Month: December 2009

Betting On Bernanke

by digby

Democrats are chomping at the bit to reappoint Bernanke. And Bernanke has no interest in lowering unemployment.

I wonder how that’s going to work out?

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Who Will Do The Fighting?

by digby

Atrios has this right about the mandate argument:

I feel like those more supportive of this bill are attacking anti-mandate strawmen. The reason for thinking that without a public option or similar mandates are going to be a disaster is that without competition or sufficient affordability (due to not quite generous enough subsidies), you’re forcing people to buy shitty insurance that they can’t afford. Mandates aren’t bad in and of themselves, but they’re bad if they aren’t part of a comprehensive plan which is… good!

That’s right. A mandate as part of comprehensive reform that includes real competition, generous subsidies and a strong regulatory structure is not inherently bad. I could have made the argument if people had a choice in the exchange to pay into Medicare or into a public plan over which they had some control as a citizen rather than an expendable consumer. But without that or much more generous subsidies and/or strong mechanisms to control costs and keep the medical industry from gaming the system, it is very hard to see how most people will see this as a “benefit they’re getting” in the end, although some surely will. And in the current political environment, it is very, very hard to see how that improves any time soon.

When this bill is passed, Republicans will still be Republicans and the media will still be the media. So what’s more likely to happen is that everyone who has a problem with their insurance company is going to blame the Democrats for failing to “fix” things. There will be stories of people who refuse to buy insurance and they’ll be derided as free riders or extolled as freedom fighters depending on your point of view. The Medicaid expansion will be characterized as welfare (for illegal aliens!) The subsidies will be called budget busters, even if they aren’t. Old people will believe that they are sick because Democrats are killing them. And the deficit vultures are circling ominously waiting for a chance to take a bite out of this 900 billion “deficit neutral” program and apply it to the debt instead.

Perhaps all that was inevitable. But sadly, because of the perverse insistence on denying liberals any political stake in the reforms, even much of the base of the Democratic party now see the bill as little more than a capitulation to the medical industry which allowed this current heartless health care system to spin out of control in the first place. The congress may pass it, but there’s no constituency except some policy wonks and medical industry shareholders who will be cheering its passage and defending it from the inevitable assaults. That’s very weak politics in my book.

Maybe there’s a chance that Dean’s call to kill the Senate bill will propel some further progressive changes around the edges before they pass it. And 20 years from now it’s possible that we will have “bent the cost curve” in health care by making more people join the pool and allowing some of them to avoid high cost emergency medicine through more primary care. Let’s hope so. But I find it hard to believe that Americans are going to feel that they have secure cradle to grave health care as those in other industrialized countries do until the government is willing to take the responsibility for adequately regulating the medical industry and creating a strong mechanism for ensuring that all people are covered through something other than “the market.” Single payer is the rational, efficient way to do this, but they could have gotten there other ways. Unfortunately our political system is so sick from living on a diet of toxic lobbyist money that I think we probably have to cure that before any of that can happen.

I still think there will probably be a bill, but it will take everything Obama, Pelosi and Reid have to pass it with a razor thin margin, which doesn’t convey a lot of confidence. Hopefully, the fallout won’t be too bad and the improvements will hold long enough to foreclose repealing the good things in the bill. But if anyone thinks that the obstructionism isn’t going to continue as the Democrats come back to “fix” things, they aren’t looking at the political dynamics clearly. The Republicans understand very well that they have to do everything they can to keep any improvements in the safety net from becoming entrenched. And the medical industry isn’t going to stand for any “fixes” that don’t benefit them.

This will be a pitched battle for some time to come. It probably would have been helpful to Democrats to have some liberals on their side fighting for it. But the liberals were too shrill and had to be put in their place. Expecting them to get in the trenches and battle the opposition on this issue after kicking them repetedly and then telling them they have to like it is arrogant and short-sighted. Democrats respect the military. But they don’t respect their own troops. And it’s hurt unit cohesion and morale.

