By FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher FDL
One of the ways the administration tried to jam its PhRMA deal/Aetna bailout on the country was forcing a series of false choices onto the debate. Those who opposed this corrupt hijacking of the democratic process were told that the reality was, you gotta have 60 votes in the Senate. And Lieberman, Landrieu, Nelson and Lincoln stood firm, so you had to give them what they wanted.
It was that or nothing. What can you do? We now hear “If only we didn’t have the filibuster” as frequently as we heard “if only we had 60 votes” when the Democrats didn’t own the war.
And now, we find out something that may surprise many (though probably not anyone who has watched politics for more than 6 months): it was all bullshit.
Part of the negotiations center on whether Reid can provide an ironclad guarantee that the Senate will not leave the House in the lurch, aides said. If the House agrees to pass the Senate bill with a companion measure — or a “cleanup” bill — to make fixes, they want to know that the Senate will indeed pass it, too.
There was some talk among Senate leadership on Thursday of putting together a letter signed by 51 Democratic senators pledging to pass a cleanup bill if the House would pass the Senate bill. But that effort fizzled when support for it didn’t materialize, insiders said.
“The Senate moderates’ viewpoint is, ‘We passed our bill. We’re not going to spend three weeks on some other bill,’” said a Democratic lobbyist who represents clients pushing for reform.
So how many “moderates” are there now?
The 60 vote bar was always crap. Now that it only takes 51 votes to pass a public option (which the OpenLeft whip count says they have), they can’t clear that either. It’s all about kabuki — who gets to feign support for publicly popular legislation vs. who gets to take credit for bashing the hippies and killing it. The White House wants what it wants, and the Senate — largely insulated from the electoral consequences of the bill — is totally willing to sacrifice those in the House who are much more vulnerable in order to give it to them.
Now the apologists are peddling the “it’s this or nothing” false choice about a bill that won’t even kick in for the next four years, as if their “60 vote” myth didn’t just explode. How is it suddenly Raul Grijalva’s fault if he stands firm and won’t accept a hideous bill crafted on the imperative of getting Joe Lieberman’s vote, which isn’t necessary any more?
Meet 51: it’s the new 60.
Tell the House Progressives to stand firm: keep your word and vote “no” on the Senate bill.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Fixing Health Reform Through the Reconciliation Sidecar: 13 Improvements, 6 Ways to Save Money, 4 Important Benefits
By FireDogLake's Jon Walker FDL
Today’s reports continue to point to the reconciliation sidecar strategy as the preferred option on Capitol Hill for moving forward with health care reform. The strategy requires the House to pass the Senate bill “as is” only after the Senate has passed measures with several fixes to the Senate bill that can then pass the senate through budget reconciliation. Reconciliation measures can’t be filibustered, so they only need a simple majority in the Senate, but because of the Byrd Rule, most only deal with budgetary matters. The reconciliation measure would also need to be net budgetary neutral.
There is a lot that needs to be fixed in the Senate bill–and now it can be fixed, using reconciliation to make it palatable. As voted out by the Senate on Christmas Eve, their version of health reform legislation suffers from many problems:
1.It lacks a public option.
2.It contains insufficient affordability tax credits.
3.It lacks a single, national exchange.
4.It has no Medicare buy-in or Medicaid buy-in.
5.It needs a stronger employer mandate.
6.It needs an excise tax fix.
7.Special Nebraska Medicaid funding needs to be removed or more fairly allocated.
8.It contains an insufficient expansion of Medicaid.
9.It lacks a go-ahead for drug re-importation.
10.It does not contain provisions for direct Medicare drug price negotiation.
11.Annual limits on out-of-pocket costs are much too high.
12.Its expansion of community health care centers is insufficient.
13.It needs stronger risk adjustment mechanisms (cost neutral, but affects the budget).
Some of these fixes will cost the government money, but many of them will result in substantial savings. The goal should be to pay for the things that cost money with the savings from the things that save money.
What Costs the Government Money?
1.Fixing the excise tax (as per agreement with labor unions)–cost $60 billion.
2.Extending extra Nebraska Medicaid money to all states–cost $35 billion.
3.Increased affordability tax credits and lower annual out-of-pocket limits (there is no one “right” amount, but for the sake of argument I will set a number)–cost $150 billion.
4.Increased funding for community health care centers–$10 billion.
5.Creating a national exchange (no official CBO score, but cost should not be more than $1 billion).
Total cost: roughly $255 billion.
What Saves Money or Increases Revenue for the Government?
1.A strong public option–saves $110 billion (only $25 billion if it is the “level playing field” public option).
2.Replacing Senate “free rider” provision with employer mandate–generates an additional $107 billion.
3.Medicaid expansion from 133% to 150% FPL–saves $25 billion (in truth, Medicaid should be extended to 200% FPL, or whatever percentage it stops being more cost effective for the government).
4.Allowing drug re-importation–saves $19 billion.
5.Direct Medicare drug price negotiation (no official CBO score, but should save several billion dollars).
6.Early Medicare buy-in for 50-65, after the exchange starts (no official CBO score, but should save several billion dollars).
Total savings/revenue generated: roughly $260 billion (with additional but yet-un-scored savings from Medicare/Medicaid buy-in, and Medicare direct drug price negotiations).
There are many progressive changes that need to be made to the Senate bill. Fortunately, many of the changes that are overwhelmingly supported by the American people–like the public option–would save the government money. That money can be used to fix other problems in the bill, like the structure of the excise tax. The smart move for Congressional Democrats would be to fully pay for any reconciliation sidecar using progressive cost-saving solutions.
This strategy will have four important political benefits:
1.Would put popular provisions back in the bill, and therefore could make the whole idea of health care reform more popular.
2.Will help save hard-working Americans money.
3.Will signal that Democrats are finally standing up to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.
4.Will not require inclusion of any new tax increases in the reconciliation measure.
Today’s reports continue to point to the reconciliation sidecar strategy as the preferred option on Capitol Hill for moving forward with health care reform. The strategy requires the House to pass the Senate bill “as is” only after the Senate has passed measures with several fixes to the Senate bill that can then pass the senate through budget reconciliation. Reconciliation measures can’t be filibustered, so they only need a simple majority in the Senate, but because of the Byrd Rule, most only deal with budgetary matters. The reconciliation measure would also need to be net budgetary neutral.
There is a lot that needs to be fixed in the Senate bill–and now it can be fixed, using reconciliation to make it palatable. As voted out by the Senate on Christmas Eve, their version of health reform legislation suffers from many problems:
1.It lacks a public option.
2.It contains insufficient affordability tax credits.
3.It lacks a single, national exchange.
4.It has no Medicare buy-in or Medicaid buy-in.
5.It needs a stronger employer mandate.
6.It needs an excise tax fix.
7.Special Nebraska Medicaid funding needs to be removed or more fairly allocated.
8.It contains an insufficient expansion of Medicaid.
9.It lacks a go-ahead for drug re-importation.
10.It does not contain provisions for direct Medicare drug price negotiation.
11.Annual limits on out-of-pocket costs are much too high.
12.Its expansion of community health care centers is insufficient.
13.It needs stronger risk adjustment mechanisms (cost neutral, but affects the budget).
Some of these fixes will cost the government money, but many of them will result in substantial savings. The goal should be to pay for the things that cost money with the savings from the things that save money.
What Costs the Government Money?
1.Fixing the excise tax (as per agreement with labor unions)–cost $60 billion.
2.Extending extra Nebraska Medicaid money to all states–cost $35 billion.
3.Increased affordability tax credits and lower annual out-of-pocket limits (there is no one “right” amount, but for the sake of argument I will set a number)–cost $150 billion.
4.Increased funding for community health care centers–$10 billion.
5.Creating a national exchange (no official CBO score, but cost should not be more than $1 billion).
Total cost: roughly $255 billion.
What Saves Money or Increases Revenue for the Government?
1.A strong public option–saves $110 billion (only $25 billion if it is the “level playing field” public option).
2.Replacing Senate “free rider” provision with employer mandate–generates an additional $107 billion.
3.Medicaid expansion from 133% to 150% FPL–saves $25 billion (in truth, Medicaid should be extended to 200% FPL, or whatever percentage it stops being more cost effective for the government).
4.Allowing drug re-importation–saves $19 billion.
5.Direct Medicare drug price negotiation (no official CBO score, but should save several billion dollars).
6.Early Medicare buy-in for 50-65, after the exchange starts (no official CBO score, but should save several billion dollars).
Total savings/revenue generated: roughly $260 billion (with additional but yet-un-scored savings from Medicare/Medicaid buy-in, and Medicare direct drug price negotiations).
There are many progressive changes that need to be made to the Senate bill. Fortunately, many of the changes that are overwhelmingly supported by the American people–like the public option–would save the government money. That money can be used to fix other problems in the bill, like the structure of the excise tax. The smart move for Congressional Democrats would be to fully pay for any reconciliation sidecar using progressive cost-saving solutions.
This strategy will have four important political benefits:
1.Would put popular provisions back in the bill, and therefore could make the whole idea of health care reform more popular.
2.Will help save hard-working Americans money.
3.Will signal that Democrats are finally standing up to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.
4.Will not require inclusion of any new tax increases in the reconciliation measure.
Public Option Resurrected From Near Death, Thanks To Special Election, Reconciliation
By FireDogLake's Jon Walker FDL
With the loss of their 60th vote in the Senate, Democrats are going to need to find a new way to pass health care reform. The most popular idea is for the House to pass the Senate bill as is with many important “fixes” passed just before or at effectively the exact same moment using reconciliation. (Passing a whole new bill using only reconciliation is another option, but seems to have less support at this moment.) SEIU President Andy Stern, Sen. Kent Conrad, and Sen. Max Baucus have all expressed support for this strategy. If they are going to use reconciliation, they have no excuse to not include the public option and/or Medicare buy-in.
The only official “reason” the public option was dropped from the Senate bill was because four Senate Democrats (Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, and Lieberman) refused to vote for cloture on a bill with a public option. Reconciliation measures can’t be filibustered, so they only need a simple majority to pass the Senate. There is no need to listen to the ridiculous demands of a handful of conservative Democrats.
Back in September, Sen. Tom Harkin said the the public option had majority support in the Senate. The early Medicare buy-in provision that was meant to have been a “compromise” that would have 60 votes until Lieberman flip-flopped, but should easily be able to gain a simple majority using reconciliation. Since there was a public option in the original House bill, we know it should have the necessary support in the House.
The public option is extremely popular with the general public. It is much more popular than the Senate bill, and even makes the unpopular individual mandate palatable with the American people. Finally, even a weak public option would save at least $25 billion. That money could be used to increase affordability tax credits.
Now that Democrats are talking about using reconciliation, there is no excuse for not including a public option. It should have the votes needed in both chambers, and will make health care reform cheaper for the government and more popular with the American people. If the Progressive Caucus were serious when they demanded that health care must contain a public health insurance option, they now have the tool of reconciliation to make sure that happens.
With the loss of their 60th vote in the Senate, Democrats are going to need to find a new way to pass health care reform. The most popular idea is for the House to pass the Senate bill as is with many important “fixes” passed just before or at effectively the exact same moment using reconciliation. (Passing a whole new bill using only reconciliation is another option, but seems to have less support at this moment.) SEIU President Andy Stern, Sen. Kent Conrad, and Sen. Max Baucus have all expressed support for this strategy. If they are going to use reconciliation, they have no excuse to not include the public option and/or Medicare buy-in.
The only official “reason” the public option was dropped from the Senate bill was because four Senate Democrats (Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, and Lieberman) refused to vote for cloture on a bill with a public option. Reconciliation measures can’t be filibustered, so they only need a simple majority to pass the Senate. There is no need to listen to the ridiculous demands of a handful of conservative Democrats.
Back in September, Sen. Tom Harkin said the the public option had majority support in the Senate. The early Medicare buy-in provision that was meant to have been a “compromise” that would have 60 votes until Lieberman flip-flopped, but should easily be able to gain a simple majority using reconciliation. Since there was a public option in the original House bill, we know it should have the necessary support in the House.
The public option is extremely popular with the general public. It is much more popular than the Senate bill, and even makes the unpopular individual mandate palatable with the American people. Finally, even a weak public option would save at least $25 billion. That money could be used to increase affordability tax credits.
Now that Democrats are talking about using reconciliation, there is no excuse for not including a public option. It should have the votes needed in both chambers, and will make health care reform cheaper for the government and more popular with the American people. If the Progressive Caucus were serious when they demanded that health care must contain a public health insurance option, they now have the tool of reconciliation to make sure that happens.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Dear President Obama: Time to Stop Letting Corporations Write the Health Care Bill
By FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher HuffPost
When Max Baucus unveiled an early version of the Senate bill in September, an ex-WellPoint VP named Liz Fowler was listed as the author. Only a few weeks earlier, the Huffington Post exposed the sweetheart deal negotiated between the White House and PhRMA in exchange for $150 million in political advertising. And Harry Reid kept Byron Dorgan's popular drug reimportation amendment off the floor of the Senate until PhRMA could whip enough votes to defeat it because it violated that deal.
Dorgan accused the White House of tanking the amendment and retired shortly thereafter. And last night, Martha Coakley paid the price for those deals too. The only real question this morning is, how more Democrats will lose their seats before they decide to stand up to the corporations?
Reports on the Death of Health Care Are Premature
In the wake of Martha Coakley's defeat, both Representative Barney Frank and Senator Jim Webb have said that jamming a health care bill through before Scott Brown can be seated is not the right thing to do. And they're right. Any attempt to do so will look like an effort to bypass the will of the public to facilitate a giant corporate giveaway.
But many on the Hill are also saying that the Massachusetts defeat means that health care reform is dead, fearful that what happened to Martha Coakley will happen to them, too, in 2010.
That's about as feasible as Wile E. Coyote trying to turn around and run back across the bridge that is crumbling behind him. There's only one way to go.
As Jerome Armstrong says, "The Democrats have less than 10 months to start governing as a people-powered party, or they will lose both the House and the Senate." The damage is done. Unless the Democrats move aggressively to right the perception that they are the party of backroom deals and massive corporate bailouts, 2010 will be more of the same.
Step One: Stop Letting Joe Lieberman Run the Party
There will certainly be no shortage of those ready to extract the wrong lessons from the Coakley loss. Joe Lieberman, Mr. 31%, says it's a sign that people "don't like all the partisanship and deal-making here in Washington" and that "they're really skeptical about this health care bill." He doesn't mention that it's his health care bill they don't like, or that making the bill was made unpopular as the price of his vote.
Step Two: Independent Approval in Swing Districts Soars With Addition of a Public Option
A new FDL/SurveyUSA poll of NY-01 shows how Lieberman's bill is affecting the race in that district, one of many that the Democrats are at risk of losing in the next election. Incumbent Tim Bishop would have a narrow lead over GOP challenger Randy Altschuler if the race were held today in a contest that was rated "lean Democratic" by Cook's Political Report.
People were pretty evenly split when asked if they supported a bill with a mandate to buy private insurance, with 50% saying it's a good idea and 44% saying it's a bad idea. Support fell dramatically when they were told that they would be fined up to 2% of their income for failure to comply, with 40% saying it's a good idea and 57% saying it's a bad idea. But when the option to buy into a government-run Medicare program was added, 63% of likely voters (66% of independents) supported it and 33% opposed even with the fine. Even support among Republicans shot up 23%.
Polling done for HCAN last September found similar results nationally, indicating that likely 2010 voters "oppose a mandate to purchase private insurance by 64% to 34% but support a mandate with a choice of private or public insurance by 60% to 37%."
Joe Lieberman was personally responsible for killing the public option/Medicare expansion in the Senate bill.
Step Three: Be Bold, Take On the Corporations With "Sidecar Reconciliation"
The good news? Nobody needs Lieberman's vote to pass either one any more. The non-budgetary "fixes" like banning the exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions have already passed the Senate. A public option -- or an expansion of Medicare -- can be added through reconciliation, which takes 51 votes. The Republicans certainly had no fear of using reconciliation when George Bush was in office. And the Democrats are going to need to do so in order to make good on their promise to fix the excise tax to benefit of the middle class, which will cost roughly $60 billion. But their options for doing that are limited by the process itself: they can pay for it by the savings from a government program like a public option or an expansion of Medicare. Or, they can piss everyone off and raise taxes.
That looks to be where Gerald Nadler and Anthony Weiner are headed. They indicate that "the only way they could sign on to the Senate bill is if it was accompanied immediately, or even preceded by, a separate bill, making a number of major preemptive changes to what they regard as an inferior package," per Brian Beutler.
It's called sidecar reconciliation. And the 65 members of the House who have pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option should be looking into it seriously tonight.
Ezra Klein says that "a Democratic Party that would abandon their central initiative this quickly isn't a Democratic Party that deserves to hold power." I would add that if they don't stick to the principles they profess to hold and stand up to the lobbyists they've kowtowed to from the start, "holding power" won't be anything they have to worry about.
When Max Baucus unveiled an early version of the Senate bill in September, an ex-WellPoint VP named Liz Fowler was listed as the author. Only a few weeks earlier, the Huffington Post exposed the sweetheart deal negotiated between the White House and PhRMA in exchange for $150 million in political advertising. And Harry Reid kept Byron Dorgan's popular drug reimportation amendment off the floor of the Senate until PhRMA could whip enough votes to defeat it because it violated that deal.
Dorgan accused the White House of tanking the amendment and retired shortly thereafter. And last night, Martha Coakley paid the price for those deals too. The only real question this morning is, how more Democrats will lose their seats before they decide to stand up to the corporations?
Reports on the Death of Health Care Are Premature
In the wake of Martha Coakley's defeat, both Representative Barney Frank and Senator Jim Webb have said that jamming a health care bill through before Scott Brown can be seated is not the right thing to do. And they're right. Any attempt to do so will look like an effort to bypass the will of the public to facilitate a giant corporate giveaway.
But many on the Hill are also saying that the Massachusetts defeat means that health care reform is dead, fearful that what happened to Martha Coakley will happen to them, too, in 2010.
That's about as feasible as Wile E. Coyote trying to turn around and run back across the bridge that is crumbling behind him. There's only one way to go.
As Jerome Armstrong says, "The Democrats have less than 10 months to start governing as a people-powered party, or they will lose both the House and the Senate." The damage is done. Unless the Democrats move aggressively to right the perception that they are the party of backroom deals and massive corporate bailouts, 2010 will be more of the same.
Step One: Stop Letting Joe Lieberman Run the Party
There will certainly be no shortage of those ready to extract the wrong lessons from the Coakley loss. Joe Lieberman, Mr. 31%, says it's a sign that people "don't like all the partisanship and deal-making here in Washington" and that "they're really skeptical about this health care bill." He doesn't mention that it's his health care bill they don't like, or that making the bill was made unpopular as the price of his vote.
Step Two: Independent Approval in Swing Districts Soars With Addition of a Public Option
A new FDL/SurveyUSA poll of NY-01 shows how Lieberman's bill is affecting the race in that district, one of many that the Democrats are at risk of losing in the next election. Incumbent Tim Bishop would have a narrow lead over GOP challenger Randy Altschuler if the race were held today in a contest that was rated "lean Democratic" by Cook's Political Report.
People were pretty evenly split when asked if they supported a bill with a mandate to buy private insurance, with 50% saying it's a good idea and 44% saying it's a bad idea. Support fell dramatically when they were told that they would be fined up to 2% of their income for failure to comply, with 40% saying it's a good idea and 57% saying it's a bad idea. But when the option to buy into a government-run Medicare program was added, 63% of likely voters (66% of independents) supported it and 33% opposed even with the fine. Even support among Republicans shot up 23%.
