Ezra Klein has an article whose thesis is that as Americans don’t directly pay the full cost of their healthcare since employers pay a large chunk, or they’re on Medicare, Medicaid or some form of socialized medicine (the military and the Veterans administration) Americans aren’t for radical change.
The problem with this is simple enough. Polls find that a super majority of Americans, from 70% to 80% want a public option. A straight up majority want single payer. That certainly qualifies as radical change.
Americans may not pay the full cost of insurance, but they are well aware of the full cost of health care. About 60% of all bankruptcies are caused by health bills, everyone who is self-employed knows the full cost, and people who get sick routinely had claims denied or lose coverage. The full cost of healthcare becomes evident when you get sick, and the health care you thought your insurance provided doesn’t actually appear, or you have to fight tooth and nail for it.
Everyone may not have experienced these costs and problems directly, but I’d be willing to lay long odds that almost no Americans haven’t had them happen to a friend, co-worker or family member.
And so, contra-Ezra, in fact Americans are ready for radical change. Even if you don’t consider the public option radical, single payer is, and a majority of Americans want it. One might argue that that the intensity of desire for change is not there, that there haven’t been huge crowds in support of health care change, but the problem there is Obama has been rather wishy-washy. He isn’t offering single payer, which is what would get the hard left out in large numbers, and he isn’t even willing to say that his bill must have a strong public option. His plan, and those offered by the House and Senate, have a mushy feel to them. “Might pass this, might not, and we aren’t committed to it.”
It’s hard to get worked up for mush and so, by and large, people aren’t.
But still, it’s clear Americans want radical change of the health care system. It’s the politicians who don’t.
Specifically Democratic conservative Senators like Baucus and Conrad, virtually every Republican Senator, and President Barack Obama, who ruled out radical change in the form of single payer and who won’t insist on even a bad public option, let alone a truly robust one, are the ones who don’t want radical change.
And yes, it’s probably because American politicians don’t feel the cost of health care: they’re fully covered, and virtually all of them are millionaires.
So, no, the problem isn’t American citizens not having the appetite for necessary radical change. The problem is American politicians.
One constant theme which needs dealing with is the idea that the country is more conservative than liberal and that centrists are needed to hold off horrible conservative things from happening.
More than that, this is an argument for oligarchy. What I see is that the majority of people, in poll after poll, want single payer. A huge majority want the public option, yet odds are decent you won’t even get that.
When people talk of left-center coalitions the center part includes a large number of Senators (like Diane Feinstein) who won’t do what the majority of their constituents want them to do. At this point “centrist” = “captured by monied interests.”
Odds are if Obama wanted single payer, the House could pass it. It’d be close, but they could get it done. The House is the more representative body of the two bodies, the Senate is deliberately retrograde.
When I look at the US what I see is a banana republic. And then I see people who think that the Senate, or even the House, actually does what the American people want. Again and again, Congress does things that the majority disagree with. In 2006 the Dems were elected to end the war in Iraq, for example, and refused to do so (though again, the House at least went through the motions, the Senate didn’t even make an effort). Oh, Congress will sometimes do what the majority want—when that’s what it was going to do anyway.
The plan to fix this is simple enough and always has been. Obama was a right wing democrat and this was clear early. I told people that repeatedly through the primaries and into the election. Once he was chosen as the nominee I told people not to work for him or give him money, because he could win or lose without netroots or progressive support (it was a drop in the bucket compared to what he was getting elsewhere and was not decisive for him), and to take their time and money and spend it on electing progressive members of Congress, where that amount of money and volunteers could be decisive.
People who hold progressive and liberal policy views are a much larger proportion of the population than the right wing crazies are, they are in fact a majority of the population, though you’d never know it from listening to the gnashing of teeth of some folks.
If the right wing crazies could capture the Republican party, liberals and progressives, who already make up the largest block in the House, and who massively outnumber Blue Dogs, can certainly do the same to the Democratic party.
If, of course, they stop telling themselves self-excusing lies about how the country doesn’t agree with them on basic issues like healthcare, when, in fact, the country does. Americans may not call themselves liberals, but when you look at their actual policy positions they are more liberal on most (not all, but most) issues than they are conservative. That’s a gap in self-perception it should be possible to jump.
