Sanders Defends Middle Class, Calls For Help

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Published on Thursday, February 10, 2011 by In These Times

Organizing Help Wanted

We must defend America’s middle class before millionaires and billionaires own the entire country.

by Bernie Sanders

There is a war going on in this country and I am not referring to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I am referring to the war waged by the wealthiest people in America on the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country. The nation’s billionaires are on the warpath. They want more, more, more. Their greed has no end and they are apparently unconcerned for the future of this country if it gets in the way of their accumulation of power and wealth.
On the floor of the Senate, we discuss a lot of things. But one thing we fail to talk about is who is winning in this economy and who is losing, and what that means for parents struggling to survive while working longer hours with lower wages, and worrying about whether their children will have the same kind of standard of living they have.
Right now, the top 1 percent controls more than 23 percent of all income earned in America. The top 1 percent controls more than the bottom 50 percent. It’s not only that the rich are getting richer. The very, very rich are getting richer. In the last 25 years, we have seen 80 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent.
On top of all this, while the millionaires get richer and there are more and more billionaires, as a result of the Citizens United decision, what we are beginning to see in elections is unbelievable—a group of billionaires getting together and deciding where they are going to spend their money. Billionaires are going to flood states with all kinds of negative, dishonest ads in an effort to defeat people defending the middle class and to elect people who will stand up for right-wing billionaires.
The Republicans’ goal—and to their credit, they have been pretty honest about it—is to bring this country back to where we were in the 1920s. All of the progressive legislation that started with FDR is on the chopping block. Despite the great successes of Social Security over the last 75 years, despite the fact that Social Security today has a $2.6 trillion surplus, they are targeting Social Security. They are targeting Medicare. In Arizona today, people on Medicaid who need transplants are no longer able to get them—that is a real death panel.
Right now, according to a number of studies, we are losing about $100 billion every year because corporate America and the very wealthy are stashing their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. We should be aware that in 2009, ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits and not only did the company not pay anything in taxes, it got a $106 million refund from the IRS. We should also be aware that since 1997, we have almost tripled funding for the military. So if we are serious about reducing the deficit, those are things we need to look at—not at Social Security, not programs everyday Americans need.
Our job now is to rally Americans to put pressure on a handful of Republicans—to tell them, go into your hearts, talk to your constituents and tell me if it is appropriate to hold hostage the future of this country for an agenda that benefits only the very rich.
If we act, we can win this fight. It is crucial that we do, because if we don’t—if they roll over us now—there is no stopping them. It is time we organize.
Your help is wanted. 

© 2011 In These Times

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. Elected Mayor of Burlington, Vt., by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York. Read more at his website.

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Published on Saturday, January 8, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How Many Dead Arizonians?

by Donna Smith

The budget crisis in Arizona means the Republican Governor Jan Brewer and her Republican legislature have decided some death is preferable to more debt.  Human life has a very measureable price in Arizona, and those who look the other way as folks who might be saved die in Arizona can expect the same to come to their states sometime soon.
Many Republicans like to frame themselves as the party that protects human life from the moment of conception, no matter what.  Many Democrats like to frame themselves as the party that protects the downtrodden and the working class folks. 
So, where are any of these people when the sick in Arizona are preparing to die?
Here's one take on the news stories of recent days:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/News/arizona-transplant-deaths/story?id=12559369
From that report: 

On Oct. 1, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System stopped paying for seven types of transplants that the state's GOP governor, Jan Brewer, and GOP-led legislature said they could no longer afford. The state faces a projected $1 billion program deficit by July 2011.
They eliminated heart transplants for non-ischemic cardiomyopathy, lung transplants, pancreatic transplants, some bone marrow transplants, and liver transplants for patients infected with hepatitis C. Arizona also restricted coverage of prosthetics, eliminated podiatric services, preventive dental services, and wellness and physical exams for adult Medicaid enrollees"

