Politblogo

A bad bill as political laxative for US health care

Ian Welsh kindly posted a link to my previous post on his blog as a separate post of his own, but rather than come here, most of his commentariat decided to respond over there.  Since I promised not to respond directly on this issue on his site, I am going to make a GREAT SACRIFICE and break my promise to forget this moribund joint and respond to some common threads in his comments here, in a new post.  (I responded to Paul Lukasiak who kindly commented in the previous thread, and I'll respond to Helena if this post doesn't manage to cover her objections.)

It appears at this point that the Senate bill is likely to pass.  For all that it is full of FAIL, I haven't made any secret of the idea that I'm mostly convinced that it is a good thing.  The underlying motivation of the table of outcomes in the last post is the sense that, on health care, the US political system is like a highly constipated patient.  We want it to poop out the golden brick of a Canadian-style single-payer system, but for many electoral cycles, now, it has been completely unable to poop out anything at all.  The reasons for this are the usual: money and media and money-in-media. 

Those are big problems, and they are the reason why the bill is so failtastic.  But until the surgical suite is ready to fix these problems---a long project---the patient still needs a laxative.  The Senate bill has the potential to be that laxative.

With that, here are some of the major classes of objections:

Objection #1: Failure to pass a bill would leave the door open for better bill

I responded to this one in the comments to the previous post.  Very briefly, regardless of what Obama wants, failing to pass a bill means that Congress is simply not going to try again any time soon.  The official narrative is already ready: no one has done it before, and it's too hard.  Clinton failed.  The official narrative is part and parcel of the political constipation problem.  So, no, failure to pass a bill would mean/have meant that the effort is dead for another electoral cycle or two.  There's no evidence to believe that single-payer is going to happen at that point either.

Objection #2: Bad bills never lead to better legislation later on

My first reaction to this idea was a certain amount of incredulity.  So I'll farm this one out to Cogitamus, first and foremost.

More importantly, though, American progressives seem not to have learned something that the American right has known for a long time: that apart from actual policy, rhetorical metavictories actually have real, long-term value.  For example: even when they can't actually destroy Social Security or other progressive programs and priorities, they can create an overall cultural milieu in which "entitlements" are perceived to eat the future earnings of our descendants.  

This bill has the potential to create the perception, once again, that health care reform is both possible and desirable as a matter of conventional wisdom.  It may not, but passing no bill doesn't even try.

Objection #3: The public will hate the individual mandate

I can hardly argue that a public-option-less mandate is a great idea for controlling consumer-end costs.  This is by far the strongest argument against the Senate bill.  But my response is roughly the same.  Alright, let's say that it is unpopular.  Than the worst-case scenario is that a Republican Congress and President repeals it, leaving the USA back where it was before, roughly.  One way or another, if the systemic breakdown of the existing health care arrangement is reaching catastrophic proportions, the only question is time; and this bill could either speed it up or slow it down by a small amount---at worst.

Objection #4: Adopting this bill is a failure to negotiate effectively

This is one of Ian's favorite themes, and it depends on some assumptions, including who the negotiating partner actually is.  The negotiating partner is the insurance industry, and what is being negotiated in any health care reform package that might actually be serious is the very existence of a large chunk of that industry if not all of it as we know it.  So, they have no incentive to negotiate.

If you doubt that the negotiating partner is the insurance industry, consider the very fact that a public-optionless Senate bill with mandates is likely to pass.  With 60 votes.  Even with Bernie Sanders (I-VT), regardless of how he really feels.

In conclusion

Progressives from Markos to Jane Hamsher to Ian Welsh have quite well articulated the reasons why the Senate bill is terrible and does not lead in itself to a signficantly improved health care system.  This is probably all true.  What it does is open a door.  The cost to not opening that door at all isn't pretty.  Opening that door may not be pretty either.  But at least there is a chance of movement.  A slim one, but a chance.

One thing I have not so far seen is an account of how and when a better health care system would be instituted for the USA on hypothetical failure of this bill---aside from Objection #1, which I've dealt with.  It's really easy to sit around running a creepy drive-by psychoanalysis of Jacob Hacker, and another to explain a political plan given current conditions for accomplishing something via the legislative system.  One of these is more fun, I guess.