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Pulling The Plug On Grandma

by digby

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, but I honestly didn’t believe this one was possible:

SO, here’s something interesting. At the beginning of 2010, the Bush estate tax plan is scheduled to change such that all estates, up to any value, are excluded. Because the tax bill was passed through reconciliation, however, it has a ten-year time frame, meaning that the law expires at the end of 2010. And that means that the heirs of fortunes received in 2010 will pay no tax, while heirs getting theirs in 2011 will pay 50% of the value of the estate to the Internal Revenue Service.Perhaps you notice the uncomfortable incentive structure here.The House of Representatives voted at the beginning of December to continue the current year policy into 2010; instead of an exclusion for all estates, only those greater than $3.5 million in value would be taxed. That would still leave some bad incentives in place, but it would be better than the current policy path. That left the Senate, graveyard of sensible policy ideas. And the Senate has now abandoned its effort to pass the House extension of the estate tax measure.

I don’t think Bush even dreamed that they’d leave 2010 as it was, certainly not if they failed to eliminate the “death tax” going forward.

All the wealthy grandmas out there had better sleep with one eye open next year.

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Jumping To Conclusions

by digby

Here’s a sad story about the demise of the Medicare buy-in. Reid insisted that the negotiators keep quiet about the details until the CBO score came out but the doctors and hospitals panicked and sicced their lobbyists on the usual suspects, along with a few liberals. Turned out that all of their concerns had been anticipated in the compromise but nobody could say anything — and then Lieberman pulled the plug. Too bad.

Apparently, these good samaritans were afraid that they’d get a whole bunch of new previously uninsured patients who wouldn’t be paying top dollar. That would be opposed to currently uninsured patients who are paying nothing until they have their heart attack and wind up in the emergency room — which is apparently a better financial deal for the doctors and hospitals. That explains a lot.

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The Dispensation Of The King

by digby

In case you were wondering, His Highness has decreed that his bill is as progressive and generous as any of you peasants (including fellow members of the congress) should require.

From an interview with CNNs Dana Bash:

BASH: ..You talk to a lot of Democrats and there is a fundamental feeling among many of them that you have animus towards the President, that you have animus toward your former party and that they say this is all about Joe Lieberman.

LIEBERMAN: Well that’s just poppy-cock. I mean, this is all about what I think health care reform should be… So again I understand people’s disappointment. Emotions are running high here. I’m focusing on getting a health care bill passed that I think is a good bill and not one that will contain baggage that not only I, but most of the American people will not like…

BASH: Are you convinced that the Medicare buy-in idea is now gone from the health care bill?

LIEBERMAN: Well, first, it was a very good meeting at the White House. President made the case that the merged bill is a good bill and it really will be extraordinarily important to millions of people in the country and it will do what he wanted to do from the beginning — begin to cut the cost of health care increases and extend health care insurance to a lot of people who don’t have it and regulate the insurance companies in a tougher way.

He also spoke very practically. He said, you know, we’re 60 people in the Senate Democratic caucus, everybody has their own politics. You’ve got to work together to get this done. I thought it was actually quite effective.

BASH: But did he specifically say — did he specifically talk about this issues?

LIEBERMAN: The public option or the Medicare buy-in?

BASH: The Medicare buy-in?

LIEBERMAN: He didn’t really specifically dwell on it. Look, I took him to say, let’s reach an agreement. Don’t let a part of this deprive the American people from the whole of it, which will really be the kind of health care reform that people have tried to achieve for decades here in this country. And then there were a lot of questions and answers.

BASH: That could be a message to you to say, Senator Lieberman, don’t dwell on this Medicare buy-in issue. Perhaps you need to accept it and accept compromise.

LIEBERMAN: Yes, I was hearing it in another way.

Look, I spoke and I thanked him because I think the president’s leadership has put us in reach of a consensus of health care reform. And you know, I said quite honestly to my colleagues — I knew some of them were upset about positions I’d taken. But like each of them, I didn’t get elected by telling my voters in Connecticut that I would follow the majority of my caucus even if I thought on some things they were wrong. We each have to do what we think is right.

As the president said, we each did have different points of view. But the challenge was to blend them and it wasn’t easy of a caucus of 60. But we needed 60 votes, according to Senate rules. In a group of 60 senators achieving ideological uniformity is impossible because the country is too big and we represent too many people.

