed immediately. Just a little one. It can be about one sentence long: should [healthcare reform] remain unsigned into law by the President of these United States on December 31, 2009, all healthcare funding and provisioning for the members of the House and Senate are null and void. Members of said organizations are furthermore ineligible for Medicare for as long as they may serve in the government.

Seems like we might see some more, uh, focused and credible debate with that particular Sword of Damocles hanging. Just saying.

Darkseid

Time reports what is essentially the only possible explanation for the sudden concern on the part of the as-yet-briefed:

[…] two former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there’s another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA’s purview -– it’s usually the FBI’s job – and it’s easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress. Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they’re only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

Let’s face it, were it just some legally questionable assassination orders for high ranking al Qaeda folks operating, say, inside an ostensibly friendly country (er, Pakistan?) and carrying out said orders would be a violation of various treaties and maybe even a few international laws…there’d be no significant dust-up whatsoever over this. Instead, even GOPers apprised of the situation are well off their normal “partisan witch hunt!” game and actually showing some sober adult sides to themselves that Our Staff never knew existed. And, in fact, that sort of program would hold no real reason to order the CIA to keep it off the books.
The only possible explanation that rises to the occasion (and explains the barely concealed outrage at its outing) is that they were planning to engage in plainly illegal acts, which probably includes but is not limited to: wide scale surveillance of US citizens as well as clearance to execute same without prior authorization. There is no doubt in my mind that the details, should they ever emerge, will fall loosely along these lines. No other reason to conceal at this level. Even for Cheney, whose first impulse is always: conceal.

For far too long now, the CIA has been the go-to agency when illegal acts are called for. Time to shut that agency down. We have far, far too many agencies competing in the spying and secrets arena as it is. Clear the slate and start over with a single, well regulated, and clearly delineated agency. And, just to make this move politically realistic: put John McCain in charge of the panel that lays it all out.

Colonel Sanders

One of those quotes that needs no introduction; independent Senator Bernie Sanders:

“I think that with Al Franken coming on board, you have effectively 60 Democrats in the caucus, 58 and two Independents,” Sanders said in an interview with the Huffington Post. “I think the strategy should be to say, it doesn’t take 60 votes to pass a piece of legislation. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster. And if somebody who votes for that ends up saying, ‘I’m not gonna vote for this bill, it’s too radical, blah, blah, blah, that’s fine.’”

Exactly. Naturally, no Democrat in the Senate will see it this way, and they’ll continue to be feckless drones to whatever the David Broders of the world seem to think constitutes “serious” opinion. Step Two: ? Step Three: Profit!