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It is easy to be brave from a safe distance. - Aesop
Today on This Week, host Elizabeth Vargas and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the following exchange about passing health care reform:
VARGAS: ... What do you say to your members, when it does come to the House to vote on this, who are in real fear of losing their seats in November if they support you now?
PELOSI: Well first of all our members -- every one of them -- wants health care. I think everybody wants affordable health care for all Americans. They know that this will take courage. It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare. And many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.
But the American people need it, why are we here? We're not here just to self perpetuate our service in Congress. We're here to do the job for the American people. To get them results that gives them not only health security, but economic security, because the health issue is an economic issue for -- for America's families.
I think Pelosi has a good point. Ideally members of Congress should be about more than just getting themselves re-elected. The problem is that it’s very easy for Pelosi to say this: she has been in the House since 1987 and took 71.9% of the vote in the 2008 elections. So I wonder if she’d be willing to take the same stand if there was any chance she’d lose re-election this November, if it was her service in Congress that was in danger of not being perpetuated.
Here’s my proposal: Nancy Pelosi should tell her fellow House Democrats that if the House passes a health reform bill and the Democrats lose their majority in the House, she’ll resign. From the House.
I only saw bits and pieces of the health care summit but it bothered me that President Obama was calling everyone by his or her first name. After all, no one was calling him “Barack”. Maybe this is the way things worked in earlier presidencies and I just missed it but it sounded weird to me.
From JustOneMinute, quoting the Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine):
President Barack Obama will use a bipartisan summit Thursday to push for sweeping health-care legislation, but if that fails to generate enough support the White House has prepared the outlines of a more modest plan.
His leading alternate approach would provide health insurance to perhaps 15 million Americans, about half what the comprehensive bill would cover, according to two people familiar with the planning.
Half? I simply do not understand how we ended up in this position with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President. Surely the priority for Democratic health care reform would be - should be - to make sure people who don’t have health insurance get health insurance. Sure they went off-track a little and instead of a ten-page bill that made sure people without health insurance could get health insurance, they ended up with a bill that has an additional 1,990 pages that do who knows what. Now they’ve realized they may not be able to pass their 2,000 page bill. So do they eliminate the 1,990 pages of dreck and keep the ten pages that actually get everyone health insurance? Of course not. They eliminate the coverage for half the uninsured and keep, well, I have no idea what they’re keeping.
I’m sorry to repeat myself but this just makes me nuts. If President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi had any sense between the three of them then on January 21, 2009, they would have proposed a bill that made sure people without health insurance could buy it if they wanted to. Let everyone who wants to buy into the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan or buy into Medicaid or buy whatever insurance they want and subsidize those who cannot afford to do so. That should have been their priority and it would have been politically feasible. Even all those people who are very happy with their existing health insurance worry about what would happen if they lost their jobs or their premiums skyrocketed. As for paying for it, they could have used some of the money that went into the stimulus bill. Heck, David Plouffe himself said that health care is a jobs creator.
Insuring the uninsured would have solved the most urgent of our health care problems and bought the country time to figure out how to lower health care costs. And since the Democrats would have successfully accomplished the task of protecting everyone’s health insurance they would have had political capital to help push through the rest of their health care reform.
Instead, Obama and the Democrats ceded not only the best political ground but also the best moral ground and committed themselves primarily to lowering health care costs. They acted as if extending coverage was a sort of dessert they'd promise not consider unless they managed the Brussel sprouts of cost control. That's a strange approach for Democrats and particularly Democrats in control of the Federal government.
Clive Crook believes that Obama’s closing statement at the health care summit:
did crystallise the key point of difference between the two sides. Democrats mainly want to expand coverage, and promise to contain costs in order to pay for it. Republicans have the opposite priorities: first contain costs, which they say would make insurance more affordable.
I don’t see it that clearly in the transcript but even if Crook is right, he goes on to acknowledge that:
Up to now [Obama] has emphasized cost control first, broader coverage second--because that is where most voters seem to be. Relatively little effort has been spent on making the case for wider coverage, and on persuading the country that this is worth paying for. Making the switch now comes a little late.
In other words, what could have been - should have been - a golden opportunity to accomplish what I always assumed was a key Democratic goal of insuring the uninsured has been frittered away. We’ve spent a year on a health care reform bill that probably won’t pass; we’ve spent a year with the uninsured staying uninsured; we’ve reduced the chance of any bill that covers the uninsured getting through Congress; we’ve done nothing to address health care costs; and while we were failing to accomplish all that we also weren’t paying much attention to stuff like improving the economy and getting people back to work. (Although if the health care reform process is any example, the economy and the unemployed might be better off if Congress and the Administration don’t try to help them.)
