Month: August 2009

Regrets

by digby

During last week’s funeral events, the fatuous gasbags must have said at least 12,397 times that Ted Kennedy’s “greatest regret” was in failing to agree to Richard Nixon’s health care plan. I had never heard this before, but it was spoken about as if it was not only common knowledge, but the impetus for Kennedy’s alleged shift from principled liberalism to post partisan conciliation, which I had also never heard before.

Turns out, it would be news to Teddy too:

The only actual quote I could find of Kennedy saying anything remotely like this comes from a 2004 interview with Susan Milligan of the Boston Globe in which Kennedy discusses an oral history project with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center:

Kennedy said he would discuss “missed opportunities” as well as accomplishments. For example, Kennedy said, he has wondered whether Democrats should have taken a rare opportunity during the Nixon administration to accept Nixon’s national healthcare proposal. While many Democrats believed the plan was flawed, it may have been better to sign onto it, given that decades later, the nation still has more than 40 million uninsured people, Kennedy said.

“I’ll have to go back and look at whether we should have jumped on that. Did we make a mistake waiting?” Kennedy said.

In The Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, author Peter Canellos made a similar claim to that of Pearlstein, but he sourced his claim back to the Milligan article.

It’s possible that Kennedy said this privately, but that isn’t how people were portraying it. In fact, the way they said it sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing that was always said about him (“He should have taken Nixon’s deal”) and which was then attributed to him once he became a beloved elder statesman who everyone wanted to claim as their own. All popular politicians are reimagined as villagers once they die.

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The Metric System

by dday

The commanding general in Afghanistan basically said yesterday that our strategy in the country is failing.

A top US general in Afghanistan has called for a revised military strategy, suggesting the current one is failing.

In a strategic assessment, Gen Stanley McChrystal said that, while the Afghan situation was serious, success was still achievable.

The report has not yet been published, but sources say Gen McChrystal sees protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban as the top priority.

The report does not carry a direct call for increasing troop numbers.

“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,” Gen McChrystal said in the assessment.

McChrystal is engaging in some sleight of hand here. The top priority for the Obama Administration, at least in the President’s public statements, has never been “protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban.” We’ve heard about dismantling Taliban safe havens, but not that our military should be used as an internal security force. We should at least have that debate if it’s the new goal.

I’m more concerned that the Administration feels it has to race to show progress, basing their continued presence in Afghanistan not on any security objective, but simply meaning to justify the presence through demonstrable benchmarks. If the benchmarks, or “metrics” in the new parlance, are not tethered to a fundamental mission or strategy, how can we possibly define success? In recent years, the success or failure in achieving benchmarks or metrics have had no impact on the larger decisions of escalation or drawdown. A benchmark strategy just looks like a justification strategy rather than any kind of real assessment.

This is why we need a timetable to bring our troops home. We do not have a clear reason for remaining in the country – Al Qaeda has departed, we cannot expect to eradicate every safe haven everywhere in the world, nor can we expect to radically transform centuries of political and social reality in that part of the world through nation-building. As Bill Moyers said in his excellent interview with Bill Maher:

Here Obama has 68,000 troops over there and the Generals are asking for another 20,000 — maybe 30,000 more troops — saying it’s not enough. The military and the hawks will always say “not enough.” Obama has to say “enough” — or he’s going to be drawn into it.

Now they’ve shifted the mission of troops: to protect the villages of Afghanistan. 100,000 Americans can’t protect the villages of Afghanistan – and now they say we’re going to be there to build a nation – we’re not good at building other nations – we’re hardly good at building our nation. If you’re an Afghani and look up and see Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature coming to build your nation, you’re going to run – you’re going to put up a No Trespassing sign. We need to come home.

We have this two-track problem, as Moyers expertly pointed out. We have a President, or more to the point a political system, captive to corporate special interests. And we have a promising foreign policy in other respect on the verge of being snuffed out by an obstinate focus on a nation-building experiment halfway across the world which we cannot even really hope to affect. We can defend our national security with law enforcement and intelligence and local information sharing. We do not need a war.

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We Can’t Handle The Truth

by digby

Matt Taibbi’s new article on the humongous clusterfuck that is health care reform isn’t easy to read. But you must. It isn’t online yet, so you’ll have to go to the grocery store and buy it (or stand in front of the newsracks and read it.)

This is the best we can do for the moment:

“Mainstream” Republicans are now batshit insane winguts who are incapable of governance. So the Democrats have stepped into the breach to govern like the Republicans used to. Whither the Democrats.

