Politics!

[Berliner]

Dennis Kucinich: opposite of the Millennium Falcon.

[funnyclown]

Am I wrong in thinking that this story (http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...,6505384.story) about Clarence Thomas's wife starting a tea party group should be major news? Between this and Roberts dressing down the president last week, I am concerned.

[Berliner]

Instinctively, I don't really see that as an issue that can gain a lot of traction, but maybe those things plus the 5-4 campaign finance position can be used to make the argument that Obama needs to appoint more liberal justices, and Stevens is probably going to retire soon.

[thegreg]

Denny K says A-OK

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/..._overhaul.html

[Berliner]

Does he have it where it counts after all?!

[ProfessorShutYoMouth]

Starting to look like the health care bill will be passed by Monday.

[Berliner]

So hopefully this all goes through today. Some notes:

The House is avoiding deem and pass, which is a weird thing for them to have done in the first place, but was not the parliamentary trickery the GOP accused it of being. It shows that a kind of distrust between the House and Senate Dems has been hopefully healed. The House Dems were afraid if they passed the Senate version and then the Reconciliation version separately, the Senate would be satisfied with just their version and wouldn't try to work with reconciliation. Now they are acting on faith that at least 50 Senators are willing to pass the reconciliation package.

When the Democrats start losing their seats in 2012, and if lose the House majority, I wonder if Republicans will also resort to deem and pass when Democrats start using obstructionist tactics for the Republican agenda. What's been crazy through this whole process is that Republicans have been using a scorched earth policy this entire time, calling things like reconciliation unprecedented. What's actually unprecendented is how partisan the Republicans have been acting this entire time, forcing the Senate into a Chamber where only a 60 Senator supermajority can actually pass things. The filibuster being used as many times as Republicans is what's actually unprecedented. What's really funny is when Democrats actually have gotten that supermajority on some of their bills, a lot of Republicans actually vote along with them. I actually do wonder whether or not some Republicans will vote for the Reconciliation bill in the end, because it is a historical piece of legislation and it will probably become very popular when all this bullshit dies down. In other words, they won't vote cloture, but will vote for the bill itself.

I fully expect Republicans to be hypocrites and do everything Democrats have done when they are in office though. I mean double hypocrites, since they've done all these things back when they were in power.

No matter what, the Senate version should be approved today, and be ready for Obama's signature. What will be interesting is seeing how Senate Republicans react to the reconciliation process. If they want to try to stop it, they are going to have to oppose a much better bill that gets rid of things like Nelson's Nebraska compromise, covers more people, and cuts the deficit more in the long run, according to the CBO. One of the reasons House Democrats have scrapped deem and pass is that they believe their bill is much better, and it truly is.

It looks like Pelosi made all this happen.

[Berliner]

I hope Limbaugh enjoys Costa Rica

[Adult Ed]

I hope Limbaugh enjoys Costa Rica

And their public health care.

[Umlaut]

It literally kills me how spineless and impotent the Democrats are.

And I do mean literally. I don't have health insurance!

Hey guys. Thanks for proving me wrong. Appreciate it.

[Berliner]

1. I would like to see a list compiled of which House members were in traditionally conservative districts and voted for this anyway. They may have just destroyed their congressional careers.

2. I don't know what time exactly Obama is going to speak tonight, but I bet its going to be good watching. It will be on CSPAN or CSPAN's website.

3. 3/21/2010: One of the most important days in American History.

[Umlaut]

4. Nancy Pelosi, easy punchline though she may be, is truly one of the most remarkable politicians of modern times.

[Berliner]

Eh, that speech wasn't so great. The one he gave yesterday for House Democrats was much better:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

[smartbunny]

RT @daveanthony Tune in tomorrow for Glenn Beck. I can only assume he'll be wearing a suicide vest.

[Berliner]

From the Economist blog, quoted in its entirety:

A Robin Hood bill that America needed

Mar 22nd 2010, 6:21 by M.S.

AS OF yesterday, America had the most screwed-up health-insurance system in the developed world. As of today, America probably still has the most screwed-up health-insurance system in the developed world, but it's significantly less screwed-up than it was yesterday. The American health-insurance system we had yesterday was screwed up in many, many ways, but the most fundamental symptom of its dysfunction was that it failed to insure 17% of the population. Today, we are on the way to getting 95% of Americans insured by the end of the decade. The law will do that in part through increasing efficiency. In part, however, it's going to extend government subsidies so that more people can buy insurance. It pays for those subsidies in two ways: it taxes the rich; and, more importantly, it redistributes existing government benefits from those who have them to those who don’t.

