Joe Lieberman is not the only right-wing member of the Democratic caucus demanding further concessions from all other 59 members of the group. Ben Nelson has joined the fray:
Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson - the moderate Democrat whose opposition is holding up the Senate's health care bill - says new language on abortion doesn't satisfy his concerns.(...)
Nelson says without further changes the compromise isn't sufficient.(...)
But Nelson said abortion wasn't his only concern and he didn't see how the Christmas deadline could be met.
I wonder if another order will come down from the White House for everyone else in the Senate Democratic caucus to cave to Ben Nelson:
Granted, Nelson has not said that he will filibuster, which puts his threat in the same, vague, gray area as the Sanders and Burris threats. More clarification when it comes.
Update--Nelson will vote no on cloture: Here is the clarification:
"If it's not at the point where I think it needs to be with the improvements that I'm pushing -- and they've made a lot of them -- then I will not vote for cloture on the motion to end debate," Nelson said in an interview on KLIN radio in Nebraska.
Even if Nelson stays firm in this position, and even if no changes are made to the bill, it is still possible the bill could pass without his support. As noted earlier today, Olympia Snowe is signaling she might vote yes.
Update 2--Will Ben Nelson be attacked by the White House now?Good question from Jed Lewison. I am sure the strong pushback against Ben Nelson from the White House will begin in 3, 2, 1...
The basic state of play on the health care bill right now is that Congressional backlash against the Lieberman deal is growing, and that there will not be a bill sent to President Obama's desk by Christmas. Here is what is going on:
Quite a few progressive bloggers are arguing that the individual mandate will prove to be unpopular, and hold long-term, negative political consequences for Democrats. Current polling on the individual mandate is all over place, some showing strong support, some showing strong opposition (PDF, page 17), and some showing a split nation. This wide variation is due not only to wording, but also because people don't really understand the policy of the mandates yet, as Kaiser polling revealed in October. Still, even though the situation is in flux, I think those who argue that the individual mandate will ultimately have a negative political affect are largely correct.
The only place where I disagree, or would at least like to expand upon, those arguments, is to assert that every outcome to the health care fight will have severely negative political consequences for the Democratic Party. There is no happy political ending at this point; it is a matter of picking your poison.
In the extended entry, I provide a quick summary of possible outcomes.
Yesterday, I argued that if progressive organizations and members were able to successfully defeat the health care bill, the main short-term political ramification would be a much tougher road for progressive and Progressive candidates in congressional primaries in 2010. This conclusion is based on the White House's demonstrated willingness to play hardball against Progressives / progressives, and the ongoing support that the White House--and its policies--have among the Democratic and liberal rank and file.
If Progressives and progressives were to defeat the health care bill, it would provide an opening for the White House--which has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to enter into primaries--to outflank progressive and Progressive candidates in primaries with more right-wing candidates. With the backing of the White House, those more right-wing candidates could argue against progressive and Progressive candidates who opposed the health care bill, and as a result win the liberal, Democratic rank and file that still overwhelmingly supports both the bill and the White House.
This is a seriously f*cked up situation for progressive groups and candidates who have legitimate concerns about the effects of the Senate health care bill. They seem to be trapped, and the White House knows it. Take, for example, anonymous White House sources on Howard Dean, who yesterday came out in opposition to the Senate health care bill:
Mika Brzezinski: I won't name names, but I heard it from several people in the Administration: Howard Dean, very not pleased, with Dr. Dean speaking out about health care reform and this plan.
Savannah Guthrie: Yeah, very irritated. Yes, isn't it fascinating they don't seem to be too angry at Lieberman, they're reserving their fervor for Howard Dean, but actually, one senior official who I talked to this morning paid the highest insult which was to call him irrelevant to the entire health care debate.
Cornered progressives in Congress, such as Senator Russ Feingold, are starting to vent their frustration:
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.
"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don't think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."