Update: And let’s not forget the media. Here is a remarkably common sense piece of advice about what to do about it from the Miami Herald.

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See No Evil, Make More Money

by digby

Ezra has an interesting graph up about the Madoff scandal which illustrated this:

[T]he central feature of [Madoff’s] scheme, viewed in the clear light of its collapse, seems to have been this: “[I]n investing, trust matters as much as greed. And investors trusted Madoff. They knew him, or his family, or his friends, or they trusted the intermediaries who sent their money to him.”

That’s not only a plausible explanation of how Madoff convinced his investors that the laws of financial gravity had lifted, but how the financial industry did the same for the country, not to mention itself. Every bank felt more comfortable going into this madness because every other bank was walking in as well. And if all the banks were trading these products and trusting these trends, then what reason was there for the rest of us to worry about the fundamentals of the market?

I would suggest that there are two more aspects to this, one of which is arguably more important and was foreshadowed by the Enron scandal which should have been a warning: complexity and greed.

The first is simply the fact that many of these bankers didn’t understand what was going on any more than the layperson. Naturally, they didn’t want to admit that, so they pretended they did. Recall this prescient (and dismissed) 2001 story about Enron by Bethany McLean of Fortune magazine:

Enron now trades at roughly 55 times trailing earnings. That’s more than 2 1/2 times the multiple of a competitor like Duke Energy, more than twice that of the S&P 500, and about on a par with new-economy sex symbol Cisco Systems. Enron has an even higher opinion of itself. At a late-January meeting with analysts in Houston, the company declared that it should be valued at $126 a share, more than 50% above current levels. “Enron has no shame in telling you what it’s worth,” says one portfolio manager, who describes such gatherings as “revival meetings.” Indeed, First Call says that 13 of Enron’s 18 analysts rate the stock a buy.

But for all the attention that’s lavished on Enron, the company remains largely impenetrable to outsiders, as even some of its admirers are quick to admit. Start with a pretty straightforward question: How exactly does Enron make its money? Details are hard to come by because Enron keeps many of the specifics confidential for what it terms “competitive reasons.” And the numbers that Enron does present are often extremely complicated. Even quantitatively minded Wall Streeters who scrutinize the company for a living think so. “If you figure it out, let me know,” laughs credit analyst Todd Shipman at S&P. “Do you have a year?” asks Ralph Pellecchia, Fitch’s credit analyst, in response to the same question.

The same story unfolded with the mortgage business just a few years later. It’s a feature, not a bug. Which leads us to the other aspect of this: greed. Even if they suspected that the scheme didn’t make sense, they didn’t want to say anything because they were making so much money.They may not understand it, but they sure as hell want to ride the tiger as long as possible.

So, in one sense it was a matter of “trust,” in that they may have trusted that somebody somewhere must have known what they were doing. But one of the major lessons of the past decade of cascading financial scandals is that they happened because people didn’t understand the business but they didn’t say anything (and shut down anyone who did) because they didn’t want to spoil the party.

And it’s still happening today.

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They Knew. They Just Didn’t Give A Damn

by digby

March 2006:

Video has been obtained by a US news agency showing President George W Bush being briefed by officials on the eve of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The confidential video obtained by the Associated Press shows very strong warnings being given to Mr Bush about the potential strength of the storm.

It appears to contradict subsequent suggestions by the Bush administration that the threat had been unclear.

Critics say more could have been done sooner to evacuate the city.

Speaking by video link from a room in his Texan holiday ranch on 28 August last year, Mr Bush is shown telling officials: “We are fully prepared.”

He does not ask any questions as the situation is outlined to him.

Along with the video, AP obtained transcripts of seven days of briefings relating to Katrina.

The footage does the president no favours, the BBC’s Justin Webb reports from Washington.

It shows plainly worried officials telling Mr Bush very clearly before the storm hit that it could breach New Orleans’ flood barriers.

In the past, the president has said nobody anticipated a breach but the video shows Michael Brown, the top emergency response official who has since resigned, saying the storm would be “a bad one, a big one”.

“We’re going to need everything that we can possibly muster, not only in this state and in the region, but the nation, to respond to this event,” Mr Brown says.

He also gives a strong, clear warning that evacuees in the Superdome in New Orleans could not be given proper assistance.

Another official, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center, tells the final briefing that storm models predict minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane.

But he adds that the possibility of anticlockwise winds and storm surges could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun afterwards is “obviously a very, very grave concern”.

His concern was borne out by events when levees collapsed, letting in the floodwater disastrously.