Polling done for HCAN last September found similar results nationally, indicating that likely 2010 voters "oppose a mandate to purchase private insurance by 64% to 34% but support a mandate with a choice of private or public insurance by 60% to 37%."
Joe Lieberman was personally responsible for killing the public option/Medicare expansion in the Senate bill.
Step Three: Be Bold, Take On the Corporations With "Sidecar Reconciliation"
The good news? Nobody needs Lieberman's vote to pass either one any more. The non-budgetary "fixes" like banning the exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions have already passed the Senate. A public option -- or an expansion of Medicare -- can be added through reconciliation, which takes 51 votes. The Republicans certainly had no fear of using reconciliation when George Bush was in office. And the Democrats are going to need to do so in order to make good on their promise to fix the excise tax to benefit of the middle class, which will cost roughly $60 billion. But their options for doing that are limited by the process itself: they can pay for it by the savings from a government program like a public option or an expansion of Medicare. Or, they can piss everyone off and raise taxes.
That looks to be where Gerald Nadler and Anthony Weiner are headed. They indicate that "the only way they could sign on to the Senate bill is if it was accompanied immediately, or even preceded by, a separate bill, making a number of major preemptive changes to what they regard as an inferior package," per Brian Beutler.
It's called sidecar reconciliation. And the 65 members of the House who have pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option should be looking into it seriously tonight.
Ezra Klein says that "a Democratic Party that would abandon their central initiative this quickly isn't a Democratic Party that deserves to hold power." I would add that if they don't stick to the principles they profess to hold and stand up to the lobbyists they've kowtowed to from the start, "holding power" won't be anything they have to worry about.
A Real Plan B - Understanding The Senate Bill Is Part Of The Problem
By TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat TL
Jacob Hacker and Daniel Hopkins write:
Forget the question of whether a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts spells the end of health reform. It doesn't -- unless Democrats let it. The Senate has already passed a bill that is far from perfect but far better than nothing. [. . .] [T]he House should simply enact it in return for strong commitments from President Obama and Democratic leaders that they will fight to improve the bill in the future, including through the filibuster-proof budget process.
There are a few problems with this Plan B. Politically, the Senate bill is NOT "far better than nothing." (As to whether it is "far better than nothing" policy-wise, that is a matter of irrelevant opinions - no group of voters thinks so.) First, let's mention a word that Dem Villagers seem to have forgotten - UNIONS. There is nothing good for unions in the Senate bill. There is a lot bad in the bill for unions. Democrats need unions to work for them - especially in off year elections. "In the future" means what exactly? If it does not mean before the November elections, then it is meaningless. The unions' concerns need to be addressed BEFORE November.
Second, outside of the Village, there is no constituency of VOTERS for the Senate bill. No one is energized in favor of it and Republicans are strongly energized against it. It is, at best, only a slight harm to Dems' chances in November 2010. (You notice I keep mentioning that date?) and guess what? November 2010 is when the next election is going to be.
Third, at this point, "commitments" and "promises" from Obama and the Democrats are not likely to carry much weight with Dem constituencies. One of the reasons for that, for better or worse, is the Senate health bill. Why? Because Barack Obama ran strongly against many of the elements in the bill (excise tax, individual mandates) and strongly for many of the elements that have been left out of the bill (public option, progressive tax on the wealthy, employer mandate.) Indeed Hacker and Hopkins write:
[W]hen the public is polled about the specifics of the health-care bills, its key elements are consistently popular. These include a requirement on employers to provide coverage, progressive taxes to fund reform and tough regulations on health insurers. Perhaps the most popular element -- the public option -- is in the House bill but not the Senate bill, and, therefore, it's off the table.
This paragraph actually tells the tale. There is no employer mandate in the Senate bill. There is no progressive tax to pay for reform -- instead there is an excise tax which is extremely unpopular with all voters, but especially with the unions. There is no public option. There are no "tough regulations" (unless you believe that leaving the states to enforce these tough regulations" is gonna work) on health insurers in the Senate bill. This paragraph form Hacker and Hopkins actually illustrates why Plan B can not be "just pass the Senate bill." The Senate bill is part of the problem.
The Establishment Dems and Village Dems are truly oblivious to the damage that the Senate bill has done. They think all will be solved by passing it. If THAT is the lesson learned from Massachusetts, the Democrats are sure to be defeated badly in November 2010.
Speaking for me only
Jacob Hacker and Daniel Hopkins write:
Forget the question of whether a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts spells the end of health reform. It doesn't -- unless Democrats let it. The Senate has already passed a bill that is far from perfect but far better than nothing. [. . .] [T]he House should simply enact it in return for strong commitments from President Obama and Democratic leaders that they will fight to improve the bill in the future, including through the filibuster-proof budget process.
There are a few problems with this Plan B. Politically, the Senate bill is NOT "far better than nothing." (As to whether it is "far better than nothing" policy-wise, that is a matter of irrelevant opinions - no group of voters thinks so.) First, let's mention a word that Dem Villagers seem to have forgotten - UNIONS. There is nothing good for unions in the Senate bill. There is a lot bad in the bill for unions. Democrats need unions to work for them - especially in off year elections. "In the future" means what exactly? If it does not mean before the November elections, then it is meaningless. The unions' concerns need to be addressed BEFORE November.
Second, outside of the Village, there is no constituency of VOTERS for the Senate bill. No one is energized in favor of it and Republicans are strongly energized against it. It is, at best, only a slight harm to Dems' chances in November 2010. (You notice I keep mentioning that date?) and guess what? November 2010 is when the next election is going to be.
Third, at this point, "commitments" and "promises" from Obama and the Democrats are not likely to carry much weight with Dem constituencies. One of the reasons for that, for better or worse, is the Senate health bill. Why? Because Barack Obama ran strongly against many of the elements in the bill (excise tax, individual mandates) and strongly for many of the elements that have been left out of the bill (public option, progressive tax on the wealthy, employer mandate.) Indeed Hacker and Hopkins write:
[W]hen the public is polled about the specifics of the health-care bills, its key elements are consistently popular. These include a requirement on employers to provide coverage, progressive taxes to fund reform and tough regulations on health insurers. Perhaps the most popular element -- the public option -- is in the House bill but not the Senate bill, and, therefore, it's off the table.
This paragraph actually tells the tale. There is no employer mandate in the Senate bill. There is no progressive tax to pay for reform -- instead there is an excise tax which is extremely unpopular with all voters, but especially with the unions. There is no public option. There are no "tough regulations" (unless you believe that leaving the states to enforce these tough regulations" is gonna work) on health insurers in the Senate bill. This paragraph form Hacker and Hopkins actually illustrates why Plan B can not be "just pass the Senate bill." The Senate bill is part of the problem.
The Establishment Dems and Village Dems are truly oblivious to the damage that the Senate bill has done. They think all will be solved by passing it. If THAT is the lesson learned from Massachusetts, the Democrats are sure to be defeated badly in November 2010.
Speaking for me only
We Tried to Warn Obama…But He Wouldn’t Listen
By Rabbi Michael LernerTikkun Daily
The defeat of the Democrats’ choice to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is being treated as though there is a decided shift of mass opinion to the Right in the U.S. But it is the Obama Administration, not the people who supported him in 2008, which moved to the Right–in the name of being pragmatists or realists. In the process they emptied their own agenda–in regard to health care, the environment, human rights, social and economic justice, and global peace–of the critical elements that made those programs sound hopeful. That left many of their supporters feeling confused, disillusioned, and unable to rally around a politics that seemed so very far from “the change you can believe in” that we had been promised.
Thousands of us saw this coming, and tried to warn Obama, but he wouldn’t listen.
On April 29, 2009, Tikkun and our education arm the Network of Spiritual Progressives bought the entire back page of a special supplement published in the Washington Post on the occasion of the 100th day of Obama’s presidency. We warned him that his presidency was in grave danger. Our point was simple and direct:
Your success depends on helping people believe that they can count on each other, that they are not alone in a ruthless world in which people are out for themselves, and there is a possibility of building a society based on kindness, generosity, and caring for each other. Unless your programs actually allow people to feel in their own lives that they are part of building a new society based on love and generosity of spirit, they will soon fall back into the older paranoid view–that we are all competing with each other and have to look out first for number one. And that will likely put them right back into the hands of the most conservative forces in this society.
It’s that simple, President Obama: if your policies do not give people a personal experience of caring and generosity, people will quickly succumb to the fearmongers who compete in the media over who can make people most afraid, most cynical, and most angry.
Our ad went on to tell President Obama that his supporters were beginning to feel immobilized because they cannot explain to themselves and others:
•Why you are bailing out the bankers and the Wall Street crowd rather than prioritizing the needs of people who have lost their jobs and homes
•Why you are not backing single payer (Medicare for Everyone) health reform but are instead preserving the interests of the health care profiteers and insurance companies that make our health care system so costly•Why you are escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, when you must know that these are no win situations, and when you have even agreed with Rabbi Michael Lerner that the best way to achieve “homeland security” is not by attempting to dominate others around the world in an insane “war on terrorism,” but instead by a Strategy of Generosity manifested in the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ proposal for a Global Marshal Plan introduced into the Congress by Congressman Keith Ellison
•Why you have failed to bring into your Administration more leaders of the peace, social justice, labor and environmental movements that gave you the critical support you needed to win the Democratic nomination for President.
Our conclusion:
If the people who made your presidency possible stop feeling excited about your present direction, the populist energies that ocould be mobilized for fundamental change will instead by mobilized by the Right for reactionary goals, and you may find yourself without the base of support you need even for your scaled down goals.
And now our worst fears and prophetic predictions are coming true.
[If you were one of the many members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives or subscribers to Tikkun who donated to make the ad we published possible, I want to thank you for your ability to see what was ahead--and your willingness to back your wisdom with the money we needed to publish that ad!]
But what could he have really done, many ask, given the way corporate interests seem to have bought their way into power not only in the Republican party, but among Blue Dog Democrats in the House and Senate?
It’s true that if Obama had fought for the kind of change he led his followers to believe would be possible, he might have lost. But winning legislative battles is not the highest goal, as FDR and Reagan, the two most influential 20th century presidents, learned. The most important thing a president can do is develop a worldview and convince the American public of it. Obama could have spoken the truth, told what he saw happening in Washington rather than trying to be a clever inside manipulator–a game that he was destined to lose. Any legislative victory won by compromising away the heart of what you are fighting for isn’t worth much, and in any event, even good legislation can quickly be dismantled by the next president if you haven’t won over the minds and hearts of the American people–and to do that you need to speak the truth and tell people what we are up against in the system of global capital and its ethos of materialism, selfishness, and looking-out-for-number-one, and what it would take to dismantle it and replace that system with a more humane and caring, environmentally sane and ethically and spiritually coherent society. And Obama could have constantly reminded his supporters that the 2008 election had shown that their yearning for a world of peace and justice, of love and caring and community and real solidarity and democracy, were not the private dreams of an isolated minority but the real needs of the American majority. By making us visible to each other, he would have empowered people to fight for programs that manifested their highest values (if and only if his programs did in fact manifest those values, which unfortunately they often did not).
Now it’s up to us, the tens of millions of Americans who really showed in 2008 the powerful commitment we have to building a world of love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity and caring for others. We have to reconstitute that movement without Obama’s help, before the disillusionment with Obama’s compromises leads to the resurgence of the Right’s policies, the surge of a know-nothing Tea Party movement, and the retreat into despair and self-imposed powerlessness by all those who are questioning whether there’s any real possibility of replacing corporate power, materialism and selfishness with a more ethically and spiritually grounded community of caring.
Please don’t let your disappointment at Obama lead you or your friends into political passivity…because the alternative if you do that is Sarah Palin and The Tea Party extremists and the haters and fundamentalists, all of whom are now momentarily dressing themselves in the language of populism, but all of whom will actually only give even more power to the elites of wealth and power.
Help us Reconstitute the Movement of Hope
That’s why it is so important for you to become part of our efforts to reconstitute the movement of hope–and we can do that with your help. We need your ideas and involvement–and so we’ve created two conferences, a one day event on the Monday of President’s Day weekend, February 15, at the McLaren Hall on the campus of the University of San Francisco on Fulton St. near Clayton; and a longer event June 11-14 at the Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.
The conferences are co-sponsored by The Nation Magazine, Yes Magazine, Democracy Now, Op-ed News, Peace Action, 350.org, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and speakers will include Chris Hedges, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Congressman Keith Ellison, Riane Eisler, Rev. Brian McLaren, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, Peter Gabel, Rev. James Winkler, Rev. Conrad Braaten, Robert Thurman, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rev. Gralan Hagler, Jonathan Granoff, Marianne Williamson, Paul Wapner, John Dear SJ, John Nichols, Svi Shapiro, Bob McChesney, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and many more.
Please register here for one of these conferences now (to plan effectively, we need to know very soon if you’ll be coming!). If you cannot come, please donate to make it possible for us to afford to create these events (the amount we are charging will not even come close to covering our expenses: donate on-line or by sending a check to Tikkun, 2342 Shattuck Ave,#1200, Berkeley, CA 94704).
Please help us spread the word–and let us know if you and your friends, colleagues, community members, would like to help us organize a “Support Obama to BE the Obama Americans Thought they were Voting For” conference in your area of the country! Please read the information at our website–this is not about trashing Obama, but about reconstituting the movement that made his presidency happen, and then moving together to bring about the changes that tens of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world desperately need to have happen.
The defeat of the Democrats’ choice to succeed Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate is being treated as though there is a decided shift of mass opinion to the Right in the U.S. But it is the Obama Administration, not the people who supported him in 2008, which moved to the Right–in the name of being pragmatists or realists. In the process they emptied their own agenda–in regard to health care, the environment, human rights, social and economic justice, and global peace–of the critical elements that made those programs sound hopeful. That left many of their supporters feeling confused, disillusioned, and unable to rally around a politics that seemed so very far from “the change you can believe in” that we had been promised.
Thousands of us saw this coming, and tried to warn Obama, but he wouldn’t listen.
On April 29, 2009, Tikkun and our education arm the Network of Spiritual Progressives bought the entire back page of a special supplement published in the Washington Post on the occasion of the 100th day of Obama’s presidency. We warned him that his presidency was in grave danger. Our point was simple and direct:
Your success depends on helping people believe that they can count on each other, that they are not alone in a ruthless world in which people are out for themselves, and there is a possibility of building a society based on kindness, generosity, and caring for each other. Unless your programs actually allow people to feel in their own lives that they are part of building a new society based on love and generosity of spirit, they will soon fall back into the older paranoid view–that we are all competing with each other and have to look out first for number one. And that will likely put them right back into the hands of the most conservative forces in this society.
It’s that simple, President Obama: if your policies do not give people a personal experience of caring and generosity, people will quickly succumb to the fearmongers who compete in the media over who can make people most afraid, most cynical, and most angry.
Our ad went on to tell President Obama that his supporters were beginning to feel immobilized because they cannot explain to themselves and others:
•Why you are bailing out the bankers and the Wall Street crowd rather than prioritizing the needs of people who have lost their jobs and homes
•Why you are not backing single payer (Medicare for Everyone) health reform but are instead preserving the interests of the health care profiteers and insurance companies that make our health care system so costly•Why you are escalating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, when you must know that these are no win situations, and when you have even agreed with Rabbi Michael Lerner that the best way to achieve “homeland security” is not by attempting to dominate others around the world in an insane “war on terrorism,” but instead by a Strategy of Generosity manifested in the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ proposal for a Global Marshal Plan introduced into the Congress by Congressman Keith Ellison
•Why you have failed to bring into your Administration more leaders of the peace, social justice, labor and environmental movements that gave you the critical support you needed to win the Democratic nomination for President.
Our conclusion:
If the people who made your presidency possible stop feeling excited about your present direction, the populist energies that ocould be mobilized for fundamental change will instead by mobilized by the Right for reactionary goals, and you may find yourself without the base of support you need even for your scaled down goals.
And now our worst fears and prophetic predictions are coming true.
[If you were one of the many members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives or subscribers to Tikkun who donated to make the ad we published possible, I want to thank you for your ability to see what was ahead--and your willingness to back your wisdom with the money we needed to publish that ad!]
But what could he have really done, many ask, given the way corporate interests seem to have bought their way into power not only in the Republican party, but among Blue Dog Democrats in the House and Senate?
It’s true that if Obama had fought for the kind of change he led his followers to believe would be possible, he might have lost. But winning legislative battles is not the highest goal, as FDR and Reagan, the two most influential 20th century presidents, learned. The most important thing a president can do is develop a worldview and convince the American public of it. Obama could have spoken the truth, told what he saw happening in Washington rather than trying to be a clever inside manipulator–a game that he was destined to lose. Any legislative victory won by compromising away the heart of what you are fighting for isn’t worth much, and in any event, even good legislation can quickly be dismantled by the next president if you haven’t won over the minds and hearts of the American people–and to do that you need to speak the truth and tell people what we are up against in the system of global capital and its ethos of materialism, selfishness, and looking-out-for-number-one, and what it would take to dismantle it and replace that system with a more humane and caring, environmentally sane and ethically and spiritually coherent society. And Obama could have constantly reminded his supporters that the 2008 election had shown that their yearning for a world of peace and justice, of love and caring and community and real solidarity and democracy, were not the private dreams of an isolated minority but the real needs of the American majority. By making us visible to each other, he would have empowered people to fight for programs that manifested their highest values (if and only if his programs did in fact manifest those values, which unfortunately they often did not).
Now it’s up to us, the tens of millions of Americans who really showed in 2008 the powerful commitment we have to building a world of love, kindness, generosity, environmental sanity and caring for others. We have to reconstitute that movement without Obama’s help, before the disillusionment with Obama’s compromises leads to the resurgence of the Right’s policies, the surge of a know-nothing Tea Party movement, and the retreat into despair and self-imposed powerlessness by all those who are questioning whether there’s any real possibility of replacing corporate power, materialism and selfishness with a more ethically and spiritually grounded community of caring.
Please don’t let your disappointment at Obama lead you or your friends into political passivity…because the alternative if you do that is Sarah Palin and The Tea Party extremists and the haters and fundamentalists, all of whom are now momentarily dressing themselves in the language of populism, but all of whom will actually only give even more power to the elites of wealth and power.
Help us Reconstitute the Movement of Hope
That’s why it is so important for you to become part of our efforts to reconstitute the movement of hope–and we can do that with your help. We need your ideas and involvement–and so we’ve created two conferences, a one day event on the Monday of President’s Day weekend, February 15, at the McLaren Hall on the campus of the University of San Francisco on Fulton St. near Clayton; and a longer event June 11-14 at the Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.
The conferences are co-sponsored by The Nation Magazine, Yes Magazine, Democracy Now, Op-ed News, Peace Action, 350.org, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and speakers will include Chris Hedges, Bill McKibben, David Korten, Congressman Keith Ellison, Riane Eisler, Rev. Brian McLaren, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, Peter Gabel, Rev. James Winkler, Rev. Conrad Braaten, Robert Thurman, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rev. Gralan Hagler, Jonathan Granoff, Marianne Williamson, Paul Wapner, John Dear SJ, John Nichols, Svi Shapiro, Bob McChesney, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and many more.
