I’ll say this for George Bush: you’d never have caught him frantically negotiating against himself to take the meat out of a signature legislative initiative just because his approval ratings had a bad summer. Can you imagine Bush and Karl Rove allowing themselves to be paraded through Washington on a leash by some dimwit Republican Senator of a state with six people in it the way the Obama White House this summer is allowing Max Baucus (favorite son of the mighty state of Montana) to frog-march them to a one-term presidency?
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Matt Taibbi on the likely demise of the public option from the health-care reform bill (via AZspot).
Marco writes:
The Democrats, and the Obama administration, do not have a mandate to pander to the crazy, screaming, ignorant wingnuts and their death-squad propaganda. We elected them to run this place and get things done after a decade of damage and neglect.
The Democrats proved during W.’s term that they had absolutely no balls and no ability to get anything done whatsoever. The Democrats would compromise, the Republicans wouldn’t, so the passed legislation was lopsided, ineffective, and often very harmful. I assumed it was because the Democrats just didn’t have enough power.
Now they have a lot more power, and should be able to pass nearly any policy initiative with broad support. And what’s happening? The Democrats are compromising and the Republicans aren’t. The resulting bill will be lopsided, ineffective, and harmful.
It’s the same old shit.
I expect as much from Congress, but I’m extremely disappointed in the ineffectiveness and lack of balls shown by the Obama presidency so far.
Public option may or may not be part of the final bill. I think it’s an important measure—but as Paul Krugman points out, it’s not the most important measure. A healthcare bill should do three things.
- Ensure universal access to coverage,
- Lower medical costs across the board, and
- Cause as few headaches during implementation as possible.
The first is the most important one. The bill will (more or less) accomplish it. And, once a bill with that objective has passed, we can make whatever tweaks are necessary to do it. Preventing insurers from dropping the sick or refusing to cover those at greater risk is a huge step.
The second objective is probably impossible for the Federal government to do at this point. The Republicans, in an effort to drum up fears about “rationing”, have decided that any effort to reduce medical costs will kill grandma. Normally the Republicans would be all for cutting grandma’s medicare—and I’m sure they’ll be for it again a year from now. But at the moment, cutting costs=murder. The bill might create some efficiency in terms of standardizing forms and preventing fraud—but it probably won’t give the transformative change we need.
And that tertiary objective is, well, tertiary. I still think that the individual mandate is a bad idea and a give-away to the insurance industry. I think few if any people will consciously try to game the system—so the real question is how to get them signed up. But there are worse things than a mandate—particularly if it has an exception (as Massachussetts’ does) for financial hardship.
The part I don’t get is why a watered-down healthcare bill would supposedly make Obama a one-term President. I see a bigger political threat in delaying the healthcare bill. Here’s the timeline I would predict.
- October 2009 - Something called healthcare reform is signed into law.
- November-December 2009 - Fox News talks about the uncontrolled spending.
- January 2009 - The implementation hits some inevitable snags. Fox calls this a collapse of the entire system and pronounces the bill a failure. The other news agencies start callng the system “troubled.”
- February 2009 - The media forgets about the snag. Things go back to normal.
- 2010 - People start getting health insurance who weren’t eligible before. Good stories start emerging.
- Mid-2011, the bill will be in full effect. Most of the little kinks will be ironed out. The economy will be improving. Everybody will be happy.
- 2012 - Obama will have wrapped up the war in Iraq, done something about Afghanistan (I hope), turned the economy around, and fixed healthcare for millions of people. None of the horror stories will have come to pass. Obama is reelected.
