With Monday morning's 1 a.m. 60-40 vote, the Senate's health care bill took another step towards passage, prompting a fresh round of public celebrations. "I think it's very exciting," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told HuffPost. "It's a big day."
Even many of those with serious reservations about the bill were slipping on their party hats. "Make no mistake about it," said SEIU president Andy Stern, "for working Americans, this vote signals progress."
And Paul Krugman, while calling the legislation "a seriously flawed bill we'll spend years if not decades fixing," applauded it as "an awesome achievement."
This typifies the current thinking of the "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" crowd. Unfortunately, there are three faulty premises at work in this line of reasoning. First, that those who oppose the bill do so because it's not perfect (as opposed to because it's a hot health care mess). Second, that the bill is, well, good (as opposed to a total victory for Pharma and the insurance industry -- witness the spectacular spike in health care stocks following Monday's vote).
Third is the premise that this is as good a bill as we can get right now, and we can always go back and improve it later.
It doesn't work that way. We heard the same kinds of sentiments about No Child Left Behind when it passed in 2001. Backers on both sides of the aisle had problems with it, but both sides celebrated it as a major step forward -- and promised to make it better in the future.
"The agreement we reached reflects the best thinking of both sides," said Sen. Joe Lieberman.
"This was a reform bill. We can't have reform without resources, and that will be the next step," said Sen. Tom Daschle.
"This is a good bill... And there are going to be many additional steps that will be necessary along the way, but all of us are committed to following in those steps," said Sen. Ted Kennedy, the primary Democratic co-sponsor of the bill.
But despite the widespread commitment to taking the "many additional steps" needed, the steps were never taken, the resources were never allocated, the bill was never improved, and, indeed, is now generally regarded as a disaster (or, as Bill Clinton put it last year, "a train wreck").
In an ominous sign of things to come, Vicki Reggie Kennedy, Sen. Kennedy's widow, made many of the same arguments that were used in support of No Child Left Behind in her Washington Post op-ed promoting passage of the current health care bill.
It's a moving piece of writing -- and nobody doubts her late husband's heartfelt dedication to health care reform. But nobody doubted his dedication to education reform, either.
If the miserable Senate health care bill becomes the law of the land, it's only going to encourage the preservation of a hideously broken system. Just how broken the system is is summed up in the fate of Byron Dorgan's drug re-importation amendment.
This is an idea that Obama co-sponsored when he was in the Senate and unequivocally championed on the campaign trail: "We'll allow the safe re-importation of low-cost drugs from countries like Canada."
But when Dorgan introduced an amendment that would do just that, the White House, sticking to the deal it made with the pharmaceutical industry, lobbied against it -- and the commissioner of the supposedly non-political FDA just happened to release a letter citing "significant safety concerns" about all those dangerous drugs from Canada. Big Pharma's many congressional lackeys trumpeted the letter and the amendment was killed.
But that didn't stop David Axelrod from insisting in an interview with John King this weekend that "the president supports safe re-importation of drugs into this country. There's no reason why Americans should pay a premium for the pharmaceuticals that people in other countries pay less for."
No reason other than our broken system surrendering to the special interests.
From start to finish, the insurance and drug industries -- and their army of lobbyists -- had control over the process that resulted in a bill that is reform in name only. The postmortems of how they pulled it off have already begun. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune published an exhaustive front-page analysis by Northwestern University's Medill News Service and the Center for Responsive Politics of how it was done. The main culprit: "a revolving door between Capitol Hill staffers and lobbying jobs for companies with a stake in health care legislation."
The study found that 13 former congressmen and 166 congressional staffers were actively engaged in lobbying their former colleagues on the bill. The companies they were working for -- some 338 of them -- spent $635 million on lobbying. It was money extremely well spent -- delivering a bill that, by forcing people to buy a shoddy product in a market with no real competition, enshrines into law the public subsidy of private profit.
As we approach the end of Obama's first year in office, this public subsidizing of private profit is becoming something of a habit. It is, after all, exactly what the White House did with the banks. Just as he did with insurance companies, Obama talked tough to the bankers in public but, when push came to shove, he ended up shoving public money onto their privately-held balance sheets.
This is not just bad policy, it's bad politics.
Sharp-eyed opponents are already seizing on the opportunity to rebrand Obama and the Democrats as the party beholden to special interests.
Sunday night, just before the post-midnight vote was taken, John McCain took to the Senate floor and, hearkening back to his days as a crusader for campaign finance reform, lambasted Obama and the Democrats' "negotiations with the special interests," adding: "We should have set up a tent out in front and put Persian rugs in front of it. That's the way that this has been conducted. So the special interests were taken care of, then we had to take care of special senators."
