This week, House Republicans will hold a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The bill is expected to pass the House, where the GOP holds a majority, but stall in the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the meantime, the symbolic vote is giving both Republicans and Democrats a pretext to publicly rehash their views on the legislation.
At AlterNet, Faiz Shakir and colleagues point out that repealing health care reform would cost the federal government an additional $320 billion over the next decade, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. The authors also note that despite Republican campaign promises to "repeal and replace" the law, their bill contains no replacement plan. Health care reform protects Americans with preexisting conditions from some forms discrimination by insurers. At least half of all Americans under the age of 65 could be construed as having a preexisting condition. No wonder only 1 in 4 Americans support repeal, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released on Monday.
Perhaps that explains, as Paul Waldman reports at TAPPED, why the White House is vigorously defending health care reform. The Obama administration is making full use of the aforementioned statistics from The Department Health and Human Services on the percentage of Americans who have preexisting conditions:
As the House prepares to vote on the "Repeal the Puppy-Strangling Job-Vivisecting O-Commie-Care Act," or whatever they're now calling it, the White House and its allies actually seem to have their act together when it comes to fighting this war for public opinion. The latest is an analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services on just how many people have pre-existing conditions, and thus will be protected from denials of health insurance when the Affordable Care Act goes fully into effect in 2014
Republicans are fuming that Democrats are "politicizing" a policy debate by bringing up the uncomfortable fact that, if the GOP's repeal plan became law, millions of people could lose their health insurance. As Waldman points out, the high incidence of preexisting conditions is an argument for a universal mandate. It's impossible to insure people with known health problems at an affordable cost unless they share the risk with healthier policy-holders. Hence the need for a mandate.
Anti-choice at the end of life
In The Nation, Ann Neumann explains how anti-choice leaders fought to re-eliminate free end-of-life counseling for seniors under Medicare. The provision was taken out of the health care reform bill but briefly reinstated by Department of Health and Social Services before being rescinded again by HHS amid false allegations by anti-choice groups, including The Family Research Council, that the government was promulgating euthanasia for the elderly.
As seen on TV
The Kansas-based anti-choice group Operation Rescue is lashing out at the Iowa Board of Medicine for dismissing their complaint against Dr. Linda Haskell, Lynda Waddington reports in The Iowa Independent. Dr. Haskell attracted the ire of anti-choicers for using telemedicine to help doctors provide abortion care. The board investigated Operation Rescue's allegations, which it cannot discuss or even acknowledge, but found no basis for sanctions against Haskell. Iowa medical authorities said they were still deliberating about the rules for telemedicine in general.
Salon retracts RFK vaccine story
Online news magazine Salon.com has retracted a 2005 article by Robert Kennedy, Jr. alleging a link between childhood vaccines and autism, Kristina Chew reports at Care2. The article leaned heavily on now discredited research by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. His research had been discredited for some time, but only recently did an investigative journalist reveal that Wakefield skewed his data as part of an elaborate scam to profit from a lawsuit against vaccine makers.
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"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.
Clinton is not going to get a majority of the delegates, but it appears she's not going to drop out on the off chance that someone might kill Obama. Howard Wolfsen clarified:
Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson defended the comments to The Post, "She was talking about the length of the race and using the '68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone -- she used her husband's race in the same vein."
In some sense, what he's saying is right. The call to drop out is premature by the standards of the 1992 and 1968 race. But her staying in the race has no precedent, since in both of those cases the race was not decided. It's not like Hubert Humphrey was waiting around in case someone went off and shot RFK, or Bill Clinton was hoping he could convince superdelegates to override the will of the voters in a clearly losing strategy. There were still primaries going on that could have a significant impact on the outcome of the race.
2004 is a better analogy. Did John Edwards or Howard Dean wait around, musing that perhaps John Kerry would be killed, even though he was clearly going to lock up the majority of the delegates? Of course not. They lined up behind the winner.
Look, I don't feel that strongly that Clinton should drop out, she will do what she wants, and I think she will unite behind Obama because it's the smart thing to do. Still, the assassination talk is, shall we say, suggestive of an extreme lack of character.
Of the 1968 candidates, only RFK gave all his energies and risked all his chances in dealing with [the issues of poverty, race and crime]. RFK builds a new coalition of the poor, the black and the young… Momentum lost after 1968.
The above quote is taken from a 1974 review of The Presidency on Trial: Robert Kennedy's 1968 Campaign and Afterwards by Stuart Gerry Brown (review written by Fred Greenstein and published in the American Political Science Review. Lexis-Nexis access is required to view the article). I quote it here because, even though I was born well after the fact, I believe it expresses the sentiment of many in the progressive movement forty years ago as to the type of electoral and governing coalition they were seeking to forge. Certainly, there was no unanimity among progressives of the time, as RFK's main rival in contested primaries was Eugene McCarthy, who certainly fomented a lot of excitement among the younger, liberal, anti-war activist class of the time. Also, anti-electoral radicalism was, as I understand it, quite prevalent among the left at the time, and I imagine there was also a lot of liberal / progressive affinity for Hubert Humphrey, as well.
Before I am crucified for my weak understanding of the election of 1968, let me first freely admit that I am neither a historian, nor a political scientist. The reason I present the quote, "RFK builds a new coalition of the poor, the black and the young," is not to debate the accuracy of the statement, or debate the potential electoral power of that coalition had RFK not been assassinated. Instead, I wish to discuss the similarities between that vision of a governing progressive majority and the one we face as progressives today. As a descriptive term, "the poor, the black, and the young" welded together the major areas of leftist activism of the time. A coalition of "the poor," connects to the New Deal and Great Society form of governance, "the black" connections to the great civil rights struggles of the time, and "the young" connects to the huge wave of youth activism and culture that exploded in the 1960's as the Baby Boomer generation came of age. Whether or not this coalition would have been successful in 1968, and the degree to which it actually existed under RFK's campaign, are not nearly as relevant to our own time as much as the attempt to bring these constituencies, and great centers of activism, together under a single umbrella. This is because today, in the contemporary "fourth wave" manifestation of the progressive movement, we face a similar challenge in forging a coalition of the non-white, the GLBT, the unionized, and the non-Christian that, in different terms, comes close to the slogan used to describe RFK's 1968 coalition.
Like the formulation of RFK's coalition described above, a coalition of "the non-white, the GLBT, the unionized, and the non-Christian" is an umbrella term that not only identifies the four key constituencies that vote for Democrats by super-majority margins (to my knowledge, no other group outside of these four is all that close to a super-majority), but also describes four of the largest areas of progressive activism today: the immigrant rights movement, the gay rights movement, the new wave of union activism perhaps best personified by Change to Win (forgive me Judith) and, of course, the progressive netroots who overwhelmingly fit into the "non-Christian" category. Thus, these are the groups from which a progressive governing majority would not only draw the majority of its votes (already, Democrats draw about 65-70% of their votes from these four groups), but also from which their would draw the political resources and machinery to make that governing majority a reality. As such, I think a reasonably fair measure of the role of the contemporary progressive movement in the 2008 presidential campaign to measure who the Democratic voters in those groups are currently supporting, and if the candidates receiving that support are living up to the ideals of the progressive movement. In other words, has the progressive movement made enough of a connection with its potential electoral and activist base so that said base is only supporting candidates who support the ideals of the progressive movement? To put it a third way, around which candidate is our version of the RFK coalition most clearly forming, and do we consider that candidate to be "worthy" of that coalition?
Obviously, this is a huge and complex task, but in the extended entry let me take a quick whack at the first part, determining where the potential base of movement support currently rests:
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