But I thought it was the hallucinogenic drugs that turned us into liberals in the first place. Or maybe it was just the patchouli. But, seriously, I don’t really disagree with Harwood. Did I just say that?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
I didn’t hear a thing.
I keep looking for the BooBoy celebration thread… haven’t you explained to that boy that he needs to show up to get his tax deduction?
Maybe too much patchouli here, but I am going to savor this event. It is historic and a step in the right direction. If others want to/need to throw out the baby…their choice. I am thrilled for those who will be able to get medical care who could not before. C’est tout. It’s not over except for those who thrive on melodrama. If medical care gets even worse because of this, I will recant, but it won’t.
I am curious. Didn’t Obama say the whole health care thing would be open and transparent when on the campaign trail? Aren’t the deals with Big Pharma and the like a break of that promise? And did you see his statement this morning? They are still claiming they are taking on the special interests. I prefer that he not insult our intelligence.
Maybe it’s just your intelligence he’s insulting. My intelligence is just fine.
I know people who believe in death panels and they think their intelligence is just fine, too, just like you.
To each his own. Peace, love and soul Bob.
Some people don’t mind their intelligence being insulted as long as there’s a White House imprimatur on the insult.
Coal under the Christmas tree huh Bob? Well have a happy holiday anyway and Happy Kwanzaa!
Make sure I have this straight please, BooMan:
A) You don’t really disagree with Harwood.
B) Harwood is saying that the current bill is the most that we could have gotten, that neither Obama nor Reid could have done any better with different strategy/tactics or priorities.
A+B = You think this is the best we could have done. Is that correct?
I think it’s unfortunate that Harwood is perpetuating stereotypes of liberals as potsmokinghippies. Though the Left may not all be well-educated / well-informed / well-versed in procedure, I think the vast majority of the Left is well-meaning and deserving of much more respect. Especially the Progressive wing.
Harwood’s false characterization delegitimizes criticism of this bill and the process by which it was created. Many of the criticisms are legitimate! And to the extent that so much of the left is confused about what the bill actually does and whether it will do more harm than good, can we really be held responsible for that?
We get spun and lied to from a thousand directions, there are very few credible sources of information and not everyone has found them, yet we are expected to some how have a lucid, “correct” perspective on this Reform effort. Sounds like a bad joke, and the insurance companies are busting a gut laughing.
we could have had a triggered PO.
It ain’t over until the ink says Barack H. Obama.
A triggered public option would not have brought Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, or Joe Lieberman to the table. In principle, the House-Senate conference could still deliver a bill to each house with a triggered public option.
“But, seriously, I don’t really disagree with Harwood.”
You obviously love punching hippies, and are no better than the MSM. Thanks for throwing my ass under the microbus.
With their behavior this past week, I’d love to punch them all hard in the nuts!
Where I am on this. Right now, progressives should fight with whatever public pressure and political power they can muster to fix some of the more egregious parts of the Senate bill. Brent Budowsky has a scenario in which the a drug reimportation provision is put in the bill and then swapped with Big PhRMA for a public option (Big PhRMA has a vested interest in not having drug prices pressured by Big Insurance). There are a lot of possible things that can be done in conference that would not wind up blowing up the bill on Senate and House final passage.
This will be a test of the unity of the House Progressive Caucus and their ability to learn to bargain. Both required for many pieces of legislation yet to come.
So jumping up and down and hollering about what is wrong about the bill and advocating voting it down if those are not taken out is at this point some helpful theater–especially because progressives are divided on this. And this division become unhelpful only when it created personal animosities that prevent building unity when the legislation is finally beyond the control of public pressure.
So continue to fight for now.
But once the signature of Barack Obama gets on the passed bill, declare victory, excoriate the Party of No, and lay out a progressive agenda for fixing the bill that Democrats can run on in the fall. Especially Democrats who are challenging Republicans.
An election that breaks conventional wisdom would be very helpful at this juncture, and when (there is no doubt of if in my mind) the healthcare bill gets to Obama’s desk, we will politically be able to send all the little Napoleons who expected Obama’s Waterloo to St. Helena.
