Month: July 2009

Friday Night News Dump

by digby

Not that it matters, since the showboating Senators had to have a dramatic hearing with the CBO chief before the committees were finished and the resultant headlines have been disseminated as if they came down from Mt Sinai, but this was released last night by the From the House Energy, Ways and Means and Education and Labor committees

For Immediate Release:

July 17, 2009

CBO Scores Confirms Deficit Neutrality of Health Reform Bill

Washington, D.C. — The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window – and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs.

Net Medicare and Medicaid savings of $465 billion, coupled with the $583 billion revenue package reported today by the House Committee on Ways and Means, fully finance the previously estimated $1.042 trillion cost of reform, which will provide affordable health care coverage for 97% of Americans.

“This fulfills the strong commitment of the President and House leadership to enact health reform on a deficit-neutral basis,” said Chairman Henry A. Waxman, Chairman Charles B. Rangel, and Chairman George Miller. “The reforms included in this legislation will help control health care costs and expand access to quality, affordable coverage to all Americans in a fiscally-responsible manner.”

The estimates also cover important reinvestments in Medicare and Medicaid, including phasing in the closing of the “donut” hole in the Medicare drug benefit. The bill’s long-term reform of Medicare’s physician fee schedule to eliminate the potential 21 percent cut in fees, and put payments on a sustainable basis for the future, will cost about $245 billion. Those costs, however, are not included in the net calculations above, as they will be absorbed under the upcoming statutory “pay go” legislation that is pending in the House.

Naturally, the inviolate Chuck Todd 30,000 feet rule of reporting is in effect and the Politico headlines reads this way: CBO deals another blow to House health plan.

Why, you ask? It’s hard to say because the article itself actually tells the story accurately:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office dealt another blow to House Democrats on Friday night, saying their health care bill would increase the federal deficit by $239 billion over the next 10 years.

The projected shortfall means Democrats would need to find additional revenue or make deeper cuts to existing programs in order to meet their goal of paying for the $1 trillion bill.

But those projections don’t account for a $245 billion reduction in the deficit this legislation would create, if Democrats can also approve new balanced budget rules that would permanently address an annual shortfall in Medicare payments to physicians Democrats may also defend the cost of their bill by pointing out that in the long run, under new accounting rules, the bill would generate a $6 billion surplus.

This is where the Chuck Todd rule comes in. The reason the CBO score of the House bill “delivers another blow” obviously has nothing to do with the facts. If all the legislation they hope to pass is passed, it will result in a surplus, also called “savings” or “cost control” while covering many millions more people. But because the Politico has added another headline to a string of headlines that say health care reform is on the ropes, it means it’s in trouble regardless of the facts. Or as Chuck would put it, “that’s just the political reality.” (Think of it like Westmoreland’s body count or Rumsefeld’s metrics. Just count the number of headlines regardless of how much ground has been taken.)

Yesterday, I noted in passing that reporters seem to be showing an unseemly amount of glee at the prospect of health care reform failing. I suppose it’s a good inside baseball political story, but they avoid good stories all the time. (The sordid tale of an out of control rogue vice president ordering torture and assassination hits all over the world doesn’t really seem to interest them all that much, for instance.)So, it’s hard to know why they would be so happy to see health reform fail unless they are childishly excited to see Obama to fall off of his pedestal. I think it may still shake their own faith in their infallibility to see Obama succeed where Bush, a man they hailed as some sort of Delphic Superhero for years before the truth made their idol worship ridiculous, failed so miserably. I have always suspected that their affection for Obama was actually quite shallow and hid a certain amount of resentment at being proven asses for having absurdly elevated the cartoonlike Bush to iconic status early on. Naturally, they want to even the score.

As for the Americans who don’t have health insurance or are being forced into bankruptcy even though they are “covered,” well, they just need to get jobs with great benefits as political reporters. It’s not like they don’t have options. After all, political reporters are just like you and me. (David Gregory’s mom is worried she’s going to lose her job, fergawdsake.) If they can get employment that offers great health benefits there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to also. As Mark Halperin prophesized, “a good reason to bet against major health care reform passing this year is that most reporters still have it.”

It’s just another game for these people, like everything else in politics. The favored team is not so dominating that they are winning going away, so suddenly it looks like there could be an upset. And because they actually score the game (the “political reality”) rather than simply call it, they can actually help make that happen.

