Progressive Breakfast: Health Care Up, Climate Down?

The daily Progressive Breakfast serves up what progressive movement members need to know to start their day

Health Care Advancing, Bit By Bit

NYT offers optimistic update on health care legislation: [1] "... President Obama’s arms-length strategy on health care appears to be paying dividends ... The bills have advanced further than many lawmakers expected. Five separate measures are now pared down to two. But the legislative progress has come at a price. In the absence of specific guidance from the White House, it has moved ahead in fits and starts. From here on, the challenges will only grow more difficult ... In the House, where leaders have vowed to pass a bill by Nov. 11, a fight over abortion coverage could still imperil the legislation, and Mr. Obama could lose some votes from liberals upset that the bill includes a weakened 'public option,' ... Last week’s back-and-forth in the Senate was emblematic of a process that has at times seemed on the brink of anarchy."

HuffPost's Art Levine observes the House-Senate differences on taxing expansive insurance plans may be a major stumbling block: [2] "abor unions, joined with other progressive organizations like Health Care for America Now, will be pushing to strengthen the legislation when the bills come to floor votes, but they're also focusing their efforts on ensuring that midde-class families and union members aren't slammed by a whopping 40% tax on insurers offering so-called Cadillac plans."

E.J. Dionne notes incremental, immediate reforms will have the biggest political impact in 2010: [3] "...since most of the changes don't become effective until 2013, the next few years will be a time of uncertainties and unknowns. Citizens typically want to know what's in this for them, and what they'll get right now. That's why the most important document House Democrats released when they unveiled their bill last week was a list of 14 benefits that would be created immediately. These include insurance reforms to ban lifetime limits on coverage and an end to 'rescissions,' under which insurers abruptly nullify patients' policies after they file claims. One of the most popular reforms in the bill -- barring insurers from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions -- wouldn't take effect until later. So the House bill creates an interim high-risk pool to help those who need coverage in the meantime. There are also particular benefits for Medicare recipients, including an immediate reduction in drug costs, and a very popular provision that would allow parents to keep their children on the family health plan through age 26. Especially important are new investments in community health centers and in efforts to increase the number of primary care doctors."

Sen. Snowe tells AP he "trigger" proposal doesn't have the votes to pass [4], won't bother introducing it. (via FDL [5])

Change.org's Tim Foley notes the House health care bill cuts the deficit more [6] "than the Senate Finance Committee bill."

Senate Climate Bill Faces Committee Debate This Week

W. Post delivers a pessimistic update on Senate climate bill before tomorrow's committee debate: [7] "With Democrats deeply divided on the issue, unless some Republican lawmakers risk the backlash for signing on to the legislation, there is almost no hope for passage ... Democratic leaders, with the support of the Obama administration, are trying to sway at least half a dozen Republicans by offering amendments to speed along their top priority: building nuclear power plants ... it remains unclear whether that approach will hold currency in the current era of political polarization."

CQ reports Sen. Stabenow looking to advance agricultural interests in climate bill offset program: [8] "The two-term Democrat has been negotiating closely with farm groups and the bill’s sponsors, John Kerry, D-Mass., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to craft language that favors farmers and can win support from colleagues representing rural regions ... Stabenow envisions Michigan cashing in on an offset program. The state has many forests, which release carbon when cut down. Landowners could earn offset payments by keeping the forests intact. The senator even envisions ways for Michigan’s economically depressed cities to generate cash from a carbon offset program ... Boxer said flatly: 'She’ll write the agriculture title.' But it’s not clear that Agriculture Chairwoman Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., agrees ... [Farm groups] want the Agriculture Department — which is likely to be more sympathetic to farmers’ interests — to oversee a farm offsets program instead of the EPA. Environmentalists say this could undercut the program’s value as a conservation tool. ... An early draft of Stabenow’s legislation aims to straddle the agency line, giving the Agriculture Department chief jurisdiction of the program while creating a consultation role for the EPA and establishing a scientific panel to evaluate the environmental integrity of offset projects."

Al Gore predicts Obama will go to Copenhagen next month [9], reports EnviroKnow.

Climate Progress praises Al Gore's latest climate book [10]: "a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen."