Rep. Anthony Weiner piles on:
"Snowe? Stupak? Lieberman? Who left these people in charge? It's time for the President to get his hands dirty. Some of us have compromised our compromised compromise. We need the President to stand up for the values our party shares. We must stop letting the tail wag the dog of this debate."
As Adam Green argued to Matthew Yglesias yesterday, there were quite a few ways that President Obama and the White House could have played hardball with conservative Democrats on the health care bill. Instead, what we are getting is hardball against Progressives to cave against the likes of Lieberman and his ilk. We should not have expected anything less from a White House where Rahm Emanuel has so much power, given that he has long been the enforcer of the will of moderate and conservative Democrats in Congress.
The White House has enormous potential leverage against either progressive or conservative Democrats in Congress. Far more often than not, they have chosen to use that leverage against progressives, but not against conservatives. This puts progressive organizations that seek to block moves by the White House in the almost impossible position of having to out-organize the Obama administration among the self-identified liberal and Democratic rank and file.
As one of the leading left-wing critics of the Obama administration's transition appointments in November and December of 2008, I am intimately familiar with the isolation that such opposition can create. If I had a solution for it, I would have implemented it by now. However, as I said yesterday, the only solution I can think of right now is to sit out the remaining health care fight, not attack the progressives who are trying to defeat the health care bill, "hang out in the tall grass for a while" and look ahead to future fights. I know that is pretty dissatisfying, but it is the best I can think of right now.
In search of the elusive, filibuster-proof 60th vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid eviscerated the Senate's health care reform bill on Tuesday. Potential GOP swing voter Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) confirmed that Reid promised to kill both the public option and the expanded Medicare buy-in, according to Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo.
Snowe didn't pledge to support the bill, of course. She didn't even promise to cooperate on the procedural votes required to pass the bill before Christmas, a deadline that the Obama administration has its heart set on. In other words, Reid gave away the progressive crown jewels of health reform on spec to a senator who cheerfully turned around and continued the Republican stalling strategy. From Snowe's vantage point, that's a great move. The longer the bill hangs in limbo, the more Reid will give away.
Former Democrat Joe Lieberman (I-CT) seems determined to kill the bill. Lieberman must be motivated more by a desire to spite liberals than any principled policy stance. He keeps threatening to filibuster policy proposals he once campaigned on, like the Medicare buy-in. Lee Fang of TAPPED notes that Lieberman told the New York Times that he now opposes the buy-in because it's beloved of lefty single-payer types like Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY); and the policy wonk behind the public option, Prof. Jacob Hacker.
The Women's Media Center has launched the #UnderTheBus campaign, which calls on supporters to contact their representatives and urge them not to let Lieberman and his close, anti-choice ally Ben Nelson (D-NE) sell out women's health care for political gain. Nelson has hinted he won't vote for the bill unless it contains strong abortion funding restrictions.
Stephanie Mencimer reports in Mother Jones that a bunch of teabaggers decided to stage a sit-in to oppose the health bill at Lieberman's office. Mark Meckler and some Tea Party Patriots showed up at Lieberman's office and asked to meet with the senator. When they were told he wasn't available, they all sat down. When they tried that routine at Sen. Barbara Boxer's office (D-CA), her staff ignored them. Lieberman's staff called the cops. (Note to teabaggers: Sit-ins are for enemies, not allies.)
The senate bill is so watered down that it wouldn't even stop insurance companies from capping benefits, as Roger Bybee reports at Working In These Times.
Former congressional candidate Darcy Burner says she'd rather see the bill die than have it pass in its current state. She argues that if health care reform doesn't curb costs, it's just a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. She writes in AlterNet:
The fundamental failing of the newest Senate proposal is that it requires individuals to purchase health insurance, but does nothing to rein in what insurance companies charge. There is nothing to stop spiraling health costs from eating up an ever-increasing percentage of our national productivity.
The House bill has two major cost-control mechanisms: the public option and the 85 percent medical-loss ratio requirement. The Senate bill is on track to have neither, and nothing new to replace them. The Senate bill is a recipe for national disaster. If it's that bill or nothing, I prefer nothing.
