But the larger reason I don’t think this will get repealed is that a staggering quantity of opposition to this bill is fake. It’s fake in two ways. In part, people have been pretending to believe things they don’t believe. For example, lately Chuck Grassley has been pretending to oppose an individual mandate to buy health insurance. In the past, however, he’s supported such a mandate. And insurance companies will want the mandate to be made stronger, not weaker. Then there are people opposing the legislation over provisions that they’re pretending exist. Grassley, for example, is very worried about death panels but since there are no death panels he can’t actually repeal them.Think Progress: Matalin slurs health reform advocates as ‘health care jihadists.’
Yesterday on CNN, Republican strategist and CNN contributor Mary Matalin railed against Democrats for pushing forward with health reform efforts. “They’ve been on this jihad for 70 years, and they’re going to throw over all their competitive seats to do it,” she said, adding:
And I don’t know what kind of party that is. That leaves left in the Democratic Party the urban centers, this is tyranny of the minority. Two-thirds of the country don’t want this. And one-third of these jihadists, these health care jihadists do. I guess that’s how democracy in the Obama era works.
Moments later, she smeared the prior efforts to establish Social Security and Medicare as “entitlement jihads” as well. Watch it:
Matalin has employed the concept of “holy war” in her political debates before. On Meet the Press in 2006, she attacked David Gregory for going “on a jihad” in covering the Vice President’s accidental shooting of his friend Harry Whittington. Gregory responded, “That’s an unfortunate use of that word, by the way. This is not what that was.”
Rayfield (TPM): Sen. Whitehouse: There Will Be A 'Reckoning' For GOP's 'Desperate, No-Holds-Barred Mission Of Propaganda'
On the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) slammed Republicans for their "desperate, no-holds-barred mission of propaganda, falsehood, obstruction and fear," which he said will result in a "day of judgment" by the American people.
Whitehouse began his monologue by quoting 1950s intellectual Richard Hofstadter, warning that a right-wing minority could create "a political environment in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible."
"The malignant and vindictive passions that have descended on the Senate are busily creating just such a political climate," said Whitehouse.
Whitehouse attributed these "desperate acts" to the Democrats' "momentum," which is
working toward passing health care reform legislation, and "when we do, the lying time is over. The American public will see what actually comes to pass when we pass this bill as our new law. The American public will see firsthand the difference between what is, and what they were told."When it turns out there are no death panels, when there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways your health care changes seem like a good deal to you, and a pretty smart idea, when the American public sees the discrepancy between what really is, and what they were told by the Republicans, there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth.He concluded: "There will come a day of judgment, and our Republican friends know that. That Mr. President, is why they are terrified."
Here's the full clip:
Ezra Klein:The cruel Senate
The Senate is very proud of its reputation as a collegial and decorous institution. At this point in the chamber's history, though, that reputation largely obscures a vicious and cruel operational reality.Yglesias: You Wouldn’t Like Evan Bayh When He’s AngryTake Ted Kennedy, for instance. He spent a lifetime serving in the Senate. His warm relationships with his Republican colleagues were proof that the Senate's unique culture could foster a cooperative environment between liberals and conservatives. His many bipartisan bills served as proof that, at one point, it actually had. But when his death threatened to imperil the passage of the bill he considered the work of his life? Not a single Republican stepped forward to assure him that his absence wouldn't be the decisive factor. There was no offer to act, at least from the standpoint of procedural votes, as if the wishes of Kennedy, or of the voters who elected him, mattered.
Another example came last night, when the ailing Robert Byrd was wheeled in at 1 a.m. to break a filibuster on the manager's amendment. Byrd's presence was not required, especially considering that he'd clearly telegraphed his intention to vote to break the filibuster. But Republicans forced him to travel to the chamber. Indeed, shortly before he arrived, Sen. Tom Coburn headed to the floor to propose a prayer. "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said. "That's what they ought to pray."
The Senate hasn't just lost a bit of its collegiality. It's become heartlessly ferocious -- a place where the death of an honored friend presents an opportunity to kill his legislation, and in which the infirmity of an ailing colleague is seen as a potential path to procedural victory.
It is, of course, a tough world out there. There are greater injustices than senators being mean to one another. But the Senate's rules are predicted on courtesy and cooperation. The body cannot function without unanimous consent, and procedures like the filibuster were included because the expectation was that the body could routinely discover consensus. At this point in its history, however, consensus is a laughable goal. Basic decency doesn't even seem achievable. And if the behavior of the Senate has changed, then so too must its rules.
On a related note, read Paul Krugman on the filibuster.
Faced with Republican resistance that many Democrats saw as driven more by politics than policy disagreements, Senate Democrats in recent days gained new determination to bridge differences among themselves and prevail over the opposition.
Lawmakers who attended a private meeting between Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats at the White House on Tuesday pointed to remarks there by Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, as providing some new inspiration.
Mr. Bayh said that the health care measure was the kind of public policy he had come to Washington to work on, according to officials who attended the session, and that he did not want to see the satisfied looks on the faces of Republican leaders if they succeeded in blocking the measure.
