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Health

Newt Gingrich’s Health Group Pretends Health Bill Exempts Members Of Congress From Public Option

By Igor Volsky on Jul 10, 2009 at 4:06 pm

newt-gingrichNewt Gingrich’s for-profit Center For Health Transformation is sending around a petition email asking “whether members of Congress writing such legislation would actually enroll themselves in a new government-run healthcare option.” “Please sign below if you agree with Congressman Fleming that members of Congress who vote for a government-run healthcare plan should participate in the plan themselves and you agree with us to broaden this to include congressional staff,” the Center asks:

As health legislation continues to be debated, one has to ask whether members of Congress writing such legislation would actually enroll themselves in a new government-run healthcare option. Current draft healthcare legislation exempts members of Congress from the public plan option, allowing them to keep their existing plans.

Congressman John Fleming (LA-04) is asking this very question noting that public servants should be accountable and responsible for what they are advocating. He has created a resolution calling on members of Congress who support a public option to enroll themselves and encourage their colleagues to do the same. We support this resolution and broaden it to include congressional staff as well.

Of course, the Tri Committee discussion draft in the House does not specifically exempt federal employees — who receive coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program — from enrolling in the new public plan. Rather, the legislation treats the American government — the largest employer in the country — like any other large employer: it can enroll its employees in the Exchange (where they can choose a public health insurance option) after a period of 2 years.

From a logistical point of view and to those concerned about continuity of care, moving the 160 million Americans who receive employer-sponsored benefits into new plans would be a costly nightmare. The goal is to reduce immediate shifts but still preserve choice. For this reason, the House Tri Committee health care bill phases in participation in the Exchange when it goes into operation in 2013:

– Individuals and employers with 10 or fewer employees in 2013
– Individuals and employers with 20 or fewer employees in 2014
– Individuals and employers with more than 20 employees in 2015

On the whole, this argument is particularly disingenuous. Republicans are arguing that the public option would eliminate employer-sponsored coverage while undermining provisions designed to allow Americans to keep what the have. During mark-up of the HELP Committee’s legislation Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) went so far as to introduce amendments that would require members of Congress (and Congressional staff) to enroll in the public option.

Media

NYT to Contemplating $5/Month Charge

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 10, 2009 at 3:57 pm

Michael Crowley gets excited:

Given that some people spend $5 per day on coffee, paying that much per month for online access the best newspaper in the world strikes me as an absolute no-brainer. I myself would pay twice as much. I hope the idea catches on, and I hope this marks a shift from the days of newspapers panicking to the start of successful new business models.

One way the NYT can make online subscriptions far more appealing is by doing a better job of promoting the terrific new TimesReader 2.0, a simple but slick Adobe-based application that you install onto your computer in like two minutes. I’ve been meaning to plug this for a while, because it was only after I tried the incredibly user-friendly and print-like TimesReader that I could imagine surviving without the Times on paper.

times_reader_2_front_page

A few points. First, I’m not sure how much “catching on” this idea could possibly do. A big part of the selling point of The New York is that it’s “the best newspaper in the world.” I can see why you would pay money to read the best newspaper in the world. But why would you pay money to read the sixth-best newspaper in the world?

The other is simply that among the New York Times’ fans, a group in which I would include myself, I think there’s a tendency to overstate the extent to which the NYT is indispensable. Crowley says that it’s only thanks to the deployment of the new NYT reader software that he can begin to imagine life without a print Times. In the real world, though, the overwhelming majority of people are living life without a print Times and have been for years: “The New York Times had an average of 647,695 weekday home delivery subscribers as of the 26 weeks ended March 29, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations data.” Now I definitely would pay $5 a month to read the NYT online. And I’m the kind of person who, did the internet not exist, would subscribe to the print NYT. But how many Yglesias’ and Crowleys are there in the world? The NYT’s online audience is now vastly larger than its print audience. How much of that is because the online version is free?

Note that BBC News runs the world’s second-best international news website and they don’t charge anything and show no sign of ever needing to charge. That’s not the kind of firm you want to compete against.

Politics

David Brooks: A Republican senator put ‘his hand on my inner thigh’ for a ‘whole’ dinner party.

