health care reform

Resolutions, Political Resolutions and Damned Lies

Leo Gerard — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:35:07 -0500

‘Tis the season of resolutions. With the new year comes pledges to quit smoking, get out of debt and spend more time with family. Gym memberships jump. Weight Watchers’ profits fatten.

This also happens to be the season of political resolutions. It’s that every-fourth-year event featuring presidential candidates in a contest of campaign promise one-upmanship. Ron Paul pledges to legalize marijuana. Michele Bachmann swears she’ll cut gasoline prices to $2 a gallon. Newt Gingrich guarantees he’ll create millions of jobs “right now.” Mitt Romney assures every college graduate a job.

Unfortunately, this also has been, for some time, a season of damned lies. These are deliberate deceptions involving a higher level of scheming. The Contract with America and the more recent Pledge to America are examples. Republicans knew they couldn’t fulfill what they led the public to perceive as promises. But the GOP designed these “pledges” specifically so that Republicans couldn’t be labeled as failures when what they pseudo-promised never materialized. That’s the stuff of damned lies.

Unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions are legendary. Low calorie salad fixings fill fridges Jan. 2, and remain there, rotting, on Feb. 2. The victim of this broken promise is also the perpetrator and therefore unlikely to protest the infraction.

These days, political resolutions strewn along the presidential campaign trail are picked up and carefully cataloged on the Internet by reporters and bloggers who hold candidates accountable for every syllable. That’s a good exercise, but the public generally recognizes political promise hyperbole and realizes that unexpected events may prevent a president from keeping his word. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, pledged not to involve the country in the European war, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mostly, the public shrugs off presidential contenders’ inflated political resolutions.

Damned lies, however, are dangerous because they subvert trust in the political system, which needs the faith of the electorate to function. Damned lies may, in fact, be an integral part of Republican strategy since the GOP hates government of the people by the people and hopes to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.

In their 1994 Contract with America, Republicans vowed:

“in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.”

That, and calling it a contract, led Americans to believe it was a step above a pledge. It was inviolable, sacrosanct. It was a bond with no double-crossing footnotes.

Except it wasn’t.

With the help of the “contract,” Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. And they passed the easy, less controversial parts of the pledge. But they never enacted the most popular, more contentious promises, including a balanced budget amendment and term limits.

They had, however, set up the “contract” so they could never be blamed for those failures. The most insidious aspect of the Contract with America was the fine print escape hatch it provided the GOP.

Republicans never promised to enact their “contract” provisions into law. They only said they’d vote on them:

“within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny.”

No wonder former President Bill Clinton called it the Contract ON America.

In the fall of 2010, when Republicans were trying to regain control of the U.S. House, they came up with a “contract” clone that they called “A Pledge to America.”

It said:

“Our plan puts forth a new governing agenda that reflects the priorities of the American people . . .and can be implemented today.”

Republicans won the majority in the House a year ago and have had nearly 365 “todays” to implement their pledges. Just like with the 1994 “contract,” Republicans have failed to fulfill the big promises, the important resolutions that people remember.

For example, the pledge said:

“A plan to create jobs, end economic uncertainty, and make America more competitive must be the first and most urgent domestic priority of our government.”

Republicans then proceeded to make deficit reduction their priority. When President Obama proposed a jobs plan in September, Republicans blocked it.

Also in the “Pledge,” the GOP swore to permanently stop “job-killing tax hikes” so that families would be able “to keep more of their hard-earned money.” Then in September when President Obama proposed to extend and enlarge the payroll tax cut for 160 million middle class families, the GOP opposed it.

And there was this pledge:

“We offer a plan to repeal and replace the government takeover of health care.”

As in the “Contract on America,” this is a sleight of hand. It doesn’t say Republicans will repeal health care reform. And, in fact, they didn’t. But they can’t be called failures because they only pledged to “offer a plan to repeal.” They didn’t promise to actually accomplish it, even though that’s what they led voters to believe.

What they can be labeled as failures for, however, is neglecting to produce their promised plan to replace health care reform.

Democrats called the latest formal list of Republican promises the “Pledge to Destroy America.” The destruction was done by the damned lies that denigrated trust in political institutions. It was deliberately done to diminish America’s democratic government.

The 99% Seek a Just Economy, Not Just an Economy

Leo Gerard — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:05:03 -0400

Republicans jammed together a mess of old, failed and vague schemes and called it a jobs bill. Sen. John McCain conceded the reason for the rehash: “Part of it is in response to the president saying we don’t have a proposal.”

They still don’t. This despite the fact that they promised voters during their campaign to take control of the U.S. House one year ago that they’d create jobs. That they’d focus on jobs. That nothing was more important to them than jobs.

Now, what they’ve offered instead of actual jobs is a polyglot of GOP talking points. It’s certainly no vision to move the country forward. It’s a plot to set the country back – to repeal the health care law that will soon help provide coverage for the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance, to rescind the Wall Street reform law designed to prevent another financial sector-caused meltdown, and to thwart regulations, like those that stopped distribution of listeria-infected cantaloupe that killed 25.

GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio called the Republican polyglot a “pro-growth proposal to create the environment for jobs.” It is, in fact, a pro-business proposal to permit corporations to destroy the environment for humans.

It is another GOP ploy to appease, accommodate and absolve corporations. It is another GOP ruse to firmly establish in America an economy designed for, dedicated to and directed by corporations rather than a just economy controlled by and beneficial to the 99 percent.

Republicans offered up their “Jobs Through Growth Act” mishmash after the GOP minority in the Senate wielded the filibuster again to block a vote on President Obama’s $447 billion American Jobs Act, a measure that even Republican economists determined would create 1.9 million jobs and reduce the nation’s aching 9.1 percent unemployment by as much as 1 percent.

The Republican measure, by contrast, could hurt the economy, according to Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Analytics, an independent firm whose chief economist advised the McCain presidential campaign. Here is what Faucher said:

“Should we look at regulations and make sure they make sense from a cost benefit standpoint? Certainly. Should we reduce the budget deficit over the long run? Certainly. But in the short term, demand is weak, businesses aren’t hiring, and consumers aren’t spending. That’s the cause of the current weakness, and Republican Senate proposals aren’t going to address that in the short term. In fact, they could be harmful in the short run if the focus is on cutting spending.”

Of all the Republican proposals, the most insidious, the most dangerous, the absolutely most outrageous is their demand to roll back Wall Street reform, to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act that was passed in an attempt to prevent recurrence of the 2008 financial collapse that destroyed the U.S. economy and caused the highest levels of foreclosures, unemployment and misery among the 99 percent since the Great Depression.

Go back, the Republicans are saying. Go back to 2007 when Wall Street financiers sold worthless mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting investors, contending with a straight face that these were assets. Go back to 2008 when these firms made hundreds of millions betting those securities would fail. Go back to 2009 when the banksters, bailed out by taxpayers, awarded billions in bonuses to the executives who’d gotten the firms and the U.S. economy into so much trouble. Go back to early 2010, the Republicans are saying, before Obama signed the Dodd-Frank reform act, and allow Wall Street to do it all over again. Reprise unfettered, irresponsible Wall Street, the Republicans demand.

For Republicans, it’s all about enforcing freedom for the few – allowing corporations and millionaires to do whatever they want. No matter what that means to the freedoms of the 99 percent. The GOP demand for repeal of health care reform is another example of that. Already, this law has expanded health coverage for a million young adults because it allows them to remain on their parents’ plan until age 26. It has also helped 1.2 million senior citizens afford their prescription drugs by beginning to close the “donut hole” during which they must pay.

Still, Republicans want to get rid of that law. They want to regress to those free-for-all days when health insurance corporations could make unlimited profits from illness, deny coverage to those with chronic illnesses and terminate coverage when policy holders got sick. They want those young adults dropped. They want senior citizens to pay more for their prescriptions again. For Republicans, it’s all about enforcing freedom for the few – allowing health insurance corporations to do whatever they want. No matter what that means to the freedoms of the 99 percent.

The Republican rebuke of any attempt to control the 1 percent is highlighted in their “jobs bill” by its call for a regulation moratorium. No new rules! The country is in the midst of the deadliest outbreak of foodborne illness in 25 years. Twenty-five people are dead. A total of 125 people in 26 states have been sickened by listeria-poisoned cantaloupe from Jensen Farms in Holly, Colo. One sickened woman suffered a miscarriage. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says more illnesses and deaths may occur over the next several weeks.

If the Republicans got their way, the FDA would be unable to write new regulations to prevent another such incident. It’s fine with the GOP that Jensen had hired its own inspector, a firm that certified the Jensen packing plant fine and dandy just before listeria-tainted cantaloupes killed 25 and just before the FDA found numerous, obvious violations.

That’s because the Republican precept is: an economy just for the 1 percent.

The End of an Era: Nation-Building at Home After Bin Laden's Death

Daniel Marans — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:03:37 -0400

In uncertain times like these, there is a thrill to be had in the occasional moment of moral clarity. Osama bin Laden’s death on Sunday was one such moment. Let’s hope it marks the close of an era lived in the shadow of September 11th, and the start of a period devoted to the more complex, but equally patriotic task of solving our country’s stubborn domestic problems--even if it rarely evokes the same sense of national unity as hunting a Bin Laden.

September 11th is a buried memory for me. But the shocking news Sunday night brought it vaguely back to life. We were still looking for that guy? Has it really been ten years?

September 11, 2001 was my second day of ninth grade at the Ramaz School in Manhattan. I was in the throes of freshman jitters, still getting used to waking up at 6 am for my school bus commute from Teaneck, NJ. Shortly after getting to school that day, though, the principal announced the attack on the World Trade Center over the loudspeaker. My adolescent anxieties were immediately supplanted by more pressing fears. Were we safe? Were our parents safe?

