I was totally happy to see this piece by Paul Krugman in the NY Times today. It’s been driving me crazy to hear Rethugs repeat these lying talking points over and over.
Myth Number 1: Obamacare will result in a government takeover of 1/6 of the U.S. Economy
Myth Buster from Krugman:
Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.
The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?
Myth Number 2: Obamacare will do nothing to control costs.
Myth Buster from Krugman:
[C]ritics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.
Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.
As discussed here a couple of weeks ago, the Republicans seem to have hit on a new meme. Extending unemployment benefits makes people lazy and unwilling to heft their shiftless asses offa the sofa and go out and get jobs! Rep. Dean Heller R.-NV previously wondered if we were creating hobos. Senator Jon Kyl threatened to block the extension of the benefits because he apparently believes it is more important for Paris Hilton and her pals to inherit boatloads of money free of any estate tax.
At about the same time Iowa Rep. Steve King suggested that extending benefits turns the “the safety net into a hammock”. (via Steve Benen)
Now Tom DeLay, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union insists that Senator Jim Bunning, R-KY, took the principled stand in trying to block the benefits extension (among other things) arguing that people are only unemployed because they want to be. Hard to believe? Don’t take my word for it - listen for yourselves.
Yes, the vile loathsome DeLay wants us to believe that the jobs are out there just waiting to be taken. But the shiftless, lazy taxpayers just wants to park they butts on the couch until that last couple of weeks of unemployment before trudging reluctantly back into the world of a paycheck. Now I think it’s you living in that parallel universe Mr. DeLay, not me.
I doubt that the rightbloggers who are pretending to believe that the coverage of [James] O’Keefe’s legal troubles is the real crime here are very concerned with his hide. Hell, if he went to prison, that’d be holy martyrdom, no doubt attributable to the long reach of Eric Holder, and a great way to rally the troops.
His Voice column about O’Keefe’s arrest can be found here.
The O.M.G. victory of Scott Brown over Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts special senatorial election has turned the health care reform debate on its head. In this parallel universe in which we live these days where a majority equals 60% if the Senate is involved, and the Dems barely had that majority, it’s been a game changer. Bill-Killers (both progressive and conservative) are rejoicing, liberals are holding their heads and who knows what moderate Dem senators are thinking. (Yay, for us, we did this?)
The plan being floated most frequently is for the House to pass the Senate bill as is and then put in some fixes through reconciliation. Not everyone is on board with that plan.
In fact what House liberals seem to be doing is taking their ball and going home.
“We cannot support the Senate bill — period,” is the message that liberals delivered to the Speaker, Dem Rep Raul Grijalva told me in an interview just now.
All in all a big legislative mess right now. Some (including people on this very blog) have said that Obama was too ambitious in taking on health care reform in his first year - that he should have focused more on jobs and put health care on the back, or at least the middle, burner for now.
I just don’t know how you explain that to these people though. How do you language that? “Sure we value your lives, folks, but we have political capital to consider.”
What the folks at Firedoglake should ask themselves is this: do you really want to become just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals?
I eagerly await the FDL petition to get Krugman fired from The New York Times. They can get Bernie Goldberg to endorse it! And I’m honestly not sure if I’m joking about that. That’s how bizarre and out-of-control things are getting over there. [hat tip gimmeabreak]
Paul Krugman wrote a well reasoned, if somewhat depressing, op-ed in the NY Times today invoking the lessons of 1937 i.e. believing the economy is recovering faster than it is and neglecting to take the steps to keep things moving.
The next G.D.P. report is likely to show solid growth in late 2009. There will be lots of bullish commentary — and the calls we’re already hearing for an end to stimulus, for reversing the steps the government and the Federal Reserve took to prop up the economy, will grow even louder.
But if those calls are heeded, we’ll be repeating the great mistake of 1937, when the Fed and the Roosevelt administration decided that the Great Depression was over, that it was time for the economy to throw away its crutches. Spending was cut back, monetary policy was tightened — and the economy promptly plunged back into the depths.
He argues rather convincingly that some of the reports coming out (increase in manufacturing, etc.) are statistical blips and should not be considered as a reason to discontinue stimulus efforts. Which he believes are already on the way to being discontinued. He may or may not be right. (Japan made the same mistakes in the mid-90’s.) But the points are well taken.
Almost inextricable, however, is this response to Krugman’s piece. I mean I know we’re not dealing with a real top-of-the-line intellectual thinker here but how did the Commies and the Nazis get involved?
Moscow was staging show trials and executions, Nazi Germany was staging its dress rehearsal in Spain while Hitler finetuned his “Lebensraum” policy and warmed up the Holocaust with a spiralling series of restrictions on Jews and other minorities, Japan was busy raping Nanking, and Neville Chamberlain became prime minister. Lots of Americans, including large parts of the body politic, assumed none of that was their problem. Nothing they needed to worry about behind their oceans, anyway. In 1937, the Democratic president of the United States didn’t fully get it yet, either, though shortly he would, and would rise to become a major figure in world history for his stalwart and even ruthless struggle against dire threats to freedom both before and after the United States entered the war.
