Posts tagged with 'tpm'
Weekly Pulse: Bayh-Partisanship=Giving Your Seat to a Republican
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
You will be shocked, shocked to hear that a Blue Dog Democrat who made a career out of undermining his own party is sucker-punching them on his way out. Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana abruptly announced this week that he would not seek reelection in November. Bayh’s departure is ratcheting up insecurity in the Democratic caucus at the very moment they need to take decisive action to pass health care reform.
Bayh could easily have won a third term, but it’s unclear whether any other Democrat can hold the seat. To add insult to injury, Bayh waited until 24 hours before the filing deadline for Democratic primary candidates, sending Indiana Dems scrambling to find a candidate to run in his place. Bayh’s tardiness was calculated. Since no Democrats were ready to file by the deadline, the Indiana Democratic establishment will get to handpick Bayh’s successor.
In a call with state Democratic officials, Bayh said his abrupt departure is for the best, as Evan McMorris-Santoro reports for TPMDC. According to Bayh, he’s doing the party a favor by sparing them a contentious primary process. Thanks a lot.
What does this mean for health care reform?
What does Bayh’s departure portend for health care reform? Monica Potts of TAPPED argues that replacing a conservative Democrat like Bayh with a moderate Republican won’t make that much difference. Bayh was never a reliable Democratic vote.
But Tim Fernholtz of TAPPED dismisses this view as naive. Fernholtz predicts that, for all of Bayh’s faults, the senate will be much worse without him: “In essence, the difference between this insubstantial Hoosier and, say, [GOP hopeful] Dan Coats, is simple: You can buy off Bayh.” Bayh voted for health care reform and the stimulus, no Republican, no matter how “moderate” is going to vote that way.
Anyone who expects a moderate Republican from Indiana to support any part of the Democratic agenda is deluded. On the other hand, the Senate Democrats already passed their bill, their only remaining task would be to pass a “fix” through budget reconciliation to make changes in the legislation that would be acceptable to the House. Of course, reconciliation will be a bitter political fight. One wonders whether the demoralized Senate Democrats will have the stomach for it.
About that health care summit…
Note that congressional Republicans have yet to commit to attending the “bipartisan” health care summit that they called for. Christina Bellatoni of TPMDC reports that yesterday White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wondered why the Republicans were for the summit before they were against it:
“Right before the president issued the invitation, the—the thing that each of these individuals was hoping for most was an opportunity to sit down on television and discuss and engage on these issues. Now, not accepting an invitation to do what they’d asked the president to do, if they decide not to, I’ll let them leap the—leap the chasm there and try to explain why they’re now opposed to what they said they wanted most to do,” Gibbs said.
Busting the filibuster
On the bright side, the Democrats still have a sizable majority in the Senate, with or without Bayh. Republicans would have to beat all 10 vulnerable Democratic incumbent senators in the next election in order to regain control of the Senate. The more immediate threat to health care reform and the Democrats’ ability to govern in general is the institutional filibuster. Structural reform is needed to break the impasse. Lawyer and author Tom Geoghegan talks with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on strategies for busting the filibuster.
Public option resurfacing
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that four senate Democrats have thrown their lot in with progressives clamoring for a public option through reconciliation. Sens. Sherrod Brown (OH), Jeff Merkley (OR), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY) and Michael Bennet (CO) argue for the public option in an open letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid. The letter reads:
There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach – its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option….
Big pharma’s lobby
That’s nice, but let’s not forget who’s really in charge. In AlterNet, Paul Blumenthal recaps the sorry history of collusion between the White House, the pharmaceutical lobby group PhRMA, and the Senate. According to Blumenthal the White House steered pharmaceutical lobbyists directly to Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the powerful Finance Committee, who was entrusted with crafting the White House’s favored version of health care reform.