So, everybody grab your popcorn and jujubes and settle in to watch the political press join with the powerful corporations to try to destroy health care reform and then call it a Republican “win.” What fun.

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Double Plus Appalling

by tristero

This is why I will never, ever buy a Kindle:

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

Unacceptable, and on so many levels, I don’t know where to start.

Actually, I do. I’m buying, as I have for a long time now, only from a local bookstore, and I’m buying only real books. Please list your own favorite local bookery in comments.

Perspective

by digby

That was then and this is now:

Throughout the course of the Bush years, the Republican Party, which now puts its stock in the CBO’s numbers, continuously marginalized the organization for its accounting.

When the CBO predicted in 2004 that Bush’s new tax and spending proposals would produce deficits of $2.75 trillion over ten years, a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget declared that ”even CBO would admit we don’t honestly know what these numbers will look like 10 years from now.”

That same year, the Bush administration pushed forward with its plans for Medicare Part D despite the fact that its internal cost estimates were $139 billion more than those offered by the CBO. Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee had worked diligently to defeat the attempts of their Democratic colleagues to make those estimates public.

In a similar vein, conservatives were beside themselves when the CBO refused to run the 2004 Bush tax cuts through various economic models to see if the government could, in the end, make money by stimulating spending. Rather, the CBO used a “static” method and found $1.2 trillion worth of deficits through the next decade. Republicans, naturally, largely ignored the findings.

Perhaps the biggest caution flag for treating CBO numbers as gospel — and one of the more illuminating benchmarks from which to compare the current debate over health care costs — is the Iraq War.

In October 2003, the CBO was asked to do a study about the costs of the Iraq War. According to varying scenarios of troop deployment the total price tag ranged from $85 billion to $200 billion over a ten-year period. A year later, the projected costs had risen further. Having already spent $123 billion, the CBO was now estimating that the prosecution of both Iraq and Afghanistan would total roughly $1.1 trillion over the subsequent ten years.

“In the scheme of things, the war is not super-expensive, but it also sure ain’t cheap,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar and prominent war supporter.

Let’s not forget that the war in Iraq was a totally unnecessary expense. And there was absolutely no good reason to cut the taxes on rich people in 2001.

I honestly don’t recall even the mildest objections to the costs of Bush’s programs coming from the same timorous Democrats who are now threatening to block health reform because they are expensive. But then, among our vaunted centrists and conservatives, cutting taxes or embarking on a useless waste of lives by violent means always seem to take precedence over making anyone’s life better.

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Who Says The Right Is Out Of Ideas?

by digby

Maha found this gem at the Cato Institute:

I have discovered a proposal for “fixing” health care on the Cato Institute website that is an absolute hoot. The plan (see PDF) is to eliminate employee health benefit insurance and all government health care support, and throw everyone into the private insurance market. Insurance companies would be allowed to risk-rate premiums, so that as people got older and/or sicker their premiums would go up. However, Cato says, this doesn’t have to be a problem. The solution is … wait for it … insurance insurance. They call it “health status insurance,” but essentially it’s insurance insurance. It’s a separate policy you take that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance. I’m not kidding. That’s the brilliant plan.

She explains that in order to make it work, it requires that everyone, including young healthy people voluntarily buy in and also carry the insurance insurance, which sounds perfectly doable, right?

If that doesn’t work out I assume there will soon be a market for insurance insurance insurance, for those who are under covered and over charged by the first two, which would create yet another market for insurance insurance insurance insurance.

Markets are so awesome. If only human beings weren’t involved in all this it would be perfect.

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Pep Talk?

by digby

I can’t stand it that Obama just said “I said that health care can’t add to the deficit and I mean it.” He even said it twice. Yuk.

That’s the George W. Bush swaggery, daddy bully style that makes me want to puke. In fact, that’s exactly what Bush used to say about critics of the Iraq war: “I told the American people they were going to have to be patient and I meant it!” Or this one, about John Roberts:

“I said there is no litmus test, and I meant it,” Bush said.

Or this one:

I said after September the 11th we would do everything in our power to bring justice to the enemy that attacked the American people, and I meant it. And part of chasing down the Taliban and al Qaeda is to find them where they hide. And just like in Iraq, we’re going to have our Special Forces stay on the hunt. And we’ll continue training at the same time.