So, we've decided in Arizona that the expendables are to be defined as adult Medicaid enrollees.  The poor, often the working poor, are our expendables.
I didn't hear anyone cry for them.  I didn't hear anyone cry out for them.  Two are dead already as they were denied transplants and 96 more are in the queue.  And it does not lead the news even among those who advocate for universal healthcare or the public option or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or repeal or replace or whatever.  The dead are expendable to all of us.
We fought immigration discrimination in Arizona, but dead poor people are acceptable?  Where are the protests?  There are no protests today in Arizona because no one we care about is dead yet. 
If your liver stops working tomorrow, God forbid, do you think your own life is worth saving?  Your child's?  Your neighbor's?  How about a little cancer that needs bone marrow treatment?
If we had a progressively financed, single standard of care for all in this nation -- the kind of government protected care that, say, Senator John McCain of Arizona has enjoyed for all but four years of his life, it isn't that every treatment would automatically be covered and appropriate.  But those kinds of choices would be determined based on medical necessity and effectiveness rather than being automatically not available to one group of adults -- like these adult Medicaid enrollees in Arizona.
This is a travesty and a horror all at once playing out in Arizona.  The only question we need ask ourselves is how many dead poor people are acceptable to us?  We've finally gotten to the point of watching a bi-partisan killing field played out in full public view, and I don't know if we care enough to act.  How many activists have booked their travel for Arizona to hold rallies and chain themselves to the governor's mansion gates or the hospital entrances where the dying have been given their death sentences?  How many of Arizona's leaders will step up?  Any national leaders?
This doesn't bode well for our future ability to transform our healthcare system from one that values money over human life.  If we cannot even gather our collective voice and courage to this trauma, we are more desperately selfish and greedy than we have accused those on Wall Street of so boldly displaying.  We're just playing at healthcare justice.

Donna Smith is a community organizer for National Nurses United (the new national arm of the California Nurses Association) and National Co-Chair for the Progressive Democrats of America Healthcare Not Warfare campaign.

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Similarities Between Oil Spill and Financial Crisis

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Published on Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by TruthDig.com
Verify, Baby, Verify!

by Robert Scheer

"Drill, baby, drill!" Those were the words that Sarah Palin used to electrify the 2008 Republican National Convention. But while she popularized that environment-be-damned slogan, it had already defined the eight years of oil-drilling policy that prevailed during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Those red state voters of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana whose livelihood is now threatened by the idiocy of that unfettered deregulatory stance might well be having second thoughts. So, too, those Democratic Party opportunists who had prevailed on President Barack Obama to one-up the GOP by vastly increasing the scope of offshore drilling.

Not so Palin, who last week took to Twitter to defend such inanities, blaming the oil spill problem not on lax regulation but rather on those damn foreigners. Ignoring the fact that her target alien company, British Petroleum, had employed her own husband, Palin tweeted: "Gulf: learn from Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil co's: don't naively trust-VERIFY."

Great, except that it is beyond the power of any one state to adequately verify what is going on deep down offshore, and as Tuesday's Senate testimony of top executives from the three companies implicated in this spill made clear, there is plenty of blame for the Brits to share with their good ol' American counterparts. What could be more American than Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, which constructed the well? Or Transocean, which operated the rig and is a homegrown product of the Southwestern energy industry?

But they are all three exactly the same: multinational corporations that couldn't care less about the countries where their home offices happen to be based. Recall Halliburton's controversial corporate relocation to Dubai three years ago and Transocean's registration in the Cayman Islands. What they are loyal to is the bottom line and the executive bonuses that it portends. They fly the flag of a particular nation only for convenience, and it is their threat to shift their base of operations that is used to effectively thwart government regulation.

As her recent tweet confirms, Palin admits verification is necessary, and in a Facebook posting, she bases that on her state's experience with the Exxon Valdez disaster. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, verification was the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Interior's Mineral Management Service. That's the same pathetic industry-whipped outfit whose personnel were literally in bed with representatives of various companies they were supposed to be regulating.

But far beyond such racy incentives to look the other way, the MMS, over the last decade of deregulation mania, had been encouraged to become a handmaiden of the industry rather than its supervisor in any meaningful sense of that term. That is the inescapable conclusion of a devastating Wall Street Journal report last week that concluded, "The small U.S agency that oversees offshore drilling doesn't write or implement most safety regulations, having gradually shifted such responsibilities to the oil industry itself for more than a decade."

