Bits & Pieces

As it now stands, if it’s any more watered down, Obamacare will be homeopathic.

– Roger Ebert, via Quotation of the Day Mailing list

My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not — this was in the ’60s — we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada.

– Sarah Palin, supposedly opposed to government healthcare, speaking to Canadians. Ironic? That is not the word I would choose to describe it. It seemed to work pretty well for her then, huh?

This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. Since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.

* * *

[N]o matter which approach you favor, I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.

I have therefore asked leaders in both of Houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks. From now until then, I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform. And I urge every American who wants this reform to make their voice heard as well — every family, every business owner, every patient, every doctor, every nurse.

–President Obama, today, finally speaking with passion about the need for healthcare insurance reform now.

I hate to jinx things, but today seems to have been a sort of breakthrough on healthcare insurance reform. Senator Tom Harkin is stating that reconciliation is a go. It actually, finally, mercifully may happen, folks.

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!

Oh, and when you the GOP whining about the “nuclear option,” review this list of bills that passed using reconciliation:

The 1995 Balanced Budget Act was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 52 to 47. The 2001 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 58 to 33. The 2003 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 50 to 50, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act was also passed in reconciliation with a 50 to 50 vote and a Cheney intervention. The 2006 Tax Relief Extensions Act was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 54 to 44. This is as you’d expect: If bills had overwhelming bipartisan majorities, they wouldn’t need to go through reconciliation.

As it happens, Republicans controlled the Senate during each and every one of these bills.

Via NBC news:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The GOP does support the retention of an anti-trust exemption for the healthcare insurance companies. The free market seems very important to the GOP, an article of faith, and government intrusion in the market to protect a free market without collusion is bad. Except when it isn’t.

Update: Matt Taibbi has more.

The insurance antitrust exemption has been an outrage for over fifty years. The original bill formalizing the industry’s exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, was dreamed up by two Hollywood villains. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran was the inspiration for the “Senator Pat Geary” character in Godfather Part II (”Senator… my final offer is this: nothing” — that guy), while Homer Ferguson was the inspiration for the Lloyd Bridges character in Tucker who whored himself out for the auto makers to get Tucker’s new car struck from the market. These two gigantic assholes teamed up to help the insurance industry avoid the albatross of competitive pricing.

This isn’t about betrayal, or a slap in the face, or an insult. It isn’t about strategies to keep seats, or grand theories of justice. Democrats in Congress have the chance to cast a single vote that will make the lives of tens of millions of Americans less wrenching, our demises less brutal. That’s what this is about.

– MD, an anonymous reader of TPM, making explicit the real world effect of a failure by the Democrats in the House to approve the Senate healthcare reform bill and seek improvements later. Where is the courage on the left to vote for real reform even at the cost of each members re-election?

Andrew Sullivan argues that President Obama must directly take on the paranoid claims of the right and, in doing so, he must fight with every tool at a President’s disposal. And, all of us who supported the President must again to so, even if we are not getting everything we want. Read the entire essay, but here is an excerpt:

The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama’s presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama – that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night – reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do… suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.

***

This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority’s morale, to break a president’s foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.

And we have to re-engage as powerfully as we did in the campaign to fight back against these now emboldened forces of reaction. I think this is true not just for the sake of the country but also for the sake of the GOP. The nihilist obstructionism and rhetoric they have embraced makes constitutional democracy close to impossible. Their total lack of any workable alternatives to dire problems is a form of degeneracy we have to avoid empowering.

So fight, Mr President.

I mean that sincerely. As Paul Krugman notes, healthcare reform, even in its current crippled form, is a big step forward.

Update: Not convinced? Check out this graphic.

With all of the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, young people are beginning to think that the allied powers defeated Nazi Germany because Germany had too much health care.

— Jim Hansen

More from Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times:

In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.

“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.

But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.

Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.

“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”

When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”

The vote was 220 to 215.  Thirty-Nine Democrats voted no and one Republican voted yes. You can follow that brave Republican on Twitter here.

He is so strangely crazy.  Someone how conservatives learned on 9/11 to stand up against health care reform….

I keep hearing more and more seemingly rationale people announce that neither they nor their children are going to be vaccinated. They will not be vaccinated against swine flu, nor will they take any other vaccinations.

If this were simple craziness, it would be fine. But the fact of the matter is that those who refuse vaccinations hurt not only themselves, but all of us.

Amy Wallace, writing in this month’s issue of Wired, outlines the damage done by vaccine deniers. It is a fascinating article and well worth a full read. Excerpt:

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

Employee healthcare insurance premiums for small business in 2010 are increasing approximately 15% to $5,500 per employee.

Some people who oppose reform complain that it would be too expensive, as if healthcare insurance cost isn’t skyrocketing with the existing patchwork system. Healthcare insurance premiums are growing extremely rapidly and is too expensive for many small businesses. These are the businesses where most job growth occurs. The current course is unsustainable. Some form of reform is needed.