Please register here for one of these conferences now (to plan effectively, we need to know very soon if you’ll be coming!). If you cannot come, please donate to make it possible for us to afford to create these events (the amount we are charging will not even come close to covering our expenses: donate on-line or by sending a check to Tikkun, 2342 Shattuck Ave,#1200, Berkeley, CA 94704).
Please help us spread the word–and let us know if you and your friends, colleagues, community members, would like to help us organize a “Support Obama to BE the Obama Americans Thought they were Voting For” conference in your area of the country! Please read the information at our website–this is not about trashing Obama, but about reconstituting the movement that made his presidency happen, and then moving together to bring about the changes that tens of millions of Americans and billions of people around the world desperately need to have happen.
Massachusetts a Big Win for Progressives
By FireDogLake's Blue Texan FDL
The race for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat was won last night by Republican Scott Brown.
This is a huge win for President Obama and progressives.
“Whaaaa. . . ?” you say.
There are two big victories at work in Massachusetts.
First, the Democrats in Congress now must recognize they will either lose without progressives or will win with progressives. Polls show that many progressives sat home instead of voting for Martha Coakley. Whoever thinks the country can’t be made more progressive by sitting at home was proven wrong last night.
I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Coakley. We did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed Democratic candidate, thereby purifying the party. Mission accomplished.
And make no mistake, despite the Beltway spin, we know for certain based on statements from the local Democratic parties, that they chose Coakley based on advice from the Washington crowd, instead of listening to the kind of people who sit at home during special elections.
So we have demonstrated to the Democratic Party that it must not take progressives for granted. The Democrats spent millions on a weak candidate who wasn’t left-wing enough. Had we had a true progressive, the Democrats would’ve held the seat. Now they’ll have no choice but to give us everything we want, including free universal health care.
Secondly, and just as importantly, now President Obama is free to pursue the agenda he’s wanted to all along. Now he can get the health care bill he’s wanted all along, while the DINOs in the Senate and the Blue Dogs in the House won’t be able to hide behind GOP obstruction. Now those DLC types will all run to the left, or run away.
For all intents and purposes, Massachusetts is a trial run for the 2010 midterms. If Robert Menendez and the DSCC do not want to see the midterms go the way of Massachusetts, they better take notice. We can totally take over the party just by staying home.
The race for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat was won last night by Republican Scott Brown.
This is a huge win for President Obama and progressives.
“Whaaaa. . . ?” you say.
There are two big victories at work in Massachusetts.
First, the Democrats in Congress now must recognize they will either lose without progressives or will win with progressives. Polls show that many progressives sat home instead of voting for Martha Coakley. Whoever thinks the country can’t be made more progressive by sitting at home was proven wrong last night.
I have said all along that the goal of activists must be to defeat Coakley. We did exactly what we set out to do — crush the establishment backed Democratic candidate, thereby purifying the party. Mission accomplished.
And make no mistake, despite the Beltway spin, we know for certain based on statements from the local Democratic parties, that they chose Coakley based on advice from the Washington crowd, instead of listening to the kind of people who sit at home during special elections.
So we have demonstrated to the Democratic Party that it must not take progressives for granted. The Democrats spent millions on a weak candidate who wasn’t left-wing enough. Had we had a true progressive, the Democrats would’ve held the seat. Now they’ll have no choice but to give us everything we want, including free universal health care.
Secondly, and just as importantly, now President Obama is free to pursue the agenda he’s wanted to all along. Now he can get the health care bill he’s wanted all along, while the DINOs in the Senate and the Blue Dogs in the House won’t be able to hide behind GOP obstruction. Now those DLC types will all run to the left, or run away.
For all intents and purposes, Massachusetts is a trial run for the 2010 midterms. If Robert Menendez and the DSCC do not want to see the midterms go the way of Massachusetts, they better take notice. We can totally take over the party just by staying home.
Why Conservatives Shouldn't Get the Credit For Coakley's Defeat
By Jeralyn TalkLeft
Peter Daou in HuffPo, Liberal Bloggers to Dems and Obama: We Told You So, explores the two most prevalent reasons for the Republican win in Massachusetts:
The first, promulgated by conservatives, is that the new administration has moved too far to the left and alienated a large swath of independent and moderate voters.
The second, pushed by progressive activists and bloggers, is that the administration hasn't been true enough to fundamental Democratic principles, has embraced some of Bush's worst excesses on civil liberties, and has ditched popular ideas (like the public option) in favor of watered down centrist policies, thus looking weak and ineffectual.
The conservative argument is unpersuasive.
I think he's got a point. But I'll take it a few steps further. [More...]
In the last year, Obama and the Dems have compromised too much, moving further away from the goals of progressives. The abandonment of the public option is just one example. On the civil liberties front, Obama has not eliminated trial by military commissions and continued many of the overbroad domestic surveillance programs of the Bush Administration. Here's the ACLU's report card on Obama's civil rights' records, out today.
On issues like spying on Americans, monitoring of activists, terrorism watchlists, the Real ID Act and DNA databases, the administration has carried out none of the ACLU's recommendations.
"Our hope a year ago was that the Obama administration would restore our nation's long tradition of respect for privacy and the rule of law by rolling back the privacy-invading domestic security policies enacted by the Bush administration," Romero said. "Unfortunately, many of those policies have not been reversed, and we now run the risk of seeing them become a permanent part of American life."
On criminal justice issues, one year has passed since Obama's inauguration and we still don't have a law equalizing crack and powder cocaine. There's been no federal law passed reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences or increasing good time for prisoners. Obama is still backing indefinite detention for some detainees, without the filing of criminal charges. He missed his one year deadline to close Guantanamo. There's been no action to legalize the millions of undocumented residents. The war on drugs is still in full force.
Rather than getting us out of the Middle East, Obama has committed more troops and money to Afghanistan. His anti-terror policies are not much different than Bush's global war on terror.
Peter says:
The case by progressives that Democrats are undermining themselves with faux-bipartisanship and tepid policies gets much closer to the heart of the problem.
How so?
....Democratic leaders and strategists, privately disdainful of the netroots, underestimated the influence of progressive bloggers.
Nothing should have been a bigger red flag to the new administration than the growing complaints by established progressive bloggers that Democrats were veering off track on the stimulus, the health care bill, civil liberties, gay rights, and more. But scoffing at the netroots is second nature in many quarters of the political establishment, even though they laid the groundwork for Obama's victory.
The single biggest reason Obama's hope bubble burst is because of the unintended convergence of left and right opinion-making. The cauldron of opinion that churns incessantly on blogs, Twitter, social networks, and in the elite media generates the storylines that filter across the national and local press, providing the fodder for public opinion. Stalwarts of the left, dedicated to principles not personalities, hammered the administration; couple that with the partisan criticisms from conservatives and libertarians, and the net effect was to alter conventional wisdom and undercut Obama's image and message.
....Progressive bloggers have been jumping up and down, yelling at their Democratic leaders that the path of compromise and pragmatism only goes so far. The limit is when you start compromising away your core values. I sincerely hope that's the lesson learned today.
Contrary to what Joe Lieberman thinks, going centrist will just be handing the reins over to Republicans. One more time:
The path of compromise and pragmatism only goes so far. The limit is when you start compromising away your core values.
The Dems are losing vast segments of us, for a variety of reasons. For some, it's health care or economic issues. For others, it's civil liberties. For some, like me, it's criminal justice reform. I wonder, had Obama shown us this year he cared about criminal justice, drug policy and immigration reform, and protecting civil liberties, would I have found Martha Coakley so objectionable? By herself, she's nothing. A crime warrior in an Administration committed to reform is a nusiance, but not a threat.
But with an Administration that has shown no inclination to push reform issues, given her strong law enforcement background, as a Senator, she posed a threat in a way that Scott Brown, whose positions are even worse, didn't. Consider: Joe Biden telling Coakley what crime bill to author, the same way prior presidents prompted him. He brags he wrote everything from Title III to FISA and AEDPA. These bills passed, because the various Administrations wanted them. Other possibilities: Coakley teaming up with DiFi and Lieberman to pass more victims rights bills. Coakley and Orrin Hatch, Coakley and Jeff Sessions. Coakley and Janet Napolitano getting together on anti-terror bills. Had Obama shown leadership and commitment to reform this year, those possibilities would not be anywhere near as worrisome.
Obama and the Dems, as demonstrated so clearly by the health care bill -- but it's only one example -- have pushed more than a few progressives over the edge. They have compromised our values past the point of no return. They've lost our trust. And if they don't turn around, and head back our way, and instead continue to run center and right in the name of bi-partisanship, I think they risk losing us altogether.
We won't support the Right or Republicans, but we may stop actively advocating for Dems. If we stop fighting for Dems, there's only one voice left out there, and it's the voice of the Right. If we jump ship and no longer have their back, whether out of a sense of futility or apathy, the Right will win, like they did tonight. It won't be because more people agree with them than us -- but because they just happen to be standing in the right place at the right time. Yes, they have finally figured out how to use new media and social media to spread their message, but by itself, that would not be enough. We are still the champs at that -- but only if we choose to use them.
I may not have been one of those filled with hope and visions of change when Obama got elected, but I did expect progress. What we've seen so far falls far short of even that modest expectation.
Peter Daou in HuffPo, Liberal Bloggers to Dems and Obama: We Told You So, explores the two most prevalent reasons for the Republican win in Massachusetts:
The first, promulgated by conservatives, is that the new administration has moved too far to the left and alienated a large swath of independent and moderate voters.
The second, pushed by progressive activists and bloggers, is that the administration hasn't been true enough to fundamental Democratic principles, has embraced some of Bush's worst excesses on civil liberties, and has ditched popular ideas (like the public option) in favor of watered down centrist policies, thus looking weak and ineffectual.
The conservative argument is unpersuasive.
I think he's got a point. But I'll take it a few steps further. [More...]
In the last year, Obama and the Dems have compromised too much, moving further away from the goals of progressives. The abandonment of the public option is just one example. On the civil liberties front, Obama has not eliminated trial by military commissions and continued many of the overbroad domestic surveillance programs of the Bush Administration. Here's the ACLU's report card on Obama's civil rights' records, out today.
On issues like spying on Americans, monitoring of activists, terrorism watchlists, the Real ID Act and DNA databases, the administration has carried out none of the ACLU's recommendations.
"Our hope a year ago was that the Obama administration would restore our nation's long tradition of respect for privacy and the rule of law by rolling back the privacy-invading domestic security policies enacted by the Bush administration," Romero said. "Unfortunately, many of those policies have not been reversed, and we now run the risk of seeing them become a permanent part of American life."
On criminal justice issues, one year has passed since Obama's inauguration and we still don't have a law equalizing crack and powder cocaine. There's been no federal law passed reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences or increasing good time for prisoners. Obama is still backing indefinite detention for some detainees, without the filing of criminal charges. He missed his one year deadline to close Guantanamo. There's been no action to legalize the millions of undocumented residents. The war on drugs is still in full force.
Rather than getting us out of the Middle East, Obama has committed more troops and money to Afghanistan. His anti-terror policies are not much different than Bush's global war on terror.
Peter says:
The case by progressives that Democrats are undermining themselves with faux-bipartisanship and tepid policies gets much closer to the heart of the problem.
How so?
....Democratic leaders and strategists, privately disdainful of the netroots, underestimated the influence of progressive bloggers.
Nothing should have been a bigger red flag to the new administration than the growing complaints by established progressive bloggers that Democrats were veering off track on the stimulus, the health care bill, civil liberties, gay rights, and more. But scoffing at the netroots is second nature in many quarters of the political establishment, even though they laid the groundwork for Obama's victory.
The single biggest reason Obama's hope bubble burst is because of the unintended convergence of left and right opinion-making. The cauldron of opinion that churns incessantly on blogs, Twitter, social networks, and in the elite media generates the storylines that filter across the national and local press, providing the fodder for public opinion. Stalwarts of the left, dedicated to principles not personalities, hammered the administration; couple that with the partisan criticisms from conservatives and libertarians, and the net effect was to alter conventional wisdom and undercut Obama's image and message.
....Progressive bloggers have been jumping up and down, yelling at their Democratic leaders that the path of compromise and pragmatism only goes so far. The limit is when you start compromising away your core values. I sincerely hope that's the lesson learned today.
Contrary to what Joe Lieberman thinks, going centrist will just be handing the reins over to Republicans. One more time:
The path of compromise and pragmatism only goes so far. The limit is when you start compromising away your core values.
The Dems are losing vast segments of us, for a variety of reasons. For some, it's health care or economic issues. For others, it's civil liberties. For some, like me, it's criminal justice reform. I wonder, had Obama shown us this year he cared about criminal justice, drug policy and immigration reform, and protecting civil liberties, would I have found Martha Coakley so objectionable? By herself, she's nothing. A crime warrior in an Administration committed to reform is a nusiance, but not a threat.
But with an Administration that has shown no inclination to push reform issues, given her strong law enforcement background, as a Senator, she posed a threat in a way that Scott Brown, whose positions are even worse, didn't. Consider: Joe Biden telling Coakley what crime bill to author, the same way prior presidents prompted him. He brags he wrote everything from Title III to FISA and AEDPA. These bills passed, because the various Administrations wanted them. Other possibilities: Coakley teaming up with DiFi and Lieberman to pass more victims rights bills. Coakley and Orrin Hatch, Coakley and Jeff Sessions. Coakley and Janet Napolitano getting together on anti-terror bills. Had Obama shown leadership and commitment to reform this year, those possibilities would not be anywhere near as worrisome.
Obama and the Dems, as demonstrated so clearly by the health care bill -- but it's only one example -- have pushed more than a few progressives over the edge. They have compromised our values past the point of no return. They've lost our trust. And if they don't turn around, and head back our way, and instead continue to run center and right in the name of bi-partisanship, I think they risk losing us altogether.
We won't support the Right or Republicans, but we may stop actively advocating for Dems. If we stop fighting for Dems, there's only one voice left out there, and it's the voice of the Right. If we jump ship and no longer have their back, whether out of a sense of futility or apathy, the Right will win, like they did tonight. It won't be because more people agree with them than us -- but because they just happen to be standing in the right place at the right time. Yes, they have finally figured out how to use new media and social media to spread their message, but by itself, that would not be enough. We are still the champs at that -- but only if we choose to use them.
I may not have been one of those filled with hope and visions of change when Obama got elected, but I did expect progress. What we've seen so far falls far short of even that modest expectation.
Tell Earl Blumenauer: Keep Your Word, Vote “No” on a Bill Without a Public Option
By FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher FDL
Today, House leadership is talking about using “sidecar reconciliation” to make the fix to the Cadillac tax that the White House promised the unions. But they evidently have no plan to put in a public option to pay for it — they plan to raise taxes instead to recoup the $60 billion that will cost. Whereas the public option (or expanding Medicare) actually saves money, they plan to lift the cap on the Medicare tax and violate the President’s pledge not to raise taxes once again. Just so they can honor back-room deals with Aetna and PhRMA.
This despite the fact that a public option makes the bill 26% more popular with independents and Republicans in a swing district.
Well, 65 members of Congress pledged to vote against any bill without a public option. Now that only 51 votes are needed in the Senate to pass one, that “60 votes” excuse doesn’t fly any more. They need to honor that pledge.
And Earl Blumenauer should remember he made it.
In July, Blumenauer signed a letter saying he wouldn’t vote for any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option. But he subsequently told the New York Times that he really didn’t mean it, and he might just vote for an Aetna/PhRMA giveaway anyway. (I guess Amgen, Eli Lily and Pfizer got their money’s worth.)
Does this mean nothing to him?
This appears to be a pattern with Blumenauer: in 2007, he signed a letter saying he’d vote against any war funding bill that did not contain troop withdrawal provisions. But when the supplemental came up for a vote this year to continue funding for the wars and it didn’t have any, he voted for it anyway. It creates the public perception that ending the war by cutting off funding is apparently only something to be demagogued when Republicans are in office and there’s no hope of actually following through on it.
Blumenauer was the first Democrat to step forward and smack Alan Grayson down for speaking bluntly about Republicans:
“You cringe,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon and an unabashed liberal but also a buttoned-down gentleman. “We’re at risk of having a self-reinforcing corrosive process that drives reasonable people away.” He added: “It breaks my heart.”
He’s from a district with a D+19 PVI. He doesn’t do this to please conservative constituents, he does it because he likes to.
Last year the online community raised $430,000 in gratitude for members of Congress who pledged to vote against any bill without a public option. Earl Blumenauer received $3,230 of that.
Democrats need to restore public confidence that they actually mean what they say, and their actions need to match up with their words. Call Earl Blumenauer’s office and ask him if he intends to honor his pledge and vote no on any health care bill that does not have a public option. Let him know that in our recent poll, 90% thought he should return the money if he doesn’t (or perhaps, as some have suggested, give it to Hatian relief). And that 76% of those responding to another survey (10,814) think that Democrats who go back on their pledge should be primaried.
Earl Blumenauer: DC Office: (202) 225-4811, OR Office: (503) 231-2300. Let us know what you hear.
Today, House leadership is talking about using “sidecar reconciliation” to make the fix to the Cadillac tax that the White House promised the unions. But they evidently have no plan to put in a public option to pay for it — they plan to raise taxes instead to recoup the $60 billion that will cost. Whereas the public option (or expanding Medicare) actually saves money, they plan to lift the cap on the Medicare tax and violate the President’s pledge not to raise taxes once again. Just so they can honor back-room deals with Aetna and PhRMA.
This despite the fact that a public option makes the bill 26% more popular with independents and Republicans in a swing district.
Well, 65 members of Congress pledged to vote against any bill without a public option. Now that only 51 votes are needed in the Senate to pass one, that “60 votes” excuse doesn’t fly any more. They need to honor that pledge.
And Earl Blumenauer should remember he made it.
In July, Blumenauer signed a letter saying he wouldn’t vote for any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option. But he subsequently told the New York Times that he really didn’t mean it, and he might just vote for an Aetna/PhRMA giveaway anyway. (I guess Amgen, Eli Lily and Pfizer got their money’s worth.)
Does this mean nothing to him?
This appears to be a pattern with Blumenauer: in 2007, he signed a letter saying he’d vote against any war funding bill that did not contain troop withdrawal provisions. But when the supplemental came up for a vote this year to continue funding for the wars and it didn’t have any, he voted for it anyway. It creates the public perception that ending the war by cutting off funding is apparently only something to be demagogued when Republicans are in office and there’s no hope of actually following through on it.
Blumenauer was the first Democrat to step forward and smack Alan Grayson down for speaking bluntly about Republicans:
“You cringe,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer, Democrat of Oregon and an unabashed liberal but also a buttoned-down gentleman. “We’re at risk of having a self-reinforcing corrosive process that drives reasonable people away.” He added: “It breaks my heart.”
He’s from a district with a D+19 PVI. He doesn’t do this to please conservative constituents, he does it because he likes to.
Last year the online community raised $430,000 in gratitude for members of Congress who pledged to vote against any bill without a public option. Earl Blumenauer received $3,230 of that.
Democrats need to restore public confidence that they actually mean what they say, and their actions need to match up with their words. Call Earl Blumenauer’s office and ask him if he intends to honor his pledge and vote no on any health care bill that does not have a public option. Let him know that in our recent poll, 90% thought he should return the money if he doesn’t (or perhaps, as some have suggested, give it to Hatian relief). And that 76% of those responding to another survey (10,814) think that Democrats who go back on their pledge should be primaried.
Earl Blumenauer: DC Office: (202) 225-4811, OR Office: (503) 231-2300. Let us know what you hear.
Public Option: Popular; Individual Mandate: Unpopular; Bill With Mandate And No Public Option: Unpopular
By FireDogLake's Jon Walker FDL
It is time for some very simple political math. The public option–or a public alternative like a Medicare buy-in–has always been extremely popular. Despite a multi-million dollar, all-out campaign against it, the public option never stopped polling well. Back when the health care bill still contained a public option, the health reform was more popular.
The private health insurance companies are very unpopular. The individual mandate, requiring people to buy a product from the private health insurers or face a fine, is extremely unpopular. The Senate health care bill with the unpopular individual mandate forcing people to buy a product from the very unpopular private insurance companies is (surprise!) very unpopular.
A public alternative to the private insurance companies is so popular that it makes the individual mandate amazingly acceptable for most people. Americans, for the most part, don’t mind forcing people to buy health insurance if they have the option of buying it from the government instead of only from the private health insurance industry.
What is now facing Congressional Democrats is an unpopular Senate bill that contains a very unpopular mandate forcing people to buy private health insurance. Unfortunately for Democrats, even in swing districts, the majority of voters have not completely soured on the general idea of health care reform. When asked if they would prefer if their Representative vote against any possible health care bill, the results in each of the three districts we polled were below 50%. (It was 48% in AR-02, 40% in OH-01, and 41% in NY-01.)
If Democrats move with clarity, it is possible that they could still make voting for the health care bill reasonably popular, or, at least, not politically damaging. They can use reconciliation to add the very popular public option–that would make the individual mandate more popular, and save the government money. They could use that money to help fix the incredibly unpopular tax on employer-provided insurance benefits to make that provision less unpopular, too. Or, Democrats could use the money saved by the public option to provide some Americans immediate health care relief before the 2010 election. This would make selling the bill and voting for the bill much easier.
This is not rocket science. To make an unpopular bill more acceptable to the American people, Democrats can add a very popular provision, the public option, stand up to the very unpopular insurance companies, and make some very unpopular provisions less politically unpalatable. Or, the other option is to use a special parliamentary tool to raise taxes for what would appear to be a special tax break for labor unions. Congressional Democrats, please don’t make me have to explain–even more simply–why the second choice is the wrong one.
It is time for some very simple political math. The public option–or a public alternative like a Medicare buy-in–has always been extremely popular. Despite a multi-million dollar, all-out campaign against it, the public option never stopped polling well. Back when the health care bill still contained a public option, the health reform was more popular.
The private health insurance companies are very unpopular. The individual mandate, requiring people to buy a product from the private health insurers or face a fine, is extremely unpopular. The Senate health care bill with the unpopular individual mandate forcing people to buy a product from the very unpopular private insurance companies is (surprise!) very unpopular.
A public alternative to the private insurance companies is so popular that it makes the individual mandate amazingly acceptable for most people. Americans, for the most part, don’t mind forcing people to buy health insurance if they have the option of buying it from the government instead of only from the private health insurance industry.
What is now facing Congressional Democrats is an unpopular Senate bill that contains a very unpopular mandate forcing people to buy private health insurance. Unfortunately for Democrats, even in swing districts, the majority of voters have not completely soured on the general idea of health care reform. When asked if they would prefer if their Representative vote against any possible health care bill, the results in each of the three districts we polled were below 50%. (It was 48% in AR-02, 40% in OH-01, and 41% in NY-01.)
If Democrats move with clarity, it is possible that they could still make voting for the health care bill reasonably popular, or, at least, not politically damaging. They can use reconciliation to add the very popular public option–that would make the individual mandate more popular, and save the government money. They could use that money to help fix the incredibly unpopular tax on employer-provided insurance benefits to make that provision less unpopular, too. Or, Democrats could use the money saved by the public option to provide some Americans immediate health care relief before the 2010 election. This would make selling the bill and voting for the bill much easier.
This is not rocket science. To make an unpopular bill more acceptable to the American people, Democrats can add a very popular provision, the public option, stand up to the very unpopular insurance companies, and make some very unpopular provisions less politically unpalatable. Or, the other option is to use a special parliamentary tool to raise taxes for what would appear to be a special tax break for labor unions. Congressional Democrats, please don’t make me have to explain–even more simply–why the second choice is the wrong one.
FDL Statement on Health Care Reform
By FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher FDL
In the wake of Martha Coakley’s defeat, both Representative Barney Frank and Senator Jim Webb have said that jamming a health care bill through before Scott Brown can be seated is not the right thing to do.
They’re right. Health care legislation would be viewed — with some justification — as illegitimate.
But many on the Hill tonight are saying that the Massachusetts defeat also means that health care reform is dead, fearful that what happened to Martha Coakley will happen to them, too, in 2010.
That’s about as feasible as Wile E. Coyote trying to turn around and run back across the bridge that is crumbling behind him. There’s only one way to go.
As Jerome Armstrong says:
I guess Democrats really didn’t realize that they would be held accountable if they got the reigns of complete power and were not transparent. Crap like buying off Ben Nelson’s vote by bribing him with our money is insulting. The internet is just a tool of transparency, and no one, least of all the online progressives, has been fooled by the last year. The Republicans have come into our hometown and kicked our butt tonight. The Democrats have less than 10 months to start governing as a people-powered party, or they will lose both the House and the Senate.
The damage is done. Unless the Democrats move aggressively to right the perception that they are the party of backroom deals and massive corporate bailouts, 2010 will be more of the same.
But there will certainly be no shortage of those ready to extract the wrong lessons from the Coakley loss. Joe Lieberman, Mr. 31%, says it’s a sign that people “don’t like all the partisanship and deal-making here in Washington” and that “they’re really skeptical about this health care bill.” He doesn’t mention that it’s his health care bill they don’t like, or the fact that the bill was made unpopular as the price of his vote.
A new FDL/SurveyUSA poll of NY-01 shows how Lieberman’s bill is affecting the race in that district, one of many that the Democrats are at risk of losing in the next election. Incumbent Tim Bishop would have a narrow lead over GOP challenger Randy Altschuler if the race were held today in a contest that was rated “lean Democratic” by Cook’s Political Report.
People were pretty evenly split when asked if they supported a bill with a mandate to buy private insurance, with 50% saying it’s a good idea and 44% saying it’s a bad idea. Support fell dramatically when they were told that they would be fined up to 2% of their income for failure to comply, with 40% saying it’s a good idea and 57% saying it’s a bad idea. But when the option to buy into a government-run Medicare program was added, 63% of likely voters (66% of independents) supported it and 33% opposed even with the fine. Even support among Republicans shot up 23%.
Polling done for HCAN last September found similar results nationally, indicating that likely 2010 voters “oppose a mandate to purchase private insurance by 64% to 34% but support a mandate with a choice of private or public insurance by 60% to 37%.”
Joe Lieberman was personally responsible for killing the public option/Medicare expansion in the Senate bill.
The good news? Nobody needs Lieberman’s vote to pass either one any more. The non-budgetary “fixes” like banning the exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions have already passed the Senate. A public option — or an expansion of Medicare — can be added through reconciliation, which takes 51 votes. The Republicans certainly had no fear of using reconciliation when George Bush was in office. And the Democrats are going to need to do so in order to make good on their promise to fix the excise tax to benefit of the middle class, which will cost roughly $60 billion. But their options for doing that are limited by the process itself: they can pay for it by the savings from a government program like a public option or an expansion of Medicare. Or, they can piss everyone off and raise taxes.
That looks to be where Jerrold Nadler and Anthony Weiner are headed tonight. They indicate that “the only way they could sign on to the Senate bill is if it was accompanied immediately, or even preceded by, a separate bill, making a number of major preemptive changes to what they regard as an inferior package,” per Brian Beutler.
It’s called sidecar reconciliation. And the 65 members of the House who have pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option should be looking into it seriously tonight.
Ezra Klein says that “a Democratic Party that would abandon their central initiative this quickly isn’t a Democratic Party that deserves to hold power.” I would add that if they don’t stick to the principles they profess to hold and stand up to the lobbyists they’ve kowtowed to from the start, “holding power” won’t be anything they have to worry about.
In the wake of Martha Coakley’s defeat, both Representative Barney Frank and Senator Jim Webb have said that jamming a health care bill through before Scott Brown can be seated is not the right thing to do.
They’re right. Health care legislation would be viewed — with some justification — as illegitimate.
But many on the Hill tonight are saying that the Massachusetts defeat also means that health care reform is dead, fearful that what happened to Martha Coakley will happen to them, too, in 2010.
That’s about as feasible as Wile E. Coyote trying to turn around and run back across the bridge that is crumbling behind him. There’s only one way to go.
As Jerome Armstrong says:
I guess Democrats really didn’t realize that they would be held accountable if they got the reigns of complete power and were not transparent. Crap like buying off Ben Nelson’s vote by bribing him with our money is insulting. The internet is just a tool of transparency, and no one, least of all the online progressives, has been fooled by the last year. The Republicans have come into our hometown and kicked our butt tonight. The Democrats have less than 10 months to start governing as a people-powered party, or they will lose both the House and the Senate.
The damage is done. Unless the Democrats move aggressively to right the perception that they are the party of backroom deals and massive corporate bailouts, 2010 will be more of the same.
But there will certainly be no shortage of those ready to extract the wrong lessons from the Coakley loss. Joe Lieberman, Mr. 31%, says it’s a sign that people “don’t like all the partisanship and deal-making here in Washington” and that “they’re really skeptical about this health care bill.” He doesn’t mention that it’s his health care bill they don’t like, or the fact that the bill was made unpopular as the price of his vote.
A new FDL/SurveyUSA poll of NY-01 shows how Lieberman’s bill is affecting the race in that district, one of many that the Democrats are at risk of losing in the next election. Incumbent Tim Bishop would have a narrow lead over GOP challenger Randy Altschuler if the race were held today in a contest that was rated “lean Democratic” by Cook’s Political Report.
People were pretty evenly split when asked if they supported a bill with a mandate to buy private insurance, with 50% saying it’s a good idea and 44% saying it’s a bad idea. Support fell dramatically when they were told that they would be fined up to 2% of their income for failure to comply, with 40% saying it’s a good idea and 57% saying it’s a bad idea. But when the option to buy into a government-run Medicare program was added, 63% of likely voters (66% of independents) supported it and 33% opposed even with the fine. Even support among Republicans shot up 23%.
Polling done for HCAN last September found similar results nationally, indicating that likely 2010 voters “oppose a mandate to purchase private insurance by 64% to 34% but support a mandate with a choice of private or public insurance by 60% to 37%.”
Joe Lieberman was personally responsible for killing the public option/Medicare expansion in the Senate bill.
The good news? Nobody needs Lieberman’s vote to pass either one any more. The non-budgetary “fixes” like banning the exclusion of those with pre-existing conditions have already passed the Senate. A public option — or an expansion of Medicare — can be added through reconciliation, which takes 51 votes. The Republicans certainly had no fear of using reconciliation when George Bush was in office. And the Democrats are going to need to do so in order to make good on their promise to fix the excise tax to benefit of the middle class, which will cost roughly $60 billion. But their options for doing that are limited by the process itself: they can pay for it by the savings from a government program like a public option or an expansion of Medicare. Or, they can piss everyone off and raise taxes.
That looks to be where Jerrold Nadler and Anthony Weiner are headed tonight. They indicate that “the only way they could sign on to the Senate bill is if it was accompanied immediately, or even preceded by, a separate bill, making a number of major preemptive changes to what they regard as an inferior package,” per Brian Beutler.
It’s called sidecar reconciliation. And the 65 members of the House who have pledged to vote against any bill that does not have a public option should be looking into it seriously tonight.
Ezra Klein says that “a Democratic Party that would abandon their central initiative this quickly isn’t a Democratic Party that deserves to hold power.” I would add that if they don’t stick to the principles they profess to hold and stand up to the lobbyists they’ve kowtowed to from the start, “holding power” won’t be anything they have to worry about.
The Obama Tide Does Not Lift The Dem Boat
By TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat TL
A few days ago in a comment thread, I was discussing President Obama's skills as a politician. My argument was, and is, that President Obama is a great politicians who has not applied his political skills to helping lift the Democratic Party's political fortunes nor to promoting his policies in a substantial way. The most recent WaPo poll supports my argument.
President Obama's approval rating is at 53%. In July is was at 59%. His personal popularity has been resilient. Unfortunately it has not translated into popularity for Democrats and Obama's policies. To be fair, it's not clear that Obama is doing any worse than the average President (his numbers are comparable to President Clinton's in early 1994.) But that is the point - in my view President Obama is capable of doing much better than the average President, especially given the conditions he inherited. Politically, President Obama has severely underperformed in his first year in my view.
There is a lesson here for Democrats in Congress - you are on your own - President Obama can not deliver for you politically (unless he is on the ballot.) This is one major reason why I have some hope that progressives in the House will buck the White House on the health bill and other issues. Right now, the White House has little to offer politically.
Speaking for me only
A few days ago in a comment thread, I was discussing President Obama's skills as a politician. My argument was, and is, that President Obama is a great politicians who has not applied his political skills to helping lift the Democratic Party's political fortunes nor to promoting his policies in a substantial way. The most recent WaPo poll supports my argument.
President Obama's approval rating is at 53%. In July is was at 59%. His personal popularity has been resilient. Unfortunately it has not translated into popularity for Democrats and Obama's policies. To be fair, it's not clear that Obama is doing any worse than the average President (his numbers are comparable to President Clinton's in early 1994.) But that is the point - in my view President Obama is capable of doing much better than the average President, especially given the conditions he inherited. Politically, President Obama has severely underperformed in his first year in my view.
There is a lesson here for Democrats in Congress - you are on your own - President Obama can not deliver for you politically (unless he is on the ballot.) This is one major reason why I have some hope that progressives in the House will buck the White House on the health bill and other issues. Right now, the White House has little to offer politically.
Speaking for me only
The Coming Obama Shipwreck
By Eli Zaretsky Tikkun Daily
The dramatic downturn in Obama’s poll numbers, the growing support for rightist positions, the unbelievably close Senate race in Massachusetts, and the upcoming losses in the 2010 election all point to a Democratic disaster. Obama may yet save his Presidency by moving dramatically to the left, but barring that we have to look failure in the face. Whenever any great effort in which popular hopes have been invested goes down, there is an inevitable period of finger pointing and blame. It might be better now, before the shipwreck, to try to assess the causes.
We all know the dominant narrative. Expectations for Obama’s Presidency were unrealistically high. In a country that is fundamentally conservative, dubious about the role of government, deeply committed to markets, he encouraged a new New Deal. He went too far too fast. From the ground up, people revolted against big government, big spending and intrusive bureaucracies. A correction was inevitable.
This narrative is more or less shared by the right and the left. The right blames Obama for being a socialist, the liberals praise him for all he got done given how dysfunctional the system is. It is also a narrative shared by Obama. He won the nomination by promising “change we can believe in;” after becoming President he talked about how long a time it will take to bring change (“turning a tanker”); and now he and his followers talk about how a dysfunctional system prevents change at all.
I reject this narrative completely. In its place, I identify three causes of the failure that were far more important than the putative conservatism of the American people, or dysfunctionality of the system: Obama, the Democratic Party and the left.
Undoubtedly the lion’s share of the blame goes personally to Obama who spent most of the first year of his Presidency sycophantically cultivating his right wing enemies, whose essential mantra (cost-cutting) he channeled. The reason it is important to understand Obama’s personal responsibility for this has nothing to do with him as an individual. It is because this responsibility goes to the heart of the so-called “system.” From its inception, the American Constitution has been a carefully calibrated machine for preserving private wealth, elite status and power. Everything in it aims to keep genuinely serious issues out of politics, and especially to make sure there is never a challenge to capital. There is only one democratic aspect to the American system, one moment when the grip of money can be loosened: the Presidency. Obama’s failure to use the President’s power — especially to reach out to the American people after he became President — sealed his fate.
Way down the list, but still bearing responsibility is the Democratic Party. Beginning in the eighties, the Party abandoned its historic role as the champion of the middle or working classes and became nothing more than the instrument of the corporations. Obama reached office with huge obligations to the rich which he more than fulfilled, handing the US checkbook to the banks, and giving the insurance companies, the private hospitals and the drug companies the bonanzas of their life in response to a very few societal gains, some real, most symbolic.
Finally, the left has to face its own failure. Understandably unwilling to criticize the first black President, it enabled Obama and the corporate Democrats to hand a popular victory over to the corporations. In the only two occasions in American history when the government acted in the interests of lower-class Americans — Reconstruction and the New Deal — it was only because a left (the abolitionists, and the Popular Front) was willing to criticize the President. Should Obama recover his footing by moving in a Populist direction, it will be the left’s job to make sure that that movement is real, and not as phony as we have come to expect.
The dramatic downturn in Obama’s poll numbers, the growing support for rightist positions, the unbelievably close Senate race in Massachusetts, and the upcoming losses in the 2010 election all point to a Democratic disaster. Obama may yet save his Presidency by moving dramatically to the left, but barring that we have to look failure in the face. Whenever any great effort in which popular hopes have been invested goes down, there is an inevitable period of finger pointing and blame. It might be better now, before the shipwreck, to try to assess the causes.
We all know the dominant narrative. Expectations for Obama’s Presidency were unrealistically high. In a country that is fundamentally conservative, dubious about the role of government, deeply committed to markets, he encouraged a new New Deal. He went too far too fast. From the ground up, people revolted against big government, big spending and intrusive bureaucracies. A correction was inevitable.
This narrative is more or less shared by the right and the left. The right blames Obama for being a socialist, the liberals praise him for all he got done given how dysfunctional the system is. It is also a narrative shared by Obama. He won the nomination by promising “change we can believe in;” after becoming President he talked about how long a time it will take to bring change (“turning a tanker”); and now he and his followers talk about how a dysfunctional system prevents change at all.
I reject this narrative completely. In its place, I identify three causes of the failure that were far more important than the putative conservatism of the American people, or dysfunctionality of the system: Obama, the Democratic Party and the left.
Undoubtedly the lion’s share of the blame goes personally to Obama who spent most of the first year of his Presidency sycophantically cultivating his right wing enemies, whose essential mantra (cost-cutting) he channeled. The reason it is important to understand Obama’s personal responsibility for this has nothing to do with him as an individual. It is because this responsibility goes to the heart of the so-called “system.” From its inception, the American Constitution has been a carefully calibrated machine for preserving private wealth, elite status and power. Everything in it aims to keep genuinely serious issues out of politics, and especially to make sure there is never a challenge to capital. There is only one democratic aspect to the American system, one moment when the grip of money can be loosened: the Presidency. Obama’s failure to use the President’s power — especially to reach out to the American people after he became President — sealed his fate.
Way down the list, but still bearing responsibility is the Democratic Party. Beginning in the eighties, the Party abandoned its historic role as the champion of the middle or working classes and became nothing more than the instrument of the corporations. Obama reached office with huge obligations to the rich which he more than fulfilled, handing the US checkbook to the banks, and giving the insurance companies, the private hospitals and the drug companies the bonanzas of their life in response to a very few societal gains, some real, most symbolic.
Finally, the left has to face its own failure. Understandably unwilling to criticize the first black President, it enabled Obama and the corporate Democrats to hand a popular victory over to the corporations. In the only two occasions in American history when the government acted in the interests of lower-class Americans — Reconstruction and the New Deal — it was only because a left (the abolitionists, and the Popular Front) was willing to criticize the President. Should Obama recover his footing by moving in a Populist direction, it will be the left’s job to make sure that that movement is real, and not as phony as we have come to expect.
