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Our blogfather Markos over at the DailyKos has finally weighed in on this healthcare reform bill and ideological purity from the left.
A little late but better than never. For the last 6 months at least I've been a little surprised that Markos hasn't spoken up more in support of healthcare reform. His book Taking on the System's main message was incremental progress. The idea that you get the best you can but you have to be in the game to play it. Or as The Rolling Stones said you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you get
WHAT WE NEED. A Great Accomplishment.
This is the message we need to be running with, healthcare reform is a great accomplishment and we need to pass it and use it as a foundation for even greater things. Did you know there's a part of this bill that allows states to setup their own single-payer systems? That's where we need to take healthcare reform next, to California and Pennsylvania. PA is closer than CA, they've got a governor who will sign single-payer. It got to Schwarzenegger's desk twice and died.
There are daily excited posts on the Daily Kos telling us about the new additions to a letter asking Senate Democrats to agree to vote for a public health insurance option through a reconciliation vote (where they only need 50).
Today's big news Maria Cantwell signed on. I'm all for positivity but this is growing to be absurd. Here is the only list that matters. With 41 Republicans you must not lose 10 Democrats.
Mark Begich Mark Pryor
Blanche Lincoln Joe Lieberman Tom Carper Bill Nelson
Evan Bayh Mary Landrieu Claire Mccaskill Jon Tester Max Baucus Ben Nelson Kay Hagan Byron Dorgan Kent Conrad
Mark Warner
Jim Webb
You gotta have 7 from this list and hold all the rest. Does anyone think that's likely or even possible? We know 6 of them are for sure nos. That leaves the 7 Public Option heroes as Begich, Baucus, McCaskill, Tester, Hagan, Dorgan and Webb?
The other conversation that none of these cheery diaries are having.
What public option would we be getting?
We have 30 votes for the public option, but we knew that already. None of them were in question. Now comes the hardest part. The final twenty votes. There's a full list of 29 below the fold, and we must have twenty from it to pass this thing. That is the goal here, to pass a public option. Which public option? No one is really saying, so you have to assume it's the one with an opt-out or opt-in clause that will limit the public option's negotiating power. For sure it's the public option that is not available to anyone who's employer (or state?) offers insurance (no matter how expensive or insufficient that insurance is). It will also be a public option not tied to medicare rates, or you lose Klobuchar and Al Franken's vote. Correct me if I'm wrong but what we're left with is going to be an expensive gov't insurance option mostly for the well off and/or unemployed not in Hawaii, Massachusetts, most of the red states, or Pennsylvania (if they get state singlepayer). Is that still worth fighting for? Probably, as a foot in the door. Is it a huge deal? No.
Ezra Klein goes through a listing sent out by Jane Hamsher who is the leader of the Kill the Bill movement on the left side of the internet. She also runs a mid-level website which I won't be linking to. I feel like she is nearly as focused on promoting that site as she is on getting a good bill passed killing the best bill possible.
I've gotten a lot of requests to respond to Jane Hamsher's list of 10 reasons to kill the Senate bill. At this point, I'm not sure there's much in the way of productive dialogue to be had here. Some of the list is purposefully misleading and is clearly aimed more at helping activists kill the bill than actually informing anyone about what is in the bill. Some of it points out things that really should be changed in the bill but aren't central to the legislation itself, and are simply being leveraged to help activists kill the bill. But maybe there's some utility to putting the document in context.
1) Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations -- whether you want to or not.
"You," huh? For the 85 percent of the country already covered by health-care insurance, it doesn't force "you" to do anything at all. People on Medicare are not going to be paying money to private insurance. People with employer-based care will not see their situation change.
For the nearly 50 million Americans caught in the ranks of the uninsured, here's the deal: The bill expands Medicaid, a public program, to cover about 20 million of, uh, "you." Private insurance gets nothing. If you make more than 133 percent of the poverty line, but less than 400 percent, there's a huge system of new subsidies to help you afford private coverage. There are also new regulations on insurers forcing them to spend between 80 percent and 85 percent of every premium dollar on medical care, barring them from rejecting you or charging you higher premiums due to preexisting conditions, ensuring they can't place any annual caps on insurance benefits, and more.
But here's the catch: So long as insurance won't cost more than 8 percent of your monthly income, you have to buy into the system. You can't wait until you get sick or get hurt and and then buy insurance, shifting the costs onto everyone else. The cost of having a universal, or near-universal, system is that people have to participate. The promise is that, for the first time, participation will be possible...
*EMPHASIS ADDED is mine not Ezra's
UPDATE: Like President Obama I was against the mandate before I was for it. That's because I didn't understand it. Nearly every healthcare economist says you have to have a mandate to make the system work and not be prohibitively expensive. A lot of Kill the Bill Democrats have moved on to saying that the Senate bill will be too expensive for people to afford. Kill the mandate and it will be even more expensive.
An individual mandate is clearly a political loser. Would anyone answer yes to the question, "would you like the government to require you to buy insurance?" But it's an absolute necessity in one form or another. Ezra explains.