Otherwise, the best thing to do is to let the bill pass and then claim a rhetorical metavictory---because the meta in all of this is actually important until you have a plan to get yourself to the clean, ideal politics in which good policy is honestly debated.

Freedom is slavery, health is insurance: the metabenefits of a bad bill

(To my "regular" "readers": I am writing this blog post in response to multiple brous-haha around the interwebs into which I may have dipped more than just my little tippy-toe on the matter of health care.  It was written at the suggestion of ex cob logger Ian Welsh as a substitute for taking my frustrations out on his impudent commentariat. Don't expect this blog to stop going Billmon after this any time soon, especially since the Noo Typepad now suXX0rz.  Next time you see me blog, it will be on Wordpress or something non-annoying that does not make my browser cry bitter Javascript tears.  But at least thunderpants will be happy that I've satisfied his demand.)

I thought I'd write a long song-and-dance about my opinion on the US health care reform effort, but then I realized that not only would it be highly susceptible to the worst sort of nitpickulation, it would also be better summarized as a table.  Well, at this point in time, there are two legislative options: no bill, or a bad bill.  Here's my assessment of the relative likelihood of good, bad, and ugly outcomes of both options:

	Long-term outcome likelihood
	Good	Bad	Ugly
No bill	Nonexistent	Reasonable	High
Bad bill	Very Low	Reasonable	High

So, as you can see, I've done the math and I think it's better to pass a bad bill rather than no bill. A bad bill has a chance of defeating at least one pernicious meme: that no Congress or administration can alter US health care delivery systems, which are wholly broken. 

I will not get into Nate Silverian attempts at defending anything about the bill as it stands.  It's a terrible bill.  It is completely bone-headed not to simply expropriate the "health" "insurance" "industry" wholesale and immediately institute a Canuckistani single-payer system.  Anything that doesn't lead to this outcome is a lie.  However, if I had a dollar for all the political lies and terrible ideas we have to tolerate, I'd be Warren Buffett.  Am I Warren Buffett?

Nevertheless, the bill should pass.  The only condition under which I would take this statement back is if there is any chance that there are legislators who are willing to scuttle this turkey who also have the wherewithal to bring about a better bill---one that eventually eliminates the desurance industry.  Since this has a hellball's chance in snow, it's better for all the other people who think that they'd rather have no bill to fix that problem---that they have no effective progressive representation in Congress, or that they have no leverage either way---than engage in perverse quests to leave the effort with nothing.

De-front-paged Corrente post: Compounding their error; or, I do indeed enjoy shooting fish in a barrel

The following is a post I wrote at Corrente which continues an ongoing bit of flamewar whose context may be a bit mysterious to my usual readership. Corrente's owner decided it was too flamewar-y for the front page his blog, but I meant to say what I meant to say, because it illustrated the point I wanted to make. I believe those with Corrente accounts can still read it, but I intended to put it on the open Internet and here it is. I mean, it has a high snark level, and I can understand why someone may not want to encourage that level on their site.

The overall context is that while I think that Obama was a somewhat bigger campaign risk than Hillary Clinton, I do believe she lost due to a small number of misapprehensions about why the Obama campaign took off the way it did. And that some of these misapprehensions are reflected in the PUMA movement---which I believe to be real, and reflecting a consequential reality---in a different way.

The specific context is a series of posts about the mortgage meltdown which reveals the kinds of poor ideological and political judgement that mars the PUMA movement. However, the owners of the Confluence blog decided to compound the error with a very interesting set of circumlocutions, which I proceed to take down.

Well! You may recall my recent scathing critique of a Confluence post on the mortgage meltdown that I thought was at best buying into tedious old right-wing saws about anti-discriminatory measures. I am flattered to report that, despite her disagreement with me over the admittedly trolly bit at the end, Anglachel has seen fit to cite my post approvingly in one of her own.

Well, this finally provoked the "Conflucian"* response. And it has appeared as a pair of posts by riverdaughter and by dakinikat (who wrote the post I originally objected to). Needless to say, these are awesome circumlocutions from start to finish. For example:

However, it is the case that sometimes reality is reality and people in the news of all races, class, status, color, gender, you name it, do things that make them look bad. This is an unavoidable fact of like. It is also the case that sometimes programs and federal funds that are created for very good purposes are exploited by people who happen to be of all races, class, color, gender, you name it, who *are*, after all, imperfect humans. Greed and bad behavior is not restricted to Republicans. We have seen that some Democrats are quite capable of it.

