House Republicans wasted no time in declaring their legislative priorities for the 112th Congress. The first: repeal health care for millions of Americans. The second: redefine rape. A day after repealing health care, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act, a bill that would not only permanently prohibit some federally funded health-care programs from covering abortions, but would change the language exempting rape and incest from rape to “forcible rape.”
By narrowing the Hyde Amendment language, Republicans would exclude the following situations from coverage: women who say no but do not physically fight off the perpetrator, women who are drugged or verbally threatened and raped, and minors impregnated by adults. As the National Women’s Law Center’s Steph Sterling puts it, this new standard of force “takes us back to a time where just saying no was not enough.”
And yet, 172 Republicans — including sixteen women — and lone Democrat Rep. Daniel Lipinski (IL), chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus — readily support the new standard. Appalled at such a cavalier attack on women’s rights, one House member is not taking the change lightly. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) “fiercely denounced” her conservative colleagues for this “absolutely outrageous” dilution of victims’ rights. Enraged at the suggestion that “there is some kind of rape that would be okay,” Wasserman Schultz told The Raw Story that she considers the bill itself to be “a violent act against women”:
“It is absolutely outrageous,” Wasserman Schultz said in an exclusive interview late Monday afternoon. “I consider the proposal of this bill a violent act against women.”[...]
“It really is — to suggest that there is some kind of rape that would be okay to force a woman to carry the resulting pregnancy to term, and abandon the principle that has been long held, an exception that has been settled for 30 years, is to me a violent act against women in and of itself,” Wasserman Schultz said.
HARRY REID: One of the things that always troubles me is when we start talking about the debt, the first thing people do is run to Social Security. Social Security is a program that works. And it's going to be-- it's fully funded for the next forty years. Stop picking on Social Security. There're a lotta places--
DAVID GREGORY: Senator are you really saying --
HARRY REID: --where you can go to save money.
DAVID GREGORY:-- the arithmetic on Social Security works?
HARRY REID: I'm saying the arithmetic in Social Security works. I have no doubt it does.
DAVID GREGORY: It's not in crisis?
HARRY REID: The ne-- no, it's not in crisis. This is-- this is-- this is something that's perpetuated by people who don't like government. Social Security is fine. Are there things we can do to improve Social Security? Of course.
DAVID GREGORY: Means testing. Raising the --
DAVID GREGORY:--retirement age--
HARRY REID: --don't--
DAVID GREGORY: --do you--
HARRY REID: --I'm--
DAVID GREGORY: --agree with either of those?
HARRY REID: --I'm not going to go to with any of those backdoor methods- you know, to whack Social Security recipients. I'm not going to do that. We have a lot of things we can do with-- this debt. It's a problem. But one of the places where I'm not going to be part of picking on is Social Security.
After raising $1.1 million from January to June, the committee raised less than $87,000 between July and September — less than it brought in during any one of the preceding five months. And in just three months, the Blue Dog PAC's monthly fundraising average dropped by more than $50,000 — probably not the sort of fiscal conservatism the 52-member coalition was hoping for.
BILL MOYERS: You know from the news that early next week the Senate Finance Committee is expected to vote on its version of health care reform. And therein lies another story of money and politics.
Polls show the overwhelming majority of Americans favor a non-profit alternative -- like Medicare -- that would give the private health insurance industry some competition. But if so many Americans and the President himself want that public option, how come we're not getting one?
Because, the medicine has been poisoned from day one, in part because of that same revolving door that Congresswoman Kaptur and Simon Johnson were just talking about. Movers and shakers rotate between government and the lucrative private sector at a speed so dizzying they forget who they're working for.
A media consumed with tracking Obama’s popularity has failed to educate the American citizenry about the key elements of the debate. Ask any 30 Americans to define Obama’s plans for subsidies, mandates, insurance exchanges, or the public option, and you’re likely to hear 30 different answers. That’s because the media has been reporting on health care issues as if gossiping about the conflicting personalities crowded in any high school cafeteria.
A corporation is not, nor has it ever been, a constitutional person with voting rights; it is not, not has it ever been, a democratic citizen; nor has it ever been a constituent member of "We the People " The founders did not mention the word "corporation" in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and only a handful of corporations were even in existence at the time the Constitution was written.
The corporation is not a membership organization but an "artificial entity," as the Supreme Court has called it, chartered by the state or federal governments to serve public purposes. Legally speaking, it has no independent constitutional standing outside of the rights of the people who own it — and they already have the right as citizens to contribute and spend on campaigns. The idea now being promoted that CEOs have a First Amendment right to take other people's money out of corporate treasuries to spend on politics is outlandish.