Texas 600-megawatt wind farm creates more than 6 times the number of Chinese jobs than US jobs. NYT's Green Inc. [11]: " The total cost of the project, which was brokered in part by the U.S. Renewable Energy Group, an American private equity company, was estimated at $1.5 billion. At an event after the announcement in Washington on Thursday, Cappy McGarr, a managing partner at the company, was beaming. 'This planned $1.5 billion investment in wind energy will spur tremendous growth in the renewable energy sector,' Mr. McGarr was quoted in a news release as saying, 'and directly create hundreds of high-paying American jobs.' ... The group’s calculations last week put the number of American jobs at a little more than 300 — most of them temporary construction jobs, along with about 30 permanent positions once the wind farm is operating. Mr. McGarr told The Wall Street Journal that more than 2,000 Chinese jobs would be created by the deal. That, along with the fact that the project was hoping to secure 30 percent, or $450 million, of its financing from U.S. stimulus funds, was enough to send tempers flaring."

Goldman Sachs Quietly Behind Subprime Housing Crisis

McClatchy uncovers Goldman Sachs secretive role in foreclosing on subprime mortgage homeowners: [12] "Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers. The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman's then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003. Unable to identify a lender, the couple could neither capitalize on a mortgage hardship provision that would allow them to defer some payments, nor on a state law enabling them to offset their debt against separate, investment-related claims against Goldman."

GOP sees fresh opening to end TARP. Politico: [13] "...Republicans are moving to use yesterday’s bankruptcy filing by business lender CIT to score political points against TARP -- which Senate Republicans are pushing to end with an amendment to unemployment benefits legislation this week. House Financial Services ranking Republican Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) said in a statement that CIT’s filing 'highlights the folly of a legislative proposal that makes the Federal Reserve the unchallenged arbiter of systemic risk, capital adequacy, and financial stability.'"

We Can Not Afford Not Passing More Stimulus

Krugman sounds the alarm: [14] "Suppose that the economy were to keep growing at 3.5 percent. If that happened, unemployment would eventually start falling — but very, very slowly. The experience of the Clinton era, when the economy grew at an average rate of 3.7 percent for eight years (did you know that?) suggests that at current growth rates we’d be lucky to see the unemployment rate fall by half a percentage point per year, meaning that it would take a decade to return to something like full employment. Worse yet, it’s far from clear that growth will continue at this rate. The effects of the stimulus will build over time — it’s still likely to create or save a total of around three million jobs — but its peak impact on the growth of G.D.P. (as opposed to its level) is already behind us. Solid growth will continue only if private spending takes up the baton as the effect of the stimulus fades. And so far there’s no sign that this is happening. So the government needs to do much more. Unfortunately, the political prospects for further action aren’t good."

American Prospect's Jake Blumgart reports ME and WA may pass anti-tax anti-stimulative initiatives tomorrow that will gut state government services: [15] "TABOR bills are designed to restrict government spending by capping taxes at the previous year's levels, and allowing them to grow only in relation to population plus inflation. This idea can be problematic in boom years, but critics fear it would be disastrous now, when state and local budgets have already been cut to the marrow. If TABOR passes in Maine or Washington, the states would have to cap their budget at the 2010 revenue baseline. If the recession continues eating into revenues, the TABOR cap would only continue dropping, forcing governments to cut more programs. If the economy improves, Maine and Washington would still be trapped by the previous year's spending limit -- in this case, the trough of the worst recession in a generation. Essentially, both states -- along with every county and city within them -- would be locked into recession-era spending. 'TABOR would make it impossible for either state to ever recover any of the public services that were cut during this recession,' says Iris J. Lav, senior adviser for state fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 'In a recession, revenues drop. When revenues drop under TABOR the inflation and population allowances are applied to those reduced revenues, you don't get to go back to your previous base.'"

Fed rate decision Wed., unemployment numbers Fri. [16] notes W. Post.

Possible positive manufacturing news. Bloomberg: [17] "Factories in the U.S. probably grew at a faster pace, while the number of people signing contracts to buy houses showed no improvement, signaling a shift to manufacturing as the driver of the expansion, economists said before reports today ... 'Manufacturing is back in expansion territory on a sustained basis,' said Adam York, an economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina."