Or: Why most of Congress could give a shit about unions, jobs, and generally thinks Social Security needs to be discontinued as soon as possible because who even needs that kind of small-potatoes stuff unless they totally screwed up or chose a bad accountant?
From the supplemental graphs section (seriously) of Kevin Drum’s excellent piece on Our Plutocracy and ever growing inequality.
The Republicans are joining the Central Bank of China in criticizing [Fed Chairman] Ben Bernanke. This is really distressing to me. […] [complaints about currency manipulation from Chinese central bankers] is like being called silly by the Three Stooges.
And then to have Republican leaders in Congress [agree is] bizarre. The Republicans are arguing that the Fed should not even be concerned about unemployment.
(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.
Today’s installment of What Paul Krugman Said:
A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.
Tuesday’s Republican victory in the Massachusetts special election means that Democrats can’t send a modified health care bill back to the Senate. That’s a shame because the bill that would have emerged from House-Senate negotiations would have been better than the bill the Senate has already passed. But the Senate bill is much, much better than nothing. And all that has to happen to make it law is for the House to pass the same bill, and send it to President Obama’s desk.
[…]
[S]ome Democrats want to just give up on the whole thing. That would be an act of utter political folly. It wouldn’t protect Democrats from charges that they voted for “socialist” health care – remember, both houses of Congress have already passed reform. All it would do is solidify the public perception of Democrats as hapless and ineffectual.
And, let me just add: this asinine idea that you can chop the bill up into component parts is both functionally impossible and utterly improbable. So: the GOP is suddenly going to agree to operate in the best interests of the public? Since when? Seriously, when was the last incident of the GOP acting as though it had any responsibility re: actually governing. Name it. I’d seriously like to know. You could offer them full revocation of all taxes, closure of the IRS, and immediate shuttering of 85% of all government offices outside military and interstate highways and they’d still say: Hells No. Even better, from their entirely predictable point of view: the chop-it-up approach then ties up all legislative action for MONTHS as you serially run the mini-bills out for failed vote after failed vote after failed vote. All of which, of course, end in giant collective failure and a total lack of action on the things people are hopping mad about: the banks, Wall Street reforms, and jobs initiatives. Which, not coincidentally, are precisely the issues the Democrat could utterly crucify the 41-vote GOP with for the next eight or so months, right up until the 2010 mid-terms.They are AGAINST all of those things. And will vote to prove it. Unfortunately, they won’t be given the chance.
What part of the months-long slow-roll of the “negotiations” that went on from August to December of last year have the Democrats suddenly forgotten? The GOP wanted no part of compromise or some mythical “centrist” option. They DO NOT WANT TO PASS HEALTH REFORM OF ANY KIND, no matter what its shape, size, composition, font, paper quality, or decorative binding may be. Repeat: THE GOP is FUNDAMENTALLY and COMPLETELY against ANY REFORM. Full fucking stop.
Democrats, you’ve got two choices:
That’s it. Those are your choices. Why this is so fucking hard to understand after the display across the last 10 or more years up there is well and truly beyond me.
Fuck this up and it’s over. Democrats will be functionally out of power in 2010, totally out in 2012; Obama recalled as little more than Carter2. I’d say the odds for this outcome are pretty much 80/20 in favor of exactly that happening. If only the Democrat had a powerful leader with charisma and a strong public following. Somebody like that could take charge of this cluster fuck, start giving legislative marching orders, and navigate the turbulent political waters. But that guy has Rahm fucking Emanuel whispering in his ear. Odds go to at least 85/15.
Merry Christmas.
Ladies and Gentlemen: your GOP. Dangerous people, of course, can be told by their names. Which are Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed. They will have their own line. For scrutiny. Everyone else: come on aboard!
Worth noting that disgraced former Speaker Newt has been the most frequent guest featured on Meet the Press this year. Number of times Nancy Pelosi, sitting Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency, and senior member of majority caucus in Congress has been on? Zero. Your Liberal Media at work again.
No. I don’t want health care.
Alexander Ryking notes something that was seemingly lost amongst the shuffle as the Liberal Media rushed to declare the Democrat dead once and for all:
Bill Owens won NY-23 — beating a right-wing extremist and becoming the first non-right-wing candidate to win the district since 1871. Great job, Michael Steele; you couldn’t even hold a district that has voted for YOUR party for 138 years.
It would seem to me the titanic face-off between the far right and moderate wings of modern conservatism (in the form of the GOP and the Conservative Party vs. the Democrat), with the direct and heavy involvement of Palin and other “rising stars” of the conservative mediasphere that shall go unnamed, that actually has national implications in terms of its outcome (in that Owens now goes to Congress (as opposed to assuming a purely statewide job)), and that ultimately resulted in a historic upending of the normal voting order stretching back more than a century would be the key outcome of what is, even still, a backwater, off-off-year election of little national import. Instead, we get breathless reports on two races for governor with unpopular incumbents, one of whom actively distanced himself from Obama, and, in both cases exit polling definitively showed that this was in no way a referendum on the Democratic Party or Obama in particular:
majorities of voters in both states (56 percent in Virginia and 60 percent in New Jersey) said President Obama was not a factor in their vote today
But, by all means liberal media, don’t let the facts of one genuinely interesting story get in the way of the preferred storyline, whatever its particulars may be. And then wonder at your continued marginalization and failure at connecting with the larger public. For some reason (that is clearly unknowable): people just don’t trust the MSM any more.
