As the health care reform debate enters what appears to be the home stretch (albeit not for the first time), what Washington is offering us (the citizenry) boils down to a choice between bad and worse. The legislation now under consideration, both the Senate bill and the slight variation on same presented as "Obama's bill," is the end result of a process that has methodically stripped away almost everything that made this reform effort worth undertaking in the first place. They've thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.
And yet, we have to hope it passes.
[Angsty details below the fold, and a somewhat longer version at my blog...]
There are still a few tidbits of worthwhile insurance regulation left in there. The bill would end coverage exclusions for pre-existing conditions, a change almost everyone agrees is a good idea. It also requires coverage for preventive care, and limits lifetime benefit caps. There are also a few tweaks to Medicare and Medicaid policy—adjusting income threshholds; saving seniors some money by closing the prescription drug "doughnut hole"; extending the Medicare Hospital Insurance tax to households with unearned income. And it cracks down on the "pay for delay" tactic Big Pharma uses to keep generics off the market.
But that's about it, really, on the plus side. All these incremental regulatory changes could easily have been achieved without all the sturm und drang of the past year... and even cumulatively, they don't amount to anything remotely resembling "comprehensive reform." In any assessment of pros and cons, they're dramatically outweighed by what the bill doesn't do—and more importantly, by what it changes for the worse.
Fundamentally, this is a bill that strengthens the private insurance industry's stranglehold on the American health care system, and hands it a guaranteed revenue stream at public expense. It's so laughably far from the Republican/Tea Party charges of a "government takeover" that it's not even in the same conceptual universe... in reality, it reflects more of a corporate takeover of government.
The bill doesn't let the government renegotiate drug prices with Big Pharma; it doesn't let Americans reimport cheaper drugs from Canada; it doesn't subject insurance companies to ordinary antitrust requirements. What it does do is force all of us to become customers of private insurance companies. It claims to "extend coverage" to millions more people (albeit only 30 million of the 46 million who lack it), by making premiums "more affordable"... but that affordability is illusory, since it comes not from requiring insurers to keep premiums low but rather from subsidizing (via tax credits) low-income households and small businesses to help them pay market-rate premiums. It also imposes IRS-enforced penalties on middle-class individuals and larger businesses that don't carry coverage.
I understand the theoretical actuarial significance of getting "everyone into the risk pool" for the sake of efficiency... but doing so won't actually achieve any cost efficiencies if it's only a mechanism for channeling public funds to private insurers. There's no way to ensure they won't just adjust premiums to capture the subsidies as profit.
The bill has no serious measures to control premium growth, or to limit (much less eliminate) the co-pays and deductibles by which insurers shift costs to their policyholders. It requires a "medical loss ratio" (insurers' quaint term for actually paying claims... as well as for every other cost of doing business and assorted overhead expense industry accountants can sneak in there) of only 85% for large-group plans and 80% for small-group and individual plans, allowing massive profit margins. (Industry MLRs have been sinking for years, to the delight of shareholders; meanwhile co-ops like Kaiser Permanente and government programs like Medicare routinely keep their MLRs well above 90%.) It claims to end rescissions, but leaves a loophole for "fraud," which of course is what insurers already routinely allege whenever they rescind policies. And the bill does nothing to end the problem of medical bankruptcies, which have skyrocketed to over 60% of all U.S. bankruptcies in recent years (three-quarters of those from people with health insurance), since the base benefits it requires for a plan to participate in the "purchasing exchange" are so inadequate.
At the end of the day, the price for a few meager regulatory improvements is a bill that does nothing to constrain costs, nothing to improve coverage, nothing to guarantee actual access to health care... and instead of reigning in the parasitical industry that's brought us to this pass by standing between Americans and their doctors, it rewards it with a bonanza of new customers and guaranteed profits.
It's a bad bill. By any reasonable policy analysis, it deserves to be killed.
And yet...
It's a Hobson's Choice, because bad as the bill is, the alternative at this point is so much worse it's no real alternative at all. Letting this bill die would mean letting the obstructionist Republican minority and the incoherent rabble-rousing Teabaggers claim credit for "defeating" it; letting them perpetuate the myth that reform is a "government takeover" and that "the American people don't want it"; putting them in position to take maximum rhetorical advantage in a campaign year, quite possibly regaining control of one or both houses of Congress—and enabling them thereby to obstruct not only health care reform but any and all other policy agenda items Obama and the Democrats have planned, to perpetuate the noxious ideology that government itself is "the problem," and thereafter to force even more destructive and reactionary policies on the country, as so vividly demonstrated by the late and unlamented Bush administration.