It might have been the hallucinogens (what exactly did your generation do?) that turned you into a liberal, but for me it was the Civil Rights Movement that totally transformed my state. (And even Mark Sanford has not been able to put that genie back into the bottle).
Got a link? Also, I think drug reimportation is far more important than a public option, why trade it–thusly why I want to see the link? Pharma is more of a culprit than the insurance companies; insurance’s only evil is hiding the prices of health care.
He was on The Ed Show, Playbook segment, Monday night.
Insurance has its own evils. Pre-certification has turned from a check on unnecessary procedures to a denial of necessary ones. PPO networks get dramatic discounts, which amount to subsidies by folks not in that PPO. And the same bloated management structure and executive salaries exist in insurance companies that exist in major health care systems (private or university run). Meanwhile the salaries of primary care physicians in large healthcare systems have stagnated, and repayment of student loans are used to lock in primary care physicians to that system. And the administrative cost of micro-managed cost accounting for fee for service (down to the aspirin tablet) begun in the Medicare progam during the Reagan administration, now infects all insurance claims. Not to mention the lost hours healthcare administrative staff spend contacting, leaving voicemails, following up, recontancting, and negotiating with insurance administrative staff and nurses on claims, pre-certifications, and collections.
All players in the industry–providers, insurers, pharamaceutical companies, medical equipment companies, medical supply companies–have their own share of being a culprit. And almost all of those are oligopolies within a local market or in the national market. And insurers have the benefit of not being subject to anti-trust laws.
The difference in the politics is that PhRMA is still at the table and AHIP never was. Therefore PhRMA wins at the expense of AHIP.
But seriously, I do disagree with sanctimonious @$$wipes who feel the need to denigrate people who think that America is capable of having a health system as good as other Western democracies.
This may in fact be the best that America can do. In the face of a healthcare crisis Congress manages to pass insurance for corporations. Maybe that’s the best that America can do.
Who knows? Maybe with the new regulations the insurance companies will run it just fine? I’m not saying they will but nobody is complaining about the oil and gas companies that fuel their cars. Why aren’t we all bitching day and night about the wealthy oil companies? I find it curious that a newly regulated insurance industry is portrayed by progressives as worse than all other corporate industries.
Of course people do bitch about oil companies. But no one’s agitating for Public Oil as the One True Way to keep evil oil companies honest. People bitch about telecom and cable companies but the municipal wireless stuff is still small potatoes, and no one is demanding PubliCom Wireless. We know plenty of people who have hot-blooded passion for particular brands of computers and OSs, and we don’t have a public alternative to those. No one insists that there be a Public Option for grocery stores. All of these public options for other phases of our lives would be pretty cool, now that I think of it, but they haven’t been the cornerstone of policy disputation. But somehow in this one case it became the litmus test for how well you measure up as a “radical.”
Well, there is this one major difference.
You can chose not to drive a car (or own one). WiFi is not an absolute necessity. Grocery stores are truly competitive and not exempt from anti-trust legislation as the health insurance industry is.
But you have only one life and body and it should be an absolute right for everyone to maintain its health as far as possible. It should not be the amoral profit maximizers of the insurance companies that decide my fate.
In my book, even a public option is a capitulation to profit – a single payer, publicly managed system is the only way to go. Now, I did grow up in the Scandinavian (Norway) welfare model and I’ll take that any day over the system here.
But we’ll have to make baby steps to get there since our politicians are in the corporate pockets and regard every little victory as a step towards a long-term goal.
exactly. Health and profit are always going to have a tenuous relationship. You want people who provide health to make a good living, and you want to encourage research and innovation, but there is something wrong about someone being denied care because they can’t afford it.
I guess I was speaking more of the future health insurance industry with the proposed regulations of not denying care. I sense that most progressives still will feel the need to continue “hating on them” as they will continue to be profitable.
