Tag Archives: health reform

The filibuster is why we can’t have nice things

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What If There Was No Filibuster?

Joshua Green: “Let’s take only the Obama presidency. Had the filibuster not applied,

  • the United States would have a market-based system to control carbon emissions, which would limit the damage from global warming, vitalize the clean technology sector, and challenge other large polluters like China and India to do the same.
  • The new health care law would have a public option.
  • Children of undocumented immigrants who served two years in the military or went to college could become US citizens.
  • Women paid less than their male colleagues because of their gender would have broader legal recourse against their employers.
  • Billionaires would not be able to manipulate the political system from behind a veil of anonymity.”

via: Political Wire

Republican-Teaparty supporters against health reform are encouraged to carry these cards

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yoctoontologist: A syndicated political cartoon that substantially illuminates a complex issue for readers unfamiliar with it. Mark this day.

Healthcare reform: free riders and their Freedumb

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Ezra Klein observes: There was a reason conservatives once supported the individual mandate: Of all the arguments being waged over the Affordable Care Act — or, as the Obama campaign now likes to refer to it, “Obamacare” — the one dominating the Supreme Court this week is perhaps the most conceptually trivial.

The individual mandate requires consumers to purchase health insurance in order to eliminate the problem of free riders — people who don’t purchase insurance until they get sick or injured or those who never purchase insurance and end up passing on to the rest of us the costs of care they can’t afford.

Like this kind of bullshit: Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama’s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue. Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month. But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.

In one way or another, everyone paying for health insurance and / or paying for any kind of medical visit or service is subsidizing Teaparty Mary Brown and her freedumb.

(EK cont): Detractors argue that the mandate unconstitutionally infringes on personal liberty by forcing Americans to purchase health insurance. But compare it to three ways of addressing the free- rider problem in health care that are clearly, indisputably, constitutional:

• Single payer: The federal government increases income taxes and, in return, guarantees everyone government-provided health-care insurance. There is no option to opt out of the taxes. This is how most of Medicare works, though the insurance kicks in only after you turn 65.

• Late-enrollment penalty: The single-payer approach only holds for “most of” Medicare because the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit works a bit differently. For every month that you don’t enroll after becoming eligible at age 65, your premium rises by one percentage point.

• Tax credits: Under various health-care proposals — including the plan of Rep.Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — the tax code is changed to give families a tax credit for purchasing private health insurance. Families that choose to go without insurance, or simply can’t afford it, would not receive the tax credit.

All of these plans share the same basic approach: They impose a financial penalty, either before or after the fact, on those who forgo health insurance. Single payer does it through taxes, Medicare Part D through premiums and Ryan’s plan through tax credits.

Now consider the individual mandate. Here’s how it works: Starting in 2016, those who don’t carry insurance will be annually assessed a fine of $695 or 2.5 percent of their income, whichever is higher.

That’s about $58 a month. For health insurance coverage. OR 2.5% of your income, which I’d bet a lot of us are paying more than that now. I’d be happier with single-payer though. Not that what I would be happy with will matter.

(EK cont): If the mandate falls, future politicians, who will still need to fix the health-care system and address the free-rider problem, will be left with the option of either moving toward a single-payer system or offering incredibly large, expensive tax credits in order to persuade people to do things they don’t otherwise want to do. That is to say, in the name of liberty, Republicans and their allies on the Supreme Court will have guaranteed a future with much more government intrusion in the health-care marketplace.

Read it all…

Wednesday morning’s 10 interesting things

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1) Vice President Joe Biden – “But the best way to sum up the job the president has done — if you need a real shorthand — Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”  | Note: US auto manufacturing is alive, no thanks to Mitt Romney, who would have let GM, Ford, and Chrysler go bankrupt … he would have gladly “Bain Capital-ed” all of them. 

2) Virginia Democrat Sen. Janet Howell Proposes ‘Gender Equity’ To Anti-Abortion Bill – “If pregnant women should have to get an ultrasound before having an abortion, men should have to undergo additional medical procedures before getting a prescription for erectile dysfunction,” she noted, and introduced an amendment to Vogel’s bill requiring that men “undergo a digital rectal exam” for pills like Viagra… “We should just have a little gender equity here.”

