Answering the Beige One...

There was a quote in the beige one’s recent post that got my attention and I wanted to answer:

Mr. President, during the State of the Union address, you said that you didn’t choose to tackle the health care reform issue just to get a legislative victory under your belt. I believe you, but can you tell me how taking someone that is unemployed, or maybe is employed, but still can’t afford decent health insurance and making them buy some kind of policy from the very insurance companies that have screwed us in the past; how is this not capitulation? How do you go from the Public Option (and you did campaign on the Public Option) to trigger plans and not see that as dispiriting for the people who voted for you?

I must call up a post I made on Ft. McHenry earlier today:

Reforming Health Care is more complicated than what the beige one is making it out to be in his statement. This is why the Democratic solution doesn't fit on an effing bumper sticker. Short of ripping everything up and installing a Single Payer Plan (which is my preferred choice – but good luck getting the votes for that in either chamber), you’re going to be surprised at what choices you have to do reform the system.

And by the way, I’ll get to the beige one’s unemployed dude in a minute. But to debate his point, I have to go to the beginning.

First, you start off with the concept of Universal Coverage. At its core, this is what we all want. Of course, since you want everyone to have access to the system, you have start with ending the ban on pre-existing conditions. This is just basic. Everyone loves this. It polls great.

But, if you end the ban of pre-existing conditions, what happens? Well, sick people who couldn’t previously get insurance will jump into the system, and healthy people will leave figuring (at this point correctly) that they can just buy insurance when they need it (i.e. when they're sick). If that happens, Insurance rates don't just rise, they skyrocket. (I believe Paul Krugman referred to this as an Insurance Death Spiral). If everyone in the Insurance Pool is pulling money out of the system, the Industry can't cover all the costs.

Not won’t, can’t.

So, to keep the healthy people in the system, thus keeping costs low, you have to force the Healthy People to buy insurance (yes, force). This is called a mandate, which everyone hates, and polls terrible.

The mandate is not Insurance putting a gun to our heads, and demanding our healthy citizens. This is just how Insurance works (Auto, Home, what have you). It’s all about managing risk. You have multiple Healthy people putting money into the system covering the one Sick person who takes money out. Doing that keeps our rates lower (though not non-existent). One day, those Healthy People will get sick themselves, but there will be other Healthy people covering them, so the cycle goes on.

Now, if people are made to by insurance, well...some of those people aren't going to be able to afford it (like The beige one’s unemployed guy), so you need to have subsidies to help those who can't pay for this crap, or increased access to Medicaid to do the same. Once you've taken that step, you pretty much have the bills that are wandering their way through Congress.

The lack of a Public Option is a loss, but there are parts of Europe (I think the Netherlands, hardly a bastion of Conservative thought) that have similar systems but don't have Public Plans. It's not a disaster if Health Care Reform doesn't have one. It's just infinitely better with one. What should still pass isn't not pretty. It’s nowhere in the same good neighborhood of Single Payer (the best and truly cheapest way to fix Health Care), but given the fact that Health Care Costs will double in ten years, it’s our best shot.

And might I remind the beige one a little something about his unemployed guy. Sickness cannot tell, nor does not care when someone don’t have a paying job. If he or his family gets sick while he’s unemployed, he’s screwed, and the rest of us are going to have to cover him. At least with even the crappier Senate plan, he has options, like Medicaid.

This is also a basic sketch of the Massachusetts Plan, which also wasn’t popular when it passed, but try taking it away from them now.

All that mess...was just for one issue: Health Care Reform. Imagine that, multiplied a thousand times (given the thousand problems we have) where every Federal dollar spent has a lobby attached to it.

If I have a complaint about my fellow progressives, it is that they’re spending a lot of time with their heads up their arses, thinking everything is simple. “If he just did this, everything would work…”

No it won’t.

Leadership is never simple. Certainly not as simple as Liberals make it out to be.

And comparing everything to the New Deal?

My fellow Liberals may be many things, but experts on Roosevelt they ain’t (particularly at the Huffington Post where they quote the New Deal like it was the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. Too bad none of them seem to have...you know...read a book on the the New Deal.)

I’ve been working on a project set in the Depression so I’ve been reading nothing but Depression stuff for the last year and a half. And let me tell you, the New Deal was horribly, horribly compromised from jump. In fact Norman Thomas (Socialist Party leader and Dennis Kucinich of his day, once compared the New Deal “cough drop for a case of pneumonia.” African-Americans were suspiciously left out of a lot of New Deal Programs. Farm Workers were cut out of the National Labor Relations Act just as sharecroppers were going on strike. FDR had a more favorable Congress (with an even bigger majority), but even then they bickered and guffawed about every little damn thing. The Supreme Court struck down a lot of the initiatives from the 100 Days, being about as ethical as the current Roberts Court. There were fears of open armed rebellion, not in the south, but in fuckin’ Iowa. And oh yeah, unemployment was at 25%, almost triple what it is now.

Roosevelt got some things he wanted, some things he didn’t. (He was, it is often forgotten against the creation of the FDIC). You have to look at the whole picture, and not just your imagined corner of it. It is the overall metric of FDR's Presidency that we judge him on, and judge him rightly. It has to be the same standard for Obama, or otherwise the Progressive movement is more full of shit than I feared.


Originally posted at Fort McHenry.