By Matt Corley on Jul 10, 2009 at 3:45 pm

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about how “the dignity code” has been “completely obliterated” in Washington, DC. Discussing the concept on MSNBC today, Brooks recalled how he “sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time”:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

Brooks said that he has “spoken to a lot of young women who are Senate staffers and they’ll have these middle age guys who are sort of in the middle of a mid-life crisis. Emotionally needy, they don’t know how to do it and sort of like these St. Bernards drooling everywhere.” Watch it:

When O’Donnell asked if he had “a couple drinks at lunch,” Brooks said that he was just “trying not to be too dignified and stuffy.”

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Roy Blunt Wishes There Were No Medicare

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 10, 2009 at 3:13 pm

It’s often frustrating to argue with conservatives who won’t admit that the logic of their position is that popular, uncontroversial, and long-established government programs never should have been created. So House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) did us all a favor yesterday by going on the radio and opining that we never should have started Medicare and Medicaid:

HOST MIKE FERGUSON: What is the proper role of government, and what are the potential impacts of the direction that we’re going right now?

BLUNT: Well, you could certainly argue that government should have never have gotten in the health care business, and that might have been the best argument of all, to figure out how people could have had more access to a competitive marketplace.

Government did get into the health care business in a big way in 1965 with Medicare, and later with Medicaid, and government already distorts the marketplace.

For the record, Medicare and Medicaid were passed at the exact same, both as part of the Social Security Act of 1965. And it’s crucial to understand that Medicare, in particular, didn’t just come about because of some random bleeding heart impulse. The reason there was political muscle to get Medicare passed even though it wasn’t possible to move to a true universal system is that private health insurers wanted nothing to do with the senior citizen client base. Insurance takes advantage of risk-pooling and risk-aversion to offer people security at a price that’s both profitable and attractive. When the whole pool is bad risks, as senior citizens are, there’s no real business opportunity.

Security

Republicans Try To Derail Immigration Reform By Bringing ‘Piecemeal’ Amendments To DHS Bill

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Jul 10, 2009 at 3:00 pm

dhsgop1

Just last month, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders emerged from a White House meeting pledging to work together on reforming the nation’s immigration laws with one broad piece of legislation that would fix the broken immigration system once and for all. The meeting’s attendees seemed to agree that a “piecemeal” approach would be counterproductive and inefficient.

However, that didn’t stop a group of right-wing GOP lawmakers from continuing on what seems like a never-ending crusade to derail comprehensive immigration reform. Their latest attack came this week when Republican senators swamped the Department of Homeland Security $42.9 billion appropriations bill with a series of immigration enforcement-only amendments before comprehensive immigration reform could even hit the Senate floor. The bill passed yesterday evening, 84-6.

– Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) sponsored an amendment that would require 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border to be completed by the end of 2012. Concerns expressed by environmentalists and social activists that the border fence will unfairly target low-income landowners and harm the environment were brushed aside. The legislation passed Wednesday by a vote of 54-44, essentially bucking the Obama administration’s plans to cut border fence funds.

– Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) offered a separate amendment that would overturn DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s decision to rescind the Bush Administration’s troubling practice of sending Social Security “no-match” letters to employers with employees whose numbers don’t match the federal database. Labor unions claim the letters have been used by employers to threaten their workers and the ACLU has often pointed out that the system uses “notoriously incomplete and inaccurate Social Security databases to decide who is authorized to work.” The legislation passed yesterday morning.

– Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) proposed an amendment that would make E-verify, an error-ridden online verification program, mandatory and permanent. The amendment passed by voice vote on Wednesday, and Sen Check Schumer’s (D-NY) effort to table it was dismissed yesterday, 44-53.

– Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also introduced an amendment that would allow employers to use E-verify to confirm the status of all their workers, not just the new hires that previous decisions had applied to. That wouldn’t be such a big problem if it weren’t for the possibility that E-verify’s error-rate could potentially lead to the accidental unemployment of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the midst of a recession. The amendment passed by voice vote last night.

While anti-immigrant groups are already toasting to the imminent failure of comprehensive immigration reform, immigration advocates remained calm and described this week’s actions as a “detour” and “political theater” that should be “taken with a grain of salt.” Either way, there’s an undeniable steep learning curve for conservative lawmakers who are slow to realize that they can no longer rely on an enforcement-only approach to immigration when the majority of their frustrated constituents want immigration laws overhauled inside and out. E-verify, no-match letters, and 700 miles of border fencing aren’t going to fix the immigration system. If anything, they further emphasize how broken it is.