Adding insult to injury, the Senate also voted down a bill yesterday that would have made it easier for consumers to purchase cheaper prescription drugs abroad. Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent suggests that the White House was relieved to see the Dorgan-Snowe bill defeated because it would have violated the deal it struck with pharmaceutical companies earlier this year. The drug companies promised up to $80 billion for health care reform if Democratic leaders withheld support for several initiatives that would cut into drug company profits.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
I said it the other day, and I feel the need to repeat it: the public does not yet understand that the government is about to order people to buy health insurance, with their own money. Yes, the government is about to order people to cough up hundreds of dollars a month each.
When the Republicans start using their toxic message-machine magic on this, and the public starts to understand that they are being ordered by the government to cough up a huge amount of money every month, Democrats had better have good hiding places, because things are going to get really bad out there.
This is the kind of policy that results when "centrist" Democrats give in to to the demands of Republicans and big corporations and the top 1% of the wealthy. Instead of just taxing the wealthy and corporations at reasonable rates and using the money to provide We, the People with health care -- thereby vastly improving the economy for ... the wealthy and big corporations -- they instead come up with a scheme to order regular people to pay for health insurance because they don't already have it because they can't afford it.
Now it is December and the current health care reform bill orders everyone to buy very expensive insurance from the big corporations, with no public option and no Medicare buy-in. Even if you are in the income range where you receive subsidies you have to pay "only" 9 or 10% of your income, at a time when people are runnng up credit cards just to get by as it is. That is with the subsidies. Above that level you pay more.
The public hasn't really tuned into this yet, but if this passes and Republicans start working their toxic magic (with of course little or no organized effort by Dems to counter their lies and sell it to the public) I expect this will be as unppular as Bush's bailout of the big financial firms, which the Republicans have largely engineered the public into thinking was Obama's, just as they did with the Bush deficits.
So I think that when all these factors come into play for the next election, passing this will turn out to be suicide for the Democrats who hold office. They don't see that because at this point are in a mindset that the public wants them to just get it over with and pass anything.
During the public option fight, I didn't focus much on the political ramifications of the health care bill. But now, with that fight seemingly over, and my attentions turning toward electing more Progressives / progressives in 2010, I give it a shot in the extended entry.
On the eve of what was thought to be, perhaps, a sign of progress in the six-decade long health care reform debate, joblessness mounts. Depression increases. The intensity of illness is on the rise. Few if any can afford to visit a doctor. People are unemployed, under-employed, and if an individual has an income, hours are reduced. There is barely enough to pay the most basic bills. let alone insurance premiums. Yet, staffers have been asked, no told, by business owners, workers must pay a larger portion of their health care coverage. Bosses bellow in unison; with profits down, certainly the corporations cannot continue to offer perks. Medical indemnities are a privilege, not a guarantee. If you feel ill, if you are injured, take two pills and call no one in the morning.
Do not dare telephone the Democrats. They have made their peace with the health care crisis. Republicans will not respond to the cries of a public, and Independents are, as you know independent! The decree; health care reform was dead on arrival.
The Huffington Post originally reported that Rahm Emanuel told Harry Reid to cave into Joe Lieberman's demands. TPMDC backed up the story, and went even further:
Then the aide provided more detail.
Emanuel didn't just leave it to Reid to find a solution. Emanuel specifically suggested Reid give Lieberman the concessions he seeks on issues like the Medicare buy-in and triggers.
"It was all about 'do what you've got to do to get it done. Drop whatever you've got to drop to get it done," the aide said. All of Emanuel's prescriptions, the source said, were aimed at appeasing Lieberman--not twisting his arm.
I contacted a Senate aide to further confirm the story. When I asked the aide if the Huffington Post and TPMDC stories were true, the aide responded "absolutely."
Further, the aide confirmed that Joe Lieberman is lying (I'm not exaggerating the language). Immediately after the Gang of Ten struck a deal on the public option, Harry Reid contacted Lieberman to hear his thoughts. Lieberman indicated that he was liking what he was seeing, and just wanted to wait for the CBO score. For him to change without the CBO score is mendacity, pure and simple.