Or this one:

The key to making sure that the deficit is reduced is for there to be on the one hand, spending discipline — and I’ve — as you noticed in my opening remarks, I talked about these appropriations bills that are beginning to move. And I thought I was pretty clear about the need for those bills to be — to be fiscally responsible. And I meant it.

If Obama’s going to adopt that attitude, maybe he could try using it on all these screeching whiners in the intelligence community who threaten to hold their breath until they turn blue if they are held accountable for anything. They seem like the type of people who might like a daddy bully to tell them to straighten up and fly right.

The deficit is obviously a sacred totem in Washington and nobody’s going to challenge it. And by reinforcing the deficit fetish, the Democrats are actually sowing the seeds of their own demise. I’m sure that will be a big relief to the privileged wealthy who have successfully created a bizarre, abstract fear of a federal budget deficit among average people for whom it has no real meaning at all. What a triumph of propaganda that is.

This is the substance of his own proposal for cost control, in case anyone’s interested. According to CNN, Democrats are thrilled that he’s finally weighing in with something specific.

Update II: Gloria Borger says that this will work for Obama if he goes back and tells the congress that they are going to have to create a plan that delivers less to the people.

Gloria won’t be affected, of course. She’s a millionaire celebrity with great health care. So that’s a relief.

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Still The Masters Of The Universe

by dday

What we’re seeing from the big bank earnings reports is that the government reacted to a situation where the financial industry titans were too big to fail, and facilitated theconsolidation of them so that they grew even bigger. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are the biggest of the lot, having seen their competition either eliminated or weakened.

“One theme here is that Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan really have emerged as the winners, as the last of the survivors,” said Robert Reich, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.

Both banks now stand astride post-bailout Wall Street, having benefited from billions of dollars in taxpayer support and cheap government financing to climb over banks that continue to struggle. They are capitalizing on the turmoil in financial markets and their rivals’ weakness to pull in billions in trading profits.

Even Bank of America and Citigroup posted big profits in the last quarter, although the elimination of mark-to-market accounting plays a major role in hiding the true weakness of a lot of these banks. The imminent failure of both smaller banks and firms below the “too big to fail” line like CIT present opportunities for JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs as well.

Paul Krugman gets shrill on Goldman Sachs today, and he makes the larger point that we have only made Wall Street more dangerous to the overall economy through no-strings bailouts and failing to rein in the excess.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers […]

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong.

Krugman hinges the success of the bailout on meaningful financial regulation to keep Wall Street from making the same gambles. I’m not hopeful about that. But what I am hopeful about is the recognition, from across the political spectrum, that the bailout has produced perverse incentives that need to be reversed in whatever way possible.

The (Wall Street) Journal’s take — “We like profits as much as the next capitalist. But when those profits are supported by government guarantees or insured deposits, taxpayers have a special interest in how the companies conduct their business” — is actually more in keeping with that of Robert Reich, who says that “Goldman’s resurgence should send shivers down the backs of every hardworking American who has lost a large chunk of retirement savings in this economic debacle, as well as the millions who have lost their jobs…. Goldman’s high-risk business model hasn’t changed one bit from what it was before the implosion of Wall Street.” […]

There is much in the Wall Street Journal that I don’t agree with but, when it comes to the failure of the administration to address and fundamentally reform what Kessler calls “the structural problems that got us into trouble in the first place,” we are of the same mind. There is no daylight between a progressive position focused on the paramount need to get the real economy going and one based purely on what makes free markets work.

The editorial goes so far as to suggest imposing a tax (yes, the Wall Street Journal is proposing a tax!), an FDIC-style bailout tax to be precise, “for those in the too-big-to-fail camp.”

I actually think the proper context to think about this is in terms of the health care debate. Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms took advantage of a financial crisis to redistribute wealth upwards. To pay for health care for the indigent, we should unwind that redistribution, perhaps with Charlie Rangel’s surtax that adds brackets at the high end. It is impossible for conservatives to argue against redistribution of wealth with a straight face, given the example of Goldman Sachs.

This is a dangerous time, politically. 80% of the public believe that Wall Street benefited from the bailouts, and not taxpayers. That’s an unsurprising result. The question is how the public reacts. We could see a right-wing populism take shape if the teabaggers ever get their act together, or a New Deal coalition reformed. I talked to a writer last night who said he felt like he was living through history, as the Depression-era battle lines are being drawn. We don’t know who will win yet, but it doesn’t look good from where I sit.