Maher had a great show tonight. Really loved his interview with Congressman Anthony Weiner. Too bad HBO won't let folks embed clips from the shows. Maher's closing remarks were excellent and you can read it all here on his blog. Loved this:
Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the 70% of Americans who aren't crazy.
Don't try to explain the "public option" one more more time.
The cure for what ails a healthcare system that leaves close to 50 million Americans uninsured and at least that many underinsured is not an "option."
"As President Obama prepares to address the nation about his vision for healthcare reform, we should not overlook the last, best truly transformative change to our healthcare system: Medicare," argues Weiner..."
Weiner is not merely offering Obama and Democratic leaders a practical proposal. He is telling them how to get out of the political corner in which they placed themselves by trying too hard to satisfy Republican legislators and their insurance-industry paymasters.
"Medicare also provides us with a case study in the hypocrisy of our Republican friends who have built their party on a 44-year record of undermining this popular program. And now their Chairman sees no irony in ripping 'government run' healthcare while publishing an op-ed opposing changes to Medicare, argues Weiner.
"If Medicare has been such a success, why not extend it? Why not have single-payer plans for 55-year-olds? Why not have one for young citizens who just left their parents or college coverage?"
And the New Yorker suggests that, "The real reason we haven't seen the Democratic Party embrace the obvious and simpler idea is that it boils down to pure beltway politics. We've been reluctant to tackle the real inefficiency in the current system, namely, the very presence of the private insurance companies. Too many in Washington would rather stay friends with the insurance and drug companies when real reform probably can't be achieved in a way that makes these powerful institutions happy."
This is a fight that Barack Obama can win -- not for himself but for the tens of millions of Americans who need healthcare and for the hundreds of millions of Americans who need a better healthcare system.
But he won't win it by taking advice from George Bush: "stay the course."
He will win it by taking the wise counsel of Congressman Weiner and offering America what the people understand and want: "Medicare for All."
I got to witness something really special. About a dozen tea party activists had staked out Sen. Al Franken's booth, and confronted him loudly when he arrived. But within minutes, he'd turned an unruly crowd into a productive conversation on health care. The discussion went from insurance reform, to the public option, to veterans benefits, to cap and trade. He made a few laugh and even told a touching story that moved a few to tears. A whole lot of common ground was found.
Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean fired one of the clearest warning shots at hesitant Democratic lawmakers on Thursday, insisting that if the party was unable to produce a health care bill with a public plan, there would be electoral consequences.
"I do think there will be primaries as the result of all this, if the bill doesn't pass with a public option," Dean said, in a phone interview with the Huffington Post.
Republican obstructionists to Obama's agenda have developed a new tactic. Seemingly forgetful of how Republican majorties jammed through huge bills without letting Dems actually read them, they now insist that every Dem has to read every bit of every bill and more specifically the Health Care Bill. Well in reality that is not that much of a challenge.
When people make the claim that no one can really understand a 1018 page bill realize that mostly you don't need to deeply engage with more than maybe seventy or eighty double spaced, highly indented pages to get a pretty solid grasp of what the bill proposes.
Matthew Frank's profile of Max Baucus in the Missoula Independent goes a long way to explaining how this unlikeliest of small state Senators finds himself at the center of the most important public policy debate of a generation. The profile shows both how Baucus got to the point of perhaps securing his political legacy, but how he might also be the very person who dooms it to failure.
The Finance Committee has been replaced by the Baucus Committee, two other conservative Democrats (Kent Conrad, ND and Jeff Bingaman, NM) and three Republicans (Chuck Grassley, IA, Olympia Snowe, ME, and Mike Enzi, WY). These six have holed up for weeks, working out a plan that many Democrats will have a hard time supporting and 99.9 percent of Republicans will oppose because they have no interest in helping the Democrats pass this massive reform. From the outside, it's a fool's errand. Baucus is trading away the store, leaving the shell of a bill that could give us some needed insurance reforms, but will fall far short of actually reforming the system, in the vain hope that he can bring Republicans along.
His own Republican negotiators proved just how pointless this exercise in placating Republicans is this week, when Mike Enzi publically rejected the idea that he was negotiating at all on behalf of Republicans.
Five other Congressional committees and the White House, are supposed to leave completely intact the legislation negotiated in secret by six Senators who represent less than 3% of the nation's population. Legislative process be damned, the Mike Enzi healthcare reform bill has to be passed without question, without amendment by all the other committees. And, if recent key votes are any indicator, all of the Republicans in Congress are going to vote against it anyway. In case Senator Baucus hadn't noticed it yet, Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi just hijacked his bill.