It takes real work for the centrists and right wing to keep Liberals and Progressives down. Notice that almost all of Obama’s whipping is towards the left, towards progressives, not to the right. The right wing of the Democratic party is more or less doing what he wants (forget the rhetoric, again, look at who he and Rahm whip), it’s the left wing he’s scared of, because if they got their act together they could stop him from passing anything. The Blue Dogs in the House do not currently have a veto, the Progressives, if they want to use it, do. And that’s why they get the back side of Obama and Rahm’s hand so often.
The left is the most dangerous force in American politics today. The entire resources of the lobbying industry and of centrist Democratic interests are required to keep it in check, not just during legislative season, but during elections, when the DCCC and the DSCC do their very best to make sure that progressives don’t win primaries, and when they do, that they’re starved of resources.
So time to spine up. If you’re a left wing Democrat, you belong to the scariest force in American politics. The crazy right will have some good cycles yet to come, mainly due to Democratic establishment incompetence and preference for mushy middle candidates but demographics are against them. Don’t write Republicans off yet, but they are failing. You—the left—are the rising force, and everyone in the center and the right, is doing everything they can to keep you down.
Don’t let them, and don’t believe lies about how you’re some tiny minority whom the American people don’t agree with.
(Note: comments weren’t working, they are now, so feel free to comment if you like.)
From the Globe and Mail (via Corrente):
While other countries were bailing out major companies by purchasing their shares and debt or taking ownership stakes, the German government took a different tack this year, bailing out payrolls instead, in order to keep layoffs and large-scale unemployment at bay and stave off the personal bankruptcies and home foreclosures that would result.
The result has been a political dividend for Ms. Merkel, whose ruling Christian Democrats face a Sept. 27 national election. In 2005, she was swept to office after a sharp rise in unemployment levels forced then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a Social Democrat, to call an election.
This time around, she can boast that unemployment has held steady for two straight months, at 7.7 per cent, below the Eurozone average of 9.5 per cent. Without the kurzarbeit, Germany would have seen unemployment rise.
It has also turned the attention of world governments to Germany, where some forecasters believe the economy is recovering faster than among its neighbouring countries. If growth can resume next year, Ms. Merkel’s payroll-boosting scheme will have paid off, saving the country from the worst effects of the downturn.
This is a crude version of what I was arguing for last year, by the way. I wanted support for homeowners and so on, which would have put a floor under the crisis. The US situation, since it was the epicenter and originator of the paper behind the crisis, required different actions, but the basic idea of supporting ordinary people so there wasn’t a demand collapse and a spiral of bankruptcies and foreclosures was the point.
What we’re seeing right now in the US is that foreclosures are up, consumer credit is crashing through the floor, and employment is still declining. The engines of demand in the US economy area almost entirely government driven at this point, which is fine, but because ordinary people weren’t helped, the requirement is for that stimulus to continue (mainly through Afghanistan once the stimulus bill runs out).
A stimulus is supposed to kick a country out of a recession or depression, not be required indefinitely. And right now, to slightly change what we used to say about the Bush economy, the economy is “isn’t dying, as long as you don’t unplug the life support”.
Welcome to Japan, 1990. Get ready for a long grey suck. All because Obama, Bush and Bernanke thought that specific financial corporations were identical to banking, and that throwing money at banks was more important than fixing the underlying economic problems created by financialization and bubbles.
Emptywheel has crunched the numbers on the Baucus plan, and has come up with how much money it will leave families if they actually have to use the insurance for any significant health care problems. Here are her numbers for a family of four earning 300% of the poverty levels or $66,150.
Federal Taxes (estimate from this page): $8,710 (13% of income)
State Taxes (using MI rates on $30,000 of income): $1,305 (2% of income)
Food (using “low-cost USDA plan” for family of four): $9,060 (13.5% of income)
Home (assume a straight 30% of income): $20,100 (30% of income)
Bad Max Tax: $20,610 (31% of income)
Total: $59,785 (89% of income)
Remainder for all other expenses (including education, clothing, existing debt, transportation, etc.): $7,215 (or 11% of income.
Now, the House bill stops subsidies at EXACTLY the same level, 400% of poverty level. We can use Emptywheel’s numbers for all of this. The difference is that the House plan limits premiums to 10% of gross income at 300% (pg 137, pdf), and out of pocket expenses to $10,000 per family.