BASH: So at this point, knowing what you know now, do you think you’ll vote for health care?

LIEBERMAN: Here’s what I’d say. I’ve always wanted to be able to say yes to health care reform. But there were some parts of this bill, public option, Medicare buy-in that I thought would essentially lead to a government takeover of health care in America, which I’m against, because I think it would reduce quality and increase prices and certainly raise the debt and taxes.

If as appears now that the public option, the Medicare buy-in are taken out — and I’m waiting to see the actual language and the budget office estimate — then I’ll be in a position to do what I’ve wanted to do, which is to say yes to health care reform.

I’m moving very much in the direction of saying yes, pending just seeing what I’ve been told is happening with the bill.

BASH: But you talked about the fact that on this particular issue, a Medicare buy-in, you have changed your position and you’ve said it’s because things have changed. The deficits are high and Medicare is in more trouble — the system.

LIEBERMAN: Yes.

BASH: But give me a little straight talk like your friend John McCain gives. Is it also that you philosophically have moved to the right a little bit?

LIEBERMAN: No, I don’t think so. I mean, actually, this is a very progressive bill. The parts that I didn’t like are taken out, I’m prepared to support. I’ve always believed that government has to be there when nobody else will be there to help people.

But in this country we don’t believe the government should take over everything. And for me, that’s what’s been on the line here. What kind of future are we going to have? And of course all of this goes to the debt — the national debt and taxes. If government takes over everything — the public option is something the public will pay for.

And that means higher taxes. That’s why I did that.

BASH: As you know, there already is a lot of pressure on some of your liberal colleagues to vote against this without the very provision that you single handedly got out of this bill — the Medicare buy-in, not to mention a public option.

Howard Dean has on his web site, “If Barack Obama’s health care plan gets changed to exclude a public option like Medicare, then it is not health care reform.”

LIEBERMAN: So I turn back the question that people have asked me to Governor Dean and others who may be raising this possibility of voting against health care reform — people in the left side of the party.

Would you really because you couldn’t get everything you want, stop this extraordinary reform? I mean, it will provide, by all expert’s estimates, insurance to 30 million people who don’t have that now.

BASH: Couldn’t somebody ask that very question, Senator Lieberman?

LIEBERMAN: They have. That’s why I’m throwing it back to them because I think — you know, this bill is a generous bill. And to adopt it now is a stretch. But it is important to do. And basically I’ve said to my colleagues, don’t push this too far. You can try to do so much that you end up doing nothing.

Again, I repeat what I hear from people all the time, they’re worried about government spending too much money. They’re worried about government taking over everything including health care. And that’s why I think this will be not only a better bill but a more publicly accepted bill without any threat of a government takeover of health insurance.

His Highness will decide what is progressive and what is not and will tell us all what we may have. And if those in the majority don’t like it, they will have to adjust. Our King will decide when we have “pushed too far.”

It would appear that Democrats will not only have to run on this bill as a great progressive achievement, they will also have to acknowledge that it was Joe Lieberman’s leadership that made them do it.

And evidently the president expects them to enjoy it:

At one point during the private White House meeting, Lieberman said: “I haven’t really had a lot of fun the last couple of weeks.”

His comment prompted a retort from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a staunch public option supporter: “I haven’t been having fun either,” Brown said, according to Lieberman.

Obama, who was described as upbeat in what was an otherwise serious meeting, responded: “Why don’t we all begin to have some fun? Let’s pass this bill.”

Obama thanked Lieberman privately for his statement issued earlier Tuesday pledging support for the bill as long as the Medicare expansion and public option were eliminated from the bill, Lieberman said.

I’m not sure His Highness is completely ready to sign on just yet. There’s more fat to cut and more money to be saved. But we’ll see.

And in any case, there’s always next year. After all, unlike the seniors who are a formidable voting bloc, poor people really don’t ever have much clout so once the fiscal scolds get hold of the subsidies and the medicaid expansion they’ll make sure they never come even close to keeping up with the inevitable rise in premiums.

There is, in my opinion, almost no chance that this bill will be expanded any time soon. As predicted, we are currently working ourselves up into a drooling frenzy over deficits. We’ll be lucky if we hang on to what’s left in this bill. The deficit scolds have been hard at work limiting the parameters of the politically possible since Obama was elected. And they are succeeding.