Finally, the aide also said that this is still about saving lives. We keep talking about cost, but this bill still saves lives. For all of its tremendous disappointments, the aide kept emphasizing that the bill saves lives. This shows, if nothing else, that Alan Grayson's messaging appears to have won the day for Democrats.
I don't really know what to think right now. Too angry to think straight. After a very long campaign, we had appeared to secure a deal that I thought was acceptable. We promptly get stabbed in the back by none other than Joe Lieberman (and the CBO, btw), and then just as promptly told by the White House to accept it all.
The cloture motion on health care reform will be filed either tomorrow or Thursday, setting up a vote two days later. With a very crowded legislative schedule, and demands from the White Hosue to pass the bill in 2009, there really isn't any other option. My bet is that Olympia Snowe will probably vote for the bill now, as will Roland Burris. All of this makes even the unlikely prospect of a no vote from Bernie Sanders on the cloture motion irrelevant. Barring further mendacity, this bill now has sixty votes.
The next step will be the conference committee, unless the White House demands that also gets thrown in the trash to appease Lieberman, or Nelson, or whoever.
First, Senate Democrats struck a deal on the public option that included a Medicare buy-in and a requirement that 90% of the money insurance companies received from premiums be spent on health care. The agreement was directly negotiated by three of the four Senate Democrats who said they would filibuster health care reform with a public option: Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, and Ben Nelson. Joe Lieberman had also been vocally supportive of the Medicare buy-in.
Senate Democrats emerged from a special caucus meeting Monday night determined to pass a health-care bill by Christmas -- but without the Medicare buy-in plan that liberals had sought as an alternative to a government insurance option.
It is likely that nothing will happen to Lieberman as a result of this.
But wait--it gets worse! The CBO has declared that if Congress passes a law stating that insurance companies must spend 90% of the money they receive on premiums on actual health care, then it is the same thing as nationalizing the entire industry. This means they would score a bill with a 90% medical loss ratio in the several trillion dollar range, thus killing the bill politically.
The Senate will not pass a public option. It will not pass a Medicare buy-in. It will not mandate a 90% medical loss ratio. Ugh. This deal keeps getting worse all the time.
A new report from the Huffington Post claims that Rahm Emanuel told Harry Reid to cave to Lieberman's double-cross, and just pass anything:
Rahm Emanuel visited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in his Capitol office on Sunday evening and personally urged him to cut a deal with recalcitrant Sen. Joe Lieberman, two Democratic sources familiar with the situation said.
Some readers may not accept reports from anonymous sources. However, consider that if any Senate aide put their name to a report about Rahm s/he would be fired instantly and faced an immediate end to his or her career. The White House deny the report anyway, the vast majority of die-hard Obama administrations believe the White House anyway, and the aide would have been reviled by huge numbers of rank and file Dems. In short, if an aide had been willing to attach his or her name to the report, it wouldn't have changed anything, except ruining the aide's life.
Further, it fits into a broader pattern of Rahm Emanuel protecting conservative Democrats in Congress at all costs. For example, it was Rahm Emanuel who argued against more strident tactics on ending the Iraq war, because he thought it would hurt conservative Dems. It was Rahm Emanuel who organized freshmen Dems to vote against their own caucus on motions to recommit, to try and protect conservative Dems from Republican attack ads. It was Rahm Emanuel that conservative Democrats worried about leaving the House, as they publicly whined about a more progressive House leadership. It was Rahm Emanuel who castigated progressive groups for attacking conservative Democrats. It is Rahm Emanuel that conservative Democrats still long for, whenever they complain about Nancy Pelosi. Above all else, Emanuel has always been about defending conservative Democrats no matter the consequences to the rest of the party. Unsurprisingly, the conservative Dems in congress love him for that.