Bad news awaited me at home in New Jersey. The parents of two elementary school friends were missing. It would take months to confirm their deaths. The mood in my house was somber and anxious.

Almost ten years later, my friends’ loved ones are still gone. Nothing can bring them back.

I like to think of Bin Laden’s death not as closure for their deaths, but as the closing of a chapter in the country’s history. For nearly a decade we have turned our vast resources outward, pursuing enemies the world over—some real, some imagined. Even as our nation grew more unequal, Wall Street speculation steadily engulfed the economy, and the health and standards of living for most of our nation’s citizens deteriorated, we drew a sense of unity and pride, for a while at least, from our commitment to “defeating the terrorists” who had perpetrated 9/11. We were still a great nation, it seemed, because we could take it to the bad guys, and make them pay for their crimes.

In the end, our national obsession with avenging 9/11 failed both to catch the criminal responsible for the act (we spent billions of dollars and inestimable amounts of human life in wars that, arguably, until now, had not resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death or capture), and to bolster our national self-esteem (the world viewed us, and we felt, like failures). It allowed us to be swept up into the horrific and misbegotten Iraq War, as well as tolerate significant rollbacks of our civil liberties and a dangerous rise in Islamophobia. Terrorists emboldened; country dejected.

Meanwhile, the damage of neglecting the home front has been incalculable, including to the service men and women who risked their lives at Ground Zero and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Could it be any more ironic that Bin Laden’s death comes only five months after Congress passed the law paying for the health care expenses incurred by the cancer-stricken 9/11 rescue workers?! Then again, maybe it is poetic that the former only happened after the latter came to be.

The fight against terrorism must no doubt continue. But maybe with Bin Laden gone, we can turn our formidable attention to the more contentious and less euphoric pursuit of domestic nation-building. Our biggest priorities right now should be ending unemployment, reforming our financial and health care systems, and fighting climate change and other environmental disasters. Accomplishing those tasks will require us to work together in unprecedented ways to challenge entrenched interests. It will not always unite us as a country, or give us a warm and fuzzy feeling inside the way the hunt for Bin Laden did.

Consider the healthcare reform battle. There was no health care crisis moment akin to 9/11 for the country to rally around. It took years of momentum, and a watershed presidential election, followed by months of tense partisan wrangling, compromising with special interests and town-hall shouting matches that almost tore the country apart. When the President signed the law giving 30 million Americans health insurance, crowds massed outside the White House—only they were protesting, not celebrating, as they were after Bin Laden’s death. And yet there is no doubt that is was the right thing to do. We are a better country for it.

Likewise, if we succeed in providing relief to the million families whose homes were foreclosed upon, and the 14 million Americans who remain unemployed, or reducing our deficit by taxing the rich, rather than slashing Social Security and Medicare, it will be because of persistence and good organizing, not because of heart-rending footage we see on TV.

The mundane work of building a stronger, happier and more compassionate country is far less of a rush then nailing the bad guy. And frankly, it is also more divisive. But it is no less of a patriotic duty. Our fellow Americans need us. Once the understandable joy over Bin Laden’s death peters out, we should embrace domestic nation-building with the dedication of genuine patriots.

GOP Offers No Death Panels, Just Death From Lack of Care

Leo Gerard — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 09:49:45 -0400

Republicans concocted death panels in an attempt to terrify Americans about health care reform, then propagated the lie because they wanted insurance corporations to profit from illness and injury unfettered.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed anyway, but now the GOP has announced that it plans to kill the reform, and Medicaid and Medicare too.

In one fell swoop, Republicans would foreclose on Americas’ long-held and cherished expectation that they’ll receive health coverage from their government in their old age, impoverishment or infirmity. For the elderly, poor, unemployed, disabled and juvenile who can’t afford insurance, the GOP offers no death panels, just death from lack of care.

U.S. Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, disclosed the GOP scheme to massacre Medicare and Medicaid. Instead of the government directly paying for medical services for the elderly and impoverished, Republicans would shift costs to states and the elderly. Under their plan, instead of Medicare, the federal government would give seniors an unspecified amount of money toward the cost of premiums for private health insurance. Also, instead of Medicaid, the GOP would give states some money to help pay for insurance for the poor, which includes nursing home care for the elderly. States and the elderly then would be stuck paying insurance costs above the amount provided by the federal government.

Ryan and his GOP gang transfer medical costs to the elderly and impoverished to compensate for federal revenues lost when they slash income taxes levied on the rich and corporations by an additional 30 percent.

The GOP message to the rich and to corporations: keep your tax break and take another 30 percent. The GOP message to the middle class: pay more and lose your safety net.

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The founders of the United States intended the government to serve the people not prostrate itself to the privileged. The signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the U.S. Constitution discarded the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the idea that monarchs derived their authority from God and thus were not subject to the will of the governed.