Not that Obama and the Democrats are any great bastion of progressivism, of course. At the moment, all they seem to be offering the country is a slow downhill slide into corporate autocracy and reduced expectations... but that's still markedly better than a precipitous tumble into despair, deprivation, and neofascism, which is what today's GOP has to offer. This is, no doubt, why a strong majority of members of MoveOn.org have chosen to support passage of the bill, even as-is. It's a bad bill, yet we have to pass it: that's a bitter pill to force down.
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There's plenty of blame to go around. Much of it falls to the Blue Dogs and other "moderate" (read "conservative") Dems who have dragged their feet at every step of the process; much of it falls to more conventional members who are simply beholden to insurance industry donations.
The perfect example of the former has to be Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, who has obstructed the bill at every opportunity because it doesn't do enough to block women from getting abortions, and still remains unsatisfied even though the bill has carved out an exception guaranteeing that no federal funds will be spent on abortion coverage. Stupak must be suffering a serious cranio-rectal inversion if he thinks either (as a matter of principle) that interfering with reproductive choice is a more worthy goal (or worthy at all, but that's another discussion) than reforming the health care system, or (as a matter of practical politics) that blocking the foremost agenda item of the party with which he's affiliated, and thus making it look ineffective and incompetent, will somehow improve his electoral prospects next fall.
Congress aside, though... the fact that any bill survives at all after the issue's disastrous mismanagement by the White House is remarkable. Whether the bill in its current form is really what Obama wanted all along (despite his campaign rhetoric), or whether he's just been unduly influenced by the corporate/DLC-type advisors with which he's surrounded himself (epitomized by the obnoxious bully Rahm Emanuel, who never saw a principle he wasn't happy to compromise so long as it brought more money into his party's coffers), is almost beside the point, since either way the buck stops in the Oval Office.
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Meanwhile, as the legislative process nears its endgame, the past week has brought no end of buck-passing and blame-shifting from Democratic leaders in Congress... What's brought this game of hot-potato about, though, and what makes this process more interesting than it might otherwise be, is the surge of grass-roots activism that's had a real and undeniable impact on legislators. In a sentence: the public option isn't quite dead yet, and we may actually beat the odds and see a halfway-decent bill make it into law.
Much of the credit goes to Adam Green and his colleagues at the year-old Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), who in late January began circulating a public letter urging the Senate to pass a bill with a public option (as the House had already done) using a straight majority vote—i.e., via "reconciliation"—and quickly picked up scores of supporters in both the House and the Senate.
Of course, reconciliation is a procedure the Senate could have used to pass health care reform nine months ago, had majority leader Harry Reid had the chutzpah (and the White House support) to do so, rather than letting Baucus have his way with the bill. This was much discussed at the time, but Reid and other Dem leaders kept insisting they needed to attract 60 votes in order to avoid the implicit filibuster that the GOP has been abusing to block almost every piece of legislation that comes along... right up until Scott Brown captured Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat for the GOP, 60 votes became literally impossible, and suddenly reconciliation became a perfectly acceptable strategy in the eyes of the leadership.
(Keep in mind, here, that health care bills have already passed both the House and the Senate. All we're talking about at this point is what's being called a "sidecar" bill to reconcile the differences between those two. And passing it with an up-or-down vote using reconciliation is not unprecedented or unorthodox, contrary to right-wing rhetoric... in sharp contrast to the so-called "nuclear option" the GOP threatened to get Bush's reactionary judicial appointments confirmed a few years ago.)
So, if all we need now is 51 Senate votes (or 50 plus Biden!) to pass that sidecar, why not yank out the godawful compromises that were made to get to 60, and pass a stronger, better bill, one that includes a public option? It would make strategic sense. It would save money (according to CBO projections). And oh, yeah: it's really popular with voters.