Last year, The White House told Democratic Senators to cave and allow Lieberman to keep his chairmanship. They dutifully complied. Now, the White House is again telling the entire caucus to cave to Lieberman, and once again it looks like they are going to comply:
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) just walked walked into the Democrats all-important caucus meeting tonight sounding defeatest about the chance that a Medicare buy-in or public option trigger will survive Sen. Joe Lieberman's (I-CT) decision to block the compromises this weekend.
Asked by a reporter if the Medicare buy-in will be pulled out, Harkin said "looks that way," before praising a Democratic health care bill without the two public option compromises.
Earlier today, Matthew Yglesias argued that Matt Taibbi's criticism of the Obama administration on financial policy is off because Congress largely has purview over that policy. Instead, the Obama administration should be criticized for those areas of policy over which it has more direct control:
If you want to complain about the Obama administration, you should complain about their conduct of issues they actually have control over. Foreign policy and the war in Afghanistan, for example.
However, these two Lieberman incidents show that the Obama administration does, in fact, have a lot of influence over many Democrats in Congress on virtually all issues.
By picking Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, President Obama immediately signaled that the White House was not going to use this influence against conservative Democrats in Congress who sought to water down the Democratic agenda. Then again, as I pointed out last night, Democrats in Congress also don't seem interested in putting pressure on the more conservative members of their caucus who seek to water down the Democratic agenda. At the highest levels of the Democratic Party, no pressure ever seems to be applied to conservative Democrats who seek to water down the Democratic agenda.
Whatever pressure is applied is going to have to come from the grassroots. However, there are limits to what pressure we can apply on our own, as Matt Stoller articled in his farewell post on Open Left. Clearly, one year later, we still have a long way to go on solving the Rootsgap. Despite everything that has happened, we are still in a very difficult environment for passing progressive legislation.
Here is a video of Lieberman supporting a Medicare-buy in only three months ago:
Greg Sargent has a transcript:
"My proposals were to basically expand the existing successful public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid...
"When it came to Medicare I was very focused on a group - post 50, maybe more like post 55. People who have retired early, or unfortunately have been laid off early, who lose their health insurance and they're too young to qualify for Medicare.
"What I was proposing was that they have an option to buy into Medicare early and again on the premise that that would be less expensive than the enormous cost. If you're 55 or 60 and you're without health insurance and you go in to try to buy it, because you're older ... you're rated as a risk so you pay a lot of money."
For Lieberman's part, he is calling people who claim he has flip-flopped on this issue cowards:
"Contrary to the claims of anonymous aides, Senator Lieberman told Reid on Friday that he had problems with the Medicare provision," Lieberman spokesman Marshall Wittman said in a statement.
"This position was also told to negotiators earlier in the week. Consequently, Senator Lieberman's position came as no surprise to the Democratic leadership. Any contrary charge by aides who cowardly seek to hide under the cloak of anonymity is false and self-serving," he added.
This Lieberman statement was specifically in response to anonymous Senate aides who had claimed Lieberman told Harry Reid that he was supportive of a Medicare buy-in. Given that Lieberman told the public that he was supportive of the Medicare buy-in only three months ago, it is pretty easy to see who is lying on this one.
Meanwhile, Politico reports that the White House is telling Reid to cave to Lieberman. However, the White House is telling Greg Sargent that is not true.
There is rightly a lot of focus on how Joe Lieberman is acting in bad faith on the health care bill. He apparently had told Reid he was open to the deal, and he supported a Medicare buy-in only three months ago. However, it is wroth noting that he isn't the only one. Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, and Ben Nelson haven't exactly been consistent and forthcoming in their dealings on the public option, either.
Mary Landrieu. Landrieu has said she is a no vote on the public option for for quite some time, instead demanding a trigger:
Count Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) as a "no" vote on the public insurance option.
"I am not open to a public option, however I will remain open to a compromise - a full compromise," Landrieu told reporters Tuesday. "A public option is not something I support i don't think its the right way to go."
