National - Thursday, November 19, 2009 11:45 - 5 Comments
Proposed Senate Health Care Bill Ditches Stupak Amendment. Kinda.
Vexing conservatives, pacifying liberals and clearly telling moderates to strap on a pair, the proposed Senate health care bill revealed last night is a favorably nuanced version of the House bill passed earlier this month to “save lives, save money and protect medicare,” in the words of majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV).
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the plan will cover 94% of Americans and cost $849 billion, which will reportedly reduce the number of uninsured by 31 million and the budget deficit by $127 billion in the first 10 years. The bill also allows States to pass legislation to opt out of the public option.
The proposed Senate bill also relaxes the stringent limitations imposed on abortion coverage by the Stupak Amendment. Federal funding for abortions remains forbidden, but women on the public option could conceivably receive insurance for abortions as long as the Secretary of Health and Human Services verifies that Federal money doesn’t contribute to the particular payment plan for it.
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National - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 11:45 - 5 Comments
Reminder That Anti-Abortion Stances are a Political Tool
Progressives in Congress are now saddled with a catch-22 thanks to House Representative Bart Stupak (D-MI). His amendment hijacked the historic House health care bill, putting the spotlight back on America’s time-honored, inflated issue–abortion.
In her impassioned post yesterday lamenting the Stupak Amendment’s thorny presence in the House health care bill, Jess explained the anticipated harm to women’s reproductive rights inflicted by banning abortion coverage in any plan subsidized by the government. There is already discriminatory legislation in place that stops the Federal government from funding abortion programs, but Stupak could result in abortions never being insurable again. Though Jess’ post and its comments provided a robust discussion of the merits and faults of abortion, the national stage is devoid of such substance.
Instead, women’s reproductive rights are treated as a mere bargaining chip to help members of congress win reelection. And I’m not even talking about Republicans. Continue…
Featured, National - Monday, November 9, 2009 11:05 - 30 Comments
Health Care Reform Bill Passes in the House, But at What Cost?
What were you doing at 11pm on Saturday night? Were you bar hopping around the East Village, or waiting an absurdly long time for the L train? Well apparently while you were out, the US House of Representatives was making history. History is rarely made on Saturday nights, unless you count getting laid or puking in a cab as doing so, but two nights ago something a little more serious happened: the House passed H R 3962, better known colloquially as the Health Care Reform Bill, with a vote of 220 to 215.
In terms of universal health care–something I definitely champion–this is no doubt a tremendous step forward. The Public Option returned from what seemed to be inevitable extinction and, should it be signed into law, will provide 96% of Americans with affordable health insurance. Unfortunately, this health insurance is not nearly as comprehensive as it should be, most notably for a major section of the American population: in terms of women’s rights, the bill passed on Saturday night was a depressingly giant step backwards.
Featured, National - Monday, November 9, 2009 9:25 - 1 Comment
How the Conservative Inability to Pick Their Battles Helped Health Care
Above is a pretty curious sight: Republicans using every parliamentary trick they’ve got to try and delay the passage of the health care bill. Of course, it didn’t work, and the whole incident seems an awful lot like an ineffective temper tantrum.
Which, as of late, has more or less been the right-wing modus operandi. Take, for example, the minor Tea Party freakout in DC the day before. Complete with out-there Holocaust comparisons that are almost too self-evidently ridiculous to be offensive.
The thing is, all of this nonsense produced a better bill. After all, imagine if the Republicans had taken on the role of the Blue Dogs–vowing to cooperate with the Democrats in crafting the language, and then gradually weakening it into an unrecognizable lump. Instead, they paid lip service to bipartisan cooperation, and then promptly made it as obvious as possible that the only acceptable bill to them was none at all.
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National - Thursday, October 29, 2009 8:00 - 8 Comments
Normally Upstanding Democrat Lieberman Shocks Caucus on Public Option
The above is Joe Lieberman using an argument he would later flatly contradict to explain why he is threatening not to vote for cloture of the public-option-including Senate health care bill.
Remember, 60 votes are needed for cloture in the Senate, and there are exactly 60 members of the Democratic caucus. With Olympia Snow now saying she won’t cross party lines, not a single Republican is expected to vote for the bill, meaning that it needs all the Democratic caucus members for passage. Lieberman is one of the key swing votes, and, as is his wont, he’s milking this for as much as he can.
Weigel, who’s usually right about these things, thinks this is an empty threat being made to garner some attention, albeit an empty threat that’s still damaging.
