Remembering Senator Kennedy

I am conflicted about the Kennedys. I shy away from the deification of the clan and the public longing for "Camelot". I find our continued fascination with everything Kennedy to be the first example of the celebritization of public life. Also, squaring the weaknesses of many of the individuals in the clan with the presumption of leadership because they are named Kennedy drives me nuts. But then, one looks at the incredible body of work which owes its existence to Senator Kennedy and one has to be impressed. Despite his many personal failings, he served this country and the public very well. Many of the programs and laws he was responsible for will live long after him. Perhaps what this teaches us is a sense of balance. Without denying his private foibles, perhaps it is not our place to stand in judgment. The people wronged by his actions should be the ones with that right. We should judge him mostly on his public life and in that regard he has made a formidable contribution to the nation. As some have said, his body of work will outshine that of either of his brothers, who attained the status of myths because of their deaths, not their lives. He has done the opposite. He will be missed.

No Public Option is NO REFORM

At the same time I'm blogging for a saner middle in our discourse, I'm extremely disappointed in the apparent fall back. A pretend competition between multi-billion dollar insurance companies and the authorization for medical cooperatives is a serious blow to health reform. The government is the only entity strong enough to provide a serious competitor to the for-profit insurance companies. I'm all for coops as another option in the exchanges, but they are not a substitute for a public option to provide competition. Without another option for people to CHOOSE, this bill will FORCE 50 million people onto the rolls of United Health, Cigna, etc. Why isn't this a meme in the media. No one seems to question the individual mandate and yet, the mandate was supposed to be accompanied by providing a public option which the uninsured could CHOOSE. Instead, without the public option, we are providing the insurance companies with 50 million new customers to gouge.

Because of a few improvements envisioned by this bill, in the system we now have, I don't want to see a bill go down to complete defeat even without a public option but I strongly disagree that this is only a sliver of the reform we were promised and therefore not all that important. Congress failed to give single payer even a minimal hearing and instead dispensed with the argument with this proposal in favor of a limited public option. Now they pretend that compromise between a limited public option and no change is the only way to get "reform". This compromise may represent a small improvement over the status quo, but it in NO way represents reform.

Ramblings on a Polarized America

I wish there were trustworthy statistics that outlined where the actual American people stand on the issue of reform. I fear most would be in the uninformed category. When I read the comments on news articles, it is clear the people who follow the news seem to be either progressive or liberal and Conservative or libertarian. [following the news doesn't make you an honest arbiter of the facts though] Little wonder Obama's polls are suffering. He can't get anything right as far as those of us who comment and read the news are concerned. Those who don't comment are the ones who often don't know that Hawaii is a state, or that there are three branches of government. They are often completely manipulated by the mainstream media [MSM]. While conservatives say that the media has a liberal bias, I would think that would be really hard to prove. The only people ever provided a a platform in most MSM are either moderates, centrists, pragmatists, mildly liberal or right wingers. Only recently have three fairly liberal programs on cable TV been added to the noise. Otherwise, its mostly conventional thought peppered with the incredibly ubiquitous and noisy right-wing. As an aside, I'm always amazed at the percentage of black right wing pundits vs. white who are given a platform considering the makeup of the Republican party is about 2% non-white.

This lack of an informed citizenry may be the end of hope for democracy. Because there is such polarization, the vast middle need to wake up and take sides. But they need to take sides as a result of becoming informed, not as a result of media manipulation. There was a HuffPo video of a women over 65 outside the CO town hall saying all of these totally factually inaccurate things about the proposals currently in Congress. The questioner asked her how she knew these things and she said Fox news because that is the only factual source of news and she claimed to have carefully researched all this information on the web. And yet, she still didn't seem to realize that her Medicare, supplemented by BC/BS which she said couldn't survive without, was government-run.

Meanwhile, many of the people I know, who would fully support a public option or even a single payer system are not inclined to do anything to make it happen except vote for President once every four years.

We have a political system that is completely in corporate hands thanks to the hundreds of thousands of lobbyists and we have a citizenry which is either uninformed, misinformed, or apathetic to the political realities of our system. We have millions of people, almost all of whom are of modest means, willing to vote and protest against their economic interests in the political belief, fostered by the right, that government [not monopolistic corporate America] is the problem. Even when we see what complete lack of good government controls over the last eight years can do to the economy, to the environment, to health care, to labor relations, and to most other aspects of American life it doesn't seem to make a difference. Folks don't seem to understand that government is the only bulwark against corporate America. People are sheep before them. Money and organization can effect anything corporate America wants, especially if there is no government to stand in the way. Our commitment to individualism becomes self defeating when faced with a cohesive and entrenched corporate political system. It becomes a way of polarizing us and defeating meaningful reform of anything.