That was a Republican-led decade in which regulation became a dirty word, and as with the financial meltdown, we are now witnessing, in the oil spill catastrophe, the dire consequences of radical free-market ideology run amok. If offshore drilling is required for our economic well-being, a questionable enough proposition given the inherent risks, it is a cause that will be set back dramatically by the current disaster.

The Obama administration, which was about to launch a vast expansion of such efforts, has had to pull back, and there are few in either party who will now question that a much more prudent course is in order. Hence the administration's recent decision to revamp the MMS by splitting its regulator function from its other role of collecting tax revenue from the oil companies it was supposed to be regulating.

After noting that the safety record of U.S. offshore drilling "compares unfavorably" to that of other nations, the WSJ observed that the key focus of the MMS was not safety enforcement, but rather maximizing oil production from which the government took a share of the profits. Hopefully that built-in and glaring, but heretofore largely unnoticed, contradiction between the government as a regulator and as a partner in oil profits will now be ended.

So, too, the illusion, as with the radical deregulation of the financial industry, that unbridled corporate greed can also provide for the common good. Greed needs a timeout with adult supervision for these out-of-control conglomerates messing with every aspect of our lives. But that won't happen until government regulation of multinational corporations is made respectable once again with adequately funded agencies pursuing an uncompromised public interest agenda.
© 2010 TruthDig.com

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com and a regular columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle.

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Elizabeth Warren Pushes Wall Sreet Reform

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Shahien Nasiripour
shahien@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting




Wall Street Reform: Elizabeth Warren Challenges Republicans To Stand Up For Families


It's time for senators -- especially the Republicans -- to square their upcoming votes on financial reform with their long-professed desire to protect families, said consumer advocate and federal bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday in an interview with the Huffington Post.

"Everyone in Washington claims to be on the side of families and to support reform," said Warren, a member of the 2010 TIME 100 list of the world's most influential people. "But the test is who votes to paper over problems with another regulatory system designed to fail and who votes for real Wall Street accountability even if it means that some donors will be disappointed.

"I'm tired of hearing politicians claim to support families and, at the same time, vote with the big banks on the most important financial reform package in generations. I'm deep-down tired of it."

Of all the proposals in the 1,400-page Senate bill attempting to reform Wall Street and protect American consumers, none is more contentious than the one calling for the creation of a consumer-focused agency dedicated to protecting borrowers from abusive lenders.

Reform-minded Democrats want a powerful independent entity able to defend powerless families from the banks and financial firms that squeeze profits out of customers through tricks, traps and outright predatory loans.

Moderates want to say that they voted for a bill that protects consumers -- even if it really doesn't.

Republicans profess a desire to protect consumers, acknowledging regulators' past failures, but they also don't want to stem the flow of credit or needlessly harm lenders' ability to make a buck.
Story continues below

The Senate bill, authored by the banking committee's chairman, Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, calls for a consumer entity to be housed inside the Federal Reserve. It largely, though, adheres to Warren's four tests: a chief appointed by the president, an independent source of funding, the authority to write consumer rules and the ability to enforce them against unscrupulous lenders. The unit, thus, focuses squarely on consumers. Ensuring banks' profitability is left to banking regulators.

The Republicans' counter-proposal, released this week, fails all four of Warren's tests.

It calls for a council led by the heads of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Reserve. They'd issue rules, supervise "our nation's largest financial institutions, large non-bank mortgage originators, and other financial services providers who have violated the consumer protection statutes," and enforce the rules.

Warren isn't thrilled with the idea of allowing bank regulators -- whose top priority is to ensure the profitability of the nation's banks -- to continue to oversee consumer protection, particularly when the OCC is involved.

"The problem with consumer protection is structure. Our current consumer regulatory process is designed to fail, and if we don't fix it, it will fail again," she said. "In every major dispute between customers and banks, the OCC entered the fray on the side of the banks. Clearly, banks -- not their customers -- were the OCC's primary interest. The idea that the OCC would now be in a position to veto the new consumer agency is shameful.

"If our goal was to take any lessons from the crisis, we would do the reverse: Let's give a consumer regulator a veto over the OCC," Warren added. After all, "it wasn't a consumer regulator who presided over the biggest financial meltdown in generations."

