Here are the FDL Action health care reform highlights for Monday, November 30.1. To put it mildly, Jon Walker believes that the Urban Institute's new report "endorsing the idea of a super-hard trigger for a robust Medicare-style public option" is off base. Walker argues that the idea of a "magical robust theoretically super-awesome trigger" is "purely a fantasy of health care wonks that does not have a prayer of ever becoming law." And Walker has a great punchline to all this, apparently riffing off of Prince's "When Doves Cry": "This is what it sounds like when veal moos." Wow, what did Jon Walker eat for Thanksgiving anyway? LOL
2. Jane Hamsher argues that the opt-out provision "was a trojan horse, championed by liberals who were negotiating against themselves," and that in the end, it failed to pick up a single Republican vote. Now, we're going to get the same charade with "the sequel, 'The Return of Trigger,' starring the Urban Institute and other featured players." Something tells me this is a sequel we don't want to see, but may be forced to anyway.
3. Jon Walker has some good news, "What The Senate Bill Does Better, Part 3: Starts With Greater Access To The Exchange."
4. I've got a post pointing to excellent framing by The Pennsylvania Progressive, who writes, "Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana says we should stop reforming health care so we can concentrate on killing Afghans...killing is a higher priority than healing." Wow, it sounds so...Republican!
5. Jane Hamsher asks, "Why Continue to Fight For a Public Option?" The answer: "The public option battle has become a proxy war over who controls government, whether Congress has the slightest responsibility to reflect the will of the public, whether Democrats from Obama on down can just casually abandon their campaign promises in the wake of unrelenting influence peddling and whether progressives are going to take a stand for something and refuse to back down." Those sure sound like fighting words to me.
6. Jon Walker riffs off of an article by Ezra Klein which argues, "If you had tuned in six months ago for 10 minutes, you would have had all the information necessary to predict exactly where we’d be today." Walker concludes that the Senate "just spent almost half a year working on health care reform, and didn’t accomplish anything that couldn’t have been done in three weeks if they were a functioning legislative body." In other words, health care reform could have been completed last spring, leaving Congress free to turn to other matters, like...uh, the economy perhaps? Clean energy and climate legislation? Comprehensive immigration reform? A million other things? Nah, much better to have spent the better part of a year negotiating against ourselves and chasing the ever-elusive "bipartisan" support. Great.
7. Jon Walker live blogs the Senate debate over health care reform, which began at 3 pm earlier today.
8. Jon Walker summarizes the new CBO report on the Senate health care bill and its effect on premiums, writing that "reform would do basically nothing to reduce or increase premiums for most Americans." According to Walker, this will largely keep U.S. health care costs "nearly twice as high as any other industrialized nation," an outcome that "should not be a surprise" given the "sweetheart deals with all the concerned health industries." And on that happy note...
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Look guys, I am in favor of a more socialized medicine health care system then what is being considered (although perhaps not as robust to please some of you).
ReplyDeleteBut we have to look facts in the face. The majority of the general public is generally uncomfortable with socialized medicine. Rightly or wrongly, they have fears of such a system of providing for their health care needs.
There appears to be a majority of Democrats even in the Senate that want to do something. Something is better then nothing. While all of the Republicans are going to say no to anything, we at least can keep together a majority of Democrats that insist failure to do anything is not an option. Boo Hoo if you do not get everything you want. That is the cost of inclusiveness. By that I mean you must include those who try to represent those who elected them and those voices who do not agree with you.
Obama did not win by that large a majority. Democratic majorities in Congress were only won by including moderate candidates in the mixture. It is wrong for you to expect these moderate candidates to turn their backs on what it was about them that got them elected in the first place.
We need to hold together a majority. Moderates already face enough pressures for even including themselves in what we might get done. Republicans are trying to set fire to the electorate for that which might be passed into law. Do not expect these moderate representatives to immediately bow down to everything that you would accept as perfection. Sometimes we need to start with baby steps.
Two points: 1) the only reason anyone's talking about "socialized medicine" is that the right wing has raised that as some kind of scary bogeyman, even though it's utter bull; 2) the "public option" is the most popular single element (according to public opinion polls) in the entire health reform package, yet that's the one element most commonly criticized as "socialism." In other words, none of this makes any sense at all, except to health insurance industry shills...excuse me, "moderates"...like Joe LIEberman, etc.