The president, however, said four days after the storm: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

Mr Bush later accepted he shared some of the responsibility for the flawed response to Katrina and the White House talked of the “fog of war” rendering decision-making difficult.

You can see the video of the bored Bush staring blankly as he was warned that the storm was potentially devastating. here.

Recall that the right blamed the government for failure, but they insisted it was the Democrats in state and local government, not Republicans.

And I think we know who they really blamed, don’t you?

h/t to bb
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Clearly A Political Move

by dday

I didn’t bother to watch Dick Cheney’s Traveling Emporium and Snake Oil Sales Extravaganza on Fox News Sunday, mainly because I knew that pro-torture Chris Wallace and the whole pro-torture team over there would treat it like a fanzine fluff piece. Wallace’s hourlong fellatio session probably satisfied Cheney immensely, and predictably, the other networks saw fit to publicize Little Dick and his concubine, because what a former Vice President says is automatically news! News! News! Don’t you remember all those prime-time slots for Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle and Al Gore recently?

In this case, there was some news made, although not of the variety that’s being reported. First of all, Cheney, who appears to think that the Bush White House functioned under the auspices of the law, believes that the Attorney General of the United States is a political appointee. I’m sure that, in the case of Alberto Gonzales, that was true. It’s not how the American system works, of course.

The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn’t do […] Well, I think if you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet.

Fourthbranch would have been the world’s best Revolution-era Tory. He truly believes in the divine right of kings. Witness later in the interview, where he in his capacity as chief law enforcement officer of the United States decides to toss out the law books.

WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?

CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.

WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.

CHENEY: I am.

Worked so well, in fact, that CIA and military interrogators killed dozens of detainees in their custody. But what’s a little torture and murder when you’re talking about saving lives? Oh, and Cheney’s answer is a lie, but that’s redundant.

Perhaps the most absurd thing about Fourthbranch, and also what gets him through the night, I would gather, is how he actually thinks his Administration has a good record on counter-terrorism.

I seem to recall the Bush/Cheney era a little differently. Cheney thinks it was a sterling success when it came to national security and counter-terrorism. Perhaps there’s something to this. After all, except for the catastrophic events of 9/11, and the anthrax attacks against Americans, and terrorist attacks against U.S. allies, and the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush’s inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, and waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush’s international unpopularity, the Bush/Cheney record on counter-terrorism was awesome.

After the previous administration established a record like that, President Obama didn’t ask Cheney for tips? The nerve.

You see what Cheney is doing here. He wants to politicize the Bush terror policies – the investigations being sought by the Attorney General are “clearly a political move,” he says – so that any attempt to question them becomes a partisan food fight instead of simply the application of law. This is his metier and he does it very well, judging from all the attention he receives every time he emerges from the bunker. Conservatives, ever on the lookout for victimization, cry that the Justice Department is being all political by investigating torture and murder, and the media cover the ping-pong match.

Also, Cheney won’t cooperate with any “improper” investigation. A Justice Department-directed investigation. You know, “fuck you” and all that.

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The Whole Foods Boycott

by tristero

As one of the first bloggers (if not the first) both to object to Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey’s insane op-ed opposing healthcare reform and to suggest a boycott of Whole Foods, let me be among the first to agree with Michael Pollan that the chain should not be boycotted. I, for one, plan on immediately shopping again at Whole Foods, assuming, of course, that they’ve cut all corporate ties with John Mackey.

Until then, Whole Foods is more than welcome to make their money catering to all the hordes of Mackey’s fellow conservatives who just love to shop there. People, for example, like this brilliant mind. She makes such a tremendously convincing case that elitist liberal scum (like Michael Pollan) want her to pay more for her food thereby depriving her of the scratch to purchase common salt-of-the earth American goods like Ikea; or that wholesome, inexpensive treat sold at all NASCAR rallies: Haagen Daz ice cream; or that third set of overpriced designer sneakers.

And oh! How she’ll love the prices at Whole Foods!

[Update: I hope it is clear that the gaping hole in Pollan’s argument is not that Mackey is a rightwing lunatic. Of course, he has every right to be a rightwing lunatic. No, the problem Pollan deliberately elides is that Mackey very publicly advocated far right nonsense and heaped contempt on the values of his customers. In short, Mackey has publicly bitten the hands that feed him.

I don’t care whether Whole Foods takes a stand in favor of healthcare reform, although it certainly would make self-interested corporate sense if they did. As far as I’m concerned, they simply need to stay neutral from this debate. But as long as their CEO feels it necessary to publicly advocate against the wishes of its customers, I see no reason why I can’t pick up my food at farmer’s markets and other sources. Of course, some of the suppliers are as politically nuts as Mackey, but they don’t go around rubbing their customers’ noses in that fact.