She didn't hold back in singling out the GOP's plan, which the Harvard Law professor and bankruptcy expert said was "pure genius -- for the banks who want to keep running things."

"The substitute language on consumer protection is designed to paper over very real structural problems with a new system that is designed to fail as much as the status quo is," Warren said. "The whole idea of the substitute is to take a bunch of regulators that already failed and throw them in a committee together."

Asked if she thought Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Richard Shelby of Alabama are trying to protect families from predatory lenders, Warren let loose.

"It isn't possible to protect families and at the same time to paper over the sorts of problems that led to the crisis with just another system that is designed to fail," she said of the duo leading the GOP effort against the consumer agency. "The time has come for choosing."

With Republicans abandoning their effort to prevent Dodd's bill from being considered on the Senate floor (the bill passed a procedural hurdle on Wednesday), senators will soon begin offering and debating amendments.

Shelby hopes to weaken the consumer agency.

"This bill still contains a sprawling new consumer protection bureau that will find and force its way into facets of our economy that had nothing to do with the housing crisis," he said in a Wednesday statement. "This massive new bureaucracy would have unchecked authority to regulate whatever it wants, whenever it wants, however it wants. I am aware of no other arm of the federal government this powerful, yet so unaccountable."

On Tuesday, Shelby told reporters that the agency was "the biggest obstacle" keeping Democrats and Republicans from reaching a deal.

McConnell also has attacked the agency, as has Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

To dilute the agency's power, Shelby and others will push proposals to give bank regulators more authority to rein it in, like replacing it altogether or giving bank regulators stronger veto authority.

The GOP proposal, for example, calls for the Fed chairman, currently Ben Bernanke, to be one of three leaders atop the consumer council.

"Can someone please ask Ben Bernanke if he actually wants to spend his time serving on that committee?" Warren asked. "How much time does he plan to carve out of his day to think about kickbacks on car loans or payday rollovers?

"Let's give those issues to people who have the time and expertise to deal with them," she added.

Sources who have been in meetings with Bernanke and have heard him discuss these issues privately say it's "very hard to believe that he has any real interest" serving on a consumer council like the one envisioned by the GOP.

Another way Republicans and bank-friendly Democrats will try to weaken the bill's consumer protection provisions is by repealing the portion of the bill that attempts to give states more power in going after big banks that violate consumers. At present, states are largely unable to thanks to an aggressive legal campaign over the past decade by the OCC.

National banks like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citibank argue that it's too difficult and costly to comply with different consumer protection regimes in 50 states, so they need a national standard. The OCC agrees, and also touts the legal precedent set by numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting the National Bank Act, the 19th-century law that forms the basis of the nation's banking system.

States and consumer advocates say the OCC protects big banks at the expense of consumers. State officials argue that the OCC essentially allows for consumers to be preyed upon and defrauded. The OCC vigorously denies the accusations.

Warren points out, though, that other industries don't get the special treatment afforded to national banks. In his proposal last summer, President Obama said the bill should end the OCC practice, known as preemption.

"Walmart operates in all 50 states, and it doesn't come to Washington demanding that Congress protect it from state laws that demand workplace safety or environmental standards or anything else," she said.

"Every other industry views compliance with state laws as a minor administrative cost of doing business. The big banks aren't worried about the difficulty of following local laws -- they have lawyers and computers to figure it out. Besides, thousands of little banks do it every day," she added.

In the House, bank-friendly Democrats led by Melissa Bean of Illinois watered down what was initially a strong provision that effectively neutered the OCC's authority to preempt state laws on everything from capping ATM fees to reducing overdraft charges and banning abusive home mortgage loans.

The bill now essentially resembles the status quo. Bean touts her vote on the House bill, which passed in December, as one for reform. So do the other legislators who voted against giving states more authority to crack down on abusive lenders, yet ultimately voted for the bill.

"There were others that thought they could get away with voting for the overall reform package while doing everything they could behind the scenes to hold water for the big banks and earn all those campaign contributions," Warren said. "We're about to find out if any senators want to play those games."

She hopes to find out soon.