As the New Republic's Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Cohn have written, that redistributionist element is increasingly the focus of the opposition to the reforms: many opponents are voicing a simple blanket rejection of the idea that the wealthy or fortunate should be obliged to sacrifice anything to help out the poor or the unfortunate. But here's the thing: many of the people who think of this as a government effort to take their benefits away, and give them to someone else, don't realise that right now, they're unjustly benefiting from discrimination by the government and by insurance companies. To a large extent, this reform isn't about Robin Hood-style taxing and spending. It's about taking the Robin Hood-style taxing and spending we're already doing, and shifting it around so it's more fairly distributed.

Let's look at how this works. First of all, the government subsidises health insurance for people who work at large companies by making health insurance tax-free for employers. That employer health-insurance tax exclusion amounts to about $250 billion a year, almost three times the cost of the bill Congress passed yesterday. Those government subsidies go only to people who have jobs at companies that offer insurance. The self-employed, the unemployed, and employees of companies (mainly small businesses) that don't offer benefits have to buy insurance themselves, on the more expensive individual market, with no tax subsidy. There's no rhyme or reason to this discrimination, but it's one of the major reasons why many people don't have health insurance. The new law takes a step towards reducing that discrimination by capping the exclusion, taxing the health-insurance plans of people who get very high-value "Cadillac" insurance (worth more than $27,000 for a family policy) through their employers, and using that money to pay for subsidies to low-income people (earning up to 400% of the poverty level) who have to buy insurance on the individual market.

Second, under the old system, insurers demanded that people who had been sick in the past, and were thus more likely to become sick again, pay much more for insurance. There's nothing evil or dastardly about insurers doing this. In an unregulated system, they have to operate this way; if they didn't, they would go out of business. But the idea that people who get sick should have to pay vastly more for insurance violates people's basic ideas of fairness, and indeed the entire concept of insurance. (A health-insurance system that can't insure people who are likely to get sick is pretty clearly not doing the job society needs it to do.) Essentially, the old system forced insurers to discriminate against people who were prone to sickness, and in favour of people who weren't. Americans strongly agree that insurers should not be allowed to discriminate on price against people with pre-existing conditions. (An ABC/Washington Post poll in early February found 80% agreed the government should bar insurers from rejecting those with pre-existing conditions.) With health-care reform passed, insurers will have to stop rejecting sick people, or charging them more, beginning in 2014. And this isn't a problem for insurers, either. As long as no company can discriminate against pre-existing conditions, the playing field stays level; insurers have not opposed this part of the reform.

Third, under the old system, a lot of healthy younger people decided that premiums had risen so high that it wasn't worth it for them to buy insurance. They figured they were better off taking their chances. In so doing, they were freeloading off of the rest of society. In America, emergency rooms are obligated by law to treat anyone, regardless of their insurance status. (That's because Americans are decent people who don't believe you should die because you're poor.) But healthy people who forego insurance are playing the same game as "too big to fail" financial institutions: they know that ultimately, if they're hit by a car, the hospital will have to treat them, and if they can't pay the full cost, the rest of society will, through higher treatment costs and insurance premiums. They're drawing the emergency-care benefits of the American health system, but they haven't paid their dues. The new law fixes this by mandating that everyone buy insurance. If you can't afford it, you'll get subsidies to help. But it will no longer be possible for healthy people with adequate incomes to decide they'd rather spend that money on a nicer car, and let the rest of us pay for their care when they fall ill.

Fourth, and most controversially, there is the issue of Medicare. Under America's old system, there was a vast disparity between 55- or 60-year-olds and 65-year-olds. Once you hit 65, you were more or less set. For the ten years before that, you'd been more or less screwed. Your premiums were much higher than those of younger people, and unless you were truly indigent and qualified for Medicaid, there was no government help. The new system limits the degree to which premiums can discriminate based on age, and it provides subsidies for those who can't afford private-sector premiums but aren't poor enough for Medicaid. It gets some of the money for those subsidies by cutting Medicare spending. And it gets much of the rest by raising Medicare taxes on the rich (specifically, from 1.45% to 2.35% of income, for those with earnings above $250,000).

Now, some of these Medicare cuts will be pure fat; there's no reason why the Medicare Advantage programme should be paying for-profit private companies to do a job the government does more cheaply. (Indeed, paying for-profit private companies to do things the government does more cheaply seems to have become a bit of an epidemic over the past 25 years.) And studies show that perhaps one-third of Medicare spending generates no difference in health outcomes. The new MedPac commission should be able to identify and cut out a lot of non-productive treatment practices. Some of the cuts, however, may represent real reductions in care. But look: America created Medicare because it wanted to guarantee health care for its seniors. It's unfair to create an absolute guarantee of first-rate health care for anyone 65 or over, while doing nothing at all for the middle-aged, leaving many of them unable to obtain any kind of coverage. Seniors may need to accept some limits on public spending on their health care in order to provide subsidies so that non-seniors can afford health insurance, too. And using an increase in direct Medicare taxes to free up money to make insurance affordable for working-class non-seniors seems fair.