Instead, the founders and framers determined that rich and poor, men and monarchs are equal, that they possess inalienable rights and that the function of government is to secure those rights. Their vision of government is an organization operating with the consent of the people to protect the people. That is, to protect their inalienable rights, to protect them from inequities, to protect them from internal and external threats.

The GOP budget is a manifestation of a very different government philosophy. It subjugates the people to the divine right of corporations and the rich.

If the wealthy and corporations had paid their share of federal income taxes over the past 30 years since successive Republican presidents began cutting them, the federal deficit would be relative peanuts, if it existed at all. If the wealthy paid their share of social security taxes, the program would not face shortfalls after 2036. If corporations and the wealthy paid federal income taxes at the rates they did during the presidencies of Republicans Dwight D. Eisenhower or Richard Nixon, no one would be talking about killing off Medicaid and Medicare.

The nation’s largest corporation, General Electric, accumulated $26 billion in American profits over the past five years, while demanding $4.1 billion in “rebates” from the IRS and paying absolutely no federal income taxes last year. Two out of three U.S. corporations paid no income taxes from 1998 through 2005. The effective tax rate for the wealthy – the rate after loopholes and special deals -- is nine points lower than that paid by the typical worker.

Still, Paul Ryan and his Republican crew insist that corporations and the rich are paying too much and demand that they pay an official rate of 25 percent instead of 35 percent. Because that will mean billions in lost revenue, the GOP slashes programs that protect the masses in the middle, education, health care reform, veterans benefits, public transportation, health and safety regulation, food and import inspection, Medicaid and Medicare. The GOP guts government for the people.

Because of those huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations, the Republican budget doesn’t even end the deficit until 2040. In fact, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined the tax cuts would increase the deficit’s share of the economy for the first 10 years of implementation. Under the GOP plan, public debt would rise to 70 percent of GDP by 2022. If the government maintained its current tax and spending levels, the debt would grow to 67 percent of GDP by 2022.

The GOP budget shows Republicans believe corporations and the rich are super citizens with divine rights, while the vast majority of the nation’s citizens, the middle class, are lesser beings who are to be taxed but not protected by their government.

Many of these citizens – the elderly, the poor, the disabled – won’t be able to afford health insurance under the GOP scheme. They’ve paid taxes all their lives to support programs like Medicare. Now, the GOP intends to rip that out from under them, to take away the protection that they believed their government -- government for the people -- would provide.

The GOP announced this week that it believes new tax cuts for the rich and corporations are more important than Medicare and Medicaid, more important than the lives of vulnerable Americans who will die for lack of health insurance to pay for care.

Making Sense - Health Care Reform

Terrance Heath — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:19:43 -0400

No Fluke: Republicans Support Off-Shoring Jobs

Leo Gerard — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:33:12 -0400

Like the clear results on a pH test strip, the vote in the U.S. Senate this week on the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act showed Republicans’ true color: Red. Red for China.

Or Mexico. Or Indonesia. Or anywhere multi-national corporations get tax breaks for exporting American jobs. In this test of loyalty, every Republican in the Senate voted for corporate greed over American workers.

No fluke, this is a GOP pattern. The red party has consistently sided with giant corporations to the detriment of the American economy and American workers. In voting against health care reform, Republicans chose giant health insurance corporations over uninsured Americans. In opposing financial reform, Republicans embraced Wall Street over the taxpayers who bailed out the big banks and don’t want to do it again.

Republicans vainly attempted to rationalize those votes as opposing government regulation. There’s no regulation issue in the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act.

That Act would have removed tax incentives the U.S. government gives corporations to close domestic factories, fire American workers and move production overseas. And, conversely, the Act would have instituted tax cuts for corporations that return foreign employment to U.S. soil.

Every Republican in the Senate voted against the Act. They voted to continue forcing Americans to give tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The GOP said it is right and proper for U.S. citizens to subsidize corporate killing of American manufacturing. And Republicans said it would be wrong to do the opposite -- to use tax breaks to encourage corporations to restore off-shored jobs to the U.S.

Democrats, whose first priority is American workers, are pushing a 17-bill Make it in America plan. The Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act is part of that effort to bolster domestic industry and employment.

With joblessness stuck at 9.6 percent and with the U.S. trade deficit destroying or displacing 5.6 million jobs -- 70 percent of them good-paying manufacturing jobs -- in just one year – 2007, Democrats developed this plan to preserve American industry and jobs. Recent surveys of likely voters suggest the Democrats’ Make it in American program is exactly what Americans want and believe the country needs.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this week, 86 percent of respondents cited corporate off-shoring of American jobs as the primary cause of the country's continuing economic distress.

Similarly, a bi-partisan polling team that conducted a survey of likely voters for the Alliance for American Manufacturing in April found large majorities believe manufacturing strength is crucial to U.S. economic security and that the government should fortify American industry. These voters told the pollsters that they believe America no longer leads the world in manufacturing but could again with proper support.