Politics

GOP Rep. Introduces Bill To Deny U.S. Funding For Nobel Winning IPCC Because Of Its ‘Junk Science’

By Ben Armbruster on Jul 10, 2009 at 2:53 pm

blaine-luetkemeyer-webRep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) this week introduced a bill purporting to “save taxpayers $12.5 million this year and millions more in the future by prohibiting the United States from contributing to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is fraught with waste and is engaged in dubious science.” In a press release, Luetkemeyer explained his move:

We all know that the UN is incompetent when it comes to spending money, and that is why American taxpayers should not be forking over millions more to one of its organizations that not only is in need of significant reform but is engaged in dubious scientific quests. Folks in Missouri and across the country are tired of this never ending government spending spree, and my goal is to deliver some of our people’s hard-earned money back into their pocketbooks instead of spending it on international junk science.

Far from “junk science,” the IPCC is generally regarded as the world’s top authority on issues of global warming and climate change. The U.S. National Resource Council has praised the IPCC, calling its conclusions “accurate.” The Royal Meteorological Society referred to the IPCC as “the world’s best climate scientists.” In fact, the Nobel Committee seems to think so too, awarding the panel in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”

Stating his case, Luetkemeyer said that “more than 700 international scientists” signed onto a Senate GOP report questioning that global warming is man-made and said that number is more than “the number of UN scientists, 52, who authored a report claiming that human emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible” for climate change. (One of these “700 scientists” has no college degree and another doubt’s Darwin’s theory of evolution.)

Yet, the IPCC’s most recent report, which found that global climate change is “very likely” to have a human cause, was reviewed by more than 2,500 experts and was written by more than 800 contributing authors and 450 lead authors.

To bolster his argument, Luetkemeyer claimed that the EPA (in its entirety apparently) says the world is actually cooling. No, the “EPA” doesn’t say the world is cooling. Luetkemeyer is referring to EPA economist (i.e. not a scientist) Alan Carlin’s assertion in an allegedly “suppressed” document that “global temperatures have declined for 11 years.” In fact, the last decade will likely be the hottest on record. And while annual global temperatures have both fallen and risen in the last 11 years, climate scientists have identified long-term warming trends spanning decades to indicate that the earth is warming, not just the last 11 years.

(HT: UN Dispatch)

Culture

Maybe Allen Iverson Just Isn’t Very Good

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 10, 2009 at 2:27 pm

Teams keep getting better when the Answer leaves (wikimedia)

Teams keep getting better when the Answer leaves (wikimedia)

Sports Illustrated’s Steve Aschburner wonders why we don’t see Allen Iverson signing on for a supporting role on a contending team:

Allen Iverson ought to be next. The ’01 MVP, nine-time All-Star and four-time scoring leader has the individual résumé for such a move. He presumably has the financial wherewithal to take the requisite pay cut after 13 seasons of superstar wages, including the $76.7 million extension he landed in ’03 and the “lifetime” endorsement deal (whatever that means) he signed with Reebok in ’01. He even has the game for it — think instant offense, sixth man, the sort of player a coach could turn loose off the bench to mess with the opponents’ second unit almost at will. At 34, Iverson still is quick enough, slippery enough and crafty enough to change games.

He concludes that “What he doesn’t have, though, is the attitude for it.”

Alternatively, maybe after trading Iverson for Andre Miller made Philadelphia better and then trading Iverson for Chauncey Billups made Denver better, teams are starting to figure out what some people have been saying for a while: Allen Iverson isn’t a very good basketball player. He scores a lot because he shoots a lot, but he’s turnover-prone and subpar at rebounding. And the fact that in order for Iverson to be effective he needs to be paired with a point guard who’s big and strong enough to guard opposing two guards is a major downside.

Security

Fox News Reporter Tear Gassed By Israeli Troops

By Matt Duss on Jul 10, 2009 at 2:00 pm

Every week for the last several years, Palestinians from the village of Bilin, accompanied by Israeli and international supporters, have turned out to non-violently protest the Israeli separation barrier that has been built on their land. As with many other areas along the barrier’s path, the barrier in Bilin imposes enormous hardships upon Palestinian residents, separating them from some 60 percent of their farming land in order to create a perimeter around the nearby Israeli settlement of Modiin Illit.

Yesterday, Fox News reporter Reena Ninan was gassed by Israeli troops, along with the rest of the demonstrators.

Watch it:

Despite Fox anchor Megyn Kelly’s apparent amazement that there is, like, totally an occupation going on here, such brutal encounters with the Israeli military are a daily fact of Palestinian life.