The Obama Year One Retrospectives, And The Progressive Choice
By FireDogLake's David Dayen FDL
We’ve seen a run on “what it all means” stories even before the results of the Massachusetts Senate election tomorrow. Aside from the all-too-typical Adam Nagourney “Democrats in disarray!” story, helped along by convenient “we have to tack back to the center” quotes from Evan Bayh, some of the others are worth reading. Paul Krugman, who may be wrong about Jonathan Gruber’s sins, is nonetheless on target with his assessment of what the Obama Administration read wrong early in their term:
The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.
E.J. Dionne picks up on that last point really well, I think.
It’s also striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited [...]
Yet the truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right’s narrative, especially among those moderates and independents with no strong commitments to either side in this fight.
The president’s supporters comfort themselves that Obama’s numbers will improve as the economy gets better. This is a form of intellectual complacency. Ronald Reagan’s numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.
Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper’s method to offer their own critique of the conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be.
The President seemed to understand in the campaign that he needed to make the rhetorical argument, to fill the space of frustration and anger with the failures of the Bush Administration with a coherent narrative for what happened then and what needed to happen in the future. For all the talk of bumper stickers like change, the Obama campaign really only surged in the general election when they got specific about this critique – laying the blame at those who built the bubble economy, who shifted risk onto the most vulnerable in society, who allowed Wall Street to become an unregulated casino. Obama has neglected to continue to tell that story – or at least the story has become muddled – and he is suffering for it with the economic woes shifting to him faster than they honestly should. In addition, the actions of a too-small stimulus, a protection of bank profits until very recently, and a health care bill torn through with compromises and concessions to stakeholders has undercut the narrative even if it were still being told.
Robert Kuttner adds:
How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more [...]
So, how did Democrats get saddled with this bill? Begin with Rahm Emanuel. The White House chief of staff, who was once Bill Clinton’s political director, drew three lessons from the defeat of Clinton-care. All three were wrong. First, get it done early (Clinton’s task force had dithered.) Second, leave the details to Congress (Clinton had presented Congress with a fully-baked cake.) Third, don’t get on the wrong side of the insurance and drug industries (The insurers’ fictitious couple, Harry and Louise, had cleaned Clinton’s clock.) [...]
Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.
Some would say that the proper response to this all is to burn the President, hope for the derailing of his agenda, and move on. History has not been entirely kind to such a stance, from the perspective of moving the country forward. It’s not necessarily a “pre-buttal,” but Chris Hayes’ piece in The Nation is pretty important in this regard. He explains pretty perfectly the corporatism that has disappointed many on the left about the health care bill. He combines the broken government with the outsized influence of the corporate sector to produce a dispiriting picture of the political landscape. He recognizes the trap of pragmatism that has left Obama at the brink of progressive abandonment.
This is precisely the locus of all the frustration, in my view – Obama promised a bottom-up movement for change and has acted top-down, mediating debates between stakeholders and only winding up with the limited success of the “politically possible.” He worked within the existing structures and made little effort to alter them after massively over-promising a transformative opportunity to use mass action to realize a progressive agenda.
But then Hayes makes an important turn, reminding readers that, for the most part, it was ever thus, and working within the system for an agenda that doesn’t align with moneyed interests is bound to produce heartache and disappointment.
In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties [...] Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. “After the old man’s death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being.”
“The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy,” Michels wrote. “Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense.” [...]
What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization. The crucial moments of American reform and progress have achieved this: from the direct election of senators to the National Labor Relations Act, from the breakup of the trusts to the end of Jim Crow.
So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to the filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the frontiers of the possible.
If I had to bet, I’d say that not of one of these will be won this year. The White House won’t be of much help, and on some issues, like breaking up the banks, it will represent the opposition. Always searching and never quite finding is grueling and often dispiriting work. But there is simply no alternative other than to give in and let the field turn hard and barren.
Frustration is truly the enemy of progress. And disengagement is only a trip into a cul-de-sac.
We’ve seen a run on “what it all means” stories even before the results of the Massachusetts Senate election tomorrow. Aside from the all-too-typical Adam Nagourney “Democrats in disarray!” story, helped along by convenient “we have to tack back to the center” quotes from Evan Bayh, some of the others are worth reading. Paul Krugman, who may be wrong about Jonathan Gruber’s sins, is nonetheless on target with his assessment of what the Obama Administration read wrong early in their term:
The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.
E.J. Dionne picks up on that last point really well, I think.
It’s also striking that most conservatives, through a method that might be called the audacity of audacity, have acted as if absolutely nothing went wrong with their economic theories. They speak and act as if they had nothing to do with the large deficits they now bemoan and say we will all be saved if only we return to the very policies that should already be discredited [...]
Yet the truth that liberals and Obama must grapple with is that they have failed so far to dent the right’s narrative, especially among those moderates and independents with no strong commitments to either side in this fight.
The president’s supporters comfort themselves that Obama’s numbers will improve as the economy gets better. This is a form of intellectual complacency. Ronald Reagan’s numbers went down during a slump, too. But even when he was in the doldrums, Reagan was laying the groundwork for a critique of liberalism that held sway in American politics long after he left office.
Progressives will never reach their own Morning in America unless they use the Gipper’s method to offer their own critique of the conservatism he helped make dominant. It is still more powerful in our politics, as we are learning in Massachusetts, than it ought to be.
The President seemed to understand in the campaign that he needed to make the rhetorical argument, to fill the space of frustration and anger with the failures of the Bush Administration with a coherent narrative for what happened then and what needed to happen in the future. For all the talk of bumper stickers like change, the Obama campaign really only surged in the general election when they got specific about this critique – laying the blame at those who built the bubble economy, who shifted risk onto the most vulnerable in society, who allowed Wall Street to become an unregulated casino. Obama has neglected to continue to tell that story – or at least the story has become muddled – and he is suffering for it with the economic woes shifting to him faster than they honestly should. In addition, the actions of a too-small stimulus, a protection of bank profits until very recently, and a health care bill torn through with compromises and concessions to stakeholders has undercut the narrative even if it were still being told.
Robert Kuttner adds:
How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more [...]
So, how did Democrats get saddled with this bill? Begin with Rahm Emanuel. The White House chief of staff, who was once Bill Clinton’s political director, drew three lessons from the defeat of Clinton-care. All three were wrong. First, get it done early (Clinton’s task force had dithered.) Second, leave the details to Congress (Clinton had presented Congress with a fully-baked cake.) Third, don’t get on the wrong side of the insurance and drug industries (The insurers’ fictitious couple, Harry and Louise, had cleaned Clinton’s clock.) [...]
Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.
Some would say that the proper response to this all is to burn the President, hope for the derailing of his agenda, and move on. History has not been entirely kind to such a stance, from the perspective of moving the country forward. It’s not necessarily a “pre-buttal,” but Chris Hayes’ piece in The Nation is pretty important in this regard. He explains pretty perfectly the corporatism that has disappointed many on the left about the health care bill. He combines the broken government with the outsized influence of the corporate sector to produce a dispiriting picture of the political landscape. He recognizes the trap of pragmatism that has left Obama at the brink of progressive abandonment.
This is precisely the locus of all the frustration, in my view – Obama promised a bottom-up movement for change and has acted top-down, mediating debates between stakeholders and only winding up with the limited success of the “politically possible.” He worked within the existing structures and made little effort to alter them after massively over-promising a transformative opportunity to use mass action to realize a progressive agenda.
But then Hayes makes an important turn, reminding readers that, for the most part, it was ever thus, and working within the system for an agenda that doesn’t align with moneyed interests is bound to produce heartache and disappointment.
In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties [...] Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. “After the old man’s death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being.”
“The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy,” Michels wrote. “Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense.” [...]
What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization. The crucial moments of American reform and progress have achieved this: from the direct election of senators to the National Labor Relations Act, from the breakup of the trusts to the end of Jim Crow.
So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to the filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the frontiers of the possible.
If I had to bet, I’d say that not of one of these will be won this year. The White House won’t be of much help, and on some issues, like breaking up the banks, it will represent the opposition. Always searching and never quite finding is grueling and often dispiriting work. But there is simply no alternative other than to give in and let the field turn hard and barren.
Frustration is truly the enemy of progress. And disengagement is only a trip into a cul-de-sac.
Fearing Senate Loss in Mass, Dems Threaten to Impose Senate Bill on the House and the Nation
By FireDogLake's fflambeau FDL
Planning for a loss in the Massachusetts Senatorial race, the Obama administration intends to impose the Senate version of health care on the House with no changes being allowed. Isn’t that pretty much what Obama has wanted all along?
From Charles Babbington of the AP:
A panicky White House and Democratic allies scrambled Sunday for a plan to salvage their hard-fought health care package in case a Republican wins Tuesday’s Senate race in Massachusetts, which would enable the GOP to block further Senate action.
The likeliest scenario would require persuading House Democrats to accept a bill the Senate passed last month, despite their objections to several parts.
The Senate version, after all, squares more closely with what Obama really wants than the more liberal House version. The Senate version, for instance, covers fewer people (94% of Americans vs. 96%) and the Senate version includes the tax on "Cadillac health plans" that Obama really pushed all along. This path would also allow Obama to push through the far less progressive Senate version WITHOUT ANY CHANGES WHATSOEVER made by the members of the House:
The newly discussed fallback would require House Democrats to swallow hard and approve the Senate-passed bill without changes. President Barack Obama could sign it into law without another Senate vote needed.
"The simplest way is the House route," a White House aide said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity because Democrats have not conceded the race to Brown.
Is there any question that the House of Representatives is really dead, killed off by our supposed democratic party and by its leader, Barack Obama who would rather deal with just the House of Lords?
Repulsive DLCer Lanny Davis, meanwhile, makes it apparent that the Rahm Obama faction of the Democratic party is really putting a gun to the head of all Democrats. Vote for Coakley or you get this:
If Democrats lose in Massachusetts, it will simply mean Democrats and President Obama need find a new center to enact health care and other progressive legislation – meaning, they must sit down with Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Orrin Hatch, John McCain and other GOP Senators with long records of bipartisan legislating — and moderate Democrats Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu and others –and create a new health care bill that can command broad bipartisan support.
That’s right, the DLCers still believe they can deal with Olympia Snowe and Orrin Hatch, even John McCain, and indeed maybe they can because their mindsets are closer to those GOP’ers than they are to democrats from the democratic side of the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, spinmeisters from the White House keep blaming Coakley for "running a bad campaign" while the fault really lies with Obama and all of his broken promises. Get this, she was criticized recently for not having campaigned (or run campaign ads) in the five days surrounding Christmas Day! I mean, who would have watched them? Who would have attended a rally on Christmas? Today, a New York Times article written from the perspective of seeing Obama as Superman coming to her rescue, talks of Coakley’s "flailing candidacy". The article makes little or no mention of the underlying reasons why any Democrat running today would have trouble: high unemployment, government bailouts of banks and Wall St., and a health "insurance" bill designed with mandates to bailout insurance companies.
Robert Kuttner, a progressive who has pretty much given Obama a pass until now, seems to be waking up to Obama’s faults now. In a hard hitting article over at Huffington Post he says:
As a resident of Massachusetts, in the last two days I’ve gotten robo calls from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Martha Coakley, and Angela Menino, the wife of Boston’s mayor — everyone but the sainted Ted Kennedy. In Obama’s call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, "because I’m fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care." Let’s see, would that be the same insurance industry that Rahm was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama’s bill as sensible reform? If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.
Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.
R.I.P.: The United States House of Representatives, born on April 1, 1789, deceased 2010.
R.I.P. The Democratic Party born a long time ago, died under Rahm Obama in 2009-2010.
Planning for a loss in the Massachusetts Senatorial race, the Obama administration intends to impose the Senate version of health care on the House with no changes being allowed. Isn’t that pretty much what Obama has wanted all along?
From Charles Babbington of the AP:
A panicky White House and Democratic allies scrambled Sunday for a plan to salvage their hard-fought health care package in case a Republican wins Tuesday’s Senate race in Massachusetts, which would enable the GOP to block further Senate action.
The likeliest scenario would require persuading House Democrats to accept a bill the Senate passed last month, despite their objections to several parts.
The Senate version, after all, squares more closely with what Obama really wants than the more liberal House version. The Senate version, for instance, covers fewer people (94% of Americans vs. 96%) and the Senate version includes the tax on "Cadillac health plans" that Obama really pushed all along. This path would also allow Obama to push through the far less progressive Senate version WITHOUT ANY CHANGES WHATSOEVER made by the members of the House:
The newly discussed fallback would require House Democrats to swallow hard and approve the Senate-passed bill without changes. President Barack Obama could sign it into law without another Senate vote needed.
"The simplest way is the House route," a White House aide said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity because Democrats have not conceded the race to Brown.
Is there any question that the House of Representatives is really dead, killed off by our supposed democratic party and by its leader, Barack Obama who would rather deal with just the House of Lords?
Repulsive DLCer Lanny Davis, meanwhile, makes it apparent that the Rahm Obama faction of the Democratic party is really putting a gun to the head of all Democrats. Vote for Coakley or you get this:
If Democrats lose in Massachusetts, it will simply mean Democrats and President Obama need find a new center to enact health care and other progressive legislation – meaning, they must sit down with Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Orrin Hatch, John McCain and other GOP Senators with long records of bipartisan legislating — and moderate Democrats Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu and others –and create a new health care bill that can command broad bipartisan support.
That’s right, the DLCers still believe they can deal with Olympia Snowe and Orrin Hatch, even John McCain, and indeed maybe they can because their mindsets are closer to those GOP’ers than they are to democrats from the democratic side of the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, spinmeisters from the White House keep blaming Coakley for "running a bad campaign" while the fault really lies with Obama and all of his broken promises. Get this, she was criticized recently for not having campaigned (or run campaign ads) in the five days surrounding Christmas Day! I mean, who would have watched them? Who would have attended a rally on Christmas? Today, a New York Times article written from the perspective of seeing Obama as Superman coming to her rescue, talks of Coakley’s "flailing candidacy". The article makes little or no mention of the underlying reasons why any Democrat running today would have trouble: high unemployment, government bailouts of banks and Wall St., and a health "insurance" bill designed with mandates to bailout insurance companies.
Robert Kuttner, a progressive who has pretty much given Obama a pass until now, seems to be waking up to Obama’s faults now. In a hard hitting article over at Huffington Post he says:
As a resident of Massachusetts, in the last two days I’ve gotten robo calls from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Martha Coakley, and Angela Menino, the wife of Boston’s mayor — everyone but the sainted Ted Kennedy. In Obama’s call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, "because I’m fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care." Let’s see, would that be the same insurance industry that Rahm was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama’s bill as sensible reform? If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.
Either way, the Massachusetts surprise should be a wake-up call of the most fundamental kind. Obama needs to stop playing inside games with bankers and insurance lobbyists, and start being a fighter for regular Americans. Otherwise, he can kiss it all goodbye.
R.I.P.: The United States House of Representatives, born on April 1, 1789, deceased 2010.
R.I.P. The Democratic Party born a long time ago, died under Rahm Obama in 2009-2010.
Should Dems Give the Money Back If They Don’t Keep Their Public Option Pledge?
By FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher FDL
65 Democrats pledged to vote "no" on any bill without a public option. Should they return the $430,000 they got in donations as thanks if they break it?
Last year, $430,000 was raised on Act Blue for 65 members of the House who said they would not vote for a health care bill without a public option.
There are many ways that health care reform can move forward, and much depends on the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race on Tuesday. But Chris Van Hollen, head of the DCCC, now says that reconciliation is a possibility — whereby the Senate only needs to muster 51 votes for the budgetary aspects of the bill (such as a public option).
It’s curious that Van Hollen, head of the DCCC, is saying this. It’s his job to get Democrats elected in 2010, and the corporatism that has taken hold of the bill in order to get “60 votes” in the Senate is clearly causing huge problems for Democrats in tough districts — something we saw in the Snyder and Driehaus polling done by FDL/SurveyUSA.
The only way the Senate bill can be jammed through the House is if those 65 members who said they would vote against any bill without a public option violate their pledge. And since the 60 vote Senate bar has now apparently been lowered to 51, that would be something they did because they wanted to, and not because they had to in order to pass health care at all.
So, we’d like to know what you think. Should those 65 members who received $430,000 in donations because they pledged to vote against any bill that did not have a public option keep the money if they break that pledge, or should they give it back?
65 Democrats pledged to vote "no" on any bill without a public option. Should they return the $430,000 they got in donations as thanks if they break it?
Last year, $430,000 was raised on Act Blue for 65 members of the House who said they would not vote for a health care bill without a public option.
There are many ways that health care reform can move forward, and much depends on the outcome of the Massachusetts Senate race on Tuesday. But Chris Van Hollen, head of the DCCC, now says that reconciliation is a possibility — whereby the Senate only needs to muster 51 votes for the budgetary aspects of the bill (such as a public option).
It’s curious that Van Hollen, head of the DCCC, is saying this. It’s his job to get Democrats elected in 2010, and the corporatism that has taken hold of the bill in order to get “60 votes” in the Senate is clearly causing huge problems for Democrats in tough districts — something we saw in the Snyder and Driehaus polling done by FDL/SurveyUSA.
The only way the Senate bill can be jammed through the House is if those 65 members who said they would vote against any bill without a public option violate their pledge. And since the 60 vote Senate bar has now apparently been lowered to 51, that would be something they did because they wanted to, and not because they had to in order to pass health care at all.
So, we’d like to know what you think. Should those 65 members who received $430,000 in donations because they pledged to vote against any bill that did not have a public option keep the money if they break that pledge, or should they give it back?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Progressives, please help defeat Coakley
By Gregory Martin FDL
It is very important that progressives help defeat Coakley. Please read my explanation. The more power the folks in the Democratic Corporate Suck Up wing of the party gain, the more we will have to fight to make the party move to the left. I do not think that many progressive Democrats understand that putting such people as Coakley into power is worse than having a Republican in the seat. Just being in the Democratic Party does not and will not ensure a progressive agenda. Do you not see that? So, if you get her into the seat, what makes you think she will be any better than Lincoln, or Nelson, or Lieberman! It will, in fact, ensure that there will be NO progressive agenda. It was not the Republicans who failed us of late. It was the Democrats. We will never succeed as long as the Dem’s can talk liberal and vote corporate.
The idea that we do this to ’send a message’ is wrong. They know the message. The idea is to not support candidates who will not support our agenda. The idea is to not feed the very beast we are fighting. It is not the Party which we fight for, it is progressive ideas. Think about what the Dem’s have actually voted for in the last year. How much of it was really any different than the Republicans? We cannot just give the Dem’s power for power’s sake. You must please realize that, as in 1994, we will lose both houses of Congress if we do not stick to our principles. I beg you to see and understand this. I am 59 years old and I saw Clinton sell out to corporate power. He managed to stay in power but he destroyed the Democratic Party. Do Not Let It Happen Again!
Just ask yourself why you vote for Democrats in the first place. It can’t be that you simply like the name.
As Rahm Emanuel and others in the Democratic Party have said, ‘…don’t worry about the left. They will fall in line….they have no choice.’ But we do! Until the powers at the top of the party realize that we cannot be taken for granted, this kind of sell out will never change. Never. Never.
Do you want to end up fighting the huge piles of money which will ensure corporate candidate invincibility in the Democratic primaries? If we do not stop it now, that is exactly what will happen. And, as in 1994, independent voters will not vote for Democrats. Hell, many Democrats will not vote for Democrats! How do I know this? Because I am a Democrat. And if things do not change, I will not vote for Democrats.
We do have a choice. Don’t limit your choices further.
It is very important that progressives help defeat Coakley. Please read my explanation. The more power the folks in the Democratic Corporate Suck Up wing of the party gain, the more we will have to fight to make the party move to the left. I do not think that many progressive Democrats understand that putting such people as Coakley into power is worse than having a Republican in the seat. Just being in the Democratic Party does not and will not ensure a progressive agenda. Do you not see that? So, if you get her into the seat, what makes you think she will be any better than Lincoln, or Nelson, or Lieberman! It will, in fact, ensure that there will be NO progressive agenda. It was not the Republicans who failed us of late. It was the Democrats. We will never succeed as long as the Dem’s can talk liberal and vote corporate.
The idea that we do this to ’send a message’ is wrong. They know the message. The idea is to not support candidates who will not support our agenda. The idea is to not feed the very beast we are fighting. It is not the Party which we fight for, it is progressive ideas. Think about what the Dem’s have actually voted for in the last year. How much of it was really any different than the Republicans? We cannot just give the Dem’s power for power’s sake. You must please realize that, as in 1994, we will lose both houses of Congress if we do not stick to our principles. I beg you to see and understand this. I am 59 years old and I saw Clinton sell out to corporate power. He managed to stay in power but he destroyed the Democratic Party. Do Not Let It Happen Again!
Just ask yourself why you vote for Democrats in the first place. It can’t be that you simply like the name.
As Rahm Emanuel and others in the Democratic Party have said, ‘…don’t worry about the left. They will fall in line….they have no choice.’ But we do! Until the powers at the top of the party realize that we cannot be taken for granted, this kind of sell out will never change. Never. Never.
Do you want to end up fighting the huge piles of money which will ensure corporate candidate invincibility in the Democratic primaries? If we do not stop it now, that is exactly what will happen. And, as in 1994, independent voters will not vote for Democrats. Hell, many Democrats will not vote for Democrats! How do I know this? Because I am a Democrat. And if things do not change, I will not vote for Democrats.
We do have a choice. Don’t limit your choices further.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Congressman Van Hollen: Reconciliation Is An Option
By FireDogLake's Jon Walker FDL
Finally, all it takes is the possibility of losing a Senate seat in Massachusetts plus tanking poll numbers for House Democrats for Congressional leaders to admit they really only need a simple majority in the Senate to pass health care reform.
“Even before Massachusetts and that race was on the radar screen, we prepared for the process of using reconciliation,” said Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“Getting health-care reform passed is important,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “Reconciliation is an option.”
Using reconciliation has been an option for months. Democrats should have started the reconciliation process back in September when it was clear that Republicans had no intention of working on a bipartisan bill. The bill would have been signed before Christmas if they had gone that route.
Instead, Harry Reid spent months watering it down until it could get 60 votes. Senate Democrats engaged in a terrible process of giving into every one of the insane and nonsensical demands from Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln. They removed some of the most popular components, made it clear the Senate was bought by the big health insurance companies, and showed that the Senate Democratic caucus is a completely non-functional group.
Democrats made the bill terrible to win Joe Lieberman’s, Ben Nelson’s, and Blanche Lincoln’s support. And now Van Hollen admits that they did not need to. They could have passed a bill without giving into this handful of conservative senators. It was always possible to pass a bill with a public option, and it is still possible.
Instead, they are going to force people to buy an expensive, low quality product from the same poorly regulated private insurance companies that helped ruin our health care system in the first place. I would not want to be the one selling that decision during the next election.
Finally, all it takes is the possibility of losing a Senate seat in Massachusetts plus tanking poll numbers for House Democrats for Congressional leaders to admit they really only need a simple majority in the Senate to pass health care reform.
“Even before Massachusetts and that race was on the radar screen, we prepared for the process of using reconciliation,” said Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“Getting health-care reform passed is important,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. “Reconciliation is an option.”
Using reconciliation has been an option for months. Democrats should have started the reconciliation process back in September when it was clear that Republicans had no intention of working on a bipartisan bill. The bill would have been signed before Christmas if they had gone that route.
Instead, Harry Reid spent months watering it down until it could get 60 votes. Senate Democrats engaged in a terrible process of giving into every one of the insane and nonsensical demands from Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln. They removed some of the most popular components, made it clear the Senate was bought by the big health insurance companies, and showed that the Senate Democratic caucus is a completely non-functional group.
Democrats made the bill terrible to win Joe Lieberman’s, Ben Nelson’s, and Blanche Lincoln’s support. And now Van Hollen admits that they did not need to. They could have passed a bill without giving into this handful of conservative senators. It was always possible to pass a bill with a public option, and it is still possible.
Instead, they are going to force people to buy an expensive, low quality product from the same poorly regulated private insurance companies that helped ruin our health care system in the first place. I would not want to be the one selling that decision during the next election.
By The Numbers: A Brown Win Could Kill Health Care
By the Huffington Post's Sam Stein HuffPost
Democratic leaders freaked out on Friday as they suddenly realized that nearly a year's worth of health-care negotiations could be tripped up by an improbably close Senate race in Massachusetts.
A poorly run campaign and a toxic political environment have imperiled what should have been a smooth path for Attorney General Martha Coakley to take over the seat long held by Ted Kennedy. But now, if Republican Scott Brown emerge victorious -- and, in the process, reduces the Senate Democratic Caucus from 60 to 59 -- the numbers will be stacked against health care's passage.
"It's not an encouraging thought," said one health care activist. "We're f---d," added another.
It all comes down to timing. The Massachusetts election is being held this Tuesday the 19th, after which there is a 10-day period to count overseas ballots, screen votes for potential fraud, and certify a winner. Should he win, Brown would be seated by January 29.
It will be incredibly difficult if not impossible for health care reform negotiators in Congress to get a bill passed before then. For starters, lawmakers have not yet settled on a final product. Once they do, they have to send the legislative language to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring. An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed that it usually takes the CBO 10-12 days to respond. Under an expedited timeframe, they could conceivably be made available in seven days.
But that's not the end of the process. Once a CBO score is released (and provided that it's a good score), lawmakers have a whole set of parliamentary loopholes through which they must jump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has pledged that the bill will be placed online 72 hours in advance of the House voting on it. Once it is passed, it is sent to the Senate where Reid will have to file a motion to proceed (not time consuming), file a measure that blocks Senators from adding amendments (again, not time consuming) and then file for cloture. The cloture vote, requiring 60 Senators to pass, takes 30 hours. Once that's passed, then the Senate can have an up-or-down vote on the bill. All told, a Democratic aide says the chamber's process will take three to five days.
If the legislation were sent to the CBO today (possible but unlikely) it could pass the Senate in time. But this is increasingly regarded as a fantasy scenario, with strategists noting the various deadlines that congressional Democrats have already missed in the health care reform process.
In light of this, several emergency options are being bandied about. The first is that Pelosi will have to drop her 72-hour pledge (which was made just this week). "We could really use those three days," said one Democratic Senate aide.
The second option would be to simply force the House to accept the Senate's legislation (which has already been scored by the CBO). "I guess they could just swallow our bill but I think Pelosi's people would erupt in revolt," said the aide.
Democratic leaders freaked out on Friday as they suddenly realized that nearly a year's worth of health-care negotiations could be tripped up by an improbably close Senate race in Massachusetts.
A poorly run campaign and a toxic political environment have imperiled what should have been a smooth path for Attorney General Martha Coakley to take over the seat long held by Ted Kennedy. But now, if Republican Scott Brown emerge victorious -- and, in the process, reduces the Senate Democratic Caucus from 60 to 59 -- the numbers will be stacked against health care's passage.
"It's not an encouraging thought," said one health care activist. "We're f---d," added another.
It all comes down to timing. The Massachusetts election is being held this Tuesday the 19th, after which there is a 10-day period to count overseas ballots, screen votes for potential fraud, and certify a winner. Should he win, Brown would be seated by January 29.
It will be incredibly difficult if not impossible for health care reform negotiators in Congress to get a bill passed before then. For starters, lawmakers have not yet settled on a final product. Once they do, they have to send the legislative language to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring. An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) confirmed that it usually takes the CBO 10-12 days to respond. Under an expedited timeframe, they could conceivably be made available in seven days.
But that's not the end of the process. Once a CBO score is released (and provided that it's a good score), lawmakers have a whole set of parliamentary loopholes through which they must jump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has pledged that the bill will be placed online 72 hours in advance of the House voting on it. Once it is passed, it is sent to the Senate where Reid will have to file a motion to proceed (not time consuming), file a measure that blocks Senators from adding amendments (again, not time consuming) and then file for cloture. The cloture vote, requiring 60 Senators to pass, takes 30 hours. Once that's passed, then the Senate can have an up-or-down vote on the bill. All told, a Democratic aide says the chamber's process will take three to five days.
If the legislation were sent to the CBO today (possible but unlikely) it could pass the Senate in time. But this is increasingly regarded as a fantasy scenario, with strategists noting the various deadlines that congressional Democrats have already missed in the health care reform process.
In light of this, several emergency options are being bandied about. The first is that Pelosi will have to drop her 72-hour pledge (which was made just this week). "We could really use those three days," said one Democratic Senate aide.
The second option would be to simply force the House to accept the Senate's legislation (which has already been scored by the CBO). "I guess they could just swallow our bill but I think Pelosi's people would erupt in revolt," said the aide.
61% Of Americans Prefer Taxing The Rich Over Taxing Health Insurance
By FireDogLake's Jon Walker FDL
CNN has a new poll out showing that a large majority of Americans prefer the House’s plan of taxing the rich to pay for health care reform:
According to the poll, 61 percent of the public favor the House provision, which taxes people with high incomes regardless of the kind of health insurance they have. Twenty-nine percent favor the Senate provision, which raises taxes on high-quality health insurance plans, regardless of the amount of money made by the people covered by those plans.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Taxing people’s health care benefits is very unpopular. There is a reason that Obama campaigned directly against the proposal, and attacked John McCain for supporting the idea. Taxing the rich is a much more popular way to pay for health care. That is why the House did it, and why Obama campaigned on the idea before flip-flopping after getting into office.
Health care reform keeps getting more unpopular each day. I suspect it is because as time goes on, the most popular elements (like the public option and employer mandate) get eliminated, while the least popular elements (like the excise tax and individual mandate) are declared “must haves” by the President.
Amazing! When you take away popular policies, and replace them with unpopular policies, the whole bill becomes less popular. Who could have guessed?
CNN has a new poll out showing that a large majority of Americans prefer the House’s plan of taxing the rich to pay for health care reform:
According to the poll, 61 percent of the public favor the House provision, which taxes people with high incomes regardless of the kind of health insurance they have. Twenty-nine percent favor the Senate provision, which raises taxes on high-quality health insurance plans, regardless of the amount of money made by the people covered by those plans.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Taxing people’s health care benefits is very unpopular. There is a reason that Obama campaigned directly against the proposal, and attacked John McCain for supporting the idea. Taxing the rich is a much more popular way to pay for health care. That is why the House did it, and why Obama campaigned on the idea before flip-flopping after getting into office.
Health care reform keeps getting more unpopular each day. I suspect it is because as time goes on, the most popular elements (like the public option and employer mandate) get eliminated, while the least popular elements (like the excise tax and individual mandate) are declared “must haves” by the President.
Amazing! When you take away popular policies, and replace them with unpopular policies, the whole bill becomes less popular. Who could have guessed?
Friday, January 15, 2010
DCCC Urges Stupak To Run For Re-Election? Not one cent!
By The Left Coaster's Turkana TLC
It's being reported that DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen is urging Bart Stupak to drop his statehouse dream, and run for re-election, to Congress.
Kate Harding:
If Stupak doesn't run, there's a strong chance his seat will go to a Republican, and then what would happen? We might end up with someone representing that district who's 100% opposed to abortion, in favor of the death penalty, a champion of gun ownership -- even the kind of person who would be willing to sabotage healthcare reform because of his personal religious beliefs. That would be terrible! Oh, right
Jos, at feministing:
Because it matters if the person restricting reproductive rights has a D or R next to their name? Because the Democrats want to do the work of limiting abortion access all by themselves? Because it wasn't obvious enough there's no major party in the US willing to take a stand for women's health?
Jos quotes Jodi Jacobson:
There you have it, gals. The Democratic Party once again has your back.
To the firing squad.
I have a message for Chris Van Hollen and the DCCC: Not one cent!
It's being reported that DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen is urging Bart Stupak to drop his statehouse dream, and run for re-election, to Congress.
Kate Harding:
If Stupak doesn't run, there's a strong chance his seat will go to a Republican, and then what would happen? We might end up with someone representing that district who's 100% opposed to abortion, in favor of the death penalty, a champion of gun ownership -- even the kind of person who would be willing to sabotage healthcare reform because of his personal religious beliefs. That would be terrible! Oh, right
Jos, at feministing:
Because it matters if the person restricting reproductive rights has a D or R next to their name? Because the Democrats want to do the work of limiting abortion access all by themselves? Because it wasn't obvious enough there's no major party in the US willing to take a stand for women's health?
Jos quotes Jodi Jacobson:
There you have it, gals. The Democratic Party once again has your back.
To the firing squad.
I have a message for Chris Van Hollen and the DCCC: Not one cent!
Update: The Cadillac Tax Will Raise Far Less Than Projected and Won't Control Costs
By Maggie Mahar Health Beat
The Senate’s controversial “Cadillac Tax” on expensive health insurance plans was supposed to raise $149 billion to help fund reform. But now, we’re told it’s been “scaled back.” Some use the verb “gutted”—though that is probably a tad strong. Still, a number of changes have been made:
•Union employees will be exempt for the tax on expensive insurance plans until 2018, five years after the legislation takes effect
•Government employees will also be exempt until 2018
•The threshold defining “expensive” plans has been lifted from $8,500 to $9,000 for individual plans and from $23,000 to $24,000 for family plans.
•The threshold will rise further for plans where premiums are higher because the work force is older or includes more women
•Adjustments will also be made to spare plans in 17 states with particularly high health costs.
•The value of dental and vision benefits won’t count toward the thresholds
Reportedly, the changes mean that the tax will raise about $90 billion over 10 years, down from $149 billion. But my guess is that, after you tally up all of the adjustments, the bill will raise far less.
Keep in mind, as I reported in yesterday's post, the original figure was based on the assumption that roughly $120 billion of the $149 billion would come from individuals paying higher income taxes, Medicare taxes and Social Security taxes. Why would their taxes go up? The bill’s architects make two assumptions:
First, they predict that in order to avoid the Cadillac tax, employers will ratchet back to cheaper plans. This is no doubt true.
Secondly, they fantasize that employers will then pass on the savings to employees in the form of higher wages. To say that this is unlikely would be an understatement.
As I explained in the earlier post, the history of wages and benefits over the past 25 years shows that employers hand out raises only if they must, in order to attract employees in a very tight labor market.
Legislators will now have to scramble to find a way to replace the funding that the Cadillac Tax was supposed to provide. Reportedly, negotiators are “considering increasing the financial hit on drug makers, nursing homes and medical-device makers.”
Here, I would note many large drug-makers have expanded into medical devices, and now enjoy 16 percent profit margins. Meanwhile, drug-makers and medical-device manufacturers rake in roughly 16 percent of the $2.6 trillion that we, as a nation, spend on health care. They could afford to make a larger contribution to reform.
But while the tax may raise far less than expected, a few years down the road, it still could have an unhealthy impact on many middle-class Americans. Today, very few employees are covered by a family plan that costs $24,000, but keep in mind that over the past ten years, the amount that private insurers pay out to doctors, hospitals and patients has been rising by an average of eight percent a year.
Each year, health care providers do more, patients undergo more tests and treatments, and manufacturers charge more for every pill and every piece of high tech equipment.
If health care costs continue to spiral, premiums will rise apace. Meanwhile, the threshold defining expensive plans will climb slowly—it will be indexed to the consumer price index plus one percent, far below the average annual rate of health care inflation. As a result, premiums will quickly begin to catch up with the thresholds.
Mercer, the benefits consulting firm based in New York, predicts that by 2016—just three years after reform kicks in—the tax could affect 24 percent of the nation’s employees. (This number may be high; no one can predict how many plans will be exempted after adjustments for older workers, women and high-cost states).
But those employees who are affected will almost certainly face higher out-of-pocket payments. Here’s how the tax trickles down to employees:
Under the proposal, insurers will be required to pay a 40% tax on high-cost plans. They will then pass that tax on to employers who continue to choose these plans in the form of even-higher premiums. To avoid that added expense, most employers will probably switch to less expensive plans. Under reform, all plans will be required to offer a fairly rich package of “essential benefits,” so the only way to find a cheaper plan will be to look for one with higher co-pays and deductibles.
Thus, the burden will shift to employees. The tax’s supporters argue that this will help rein in health-care inflation. Because they will have more “skin in the game”, employees will become more prudent in their use of health care, going to the doctor less frequently, and avoiding unnecessary tests and treatments.
But, as I noted yesterday, research shows that when patients face high co-pays and deductibles, they are just as likely to skip needed care as they are to avoid overtreatment. And, when they put off necessary care, at some point down the road, they become sicker, and many even land in the hospital.
Recent experience confirms the research. As employers who can no longer afford sky-high premiums shift costs to employees, co-pays and deductibles have climbed. Yet health care spending continues to spiral as Americans undergo more procedures, see more specialists and pop more pills.
If “skin in the game” was going to control spending, one would think that it would already have begun to “bend the curve” of healthcare inflation.
I would also point out that in developed countries that have done a much better job of holding down health care costs, their citizens often receiving “first dollar coverage, ” paying nothing when they receive care. Their governments don’t try to force patients to ration themselves; they regulate prices and put caps on volume. And their hospitals and doctors are more likely to follow evidence-based guidelines to lift the quality of care while lowering costs.
Recently, I’ve written about how Norway has all but eliminated hospital infections, while France’s hospitals have adopted checklists that we know greatly reduce costly medical errors.
Finally, I can’t help but recall the House’s alternative to a “Cadillac tax”: raise income taxes on Americans earning more than $500,000. Even with the hike, the richest 1% would be paying no more than they did in the middle of the 1990s. It was such a simple plan. . .
The Senate’s controversial “Cadillac Tax” on expensive health insurance plans was supposed to raise $149 billion to help fund reform. But now, we’re told it’s been “scaled back.” Some use the verb “gutted”—though that is probably a tad strong. Still, a number of changes have been made:
•Union employees will be exempt for the tax on expensive insurance plans until 2018, five years after the legislation takes effect
•Government employees will also be exempt until 2018
•The threshold defining “expensive” plans has been lifted from $8,500 to $9,000 for individual plans and from $23,000 to $24,000 for family plans.
•The threshold will rise further for plans where premiums are higher because the work force is older or includes more women
•Adjustments will also be made to spare plans in 17 states with particularly high health costs.
•The value of dental and vision benefits won’t count toward the thresholds
Reportedly, the changes mean that the tax will raise about $90 billion over 10 years, down from $149 billion. But my guess is that, after you tally up all of the adjustments, the bill will raise far less.
Keep in mind, as I reported in yesterday's post, the original figure was based on the assumption that roughly $120 billion of the $149 billion would come from individuals paying higher income taxes, Medicare taxes and Social Security taxes. Why would their taxes go up? The bill’s architects make two assumptions:
First, they predict that in order to avoid the Cadillac tax, employers will ratchet back to cheaper plans. This is no doubt true.