That can-do-it attitude is realistic. Already some manufacturers are on-shoring. General Electric is moving production of its energy-efficient water heaters from China to the United States. Caterpillar and NCR, a technology company, are doing the same. A survey in June found 21 percent of North American manufacturers brought production into or closer to the United States in the previous three months and another 38 percent planned to research such a move.

Manufacturers gave USA Today numerous reasons for this repatriation. Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen. They cited poor quality foreign manufactured goods; theft of intellectual property; long product delivery times interfering with response to consumer demand, and benefits from providing engineers easy access to assembly lines.

The trade publication, Supply Chain Digest, quoted two experts in an August story about the on-shoring trend:

“George Stalk, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, has led research efforts showing the inventory benefits for high margin, fashion-oriented goods from bringing production at least back to North America almost always trump the value of lower manufacturing costs in Asia. Those benefits come from both not losing sales from being out of stock and not getting stuck with obsolete inventory that a company can’t sell or must mark down dramatically.”

And, the story quoted Jeremy Leonard, a consultant for Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI:

“A lot of companies who have gone there to take advantage of cheap labor are starting to tell us that if you (calculate) total cost and don't just look at wages, it's actually not worth it."

Democrats sought to nurture and expand the repatriation trend. But like numerous Make it in America bills passed by the U.S. House, the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act died at the hands of Senate Republicans. Democrats had the majority with 53 votes for the measure, but Republicans, as they have all year, blocked passage by using a filibuster to require a super-majority of 60.

The next test for Republicans will occur Nov. 2. In the mid-term election, Americans red-in-the-face angry at the GOP for extending tax breaks to corporations for expatriating American jobs have the opportunity to show Republican politicians what it feels like to lose a job.

Republican Pledge: A Rotten Egg for the Middle Class

Leo Gerard — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 10:05:51 -0400

When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, the Republican party promised his victory would assure the prosperity of “a chicken in every pot.” This week, Republicans proffered a similar pledge to America.

Hoover won, and in 1929, after a decade of GOP rule in Washington, Republicans did deliver something foul to Americans. It wasn’t the much-anticipated cooking hen. It was the Great Depression.

Now in the Great Recession, also delivered during a GOP presidency, Republicans have presented a new promise. They pledged to withdraw all unspent Recovery Act money to prevent it from employing even one more worker; kill health care reform to stop 30 million Americans from getting affordable insurance; slash $100 billion from federal programs protecting the middle class; preserve tax cuts for the rich and cut government regulation -- like oversight of Gulf-oil-gusher-BP and contaminated-egg-producers Jack and Peter DeCoster.

This time, the GOP downsized the “chicken in every pot” promise. Instead they’re pledging a salmonella-poisoned egg.

In 1932, Americans wisely rejected re-electing Republican Hoover, who is regarded as one of the nation’s most inept leaders, and chose instead Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revered as one of the best. This fall, it’s crucial that Americans choose sagely again, selecting Democrats intent on reforming Washington and protecting the nation’s middle class.

Eight years of Republican rule in Washington climaxed with the worst recession since the Great Depression. Since that downturn officially began in December of 2007, poverty, unemployment and foreclosures have risen while middle class income and health insurance coverage have fallen.

The poverty rate increased to the worst level in 16 years, with 3.7 million people slipping from the middle class to the ranks of the poor in 2009. One in seven Americans now is impoverished. More than 8 million workers have lost their jobs, and 2.3 million families have lost their homes to foreclosure. Nearly one in four mortgage holders is under water, meaning they owe more on their house than it’s worth. Also, last year, the number of uninsured Americans rose by 4.4 million to 50.7 million -- 16.7% of the population. It was the largest annual increase since the government began collecting comparable data in 1987.

By contrast, on Wall Street, where unrestrained and unregulated bankster recklessness caused the recession, happy days are here again. The banks that taxpayers bailed out have resumed paying million-dollar salaries and bonuses. The nation’s top 25 hedge-fund managers each took home an average of $1 billion (BILLION) last year. Those hedgers are among the nation’s richest 1 percent, those whose take home pay grew so fast between 1979 and the start of the recession in 2007 that nearly 39 percent of all income growth went to that tiny number of super-wealthy. Only 36 percent went to the bottom 90 percent of the nation’s population.

Democrats, keenly aware of the diverging experiences of the nation’s sucker-punched workers and its well-heeled elite, have worked to aid the beleaguered middle. They passed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which the Congressional Budget Office estimated created between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs by July.

Democrats reformed health insurance so that children with pre-existing conditions can’t be denied insurance; senior citizens won’t have to pay for “donut hole” medications; young adults up to age 26 may remain on their parents’ plans, and insurance companies can no longer choose doctors or place lifetime limits on coverage or drop the sick. On top of all that, the Democrats’ reform will lower federal deficits by $138 billion.