Abortion and health care reform
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, Nick Baumann of Mother Jones notes that the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) is making abortion is an obstacle to passing health care reform through reconciliation. The NRLC is insinuating that Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his coalition of anti-choice Democrats will vote against the Senate health care bill because it it’s slightly less restrictive of abortion than the bill the House passed. The good news is that it’s procedurally impossible to insert Stupak’s language into the Senate bill through reconciliation. The bad news is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) needs every vote she can get to pass the Senate bill and anti-choice hardliners could be an obstacle.
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.
Weekly Pulse: Who are Landrieu’s Alleged Phone Tamperers?
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The four young men arrested last week for allegedly attempting to tamper with the phones at the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) have ties to Republican politicians, conservative think tanks, radical campus activists, and even the intelligence community.
It appears that Landrieu was targeted, at least indirectly, because of her stance on health care reform. Two of the men posed as telephone repairmen while a third taped them with his cell phone. A fourth alleged accomplice was arrested in a car a few blocks away. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Healthcare Reform Without Kennedy
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
One of healthcare reform’s greatest champions died last night. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. During his 46-year career in the senate, Kennedy’s name appeared on virtually every major piece of progressive legislation from civil rights to economic justice, to healthcare. Kennedy called healthcare reform “the cause of my life.”
Jack Newfield of The Nation remembers Kennedy as the senate’s fighting liberal, the “best and most effective senator of the past hundred years.”
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones laments:
We are left with weak, squabbling, visionless Democratic puppets and a President whose domestic reform policies are adrift—sliding towards the horizon with each passing day.
The loss is a blow to healthcare reform. Alex Koppelman of Salon notes that with Kennedy’s passing, the Democrats have lost one of their most effective bipartisan deal-makers. Democrats will also be down a vote in the senate for the foreseeable future because Massachusetts state law doesn’t allow for the appointment of an immediate replacement.
Naturally, with congress on vacation, wackos are rushing in to fill the media vacuum. Eric Boehlert asks in AlterNet why Republicans the only ones allowed to get angry about healthcare reform, or anything else. He notes that in 2003, the media decided that Howard Dean was too angry for prime time. During the Republican National Convention in 2008, SWAT teams were sent to raid the homes of suspected anarchist protesters. And yet, conservative demonstrators in Arizona are allowed to tote rifles just outside the security perimeter of a presidential event.
RNC Chair Michael Steele raised eyebrows by championing single-payer healthcare in an op/ed in the Washington Post framing the GOP as defenders of Medicare.
Odd that Steele has so much love for Medicare, but none for the nation’s other leading source of government-run healthcare, the Veterans Administration (VA). This week, Steele accused America’s other leading public insurance provider of encouraging veterans to commit suicide, based on a booklet published by the VA which explains living wills, advanced directives and other key concepts in end-of-life care, Rachel Slajda reports for TPM DC.
Progressives have been doing a great job debunking the death panel and death book myths, like this creative photo essay from TPM. But we’re scarcely addressing the misconception that underlies them: The idea government-administered health insurance is inherently more prone to rationing than private health insurance.
Newt Gingrich and other prominent opponents of reform claim that a public option will restrict choices and deny care. What they don’t say is that for-profit insurance is rationing. When your insurance company covers an old drug for your condition, but not a new one with fewer side effects, that’s rationing. The company is restricting your treatment choices to improve its bottom line. When an employer or an insurer decides not to cover mental health care, that’s rationing. The entire business model is predicated on charging people more and giving them less care so there’s more money left over for the stockholders.
No health insurance can cover every treatment, no matter who runs it. But public insurance has two major advantages: 1) Public insurance tends to be cheaper to administer; 2) The tough choices about what to cover are ultimately in the hands of the voters, not health insurance bureaucrats with an eye on the bottom line.
The whole town hall concept is turning out to be a strategic blunder for the White House. The format makes legislators and the media sitting ducks for extremists and astroturfers who want to paint themselves as typical citizens. As Sandy Heierbacher of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation writes in YES Magazine:
[T]he town hall design sets the stage for activist groups and special interest groups to try to ‘game’ the system and sideline other concerned citizens in the process. As Martin Carcasson, director of Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation, recently pointed out, “the loudest voices are the ones that get heard, and typically the majority voices in the middle don’t even show up because it becomes a shouting match.”