…Simon Johnson:

We are looking at a concentration of political power in the US banking system that we haven’t seen since the 1830s: Shades of Andrew Jackson vs. the Second Bank of the United States. We put up with a lot from our banking elite in this country, but historically we draw the line at financial power so concentrated it can confront the power of the President.

The logic for reform and for breaking up the big banks begins to build. Bank of America’s fall was, in some senses, a fortunate accident for Goldman and JP Morgan. But it has also given them an excessive and unsustainable degree of political power.

Of course, you also have to ask: Who can break that power, when, and how?

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Glenzilla vs The Todd Monster

by digby

Turns out Chuck isn’t all that bright.

Todd is a perfect example of a village reporter. He sees the world entirely through the lens of beltway conventional wisdom and obviously hasn’t taken even five minutes to consider whether or not it’s right, much less what the implications of blindly following its edicts might be. From this interview, I’m not sure he would even know how to do it. He’s so ill-informed, even about basic facts about the US Attorney firings, that I don’t think he has the tools.

The conventional wisdom at this minute says that since investigations of politicians inevitably become political, it is bad to have investigations because the country needs to heal its wounds. As it happens, this is always the conventional wisdom when a Democratic president succeeds a Republican one. Conversely, when Bush succeeded Clinton, there were investigations of things as silly as the alleged removal of of the letter “w” from the keyboards of the white house computers and the pardon of Marc Rich. There would have been more if the town wasn’t already completely sated after eight years of endless nonsensical investigations into everything from old land deals to extramarital fellatio with the press slobbering and slavering over every detail each step of the way.

If the conventional wisdom were to shift on torture, say if a different administration and their allies in the village decided that it was important for America’s image that these investigations take place, Todd would be right on board with it. (This was, in fact, why I thought the Obama administration would legitimately want to pursue these investigations and Todd’s bizarre repetition of the talking point that torture investigations will harm America’s image abroad is quite telling. You can be sure he didn’t come up with that all by himself.) He has no independent judgment and zero insight into his role in the political process.

I would just write him off as another fluffy spokesmodel except he’s got a real job as political director at NBC news. As shocking as it seems, he’s really quite powerful. His shallow understanding of the issues at stake — the reduction of absolutely everything, (even torture and murder) to the insider political parlor game are the most important requirement for advancement in the beltway press and he has that function totally mastered.

But then he’s just following in the footsteps of his mentor Tim Russert who wistfully looked back at the lies leading up to the Iraq war and wished someone had picked up a phone and who automatically assumed all conversations were on background instead of the other way around. His protege has filled his shoes quite admirably.

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Running With Half The Story
by digby
The headlines today were brutal on the health care front. The CBO chief’s testimony that the reform bills currently on the table won’t contain costs has shifted the Village chatter into shrill keening about deficits and costs and all the things the wealthy beltway celebrities love to pretend are important to average people just like them.
But there’s a little problem with the reporting. First, the bills the CBO scored aren’t complete. Second, the CBO didn’t score the savings to the economy as a whole, which is the actual point of health care reform savings. From the Wonk Room:

Part of Elmendorf’s message is painfully obvious: investing in health care reform by providing Americans up to 400% of the federal poverty line with subsidies is going to cost the federal government a good deal of money — somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, to be exact. Progressives have always argued that in order to reduce the growth of health care costs in the long term and avoid the kind of catastrophic spending levels that could swallow-up our entire economy, we’re going to have to bring everyone into the health care system. As Elmendorf points out, that shows up on the federal books. But the budget outline that passed the Senate Budget Committee requires a fully funded health reform bill, and both the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee are proposing different options to pay for reform and ensure that the bill does not add to the deficit. For his part, Elmendorf, is isolating the ledger of the federal government from the context of the entire system. In other words, since many of the savings from reform won’t be reflected in the federal budget, Elmendorf does not consider them. But modernizing the health care system (implementing electronic medical records, health information technology) and reforming the way Medicare and Medicaid reimburse providers will save money for the system as a whole. As Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin and David Cutler pointed out in a recent analysis, these savings can total to some $2 trillion. In fact, even the industry is on record as saying we can reduce the growth rate in annual health spending by 1.5 percentage points a year over the next 10 years, lowering spending overall health care spending by $2 trillion (this represents a 20 percent reduction in projected growth.) Elmendorf is looking at the trunk of the elephant and not the whole.