Secondly, they fantasize that employers will then pass on the savings to employees in the form of higher wages. To say that this is unlikely would be an understatement.
As I explained in the earlier post, the history of wages and benefits over the past 25 years shows that employers hand out raises only if they must, in order to attract employees in a very tight labor market.
Legislators will now have to scramble to find a way to replace the funding that the Cadillac Tax was supposed to provide. Reportedly, negotiators are “considering increasing the financial hit on drug makers, nursing homes and medical-device makers.”
Here, I would note many large drug-makers have expanded into medical devices, and now enjoy 16 percent profit margins. Meanwhile, drug-makers and medical-device manufacturers rake in roughly 16 percent of the $2.6 trillion that we, as a nation, spend on health care. They could afford to make a larger contribution to reform.
But while the tax may raise far less than expected, a few years down the road, it still could have an unhealthy impact on many middle-class Americans. Today, very few employees are covered by a family plan that costs $24,000, but keep in mind that over the past ten years, the amount that private insurers pay out to doctors, hospitals and patients has been rising by an average of eight percent a year.
Each year, health care providers do more, patients undergo more tests and treatments, and manufacturers charge more for every pill and every piece of high tech equipment.
If health care costs continue to spiral, premiums will rise apace. Meanwhile, the threshold defining expensive plans will climb slowly—it will be indexed to the consumer price index plus one percent, far below the average annual rate of health care inflation. As a result, premiums will quickly begin to catch up with the thresholds.
Mercer, the benefits consulting firm based in New York, predicts that by 2016—just three years after reform kicks in—the tax could affect 24 percent of the nation’s employees. (This number may be high; no one can predict how many plans will be exempted after adjustments for older workers, women and high-cost states).
But those employees who are affected will almost certainly face higher out-of-pocket payments. Here’s how the tax trickles down to employees:
Under the proposal, insurers will be required to pay a 40% tax on high-cost plans. They will then pass that tax on to employers who continue to choose these plans in the form of even-higher premiums. To avoid that added expense, most employers will probably switch to less expensive plans. Under reform, all plans will be required to offer a fairly rich package of “essential benefits,” so the only way to find a cheaper plan will be to look for one with higher co-pays and deductibles.
Thus, the burden will shift to employees. The tax’s supporters argue that this will help rein in health-care inflation. Because they will have more “skin in the game”, employees will become more prudent in their use of health care, going to the doctor less frequently, and avoiding unnecessary tests and treatments.
But, as I noted yesterday, research shows that when patients face high co-pays and deductibles, they are just as likely to skip needed care as they are to avoid overtreatment. And, when they put off necessary care, at some point down the road, they become sicker, and many even land in the hospital.
Recent experience confirms the research. As employers who can no longer afford sky-high premiums shift costs to employees, co-pays and deductibles have climbed. Yet health care spending continues to spiral as Americans undergo more procedures, see more specialists and pop more pills.
If “skin in the game” was going to control spending, one would think that it would already have begun to “bend the curve” of healthcare inflation.
I would also point out that in developed countries that have done a much better job of holding down health care costs, their citizens often receiving “first dollar coverage, ” paying nothing when they receive care. Their governments don’t try to force patients to ration themselves; they regulate prices and put caps on volume. And their hospitals and doctors are more likely to follow evidence-based guidelines to lift the quality of care while lowering costs.
Recently, I’ve written about how Norway has all but eliminated hospital infections, while France’s hospitals have adopted checklists that we know greatly reduce costly medical errors.
Finally, I can’t help but recall the House’s alternative to a “Cadillac tax”: raise income taxes on Americans earning more than $500,000. Even with the hike, the richest 1% would be paying no more than they did in the middle of the 1990s. It was such a simple plan. . .
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Final Health Care Bill Will Be Online 72 Hours Before Vote
By TalkLeft's Jeralyn TL
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Hoyer, the final health reform bill will be online for 72 hours before the House vote so Members and Americans can review.
You can follow the twitter feed of the Official House twitter account for the bill for updates.
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Hoyer, the final health reform bill will be online for 72 hours before the House vote so Members and Americans can review.
You can follow the twitter feed of the Official House twitter account for the bill for updates.
Unions Do Their Job On Excise Tax
By TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat TL
Some folks are up in arms because union leaders protected their membership in their negotiations on the health bill (David Dayen has some details.)
I think people misunderstand precisely what the job of a union leader is - hint - it is not to protect non-union members. Anyone non-union who was counting on the unions to defend their interests probably also believed Obama was going to change politics.
I hold no grudge against the unions. They did their jobs. Folks who want the excise tax fixed further need to understand that fighting for that is their job, not the unions.
Speaking for me only
Some folks are up in arms because union leaders protected their membership in their negotiations on the health bill (David Dayen has some details.)
I think people misunderstand precisely what the job of a union leader is - hint - it is not to protect non-union members. Anyone non-union who was counting on the unions to defend their interests probably also believed Obama was going to change politics.
I hold no grudge against the unions. They did their jobs. Folks who want the excise tax fixed further need to understand that fighting for that is their job, not the unions.
Speaking for me only
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Why Congressman Emanuel Cleaver Knows The Health Care Bill Is In Trouble
By FireDogLake's David Dayen FDL
You may think that House Democrats warning that the health care bill is in a lot of trouble reflects nothing more than posturing. Why is Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying in the above clip that the bill might go down on the first pass and then return to the House before it passes?
Consider the math.
I hadn’t remembered until CQ reminded me today that Robert Wexler (D-FL) resigned his post at the end of the year to become the head of a Jewish nonprofit group. Wexler was one of the 220 votes in favor of the House bill in November, with 215 opposed. Wexler’s replacement won’t be in place until April, but by then, Neil Abercrombie will have resigned to run for Governor in Hawaii.
With respect to the Stupak amendment, at least two members, Bart Stupak and Republican Joseph Cao (R-LA), are definitely not going to vote for the bill if anything less than their amendment is included. Therefore, without even getting to the other major issues, the House is at 217-217 on the bill. Say Stupak is satisfied; Joseph Cao is NOT a reliable vote on the second pass. At BEST, you have 218 votes, without going into all the other flashpoints. So, any one member can blow up the bill.
Maybe Nancy Pelosi can flip some of the no votes, especially with the more conservative Senate bill being the base, and the public option likely dead. But I have explained repeatedly that those Democrats who voted against the bill the first time around have every political incentive to vote against it again. Heck, the Larry Kissell poll from yesterday is enough to prove to people that voting no is the right political move, although I question both the poll and the logic behind that thinking. My point is that there will not be more than a small handful of no-to-yes flips available.
But there’s a HUGE universe of yes-to-no flips that are at least possible. Anthony Weiner yesterday said he would vote against the Senate bill. There are clearly others out there, like Peter DeFazio. There were 60 members vowing to vote against a bill without a public option. There are 190 members demanding the elimination of the excise tax on high-end insurance plans. Virtually everyone in the Democratic caucus has some problem or other with the bill.
Now maybe all of those problems get ironed out. But even if every single provision does, just with the hardline abortion issue unresolved, you’re at 217-217. Simple math dictates that the bill is seriously threatened.
You may think that House Democrats warning that the health care bill is in a lot of trouble reflects nothing more than posturing. Why is Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) saying in the above clip that the bill might go down on the first pass and then return to the House before it passes?
Consider the math.
I hadn’t remembered until CQ reminded me today that Robert Wexler (D-FL) resigned his post at the end of the year to become the head of a Jewish nonprofit group. Wexler was one of the 220 votes in favor of the House bill in November, with 215 opposed. Wexler’s replacement won’t be in place until April, but by then, Neil Abercrombie will have resigned to run for Governor in Hawaii.
With respect to the Stupak amendment, at least two members, Bart Stupak and Republican Joseph Cao (R-LA), are definitely not going to vote for the bill if anything less than their amendment is included. Therefore, without even getting to the other major issues, the House is at 217-217 on the bill. Say Stupak is satisfied; Joseph Cao is NOT a reliable vote on the second pass. At BEST, you have 218 votes, without going into all the other flashpoints. So, any one member can blow up the bill.
Maybe Nancy Pelosi can flip some of the no votes, especially with the more conservative Senate bill being the base, and the public option likely dead. But I have explained repeatedly that those Democrats who voted against the bill the first time around have every political incentive to vote against it again. Heck, the Larry Kissell poll from yesterday is enough to prove to people that voting no is the right political move, although I question both the poll and the logic behind that thinking. My point is that there will not be more than a small handful of no-to-yes flips available.
But there’s a HUGE universe of yes-to-no flips that are at least possible. Anthony Weiner yesterday said he would vote against the Senate bill. There are clearly others out there, like Peter DeFazio. There were 60 members vowing to vote against a bill without a public option. There are 190 members demanding the elimination of the excise tax on high-end insurance plans. Virtually everyone in the Democratic caucus has some problem or other with the bill.
Now maybe all of those problems get ironed out. But even if every single provision does, just with the hardline abortion issue unresolved, you’re at 217-217. Simple math dictates that the bill is seriously threatened.
TODAY: National Call-In Blitz for Health Care Reform
By Mike Hall, Jan 13, 2010 AFL-CIO
Today is the AFL-CIO National Call-In Blitz for health care reform.
Call 1-877-3-AFLCIO (1-877-323-5246) toll-free and urge your representative to support working families by voting for health care reform that:
• Does NOT tax our health care benefits;
• Requires employers to pay their fair share; and
• Reduces health care costs—the best way to do this is with a public health insurance option.
In the meantime, here’s a look at some of the latest news across the country on health care reform:
• Following his address to the National Press Club on the nation’s jobs and economic crisis, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other union leaders met with President Obama at the White House to discus how the final health care reform legislation should be shaped, especially the tax on working families’ health benefits that is part of the Senate-passed bill.
The New York Times reports that during the hourlong meeting, Obama repeated his support for some form a health care benefits tax, but “used Monday’s session to search for a sort of compromise.” In a statement following the meeting, Trumka said it was “frank and productive meeting between friends on moving forward on health care reform.”
• Allan Sloan, senior editor at Fortune magazine (hardly a pro-union, left-leaning, tax-the-rich journal), writes in a Washington Post op-ed today that despite claims that the tax on “Cadillac” health care plans would finance health care reform, more than 80 percent of the money to finance the plan would come from individuals paying higher income, Social Security and Medicare taxes—and the biggest portion of that money would come from people who make less than $200,000. Sloan adds:
The impact on people in the $1 million-plus range—most of whom probably really are rich—is relatively trivial.
• Several studies show the tax on workers’ health benefits impacts regular folks with basic “Chevy” plans and likely won’t result in employers returning the tax to workers in the form of higher wages. Studies also show that no one really knows if the benefits tax would reduce overall health care costs.
• While pundits have been pontificating about the mostly cons of the tax on workers’ health care, everyday folks have more down-to-earth descriptions. Check out the comments’ section following Art Levine’s recent Truthout post about the possible political fallout if the tax lives. Real anger there.
• Who really spawned this awful idea to tax working families on their health benefits? PaulVA at Daily Kos reveals it was the gleam in the eye of the Heritage Foundation in 1973 and was given birth by Ronald Reagan when he proposed it in 1985. However Reagan, showing his political savvy,dropped this tax like a hot potato once he found out it was so unpopular.
Today is the AFL-CIO National Call-In Blitz for health care reform.
Call 1-877-3-AFLCIO (1-877-323-5246) toll-free and urge your representative to support working families by voting for health care reform that:
• Does NOT tax our health care benefits;
• Requires employers to pay their fair share; and
• Reduces health care costs—the best way to do this is with a public health insurance option.
In the meantime, here’s a look at some of the latest news across the country on health care reform:
• Following his address to the National Press Club on the nation’s jobs and economic crisis, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other union leaders met with President Obama at the White House to discus how the final health care reform legislation should be shaped, especially the tax on working families’ health benefits that is part of the Senate-passed bill.
The New York Times reports that during the hourlong meeting, Obama repeated his support for some form a health care benefits tax, but “used Monday’s session to search for a sort of compromise.” In a statement following the meeting, Trumka said it was “frank and productive meeting between friends on moving forward on health care reform.”
• Allan Sloan, senior editor at Fortune magazine (hardly a pro-union, left-leaning, tax-the-rich journal), writes in a Washington Post op-ed today that despite claims that the tax on “Cadillac” health care plans would finance health care reform, more than 80 percent of the money to finance the plan would come from individuals paying higher income, Social Security and Medicare taxes—and the biggest portion of that money would come from people who make less than $200,000. Sloan adds:
The impact on people in the $1 million-plus range—most of whom probably really are rich—is relatively trivial.
• Several studies show the tax on workers’ health benefits impacts regular folks with basic “Chevy” plans and likely won’t result in employers returning the tax to workers in the form of higher wages. Studies also show that no one really knows if the benefits tax would reduce overall health care costs.
• While pundits have been pontificating about the mostly cons of the tax on workers’ health care, everyday folks have more down-to-earth descriptions. Check out the comments’ section following Art Levine’s recent Truthout post about the possible political fallout if the tax lives. Real anger there.
• Who really spawned this awful idea to tax working families on their health benefits? PaulVA at Daily Kos reveals it was the gleam in the eye of the Heritage Foundation in 1973 and was given birth by Ronald Reagan when he proposed it in 1985. However Reagan, showing his political savvy,dropped this tax like a hot potato once he found out it was so unpopular.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Paying for The Health Bill Part II
By TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat TL
I have been stressing this question and am pleased to see others beginning to look at it as well. Ezra has a good post:
In the House/Senate negotiations, Democrats want to make three major changes to the health-care bill, all of which cost money. First, they want to weaken the excise tax, which means less revenue. Second, they want to increase the subsidies, which means more spending. And third, they want to extend some version of the Nebraska deal federalizing the Medicaid expansion to all the states. That, again, is pricey. So where does all the new money come from?
One answer? Applying the Medicare tax to all forms of income above 250K per year:
Currently, the Medicare tax applies only to wages, without any limits. The 2.9% tax is divided in half, with workers and employers each paying 1.45%. The health bill passed by the Senate would raise the worker contribution to 2.35% for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000 a year.
Under the proposal now being considered, people making more than those amounts would also pay the Medicare tax on dividends and other income from investments, the people familiar with the talks said. Income from pensions and retirement accounts, including 401(k) accounts, would be exempt.
If they prefer a "Medicare" tax on the wealthy instead of an income tax for political purposes, that works for me. However, Ezra makes a good point:
Why Democrats prefer a new Medicare tax to, say, capping the itemized deductions rate at 28% for taxpayers making more than $250,000 is, however, beyond me. And if you did that, you'd have more than $300 billion in new money to play with.
300 billion is more than 100 billion. Ezra has a strong point here.
Speaking for me only
I have been stressing this question and am pleased to see others beginning to look at it as well. Ezra has a good post:
In the House/Senate negotiations, Democrats want to make three major changes to the health-care bill, all of which cost money. First, they want to weaken the excise tax, which means less revenue. Second, they want to increase the subsidies, which means more spending. And third, they want to extend some version of the Nebraska deal federalizing the Medicaid expansion to all the states. That, again, is pricey. So where does all the new money come from?
One answer? Applying the Medicare tax to all forms of income above 250K per year:
Currently, the Medicare tax applies only to wages, without any limits. The 2.9% tax is divided in half, with workers and employers each paying 1.45%. The health bill passed by the Senate would raise the worker contribution to 2.35% for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000 a year.
Under the proposal now being considered, people making more than those amounts would also pay the Medicare tax on dividends and other income from investments, the people familiar with the talks said. Income from pensions and retirement accounts, including 401(k) accounts, would be exempt.
If they prefer a "Medicare" tax on the wealthy instead of an income tax for political purposes, that works for me. However, Ezra makes a good point:
Why Democrats prefer a new Medicare tax to, say, capping the itemized deductions rate at 28% for taxpayers making more than $250,000 is, however, beyond me. And if you did that, you'd have more than $300 billion in new money to play with.
300 billion is more than 100 billion. Ezra has a strong point here.
Speaking for me only
Employer Health Costs Do Not Drive Wage Trends
By FireDogLake's Lawrence Mishel FDL
Financing health care reform will be a prime subject of discussion among the Senate and House conferees, specifically how much the financing relies on a tax on high-cost health plans. Supporters of this tax label these “Cadillac” health plans and make the assumption that they provide comprehensive (even lavish) coverage that requires very low out-of-pocket costs from beneficiaries. However, in the dysfunctional health insurance market, high-cost does not equal high-value; and it is not comprehensiveness of coverage that is the primary predictor of who will be affected by this tax, rather it is the size of the firm they work for or the age of their co-workers. The fact that Chevy plans are about as likely to be taxed as Cadillac plans is one reason to be cautious about relying on such a tax. Bivens and Gould (2009) document this as well as other reasons to prefer the more straightforward, progressive financing in the House bill.
One claim for the Senate excise tax has recently surfaced: that health care cost increases have been a major driving force in constraining wage growth and that wages will grow more strongly by curtailing employer health costs via the excise tax. This claim boldly asserts that health care costs are large enough (and the tradeoff with wages is large enough) to drive major changes in overall wages. This is a much stronger claim than saying that there is some tradeoff between higher health costs and wages in the total compensation package.(1)
Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at M.I.T., argued in an op-ed in the Washington Post on December 28, 2009:
And when firms reduce their insurance generosity, they make it up in higher pay for their workers. We saw this in the late 1990s, when the rise of managed care temporarily lowered insurance costs, and wages rose in real terms for the first time in many years. But as soon as managed care was weakened and health costs rose again, we once again saw flat or declining real wages in the United States. (Gruber 2009)
Others, including prominent and well-respected journalists, have also made the argument recently for a “health care theory of wage determination.”(2) Proponents of this theory point for evidence to the latter half of the 1990s, a five-year period when wages were growing rapidly while growth in employer health care spending was relatively constrained. They contrast the period from 1995 to 2000 with the periods from 1989 to 1995 and 2000 to 2006, when wages stagnated while health care costs grew much more rapidly.
There is logic to their argument, but it is only skin-deep and deeper examination will show it to be simply not true. The logic can be seen looking at trends in health care premiums and wages—wage growth fared better in the late 1990s when health care premiums grew more slowly than in the early 1990s and wages performed poorly in the 2000s, a period when health premiums grew strongly again.(3)
However, digging just a bit beneath the surface reveals the following:
1. Health care costs are not large enough to substantially move wages as these proponents claim;
2. Examination of actual wage and benefit trends confirms that changes in the trajectory of health care costs did not materially affect wage trends over the last 20 years; and
3. The wage behavior described—accelerating in the late 1990s and more slowly thereafter—actually best characterizes wage growth for low-wage workers who have minimal access to employer-based health care. Conversely, this pattern of wage-growth over time is least pronounced for higher paid workers with the most health coverage.
Clearly, this “health care theory of wage determination” is wrong, and other factors explain these overall wage trends. The simple explanation is that productivity accelerated in the mid-1990s, and the low unemployment (and hikes in the minimum wage) facilitated faster wage growth. That this wage growth disappeared entirely in the 2002-07 recovery is not due to faster health care cost increases but to weak employment growth and employers’ ability to achieve increased profitability rather than pass on productivity gains to workers. This reveals a fundamental flaw in our economy: productivity gains are not passed on to higher living standards for workers.
