Christopher Hayes has a very interesting article up over at washingtonmonthly.com, exploring how the realities of two issues -- universal health care, and global warming -- are driving wedges between large corporations, and the conservative ideologues currently in control of the Republican Party. The complete title should grab your attention (it did mine): Revolt of the CEOs: A massive expansion of the federal government, supported by big business, is on the way. Conservatives couldn't be less prepared.
There’s more downstairs.
Business executives, Hayes observes, have been reluctantly forced by reality to three conclusions. First, the out-of-control costs of providing health care for employees has become a serious threat to the very survival of their companies, let alone their profits. Second, global warming is indeed a serious problem, and the longer society dawdles in doing something about it, the less palatable the possible solutions are going to be. This second conclusion rather foreshadows the third: If business executives remain adamantly opposed to even agreeing that these issues are problems, and society is finally forced to do something about these issues, there is a good chance that business is not going to like the decisions made. As Bruce Josten, a top lobbyist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Hayes
You want a seat at the table, because if you’re not at the table you may be on the menu.
Conservatives, Hayes writes,
are almost completely unprepared for this tsunami of federal growth. Unless they can get business back on their side, or win back power, they’ll be in a position neither to stop this development nor to shape it. Indeed, right now they seem blithely unaware of what’s about to hit them.... Republicans, weighed down by the knee-jerk small-government philosophy that their base demands, simply lack the ideological flexibility to even talk about issues, like global warming and health care, that will require an expansion of government—much less propose ideas to help shape them.
Hayes explains that
Even for those CEOs preoccupied with the next quarter’s earnings, the long term has a funny way of sneaking up. Imagine for a moment you’re planning a new factory to produce washing machines. Ideally, the facility is going to operate for a number of years into the future, but its operating costs are going to be quite different if the federal government imposes a carbon tax at some point in the near future. How much capital do you invest up front to reduce the facility’s emissions? Or imagine you’re a major car company debating whether to site a new car plant in Canada or Alabama. After weighing the pros and cons, you decide on Canada. Why? Because in the United States, health care costs are growing at 7 percent above inflation, and you’re likely to be on the hook for your employees’ health care costs into the foreseeable future. This, in fact, is exactly what happened in 2005, when Toyota sent shockwaves through corporate boardrooms by opting to open a new plant in Woodstock, Ontario, citing Canada’s socialized medicine as a factor.
If the Toyota decision was a wake-up call on health care, Hurricane Katrina played a similar role on climate change. "I think it moved the frame of reference," said Mindy Lubber, who leads a group of institutional investors working to pressure businesses to reduce emissions. Even for those CEOs who’d believed that climate change was a problem, Lubber said, most had conceived of it as a long-term issue. "And as a CEO, I’m programmed to think about quarterly earnings. But what we saw with Katrina was that quarterly earnings are impacted," since the destruction of the Gulf refineries caused a spike in energy prices, among other negative effects.
There are some other very interesting gems of information in the article. For example, a Pew poll conducted last year found "that only 45 percent of Americans now think the government needs to get smaller, down from 61 percent a decade ago."
But the paragraph that most piqued my interest was an explanation of leading neo-conservative Bill Kristol’s role in defeating President Clinton’s plan for universal health care in 1993. I must admit that I am embarrassed I did not know this previously.
Conservatives, led by Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses—an interest group for small and medium-sized businesses, with a unwaveringly conservative line—recognized the political threat that universal health care posed. In a now-famous strategy memo, Kristol warned that Republicans had to kill, rather than amend, the Clinton proposal. Its success, he warned, would "re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation," and "revive ... the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests." Kristol and his allies succeeded in convincing big business that their long-term interests couldn’t brook a Democratic resurgence. The change was decisive. The business community mobilized against the Clinton plan, spending $17 million on advertising, and helping to ensure its defeat.
The question that immediately came to my mind was: How many people have needlessly suffered and even died so that these conservatives could keep the American people enthralled to their preferred philosophy of small government? According a study published in 2004 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, Insuring America's Health: Principles and Recommendations
Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.
(I believe this is the study the Edwards campaign relied upon for its February 2007 news release on the need for universal health coverage).
That means over 180,000 Americans have died as a result of Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, and the conservatives’ ideological straight-jacketing of America.
I tried to google Kristol’s (in)famous 1993 memo, but was not able to find the complete text. So I appeal to Kossacks and others if they know where to locate a copy online, or if they have a copy, to please post it online.
(I would like to recommend this blog by Stephen Frug on February 28, 2007, when that child in the Washington D.C. suburb of Prince George's County died from a tooth infection: Deamonte Driver is Dead and You Can Thank Bill Kristol.
And, there is this quote from Kritstol’s 1993 memo, contained in an article in Reasonmagazine (which if Kosacks are not familiar with, they should be. Reason has been one of the most effective media organs of libertarianism and conservatism, in its unthinking worship of "free market" economics, because it has attracted and cultivated a dedicated readership among the information technology and computer industries.
"For the health consumer in America, life under the Cooper plan would look very much as it would under the president's: standardized medicine, impersonal systems of care, and hospitals and doctors judged by economic efficiency standards," writes former Quayle aide Bill Kristol in a memo from the Project for the Republican Future. "'Cost containment' would become the mantra of American medicine ... Doctors ... would be required to report on procedures, treatments, outcomes, patient background, expenses and other 'necessary' medical information; health plans would withhold payment to any doctor who does not provide such requested data."
This was Kristol’s 1993 warning of what was going to happen if the conservatives were defeated, and national universal health insurance were enacted. But, Kritsol’s warnings sound pretty much like the situation we are faced with today, with "cost containment" the prime consideration, leading to patients being dumped on skid row in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and the judgment and decisions of doctors subordinated to faceless bureaucrats in health insurance company offices who, rather than having to look into the eyes of suffering patients and their anxious families, have to settle scores only between themselves and their spreadsheets. But has Kristol -- or Gingrich, or any other conservative poltroon -- ever apologized for his or her massive errors in judgement back in 1993?