Now, Democrats are fighting to preserve income tax cuts for the middle class while eliminating breaks for the rich. The Democrats would continue to lower by $1,132 a year the taxes of median wage earners, those with incomes of about $50,000 a year. Under the Democrats’ plan, the super rich – those taking home more than $1 million a year -- would still get a tax cut of $6,349 – six times that of the middle class. But Democrats would have the super rich pay $97,651 in taxes a year that they now pocket.

Democrats think the rich have an obligation to pay those taxes. To get where they are, in the top one percent income bracket, they’ve used tax-subsidized public services at significantly higher rates than the other 99 percent of Americans. That includes services such as roads and airports, civil courts, the U.S. patent office, the U.S. Department of Commerce and professional licensing, regulation and inspection departments.

Republicans don’t agree. They believe the middle class should pay so the rich can continue getting breaks. The GOP believes it is fine to give tax cuts to the rich that will cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, but not pay for them. Conversely, Republicans have refused to extend unemployment insurance for the middle class jobless unless that’s paid for. The GOP believes it’s appropriate to continue tax breaks for multi-national corporations that ship jobs overseas but it’s not to extend aid to the middle class unemployed to pay for health insurance.

In their Pledge to America, Republicans promise to take care of the rich. They said they’d change Washington by decimating the very regulation that protects middle class workers and their families and by cutting off money that is providing jobs to the unemployed. The GOP pledges to undermine middle class America.

It might be called a turkey, but even that would inflate its value. It’s a rotten egg hurled at middle America.

Phony Bipartisanship Won't Fix Wall Street

Zach Carter — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:30:00 -0400

I generally find Andy Kroll to be both a rigorous and persuasive journalist. He knows what he's talking about on Wall Street reform, and he routinely pens informative yet approachable articles about very complicated subjects. So I was both surprised and disappointed to see his piece from this past Thursday, in which he argues that Democrats need to lighten up on the political push to overhaul the nation's broken financial system.

This strikes me as exactly the wrong argument at exactly the wrong time, but before I go into the why, let's examine Kroll's what. This excerpt sums up his argument:

"[Democrats are] potentially setting the stage for another health-care-esque bruiser in the Senate. Already, the bill, which should theoretically garner plenty of bipartisan support (everyone wants to end too-big-to-fail, predatory lending, and dangerous financial products, right?), has divided the Senate . . . . the debate over new financial reforms has rapidly disintegrated into a partisan shout-fest . . . . One of the few lawmakers . . . asking for a reasonable debate on the bill is Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) . . . . Corker's pleas, however, could be bowled over if Reid decides the Democrats need to plow onward with financial reform."

Unless I'm misreading Kroll, the implication here is that Democrats are being too hasty, Bob Corker is being reasonable, and the right thing to do is slow down and negotiate, lest the partisan black-eye of last month's health care debacle be repeated.

I think this is wrong on both politics and policy. Let's start with the politics. The Senate health care showdown finally put some wind in the Democrats' sails. At last, Democrats drew a line in the sand around some core policies, allowing people to see exactly what it was that Democrats stood for, and realize it was something they, the public, actually supported. As a result, nearly everybody in the country felt better about the party in power than they had since January 2009. Democrats took their political licks while they refused to coalesce around a set of concrete demands—the party's leadership looked (and, I believe, were) willing to accept any bill that garnered a Republican vote and could be characterized as "reform." That reeked of political opportunism, and people found it unattractive.

But after pushing hard for their bill at the end, Democrats came away from the health care battle looking very good. I still miss my public option, but I simply cannot understand how that final thrust hurt them politically. They stood for something, and people liked what they stood for. Repeating this "bruiser" on Wall Street reform would be very good for Democrats come November, no matter how the final vote turned out. Democrats would be principled defenders of the reasonable ideas Kroll lists in his article, and the only price they'd pay would be among (part of) the Tea Party crew. Something tells me the Dems aren't going to win those votes anyway.

Republicans do not support better consumer protections, nor do they support ending too-big-to-fail. They support anything that makes lots of money for their backers on Wall Street (this is true for some Democrats, as well). In last week's interview with Ezra Klein, Corker does indeed come across as a reasonable person. He's basically right about uncertainties in the technocratic minutia surrounding the resolution authority. And Ezra does a nice job showing how Corker's core differences with Democrats on this topic are not philosophical, but technical.

But technicalities were not the source of all the trouble when Corker was negotiating with Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) on the Senate Banking Committee, which is why Corker refused to even state his 14 objections to the Dodd bill to Ezra. During February and March negotiations, Corker tried to gut proposals to strengthen consumer protection and hampered efforts to the rein in the derivatives market (a.k.a. the crazy casino that brought down AIG). Corker was instrumental in pushing to give the existing slate of regulators—who utterly failed to regulate consumer protection leading up to the crisis—veto power over any rules devised by a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. He also convinced Dodd to place that regulator under the jurisdiction of the secretive consumer scourges at the Federal Reserve. There is no good, principled argument for such an arrangement. The Fed and other existing regulators have repeatedly proven themselves either totally incompetent with regard to consumer protection, or totally uninterested in its enforcement. For a list of their failures, see this article I wrote for The Nation in March.