SCALE
It is easy to understand that health care cost trends have not been a significant driver of wage trends when one examines the scale of employer expenditures on health care. Health care costs were just 7.6% of total compensation and 9.4% of total wages (all wages paid, including premium pay, paid leave, and so on) in 2007.(4) The share of health care in total wages (in nominal, non-inflation adjusted terms) grew from 7.2% in 1989 to the 9.4% in 2007, suggesting that the expanded role of health costs could have reduced wage growth by 2.2% over this entire 18-year period, or 0.12% each year. This assumes a complete tradeoff between health costs and wages (if every dollar of higher health costs reduced wages correspondingly). Consequently, employer health costs can hardly be considered a major determinant of wage growth.
Further, overall benefits’ (health care plus all other fringe benefits) share of total compensation has actually been stable for the last 20 years or so—as health costs expanded, pension and payroll tax shares diminished. Hence, the story of stagnant wages in the U.S. economy is not one of growing non-wage compensation.(5)
ACTUAL WAGE AND BENEFIT TRENDS
Digging deeper, consider the changes in health care costs and wages per hour worked in the early 1990s, the late 1990s, and 2000 to 2006, the periods cited by proponents of the health care theory of wage determination.
The data in Table 1 show that wages and total compensation definitely accelerated in the late 1990s, with hourly compensation growth tripling from a $0.22 to a $0.68 annual growth. This alone disproves the theory that moderated health care costs were the primary driver of wages: it was not a change in the mix of compensation between wages and benefits that drove growth, rather it was the simple fact that total compensation accelerated rapidly. After 2000 compensation growth subsided to $0.41 per hour but still remained faster than that of the 1989-95 period.
Do trends in health care costs explain this behavior in compensation or wages? Employer health care expenditures grew $0.03 in the late 1990s, pretty much the same as in the early 1990s, so that hardly seems an explanation. Health care expenditures did grow more quickly in the 2000-06 period (up $0.09 each year).
This greater growth could at most explain $0.06 of the $0.45 deceleration of wage growth from 2000 to 2006 versus the late 1990s. Interestingly, the growth of pension costs is more important than that of health costs. More important, the health care story misses and cannot explain the substantial deceleration (one-third slower) of overall compensation growth in the 2000s.
Most economists would point to the faster productivity growth of the late 1990s to explain the faster wage and
compensation growth. In the early 1990s, as in the 1980s, productivity growth was about 1.3% each year. Productivity growth doubled in the late 1990s to 2.5% annually and maintained that pace in the 2000s. It is the combination of this trend—a faster growing pie—and the lower unemployment and higher minimum wages that allowed workers the leverage to make sure their wage growth kept pace with overall productivity.
But the lessons of the 2000s are also instructive: despite the faster productivity growth there has been no real wage growth recently, either for those with a high school or a college degree (See Mishel et al. (2009), Figure 3A).
There is something fundamentally broken about our economy when workers gain nothing from productivity
growth, and this should give pause to those who assume that when employers lower their health care expenses they will automatically pass these savings onto workers in the form of higher wages. This is an especially problematic assumption given the very high unemployment expected to prevail over the next five years, an environment where workers will have little leverage.
WAGE TRENDS FOR LOW-, MIDDLE-, AND HIGH-WAGE WORKERS
The last piece of evidence on this issue is data on the wage trends for workers at differing wage levels. The same trends discussed above—accelerated wage growth in the late 1990s and the subsiding of this growth in the 2000s—are evident across the board for segments of the workforce that have extensive health care coverage and those for whom coverage is sparse.
This is a point made by Jared Bernstein and Sylvia Allegretto in an analysis in 2006:
About half of all workers don’t even receive employer-provided coverage. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 47% of workers did not participate in employer-provided health care benefit plans in 2005. Thus, there is no health care squeeze that would explain the wage losses of nearly half the workforce. In addition, the BLS data show that among workers whose average wage was less than $15 per hour last year, only 39% participated in employer-provided health plans….. low-wage workers also lost the most ground in terms of real wages. Thus, those least likely to get health care experienced the greatest loss in real wages, the opposite of what the trade-off explanation would predict. (Bernstein and Allegretto 2006)
Table 2 shows the wage growth for workers at every decile over the 1989 to 2007 period, including the relevant sub-periods. Wage growth was far faster from 1995 to 2000 than in the 1989-95 period at every wage level. However, the acceleration of wage growth was far greater for low- and middle-wage workers, the groups with the least coverage by employer-provided health care plans: only 27% and 64%, respectively, of workers in the bottom and middle fifths of the wage distribution received employer-sponsored health insurance in 2000 (see coverage by wage fifth in Mishel et al. (2009), Table 3.12). This further reinforces how health care cost containment of the late 1990s was not the major, or even an important, determinant of wage trends. Note that the acceleration of wages for the two highest-paid groups—at the 90th and 95th percentiles—was half that of what the lowest-paid workers enjoyed even though 80% of the highest fifth of earners received employer-sponsored health coverage. This runs directly counter to the notion that health care costs are driving wage trends. Note also that wage growth was substantially diminished in the 2000s, even though productivity growth continued at the same fast pace. In the recovery period from 2002 to 2007 there was hardly any wage growth at all (see Mishel et al. (2009), Table 3.1). The worst wage growth in the 2000s was for low- and middle-wage workers, the groups with the least health care coverage. So, it does not seem likely that faster health care premium growth in the 2000s can explain the disappointing wage growth.
CONCLUSION
The recent claims that trends in employer health care expenditures explain the beneficial wage growth of the late 1990s and the disappointing wage growth since 2000 does not hold up to any careful scrutiny. Health care expenditures are relatively small compared to overall wages, and an examination of the actual trends shows that health care cost increases do not correspond to the major movements in wages or compensation. This is especially the case for the wage trends of low- and middle-wage workers: their wages accelerated the most in the late 1990s and grew the least in the 2000s. The fact that these groups have the least participation in employer-provided health plans confirms that health care is not the major factor that the advocates of this new health care theory of wage determination would have us believe. There undoubtedly is a tradeoff between health care costs and wage growth, but this dynamic does not play a leading role in the drama of the stagnant wages facing workers for several decades and the inability of working families to benefit from rising productivity growth.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, Jared, and Sylvia Allegretto. 2006. The Wage Squeeze and Higher Health Costs. EPI Issue Brief #218. Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib218/
Bivens, Josh, and Elise Gould. 2009. The House Health Care Bill is Right on the Money: Taxing High Incomes is Better Than Taxing High Premiums. EPI Issue Brief #267. Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. http://epi.3cdn.net/d4461bae3920d3a28a_7jm6b9314.pdf
Gruber, Jonathan. 2009. ‘Cadillac’ tax isn’t a tax—it’s a plan to finance real health reform. Op-ed. Washington Post. December 28.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/27/AR2009122701714.html
Mishel, Lawerence, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholtz. 2009. The State of Working America 2008/2009. Washington, D.C: Economic Policy Institute.
ENDNOTES
1 I remain a skeptic that the tradeoff is 100% over any short-run period, especially the high unemployment period ahead. That is a different topic for another time.
2 Ezra Klein, in his (appropriately) highly regarded blog for the Washington Post and in an op-ed, was the first to enunciate this “health care theory of wage determination”:
From 1989 to 1995, median wages actually fell a bit. Then, managed care kicked in. Annual growth in health-care costs fell from more than 10 percent in the early 1990s to less than 5 percent in the late ‘90s. Meanwhile, wages shot through the roof, rising more than 11 percent from 1995 to 2000. Then we ended the managed-care experiment, and health-care costs resumed their normal speed of growth. Predictably, wages slumped back down from 2000 to 2006. (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezraklein/2009/12/lower_health_costs_higher_payc.html)
David Leonhardt, an influential economics reporter for the New York Times, weighed on this as well:
A dollar that an employer spends on insurance is a dollar that’s unavailable for income. This helps explain why the one period of slow growth in medical costs over the last two decades — the late 1990s — was also the one period of rapid income growth. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/business/economy/23leonhardt.html?_r=1)
3 See Exhibit One in this compilation from the Kaiser Foundation: http://www.kff.org/insurance/7672/upload/7693.pdf.
4 See the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 9, ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ocwc/ect/ececqrtn.pdf.
5 See the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 9, ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ocwc/ect/ececqrtn.pdf.
Financing health care reform will be a prime subject of discussion among the Senate and House conferees, specifically how much the financing relies on a tax on high-cost health plans. Supporters of this tax label these “Cadillac” health plans and make the assumption that they provide comprehensive (even lavish) coverage that requires very low out-of-pocket costs from beneficiaries. However, in the dysfunctional health insurance market, high-cost does not equal high-value; and it is not comprehensiveness of coverage that is the primary predictor of who will be affected by this tax, rather it is the size of the firm they work for or the age of their co-workers. The fact that Chevy plans are about as likely to be taxed as Cadillac plans is one reason to be cautious about relying on such a tax. Bivens and Gould (2009) document this as well as other reasons to prefer the more straightforward, progressive financing in the House bill.
One claim for the Senate excise tax has recently surfaced: that health care cost increases have been a major driving force in constraining wage growth and that wages will grow more strongly by curtailing employer health costs via the excise tax. This claim boldly asserts that health care costs are large enough (and the tradeoff with wages is large enough) to drive major changes in overall wages. This is a much stronger claim than saying that there is some tradeoff between higher health costs and wages in the total compensation package.(1)
Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at M.I.T., argued in an op-ed in the Washington Post on December 28, 2009:
And when firms reduce their insurance generosity, they make it up in higher pay for their workers. We saw this in the late 1990s, when the rise of managed care temporarily lowered insurance costs, and wages rose in real terms for the first time in many years. But as soon as managed care was weakened and health costs rose again, we once again saw flat or declining real wages in the United States. (Gruber 2009)
Others, including prominent and well-respected journalists, have also made the argument recently for a “health care theory of wage determination.”(2) Proponents of this theory point for evidence to the latter half of the 1990s, a five-year period when wages were growing rapidly while growth in employer health care spending was relatively constrained. They contrast the period from 1995 to 2000 with the periods from 1989 to 1995 and 2000 to 2006, when wages stagnated while health care costs grew much more rapidly.
There is logic to their argument, but it is only skin-deep and deeper examination will show it to be simply not true. The logic can be seen looking at trends in health care premiums and wages—wage growth fared better in the late 1990s when health care premiums grew more slowly than in the early 1990s and wages performed poorly in the 2000s, a period when health premiums grew strongly again.(3)
However, digging just a bit beneath the surface reveals the following:
1. Health care costs are not large enough to substantially move wages as these proponents claim;
2. Examination of actual wage and benefit trends confirms that changes in the trajectory of health care costs did not materially affect wage trends over the last 20 years; and
3. The wage behavior described—accelerating in the late 1990s and more slowly thereafter—actually best characterizes wage growth for low-wage workers who have minimal access to employer-based health care. Conversely, this pattern of wage-growth over time is least pronounced for higher paid workers with the most health coverage.
Clearly, this “health care theory of wage determination” is wrong, and other factors explain these overall wage trends. The simple explanation is that productivity accelerated in the mid-1990s, and the low unemployment (and hikes in the minimum wage) facilitated faster wage growth. That this wage growth disappeared entirely in the 2002-07 recovery is not due to faster health care cost increases but to weak employment growth and employers’ ability to achieve increased profitability rather than pass on productivity gains to workers. This reveals a fundamental flaw in our economy: productivity gains are not passed on to higher living standards for workers.
SCALE
It is easy to understand that health care cost trends have not been a significant driver of wage trends when one examines the scale of employer expenditures on health care. Health care costs were just 7.6% of total compensation and 9.4% of total wages (all wages paid, including premium pay, paid leave, and so on) in 2007.(4) The share of health care in total wages (in nominal, non-inflation adjusted terms) grew from 7.2% in 1989 to the 9.4% in 2007, suggesting that the expanded role of health costs could have reduced wage growth by 2.2% over this entire 18-year period, or 0.12% each year. This assumes a complete tradeoff between health costs and wages (if every dollar of higher health costs reduced wages correspondingly). Consequently, employer health costs can hardly be considered a major determinant of wage growth.
Further, overall benefits’ (health care plus all other fringe benefits) share of total compensation has actually been stable for the last 20 years or so—as health costs expanded, pension and payroll tax shares diminished. Hence, the story of stagnant wages in the U.S. economy is not one of growing non-wage compensation.(5)
ACTUAL WAGE AND BENEFIT TRENDS
Digging deeper, consider the changes in health care costs and wages per hour worked in the early 1990s, the late 1990s, and 2000 to 2006, the periods cited by proponents of the health care theory of wage determination.
The data in Table 1 show that wages and total compensation definitely accelerated in the late 1990s, with hourly compensation growth tripling from a $0.22 to a $0.68 annual growth. This alone disproves the theory that moderated health care costs were the primary driver of wages: it was not a change in the mix of compensation between wages and benefits that drove growth, rather it was the simple fact that total compensation accelerated rapidly. After 2000 compensation growth subsided to $0.41 per hour but still remained faster than that of the 1989-95 period.
Do trends in health care costs explain this behavior in compensation or wages? Employer health care expenditures grew $0.03 in the late 1990s, pretty much the same as in the early 1990s, so that hardly seems an explanation. Health care expenditures did grow more quickly in the 2000-06 period (up $0.09 each year).
This greater growth could at most explain $0.06 of the $0.45 deceleration of wage growth from 2000 to 2006 versus the late 1990s. Interestingly, the growth of pension costs is more important than that of health costs. More important, the health care story misses and cannot explain the substantial deceleration (one-third slower) of overall compensation growth in the 2000s.
Most economists would point to the faster productivity growth of the late 1990s to explain the faster wage and
compensation growth. In the early 1990s, as in the 1980s, productivity growth was about 1.3% each year. Productivity growth doubled in the late 1990s to 2.5% annually and maintained that pace in the 2000s. It is the combination of this trend—a faster growing pie—and the lower unemployment and higher minimum wages that allowed workers the leverage to make sure their wage growth kept pace with overall productivity.
But the lessons of the 2000s are also instructive: despite the faster productivity growth there has been no real wage growth recently, either for those with a high school or a college degree (See Mishel et al. (2009), Figure 3A).
There is something fundamentally broken about our economy when workers gain nothing from productivity
growth, and this should give pause to those who assume that when employers lower their health care expenses they will automatically pass these savings onto workers in the form of higher wages. This is an especially problematic assumption given the very high unemployment expected to prevail over the next five years, an environment where workers will have little leverage.
WAGE TRENDS FOR LOW-, MIDDLE-, AND HIGH-WAGE WORKERS
The last piece of evidence on this issue is data on the wage trends for workers at differing wage levels. The same trends discussed above—accelerated wage growth in the late 1990s and the subsiding of this growth in the 2000s—are evident across the board for segments of the workforce that have extensive health care coverage and those for whom coverage is sparse.
This is a point made by Jared Bernstein and Sylvia Allegretto in an analysis in 2006:
About half of all workers don’t even receive employer-provided coverage. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 47% of workers did not participate in employer-provided health care benefit plans in 2005. Thus, there is no health care squeeze that would explain the wage losses of nearly half the workforce. In addition, the BLS data show that among workers whose average wage was less than $15 per hour last year, only 39% participated in employer-provided health plans….. low-wage workers also lost the most ground in terms of real wages. Thus, those least likely to get health care experienced the greatest loss in real wages, the opposite of what the trade-off explanation would predict. (Bernstein and Allegretto 2006)
Table 2 shows the wage growth for workers at every decile over the 1989 to 2007 period, including the relevant sub-periods. Wage growth was far faster from 1995 to 2000 than in the 1989-95 period at every wage level. However, the acceleration of wage growth was far greater for low- and middle-wage workers, the groups with the least coverage by employer-provided health care plans: only 27% and 64%, respectively, of workers in the bottom and middle fifths of the wage distribution received employer-sponsored health insurance in 2000 (see coverage by wage fifth in Mishel et al. (2009), Table 3.12). This further reinforces how health care cost containment of the late 1990s was not the major, or even an important, determinant of wage trends. Note that the acceleration of wages for the two highest-paid groups—at the 90th and 95th percentiles—was half that of what the lowest-paid workers enjoyed even though 80% of the highest fifth of earners received employer-sponsored health coverage. This runs directly counter to the notion that health care costs are driving wage trends. Note also that wage growth was substantially diminished in the 2000s, even though productivity growth continued at the same fast pace. In the recovery period from 2002 to 2007 there was hardly any wage growth at all (see Mishel et al. (2009), Table 3.1). The worst wage growth in the 2000s was for low- and middle-wage workers, the groups with the least health care coverage. So, it does not seem likely that faster health care premium growth in the 2000s can explain the disappointing wage growth.
CONCLUSION
The recent claims that trends in employer health care expenditures explain the beneficial wage growth of the late 1990s and the disappointing wage growth since 2000 does not hold up to any careful scrutiny. Health care expenditures are relatively small compared to overall wages, and an examination of the actual trends shows that health care cost increases do not correspond to the major movements in wages or compensation. This is especially the case for the wage trends of low- and middle-wage workers: their wages accelerated the most in the late 1990s and grew the least in the 2000s. The fact that these groups have the least participation in employer-provided health plans confirms that health care is not the major factor that the advocates of this new health care theory of wage determination would have us believe. There undoubtedly is a tradeoff between health care costs and wage growth, but this dynamic does not play a leading role in the drama of the stagnant wages facing workers for several decades and the inability of working families to benefit from rising productivity growth.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, Jared, and Sylvia Allegretto. 2006. The Wage Squeeze and Higher Health Costs. EPI Issue Brief #218. Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib218/
Bivens, Josh, and Elise Gould. 2009. The House Health Care Bill is Right on the Money: Taxing High Incomes is Better Than Taxing High Premiums. EPI Issue Brief #267. Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. http://epi.3cdn.net/d4461bae3920d3a28a_7jm6b9314.pdf
Gruber, Jonathan. 2009. ‘Cadillac’ tax isn’t a tax—it’s a plan to finance real health reform. Op-ed. Washington Post. December 28.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/27/AR2009122701714.html
Mishel, Lawerence, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholtz. 2009. The State of Working America 2008/2009. Washington, D.C: Economic Policy Institute.
ENDNOTES
1 I remain a skeptic that the tradeoff is 100% over any short-run period, especially the high unemployment period ahead. That is a different topic for another time.
2 Ezra Klein, in his (appropriately) highly regarded blog for the Washington Post and in an op-ed, was the first to enunciate this “health care theory of wage determination”:
From 1989 to 1995, median wages actually fell a bit. Then, managed care kicked in. Annual growth in health-care costs fell from more than 10 percent in the early 1990s to less than 5 percent in the late ‘90s. Meanwhile, wages shot through the roof, rising more than 11 percent from 1995 to 2000. Then we ended the managed-care experiment, and health-care costs resumed their normal speed of growth. Predictably, wages slumped back down from 2000 to 2006. (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezraklein/2009/12/lower_health_costs_higher_payc.html)
David Leonhardt, an influential economics reporter for the New York Times, weighed on this as well:
A dollar that an employer spends on insurance is a dollar that’s unavailable for income. This helps explain why the one period of slow growth in medical costs over the last two decades — the late 1990s — was also the one period of rapid income growth. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/business/economy/23leonhardt.html?_r=1)
3 See Exhibit One in this compilation from the Kaiser Foundation: http://www.kff.org/insurance/7672/upload/7693.pdf.
4 See the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 9, ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ocwc/ect/ececqrtn.pdf.
5 See the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 9, ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ocwc/ect/ececqrtn.pdf.
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