Right now, the insurer sets the rules. It collects background information on applicants and then varies the price and availability of insurance to discriminate against those who are likely to use it. Health-care reform is going to render those practices illegal. An insurer will have to offer insurance at the same price to a diabetic and a triathlete.
But if you remove the individual mandate, you're caught in the reverse of our current problem: The triathlete doesn't buy insurance. Fine, you might say. Let the insurer get gamed. They deserve it.
The insurers, however, are not the ones who will be gamed. The sick are. Imagine the triathlete's expected medical cost for a year is $200 and the diabetic's cost is $20,000. And imagine we have three more people who are normal risks, and their expected cost in $6,000. If they all purchase coverage, the cost of insurance is $7,640. Let the triathlete walk away and the cost is $9,500. Now, one of the younger folks at normal cost just can't afford that. He drops out. Now the average cost is $10,600. This prices out the diabetic, so now she's uninsured. Or maybe it prices out the next normal-cost person, so costs jump to $13,000.
Senator Tom Harkin also defended this bill today saying it wasn't a mansion but it's a starter home. It's got a good roof and a good foundation and we can add on to it in the future. I'm with these guys I think this is the best we can get, and it's a net positive. At this point in time I don't see a movement that's going to bring in 60 votes for a real alternative in '10 or '12 or to bring down the vote threshold to 50+1.
John Stewart does his thing by laying out the healthcare reform nonsense debate thats going on in the Senate. The Republicans demand that their input be given and that the debate be heard in the open. But there's no debate to be had. 40 Republican Senators want no part in healthcare reform and nearly all the Democratic Senators want it. There's precious little middle ground here, so very little to discuss. But the debate rages on anyway. John calls this faux debate the Senate Fight '09.
Shatner really elicits the elitism of Rush Limbaugh's views in that interview. Limbaugh's most recent contract was for $400 million dollars and it shows. When asked if poor people will have a hard time getting healthcare Rush says they'll also have a hard time getting a bungalow on the beach. Like there's no difference between the two things. So for the average person their basic needs are food, water, shelther, healthcare. Limbaugh pretty much confirmed that his list goes drugs, caviar, bungalows, gold bars, hate.
MIT has done an analysis of the Senate Healthcare Bill and found that it saves money.
Politico The report concludes that under the Senate's health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs...
The "microsimulation" analysis is by Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Treasury Department official under President Bill Clinton. Gruber used data from the Congressional Budget Office.
Gruber concludes that people purchasing individual insurance would save an annual $200 (singles) to $500 (families) in 2009 dollars. And people with low incomes would receive premium tax credits that would reduce the price that they pay for health insurance by as much as $2,500 to $7,500.
This goes in the face of what the whining masses have screeched since 1/20/09 about spending. I won't hear it about this healthcare bill anymore. Not from the howling throngs of teabaggers or from the Congressmen who pass $690B a year Defense bills only to crow about $1T over 10 year healthcare bills.
Wow the Gun Owners of America are masters at using fear to get donations. Today they sent out a wild letter full of dog whistles. The basic idea was taxes = less guns.
to their following.
Fox News is reporting today that the word "tax" appears 183 times in the health care bill. Is Obama serious? Is that what he and Reid want to do to us in the midst of a recession?
Of course, all this increased spending -- and taxes -- means that you will have less money to spend on pursuing your real passions: like providing for your family and purchasing guns and ammunition! [emphasis in the original]
....
[A]s we have mentioned several times in the past, the mandates in the legislation will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database that was created in section 13001 of the stimulus bill. This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned... or any determination of PTSD, or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms.
And, the special "wellness and prevention" programs (inserted by Section 1001 of the bill as part of a new Section 2717 in the Public Health Services Act) would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles -- and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that "no guns" is somehow healthier.
I could make the opposite case that this legislation will allow gun owners to buy more guns. That would happen if this bill gets some cost control over the rising price of healthcare and if it creates jobs. Both of which this bill is likely to do.
One more argument that could be made using insane GOOA logic. We're spending $690 Billion dollars a year in defense. We're buying all kinds of stuff for our military and even for the Afghani, Pakistan and Israeli military. That's just less $$ in hardworking American civilian's pockets that they have for guns.
Tonights MNF games is the Tennessee Titans against the Houston Texans. I've got Steve Slaton on my fantasy team and the guy I'm playing has Andre Johnson, both are on the Texans. I need Slaton to get 9.5 pts more than Johnson to win my matchup. How's your fantasy matchup doing? Any thoughts on tonight's game?
BRUSSELS - For 23 torturous years, Rom Houben says he lay trapped in his paralyzed body, aware of what was going on around him but unable to tell anyone or even cry out.
The car-crash victim had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state but appears to have been conscious the whole time. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s finally realized it, and unlocked Houben's mind again.
The 46-year-old Houben is now communicating with one finger and a special touchscreen on his wheelchair.
"Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it," he said
2. Huffington Post Lifesize Lincoln. This piece looks at Lincoln's face in some rare photographs, comparing the left to the right.