How much more clear can the Republicans be? They are not interested in bipartisanship. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), supposedly the Senate’s leading reasonable Republican on healthcare, couldn’t even be bothered to rebuke a town hall participant who hinted about assassinating the president, as Raw Story reports.
If the Democrats want healthcare reform, they are going to have to go it alone. Let’s hope they pass a bill that would make Sen. Kennedy proud.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Pulse: Angry Mobs Demand Status Quo
by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
By now it’s clear that the Senate Finance Committe won’t cough up a heathcare bill before the summer recess. As Nick Bauman points out in Mother Jones, the delay is sure to sap momentum for reform. Worse, the break will give healthcare reform’s opponents more time to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Disinformation is already running wild.
Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent points to July 31 memo from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) entitled “A Very Hot Summer,” in which he announces that the GOP has launched an “entrepreneurial insurgency” against healthcare reform.
And now the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is openly celebrating the angry mobs of anti-reform protesters that are disrupting town hall meetings and shouting down pro-reform Democrats, as Eric Kleefeld of TPM DC notes. “Roaring Chants Interrupt Healthcare PR Campaign As Dems Lose Their Cool and Town Halls Turn Into ‘Town Hells’,” gloats one NRCC email message to reporters. This campaign’s official logo depicts a donkey being roasted alive (image at right) .
If the reformers used the NRCC’s playbook, reporters would be deluged with retaliatory tweets claiming that teabaggers are killing babies and raping old women, but facts are stubborn things. As of press time, the Pulse is not aware of any ritual sacrifices by teabaggers at townhall meetings.
Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly warns that the GOP’s strategy to egg on the wingnuts could have unintended consequences:
It’s probably the one angle the corporate interests and their lobbyists haven’t considered: the unintended consequences of rallying confused right-wing activists to shout down policymakers who’ll improve their health care coverage. Once you wind up the fanatics and point them in the direction of a town-hall meeting, you never really know what they’re going to say, do, wear, or hold. In at least one case at the Doggett event, there really was a sign with Nazi “SS” lettering.
Top Obama adviser David Axelrod denounced groups like Conservatives for Patients Rights for stoking the protesters. Axelrod pledged to aggressively combat misinformation about the Obama administration’s reform plan, as Rachel Slajda of TPM reports. Is it a coincidence that Axelrod was abruptly issued a Secret Service detail this week without explanation?
In the American Prospect, Paul Waldman describes how Republican members of Congress are promulgating the urban legend that the healthcare bill includes mandatory euthanasia:
In some tellings, government bureaucrats will visit the elderly to force them to choose their manner of death. In another, their doctors will be required to “tell them how to end their life sooner” (this one is being popularized by Betsy McCaughey, as despicable a merchant of lies as has ever slithered through our public debate). One GOP member of Congress after another has simply dispensed with all the complexity and said that the Democratic health plan will cause seniors to be “put to death by their government” or some variation thereof.
The rumor grew out of a provision to reimburse doctors for end-of-life care, including discussions of living wills, as Waldman explains.
Speaking of misinformation, Rep. Kent Sorenson (R-Iowa) is tweeting nonsense about a shadowy healthcare commissioner who decide’s everything for you, as Jason Hancock of the Iowa Independent reports. “Page 42 healthcare bill ‘Health Choices Commissioner’ will decide health benefits for you. You will have NO choice,” Sorenson breathlessly informed his followers. In fact, according to an analysis by the Pullitzer Prize-winning website PoliFact, the healthcare commissioner would regulate insurance companies to make sure they don’t exclude people for preexisting conditions.
At the rate misinformation is mutating, perhaps Republicans will have convinced themselves that the bill will create Health Care Commissar who will involuntarily euthanize you and make your grandmother have an abortion by tomorrow morning.