There are three camps in the Healthcare Reform movement here in Maine and across the country: the Republicans, who basically want to keep the status quo, the Democrats, who are promoting the "Healthcare for America Now" campaign, and those who support HR676, the House bill that lays out a single-payer model, which is the time-proven system in every other industrial democracy in the world where all citizens, without qualification, are covered from cradle to grave.
The single payer camp has been split between HR 676 supporters and the Public Option/Obama loyalists who claim passionately, "I support single payer with all my heart, I believe it's the best way, but we have to take baby steps to get there." They believe, as the Administration insists, that we have to work with the system we have "for now" and pass a bill out of political expediency, no matter how bad it may be.
But the ground rules for the debate on health care reform in Congress portend a dead end for the "baby steps." It is shaping up to be a wholesale exclusion of a single-payer option in favor of a health care financing hybrid which would include private insurance companies and a government-run insurance program, the "public option."
It keeps the for-profit insurance industry alive and well by actually forcing people to buy into it or be fined; the public option will be available only to those who cannot afford to buy for-profit insurance. If income or age is used as a qualifier to receive Medicare-style payments for health care (as is now the case), there will still be millions of middle-to-low-income Americans and small businesses slipping through the cracks.
The Obama Administration's decision to take single payer off the table for now and into the future has many serious, if not fatal, consequences. Most egregiously, it eliminates from consideration the largest sources of savings which a single-payer system would accomplish without affecting quality of care: eliminating the profits paid out to insurance company stockholders, the inflated salaries paid to corporate CEOs, the phenomenal cost of redundant administrative expenses, the cost to providers for billing to countless insurers (instead of just one), and finally the millions the industry pays out to lobbyists and their congressional targets, around $300 million at the last count.
The devil, of course, is in the details, and the details as now dictated by the insurance industry are that private and public insurers, "must compete on a level playing field." The President has recently signaled that he is willing to compromise on the public option, even as he launched a grassroots campaign (through Organizing for America) to promote HCAN and save the public option.
However, the insurance industry is committed to removing any advantage the public option may have that would threaten their competitive edge: specfically, any cost-saving devices, like public subsidies or negotiating more favorable terms for drugs and services, would not be permitted.
Another consequence of setting up two competing systems is to create, inevitably, a two-tier health care establishment with very different risk pools: one for the old, sick, poor and disabled (Medicare/Medicaid/ public option), and the second for the young, the healthy and the rich. The costs to the "public," high-risk pool is substantially higher, obviously, than the private, low-risk pool.
Since private insurers are accountable only to their stockholders, not to the consumer, they are bound by their fiduciary obligation to lower costs and maximize profit. The only way they can deliver on their obligation to their stockholders is to cut payouts and reduce risk.
This business plan is achieved typically by denying prior approval to subscribers for recommended procedures or selected prescribed drugs and by insuring only the healthy by removing the sick from their rolls, including those with “prior conditions.” This last point is on the table in congressional committees and may likely become one of the deal-breakers in the congressional negotiations on a final bill.
All of this begs the question: Why would an administration with so much political capital for "change you can believe in" want to set up a public option to compete with the private insurers on these terms? Terms which, in our view, carry the seeds of its own failure as it founders under the high costs of a risk pool overwhelmingly skewed towards the sickest and most vulnerable, while in the other pool "the water's just fine, thank you, why don't you just hop in, while we sweep in the profits. Just don't get sick."
The way things are shaping up in Congress now, the Obama people will either cave in to unreasonable conditions and amendments, which produces a compromise doomed to failure, casting a blot on anything "public," or risk not getting a bill passed this year at all, with diminishing chances, as in the Clinton era.
The Republicans and the insurance industry have a big stake in the failure of this legislation, and have no stake in compromise. The Obama people, on the other hand, seem to have a big stake in passing legislation, any legislation -- no matter how bad -- and have shown their willingness to compromise big, as in their bowing to a crippling amendment on the recent federal budget bill in order to gain merely three, count 'em, Republicans for the sake of "bi-partisanship" appearances.
This seems to add up to setting the stage for a final bill which fails altogether, or which so compromises a public option as to completely squander any opportunity for real change for another decade or more.
The last time a serious discussion of national (single- payer) health care occurred in Congress was in 1948, when Harry Truman choked and withdrew the bill. That was 61 years ago. It would be a tragedy if we have to wait that long again for another chance.