However, not long before she said that she opposed the public option, she said that she supported it. Landrieu signed a statement with Health Care for America Now, celaring the following:
Our government's responsibility is to guarantee quality affordable health care for everyone in America and it must play a central role in regulating, financing, and providing health coverage by establishing...
A choice of a private insurance plan, including keeping the insurance you have if you like it, or a public insurance plan without a private insurer middleman that guarantees affordable coverage.
But hey, what do promises like that mean to Mary Landrieu, given that she is not up for re-election again until 2014?
Blanche Lincoln. On November 21st, Blanche Lincoln declared on the floor of the Senate that she would filibuster any bill with a public option:
I have already alerted the Leader, and I am promising my colleagues that I am prepared to vote against moving to the next stage of consideration as long as a government-run public option is included.
Another with Landrieu, Lincoln also signed the HCAN statement supporting a public option.
Ben Nelson: Last week, Ben Nelson was one of the ten Senate Democrats tasked by Harry Reid with developing a compromise solution on the public option. Their eventual deal included a Medicare buy-in.
And yet, as Greg Sargent notes, Ben Nelson is still raising red flags about the Medicare buy-in on national television:
"I am concerned that it's the forerunner of single payer, the ultimate single-payer plan, maybe even more directly than the public option," he said.
This is even though Nelson himself was one of a very small group of Senators who actually developed the Medicare buy-in compromise. Nice. If you are going to strike a deal, then defend that deal.
All four of these Senators have acted on bad faith in the public option. If they were consistent, at the very least we should have 60 votes for a Medicare buy-in for the Senate bill. They all recently supported such a buy-in.
To no one's surprise (but certainly to my disappointment), Joe Lieberman has now told Harry Reid that he will filibuster any health care bill with a Medicare buy-in or a public option (emphasis mine):
Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) informed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a face-to-face meeting on Sunday that he will vote against a health care bill that includes a public option or a provision that would expand Medicare, a Democrat Senate aide tells the Huffington Post.
The two Senators had a discussion in Reid's office shortly after Lieberman appeared on CBS's Face the Nation Sunday morning. The Connecticut Independent discussed with Reid some of his concerns about the legislation, elaborating on issues he had raised during the show. According to the source, who was briefed on the exchange, Lieberman punctuated the discussion by telling the majority leader directly that he would vote against the bill if the Medicare buy-in and public option provisions remained in it. Roll Call reports that Lieberman said he would also support a Republican filibuster of legislation that included these provisions.
This is a reversal of Lieberman's position when the deal was struck:
A Senate Democratic aide, flummoxed by Mr. Lieberman's stance, said, "It was a total flip-flop and leaves us in a predicament as to what to do."
Lieberman flip-flipped because he can. No matter what Lieberman does, the majority of the Democratic Senate caucus won't do anything about it. Here is a quick review:
When Lieberman blows up a hard-fought deal on health care legislation, the Senate Democratic leadership immediately declares that circumventing Lieberman through reconciliation is still not on the table:
The final path would be to try the reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure that would allow Democrats to pass chunks of health care reform by a simple up or down vote. There are a host of hurdles that come with going down this route, including questions over what, exactly, could be passed. And at this point both the White House and Reid's office seem hesitant to use the procedural tool, even after Lieberman's latest round of opposition.
"It is not on the table at this point," the source said. "We are still trying to go through regular order."
If it is not on the table at this point, it is hard to imagine when it ever will be.
Nothing Lieberman is doing would be possible without the ongoing support of the majority of the Democratic caucus. If Democratic Senators wanted to punish Lieberman for his consistent transgressions against the party, they could. If Democrats wanted to use reconciliation, and just circumvent him altogether, they could do that to. But they are not going to do either.
As such, Lieberman is simply taking the power that is being handed to him by the rest of the caucus. Since he knows that Senate Democrats won't ever punish him, and won't ever circumvent him, he now has free reign to dictate whatever legislation he wants, get tons of face time with the White House and Senate leadership, regularly be the top story on news outlets around the country, receive millions in campaign contributions, and appease his Republican base (at this point, most of Lieberman's supporters are Republicans). It is a great deal for Lieberman, and it would not be possible without the ongoing consent of the majority of the Democratic Senate caucus.
