Wir gibt das feuer?
— The trouble with big-footing.
— Portugal’s center-left hands on to power.
— Spending cuts at Condé Nast.
— Ah, white civil rights.
— Chinese province implements temporary divorce ban.
For my last song of the day from Germany, I offer Stereo Total’s “Ich bin der Stricherjunge”. Tomorrow I’ll be in Sweden where there are more good bands.
On Thursday, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) speculated that “if there’s anything which is clear, it’s that the insurance industry is not running this markup, but it is running certain people in this markup.” Indeed, in the last two and a half years, the health insurance industry has spent at least $585,725,712 lobbying Congress to protect its investments in Medicare advantage, defeat competition from a public option (or even a cooperative), and preserve policies that allow it to attract a disproportionate number of healthy applicants.
An analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund of all 534 amendments has identified at least 48 amendments that directly reflect the industry’s wish list. And while the information below does not demonstrate a direct quid-pro-quo between an insurers’ contribution and a senator’s amendment, it raises an important question: Why are some senators so intent on protecting an industry that is partly responsible for creating the current health care crisis?
Watch a video compilation of senators arguing on behalf of the industry:
Industry ask: “We have strong concerns about the proposed funding cuts in Medicare Advantage.” [AHIP Letter, 9/21/2009]
Industry gets: At least 14 amendments that protect the 14% subsidy private plans receive for participating in the program.
| Amendment | Provision |
| Kyl D1 | Strike Title III. Title III includes the cuts in Medicare Advantage payments via new competitive bidding rules for Medicare Advantage plans. |
| Roberts D9 | Amend Title III to strike all provisions that reduce or have the effect of reducing financing for Medicare. |
| Kyl-Crapo D6 | Kyl-Crapo D6—The amendment would strike the MA payment cuts under subtitle C of Title III |
Insurers ask: “We have strong concerns about the proposal for new, untested government-created health insurance cooperatives.” [AHIP Letter, 9/21/2009]
Insurers get: At least 9 amendments eliminating the mark’s network of cooperatives.
| Amendment | Provision |
| Kyl C1 | Eliminate the Consumer Operated and Oriented Plan (CO-OP) Program. |
| Hatch C7 | Strikes the Federal Government-funded Health Care Cooperative under Title I, Subtitle E and direct savings to reduce the deficit. |
| Cornyn C18 | Before the CO-OPs can operate or receive federal funding, the state must have implemented all the insurance reforms required by America‘s Healthy Future Act. |
Industry asks: “We are concerned that the new national benefit standards – taking into account both the actuarial value requirements and provisions that provide unlimited access to any and all services – would impose higher costs.” [AHIP letter, 9/21/2009]
Industry gets: At least 4 amendments loosening benefits standards.
| Amendment | Provision |
| Enzi C1 | The amendment lowers the actuarial value of the bronze plan to 60 percent and maintains the out-of-pocket limit specified in the Chairman‘s mark. |
| Kyl C11 | Prohibits the federal government from limiting consumer choice by setting actuarial values of health insurance plans. |
| Cornyn C10 | Gives states the authority to allow individual and small group health insurance plans that do not meet the actuarial standards described in Subtitle C, if the state determines this would result in more affordable coverage options for their residents. |
Industry asks: “Without system-wide cost containment provisions, the proposed new taxes on high cost plans and the proposed new taxes on key components of health expenditures would cause many Americans to spend more on coverage….We are concerned that these provisions will increase costs.” [AHIP letter, 9/21/2009]
Industry gets: At least 8 amendments loosening benefits standards.
| Amendment | Provision |
| Grassley F1 | This amendment would strike the fee on health insurance providers contained in the Chairman’s Mark. |
| Kyl F1 | Eliminate all industry fees. Offset by reducing value of the affordability subsidy.. |
| Cornyn F3 | Cornyn F3 – Strike insurance industry fee. |
Download a complete copy of the report HERE.
Texas currently has the third-highest teen birth rate in the country and “the highest rate of repeat teen births.” It also leads the nation in the amount of government money it spends on abstinence-only education. But some school districts in the state are now shifting away from that approach, admitting that it isn’t working:
“We mainly did it because of our pregnancy rate,” said Whitney Self, lead teacher for health and physical education at the Hays Consolidated Independent School District. “We don’t think abstinence-only is working.” [...]
Both approaches to sex education teach that refraining from sexual activity is the safest choice for teens.
But abstinence-only gives limited information about contraceptives and condoms and tends to downplay their effectiveness, while abstinence-plus stresses the importance of using such protection if teens are sexually active.