That last point is key. As the bill before Congress got whittled down over the course of months to the pathetic shadow of reform described above, increasing numbers of Americans have turned against that bill, for understandable reasons—leading right-wingers to circulate the dishonest meme that people are opposed to reform in general. In reality, though, most people are upset not because Congress is trying to do too much but because it's trying to do too little... leaving the real problem, the insurance industry, untouched. This is corroborated by the fact that even as public support for the bill has fallen, the same polls show majorities across the country and across the political spectrum have continued to support the specific good policy ideas it still contains (e.g., ending pre-existing condition exclusions)... and, as corroborated most recently by a Research 2000 poll conducted just last month, that they especially support a public option that would offer a competitive alternative to corporate insurance. Ordinary Americans know who the primary culprits are for the health case crisis, even if much of Congress is blind to the fact.
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At this point, then, it has become a question of both legislative will and legislative procedure, both of which have been much-debated in the last few days. On the Senate side, even though Reid and the majority whip, Illinois' own Dick Durbin, are both on the record as supporting the PO letter, they initially said on Wednesday that they didn't want a public option in the sidecar and would whip the Dem caucus against it, allegedly because it would have to be introduced by amendment and any amendments to the bill would open the door to Republican shenannigans. Much public outcry ensued on Thursday, though, and they were quick to backpedal. It became clear that since the sidecar might well originate in the House, the public option could be in it anyway; and moreover that if it weren't, any one Senator could introduce an amendment to include one, which Vermont's Bernie Sanders promptly promised to do. At this point Durbin clarified that he would whip for a bill with a public option, provided that it came from the House that way—thus throwing the onus back on Pelosi. That same day, however, Pelosi declared that the House bill wouldn't include one, pointing the finger of blame back at the Senate because in her view that chamber didn't have the votes to pass it.
It's not clear which statement came first in this tennis match, though, or whether either Durbin or Pelosi was aware of the other's words at the time... perhaps each thinks they can leave it out while deflecting blame toward the other. But the drama continued on Friday, as the PCCC released a vote count making clear that the Senate does have 51 votes in support of a public option. The question now turned to what could pass the House, where it became clear that the leadership had given up on trying to appease Stupak and his ilk... leading to a somewhat precarious vote count on the prospect of passing anything, but also making it all the more important to attract the votes of wavering progressives who've become understandably skeptical of the whole bill (like, e.g., the stalwart Dennis Kucinich) to replace those of the stubborn Blue Dogs. One step quickly taken along these lines was to fold student loan reform into the proposed sidecar bill... and of course another logical one would be to reinstate the public option.
(As I've argued for months, progressive members of Congress have far less to lose from opposing a health care bill than do conservative Dems. Progressives tend to represent liberal districts that they can safely count on to re-elect them, even (perhaps especially) if they take a stand on principle; Blue Dogs, on the other hand, have nothing to gain by making their party look weak, since that alienates independent voters and plays right into the hands of Republican opponents.)
A final vote in the House is expected by next Friday at this point, but what exactly it will look like remains to be seen. Even a restored public option won't make a silk purse out of this sow's ear, but it would make it at least arguably a bill worthy of passage on its own merits rather than strictly for lesser-evil reasons. Without one, the oft-heard argument that even a lackluster bill can be the foundation for future improvement (akin to Social Security in 1935) rings painfully hollow; this would be far too likely to be seen as the outer limit of what's politically viable, rather than just a starting point. (Imagine how Social Security would have developed if it had been started not with a public retirement fund, but with a legal mandate forcing every citizen to invest in a Wall Street brokerage account.)
It's important to get a public option into the bill, to submit it to an up-or-down vote, even if it gets voted down—if only so we know exactly who to hold accountable. And if Congress can muster the political will to do what's right—with activists like the PCCC lighting a fire under their heels—and if we as voters can elect more progressive Dems rather than the centrist types (beloved of Rahm) who hobble the party today—then we just might have something we can build on with future bills. In another development this past week, after all, outspoken Florida Rep. Alan Grayson introduced a new standalone bill that would let Americans under 65 buy in to Medicare... and within 48 hours he already had 50 cosponsors.
Our national government may have been reduced to near-paralysis by decades of right-wing influence and corporate money, but it's not entirely broken quite yet. Tempted as I often am just to give in completely to cynicism, I'm reminded that there are still good people with good ideas on Capitol Hill... it's just that the people are still a minority, and it takes almost superhuman hard work and perseverance to get the ideas past the sausage-making machinery.