We bypassed Republican stall tactics with 60 votes. So the L's - Lieberman, Landrieu and Lincoln voted with the Dems after all the posturing.
Glad this passed and that we can move forward in trying to get real reform.
I'm sure this will be the hot topic of discussion on the Sunday news shows. I won't be watching though so if you see anything particularly interesting let us know.
As you may know, I am a huge fan of College Football, HUGE FAN. I am also a huge fan of providing affordable Health Care coverage to all Americans. I am also a big fan of ending the two ridiculous wars we have been fighting for what seems like 20 years now. I also enjoy Americans having a paycheck to take home to provide for they're families and loved ones. Also a big fan of making progress on a future free of a dependence on foreign oil, and starting to make strides in the Alternative Energy front, creating jobs in the fastest growing sector for jobs in the country, and NOT sending billions and billions of dollars a year to a region, that quite frankly, doesn't like us very much. I am also a fan of making college affordable and making it easier to get the funding it takes to get an affordable education to prepare yourself for the jobs of tomorrow. Orrin Hatch, the Republican State Senator from Utah, is apparently just a fan of College Football, and that's about it.
We are smack dab in the middle of the worst economic crisis since perhaps The Great Depression, we are stuck in the mire of fighting two wars, one justified, one not so much, Americans are in the fight of they're life with the Health Industry and are closer then ever to having real options when it comes to they're healthcare, people are losing they're homes, they're jobs, they're retirements, they're slice of the American Dream, and Senator Hatch is worried about how his Utah Utes didn't get into the BCS National Title Game last year. Really.
Now I am going to try to keep this focused on the Political aspect and not go on a rant about football, but I will say this, Hatch has a point, I have said it 482 times. But really, right now? Is it that damn important? Is it more important then the things I mentioned above? Not to me, not to the American people. I am a College Football freak, and would love nothing more then to see a playoff in College Football, but I would prefer my President to keep working towards health care reform, energy independence, affordable college, job creation, just to name a few, and not some personal grudge against the BCS for not putting his favorite team in the National Title Game. The fact this is at the top of the list of Senator Hatch's priorities is absolutely mind numbing.
Look, my displeasure with the GOP is pretty well documented, but this just furthers my frustration with just how out of freaking touch they are with the American people. I am sick and damn tired of hearing the Sean Hannity's of the world try to sell people to the fact that the Tea Partiers/Town Hallers are speaking for the majority of America. NO THE FUCK THEY ARE NOT! I am firm in my belief that these people are so insecure with who they are and what they stand for, that they're only outlet to let out those frustrations is a public display of idiocy. The Republicans main priority right now is to distract from the goals the Democratic Party and The President are working hard to make happen and are VERY close to making happen. Health Care, Energy just to name a couple. I think this is just another example. A very fine example at that.
Look, like I said, I am all for Senator Hatch moving forward on this, I really am, but lets get America dusted off and back to creating jobs and putting hardworking Americans back to work before we go making our Saturday afternoon football watching that much more enjoyable. Besides, if America isn't working, so they can pay the bills, the mortgage, the energy bills it takes to power a T.V., they won't be watching College Football no matter who is playing in the National Title Game. Let's keep this in mind Senator Hatch.
As usual, thanks for reading. Welcome to thoughts, criticism, suggestions, PRAYERS (always welcomed, not needed). The link to the Bloomberg story is below, check it out, and then get motivated. By the way, GO GATORS, GO PUBLIC OPTION.
Watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has requested an investigation into whether Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) broke House rules in organizing an anti-health care reform rally on November 5.
In a letter sent to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), CREW contends that Bachmann violated House rules by using her official member's website to garner "grassroots lobbying" for the health care protest in question.
The Business Insider gives us their far from precise rankings of the top 25 laziest cities in America based on combining three factors: obesity rates, lack of exercise and television viewership.
Coach Nick Saban will be furious that Tuscaloosa tops the list. Of course Alabama and the south are way overrepresented in this "study". The Business Insider, who the heck are they by the way, found some of the most stereotypical pictures to use in their slideshow.
We give you the top 25
1 Tuscaloosa, AL 2 Huntington, WV
3 Birmingham, AL 4 New Orleans, LA
5 Orangeberg, SC
6 Memphis, TN
7 Wichita Falls, Tx
8 Tulsa, OK
9 Oklahoma City, OK
10 Fayetteville, NC
11 Las Vegas, NV
12 Hagerstown, Maryland
13 Louisville, Kentucky
14 Detroit, Mich
15 Pittsburgh, PA
16 Atlantic City, NJ
17 Charleston, WV
18 Hickory, NC
19 Buffalo, NY
20 Camden, NJ
21 Dallas, TX
22 Jackson, Miss
23 Scottsbluff, Nebraska
24 Grand Island, Nebraska
25 Mobile, Alabama
I will say that in the health care debate, we have not emphasized wellness and prevention enough. I do agree with a Republican friend that reminded me of that on Sunday when we were discussing the House vote. I certainly can use more exercise during the week.
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