Medical experts have stated concluded that not only do abstinence-only programs not curb teen pregnancy, but “there is evidence to suggest that some of these programs are even harmful and have negative consequences by not providing adequate information for those teens who do become sexually active.”
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the influential chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, opposes efforts to add coal and nuclear subsidies to win votes for climate legislation. In an interview with Grist, Bingaman disagreed with Sen. Joe Lieberman‘s (I-CT) strategy to make the Senate version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act “more attractive to Republicans and conservative Democrats” by “including greater funding for coal and nuclear energy,” saying that instead climate leaders should put forward “a proposal people are confident will work“:
Frankly I don’t believe that gaining support of conservative Democrats depends upon putting more money into nuclear and coal power…. I think what’s really needed to get conservative Democrats supporting cap and trade legislation is to be able to put forward a proposal that people are confident will work and that people are confident will not impose an undue burden on rate payers or on our overall economy.
Watch it:
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) intend to introduce their climate legislation to the Senate on Wednesday. Senators such as John McCain (R-AZ), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Mark Udall (D-CO), and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) have implied they will only support climate legislation that includes increased subsidies for the nuclear, coal, or agribusiness industries. However, as Sen. Bingaman indicates, the only successful strategy to overcoming a Republican filibuster of clean energy reform is to convince the Senate that reform will create jobs, expand the economy and preserve and create prosperity.
Fortunately for advocates of reform, each day brings new evidence that a clean-energy future is just what America needs to rebuild our economy and prevent catastrophe. The UK Meteorological Office has found that global warming is accelerating. Military analysts warn “climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions.” The “Chinese decision to go green,” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman argues, “is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik.” And despite the ideological rantings of polluters who have crippled the global economy, non-partisan analyses repeatedly find that the tremendous benefit of halting global warming by investing in American jobs comes at a pricetag of a postage stamp a day.
“The carbon-based free lunch is over,” Exelon CEO John Rowe explained today. “But while we can’t fix our climate problems for free, the price signal sent through a cap-and-trade system will drive low-carbon investments in the most inexpensive and efficient way possible.” Rowe also announced his company was severing ties with the right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of its opposition to clean-energy investment.
To understand the severity of the German Social Democrats’ problem, you need to consider that not only is the growing Die Linke party cutting into their voting base but the prospects for forming some kind of broad left-wing coalition that would embrace the SPD the Greens and Die Linke all together are very bad. Linke partially arises out of the old regime in East Germany and that on its own terms makes the idea of a government including the party anathema to many Germans. And the less-unacceptable non-Communist portion of the Linke leadership consists of people who left the SPD to forge an alliance with the Communists as part of a quasi-personal feud with SPD leaders.
For an illustration of the challenges involved it’s instructing to look at what happened recently in the state government of Hesse. In 2008, the Hesse SPD ran promising to try to forge a coalition with the Greens and the CDU promised to try to forge a coalition with the FDP. But the way the election worked out, neither Red-Green nor Black-Yellow had a majority. But CDU and SPD couldn’t work out a grand coalition. So after a great deal of wrangling, the SPD leadership put together a Red-Green coalition government that had tacit support from Die Linke. Even this was too much for some of the SPD delegates who rebelled against the party leadership. That eventually led to a new election in which the local SPD chief admitted that, yes, she was going to seek to build a Red-Red-Green broad left coalition. As a result, the party’s share of the vote dropped from 36.7 percent in 2008 to 23.7 in 2009.
Long story short, a lot would have to change about Die Linke and about Germany before it could participate in a federal coalition government.
In August, the Mohave Daily News reported that Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) told a town hall that he was “considering filing a lawsuit” over President Obama’s birth certificate. Franks later clarified that he had considered a lawsuit before the 2008 election, but became convinced Obama was a citizen when he “found several different newspapers that had shown that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii two years after it became a state.” In an interview with the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel at the How To Take Back America conference this weekend, Franks said that he believes Obama is American, “even if he acts un-American”:
FRANKS: That solved the issue for me. I said, you know, I can’t — I believe he’s a natural born citizen of the United States under the Constitution. And therefore, even if he acts un-American and he seems to go against American interests, I’d still believe he’s a natural-born American citizen.
Watch it:
Later in the interview, Franks told Weigel that “Barack Obama could solve this problem and make the birthers, you know, back off, by simply showing us his long-form birth certificate.” “That’d solve the problem,” said Franks. “There’s some other issue, I don’t know what it is, that he doesn’t want people to see the birth certificate on.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of Sen. John “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” McCain’s favorite bons mots was that “There is only one thing worse than military action [against Iran], and that is a nuclear armed Iran.” As with so much else that McCain said during that campaign, it’s really not clear that this is actually true, but its tone of belligerence posing as analysis was very much in keeping with the sort of “tough and stupid” foreign policy that Fareed Zakaria refers to in his op-ed this morning. (“Tough and stupid” was, I believe, one of the taglines originally considered for The Weekly Standard.)