This kind of populist rhetoric resonates with voters across the board, including independents. If Democrats cede this turf by celebrating a bill that is a victory for special interests and special senators, look for a lot more of this kind of rhetoric in the run-up to 2010.
President Bush brought us preemptive war. President Obama's specialty seems to be preemptive compromise. He gave the farm away to Pharma, and then had to keep on giving when Lieberman, Nelson, and the other industry-backed Senators came calling.
There are many reasons for hoping the current Senate bill doesn't become law. But the biggest reason of all is the desperate need for a DC pattern interrupt. The desperate need to draw a line in the sand against the continued domination of our democracy -- and the continued undermining of the public interest -- by special interests.
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Janine R. Wedel: Is the Government In Charge, Or Is It The Shadow Elite?
Make health care a consumer driven market. In Switzerland, a county with the population comparable to Massachusetts, there are ~84 insurance companies while in the U.S., ~15. Let the market in a consumer driven economy fix the health care problem.
Require everyone to purchase private insurance, verifiable through tax returns, 1099 or W-2 type reporting, driver’s licenses, I-9 forms, food stamps - whatever the detail. Next, eliminate the tax deduction to businesses for employee medical coverage. Done, and with minimal cost to tax payers.
Now I know it’s not that simple. There is no guarantee that employers will share their bounty by increasing wages so employees can afford to buy insurance, unless of course the employer wants to remain competitive for a limited pool of talent, or government could simply raise the minimum wage rates. Businesses will figure something out else, the IRS takes 34% of the employer’s windfall.
I’ve heard that Starbucks spends more for health insurance that it does for coffee beans. Why? Because there is a lot more competition in the coffee market, than in the U.S. health care market.
Congress just has to get its nose out of K-Street’s behind and step up to its constitutional obligations.
BTW, the Swiss system has a feature not unlike a whole life insurance policy where by the insured builds up cash value. Such a deal!
If I were looking to start-up a new special interest group, I would lobby for direct payment of our federal income taxes to private corporations. Why mess with the middlemen in Washington? They've never run a corporation. What do they know about wisely using the money that we send them?
The corporations would then be able to hire scads of unemployed Americans with their newly found wealth. Isn't that what we could call a win-win? SCADS. The Society for the Advance of Declining Securites.
We have a system of legalized bribery...a bribeocracy, no longer a democracy...
We can't really Reform anything, until we Reform the Senate, and also of course the Congress..!
You are so right! Enough! As a lifelong democrat, it's time. It's time, in 2010 to begin the campaign of Elizabeth Warren for president of the United States--as an independent. An organization such as Huffington Post can begin this movement, and it will be nurtured by the millions of disenfranchised Americans. Please!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/breakthrough-offers-hope-to-cancer-sufferers-1851097.html
Gee, was that research funded by wealthy private interests in the US? Nope, the work was done in Scotland where they have the evil of socialized medicine resulting in no advances whatsoever.
I agree that I too don't think we should let perfect be the enemy of the good, but that doesn't apply here. The Senate bill is worse than the status quo.
On the other hand, once this thing passes and people see how it will affect their pocketbooks, you could see real anger in the streets and that will help to start drawing that line in the sand you want drawn. We need a win, and a lot of us out here actually need the help offered in this bill, even if it's not exactly what we wanted.
Once again you are right on and call it for what it is. This public funding of private profit is disgusting and shameful- and I also see a pattern developing too. How much more of a burden can people possibly bear? If insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies can spend a bundle to lobby
( or should I say "sponsor") then it's obvious that they're pretty secure financially and are scared to death to lose their comfortable existences. The insurance companies provide nothing related to health in the equation; they are only pimps that jack up the rates so that they can get a bigger cut. I felt fairly certain that the Senate would craft a watered-down compromise that satisfies none of their constituents and caters to their corporate sponsors. It's disgusting and is completely counter to the populist stance that Obama took as a candidate. Did "Public Option" mean it was optional that it be included?
lobbying for third, fourth, fifth parties (the way the rest of the world does it), and demand that it is a PRIORITY, as in emergency;
lobbying for having a very critical look at our public institutions (The Constitution, the Presidency and how it is done, the Congress and its dysfunction, the Judiciary and its obvious corruption, the States & their dysfunctions blah blah blah). Arianna, we need to tell the people that they are badly served by a viper-type media that tell them exactly what they don't need to hear;
getting a very nice post as Culture Secretary when there is such a cabinet post in this government.
My remedy --
reform the FCC so that the people instead of being fed propaganda are being told the truth (that our model of capitalism is a disaster, and that going into a socialist-capitalist system, the way Europe operated [until very recently when it decided to go "free market"]) is the way we have to go;
making Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, required reading in all U.S. high schools with an essay-type exam at the end before graduation.
I hope others can add to my "remedy".