Amazing. So, astonishingly, all kinds of people are bad. This is what we have discovered. And thus we are invited to ignore the context of what dakinikat actually said in her post. Bad person is bad.

The comments, oh the comments. They could fill and entire blog's worth of deconstruction. Like the blog posts that precede them, they studiously avoid discussing how exactly we got here. For starters.

And as for dakinikat, it is so tempting to quote the "my black friend" she pulls near the end---it would be like shooting a tuna balanced on a wet thimble. Or the appeal to "peer-review" authority, as though peer reviewed journals do not continuously contradict each other even in real science**. But that's not the important bit. The important bit is right at the beginning, where she reasserts the very article that's at issue, the Liebowitz article that buries a very charged set of ideological claims under an ultimately quite irrelevant discussion and analysis of mortgage typology. And she does so not merely apparently oblivious to the objection, but also forgetting why the objection was raised: an claim about the Congressional Black Caucus.

So, as I recall, commenter Valhalla admonished me in the last post that I did not attempt to engage with them. While I felt I had good reason to critique them from Corrente rather than from their comments, I attempted to correct this by posting the following brief but substantive response to dakinikat:

*BOOP*

Dakinikat insists on repeating the Liebowitz business, which I made the very focus of my own post to which Anglachel links. Its entire purpose is to do one of three things, and probably all:

* Discredit the idea that mortgage approval discrimination exists against minorities (while ignoring subsequent evidence and argument to the contrary).

* Blame the foolishness of mortgage lenders on *gasp* an anti-racist policy, when it's been amply shown that this is not the case.

* Blame the allegedly impending economic collapse on mortgage qualification liberalisation, deflecting it from the actual cause, which was allowing these segments of the credit apparatus to be overleveraged.

These three things are interconnected by ideology, and they bear a number of ideological fruits. One of these begins with "r". Oh no!

Yes, it is sharp and critical, and yes, it is somewhat snarky. But, unlike nearly anything else on either Confluence response posts or their comments, it addresses the point being made directly. What Liebowitz is saying is basic and well-known glibertarian cant (which is sometimes popular with economist-types). But it is an ideological claim no matter which way his data actually falls out. Because economics doesn't really tell us half us much as it claims to do, about the facts, but it sometimes gives us a language to talk about ideology.

And I happen to believe that the predictable result of this type of glibertarianism is a racist result. I'm sorry if this hurts anyone's feelings.

However, I am known there as a "crazed Obama-loon", and my substantive response was quite predictably deleted, and quickly. And the moderator decided to respond with:

fuck off mandos.

Oh, woe is me. But: at least Valhalla should now know why I didn't try the first time.

So, the point is not that PUMAs are burning crosses on their front lawns, or aren't perfectly nice people who wouldn't go out of their way to give a brown guy a break, or don't have dark pigmentation themselves. It doesn't even mean they have no legitimate complaint, or that their complaints are entirely motivated by nefarious intent. Far from it. It is merely that the PUMA movement, at least as represented by quite a proportion of Confluence regulars, has allowed defensiveness and anger over Obama campaign strategy to severely blunt their political judgement, even so far as misunderstanding the actual tactic the Obama campaign used. And, for that reason, we should hope beyond hope that this poor judgement is not loudly echoed in the wider political sphere.

*They apparently have a web radio show called "Conflucians Say". Uhm. I really couldn't resist, sorry.

**Economics is dressed-up moral argument at best, well before it is science, and the Liebowitz paper at issue is no exception.

What follows is a comment thread that I think is also interesting in itself, but I'm still working out what/how to refer to things for which I've written a response comment.

Be grateful you aren't starving

For some reason, I decided today to punish myself by reading redstate.com.  RedState, for my Canadian readers, is a wannabe Daily Kos for the right-wing.  The people who run it are the sort of Republicans who give off a sort of normal, less freepish aroma, but do not be fooled: they are actually completely loopy neocons and the like with the thinnest veneer of erudition. 
The difference between them and the freepers is the recognition that you have to put on a suit to get the creamier fraction of wingnut welfare.