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No Teabags For the Cyborg

by digby

Considah dis a divorce:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took the stage in Copenhagen today to deliver his speech on combating climate change, but he also created buzz with a series of shots at 2008 GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin’s global warming skepticism. “You have to ask: what was she trying to accomplish?” he told the Financial Times. “Is she really interested in this subject or is she interested in her career and in winning the (Republican) nomination (for president)? You have to take all these things with a grain of salt.” On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he dismissed Palin’s calls for President Barack Obama to boycott the climate talks. “I think there are people that just don’t believe in fixing and working on the environment. They don’t believe there is such a thing as global warming, they’re still living in the Stone Age, which is OK, we need people like that, too,” he said.

Do we?

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Inventing Joe

by digby

Reader Jon S writes in:

I had an incredible flash of deja vu reading the Lieberman “apology” story at TPM. Didn’t he do this same “I’m so very sorry I had to take a giant crap on all of you, but now I extend the olive branch and want to come back to the fold” bit after stumping for McCain and saying ugly stuff about Obama just a year ago?[yes he did — ed]

At this point, it’s simply not possible for me to believe that the Dems are actually falling for this “I’m so very sorry…” act. The only explanation for why he keeps getting let back in is that they actually /want/ him around to play “bad cop,” so that they can say to progressives “we tried, but we just couldn’t get that black sheep Joe on board.”

I mean, is it possible that, despite public appearances, Holy Joe really is a genuine Democratic team player–it’s just that the Dems aren’t on our team, here? Think about it: if it wouldn’t be for Joe, the Dems wouldn’t have an excuse to not pass progressive reforms. If he didn’t exist, The Village would have to invent him.

I think there’s something to this. With Republicans almost entirely laying out the Democrats needed some of their own to ensure that the liberals didn’t get out of hand. It wasn’t a problem finding them. And Lieberman was more than happy to take the blame. Indeed, he revels in it. He’s a very useful fellow.

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Move Over Oliver Stone

by digby

…. an untalented, wingnut rival is moving into your historical “counter myth” territory and I doubt it’s going to be pretty. Amato has the story:

The man responsible for trying to make torture a moral imperative for America now gets the opportunity to produce an eight-hour miniseries about the Kennedy family.

Joel Surnow is swapping “real time” political intrigue for historical realism. The “24″ co-creator is executive producing “The Kennedys,” an eight-hour miniseries about one of America’s most iconic political families, for the History Channel. Unlike “24,” however, “The Kennedys” will be as historically accurate as possible and not feature any gimmickry…Surnow says he and series writer Steve Kronish were most interested in cobbling together a dynastic story about family ambition. “That some of the most important events of the 20th century, such as the Bay of Pigs or the civil rights movement, is in the background, is almost besides the point,” he said. Focusing on the idea of a father living out his ambitions through his sons (”primarily Jack and Bobby, though Teddy was in the mix”), the series — which Surnow likens more to a season of the “Sopranos” than a traditional miniseries — will take place between the years of 1960 and 1968, but with plenty of flashbacks, such as Joe Sr. being rejected by a Harvard club.

As John points out, there’s nothing at all partisan or hackish about Surnow. Just because he hangs out with Rush Limbaugh doesn’t mean that one should make any assumptions about his analogy between the Kennedys and the Sopranos.

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Leadership

by digby

There has been a bit of back and forth about whether or not it’s fair to blame Obama for the state of the health care debate , with Yglesias and Klein, among others, saying that criticisms of domestic initiatives should be focused on the congress rather than the president, who has little institutional power to affect it. I think it’s true that the congress, particularly the Senate, is the choke point on domestic legislation, but the fact remains that the president is the only one who runs a national campaign and he sets the agenda. And depending on the extent of his mandate, the president has a tremendous amount of power, particularly in the first year of his term, because he has a measurable support from the public. And public opinion, believe it or not, is important.