Moreover, the resolution authority that Corker discusses with Klein cannot and will not end too-big-to-fail, however it is tweaked. Too-big-to-fail is fundamentally a political problem, not an economic problem. If the banking behemoths remain tremendous, their political connections will endure. When the next crisis comes, they will find a way to secure their bailouts—regardless of whatever laws we put on the books now. It's not obvious that the Federal Reserve's bailout operations during this crisis were legal, and it will not be obvious the next time they are invoked. The only way to break the bailout cycle is to break the banks' political power, and doing that requires breaking them up. It is not an accident that a new resolution authority is the policy supported by Too-Big-To-Fail-Captain Jamie Dimon of the Lobbying Battleship J.P. Morgan Chase.

Corker is a freshman Senator eager to make a name for himself on Capitol Hill, and if he emerges from the haggling over Wall Street as a moderate who can cut deals with Democrats, his stature within the Republican Party will increase significantly. But there's only one way for him to accomplish that goal: he must vote for the reform package the Democrats put forward. So what Democrats need to do is move on a bill that actually breaks up the banks that brought down our economy, and force Corker's hand. If he, like nearly all other members of his party, decides that the price of losing Wall Street's campaign contributions is too high, then so be it: Voters will see which party stands for reform, and which party stands with Wall Street. But if Democrats give still more ground on their already weak bill in hopes of winning over coy Republicans, they'll simply be repeating the health care mistakes of 2009.

Democrats need to move forward with a strong bill as soon as possible. "Delay!" is the rallying cry of the status quo, one that has been quite effective in the debate over Wall Street reform. The financial crisis hit in full force during the summer of 2007. By the fall of 2008, Wall Street had nearly destroyed itself. President Obama put forth a reform proposal in June of 2009. It is now the spring of 2010. The time for action is long overdue.

Update: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the top lobbying group for the U.S. executive class and a big bank booster, is urging Congress to adopt "bipartisan" reform. A good rule of thumb: if the Chamber wants something, it's probably not good.

The House Makes History: A Strong First Step Toward Health Care for All

Roger Hickey — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:12:07 -0400

The votes Sunday in the House on health care reform represents a historic accomplishment!

The first House vote passes the Senate health care bill. The second on Sunday night passes the reconciliation fix and get the Senate to vote for the House's improvements.

Congratulations to all our allies joined together as Health Care for America Now -- and, as the President said, "every unsung American who took the time to sit down and write a letter or type out an e-mail hoping your voice would be heard ... the untold numbers who knocked on doors and made phone calls, who organized and mobilized" or organized an accountability session demanding that our representatives act for health reform. We know how to make democracy work.

We must all keep watch on the insurance and drug industry—to make sure that this is just the beginning of reform. And someday soon we must pass a strong public option. The American people should demand that we monitor this reform.

Some wanted to cut back health reform even more, and tonight we should all thank House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who rejected that advice and passed this bill with 220 votes. Now on to the Senate!

What's In The President's Health Care Plan?

Jason Rosenbaum — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:17:20 -0500

Over the past few weeks, House and Senate Democratic leaders have been working to craft a compromise between their two health care bills that were passed over the last few months. Today, President Obama has released what Dan Pfeiffer, Communications Director at the White House, is calling the administration's "best shot" at bridging the differences between the House and Senate.

The proposal comes in advance of the planned February 25 health care summit, where Republicans and Democrats will meet and talk about the health care proposals on the table. The White House thought it would be most productive to "come to the table with one proposal," as Pfeiffer put it.

Over the last few months, we've been fighting to finish health reform right under the rubric of two main goals. By making health care affordable we mean making sure insurance is affordable for individuals, making sure insurance is affordable at work, and making sure middle-class health plans aren't taxed. By holding insurance companies accountable we mean giving regulators a national exchange so insurance plans in the exchange are subject to the same stringent rules and creating a public health insurance option to hold private insurance companies accountable.

So, what does the President's plan do?

(Note: The plan starts from the Senate bill as a foundation so any changes listed in the overview of the President's plan [pdf] are changes to the Senate bill.)

Affordability for individuals

The President's plan merges the tax credit schedules of the House and Senate bills for the subsidies an individual or small business would get if they buy health care on the exchange.

As noted previously, the House bill provided much more generous tax credits to lower income people so they could truly afford health care while the Senate bill was more generous for the middle class. The President's bill has merged these two in a way that makes health care more affordable to both low and middle income people.

Here's what the subsidies look like in the President's bill compared to the House and Senate bills:

Affordability at work

The House bill included a crucial "pay or play" provision that would have required employers to provide good health care at affordable prices to their employees and help small business afford it. If a business didn't provide health care, it would have had to pay a fee to the government to offset the cost to government of providing health care for uncovered workers.