See if this rings a bell with regard to your typical visit to the doctor’s office:
A [patient] walked in and was generally walked right back into a physician’s office. They get good care. They are not rushed. They are examined thoroughly
[Patients] receive top-notch, wait-free care, and money is largely no object. [Patients] pay a flat annual fee of $503, and it covers all expenses – without submitting claim forms to their insurer. Despite soaring costs throughout the health care system, prices have been largely stagnant in [this practice] for 17 years.
Man, America really does have the best possible healthcare system in the world. How could that possibly be improved upon? Plus, everybody gets a choice of 10 plans with nationwide coverage networks. Pretty fantastic, eh? Oh, wait, that’s not your experience? Oh, right, that’s the in-house health clinic that members of Congress provide for themselves. Worth noting that many who don’t even pay the paltry $503 fee still take advantage of the care.
Is it any wonder we can’t get reform passed?
Resolved: All healthcare benefits for sitting members of Congress shall be sunset effective December 31, 2009. Furthermore, all members of Congress shall be ineligible for Medicare or any other government supplied benefits for themselves or their families during their term of elected (or appointed) service beyond the normal provisions for their salary.
It’s the only way to get an honest attempt at reform.
There is no serious dialogue between the Democrats and the GOP. How can you possibly form any governing coalition between groups when one half of those groups refuses to accept empirical reality?
This is a post about Joe Wilson, but not about him specifically. But let’s start there. He’s the one who lied when he called out “You Lie!” in reference to coverage of illegal aliens. Facts are troublesome things to the modern GOP; one need not read any further than the name of the appropriate subsection to see what’s what, but Politifact goes one further:
…health reform leaves in place the status quo on illegal immigration, and certainly does not provide any new benefits particularly for illegal immigrants
If this outburst were limited only to the sad fucktard that is Joe Wilson, that’d be one thing. But Dana Milbank lays out the entire sad situation:
Wilson was only the most flagrant. There was booing from House Republicans when the president caricatured a conservative argument by saying they would “leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.” They hissed when he protested their “scare tactics.” They grumbled as they do in Britain’s House of Commons when Obama spoke of the “blizzard of charges and countercharges.”
When he asserted that “nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have,” there was scoffing and outright laughter on the GOP side. Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) shook his head in disbelief. Several Republicans shouted “What plan?” and Rep. Louis Gohmert (Tex.) waved at Obama a handwritten poster he made on a letter-size piece of paper: “WHAT PLAN?” Gohmert then took that down and replaced it with another handmade poster that said “WHAT BILL?”
The essential outcome of all this is something the media seems to forget on a daily basis: There is no GOP anymore as a functional political party interested in governance. Full stop. All policy debate, healthcare or otherwise is being conducted by Democrats: liberal and conservative. They then have to pass said policy through a perfectly mysterious 60-vote supra-majority in the Senate that the media can never see fit to explain either. Just why is it that the Senate cannot move on 51-vote majorities? Why is that anti-democratic policy in place and ruling our worlds? Easier to repeat whatever it is Drudge is peddling, I suppose. But consulting the MSM, you will never, ever find out what’s behind those mysterious 60-vote requirements. But, rest assured, there is no dialogue, because there is no (functional) GOP. It seems more and more likely that the ultimate outcome of the current situation is a new third party that, over time, first relegates the GOP into a regional, state-level party, and then into Whig-town.
And but Obama is exactly right, though probably a few decades late, in issuing this warning:
[When] we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter, we don’t merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.
One might add that we also lose the ability to govern the country at all.
You’d hope that the powers-that-be in the GOP (or the public at large) will see this sequence as a tipping point, and Joe Wilson will become the Joe McCarthy of his era (though, in his case, managing to be his own Joe Welch). Based on the various FOXnews reactions last night, I seriously doubt it. Things will only get much, much worse as Joe Wilson is held out as some sort of conquering hero and sets about creating a whole crew cast in the vapid image of Sarah Palin.
Resolved: There shall be a 100% tax on all bonuses, remunerations, inducements, extras, fees, and any other income not classified as “regular” (tax code here) on all employees of AIG for fiscal years through and including 2010.
Resolved: Regular incomes in excess of $50,233.00 shall be taxed at 50% in each of those years for any employee of any institution receiving TARP funds. This shall include all meals, airline flights, club memberships, cars or car services, homes, and any other indirect income received as part of an overall “compensation package” by any individual so employed.
The fucking end. Are you listening, Congress?
Are we really meant to believe that retention bonuses for the very same fucking idiots that crushed the global markets are absolutely required to keep these same “best and brightest” around long enough to fix what they hath wrought? Unbelievable.
Lemkin 