Arc de Triomphe, Paris (wikimedia)

Kevin Drum thinks someone should tell Max Baucus the truth about foreign health care:

Now, the fact that the French spend about half what we do doesn’t mean that we’d cut our costs in half if we adopted a French-style system. We wouldn’t. There’s too much path dependence and too many cultural differences for that. But what it does mean is that if we adopted something close to their system, we could certainly achieve high-quality 100% basic coverage — with the ability to purchase extra coverage for anyone who wants it — for no more than we spend now and possibly a bit less.

We won’t, of course, because too many people are still convinced that healthcare in the United States is better than it is in France — or anywhere else. It’s not. It’s worse and more expensive. Somebody tell Max Baucus.

The trouble is that as I’ve had occasion to note before the evidence suggests that Baucus already knows this:

Afterward, Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who has since become interior secretary, noted that other countries saw a conflict between profits and health. How could the United States possibly persuade insurance companies to give up profits? [Author T.R.] Reid answered that Switzerland, home to many powerful insurance companies, had done it in 1994 when it adopted the Bismarck model. The insurers fought it tooth and nail, of course, but now they compete energetically to sign up people for basic care on a nonprofit basis because they constitute a customer base for supplemental insurance that they’re allowed to sell on a for-profit basis. This answer didn’t satisfy Baucus. “Perhaps you don’t know how much money [U.S. insurers] have,” he told Reid.

As I’ve said before, it’s as if Baucus doesn’t realize that he’s the single most important person in Congress on this issue. He could just decide not to listen to the insurers no matter how much money they have. Instead we get things like Rahm Emannuel floating compromises about introducing a public insurance option only after a “trigger” test has been passed. This really only makes sense if you think protecting the profits of insurance firms is an independently desirable policy goal. You’re open to the possibility of a public plan, but you want to err on the side of avoiding its introduction because . . . well . . . because . . . it’s not really clear.

Very interesting Newsweek article on Rahm Emannuel’s role in Barack Obama’s push for Middle East peace:

Emanuel’s status as a near-native son gave some Israelis and Jews the impression he would be their guy on the Obama team—the pro-Israeli with the receptive ear. He had those golden Zionist credentials, after all: His father, Benjamin, had been a member of the Irgun, the right-wing Jewish militia that existed before Israeli independence. His Uncle Emanuel had been killed in a skirmish with Arabs back in the ’30s, prompting the family to change its name from Auerbach to honor him. But some in the Jewish community have been disappointed. Even his own rabbi, Asher Lopatin, has doubts about his absent congregant. “There is a lot of disappointment,” says Lopatin, who presides over the Modern Orthodox Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago. “In some ways there was a heightened expectation because Rahm is so connected to Israel and the Jewish community. Instead what we’ve seen is more of the tough Rahm Emanuel. Not the warm Rahm.“

There’s also this warning of dire political consequences:

All that will present political problems for Obama at home as well—with Emanuel playing his familiar role of fireman for his boss. Rep. Eric Cantor, the only Republican Jewish member of Congress, says the Obama administration is taking a position “that’s vastly different from the mainstream American Jewish community” in trying to engage with Iran. “The pro-Israel community has consistently been for keeping sanctions pressure on the terrorist regime in Iran … The administration has indicated in all ways I can tell that we ought not to be pursuing sanctions while talks go on.” (Administration officials deny they intend to let up on sanctions if talks go forward.)

I think the fact that Cantor is “the only Republican Jewish member of Congress” should tell you must of what you need to know about what mainstream American Jewish opinion is.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was said to badly want Kadima chief Tzipi Livni to join his coalition, but the price she was asking—for Netanyahu to say he supports the idea of a two state solution—proved too high for the Likud leader. Instead, he formed a coalition with far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman who also opposes a two state solution, has disavowed the Annapolis process, and wants to entrench greater levels of discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens. Given that Livni wasn’t even talking about any concrete concessions to the Palestinians, this makes the outlook for peace look quite bad. But according to this M.J. Rosenberg item, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emannuel is signaling that Barack Obama is very serious about pursuing a two state solution:

Yedioth Achronoth, the largest circulation daily in Israel, reports today that President Obama intends to see the two-state solution signed, sealed and delivered during his first term.

Rahm Emanuel told an (unnamed) Jewish leader; “In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn’t matter to us at all who is prime minister.”

He also said that the United States will exert pressure to see that deal is put into place.”Any treatment of the Iranian nuclear problem will be contingent upon progress in the negotiations and an Israeli withdrawal from West Bank territory,” the paper reports Emanuel as saying. In other words, US sympathy for Israel’s position vis a vis Iran depends on Israel’s willingness to live up to its commitment to get out of the West Bank and permit the establishment of a Palestinian state there, in Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

That sounds like a good approach to me, though foreign press reports are often unreliable.

I noted yesterday that in an underexamined portion of Ryan Lizza’s profile of Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff appeared to say he thinks the stimulus plan wasn’t big enough. Turns out that Alec MacGillis had similar material at the end of a Washington Post article last week:

He acknowledged that the package was smaller than what Obama envisioned, particularly if one does not count the $70 billion tax fix — which Emanuel called “the price for getting the deal done.” But he said the final deal was “90 percent” of what Obama wanted.

“We clearly thought that economic activity needed more, but it was more important to get it done than argue about just that,” he said. “At the end, it became a choice between passage or not.”

I guess my view is that since Rahm’s opinion of the bill can’t change reality one way or the other, it’s probably good news that the White House is aware of the shortcomings of its own bill. I think one of the most dangerous things that happens to people in politics is that they start making pragmatic compromises because politics is the art of the possible, but then because they want to think the best of their own accomplishments they wind up confusing what they settled for with what they were aiming for. The question remains, however, of what, if anything, the White House can contrive to do to compensate for the need for some measure of additional stimulus.