This is an obvious point, but one that seems to have been overlooked in the reporting.Meanwhile, there is a new call for delay from centrist Democratic Senators. And one of the people arguing for delay is Ron Wyden, whose plan dday endorses below and suggests that progressives rally around. Perhaps Wyden hopes to build some consensus around his plan which is why he’s among those seeking delay.
On the merits I agree with dday. I see no reason why everyone is so wedded to the idea that employer based health care can’t be touched. But I have my doubts about whether or not a delay to accomplish that at this point is a good idea from a political standpoint. The CW is that any delay is the kiss of death; giving the insurance companies the month of August to plaster the airwaves with ads is a very bad idea and once they get past October this all starts to become impossible under the constraints of an election year. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but the administration certainly seems to think so as does the congressional leadership. I do that regardless of the electoral restraints, getting the entire government focused on major reform is very, very difficult and requires momentum. The momentum for health care reform came out of an exciting election campaign and the inevitability that was built around Obama’s mandate. The energy from all this rapidly fading as it was always going to do. I’m not sure we get it back. Whatever happens, people need to understand at least one thing — the idea behind health care reform was to bring down costs across the entire health care economy, which was not scored by the CBO. This is a very important piece of information that reporters should be imparting along with what seems to me to be their glee at the prospect of health reform failure.
Update: Larry Summers should be kept on a leash.

Update II: John Harwood and Norah O’Donnell both agree that if a “partisan” bill passes then the Republicans will be sitting in the catbird seat with something to run against. Apparently, health care reform is very unpopular. Who knew?

They also think that destroying real reform to get three Republicans will make it “bipartisan” and then the Republicans can’t run against it.

I wonder how the weather is on their planet today?

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Killer App

by dday

The House Ways and Means Committee as well as the Education and Labor Committee have passed health care reform bills this week, which have largely the same form as the Tri-Committee bill released earlier. Both of the committee votes lost Democrats, but their numerical advantages allowed them to still pass the legislation. In the Energy and Commerce Committee, Blue Dogs hold higher numbers, and so some compromises may be needed to pass the bill. That markup will end sometime next week.

The focus now, thanks to the CBO head Doug Elmendorf’s testimony in the Senate Budget Committee, is on cost control. Elmendorf claims that the current legislation would not bend the cost curve on health care to a sufficient degree. The White House has distributed language on strengthening MedPAC, the board that recommends how Medicare pays for certain services. If Medicare gets used as a way to make medical delivery more efficient, that could ripple through the rest of the system, and the White House proposal would allow those recommendations to go into law immediately, though Congress would have the power to vote down any recommendation. It’s similar to Tom Daschle’s old proposal of a Federal Reserve for health care. Elmendorf himself wants to revisit the employer deduction for health benefits, but as long as advocacy groups paid by unions continue to protect union interests, there will be no momentum for it in Democratic circles. I’m fairly upset with union opposition on this score.

But there is one legitimate reform that could lower costs for both individuals and the government, increase competition in the marketplace, and provide the best coverage at the best cost for everyone. That would be Ron Wyden’s Free Choice Act, and it’s what I think progressives ought to really push at this point.

There are two major problems with the proposals being considered in Congress. The first is that they do not do enough to cut costs, because they do not do enough to change the fundamental nature of the employer-based health-care system […] The second is that the bill does not offer obvious benefits to an insured worker. You can argue that it changes the system around them: There are subsidies if they lose their job and regulations to protect them from the excesses of private insurers. But though the health-care system might be different, it will not, for most people, feel different. And that has made it hard to explain to people why this is something they should pay for. You can tell the insured worker what he gets if his circumstances change. You cannot tell him what he gets if his circumstances do not change.

Enter Wyden. The Free Choice Act is not a health-care-reform bill. It is best understood as a reform of the health-care-reform bill. In particular, it reforms the nature of the Health Insurance Exchange. Under the bills being considered right now, the exchange will be limited to the uninsured, the self-employed and small businesses. Maybe it will be expanded over time. Maybe not. In addition, it is barricaded by what’s called a “firewall.” The firewall essentially bars individuals from entering the exchange so long as their employers offer them a basic level of health-care coverage.