So that makes the House Tax: $10,000 + 6,615 = 16,615 or 25% of income (as opposed to 31%).
The difference between the House plan and the Baucus plan is $4,025. Total expenses are $55,7607, or The remainder for all other expenses is $11,240 or 17% of income.
It’s not a meaningless difference, $4,025 a year is $335 a month. But it’s not huge , either.
Now, one might say the real difference is that the House plan has a public option, which will drive down costs. At best that’s questionable. I don’t think so, neither does Taibbi, and neither do various other people. Yes, a good public option would, but the House plan has a crippled public option. I strongly expect that most people at 300% are going to be paying 10% of their income, because that’s what insurance companies are going to charge them, since that’s what they can charge them.
If you object to the Baucus bill because it will force families to buy insurance that will still financially cripple them, then there’s little reason not to object to the House Bill for the exact same reason.
Update: Dave Johnson points out the following (which would be true of Marcy and my numbers):
It seems you want to deduct the $20K insurance premium from gross income before you calculate the federal tax, so fed tax shouldn’t be $8710, it should be
$66,150 – 20,610 = 45,540 * 13% tax = $5920 tax.
The difference is $2,790 to both the Baucus and House plan numbers. Which is slightly better for both of them. I leave it to readers to decide if it’s enough better to make either of them a good deal.
Really, everything else about Labor in America is just commentary on this graph:
You have exactly the rights you are willing to fight for.
Hard not to decide that Reagan broke the unions, isn’t it? The number of strikes crashed off a cliff even faster than did membership.
And, in case you didn’t realize, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is already dead on arrival. Something may pass with that name, but it will not allow workers to create a union just by putting a check mark on a card, and it will not have quick mandatory arbitration of first employment contracts so that employers don’t just refuse, for years, to give unionized workers a first contract, effectively voiding the unionization.
Well, now Matt Taibbi is saying it, maybe progressives will listen:
In the end, the Blue Dogs won. When the House commerce committee passed its bill, the public option no longer paid Medicare-plus-five-percent. Instead, it required the government to negotiate rates with providers, ensuring that costs would be dramatically higher. According to one Democratic aide, the concession would bump the price of the public option by $1,800 a year for the average family of four.
In one fell swoop, the public plan went from being significantly cheaper than private insurance to costing, well, “about the same as what we have now,” as one Senate aide puts it. This was the worst of both worlds, the kind of take-the-fork-in-the-road nonsolution that has been the peculiar specialty of Democrats ever since Bill Clinton invented a new way to smoke weed. The party could now sell voters on the idea that it was offering a “public option” without technically lying, while at the same time reassuring health care providers that the public option it was passing would not imperil the industry’s market share.
The public option, isn’t. As I noted quite some time ago. It will not reduce costs, it is questionable that it is even viable. And yet progressives are going balls-to-the-wall for a non-viable public option which won’t even reduce costs rather than, at the least, fighting for a real public option?
Folks, you are being sold a bill of goods. The people shilling for this version of the public option, whether politicians or others, are shilling for something that won’t work (not that even a nominal public option is likely to be in the final bill).
The best thing that can happen, at this point, is for nothing to be passed. Because right now it looks most likely you are either going to be forced to buy insurance without an option to buy a government plan, or you’re going to be forced to buy insurance with the possibility of buying government insurance that’s no cheaper than private insurance, and which may not even be able to stay in business (it does have to succeed without any subsidies.)
Or Obama can lead. He can say “Enough. You tried, you failed. We will expand Medicare to all.” Then the Republicans have to run against Medicare, and if they do that, they’ve lost. Medicare is the most popular government program aside from Social Security, and anybody running against Medicare is taking on old folks as well as taking on something that’s already a known quantity. You can’t say Medicare has “death panels” because it doesn’t. You can’t say Medicare rations care, because it doesn’t — it won’t pay for everything, but you can always buy Medi-Gap coverage from private insurers for the things it won’t pay for. And the bill would be literally 5 pages long, most of which would be boilerplate around the three paragraph payload, one paragraph expanding Medicare to everybody, the second one which raises the Medicare payroll tax to 4/4%, the third which adds a 5% Medicare surcharge to the income tax for everybody who makes over $500K/year. I’ve worked the numbers and that would pay for every dime that’s currently being paid through private insurance, and leave enough to cover the current uninsured. Three paragraphs. That’s all it would take.