There is one piece of old-fashioned redistribution involved in the new law. Because the cap on the employer health-insurance tax exclusion was unpopular with labour, businesses, and the public, the Obama administration postponed its implementation and made up for some of the revenue with a 2.9% surtax on investment income for families earning over $250,000. That sort of tax on the wealthy may be unpopular with the Tea-Party crowd. But it's extremely popular with the country as a whole. In January another ABC/Washington Post poll found the public preferred this approach to capping the tax exclusion for Cadillac plans, 58% to 22%.

In short, those who oppose this bill because it's a Robin Hood bill are not wrong. It does involve redistribution. But that redistribution is largely about reducing the unfairness of redistribution that already exists. There's no reason why taxpayers should be subsidising the health-insurance premiums of people who work for large companies but not those who own small businesses, why sick people who pay high insurance premiums should be subsidising the emergency-room guarantee for healthy young people who choose not to buy insurance, or why we should all be paying the insurance premiums of a wealthy 65-year-old while doing nothing for a working-class 64-year-old. The new system isn't going to eliminate the unfairness and discrimination in the American health-insurance system; we didn't turn into the Netherlands overnight, let alone France. But we do wake up today with a system that's significantly less unfair than it was yesterday, and most of that has to do with a fairer distribution of the benefits the government was already handing out.

[Teaflax]

Congratulations, Americans (which includes 90% of my immediate family, BTW).

It's not the perfect health care solution, but as it says above, it's still quite an improvement. And as a bonus, you may get rid of Rush Limbaugh in the bargain (as if he's going to stand by his word - ha).

[ProfessorShutYoMouth]

I just hope the Dems don't take this victory as a reason to sit back and let the Republican lie machine continue to run unopposed in the media. Kathleen Sebelius is already quoted as saying that the lies of the Republicans about the health bill are going to stop...I hope she really doesn't believe this.

It sounds like the Republicans' strategy the rest of the year is going to be:

1. Campaign on a promised repeal of the health bill.

And that of course entails:

1. Lying about the cost of the bill.
2. Lying about what the bill does.
3. Trashing the members of Congress who passed it.
4. Repeatedly calling the bill unconstitutional, unAmerkin, etc.
5. Staging astroturf rallies to create the illusion of widespread dissatisfaction with the bill.

The Dems need to:

1. Get as many people on as many shows as possible as often as possible selling the benefits of the bill to Americans.
2. Have those people stay on message.
3. Relentlessly attack Republicans as being anti-elderly, pro-corporate goons who want to raise the cost of health care for everyone.

In an ideal world, perhaps the Republicans will wake up to David Frum's lament that they have allowed themselves to be led into legislative defeat by a fringe group of rightwing psychos and start being reasonable. Of course, that ain't gonna happen.

Anyways, YAY for the passage of the bill!

Up next...immigration reform, gay rights and at some point...the economy?

[Berliner]

This bill is written to front load a lot of goodies right away. A lot of provisions don't really kick in until 2014, but Umlaut for example, being under 26, will be able to get on his parents' insurance program immediately (by which I mean six months). A lot of people are going to see improvements right away.

The same kind of people who were against Medicaid and Medicare are the people against this. In other words:



Hopefully this passage will reassure the base for a while. The thing Democrats really needs to concentrate on for the next eight months is reducing unemployment any fucking way they can. They spent way too much time on healthcare, and they need to staunch the bleeding by getting people jobs.

[ProfessorShutYoMouth]

Hopefully this passage will reassure the base for a while. The thing Democrats really needs to concentrate on for the next eight months is reducing unemployment any fucking way they can. They spent way too much time on healthcare, and they need to staunch the bleeding by getting people jobs.

How should they go about that?

[Berliner]

Honestly, any way they can. I'm saying that as someone who wants Democrats to retain power in hopes that they would be able to improve the country in the long run, and not as someone who would be concerned about deficit expansion. Though I honestly believe Democrats would be more capable of deficit reduction, especially with Obama, than Republicans would be.

I would as always say that government spending should be invested wisely, on alternative energy, biotech and IT, education, and vital infrastructure projects, blah blah blah. Also, it would help to create more jobs focused on exporting goods and services abroad.