The Free Choice Act starts by setting the rules for the exchange: Within five years the exchange is open to all employers. More importantly, it’s open to all people. The firewall is extinguished. But as the late, great, Billy Mays would say, that’s not all!

The key component of the Free Choice Act is called “cash-out.” Under the Free Choice Act, if I decide that I don’t like any of the health-care coverage options being offered by my employer and would prefer to choose from the many options being offered on the Health Insurance Exchange, my employer has to give me a voucher that covers 65 to 70 percent of the cost of the lowest level of exchange plan. (That is the average portion that an employer pays of his employee’s health insurance premiums.) I can take that voucher and, along with whatever money I want to throw in, choose a plan on the exchange.

We keep hearing the mantra of “if you like what you have, you can keep it.” Wyden’s reform preserves that. But it also opens up the health insurance exchange to everyone, and forces both insurers and the public option into real competition. The public option would not be walled off simply to those who don’t have insurance from their employer or certain small businesses. It would have the opportunity to get market share to compete with private insurers. And for the first time, insurers across regions would compete with one another, as the companies inside the exchange would be able to entice workers who get insurance through their employers. All of this could actually change the dynamic in the insurance market and force competition on price and quality, rather than the current competition among insurers, which is “who can pay for the least amount of health care.” It gives individuals the freedom to choose without stripping them of their bargaining power – in fact, it empowers them more. And it strengthens the public option, by opening the market to potentially tens of millions more consumers.

The employer-based system is nice for some, but it really delivers health care inefficiently, and Wyden’s Free Choice Act would allow over time for an alternative to emerge that maintains the economies of scale to allow that alternative to compete. And this would save money, as it encourages cost effectiveness since everyone is competing on price.

Wyden talks about his idea here:

What we tried to do in this proposal is show the sweet spot between blowing the employer-based system to pieces and, on the other hand, simply saying that we will not try to improve it. The president’s promise that we will be sensitive to not changing what people have is not incompatible with being able to choose some better.

When you tell people they can have access to a full menu of choices like members of Congress have, that’s out of the park in terms of positive reaction. But if you’re a congressperson and you’re with Blue Cross one year and then all of a sudden you decide you want to go with Aetna, your transition is seamless. Someone in the private sector wouldn’t even get that choice. We’re trying to give it to them.

The biggest problem with health care reform right now is that we’re grafting onto a system that doesn’t work. Wyden actually finds a way to do that while also transforming the system. It’s not enough to just argue for a public option that is as highly regulated and firewalled as what exists in the current House and Senate options. If you want actual health care reform, I think you need to echo Wyden’s call for free choice.

…From the Department of Bad Timing, just as I praise Wyden, he signs on to President Nelson and Collins’ letter to delay health care reform. I have no idea why Wyden is in that coalition, but maybe this Free Choice Act has something to do with it.

Also, Dennis Kucinich passed an amendment, with broad bipartisan support, in the Education and Labor Committee that would allow states to institute their own single-payer programs if they chose to do so. Worth noting.

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Throwing In Some Uighers

by digby

Here’s a good one:

A fight is brewing between Capitol Hill and the Pentagon over allegations that Chinese government agents were allowed to interrogate some detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

Jay Alan Liotta, principal director of the Defense Department office responsible for detainee policy, told a House subcommittee on Thursday that he would not publicly comment on whether officials from China or any other nation were granted access to foreign citizens held at the detention facility.

[…]

Three former Uighur detainees submitted testimony through legal counsel on Thursday alleging that all 22 detainees of the Chinese Muslim minority group were interrogated by Chinese government officials during a seven- to 10-day visit in 2002.

The former detainees testified that they were forced to provide their photographs and identities to the Chinese agents under the threat of torture and, under those agents’ orders, were denied food and water and isolated in a frigid room.

Maybe this isn’t true. But it sounds perfectly believable to me considering what else they did with those prisoners. Who knows, maybe they had some business deal on the line and threw in some Uighers to sweeten the pot. Or perhaps they wanted some tips from the Chinese on torture techniques. After all, the regime the administration designed was based in part upon Chinese torture techniques developed back in the 1950s. Maybe they had something more up to date.

Considering what’s happening to Uighers in China right now,if true, this is yet another in the long list of despicable, evil acts perpetrated by the Bush administration. Is anyone keeping score?

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