For all the conservative bluster being leveled at Obama’s engagement policy, you’d think that we hadn’t actually just come off of eight years wherein their ideas were tried and shown to be a complete failure, but of course we have. The administration of George W. Bush, especially its first four years, was about as pure an application of hard line conservative foreign policy principles as one could ever hope for, and it was a disaster. It resulted in an Iran that was far more dominated by hardliners, far less inclined to compromise, in a far more secure and influential position in the region, and much closer to a nuclear weapons capability.
Former ambassador John Bolton, who works in this vein of clueless conservative bluster the way some artists work in oils or watercolors, told Fox News this morning that “the only real way to be sure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons, unfortunately, is the unhappy alternative of military force against its nuclear program.”
I don’t see the Obama administration doing that. I think that leaves the decision with Israel. I think President Obama is committed to diplomacy and I think the outcome of that strategy is a world where Iran has nuclear weapons.
As with McCain’s claim about nuclear Iran, Bolton’s isn’t true either. Military strikes would not ensure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons, they would, in even the best case scenario, merely delay it. But what’s more disturbing is the way Bolton raises, with obvious relish, the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran, something that is becoming increasingly common among the Cheneyite set.
In an op-ed on Saturday, Anthony Cordesman focused on the difficulties that the Israelis would face in a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities (as well as the difficulties that Iran would create for itself by choosing to create a nuclear weapon.) What Cordesman doesn’t discuss, and what has been far too little discussed in the debate over how best to deal with Iran, are the likely consequences that a military strike on Iran would have for the region, and the world.
During remarks at the New America Foundation earlier this month, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni gave a very good — and chilling — overview of those consequences. Zinni said that he liked to respond to advocates of such strikes with “And then what?”
After you’ve dropped those bombs on those hardened facilities, what happens next? What happens if they decide, in their hardened shelters with their mobile missiles, to start launching those? What happens if they launch them into U.S. bases on the other side of the gulf? What happens if they launch into Israel, or somewhere else? Into a Saudi oil field? Into Ras Laffan, with all the natural gas? What happens if they now flush their fast patrol boats, their cruise missiles, the [unclear] full of mines, and they sink a tanker, an oil tanker? And of course the economy of the world goes absolutely nuts. What happens if they activate sleeper cells? The MOIS, the intelligence service — what happens if another preemptive attack by the West, the U.S. and Israel, they fire up the streets and now we got problems. Just tell me how to deal with all that, okay?
Because, eventually, if you follow this all the way down, eventually I’m putting boots on the ground somewhere. And like I tell my friends, if you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’ll love Iran.
The Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour has also said that he thinks that “Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would actually welcome a military strike; it may be their only hope to silence popular dissent and heal internal political rifts.” It’s hard to think of a more efficient way to extinguish Iran’s reform movement than by either an Israeli or U.S. strike on Iran.
These are, to say the least, very serious consequences. But given the way they have resolutely ignored the catastrophe that ensued the last time their foreign policy ideas were tried, we probably shouldn’t expect conservatives to honestly address them as they prepare the ground for their latest war.
New York Times article about the Obama administration’s involvement in Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid once again reminds me of how crazy all the Olympic-related lobbying seems. Is there any reason to think these events are actually beneficial? The main sense in which you can imagine a city being made better off by hosting an Olympics is that the hosting duties may cause it to invest in some useful infrastructure that pays off. But if that’s the case the infrastructure investments would have paid off even if there had been no Olympics. The name of the game is to identify useful infrastructure opportunities and build what’s worth building. If anything, pegging the investments to a one-off multination sporting event seems likely to cloud thinking about what is and isn’t truly needed.
This paper is skeptical of the Olympics. This paper sees a summer Olympics announcement giving a sharp short-term boost to stock prices. I take that as evidence that stock market participants are behaving irrationally, but if you think irrational capital market behavior is impossible then I guess that counts as evidence that hosting the games is beneficial.
Over the weekend, thousands of Texans attended what is being called the “largest free clinic ever held in the United States” to get health care they otherwise could not afford. ABC-13, a local Houston station, reported that the event showed that there is an “epidemic” of people without proper health coverage in Texas:
It’s an epidemic here in Texas and Harris County — people without health insurance. On Saturday, the uninsured lined up to get their needs met.