So anyway, token funny-name* dude Pejman Yousefzadeh approvingly quotes this stunning piece of Jonah Goldberg-ian sophistry from some nobody writer in the NYT.

 

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?

Um, no. Even if you've just lost your job, there's something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that's elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

This is, in a nutshell, why capitalism---whatever its merits---exists in deep opposition to democracy. What is this guy really telling the victims of trade and, indeed, the rest of us?  What is the moral corollary of this logic, logic that the writer quite correctly identifies as emanating from capitalist ideology?

Be grateful that we allow you to survive.

I don't normally go after right-wing ideologues directly myself, happily preferring, as I do, what others call the circular firing squad; I have generally preferred to go after intellectually dishonest people who profess to be, in some way or another, on my side.  And I can't help but feel that this sort of logic also underlies those people as well, especially the well-meaning economists and the like. 

But when someone tells me, "Congrats!  We are not going to kick you onto the street today," I may indeed count my blessings for myself.  But I am not obliged to express any gratitude for it.   If I believe that I owe gratitude for survival to something, then I believe that it is my master.

*I can say this because in real life, I have a funny name like his.

The second day of Oilmas

Yesterday was Oilmas! $100 NYMEX, baby!

Public service announcement

Sadly, No! has a post on the congressional Democrats' complicity in torture, just in case you might have once thought, like Bradrocket, that the Dems were better on that issue.  The credibility of the report is disputed in comments, but there's an overall discussion on the crediblity of the Dems in general.

Why do I even bother voting for Democrats again? I mean, WTF. It would be nice, really really nice, to have at least one goddamn party in this doomed nation that stands fully against torture. Jesus H., you horrible assholes. Don’t you have any damn principles? Don’t you have any ethics? Have you ever, at any point in your miserable lives, taken a principled stand on any issue?

Again, I feel sick.  Favoring torture is now a bipartisan issue.  David Broder must be very pleased.

This Kos diary by Jerome à Paris contains a link to a fascinating Financial Times report.

Minimum wages are new in Germany, where pay is traditionally negotiated by business federations and trade unions. Yet they are hugely popular – a survey this week showed 78 per cent in favour. Yet Mr Westerwelle said the CDU’s decision to bow to popular pressure merely underscored the weakness of its leadership.

The horror!  Leaders bowing to popular pressure?  Next thing you know, they'll want democracy.

The FT editorial on this issue is a hoot too.

None of this will be new to most of you.  I don't know why I posted it---which is the general problem with blogging for me, it's so hard to post anything original, and there's nothing more banal than hatred for democracy.  But then you get those public service ads on TV from the Shriners about not cooking your kids, so I'm thinking of this post in that vein.

I CAN HAS BATHTUB?

The Grover, he is winning.

So, I love to get snippy with DKos.  But with things looking up for the Dems, it looks like the stifling conformism is relaxing a little bit. And, truth be told, some of the "diarists" at that site have been consistently informative for years.

One longstanding diarist, bonddad, has commented on finance for some time now.  And he writes that the next US president, probably a Democrat, is probably going to be hobbled economically.

Democrats have high hopes for the 2008 election.  And they should. Bush’s policies have done an incredible amount of damage to the Republicans.  It’s doubtful they will recover anytime soon. But should a Democrat win, the fiscal mess left by Bush has already predetermined the next president’s primary policy goal: to clean-up the mess Bush is leaving behind.

He then quotes some very scary debt figures.

Canadians will know to be very wary of debt scaremongering.  If there's one thing this country learned during the previous Liberal government(s), it's that it's surprisingly easy to dig oneself out of rather deep holes.  Canadian writers such as Linda McQuaig have built careers out of pointing out the artificial nature of debt and deficit numbers and their propaganda value in media-popular victim-blaming schemes, whereby the weakest are accused of soaking up and squandering our valuable resources and left to fend for themselves.

Certainly, any drawdown in US forces in Iraq will have a noticeable effect, for instance.  Reversing some of the tax cuts, another.  And so on.

But even this long in hock has had an effect, and the patient---the prospect of a decent social welfare schemes in the USA---is still partly drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub.  Perhaps not quite the way that dear old horrid Grover intended it; he entertained, at least publicly, the fatuous thought that it might be brought about by spending cuts on the meagre redistribution schemes for the poor, or something like that.  But by the only way it could: coercive wealth transfer to the powerful.