Shut Up And Pay Your Higher Taxes, You Whiners

Something that the media should be pointing out a lot more than they are is McCain's lie about how Obama is going to raise your taxes and McCain is going to lower them. The media has started to question him a little more on it than they have previously, pointing out that an independent and nonpartisan tax group has said Obama will cut taxes for the majority of Americans and only raise the taxes of the highest wage earners.

But one thing they have not tried to call McCain on is his insane tax increase on health insurance. The big thing he says he wants government to get out of the way of is the very thing that he's going to put a tax on.

What McCain is proposing is not just insanity, it is criminal insanity. Under McCain's plan the health insurance you get from your job would now be taxable income. You read that right.

To make sure I'm clear, we are not talking about just the non-taxed portion of your salary that you contribute to your coverage being taxed. That would be bad enough, that $100 to $300 or whatever per month being taxed when you now enjoy being able to put that into your health insurance as pre-tax money. That saves you a few bucks a year.

No, what McCain's plan would do is put the entire value of your health insurance, meaning the amount that it costs your employer, in the taxable income column.

This means that a President McCain would raise your taxes as if you got a $10,000/year raise (average cost for a family on the cheapest plan) without you being able to actually reap the benefits of a larger income.

He would replace this with a $5,000 tax credit for families, which won't pay for even half of a year's worth of health coverage even if what you get even really equals five grand, which for most people it will not. You can't get the whole amount if you don't make enough money to owe that much in taxes to begin with.

So who would this help, when it is obviously not the working people of America? Well, it sure goes a long way in helping the big corporations. Once people can't afford the extra taxes they have to pay they will drop their health plan at work, saving millions for large companies with thousands of employees. (Wal-Mart would presumably be unaffected, not really having a health insurance plan for the majority of their employees anyway)

John McCain is selling a health care plan that would considerably increase number of people who are uninsured in this country.

Add this slap in the face to the working class to the one his biggest financial advisor, Phil Gramm, already did by calling us a nation of whiners about the economy.

That isn't even the biggest sin of Phil Gramm. As the Princeton economist Paul Krugman points out, Gramm - as the head of the Senate banking committee and the chief writer of banking deregulation bills in the late 90s and early 2000s and as the V.P. and main lobbyist for the investment firm UBS - is the person most responsible for the current economic crises, save for one Alan Greenspan.

It is widely known that McCain will tap Gramm as the Secretary of the Treasury if he is elected.

The United States better get used to the phrase, "Brother can you spare a dime?" again.

I beg you to make sure that every voting age person you know knows about this disastrous plan.

Read: Journal Disputes McCain’s Health Care Claims.

Read: McCain’s Radical Agenda.

__

Quick addendum from JJ:

Mother Jones has a nice piece about McCain slamming Wall Street for the failure, and ignoring how much Phil Gramm had to do with it.

Mother Jones - MoJoBlog: McCain Blasts Wall Street Failure, Neglects To Mention His Adviser Helped Cause It

The best part of the whole financial mess is going to be how it forces McCain out of his comfort zone of personality politics (read: bullshitting the voters) and into actual policy conversations, in which he inevitably flounders.

Die Harry & Louise! Die!

So Harry and Louise are back. You remember them, right? They were the 40ish middle class couple in the ads made by the insurance industry that bashed the Clinton health care plan, scaring every dumb American they could with their lies about government health care plans run by bureaucratic bogeymen high costs and no choice.



Though not really a married couple, Harry and Louise are the actors' real names.

Now they are in their 60s and making a new set of commercials that started airing during the conventions. In the new ones, they sit around their kitchen table yet again, but now they are bemoaning the lack of affordable health care in America. By the end of the commercial they are saying that the government needs to do something about it.



Well screw you Harry and Louise. You were a part of the propaganda campaign that ruined any chance we had at a national health care plan in this country (imperfect as it was, but it was an attempt) for the last 15 years.

The idea that these two actors have the stones to appear in the new ads saying that now our government needs to do something about health insurance is sickening. What tools.

And if you watch the making of video, you can see them talk about themselves as a couple of humanitarians who are trying to make a difference, instead of the actor-whores they are.



No actors have ever been more deserving of being beaten with a stick. Except for Ashton Kutcher.

Bizarro World Soundbites

So during McCain's incredibly dull speech last night, which even from a partisan crowd got the most tepid response I've ever seen in a political speech, he bashed Obama about his health care plan. This is what Johnny Maverick (or "mavrick" as it was spelled by one of the genius delegates) said:

My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. His plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor.

First off, there is the myth that Obama is proposing a single-payer universal health care system like they have in Canada, France, Great Britain and everywhere else in the industrialized world. If only that were true, I would be out pounding the pavement 16 hours a day for his campaign instead of just planning on taking 45 seconds to give him my vote.

But the real point of this is, who the hell in this country doesn't have a bureaucrat standing between them and their doctor? I just spent a whole day trying to find a pediatrician from the very narrow scope of a list that my wife's insurance company says are the only doctors I can use. I was also cut off from physical therapy for my back by the insurance people even though my doctor prescribed a longer program.

But John McCain doesn't have this problem. Do you know why?

BECAUSE HE HAS BEEN PROVIDED WITH GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE HIS ENTIRE FUCKING LIFE! *

That's why.


*Born into a Naval officer family, went to Naval Academy, became a Naval officer and then joined the Congress.