Not really sure why he thinks a bipartisan deficit commission is going to work, given his (correct) analysis of the health care landscape.
Ezra Klein: The most important table you'll read today
Krugman: Coverage and costsYou probably can't read the table atop this post. Click on it, it'll get bigger. It's the work of Jon Cohn and MIT's Jon Gruber, and it shows what health-care reform will mean for families at different levels of income.
The story isn't perfection but improvement. An insured family making $60,000 is likely to be paying almost $13,000 for coverage in 2016 and facing more than $12,000 in out-of-pocket costs if they're hit with a real medical emergency. Under reform, that same family will be paying $5,800 in premiums, and their out of pocket maximum will be $6,300. Their total risk, as Cohn puts it, has fallen from $25,000 to $12,000. That's still an embarrassment when judged against other industrialized nations where people aren't bankrupted because someone fell sick, but it's an enormous improvement compared with our nation.
And Cohn's table, if anything, understates the gains. For instance: That family making $60,000 could be turned away because the mother once had breast cancer. And if they can't get insurance, they are, of course, on the hook for everything they own. Under reform, that family can't be turned away from insurance.
Anyway, read Jon Cohn for much more.
The usual suspects are out in force on the op-ed pages, declaring that the health reform bill doesn’t control costs, it’s a huge cost, etc.. And I had a new thought: part of what’s going on here, aside from the fact that these people just hate the idea of expanding social insurance, is that they haven’t looked at all at the actual numbers involved.
The theory of the reform is as illustrated above. Expanding coverage will, other things equal, increase health care spending. But the expansion of coverage is linked to a serious effort to control cost growth that will, one hopes, “bend the curve”, so that costs eventually fall below what they would have been otherwise.
What the bah-humbug crowd insists is that this is highly implausible; implicit or explicit in this claim is the idea that covering the uninsured is extremely costly. But it isn’t.
The key thing to understand in the coverage debate has always been that it costs surprisingly little to cover the uninsured. For the most part, the uninsured are relatively young, and hence have relatively low medical costs. Also, they receive a fair amount of uncompensated care, as well as spending funds out of pocket. So even if you ignore the possible monetary gains from preventive care, avoiding emergency room visits, and so on, we’re not talking about a vast rise in health care spending.
Take the CBO estimate of the cost of subsidies and Medicaid expansion in the Senate bill — that is, ignoring all possible cost savings. It’s $179 billion in 2018. Take the CMS projection of total health care spending in 2018: it’s more than $4.5 trillion. So the direct cost of expanding coverage — the initial bump in the blue curve above — is less than 4 percent of total health care spending. That’s the amount by which, on the current trajectory, health spending rises every 7 months.
Against that you have to set the fact that this reform makes the first serious effort, ever, to rein in costs. It’s not at all hard to believe that after a few years this will lead to lower, not higher, spending.
And it’s not an accident that cost control is finally on the agenda as part of a package that also expands coverage. Cost control as a stand-alone — hey, seniors, we’re going to cut your Medicare so we don’t have to raise taxes! — was a political non-starter; cost control as part of an overall deal — look, we have to spend our health dollars wisely to ensure that all Americans get the health care they need — is, it turns out, doable, even in the face of death-panel demagoguery.
I know that the pain caucus hates, just hates, the idea that social justice and responsible policy can ever go hand in hand. But that’s exactly what’s happening now.
Yglesias: Party-Line Health Care
There’s no real precedent for such a major piece of social policy legislation as this health care bill being enacted into law on a party-line vote. That naturally raises the issue of the sustainability of this legislation. What happens when the Republicans run things?
One thing to note is that it’s hard to imagine the GOP getting to 60 Senators any time soon. The more-disciplined Republican Party has more trouble putting together supermajorities. Indeed, there have never been sixty Republican Senators at any time in American history. The last time the GOP controlled over 60 percent of the Senate (59 out of 96, specifically) was the 67th Congress of 1921-22.
But the larger reason I don’t think this will get repealed is that a staggering quantity of opposition to this bill is fake. It’s fake in two ways. In part, people have been pretending to believe things they don’t believe. For example, lately Chuck Grassley has been pretending to oppose an individual mandate to buy health insurance. In the past, however, he’s supported such a mandate. And insurance companies will want the mandate to be made stronger, not weaker. Then there are people opposing the legislation over provisions that they’re pretending exist. Grassley, for example, is very worried about death panels but since there are no death panels he can’t actually repeal them.
Related to the opposition based on fake things, there’s a lot of opposition based on hypotheticals and vague slippery slope claims. People think this will lead to price controls or to mandate creep or that IMAC spending guidelines won’t be enacted. Once the bill is signed, however, none of that points in the direction of repeal—it points in the direction of opposing price controls, of opposing mandate expansions, and of favoring stringent cost-controls.
Last, for the past fifteen years Republican domestic policy has, in practice, consisted pretty overwhelmingly of seeking lower taxes on rich people without any offsetting spending cuts. I see no sign of that changing. I think the safe prediction is that when Republicans have more political power in the future, they’ll try to make taxes on rich people lower. Linking that agenda to lower subsidies for people to buy insurance would be politically disastrous, so they won’t do it.
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