ReplyDeleteSocialized medicine is not a bogeyman, what is being considered is taking from the wealthy and giving it to the less fortunate. This qualifies as socialism. I just happen to be in favor of it and I am not ashamed of admitting it.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't be "ashamed" either, but it's not "socialism" by the definitions I think of. Certainly, a public option is no more "socialism" than Medicare.
ReplyDeleteThere are arguments that can be made that the public option is not socialism. However the funding of everything being considered is socialistic. We're going to tax the wealthy and give to the poor.
ReplyDeleteSome citizens are fearful that the public option will unacceptably benefit from this mandated revenue stream.
"We're going to tax the wealthy and give to the poor."
ReplyDeleteThat's called "progressive taxation" and has been part of our country for 100 years now. I guess we've been "socialist" this whole time and didn't know it. :)
Countries like Switzerland (one the models I've heard we've been using) aren't anything like "socialized medicine." In the media, we hear about Canada or the UK, but none of our plans, repeat NONE of them, come anywhere near to replicating those systems. Not all of Europe has "socialized" medicine as Little David is using the term, although they do have health coverage for all citizens. Americans clearly like the idea of a public option without wanting a solely public system.
ReplyDeleteI guess I just don't see why Little David keeps telling me what I'm supposed to know and think, and for all of his claims of support, it's an awful lot like what I hear reading conservatives.
And we're going to tax those who are very wealthy from the largest increase in income diversity in a 100 years and give some of that to the struggling middle class in the hopes that they do not become poor. (Sounds a little different when you put it that way, doesn't it?)
Lowell,
ReplyDeleteI extremely love progressive taxation as well. I also am extremely in love with the estate, sometimes called the death tax.
However please realize where these steps came from. They came from getting the electorate to agree to live under capitalism lite instead of going whole hog out in favor of communism. You can call out the army to prevent violent revolution but what do you do in America when the majority peaceably turns out at the polls?
Let the election ballots determine the results and let the defenders of liberty turn out with their guns to defend the results of the elections.
Little David,
ReplyDeleteAre you drawing this conclusion, that Americans peaceably turning out at the polls to vote against issues like healthcare -- is this conclusion based on this past November's elections in VA? If so, did you make that same calculation, when Virginians elected Mark Warner to the Governor's mansion in 2001, that they were peaceably turning out at the polls to repudiate Bush policy?
It may be true that Americans will come out to the polls in 2012 and vote Obama out if health care passes. It may also be true that if it does NOT pass, he is also no re-elected.
You might think of it this way -- if we go to the wall (my communist reference of the day!) over healthcare and win, and this causes us to usher in a new Republican Administration in 2012, well, at least we likely have better and more affordable health care for all Americans when that happens! :)
Actually, given that pretty much every Democrat - certainly including Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and other presidential primary contenders - ran on universal health care, there's absolutely no question in my mind that the Dem's have a strong mandate on this more than almost any other issue. Which is exactly why it's going to get done. Next election, the American people can make whatever choices they want, but this is what they overwhelmingly decided in 2006 and 2008.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think the character of Little David is very clever. He's doing two things here rhetorically, and both are quite interesting in the culture of reading and posting at blogs.
ReplyDeleteFirst, he the person, makes sure to let us know repeatedly that he is more of a communist/socialist than any of us! Now this is a VERY cool trick, because despite pretty much everyone who posts and blogs here saying straight out that we aren't any of those things (Sorry Fox News!) any agreement with Little David runs the risk of being cast that way, since, after all, that is who he is claiming to be.
The second clever trick is to then, under the guise of wistful personal belief, inevitably claim that no progressive or liberal idea could possibly work. I'm trying to think (and I went back and read quite a few of Little David's most recent posts) but as a MATTER OF PUBLIC POLCY (as opposed to personal belief) has he even once come out on the side of a progressive or liberal idea?
I couldn't find it, although I confess, I read quickly. But most of the time, I figured I could read the same thoughts on National Review or the Weekley Standards.
I'm sure I'm possibly off base, but if I'm not, this would be a BRILLIANT position for a hard-core Republican troll to take up on a blog like this one, where ideas are actually discussed and people genuinely try to hear each other out. Think about it -- Little David sets himself up by saying "We are all communists here, right?" and then joining that with "But let's admit it, our ideas are failures. The Conservatives are right."
Brilliant!!!
Gretchen: I believe it's known as "concern trolling." I'm leaning heavily towards banning "Little David" unless he has something constructive to add to the dialog on this blog. So far, I haven't seen it.
ReplyDelete