What. does. any. of. this. have. to. do. with. theeconomystupid?
But let’s throw global warming in there for good measure while we’re at it. Shorter Crittendon: “If Obama would just bomb Iran, none of this would have happened!”
Keeping Fannie and Freddie fully engaged in the mortgage-support business is one of the few tools available to prop up a still very weak economy. And so they’re doing it.
And here’s the requisite instructional video for the increasingly irrational teaprogger brigade on how to react to Krugman’s Kool-Aid quaffing, Messiah-worshiping, Rahm-loving, corporatist crapola…
Just when you thought it couldn’t get more wretched than the crazed scrawling of that steaming pile of suck Andrew Malcolm at the LA Times or anything Amy Siskind burps up anywhere (Daily Beast, HuffPo, Cat Fancy, etc.), along comes Colleen O’Connor, armed with a mouth full of paste, from something called the San Diego News Network to boldly challenge both Malcolm and Siskind for the coveted title of “Worst Professional Poliblogger.” Jumpin’ jeebus in a, ummm, jumpsuit, “King Obama v. Queen Clinton — Check or Checkmate?” is perhaps the most abominable “editorial” I’ve read in my life. Here’s just a taste:
If Clinton supporter and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley wins that will make the ninth score that Clinton has settled. And it will have happened in the state that the Kennedy family once ruled.
Monday, in a surprise announcement, former President Bill Clinton just endorsed Coakley and has recorded a message to be sent to 500,000 Massachusetts voters to get out and vote for Coakley.
Ironically, it was Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama in the Iowa caucus that ended the Clintons’ dreams of reclaiming the White House, and started the vendettas.
One major problem with that festering mess o’ words: Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama on January 28th, nearly a full month after the Iowa caucuses, which were held on the 3rd, and a couple of days after he won a landslide victory in South Carolina. How can you write about politics and not get that right? And what’s with “the Clintons’ dreams” and “started the vendettas”? There is no doubt who adhered the “what the” to the “fuck” on Monday. It was Colleen O’Connor.
The biggest offense in this ad, IMO, and a couple of related ones, is implying that sodas and sugary fruit drinks are an important element in our diet as opposed to being simply a delivery system for boatloads of high fructose corn syrup. Which has been implicated in high rates of weight gain and type 2 diabetes. Particularly in children and young adolescents.
As yet, no actual “sugar tax” is on the table. But, Commercial Lady, how’s this for an alternative? Try having your family drink water, seltzer or low fat milk instead. Cut them back on the Twinkies and Ho-ho’s while you’re at it. Also.
* Except when they do. Many states and municipalities collect sales taxes on food and beverages sold through restaurants and fast food outlets and some collect sales taxes on food sold at grocery stores.
Robert Gibbs used the phrase “silly season” when he was asked about right wing reactions to President Obama’s speech to the nation’s school children as they returned to school.
I think that phrase applies equally well to the quality of the health care/health insurance reform debate up to now. I would apply this not only to the “death panels” and “socialized medicine” accusations of the far right but also to the “single payer/public option or die” pearl clutchers on the left and the staunch refusals of many members of Congress to vote for the bill as they see it when there isn’t even an actual bill on the table yet!
(I mean, I have nothing against this guy, in fact I usually like him, but this is an example of what I mean.)
Currently the House has the “Tri-Committee” Bill (H.R. 3200) on the floor and the Senate has issued one bill out of the HELP Committee. A second Senate bill, currently being butchered in the Finance Committee with the help of Max Baucus is apparently due out any day now. Nobody knows what that bill will eventually look like except that apparently it will not have a public option and will look for funding by taxing insurance companies on expensive policies and imposing various fees on other health care related industries. Gee, the Republicans should really go for that idea.
Maybe Obama was just testing the waters when he and Kathleen Sebelius both indicated over the weekend that the public option could be expendable. Because the reaction by liberal members of Congress has been swift and firm. Greg Sargent is reporting that “(t)he debate over the public option has suddenly reminded us that there are in fact two houses of Congress, something that’s been easy to forget amid the media obsession with the “bipartisan” negotiations in the Senate.” Sixty House liberals sent a letter to Kathleen Sebelius which stated in part:
We stand in strong opposition to your statement that the public option is “not the essential element” of comprehensive reform. The opportunity to improve access to healthcare is a onetime opportunity. Americans deserve reform that is real-not smoke and mirrors. We cannot rely solely on the insurance companies’ good faith efforts to provide for our constituents. A robust public option is essential, if we are to ensure that all Americans can receive healthcare that is accessible, guaranteed and of high-quality.
To take the public option off the table would be a grave error; passage in the House of Representatives depends upon inclusion of it.
We have attached, for your review, a letter from 60 Members of Congress who are firm in their Position that any legislation that moves forward through both chambers, and into a final proposal for the President’s signature, MUST contain a public option.
MUST contain a public option. The emphasis was theirs, not mine.