If at this remarkable juncture Obama and the Democrats cannot enact a robust health care reform -- with a strong nationwide public option, cost controls, and nearly universal coverage -- I would not want to be in charge of fundraising and mobilization for them in the 2010 and 2012 elections! Most of us who supported them last time will of course not vote for a Republican.. But if Obama and the Democrats cannot act now on a once in a half century challenge and opportunity, they are not worthy of extra energy. And those of us who wrote big checks last time will tell the Democrats -- especially in the Senate -- to hold pharmaceutical fundraisers instead.
Key leaps forward for U.S. public social provision -- Social Security, Medicare, etc. -- have NEVER happened through "bipartisan" compromises and they always happen in close votes. They have always sqweaked through after gargantuan effort, strong presidential pressure, and refusal to allow eviscerating compromises. Think of Social Security if the Clark amendment -- allowing corporate opt-out -- had passed in 1935. We would not have it. And conservatives and the medical and insurance establishments cried "socialism" in 1965, too. We would not have Medicare if we had listened.
Because let's not kid ourselves: WHATEVER passes this year will make the Democrats owners of the health care mess going forward. If they just throw more subsidies and piecemeal regulations into the current system, they will ensure galloping public costs for residual arrangements and for subsidies to private insurers who will easily find ways to avoid sick or costly patients. Businesses and citizens will grow more and more irritated as time passes, and will blame the Democrats. Rightly so.
And to return to my theme at the start: no matter if Senate Democrats still think they are operating in the world of the 1980s or 1993, they are not. Activist Democrats -- mobilizers, volunteers, bloggers, analysts, and donors -- are watching them. We will know exactly who blocks or eviscerates real reform here. We WILL blame the Senate and the responsible individual Senators. And many of us will blame the Obama adminsitration if it does not take a strong stand on the public option and real reform, starting right now. Whatever he says in public, Obama needs to draw lines in the sand with Democrats in private -- and get tough. If he does not, and this fizzles into no legislation or reform in appeance only, energy will dissipate from the Demorats and the Obama movement. There will be the wrong kind of turning point for them -- and for America.
The AMA is not just a bunch of doctors, but among other things an extremely lucrative lobbying organization that has given more than $12 million in campaign contributions to federal candidates since 1998. And since 1998, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.org, some 64 percent of the AMA's donations to federal candidates have been to Republicans -- although 2008, in which the AMA gave 56 percent of its contributions to Democrats, was a notable exception.
Since 1998, almost four-fifths of the AMA's donation to Senate candidates have been to Republicans (including 64 percent in 2008). They have been a bit more equitable on the House side
The AMA is dying. Mostly made up of richer, older doctors working as specialists. It no longer represents the majority of American physicians- only about 1/3 of doctors; 90% of doctors over the age of 70; less than 30% of doctors under 50.
Americans think that it’s healthcare that produces health, when there really is very little evidence for that. What turns out to be really important is the nature of caring and sharing in society….Where societies are more equal — and economic equality is the thing that is most important in this — people look after each other…and pretty well everyone does better.
How can we mourn the loss of 3,000 on 9/11, yet tolerate a dysfunctional health care system that kills 18,000 uninsured each year plus countless others who were denied needed care simply to protect the obscene wealth of a few CEOs?
As the above-cited PNHP article reveals, the irrationality and waste of the deadly US health care system is underscored by the statistics. In the US 31% of all health care costs goes to the parasitic middle men --- for profit carriers and HMOs. Canada, a single-payer country, devotes just 1.3% to administrative costs. Daniel Wirt, MD reports that the 31% translates to "more than $350 billion per year, provides no health care: it is consumed by enormous administrative costs, profits for investors and shareholders, and large salaries for managers of these for-profit insurance companies."
Americans pay nearly double what people pay for health care in single-payer countries, yet the World Health Organization ranks the US as 37th in the delivery of health care services.
Where opponents of single-payer rail against paying taxes toward a single-payer system, the PNHP reports that our taxes already pay for 60% of health care costs in the US. "Americans pay the highest health care taxes in the world. We pay for national health insurance, but don’t get it."
People in single-payer countries are healthier and live longer than we do. As revealed by Sicko, especially in the segment in which Moore interviews American exiles in Paris, with the stress and weight of America's health care burden removed, they also appear a whole lot happier --- a point which underscores the title of an article written by autoworker Phillip Bannowsky, “Capitalism produces rich bankers, but Socialism produces happiness."