Bilin resident Iyad Burnat is a Palestinian activist and founder of the Friends of Freedom and Justice in Bilin. Reached by phone, Burnat described the scene at the protest: “When we got there today, the Israelis just started shooting tear gas. Why are they shooting at non-violent demonstrators? We are people with our hands up, we are protesting the confiscation of our land.” Burnat said that the barrier “is not a security wall, this is just to confiscate more land, and build more settlements on our land.”

Burnat described the frequent Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) incursions into Bilin, saying that “every night we have the IDF invading the village, searching the houses, arresting people from Bilin. Why? Because we say to all the world that this is our land. The soldiers come in the middle of the night, shooting into the houses, where our children are sleeping.”

Burnat’s claims are borne out by video footage on this Bilin website, as well as by reporting done for Mondoweiss, which has previously covered the IDF’s late-night incursions into Bilin.

In April, 30-year-old Bassem Ibrahim Abu-Rahma was killed while protesting the Bilin barrier when a tear gas canister fired by the IDF struck him in the chest.

While there is a legitimate security justification for the barrier, there is no justification for building it on Palestinian land, other than as a mechanism for appropriating it. In a 2005 ruling, the International Court of Justice found that “the construction of the wall and its associated regime create a ‘fait accompli’ on the ground that could well become permanent, in which case, . . . [the construction of the wall] would be tantamount to de facto annexation” of Palestinian land.

In 2007, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the government to reroute the wall near Bilin because the current route was “highly prejudicial” to the villagers and not justifiable on security grounds. In 2008, the Israeli court again rejected the placement of the wall and said it must be rerouted “as soon as possible.”

Follow Bilin on Twitter.

Politics

Sanchez Breaks From ‘Blue Dog Coalition,’ Endorses Public Plan

By Faiz Shakir on Jul 10, 2009 at 1:45 pm

House Democratic leaders were planning to unveil a final health care reform bill today, but on the eve of the announcement, a group of “Blue Dog Democrats” released a list of demands that have forced the leadership to wait until next week as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer attempt to broker a compromise.

In a letter to Speaker Pelosi, the conservative “Blue Dog” members claimed that they are concerned about the cost of the health care bill:

Paying for care reform must start with finding savings within the current delivery system and maximizing the value of our health care dollar before we ask the public to pay more. […]

The discussion draft fails to include adequate structural changes that will succeed in lowering costs and increasing value.

But the letter also comes out against a public plan, which is one of the primary tools to rein in health care costs over the long-term. The letter complains, “‘A Medicare-like’ public option would negatively impact hospitals, doctors and patients…using Medicare’s below-market rates would seriously weaken the financial stability of our local hospitals and doctors.”

Igor Volsky notes there’s “an inherent contradiction” in this letter: the Blue Dogs want to find more savings within the system, but they’re also asking that the bill spend more.

Fortunately, there is at least one “Blue Dog” member who understands this contradiction and is willing to break from her coalition to support a public plan. On MSNBC this afternoon, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) said, “I am one of those people who believes that we should be required to have a public option because it will bring the costs of health care down.” Watch it:

Sanchez is right. If the “Blue Dogs” wanted to stick to their principles of bringing costs down, they’d join with Sanchez to endorse a public plan.

Update

“A band of 22 New Democrat and Blue Dog lawmakers say they support a ‘robust’ government-run health plan, boosting chances of moving healthcare reform with a public insurance plan through the House.” (HT: Atrios)

Yglesias

Trade Deficit Declining

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 10, 2009 at 1:43 pm

tradebalancemay2009

Amidst the economic gloom, the Census Bureau reports that the trade deficit is declining:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that total May exports of $123.3 billion and imports of $149.3 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $26.0 billion, down from $28.8 billion in April, revised. May exports were $1.9 billon more than April exports of $121.4 billion. May imports were $0.9 billion less than April imports of $150.2 billion.

Sustainable recovery requires some unwinding of the global trade and financial imbalances, so this counts as good news. Nevertheless, it’s still the case that exports are far below their pre-recession high point. The trade gap is narrowing because imports have collapsed even further and faster. And ultimately we’re going to need not just a smaller trade deficit, but several years of surplus. It’s a reminder that however much additional stimulus in the U.S. may be desirable, even better would be additional stimulus from Japan, China, Germany, and the oil exporters. Those are the places where the world really needs more demand.

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