Since we have already defeated Lieberman in a Democratic primary, there is nothing more severe we can do as progressive activists to directly threaten Lieberman. What we need to start doing is taking action against the Democrats who enable Lieberman and his ilk. If other Senate Democrats are not going to do anything about Lieberman taking control of the entire caucus, then really, what is the difference between those other Senators and Joe Lieberman?
Never thought I would echo George W. Bush, but we have reached the point where it is time to stop differentiating between problematic Senators like Joseph Lieberman and the other Senate Democrats who enable them.
Moments ago on the Senate floor, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts compared health care reform to a pivotal moment in American history. Of the following five options, can you tell us which it was...
A) The passage of the Social Security Act
B) Pearl Harbor
C) Man walking on Moon
D) Balloon Boy
E) None of the above
Click here to submit your guess on what Pat Roberts compared health care reform too!
If you get it right, you'll get a sneak peek of the new KDP website. (trust me, you'll want to see it!)
P.S. The answer and video is below, but we'll trust you! ;)
Over the next few decades, the United Sates’ Latino population is estimated to triple, comprising about 29% of US residents. At the same time, voters of Latin descent made up 7.4% of the electorate. In a continuing effort to better understand the attitudes and values of Latinos as expressed in survey studies in the past, we rounded up below findings from recent months.
The Pew Hispanic Center released today a new survey of Latinos focusing especially on young people who are ages 16 to 25. The survey explores the “attitudes, values, social behaviors, family characteristics, economic well-being, educational attainment and labor force outcomes of these young Latinos”. We will look more carefully at this study in one of our upcoming blog postings, but we wanted to bring attention to the racial identification of Latinos in this survey, in case it’s taken out of context in the various coverage of the study. Three out of four Latinos don’t identify themselves as white in the race question (“What race do you consider yourself to be: white, black or African- American, Asian, or some other race?”), or they volunteer that their race is Hispanic or Latino, although based on the U.S. Census these terms are used to describe ethnicity. This finding is consistent with what we see in studies of Latinos every day. The questions usually asked and response choices offered to identify the respondent’s ethnicity and race are not aligned with the way Latinos think about race.
When thinking about how to make the health care bill better, at this point there are two main questions:
What can be done to make either Lieberman or Snowe support better legislation? At this point, it appears we only need either Lieberman or Snowe to achieve a health care deal with vast Medicaid expansion, smallish Medicare buy-in, moderate subsidies, and a new regulatory regime. Keeping in mind that there are many fights left to be had, and Mike's warning that no deal is final until it lands on the President's desk, for all intents and purposes only one more vote is needed to pass this bill. That vote, unfortunately, needs to come from either Lieberman or Snowe.
OR, if that fails
What can be done to circumvent the need for 60 votes altogether? If the current framework of the Senate compromise is not good enough for you, and you would only be willing to support something better, then you need to figure out a way to circumvent the need for 60 votes altogether. A 51-vote Senate would produce a bill comparable, and perhaps even better, than the one produced by the House. Achieving a 51-vote Senate requires either reconciliation or nuking the filibuster entirely.
Of all the critics of the various campaigns for better health legislation, they don't advance the campaign unless they offer solutions for the current predicament we face. We can save the broader post-mortems on how the fight could have been waged differently from the beginning for later. Right now, we need to deal with the problem at hand, rather than look into the past.
I personally don't have particularly comprehensive answers to either of those two questions. In the extended entry, I describe what strategies I can think of for getting to 51 votes, and for pressuring Lieberman and Snowe. Hopefully, the discussion that ensues can lead to something more comprehensive.
According to the CBO report on the health care bill Harry Reid sent to the floor of the Senate, the opt-out public option would have taken in $134 billion in revenue from 2014 to 2019 (see page 5 of the report).