The White House knows this very well and it husbands its capital, prioritizing the things it cares enough about to spend it on. Here’s a somewhat twisted example of how the president is using his power right now:

Lawrence O’Donnell: Howard, when you have shaky votes on the Democratic side. And you have Howard Dean, physician, Dr Dean coming out against this bill, there have to be some Democrats in the Senate who are saying in effect, you want me to cast this vote, which in my state is kind of difficult and I might not get thanked politically by anyone. I might not get thanked by the base represented by Howard Dean, I certainly won’t get thanked by Republicans and I don’t know what’s going to happen with Independents. It seems to me it does make the Senate vote much more tense

Howard Fineman: Well I think it’s symbolic, in a way, of the predicament that the president and the Democrats are in. At the meeting at the White House today, Lawrence, from talking to people about it from people who were there, the subtext of it was look, you think things are bad now, if we don’t pass this bill the president in effect said, you’re going to be damaging me. The economy’s bad, the historical trends are against us in 2010, but if we don’t pass this bill, I’m going to look bad and that’s going to make me useless to you as a vehicle to try to help you guys this next year and the period after that.

So the president might be jawboning in a way, but he’s not really threatening. He’s saying don’t make me jump. Because I’m the one who’s going to get damage and that’s not going to help you.

That’s the argument that’s being made and that the argument Harry Reid is making to his fellow Senators as I understand it. He’s saying look, we need to pass a bill because we can’t afford to damage our president any further than he’s already been damaged. That’s kind of a backhanded way of looking at the thing, but that’s what’s going on behind closed doors right now…

There are not a lot of good reasons why he wouldn’t use the power of his popularity when his numbers were stratospheric to insist on something other than cost controls. One can only assume he didn’t want to.

Even I knew that the Senate was full of a bunch of prima donnas who had to be deftly handled and given a tremendous amount of attention and engagement when you try to do something big. That’s just how it works in that chamber, especially when Democrats are in the majority. It was never going to be easy. But the president had a tremendous amount of good will and political power when he came into office and indicated from the beginning that instead of pushing through his agenda quickly and efficiently he would have the congress to “take the lead” and only inject himself when it was necessary to consecrate some (preferably bipartisan) compromise. That’s a recipe for slow action and bad legislation.

The president may not have the singular power to enact good domestic policy, but he is the only one with the power and public backing to knock heads and lead in his own party. And if the best he can do in that regard is tell the Democrats that they need to “protect him” by passing any bill, well, that’s pretty weak.

Considering the recent polls, however, you can see why he’s making that pitch:

A bare majority of Americans still believe government action is needed to control runaway health-care costs and expand coverage to the roughly 46 million people without insurance. But public opposition to the proposed health reforms under consideration has hit a new high, and there are signs the political fight has hurt President Obama’ s general standing with the public.

One can only speculate about what might have happened if they had gamed this out a little bit differently. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. But the fact remains that Obama last made a speech about health care last September (in which he inexplicably put a 900 billion dollar cap on the legislation) and there’s been nothing but mild admonitions to “work it out” ever since then. He simply did not show leadership on the issue. And now his own ratings are suffering because of the mess. If Greenwald is right when he says that the White House achieved the plan they always wanted, then it came at a very high price.

I actually think they originally conceived of health care reform as a necessary gesture to achieve their Grand Bargain and so the details didn’t much matter to them. They would have “given” us something we could call health care reform and then it would be time put some of our own “skin in the game”: “entitlement” reform. I suspect that rather than being the result of some master plan, the health care debate just got away from them. (It’s a terrible irony that the technocratic “what works” administration would find themselves tied up in knots creating an image of fiscal probity.)

I’m not sure how that will all work out in the end. But I’m fairly confident that the deficit scolds are getting ready to launch a full scale offensive on government spending, so “improving the bill” in any financial way is probably not going to be on the agenda any time soon, certainly not with a looming election and tanking poll numbers. And with the president’s approval rating suffering not simply due to health care reform, but because of unemployment and economic torpor, what we get in this health care reform bill had better be enough to last us for quite a while.

Update: I should add that contrary to some reports I am not arguing to “kill the bill.” Even if I thought we should, I have yet to see a strategy that could make that happen. I think the bill will pass, I always have. So, what I’m writing is simply analysis of what has happened and what is.

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