I don't doubt a large proportion of Americans are angry. We've seen enough stuff in the last few years to make a saint angry. Unfortunately, amorphous anger without adequate and accurate information becomes a chaotic mob which can be manipulated by extremists to accomplish the agenda of the leaders rather than change for the people following.

Hitler knew this in the late 20's and 30's; Lenin and Trotsky in 1917; France in 1780's and others throughtout history which have taken advantage of people's righteous anger to overthrow the status quo. However, this can be a very dangerous road to travel as these examples would show. Hitler = holocaust and WWII; L&T = white revolution and Stalin's purges; and France = Reign of Terror. In the 1930's, Huey Long of LA was bringing together a coalition of white and black poor people and was shot and killed. History suggests he was a demagogue, but his death just led to a deepening of the polarization between poor white and black southerners and stopped them from seeing that economics should have brought them together instead of allowing racism to drive them apart. FDR is credited with preserving capitalism in the US because he made significant economic changes in response to the cataclysmic Great Depression. He used the government to make these changes because it was the only entity that could. Failure to push through these changes would likely have led to either fascism or communism becoming the dominant system in this country during that time, circumstances were that dire.

I believe there are a small percentage of extreme radicals, left and right, in this country who do not care if the current system survives or not as long as their side prevails. There are another small percentage of people who will support these groups because of their perceived self interest. I count among them many of the Republican Congressional leaders. I really believe that they do not care about consequences as long as they remain in office and can find a way back to mainstream power. How else can you explain reasonably informed human beings spreading incredible distortions and lies with a perfectly straight face. I don't discount that there are plenty of Democrats who also care more about staying in office than about trying to do the right thing. However, these Democrats are not aligning themselves with the radical fringe like the Republicans are. Even the most leftist of the Democrats in Congress want the basic political system to remain. The changes they support are mostly at the margins of the status quo rather than really fundamental. Most so-called leftists in Congress and across the land really just want a more compassionate economic system that promotes the interests of people over corporations so that most can thrive instead of just the few. This seems hardly radical. Yet, often this "leftist" view is equated with the extreme right wing when it comes judging political options.

This is a very rambling post but my point is that the polarization of our political discourse is very dangerous and may lead to scary unintended consequences. The failure to recognize that we have a lot of people who can be swayed one way or another because they tend to be the low information voters and non voters and the failure to prevent the extremes from doing the swaying will leave us on a dangerous precipice facing real chaos.

Sebelius: Public Health Care Option "Not The Essential Element"

I wanted a real public option, but the limited public option available to the uninsured and some small business, is unlikely to make much of a difference anyway. At yesterday's town hall, it was clear Obama is signalling that the public option is expendable - the deal has probably already been struck behind closed doors. This was to give the people who wanted a publc option time to rant and rave until October when the tiny sliver gets thrown under a bus to be renamed coop. We will get modified insurance reform, where the government will pretend that insurance companies cannot discriminate and cannot rescind, we will have an individual but not an employer mandate. we will have some subsidies to make it more affordable and that's it.

Health care reform isn't coming anytime soon. Are baby steps better than none? I don't know, but probably. I did read an intriguing article in Atlantic called health care killed my father that made some really interesting points about the employer based insurance system and the idea that comprehensive, unlimited care can ever be affordable. Frankly, with the moderate changes likely to be the end result, I don't see why I should get excited trying to get my representatives to pass something that barely resembles reform. I have to remind myself that this is administration is better than the alternative but was never going to be revolutionary or truly progressive. And I also have to remind myself that the President isn't able to make these changes uniliaterally and having to work with this Congress which may be Democratic in name but in reality milk toast, moderate change is all you can probably hope for. As Donald Rumsfeld might have said, you go with the Congress you have not the Congress you want.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Public Option vs Non Profit Coops

Well, the insurance industry has come up with a new clean way to shut down the public option. We are not against robust competition, we just don't want it to come from the government. Therefore, we will support non-profit coops as an alternative that you, chicken hearted Democrats can vote for.

