Now it’s time to work for real health care reform — Medicare For All, say Greens
• The Democratic “insurance company enrichment” bill burdens millions of Americans and imposes mandates that enrich insurance companies
WASHINGTON, DC — Green candidates and party leaders said today that the passage of the Democratic health care bill, with its increased financial burdens on millions of Americans, should not slow the movement for Medicare For All (single-payer national health care).
Physicians for a National Health Program said in a statement on Monday, “Instead of eliminating the root of the problem — the profit-driven, private health insurance industry — this costly new legislation will enrich and further entrench these firms. The bill would require millions of Americans to buy private insurers’ defective products, and turn over to them vast amounts of public money.” (http://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/march/pro-single-payer-doctors-health-bill-leaves-23-million-uninsured)
• Dennis Spisak, Green candidate for Governor of Ohio (http://www.votespisak.org/governor): “Now that this bill has passed, those of us who support real universal health care must keep up the demand for Medicare For All. Every American deserves the same high-quality guaranteed health coverage that Congress members enjoy. We will challenge those who insist that further health care reform is no longer on the table. The Democratic bill was mainly written to give the appearance of reform. It forces people to buy insurance or face a tax penalty. It works like a regressive tax, in which in the uninsured — in the midst of a recession — must pay for insurance they can’t use due to the likely high co-pays and deductibles. Especially vicious is the amendment prohibiting states from enacting their own single-payer programs.”
• Jill Stein, physician and Green candidate for Governor of Massachusetts (http://www.jillstein.org): “”The position of most Democrats and Republicans on health care is that Americans have no right to medical treatment, but private insurance companies have every right to enrich themselves on our need for health care and to send hundreds of thousands of Americans financial ruin over medical costs. According to Physicians for a National Health Program’s critique of the bill, about 23 milion Americans will remain uninsured after nine years, resulting in ‘an estimated 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually and an incalculable toll of suffering’. In the media coverage of health care reform, the angle was whether President Obama could prevail against the GOP and uncooperative Democrats. It was all about personalities and a horse-race competition. Whether the Democratic legislation — or obstruction of reform by Republicans — actually helps people became a side issue.”
• Rich Whitney, Green candidate for Governor of Illinois (http://www.whitneyforgov.org) : “The real story of health care reform over the past year is how the insurance and other health lobbies sent millions of dollars in campaign checks to both Democrats and Republicans to make sure their interests came first. We’ll get real health care reform when Americans get angry enough to stop voting for Democratic and Republican candidates who are addicted to corporate contributions, and elect Greens, who call health care a basic human right.” (Visit the web site of the Center for Responsive Politics to learn how much these corporations donate to each Congress member: http://www.opensecrets.org)
• Nancy Allen, farmer and long-time Green organizer from Maine: “Some of the Tea Partiers showed their true colors this past weekend, when crowds hurled racist and homophobic epithets at Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Barney Frank, and other Congress members. How much did Republican politicians, insurance companies, and other industries encourage such behavior? How did these corporations successfully convince so many Americans that their own medical care is less important than corporate profits and power?”
• Rodger Jennings, Green candidate for US Congress in Illinois, District 12 (http://www.rodgerjennings.org): “The winners are the largest for-profit health insurance companies. Both Democrats and Republicans made the bottom lines of the insurance cartel the top priority, rather than every American’s need for quality medical care. Private insurance adds cost to health care but provides no value — physicians, nurses, and other professionals do the actual medical work. The administrative overhead, including CEO bonuses and salaries, of private insurance raises health care costs by up to 31%. The administrative overhead for Medicare is under 3%. By eliminating the corporate insurance middle-man, we’d reduce health care spending from over 15% to about 9% and cut the price of coverage and care dramatically, and every American would enjoy guaranteed, quality health care.”
Pelosi and other Democrats are bragging about how very conservative the newly-passed health insurance mandate really is. When the "best" that can be said about Obamacare is how conservative it is, Democratic Party hacks might want to rethink their support for it.
