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The Vanishing GOP
Today, Fred Hiatt writes an entire column about the obstacles lying in the way of (a) reining in healthcare costs and (b) raising revenue to close the long-term deficit, without once mentioning the word "Republican." Truly, it is an amazing performance.
Yeah
Has Kevin Drum heard that the Democrats control the Presidency, the House (with a gigantic margin), and have an filibuster-proof majority in the Senate?
Because, apparently, in Kevin Drum-land, the party that has absolutely no power to do anything in Washington is to blame for a failure to address the problems at hand. And the party that has all the power in Washington should not be blamed.
Truly, it is an amazing performance.
Uh huh. Keep telling
Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that, Al. You might as well, since no one else is buying it.
I've been programmed to hate
I've been programmed to hate Fred Hiatt, so hate Fred Hiatt I will.
But I think he raises some interesting questions that I've wondered about.
a) no tort reform at all?
b) no independent death panel ("It doesn't empower an independent commission that could make cost-control decisions that are too hard for Congress.")
and I have my doubts too about Congress making the future cost cutting efforts this apparently depends on.
Plus there's the whole issue of transparency of bills and costs. I came home from the hospital last week with five 4x10 inch dressings. Just for shits and grins I googled the product and each dressing, when bought in a big pack of dressings, is $20 in bulk. And yet, there's nothing magical about these dressings (just big telfa pads), and I bet there's enough of a market that there's no real reason for $20 to the hospital apart from the fact that hospitals don't really seem to care. And god knows what the insurance company will be billed for these things. I'm not saying that if they billed me directly for the dressings I would be using the $5 free market dressing price, just saying that the entire industry suffers from hidden costs.
And the biggest elephant in the room which is what seems to be the continued ties between health insurance and a) employers and b) the insurance industry.
So I hate Fred Hiatt, and I am optimistic about health care reform, but in part that's because I fear that this one will fail and we'll try it again, or this one is a loser, but will be camel nosed into what we need.
Goddamn I hate Fred Hiatt. But some of his questions were germane.
That fucking asshole!
Over at the HuffPo, Marcia
Over at the HuffPo, Marcia Angell, MD, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, has a take that in some ways echoes Hiatt, even as she agrees with Kucinich, this bill is worse than no bill.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-angell-md/is-the-house-health-care_...
"Well, the House health reform bill -- known to Republicans as the Government Takeover -- finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.
Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.
What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)
Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.
If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?
...
Is the House bill better than nothing? I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right.
"
Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcia-angell-md/is-the-house-health-care_...
The argument for this bill is THAT WE ROCK, WE KICKED REPUBLICAN BUTT, WE ROCK WE ROCK, GO OBAMA GO OBAMA GO OBAMA.
The argument against this bill is everything else.
P.S. What sort of stupid software does this site run that allows img but not i ?
no, the argument for this
no, the argument for this bill is that no leftist today would support social security in its original form: not one.
and so, social security, by your standard, shouldn't have been created in the 1930s at all, because it wasn't really a substantial social insurance program.
and who knows when we would have gotten social security as a result? under eisenhower?
give the conservatives credit: once the bill is passed, the entire playing field changes and they know it. the program can and will be improved over the years, assuming it gets passed now.
passing health-care-access reform being so easy that it's merely gone wanting for 60 years.
Are there any indexes that
Are there any indexes that track just the healthcare insurance companies?
I wonder how they did Friday, and how they'll do today and this week?
Republicans are the party of
Republicans are the party of change coming in to clean up the inevitable financial collapse. It's usually safe and conservative to triple government cost estimates, so Pelosicare will cost 3.6 trillion dollars over the next ten years. That's 3.6 thousand billion dollars. Plus Obama is hanging tough over Afghanistan. plus, plus, plus....education, more bailouts coming, etc., etc., you name it, they'll spend on it. That's all Washington knows how to do.
Amazing how some get
Amazing how some get religion only when someone else is trying to solve the problems they created in the first place. Where was all this concern about the exploding national debt over the previous eight years? Oh, that's right, it was Dick Cneney who said deficits don't matter. I guess we are supposed to amend that to "Republican deficits don't matter," while Democratic deficits are a disaster.
We're not going to make the slightest headway in lowering the deficit and national debt until there is a thriving economy that generates a lot more tax revenue than it's doing now. The annual deficit looked awful for 12 years of Republican Presidents until a thriving economy during the Clinton administration changed to creating surpluses. There will be no thriving economy until the fear of bankruptcy due to a health problem among 95% of the American people is eliminated. Throwing people out of work to reduce deficits is not exactly the path to a thriving economy, either.
It's a conundrum, isn't it? Hiatt's simple-minded shibboleths are more damaging than helpful.
Remember when Fred Hiatt
Remember when Fred Hiatt opposed both of the Bush tax cuts and keeping the costs of fighting two wars off the books? Neither does he.