The Senate, by contrast, does not require all businesses to contribute their fair share. Instead, they'd only pay $750 per worker per year if they left them uncovered and the worker qualified for a subsidy in the exchange.

The President's plan, though not a full "pay or play" system, moves towards reconciling the House and Senate bills. If a business does not offer coverage, it must pay $2,000 per worker to help cover the cost of insuring its employees. The White House estimates that this amount is one-third less than the average amount businesses would pay under the House proposal.

Taxing middle class plans

The excise tax in the Senate bill would tax many middle class health care plans, making coverage worse and more expensive. The House finances their health care bill by taxing those that can most afford it—households making more than $1 million per year.

The President's plan does not do away with the excise tax entirely, but it makes some significant changes. The threshold at which the tax kicks in was moved from $23,000 as the cost of a health care plan in the Senate bill to $27,500 for families and from $8,500 to $10,200 for individuals. This would likely exempt millions of middle-class people from the tax.

In addition, dental and vision benefits won't be part of the cost calculation, in effect raising the threshold higher.

The thresholds will be pegged to inflation plus 1 percent and will automatically go upwards if "health costs rise unexpectedly quickly between now and 2018″ when the tax is set to phase in.

Finally, there will be adjustments in the threshold for businesses that have higher costs due to the gender or age makeup of their employees.

Health Insurance Exchange Design

The President's plan maintains the state-based exchange design in the Senate bill instead of a more robust, national one. The President proposes giving the Department of Health and Human Services and state regulators the authority and funding to question and block rate increases like we've seen recently from Anthem/WellPoint in California.

Igor Volsky at Think Progress has a rundown of what the new policy would do:

The final Senate health care bill already bars insurers with excessive rate hikes from participating in the insurance exchanges but this new provision would go a step further, federalizing the states’ traditional and somewhat uneven role in monitoring insurance rate increases. At least 25 states have some “form of a prior approve process for premium increases,” but state governments often lack the resources or political will to keep insurers in check. Obama’s provision is both politically and substantively significant. It protects consumers from unreasonable rate increases but also prohibits insurers from dramatically increasing rates during the elections of 2010 and 2012 or the period between the passage of comprehensive reform and implementation.

Democrats were worried that insurers would exploit the interim period to boost profits ahead of the new insurance regulations. The federal government’s new rate review powers could blunt at least some of the anticipated increases. Here is how rate review would work:

- Insurance companies would have to justify unreasonable premium increases.

- The Secretary could deny or modify health insurance rate increases that are found to be unjustified.

- The Secretary would determine whether states have the capability to conduct rate reviews.

- Establishes a Health Insurance Rate Authority to advise the Secretary. It will have seven members, including consumer representatives, an insurance industry representative, a physician and other experts like health economists and actuaries

Since conservatives will surely claim that rate review is some kind of government takeover of private industry or a burdensome new federal requirement for insurers, it’s important to note that states that have instituted [the rate review process] house profitable insurance companies and maintain competitive and vibrant markets. Families USA has more on that here.

Public Option

There is no public health insurance option in the President's bill.

Other changes

In addition, the President's plan would:

fully close the donut hole for prescription drugs under Medicare by 2020
put more money into community health centers
some changes in the individual mandate, plus allowing people to opt out of purchasing insurance entirely if they're below the tax filing threshold of $18,700 per year for families
gets rid of "pay for delay" which allows branded pharmaceutical companies to keep generics off the market by paying the generic maker to stay out
$10 billion in more tax on big PhRMA
fully funds the Medicaid expansion for states until 2017, funds it at 95% until 2019, and funds it at 90% going forward after that
gets rid of the special deals like Senator Nelson's cornhusker kickback
is fully paid for and reduces the deficit over 10 and 20 year periods

The Wonk Room has more.

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Perhaps more significant than the proposal this morning was Pfeiffer's comments on the strategy for passing the President's plan:

The President expects and believes the American people deserve an up or down vote on health reform. The proposal was designed to ensure we can get that if the opposition decides they will filibuster health reform.

Heading into the Thursday summit, the President has a plan on the table that the administration believes represents a compromise between Democrats in the House and the Senate with no large token policy given to Republicans before they arrive at the negotiating table that wasn't already in one of the two bills. And the plan was designed to pass via reconciliation.

Most Republicans have yet to formally RSVP to the summit or post their unified plan online as the White House has done. It's still an open question whether Republicans can coalesce around one plan, as opposed to the multiple, non-serious proposals they've released so far. And the President has told them that he hopes they come to the summit in "good faith." The rest of America? We know we need health reform finished, we know we need it finished right, and we know that it will take the Democrats in Congress to get it done.

And we're making our voices heard. On Wednesday, the day before the summit, we're mobilizing with MoveOn.org and dozens of other partners to let Congress hear from us one million times. This barrage of action will come as Melanie's March—a group of health insurance company survivors walking 135 miles from Philadelphia to Washington in honor of Melanie Shouse, a health-care activists who died because she didn't have affordable health care—concludes with a rally in Washington.