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Featured, National - Monday, October 26, 2009 8:30 - 0 Comments
Public Option Compromises Demystified
The public option is back from the dead once again, and this time it has a new bi-partisan image (in that Democrats’ best hope is getting the vote of ONE Republican who apparently isn’t even a Republican at all). Since making it out of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus’ health care bill has been bombarded with compromise amendments seeking to add a public option. In contrast to the health care bills being debated in the House, these amendments have been throwing around new terms like “trigger” and “opt-out.”
The first idea, mostly associated with Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, is the “trigger” option. If adopted, it would create government owned and operated health insurance corporations in states where less than 95% of residents have access to “affordable” coverage. The entire point of the public option is to spur competition in areas where one or two private insurance companies dominate the market. The advantage of Snowe’s proposal is that it would be limited only to states where the private market is obviously not providing affordable options for consumers. It becomes much harder to Republicans to talk about a government-takeover of health care when it isn’t implemented everywhere. Of course, that’s also the downside of the plan. Suppose your state slips from a competitive to a non-competitive market; then the government has to create a health insurance provider from scratch. How long can, or should, residents of your state live without an affordable health insurance option?
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National - Thursday, October 15, 2009 12:00 - 4 Comments
Senate Health Care Bill Finally Awful Enough to Gain Republican Support
Max Baucus’ awful, awful health care bill has finally passed the Senate Finance Committee, this time with the vote of a Republican. Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, famous mostly because of the astounding intransigence of her Republican colleagues in Congress, said of the bill, “Is this the bill that I would want? Far from it … But when history calls, history calls.”
The Baucus bill, the summary of which takes up 223 pages, would establish private health insurance co-operatives that could not turn a profit, and hence would not spend millions compensating CEOs. The idea is that, like a public option, co-ops would avoid some of the pitfalls of the private insurance companies which, remember, are in the business of maximizing input (the premiums you pay) and minimizing output (the care you receive). Since co-ops don’t share this goal, they can offer lower premiums for similar care, providing effective competition for private insurers.
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National - Thursday, October 15, 2009 8:15 - 24 Comments
Is Health Care a Right?
On Tuesday I asked our readers whether or not they supported the public option. In the comments thread that ensued we learned, unsurprisingly, that whether or not one supported the public option was a pretty good indicator for whether or not they thought basic health care was a right at all.
That’s not an easy question, although it’s often treated like one. In fact, it goes back to an even more basic, yet harder to answer, question: do positive rights exist?
By “positive rights,” I mean entitlement to certain services or resources. When we think of rights, we’re usually talking about negative rights, or rights that protect you from excessive interference. And while most of the rights in the Bill of Rights are negative–freedom of speech, the right to bear arms and so on are rights of non-interference–the first ten amendments also include some positive rights, such as the right to counsel.
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National - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 12:00 - 1 Comment
Private Health Care Advocacy Group Shocks Nation With Report Advocating Private Health Care
The big news in health care yesterday–god knows why–was that the trade association known as America’s Health Insurance Plans released a report concluding that the passage of the finance committee’s reform bill would cause a precipitous rise in health insurance premiums.
In other words, a political advocacy group representing the health insurance industry–the industry that is currently intently focused on blocking meaningful health care reform–came out with a report suggesting health care reform would be a bad idea. And this is news!
Of course, it’s not just who commissioned the report that makes it suspect. As foremost health care wonk Ezra Klein points out, the report’s methodology is highly suspect, which is no surprise given that it was drafted by the same consulting firm big tobacco recruited to fight taxation on their product in the early 90s.
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Featured, National - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 8:00 - 41 Comments
NYU’s Political Union and Review Comes Down Against Public Option
From Left to Right: PURNYU President Brad Powell and Debate Moderator Alec Wright
Last night the group held its first debate of the semester at 19 West 4th street, on whether or not to support the public option. At the end of the debate–which I liveblogged on NYU Local’s Twitter feed–the audience and the speakers voted the public option down 12-14.
It was sort of a curious moment: the narrow defeat of a broadly popular liberal policy at an undeniably liberal university. But I suppose that’s because it was more a reflection of what sort of student the Political Union is likely to attract than it was an indication of NYU opinion as a whole. As far as I know, there’s no good data on the latter, although Greg Lefkin, arguing for the libertarians, at one point said he found it “ironic” that the percentage of Americans in favor of the public option was “the same percentage that didn’t go to college.”
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