"corporate control of the Government is one of the most serious problems, if not the single most serious problem, the nation faces.... To pretend that these interests were vanquished or 'neutralized' here ... is not just deeply misleading but, worse, helps conceal what remains the greatest threat to the democratic process: a threat that is not only stronger than ever, but has been made stronger as a result of the last several months."
A bill written by industry lobbyists, effectively celebrated by Democrats as being just as conservative as anything the Republicans would have come up with (if anything), and which still leaves millions uninsured is better than passing nothing? You who demanded that the left shut up and support this bill no matter how bad it got owe us three things: an explanation, an apology, and your complete and permanent retirement from political activism. You are less than worthless when it comes to fighting for progressive goals.
The folks who read my blog posts might be surprised to learn that there is an alternative to the public option I could live with (besides single-payer, of course, that being my preferred option from the beginning). I have been an advocate for a very hard line on the public option, as I discussed here yesterday. But there is one other alternative I would feel okay about, and Bob Creamer outlines it today in his great post, Three Reasons Why a Strong Public Option is Likely to Be Part of Health Insurance Reform.
More on Bob's post, the alternative I could live with, and an action to take, in the extended entry.
I have been in the battling-the-rich-and-powerful-on-behalf-of-the-poor-and-middle- income business for a very long time now (almost 30 years), and it can get pretty discouraging at times. For one thing, in some news that I am sure will be shattering to you, the rich and powerful have a lot more money. And they have seemed to have a lot more political friends over that era than do the poor and the middle income folks combined.
But hope rises anew from time to time, and there are encouraging signs. The most obvious one, of course, is that we have a President and both houses of Congress led by center-left politicians who will be with the poor and middle income quite a bit more than their predecessors in the Bush White House and the Republican led Congress - not always, of course, but more than the last set of politicians. But my hopes are rising for a lot less visible reasons than that.
More on what those reasons on in the extended entry.
$100 billion more in wartime spending. That's what Congress is hellbent on approving despite valiant efforts from a growing number of Progressives led by FireDogLake's Jane Hamsher to derail this legislation's passage in the House. $100 billion, and for what? To bring more troops to Afghanistan without an exit strategy? To further US foreign policy that fails to address the humanitarian needs of the world's third poorest country? To escalate military operations that directly result in Afghan civilian casualties?
Recently, Anand Gopal, who has been covering the war in Afghanistan for The Christian Science Monitor, dispelled the myths about troop escalation at the America's Future Now Conference in Washington, DC. The reality, Gopal grimly assessed, is that more troops will mean more incidents of violence. More troops will also mean the need for more airstikes, which, as you can see in the sobering trailer for part four of Rethink Afghanistan, will mean more civilian casualties.
I wrote this as a personal reflection point; I don't presume to know or be suggesting any statistical or methodological pretext in this post. I just wanted to raise the observations of one node in the network.
I wonder what happened to all of my colleagues who said they were opposed to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder what happened to my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration. It seems, with very few exceptions, they have changed their position on the war now that the White House has changed hands. I find this troubling. As I have said while opposing previous war funding requests, a vote to fund the war is a vote in favor of the war. Congress exercises its constitutional prerogatives through the power of the purse.
As a lifelong Texas Democrat, I don't know if there's anything that pains me more than having to cite Ron Paul at the beginning of my first post written for OpenLeft. But the man has a point -- what the heck just happened?
I read the national blogs -- the "short head" of the political blogosphere -- regularly, but not fervently. I browse the stories on Google Reader, go to several sites to comment on interesting posts, but my real focus is on state politics. I write for Burnt Orange Report down in Texas, and if I only have 30 minutes a day to focus on blogging politics, I'll focus on state politics and not really pay attention to national politics.