The core problem with health care is not the fact that the insurance industry has (and will continue to) make a profit even with the new regulations. Profit can’t be our enemy as doctors sure the hell aren’t poor —it’s that the claim denials and, exclusion for pre-existing conditions and other related policies are the reason that we should see this legislation as so needed. I emphasize this as that I read it as a core philosophy of Obama’s and one of which I completely agree. I think it’s wrongheaded and futile to rail about profitable companies, corporations, nursing homes, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, ambulance companies,and anyone who earns an income related to health care. If we are going to be pissed off about profitable insurance companies in the future, then, to not be hypocritical, we also need to include the others in our “pissed offedness” š
Bowers says it well: Obama holds sway of the progressive base despite whatever blogs do. If bloggers want to have influence, they need to hold a significant chunk of sway over that base. So if you want power aside from the rest, you have to go and earn it.
A BMT “fan” worships Jane.
Acolyte – nothing more!
LEAVE
BRITTNEYJANE ALOOOOOONE!!!!Reference
After reading comments at another blog where the clientele call themselves progressive, I can’t really disagree either. At least hallucinogenic drugs is an explanation for the self-described progressive freak out over the Senate bill. Otherwise, the watb and their hubris is an unfortunate mystery.
Check out my comment above, please, the second party mainly. I think a lot of progressives are “freaking out” because they don’t want to hand Big Insurance and Big Pharma a victory. It gets sticky because, while the Senate bill emphatically is a huge victory for INSU-PHAR, I think it is also a victory for many of the people in this country that the bill will help.
Really not that mysterious, when you think about it. Much of the left has felt for decades that they could never achieve big policy wins in America; victory is for Corporations, Republicans, and sports teams. Obama’s election gave a lot of those people hope that this trend was reversed, hope that they could win now, that they have a champion. Thus it is jarring to see health care reform somehow turn into an INSU-PHAR victory, and a lot of attention is being focused on that.
But, again, it’s not ONLY a victory for INSU-PHAR. Perhaps we on the left need to acknowledge that this bill contains many victories for the people we care about, and let INSU-PHAR have theirs.
Someone needs to go back and read the arguments that Bill Clinton and Al Gore (yes, that AL GORE) used to sell NAFTA and the other trade deals that gutted American manufacturing and expedited the relocation of working class jobs overseas. I’m sure we could find quotes from the “centrist” Dems who sold those trade deals, telling us all about how the “free market” would create more jobs and better jobs for Americans and that the fall of “artificial” trade barriers “inevitable”. And there was that boom in Silicon Valley and the housing bubble that obscured the devaluation of the American worker for most of the last couple of decades.
The reason why I mention this is that it was a coalition of “centrist” (read: corporate-owned) Dems plus Republicans and the Clinton White House that pushed through the destruction of the American middle class. At least those trade agreements were a bipartisan sellout of workers. “Healthcare reform” is strictly a Democratic product. All blame will accrue to the Democratic Party.
When Americans’ health insurance bills continue to rise under the new rules that increase will be blamed strictly on Dems. Does anyone here actually think that there will be enough poor people who get healthcare from the bill who will go to the polls to offset the lost Democratic votes in the middle class? Of course not. Poor people don’t vote, especially when the Dems cut off funding to groups like ACORN. So from a strictly political view the Dems are trading middle class voters for vaguely potential poor voters.
And who believes that a healthcare system even more securely in the hands of the insurance companies is going to be appreciably better for the average voter? Or that it will be appreciably better for anyone?
When the public option in this bill was eliminated a true leader among the Democrats should have stepped up and offered in its place a simple stand-alone proposal for a Medicare-like option to only those people who can’t afford insurance from insurance companies. But such a simple proposal wouldn’t get “traction” in the public arena, wouldn’t generate any support among “centrists” who keep getting money from insurance companies and would be sneered at by people who confuse liberalism and progressivism with dreams of spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Hope you enjoyed being in the majority, Dems. See you in line at the free clinic.
I’m trying to figure out how this is a reply to my comment. It just seems like a really snarky screed against the Democrats. You make some fair points, but obviously you have disproportionately placed the blame on the Democrats for all of this stuff. I think that kind of ignores the reality of politics in America.
But you know what sucks the most about your reply? I probably WILL see you in line at the free clinic.
There must be a perfect Cheech and Chong clip to respond to Mr. Harwood.