More than 2,000 people came to Reliant Center to see doctors for free. Many of the people we talked to can’t afford health insurance, especially in the rough economy. Some say it shows the need for health care reform.
Numerous patients described their experience with the broken U.S. health care system to ABC-13:
“My foot was turned upside down,” said patient Lillian Beverly. Beverly has had trouble walking since she took a bad fall three months ago. “I really don’t have the money to keep going to doctors and doctors,” she said.
Kevin Braggs is worried about his diabetes. “I’ve been without insurance for six months,” said Braggs.
And Vicki Robinson wants to keep her son’s asthma under control, but she says it’s difficult. “My husband’s lost his job. We’ve gone through our savings,” said Robinson.
And nine-year-old Kempton knows it. “We can’t afford medicine,” he said.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, one of the physicians who worked at the clinic this weekend, compared what he saw there to the post-Katrina crisis:
DR. OZ: We had no idea the overwhelming response we would have, the cries for help from the city of Houston and the state of Texas. … This is the largest health mobilization in Houston since Katrina. So a national disaster which brought out this kind of response is now paralleled by a national disaster, because this is just an average day in Houston, and there are thousands of people who need help.
Watch it:
Although this free clinic was especially needed in Texas, which currently has the largest uninsured population in the country, there have been similar events all over the country.
Last month, more than 1,300 patients showed up during a single weekend at a free dental clinic held in Parkersburg, West Virginia. A few days later, nearly 1500 people attended every day of an eight-day free clinic Remote Area Medical set up in Los Angeles. Former Cigna insurance executive and industry whistleblower Wendell Potter credits his 2007 visit to a Remote Area Medical clinic as opening his eyes to the health care crisis in the United States, and says it was instrumental in causing him to leave the industry and join the fight for universal health care.
Last week, House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank released a scaled-back proposal for creating a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), which was reportedly meant to address the concerns of some Democrats on the committee. Among other changes, the bill will no longer mandate that financial firms offer consumer “plain vanilla” products before moving on to more complex products.
While the changes may have been necessary to win support on the committee, the financial services industry now sees an opening, and is “turning up the pressure on moderate Democrats on the panel to push for more concessions.” And as The Hill reported today, “lobbyists are tailoring their efforts to rewrite specific provisions in the bill,” particularly that giving states the right to impose regulations that are stricter than the national standard set by the CFPA:
The financial industry believes that will create a patchwork quilt of different state regulations that increases the cost to firms. Those costs might then be passed on to consumers. “What’s going to happen to a customer who moves from one part of the metro area of D.C. to another? Will they have different rules just depending on geography?” said Tracey Mills, spokeswoman for the Consumer Bankers Association.
Roll Call reported that “industry groups are largely relying on the 15 members of the New Democrat Coalition to carry their water to ensure that federal pre-emption remains part of the package.” Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) is reportedly working on a preemption amendment that could be offered in committee.
As I’ve pointed out before, preemption is a failed policy choice that contributed to the housing bubble by preventing states from going after national banks engaged in predatory subprime lending. That this lesson has been forgotten so quickly is a testament to the financial services industry’s influence over the regulatory reform debate.
As for the Consumer Bankers Association’s (CBA) specific question regarding whether rules will differ “depending on geography,” the short answer is “yes, they will.” But that’s not the huge worry that CBA makes it out to be. After all, differing state regulations in terms of health insurance requirements have not eviscerated the health insurance industry. And a consumer moving within the Metro DC area (from Virginia to Maryland, maybe?) will presumably not bring his mortgage with him, rendering this concern over different terms overblown.
In the past, Democrats have viewed preemption as a “compromise” to be made with the industry, and the classic example of this is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). After a media exposé revealed that many Americans’ pension funds were disasterously mismanaged, Congress enacted ERISA to protect employee health and retirement benefits. But thanks to a preemption provision and a Supreme Court decision gutting the federal remedy that Congress intended to replace state law, ERISA became a boon for corporations looking to avoid state regulations. As the late Justice Byron White put it, ERISA resulted in the “perverse anomaly of leaving those Congress set out to protect with less protection than they enjoyed before ERISA was enacted.”
“Preemption doctrine often serves business interests at the expense of taxpayers…and also should offend lovers of local democracy,” wrote Tim Fernholz. “Why should the feds limit your ability to make rules?” And as long as the CFPA sets a strong minimum level of regulation, there will be no worries about a race to the bottom, in terms of states trying to coax business to their state by eliminating regulations. So hopefully, Frank will stand tall against the push to include preemption in the final regulatory reform package.
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