As usual, the Onion delivers

In The Know: Are America's Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?

Via the comments at Sadly, No!

A buys luxury yacht, forbids B to sleep under bridge

In a previous post, I was confused by what was apparently an attempt at satire on another blog.  The blog owner came and attempted to clarify her point, but I became confused even further.  Fortunately, someone named Dave stepped in to clarify the position.

Confusing terminology because of a confusion of premises in the original question -- what is meant by opporutnity? There should be equal opportunity before the law, of course, because the government is supposed to be of and for all the people equally, otherwise it is indefensible. As far as other opporunities go, of course they are not equal. A is not obligated to share his opportunities and B is not obligated to expropriate them through the intermediary of the law -- this would destroy equality before the law, after which equality of opportunity becomes meaningless. This is the obvious target of Lisa's post -- all these groups demand in one way or another equality of some opportunity they are not ethically entitled to and simultaneously subvert the only equality of opportunity that is worth defending.

Fair enough.  This makes aspects of Lisa's confusing original post and subsequent remarks a little more clear.  It appears that she believes that some shrieking harpies are going around encoding special statuses and advantages for...a privileged few? 

So presumably before these vicious, envious meanies started their evil works, we had some modicum of greater "equality before the law", no?  So, this still leaves me with some areas of confusion:

1. What, according to Dave and Lisa, does it mean to be "equal before the law"?  I mean, the law could say (giving an extreme example for the sake of argument---I hope you aren't allergic to hypotheticals), "From 2pm to 3pm, everyone using the sidewalk in downtown is subject to pelting with diluted peanut butter."   "Everyone" here, refers literally to what it says, everyone, equally.  So we can say that everyone is still equal under the law, no?  Now, let's say that the peanut-butter-anaphylactic lobby succeeds in inserting the clause "except for people with peanut butter allergies"---are they institutionalizing "special status" as you and Lisa define it?  The answer will go a long way to clarifying what you mean.
2. Who wrote the law, anyway---before those silly Reds got their hands on it?  How were they able to write the law so that everyone is equal under it?  Did everyone have equal opportunity to write these laws? 
3. Lastly, and my biggest point of confusion, how does B's appropriation of A's greater opportunities destroy "equality before the law"?  After all, if B and A were reversed in the characters that gave them opportunities, the law would work the same way, no?

India complaining; VIjay Sappani gets it exactly backwards

Vijay Sappani gets it exactly backwards.  He thinks that the Lashkar-e-Taiba and similar groups come from Western indifference to anti-Indian violence by Pakistan.  I guess his affliction can be explained by the fact that he reads the Notional Pest.  Or something.

VijaySappani.com - Blog Archive - Pakistan:The Path to Terror in Canada: National Post has this front page story on ‘The path to terror in Canada”. It talks in detail the story of a Canadian who was trained there. India has been complaining of L-e-T and other pakistan army supported terrorist training camps for nearly two decades, but western governments did not bother until these terror camps started createing demons that are affecting their own borders and citizens.

Sadly, no.  It's not that "Western governments did not bother".   It's that Western governments---well, at the minimum, a Western government---chose to make use of Pakistan by encouraging certain destructive dynamics in the 70s and 80s as a weapon against a particular, now temporarily defunct, enemy.

But it's funny: Vijay's post is, coincidentally, the standard Official Line of the Indian government and its supporters.  It's always good to be suspicious of something when it transparently tries to align itself with the powerful.  India is claiming that it is an Innocent Victim of Islamofascism---just like you white people!  It's actually a quite typical and obsequious behaviour that us desi folk sadly exhibit.

Really, though, India does have a few relevant features in common with the West---a very tenuous claim to democracy, even of the representative kind, that is somehow expected to excuse its behaviour, a tendency to bully its neighbours, and exploitative economic system, etc, etc.  The best part is that India has often violently crushed liberation movements currently right inside itself, rather than tucked away in South America.

Most of all, for all Pakistan's faults, India is incredibly intransigent on the issues that make up the heart of the critical India-Pakistan dispute.  And it and its supporters have the gall to make accusations.