If Mackey wants to use Whole Foods as a bully pulpit to sell rightwing garbage, that’s totally cool with me, it’s a free country. And Ill be happy to shop at Whole Foods again once they return to their main business, which is not selling junk ideas but selling decent food.]

Four Years Ago Today

by digby

I wrote this:

Commenter antifa wrote in another thread on Sunday night:

I called Mama Marisol, got her on her cell phone. She had her crystal ball in the front seat, and she was ‘leavin-leavin, cher.’

Heading up Basin Street past St. Louis 1, she saw all the skeletons sitting on top of their tombs, rolling their bones and readin’ em, shakin’ their heads at her.

This won’t end well.

Mama marisol was right, cher. This is terrible.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay

Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And all these people have no place to stay

Now look here mama what am I to do
I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to

I works on the levee mama both night and day
I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away

Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose

I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away

I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I’m goin’ back to my used to be

I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home

That night was the beginning of one of the most horrific events this country has ever experienced. All I felt that day was a sense of dread, not knowing how bad it was. But it was so much worse than I could have imagined:

The Timeline for August 30th

11AM CDT — BUSH SPEAKS ON IRAQ AT NAVAL BASE CORONADO [White House]

MIDDAY — CHERTOFF CLAIMS HE FINALLY BECOMES AWARE THAT LEVEE HAS FAILED: “It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.” But later reports note that the Bush administration learned of the levee breach on Aug. 29. [Meet the Press, 9/4/05; AP]

PENTAGON CLAIMS THERE ARE ENOUGH NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS IN REGION: “Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said the states have adequate National Guard units to handle the hurricane needs.” [WWL-TV]

MASS LOOTING REPORTED, SECURITY SHORTAGE CITED: “The looting is out of control. The French Quarter has been attacked,” Councilwoman Jackie Clarkson said. “We’re using exhausted, scarce police to control looting when they should be used for search and rescue while we still have people on rooftops.” [AP]

U.S.S. BATAAN SITS OFF SHORE, VIRTUALLY UNUSED: “The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore. The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents. But now the Bataan’s hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty.” [Chicago Tribune]

2PM CDT — PRESIDENT BUSH PLAYS GUITAR WITH COUNTRY SINGER MARK WILLIS [AP]

BUSH RETURNS TO CRAWFORD FOR FINAL NIGHT OF VACATION [AP]

Here’s what the right had to offer that day:

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]
I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It’s never too soon to be prepared.

And then this:

Knuckle Smacking [Jonah Goldberg ]

Doc Bainbridge chastises me for my insensitivity and implores my more mature colleagues to take me to task. He even goes so far as to call me Taranto-esque, for what that’s worth.

Perhaps Professor Bainbridge — of whom I am a fan — thinks something really awful will befall the denizens of the Superdome and therefore making a joke at their expense is wrong. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent time for the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status. I assumed the reference to gill-growing and whatnot made it clear where I was coming from. I’m sorry if we don’t always fulfill the good professor’s expectations around here. But it can’t be all brandy-snifters and Latin puns in the Corner.

Immediate reactions to tragedy are always telling. And it only got worse as the week wore on.

Meanwhile, if you want to know what a living nightmare really is, read this story from today’s NY Times Magazine about the plight of one of the hospitals during those horrible days, the awful decisions they faced and the people who made them.

It’s almost impossible to believe that it happened in a country that hadn’t been obliterated by an apocalyptic event so extreme that the entire national infrastructure was completely paralyzed. It wasn’t. It just didn’t respond:

I’m planning to revisit Katrina all week, as I usually do. Hopefully, there will be some good news as well. But I think it’s important to remember what happened there, especially as we see the red faced anger coming from people who don’t believe that Americans have an obligation to help their fellow man in times of trouble. It’s clarifying.

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Still Crazy After All These Years

by digby

Yesterday, in my invitation to the upcoming conversation with Dave Neiwert about his book The Eliminationists, I wrote:

There times when a writer publishes a book at exactly the right moment and this is one of them. With violent mainstream rhetoric hitting peaks we haven’t seen in nearly 40 years, the village is struggling to comprehend where it’s all coming from and what it means. They haven’t been paying attention.

On the other hand, there are times when a writer’s timing and thesis are so wrong, it’s inuntentionally funny. For instance, John Podhoretz published his tribute to George W. Bush Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century—While Driving Liberals Insane just before everything went to hell in a handbasket.