Why would the insurance industrial complex support coops. Because they know they would be toothless weak shells that could be run over by the insurance industry. They also know that it sounds so democratic to support coops as viable competition. These coops will take years if not decades to even organize and begin to service people. They do not resolve any of the overhead issues [where most savings might lie] costing health care so much money in the current situation - rather they will be saddled with as much or more because they will lack economy of scale that either most major insurance companies or govenrment health plans would have. They will be denied financing by the same industry that they are supposed to compete against and they will either eventually do ok and then become for profit insurance companies ala Blue Cross, or they will go out of business like so many coops do. The insurance companies will be no worse the wear.

Furthermore, as part of their support, they have succeeded in obtaining an individual mandate [but not an employer mandate] in the bill. This means that the insurance companies can expect another 40 million lambs for them to slaughter. What's not to love?

Thirty to fourty percent of our health care dollar is paid for administrative overhead. This includes profit, marketing, huge salaries and other benefits for the executive class, denial of coverage specialists, state and federal lobbying expenses, underwriting to reduce claims, along with some necessary expenses such as salaries, benefits, rent, and supplies. One of the main goals of a public option is to save money by getting rid of the first five items. By being able to streamline the claims process because only one entity will be processing the claims, further savings will occur. Medicare for example has only a 3% overhead. This is not money for medical care, this is money for conserving and promoting the insurance industrial complex. On the other hand, this is also the best reason for single payer because all this fat is sliced from the budget [estimated at 400 Billion dollars]. However, since a mini public option is viciously attacked by so many as socialized medicine, there is not hope that a single payer program could be passed. However, a public option would provide much of this benefit for the people receiving the coverage, thus allowing an affordable insurance program for the currently uninsured and perhaps demonstrating where the waste is in the system we now have. That demonstration is what the insurance companies so fear that they and their allies will say anything, do anything to ensure that it does not pass. Unfortunately, with their lies and distortions, they seem to be able to scare enough uninformed, low information voters about the program that the weak-kneed well greased Blue Dog Democrats and others in the Senate seem prepared to scuttle the public option so that nothing will change, except our premiums, which will of course go up.

This is what will pass as health reform, until the country either goes broke or wakes up to its puppet masters.

Bacon vs. Pork

A blog [can't remember which one] had a game where you could vote bacon or pork on various earmarks contained in last year's budget bill. I started to vote when I realized that all of what was listed was pork [defined as a specific allocation by a Congressman for a specific project, often run by a specific entity]. What is missed in the discussion of these projects is not whether or not they have merit but whether or not this is an adequate way to make policy. Removing gang tatoos is a worthwhile project, building an interchange to improve traffic flow is also, even research into mitigating odor from hog farms. What makes all of these projects pork is that the decision to fund these "worthwhile" projects is not made by any rational, fairly based system, but rather to line the pockets of a legislator with campaign contributions, benefit a friend or ally, or to curry favor at home with a constituent group. These decisions are made without regard to the priority of the project on a state or national basis, without regard to the competence of the entity to perform the task, or the wishes of the locality that is the recipient of the largess.

Most federal grants are required by Congress to be competitive, as are almost all contracts that carry out the project or program being awarded. They require the applicant to demonstrate why its project is better vis-a-vis another project. They require some demonstration of capactity to perform. The priorities are set by Congress by their allocation of a set amount of money to the program and presumably as a result incorporate a priority setting process for what's important and essential. None of this applies to earmarks. Some of these projects are worthwhile, some may even be essential to the well being of an area, but none of this really matters because of the manner in which the earmarks are made.

Earmarks are perhaps the most corrupting practice in Congress outside campaign contributions. They are often repayments for those contributions, but even when they are unsullied by such, they are allowed to skew priorities and, based on a lawmakers standing, allowed to reward projects and places that may not need or be able to use the money effectively and efficiently. But that is ok with the lawmakers because of the political rewards they see such earmarks providing. One lawmaker bristled at the idea that such decisions should be made by faceless bureacrats [who are making decisions on criteria established by Congress and attempting to carry out Congressional intent in a fair and equitable manner] instead of a lawmaker who has his pulse on the local people. However, any benefit of having the pulse of the people is lost by the failure to have a systematic and transparent way of evaluating the projects which might result in effective priority setting, efficient use of funds, and ensuring that money is spent where it is most needed in a way that isn't designed to make some lawmakers friends and supporters rich.

I doubt that we will ever get rid of earmarks because politicians value their political capital. However, would it be so unreasonable that earmarks be less than a set percentage of discretionary funds? Would it be unreasonable that they compete with all the other earmarks sought for a particular bill? Would it be unreasonable that Congress figures out someway to more fairly and openly evaluate the earmark other than the seniority or influence of the lawmakers?