That $134 billion, or more, will likely now go to private insurance companies. As such, why aren't the insurance companies paying the 44 Senators who said they would filibuster a public option (all 40 Republicans, plus Landrieu, Lieberman, Lincoln and Ben Nelson) an appropriate finder's fee for the massive amount of revenue they will generate for those companies?
I did some poking around looking for industry standard on finder's fees. Something around 3% of the deal seems to be normal:
from an investment banking perspective, 3% of value has long been a thumb rule used by M&A; advisors. It may go up to much higher (~10% even) depending on how important the the organization views this deal to its future; complexity and expertise provided around jurisdictions, tax law, IP, funding and other factors.
This is certainly a find of major, long-term value to the insurance companies, so perhaps something more than a 3% finder's fee would be warranted. But hey, we are talking public officials here, and don't want to raise a whiff of corruption, so let's be modest and keep it at 3%.
3% of $134 billion is $4.02 billion. Divided 44 ways, that comes out to nearly $91.4 million per Senator ($91,363,636.36, to be precise). Quite a windfall for those Senators.
However, it would appear that the insurance industry has only contributed just under $11.8 million to all federal candidates so far in 2009. It will have contributed far less to each of the 44 Senators that just made them hundreds of billions.
What a bunch of chumps these Senators are. They go and make hundreds of billions of dollars for the insurance industry, and don't even bother to collect an appropriate finder's fee. Some believers in the free market, they are.
The largest public option in the health care bills is, and has always been, the significant expansion of Medicaid. In terms of the number of people it covers, this expansion dwarfs any other public option expansion currently on the table in Congress. In terms of the type of people it covers, the Medicaid expansion includes a much higher percentage of Americans who are uninsured, and a much higher percentage of Americans who are in poverty, than any other public option expansion on the table in Congress.
The CBO report on the bill passed by the House (PDF, page 11), and the CBO report on the bill that was sent to the floor of the Senate (PDF, page 20), both project that the bills will add 15 million more Medicaid subscribers than current law. All of those 15 million are at 150% of the national poverty level or lower in the House bill, and 133% or lower in the Senate bill. Also, virtually all of the new people who will be covered by Medicaid in both bills are uninsured.
By comparison, the Medicare +5% public option was projected to cover 10 million people, the negotiated rates public option that passed the House was projected to cover 6 million people, and the opt-out public option was projected to cover 3-4 million people. Even in the July version of the House bill, the Medicaid expansions were projected to cover 11 million new people (PDF, page 17), larger than any of the other public option expansions reviewed by the CBO. As such, at all times, the Medicaid expansion was the largest expansion to public health insurance in the various bills that passed through Congressional committees.
Providing 15 million low-income, uninsured Americans with public health insurance is also why so few House Progressives carried through on their earlier threat to sink any health care bill without a new public option program tied to Medicare rates. After all, House Progressives both want to help people in poverty, and they disproportionately represent districts that would have been impacted by the new Medicaid coverage. It would have been difficult for House Progressives to explain to their constituents why they denied them health care, especially when the only electoral pressure most Progressives face comes from primary challenges.
There is another reason any Progressive explanation for defeating the bill would have been difficult. In their July 30th letter, House Progressives were advocating for a Medicare +5% public option, which would have covered 10 million people, to be added to a bill with a Medicaid expansion that, at the time, covered 11 million people. Such a bill would have increased the number of people with public health insurance by the exact same amount as the bill that eventually passed the House (15 million through the Medicaid expansion and 6 million through the negotiated rate public option in the exchange). In both pieces of legislation, 21 million more people are covered with public health insurance.
Defeating the vast Medicaid expansion is the pill House and Senate Progressives have been unable to swallow. If you want to know why Progressives in the House and Senate are not blocking the bill, Medicaid expansion is the reason.
In their quest to get votes, the Democratic leadership seems to have accurately calculated that a Medicaid expansion would lock in Progressives throughout the process. It would have been nice if they could have figured out something palatable that would have locked in all the Blue Dogs and Conservadems from the start, too.
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