Congress will return from summer break on September 4. Expect heated rhetoric and increasingly frenzied political theater in the weeks ahead.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Healthcare: Out with the Old, In with the New
Because if it bleeds, it leads… Sarah van Schagen rates the environmental impact of feminine hygiene products for Grist.
In all seriousness, this has been a very exciting week in healthcare news. The Bush administration is racing to take away as many reproductive rights as it can before leaving office. The Democrats in Congress are taking the lead on healthcare reform by writing up their own proposal before president Obama takes the Oath of Office.
Last week, Sen. Max Baucus unveiled a detailed proposal to provide health insurance for all Americans. Brian Cook has a roundup of reactions.
Note that the Baucus plan is by no means a call for radical change. The blueprint proposes to fix the healthcare system with the same piecemeal strategies that get trotted out every time Americans talk about healthcare reform. The stated goal is to enable more people to buy “affordable” private health insurance while expanding Medicare and Medicaid for the poor and the elderly.
Why such timidity? As Josh Marshall argues at TPM, Obama’s election is a mandate for fundamental structural change in the healthcare system.
The fact is, majority of Americans support single-payer health insurance, even if they’d have to pay higher taxes. Daina Saib reports in YES! that even Republicans are getting on board. Saib introduces us to an unlikely champion of single-payer, Dr. Rocky White, conservative Christian and former Republican who started advocating for single payer when the system made his own practice unmanageable.
As we talk about the dire state of the Big Three automakers, remember that the Canadian auto industry stays competitive because the government takes care of health care, unlike in the ‘States where automakers and unions are struggling to pay for it.
Ezra Klein gives us a crash course two strategic approaches to healthcare reform. He explains that there are two basic schools of thought: delivery system reform and financing reform. Delivery reformers hope to make the system work better by bringing down costs and delivering better value for money. Financing reformers focus on how we’re going to pay for it all. The Baucus blueprint is financing reform. Repealing Medicare Plan D would be delivery reform.
These two approaches are complimentary. Ezra writes: “[T]he two agendas fit neatly in a comprehensive reform package. Coverage expansion isn’t sustainable unless cost growth is slowed. Cost growth can’t be slowed without delivery system reform.” He notes that The Center for American Progress has a new, free, book on healthcare reform, available for download, here.
The Bush administration is weighing an eleventh hour rules change that could prevent women on Medicaid from receiving birth control and deny rape victims emergency contraception and push the country one step closer to theocracy.
The proposed rule would prevent any entity that receives federal funds (e.g., hospitals, universities, etc.) to require employees to “assist in the performance of any part of a health service program or research activity” financed by the Department of Health and Human Services” or participate in abortions or sterilizations if these activities offend their religious or moral convictions.
President-elect Obama has already spoken out against the proposed rules change.
Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones notes that civil rights law already protects employees from discrimination on the basis of religion. In fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that enforces the federal employment discrimination law, is strenuously objecting to the new rules because they would create an absolute right to religious accommodation, as opposed to the balance between employer and employee that exists under current law.
With Sarah Palin back in Wasilla, we thought we’d heard the last about victims paying for their own rape kits. Not so fast. While the Violence Against Women Act forbids victim-pay rape kits for civilians, women in the armed services may not enjoy the same protections.
Penny Coleman, writing in AlterNet, explains: “TRICARE, the United States Department of Defense Military Health System that covers active duty members, will only pay for rape kits if the victim is seen in a military or a VA facility.” However, service women are being seen in a non-VA facility in the USA, they shouldn’t be paying for their rape kits, thanks to VAWA. This shouldn’t be happening.
Another sobering statistic: The US military loses the equivalent of a brigade of veterans to suicide each year–yet more evidence that mental health parity should be a priority in health care reform.
Finally, Stephanie Losee interviews Valerie Frankel, the author of Thin is the New Happy, a memoir about coming to terms with weight and body image in an appearance-obsessed society.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. And for the best progressive reporting on the ECONOMY, and IMMIGRATION, check out, Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.