3) GOP Declares Obama Plan That Taxes Banks To Help Homeowners ‘Dead On Arrival’ – But any such scheme that relies on a bank tax “would be dead on arrival,” said Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.), chairman of the subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, in an interview last week. “No one is going to suggest that the way to help the mortgage market is to propose a tax indirectly on the system,” he said.

4) Seven States Are Considering Eliminating Their Income Tax – Buoyed by the Tea Party, Republicans took over state houses across the country in 2010 and quickly pushed legislation to advance the conservative agenda on voting rights, abortion, and immigration. But now, the AP reports, there’s a new target: the state income tax, with Republican lawmakers are pushing to repeal in Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina. Income tax revenue funds “bedrock government services, including roads and bridges and schools and prison systems” ….

5) Republicans in Arizona plan to nearly wipe out public unions – Republicans in the Arizona Senate introduced legislation on Tuesday that could eliminate public employee unions, according to Talking Points Memo. The bills go even further than those proposed in Wisconsin last year, which lead to massive pro-union protests at the state Capitol. “At first glance, it looks like an all out assault on the right of workers to organize,” Senate Minority Leader David Schapira (D) told TPM. “And to me, that’s a serious problem.”

6)  How Deficit Cuts Are About To Hurt The Economy – The U.S. economy will suffer over the next few years as a result of fiscal austerity measures including the recent spate of spending cuts, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest forecast issued Tuesday. Economic growth and the employment rate will be reduced for many years to come as a result of the August debt limit law’s steep $2.4 trillion in spending cuts and expiration of expiring tax provisions including the Bush-era tax cuts, the budget office report concluded.

7) Florida GOP Turnout Actually Fell From 2008 – In the 2008 Republican primary in Florida, in which John McCain beat Romney by a margin of 36%-31%, a total of nearly 1.95 million votes were cast. But in tonight’s primary, turnout was actually much lower. At time of writing, with 98% of precincts reporting, the total turnout is only about 1.65 million — a drop-off of 15% in terms of the raw number of voters.

8) Romney on health reform, then and now, II – “… In my view, the other direction is to move in favor of free market reforms and insisting on people buying their own insurance and having a stake in the insurance equation and having a stake in how much a particular procedure costs. That’s the direction I’m going.” Watch video from a speech Romney gave in April 2006 to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

Greg Sargent posted a 2007 interview in which Romney suggested that after the states experimented with solutions for the uninsured, they’d end up choosing the individual mandate.

9) If you base your entire candidacy on your ability to beat Barack Obama in a debate, you damned well better be able to beat Mitt Romney – When liberals hear Gingrich sell himself on the basis of his intellect, they hear a blowhard who wants to be president to vindicate his narcissism; when conservatives hear the same thing, they hear someone willing, at long last, to step up for them and be their champion. Conservatives do not think that the mixed-race man who is president can be as smart as he is supposed to be; they don’t think that he can be smarter than them; they think that he is “a false-smarty pants” whose transcripts were altered to clear his way into Harvard, whose books were written by someone else, and whose eloquence leaves him as soon as he leaves the teleprompter. Obama’s intelligence is an affront to them, and so they’ve been depending on Gingrich not just to defeat but also to expose him — to finally get it over with, and, in a single debate, tear down not only the whole edifice of liberal thought but the also the myth of liberal intellectual superiority.

10) Secret Service to protect Romney – The Secret Service is set to begin providing protection to Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The Romney campaign made the request as its events have grown larger and security has become tougher to handle. (Feb. 1, The Associated Press) | Note: the quarter billion dollar man couldn’t “afford” his own protection?

Ignorance is bliss

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“The states that requested (and were granted money) include Florida ($4.2 million), whose governor, Rick Scott, has been an outspoken critique of the president’s health care package; Mississippi ($1.3 million), whose governor, Haley Barbour, is a potential 2012 candidate; and Minnesota ($13.4 million), whose former governor, potential presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, has challenged health care’s constitutionality.”

GOP Governors Get Millions More In Obama Health Care Grants

These GOP hypocrites are probably counting on this information never being reported on Fox News or by Jabba-the-Rush, so the teabagging horde will never find out that they ASKED FOR and RECEIVED socialist Obamacare money.