"Every day that goes by without a clear set of rules in place to guide our economy into the future is a day that costs us money," she said. "Every credit card, payday loan, car loan and check overdraft that hides another fee or another bizarre interest calculation in the fine print costs American families. Every Too Big to Fail that takes on a little more risk, or leverages up just a little more, or that sucks capital away from another business that doesn't have a government guarantee at no charge costs American families. Every lousy product sold to a family, to a retirement fund, or to a local township costs American families.

"We cannot rebuild a strong and reliable economy without new rules," she continued. "We need those rules now. Not next month, not in six months, not in a year. Now."

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Down With the People Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.

By Jacob WeisbergUpdated Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, at 7:07 AM ET
In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state's bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya's), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The politicians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimism, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

Quote of the Day from Health Care Action

January 29, 2010

Remarks by the President at GOP House Issues Conference



Congressman Price (Dr. Tom Price from Georgia): Mr. President, multiple times, from your administration, there have come statements that Republicans have no ideas and no solutions. In spite of the fact that we've offered, as demonstrated today, positive solutions to all of the challenges we face, including energy and the economy and health care, specifically in the area of health care -- this bill, H.R.3400, that has more co-sponsors than any health care bill in the House, is a bill that would provide health coverage for all Americans; would correct the significant insurance challenges of affordability and preexisting; would solve the lawsuit abuse issue, which isn't addressed significantly in the other proposals that went through the House and the Senate; would write into law that medical decisions are made between patients and families and doctors; and does all of that without raising taxes by a penny.



But my specific question is, what should we tell our constituents who know that Republicans have offered positive solutions to the challenges that Americans face and yet continue to hear out of the administration that we've offered nothing?



The President: It's not enough if you say, for example, that we've offered a health care plan and I look up -- this is just under the section that you've just provided me, or the book that you just provided me -- summary of GOP health care reform bill: "The GOP plan will lower health care premiums for American families and small businesses, addressing America's number-one priority for health reform." I mean, that's an idea that we all embrace. But specifically it's got to work. I mean, there's got to be a mechanism in these plans that I can go to an independent health care expert and say, is this something that will actually work, or is it boilerplate?



If I'm told, for example, that the solution to dealing with health care costs is tort reform, something that I've said I am willing to work with you on, but the CBO or other experts say to me, at best, this could reduce health care costs relative to where they're growing by a couple of percentage points, or save $5 billion a year, that's what we can score it at, and it will not bend the cost curve long term or reduce premiums significantly -- then you can't make the claim that that's the only thing that we have to do. If we're going to do multi-state insurance so that people can go across state lines, I've got to be able to go to an independent health care expert, Republican or Democrat, who can tell me that this won't result in cherry-picking of the healthiest going to some and the least healthy being worse off.



So I am absolutely committed to working with you on these issues, but it can't just be political assertions that aren't substantiated when it comes to the actual details of policy. Because otherwise, we're going to be selling the American people a bill of goods. I mean, the easiest thing for me to do on the health care debate would have been to tell people that what you're going to get is guaranteed health insurance, lower your costs, all the insurance reforms; we're going to lower the costs of Medicare and Medicaid and it won't cost anybody anything. That's great politics, it's just not true.



So there's got to be some test of realism in any of these proposals, mine included. I've got to hold myself accountable, and guaranteed the American people will hold themselves -- will hold me accountable if what I'm selling doesn't actually deliver.



http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-gop-house-issues-conference





Comment: The President enters the Republicans' den, and politics broke out. At least that's the impression you might have from the media coverage of the President's appearance at the GOP House Issues Conference. But this was not simply an exchange of partisan political rhetoric; it was a plea by President Obama to set aside rhetorical grandstanding and to join together in a fair, credible, and objective discussion of the impact of the actual policies under consideration.



Did that happen? It is puzzling how Congressman Tom Price, a physician, could state directly to the President that their Republican bill "would provide health coverage for all Americans." That goes beyond political grandstanding for the benefit of the television cameras. That is shameless, arrogant lying to the President of the United States and to the American people. It is impossible to have a constructive dialogue with liars.



President Obama is right when he states that these proposals must pass the test of realism, while at the same time holding himself accountable. But realism alone isn't enough. The policies must be effective and efficient. Yet the President and Congress abandoned those health care reform policies that pass the tests with the highest scores, and accepted flawed, lower-scoring policies that were believed to comply better with the political tests, though that political support is waning.