What the heck happened?
In a good explanation of the health insurance premium rate review provision in President Obama’s proposed health care bill, Wonk Room says:
Since conservatives will surely claim that rate review is some kind of government take over of private industry or a burdensome new federal requirement for insurers, it’s important to note that states that have instituted rate review house profitable insurance companies and maintain competitive and vibrant markets.
Um, no. I hope that conservatives are intelligent enough to claim that rate review is best handled by States, especially since the Wonk Room post itself says (emphasis mine):
According to the New York Times the Health Insurance Rate Authority, “made up of health industry experts that would issue an annual report setting the parameters for reasonable rate increases based on conditions in the market.” What’s ‘reasonable’ will vary from state to state.
Although Wonk Room talks about the success some States have had in beating back health insurance premium rate hikes they considered unreasonable, it also claims that “state governments often lack the resources or political will to keep insurers in check.” Perhaps, but why is that my problem? My State of New Jersey regulates its health insurance companies within an inch of their lives and I’m sure some of my State tax dollars go to pay for that regulation. I don’t see why I should also pay for the Federal government to "take care" of States whose voters aren’t willing to do the job themselves. Or who even - heretical as it no doubt seems to Obama - don't think the job needs to be done at all.
(Via Legal Insurrection via Neo-neocon)
I’ve caught up on responding to comments that have come in while I was out of commission:
Yes
Great minds
This sounds familiar
And I deleted a comment on a very old post. I’m so proud: the Spambots have found me.
If I wasn’t such a coward I’d try installing the widget that shows recent comments. Maybe someday...
[I’m struck speechless by reading that President Obama’s “new” health care proposal apparently includes (via Neo-neocon) price controls on health insurance premiums. I haven’t looked at the White House posting myself yet and hope that it will turn out to be not really as described. Failing that, I hope voters will be smart enough to realize that this way lies disaster. For now, though, I need to write about something less fraught and figured that if Megan McArdle can write - however dangerously - about makeup, I can certainly write about candles.]
I’m a Yankee Candle junkie. So sue me. It’s a relatively harmless addiction: there’s a limit to how many candles I can burn so I don’t have to mortgage my house to feed my habit and it has the pleasant side-effect of making the house smell good even when it’s, shall we say, not looking its best.
The problem with my addiction is the usual: I’m dependent on my supplier. And Yankee Candle shows a distressing tendency to discontinue candles I really like. The most heart-breaking of these discontinuations is Rainbow’s End (tm). This is a lovely candle. It’s a watery almost aqua color described as having:
A fresh, clean and cool scent like the country air after a storm
To me it smells nice, definite, but not specific. That is, it doesn’t smell like anything. Not fruit or flower or food or wood or Christmas or autumn. When I found Rainbow’s End years ago, it was a revelation because so many of the Yankee Candle scents classified as “Fresh” (i.e., not found in nature) smelled like dryer fabric softener sheets. That’s changed now although YC still sells the scent Clean Cotton and as far as I’m concerned you get the same effect by draping a piece of Bounce over a lampshade. And since I hate the smell of dryer fabric softeners, finding a non-specific candle that didn’t make me think of laundromats was wonderful.
Rainbow’s End has been discontinued for years now. It’s been so long that the last time I was in a Yankee Candle store the two women who worked there had never even heard of it. I check from time to time but I’ve never seen it among the “temporarily revived” scents YC makes from time to time.
I have one lone Rainbow’s End votive candle left, stored away safely. I hate to burn it: it’s the last of its kind. And yet if a candle never burns, is it really a candle?
*****
If you’re interested in reading the Roy Edroso article that prompted McArdle’s “feminine” response, it’s here. I can’t decide if it’s incredibly stupid or incredibly funny. Probably stupid since this level of arrogance is too frightening to ever be truly funny. Althouse considers pity the appropriate response.
I had shoulder surgery on Monday which was pretty minor and went very well. I got a nerve block for pain which meant my left hand was insubordinate for a couple of days (and still occasionally seems to harbor rebellious impulses). Further, the dregs of the general anesthetic and whatever the opposite of dregs is of the pain meds are resulting in spectacularly brilliant thoughts that I suspect wouldn’t seem nearly as brilliant to anyone who read them.
All of which is a long way of saying I have lots of stuff to say about lots of stuff - including the interesting comments that have come in over the last week - but probably won’t be saying it for at least a few more days.
Back to Xanadu.
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