This is all by way of saying that I just lose some stories. I just do. And, for whatever reason -- my recent graduation from grad school, job hunting, blah blah -- I had no idea that nearly 2/3 of progressives who pledged not to fund the war have totally changed their minds until KT got all of us over at BOR involved.
But now what? I can do little more than read the coverage. And that's what this post is about -- the different tones in coverage that are now recorded and part of the "history" of this particular Congressional milestone. But I'm not talking about Democrat vs. Republican (as all the major papers will report), or even Democrats vs. Democrat (which is the more obvious discussion for Democrats to have). No, I'm talking about the difference in tones among Democrats that wanted the "No" vote, including:
These are not the whole spectrum of tones, I'm sure -- just the ones I interacted with right away when I was reading about this tonight. And I don't mean to pigeonhole any/all of these voices as solely existing in that tone. Those descriptors are relevant to this set of observations on this issue, with the hope that a simple case-study may generate an interesting discussion.
So here's the question: in light of the fact that I wish I had done more and am displeased by the outcome, how do I react/respond to the various rhetoric of the coverage provided by those whose goals I agree with?
One of the biggest memes the netroots is constantly fighting against is the idea that we mindlessly participate in an "echo chamber." Yet I would argue that each of those posts has decidedly different tones, and that each tone influences an activists' perception on the work that was done in distinctly different ways.
Ultimately, the dividing line among these voices has little to do with any talking points -- because each group supported the same side of the same issue. Instead, the dividing line amongs the "progressives of the progressives" appears to be those who appreciate emergence politics, and those who don't.
Big and bold. That's Mike Lux's recipe for sweeping transformative change. That's the way for progressives to achieve a Big Change Moment, as Lux calls it in his new book, "The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be." Lux likens progressive ideals to American ideals, and calls for progressives to pressure cautious Democrats hesitant to spend political capital.
I'm not talking about President Obama specifically. As Lux wrote here yesterday, Obama has taken tremendous strides to get past the hurdles of centrist cabinet picks and stay on the progressive track. You could hear calls for a Big Change Moment in Obama's congressional address last week, and you can see audacious ambition in his economic recovery bill and budget. While Lux is right when he says we shouldn't hesitate to disagree with the President on everything from the banking crisis to the war in Afghanistan--particularly when Obama respects plurality of opinion--this ought to go double (or I guess increase exponentially depending on your math skills) for every Democrat in Washington right now.
We're launching our first action campaign on OpenLeft, called Stop the DC Establishment at http://stopthedcestablishment.com. Please sign the petition. While it's fun to think that Iraq is Bush's war, the reality is that The war is enabled by Democrats, Republicans, DC press, think tank experts, and a whole slew of lobbyists which together comprise a noxious DC establishment. They puff up figurines like Petraeus, they shovel billions into the sand and into the hands of dishonest military contractors, and they live in comfortable sinecures at places like Brookings.
It's time for the media to cease treating his statements with open-mouthed credulity, and for politicians in both parties to stop being rolled by the elaborate PR campaign he is leading on behalf of the administration. (Think Progress has a helpful graph which shows he spent 17 days in August flacking for the surge.) The American public wants an end to the war in Iraq and it's time that our elected officials realize that a vote for any funding bill that does not include binding timelines will only continue to bog us down in a deadly, ill-conceived endeavor which only a fool (or a knave) could think it possible to "win."
Please sign the petition to be delivered to the Democratic leadership, which says that we do not want the dissembling and statistical manipulation being put forward by Petraeus, Crocker and others to serve as an excuse for prolonging the war. It's time that they do their job and stand with the majority of the country to oppose this unpopular president and his fiasco of a war.
Thanks to David Olsen of the Backtalk videoblog series for editing the video.
Asked early Monday if this was the right message for his party to send, a member of the Democratic leadership, speaking on background, curtly answered, "No."
Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, called the ad "over the top."
"I don't like any kind of characterizations in our politics that call into question any active duty, distinguished general who I think under any circumstances serves with the best interests of our country," said Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and a decorated veteran.
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