When objectivity and realism demonstrate that the Democratic proposal falls far short, and when better, proven policies would bring affordable care to everyone, we should hold the President and Congress accountable. But we should also support them politically when they throw the liars out so they can get on with the reform that we need.



One more lie. Congressman Price said that H.R.3400 "has more co-sponsors than any health care bill in the House." It has 52 cosponsors. Congressman John Conyers' H.R. 676, "United States National Health Care Act or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act," has 87 cosponsors.



More importantly, Conyers' bill is based on sound health policy that would actually work, whereas Price's bill is based on feeble policies that will have almost no impact on the problems we face in health care. But their bill does provide them with rhetoric they can use for political grandstanding, even if based on lies (e.g., "provides health coverage for all Americans").

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Published on Monday, September 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

The Public Option Is Nothing To Fear

Republican opponents of a public option for US healthcare are defending the insurance industry, not conservative principles

by Dean Baker

Back in the good old days, the conservatives were the folks who favoured individual choice. Not any more. In the current healthcare debate, the top priority of the so-called conservatives is to deny people choice. They want to make sure that Americans do not have the option to buy into a Medicare-type public healthcare plan. These alleged conservatives have come up with a variety of arguments against allowing people the Medicare-type option, but the only one that makes sense is that they work for the insurance industry.

The argument against a Medicare-type option always begins with the assertion that the government can't do anything. This is a peculiar claim given the popularity of Medicare, but it also makes no sense as an argument against giving people a buy-in option. Suppose the government gives people the option to buy into its really bad plan. Everyone would just stick with the good private plans we have now, right?

The so-called conservatives then tell us that people will end up buying into the bad Medicare-type plan instead of the good private insurance options because the government will subsidise the Medicare-type plan. A little bit of arithmetic is sufficient to dismiss this argument.

How much money would be needed to get people to choose a bad healthcare plan rather than a good one? This would have to involve some serious subsidies. People are not going to sacrifice their health and the health of their families for another cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Suppose it took a subsidy of $1,000 a year to get people to choose the bad Medicare-type plan over the good private sector plans. With a non-Medicare population of more than 250 million, this would imply government subsidies of more than $250bn a year, if the Medicare-type plan was to fully replace private sector plans, as the so-called conservatives warn.

Is it really plausible that Congress will approve $250bn a year in subsidies ($2.5tn over a 10-year budget window) for a Medicare-type plan that everyone thinks is awful? Is there another altogether wasteful programmes that gets public subsidies even one-tenth of this size?

This one just doesn't pass the laugh test. If conservative politicians don't think they can prevent such an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars being perpetuated year after year for the indefinite future, they should probably consider another line of work.

In short, there is no genuine conservative argument against allowing people the option of buying into a Medicare-type plan. If the plan proves to be inferior to private insurance plans, as is often argued, then the consequences will be relatively minor. Some number of people who choose to sign up with this plan will find that they don't like it, and then will switch to a better alternative. In time, a bad public plan will soon flounder, since few people will buy into it. There may be some effort to provide subsidies to even a bad public plan, but it is not plausible that the subsidies could be large enough to displace private plans.

It is also clear that the opposition to a Medicare-type public plan does not stem from townhall-type mass opposition. A recent New York Times poll found that by an overwhelming majority, 65% to 26%, the public favours giving people this option. If there is a member of Congress that risks defeat by supporting a public plan, it is not because of their constituents' views.

The opposition to a Medicare-type option is not based on public sentiment or the fear that the plan will be bad. Rather the opposition is based on the fear that the plan will be good and that people will choose to buy into it. This will cost the insurance industry tens of billions of dollars in profit over the next decade and could mean the end of big paycheques for the industry's CEO's and other high-level executives.

But the people who oppose giving the public the opportunity to buy into a Medicare-type plan should not be called conservatives. Honest conservatives would have no objection to giving the public a choice. The people who oppose a Medicare-type plan are doing the bidding of the insurance industry - there is no conservative principle at stake. And we all know what Joe Wilson has to say about people like that.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer ( www.conservativenannystate.org) and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.