Yes he can

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Despite the 24/7/365 opposition from the GOP / Tea Party, Obama has accomplished A LOT so far. Rachel Maddow details all of it (transcript below the video):
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Transcript from Democratic Underground:

MADDOW: He signed a bill that gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants. He grew the size of the federal government and the budget, added a whole new cabinet level agency and added tens of thousands of government workers to the federal payroll.

He tripled the deficit. He bailed out and expanded social security with a big fat tax increase. He raised corporate taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars. He raised taxes on gasoline.

He, in fact, signed into law the largest tax increase in history. He supported federal handgun controls. He called for a world without nuclear weapons. He was Ronald Reagan.

As a conservative saint, as the right-wing rock star, as king of the Republican prom in perpetuity, as a transformative figure for people who call themselves conservative, the facts of Ronald Reagan`s legislative record are awkward.

Ronald Reagan`s record has in it a lot of things that would get him kicked out of today`s Republican Party, which is not to say that President Reagan was a secret liberal. He was not. What he was, was complex, but accomplished in his own way.

With the passage of financial regulation in Washington today, President Obama took to the very un-momentous setting of “Twitters,” as he called it yesterday, to say this, quote, “Last night`s House Senate agreement on Wall Street reform represents the toughest financial reform since the Great Depression.”

It turns out that a lot of things that have happened in the less than two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations. On the occasion of the Wall Street reform announcement today, Taegan Goddard at “CQ Politics” wrote, “Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform this country.”

Even before today’s historic Wall Street reform agreement, President Obama, of course, did what politicians have been trying to do for more than 60 years. He passed health reform, which, for the first time, establishes government responsibility for the health care of American citizens.

Consider also the stimulus bill. It didn`t just throw a lasso around our entire economy and yank it back from the brink. It also pumped about $100 billion into the crumbling embarrassment of our national infrastructure and transportation system.

It was the largest investment in infrastructure since Ike. For solving our country`s energy problems, something Obama has compared to man walking on the moon, it contained about $60 billion in spending and tax incentives for renewable and clean energy, also a historic investment.

It also included an unheralded but giant investment in science and tech, amping up the budgets at NASA, the National Science Foundation, and an experimental energy research agency that was created under President George W. Bush, but never funded until now.

President Obama also expanded state kids` health insurance to cover another four million kids. He signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act amending the 1964 civil rights act for equal pay for equal work.

He signed a nuclear arms deal with Russia that would reduce both countries` arsenals by a third. He created a new global nonproliferation initiative to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists.

He set forth an international way forward on that radical left-wing proposition of Ronald Reagan, a world without nuclear weapons. Then there are the legislative and policy achievements that don`t just build on previously-set precedents, but set new ones.

The Hate Crimes Prevention Act, also known as the Matthew Shepard Act. It had languished in Congress for years. The Food and Drug Administration permitted for the first time to regulate tobacco.

Better late than never, he dismantled the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service, broke it into three parts so that the folks who collect money from oil leases aren`t the same ones regulating the industry. And now, it will actually investigate the industry that it was busy schtupping and doing drugs with during the last administration.

Obama fired two wartime commanding generals in little over a year. He overhauled the astonishing stupidity of the student loan system in which banks were being subsidized to give loans that were guaranteed by the government anyway, a license to print money.

That was ended and the savings put toward actual aid to students. He canceled a weapons program that was bloated, unnecessary and totally irrelevant to either of our current wars, the F-22. Why even mention the cancellation of a single weapons system? Because that never happens. Weapons systems never get canceled. The F-22 did, which is itself a miracle.

In each of these achievements and in the list of things he has yet to do – “Don`t Ask, Don`t Tell,” closing Guantanamo – in each of these things, there is room for liberal disappointment. I sing a bittersweet lullaby to the lost public option when I go to sleep at night.

But presidential legacies are complex. Not even the Reagan administration’s legacy is pure as the conservative-driven snow. But Taegan Goddard at “CQ Politics” was right today about nothing this big happening since FDR.

The list of legislative accomplishments of this president in half a term even before energy reform which he`s probably going to get to is, to quote the vice president, “a big freaking deal.” Love this administration or hate it, this president is getting a lot done.

The last time any president did this much in office, booze was illegal. If you believe in policy, if you believe in government that addresses problems, cheers to that. Good night.

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