Here’s another one:

Poor Kurt Anderson obviously believed the hype that America had permanently cast off its long history of racism, the right wing had been permanently neutered by the election of Barack Obama and a new era of post partisan cooperation was sweeping the the nation. I guess somebody had to write that book, but I wouldn’t have taken that bet in a million years. (Maybe for a million dollars …)

He dances quite admirably during that segment, but it’s not very pretty. After our summer of teabaggers packing heat and “Obama is Hitler” rhetoric it’s a little hard to argue that our political differences have been solved, particularly since their behavior seems to have seriously affected the debate, at least in the village.

The crazy and the hate is still with us. If you want to read a good book about modern American politics, just read Nixonland
. The original title was Nixonland: Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, but the publishers foolishly insisted on changing it. Not only was the original more interesting it was more accurate. We’re still living it.

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Bill Bradley’s Model Congress

by dday

In 2000, angered by the rightward, DLC-led turn of the Democratic Party, I became interested in Bill Bradley’s candidacy for the Presidency and voted for him in the California primary. Needless to say, he didn’t win that year, and he retreated to the world of speeches and occasional op-eds as an eminence grise of politics. During that 2000 campaign he would talk very adamantly about how all Americans should have access to quality, affordable health care. It was a pillar of his campaign. Now a member of the punditocracy, he can imagine some grand compromise between the left and right on the issue.

Since the days of Harry Truman, Democrats have wanted universal health coverage, believing that if other industrialized countries can achieve it, surely the United States can. For Democrats, universal coverage speaks to America’s sense of decency and compassion. Democrats also believe that it will lead to a healthier and more productive country.

Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have wanted legal reform, believing that our economic competitiveness is being shackled by the billions we spend annually on tort costs; an estimated 10 cents of every health care dollar paid by individuals and companies goes for litigation and defensive medicine. For Republicans, tort reform and its health care analogue, malpractice reform, speak to the goal of stronger economic growth and lower costs.

The bipartisan trade-off in a viable health care bill is obvious: Combine universal coverage with malpractice tort reform in health care.

On what planet does Bill Bradley spend most of his time? Let’s grant him for a second the possibility that Republicans want to reach a compromise at all on health care reform, something they have not at all shown in every single day of this debate. Mike Enzi, one of the “bipartisan” negotiators, is still referring to death panels and has been quoted as saying he’s only participating in talks to stop a bill from getting passed. So you have to waive a lot to get to Bradley’s notion of a model Congress.

But tort reform, which is one of those conservative buzz words which has been drained of most of its meaning, has been a state issue, at the behest of Republicans, for many years, and 38 states have enacted it in one form or another. It would be curious for Republicans to compromise on universal health care in exchange for something most states already have. What’s more, given that we have this evidence from over 75% of the country, we can pretty quickly determine that medical malpractice suits are at best tangential and more accurately completely meaningless to the health care debate. Josh Richman, a very good journalist in the SF Bay Area, rounds up that evidence:

From Bloomberg News:

“(A)nnual jury awards and legal settlements involving doctors amounts to “a drop in the bucket” in a country that spends $2.3 trillion annually on health care, said Amitabh Chandra, a Harvard University economist. Chandra estimated the cost at $12 per person in the U.S., or about $3.6 billion, in a 2005 study. Insurer WellPoint Inc. said last month that liability wasn’t driving premiums.”

The Congressional Budget Office in 2004 concluded that medical malpractice tort reform wouldn’t have a significant effect on health care costs:

“Malpractice costs amounted to an estimated $24 billion in 2002, but that figure represents less than 2 percent of overall health care spending. Thus, even a reduction of 25 percent to 30 percent in malpractice costs would lower health care costs by only about 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, and the likely effect on health insurance premiums would be comparably small.”

And Americans for Insurance Reform, a coalition of nearly 100 consumer and public interest groups around the country, issued a report in July which found:

• Medical malpractice premiums, inflation-adjusted, are nearly the lowest they have been in over 30 years.
• Medical malpractice claims, inflation-adjusted, are dropping significantly, down 45 percent since 2000.
• Medical malpractice premiums are less than one-half of one percent of the country’s overall health care costs; medical malpractice claims are a mere one-fifth of one percent of health care costs. In over 30 years, premiums and claims have never been greater than 1% of our nation’s health care costs.

Democrats like Bill Bradley validate conservative claims on things like tort reform despite all evidence to the contrary, then decide that honest men can strike a wonderful compromise despite having no negotiating partner on the other side.

Just in case you were wondering why Democrats lose national debates.

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