But yeah, that’s not happening. So… get ready to pay out for insurance you can’t afford, with co-pays so high you can’t afford to use it even after you’ve been forced to cough up for it.
Plus ca change
The manufacturing sector lost 63K, the financial sector 28K and Construction lost 65. Health care added 47.4 thousand jobs.
One of the more interesting findings is that up till April government jobs were increasing, since April they have declined. The decline isn’t huge, but it exists at all levels of government. For some reason the postal service in particular seems to be shedding jobs.
Though the job loss is less than we’ve seen in the past it’s surprisingly uniform: except for health care and social assistance everything else is either down, or just barely increasing. Fundamentally, every industry without pricing power is taking it on the chin, but if you’re sick, you’re sick, so the medical industry retains the ability to hire. I suspect that the manufacturing numbers would be much worse if defense related manufacturing was removed.
The broadest measure of unemployment, which includes all discouraged workers and folks who work part time but want full time work is up .5% to 16.8%.
Men have lost jobs a lot faster than women. The female unemployment rate has increased by 2.5% in the last year compared to an increase for males of 4.3%.
America continues to be hollowed out. The stimulus will start hitting harder over the next few months, and we should see somewhat better numbers but my long term forecast remains the same: before the next recession, the US will not see a recovery to the same percentage of people employed as before the recession. My forecast for the year was a technical recovery of GDP before the end of the year (it looks like we might even have one for the second quarter, which is sooner than I expected) and no job gains before next year. Might be wrong on the second as well, but any job gains will be nominal and below the 150,000 level just required to keep up with population increases.
The job market is certainly not going to feel good this year. I expect it to remain hard to find a new job right through the end of 2010. Since the likelihood of a new civilian stimulus bill is low, and all stimulus will have to be run through the defense department and the Afghan war, I would suggest that those who can see what they can do about getting a security clearance. The best paid jobs with the best benefits will be in the defense industry for the time being—unless you’re able to finagle a high end job in the finance industry, and be kept afloat with trillions of dollars of Federal Reserve money, of course. In which case, buddy, could you spare some change?
Military spending by country, 2008
Here’s a truth for you. No one, and I mean no one, can invade the US. The US spends more on its military than the next 10 nations combined, and more naval tonnage than the next 13 navies combined. For this the US gets an army which, sorry American jingoists, is bloody awful at brushfire wars.
The US army should be cut in three quarters, at the very least. The air force should be disbanded, since it refuses to do its job anymore (it hates doing close support of troops and its planes are too expensive to be used in most circumstances, which is one main reason for the rise of drones) and the army and navy can pick up the necessary pieces.
The navy should be America’s main arm, but even it needs some cuts, and the carrier flotillas need a serious rethink, they’re nothing but big targets in the case of a war against a real enemy.. The army should be a much smaller expeditionary force, designed so it can be ramped up in the case of the sort of war that requires a mobilization.
The US cannot afford its current military. The budget should be cut in half, at a minimum. That budget, and the huge distortions that the military industrial complex is inflicting on America, are a large part of what is destroying America as an economic power. The best and smartest techies are flooding into the military industrial complex as fast as they can get security clearances, because post dot-com bubble it pays far better and has far better salaries than any other part of the economy except the financial industry. Certainly the military industry isn’t the only thing destroy America’s economy (who needs them when you have the banks) but in the long term, they’re doing more than their fair share.
With a much smaller expeditionary force the US will stick to bombing and shelling, and occasionally kick over small Caribbean countries, which is as it should be, because even the large army has proved radically bloody incompetent at very great cost for almost zero results (what, exactly, is the benefit to the US of the Iraq war? An Iraq aligned with Iran?)
And Americans need to stop talking about being invaded. No one can, no one will. You’re a continental power with a huge nuclear arsenal, even if they could get to your borders, the idea of invading a continental mass the size of the US is insane: there is no one who can do it.
Go back to a pre-WWII army, with a relatively large navy (though not as large as what you have, which is over 50% of the entire world’s naval tonnage). You’ll be fine. Honest. And so will the world. The world is not being made safer by US brushfire wars and neither is America.
And hey, maybe you can take the money and give yourselves real universal healthcare as opposed to some garbage bill that forces you to buy insurance you can’t afford to use.
