Later On

ThinkProgress:

Last week, over the objections of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Obama administration, the House Armed Services Committee restored funding for the basically useless F-22 fighter jet, in the process stripping funding for nuclear waste cleanup efforts. Last night, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) filed an amendment to restore the waste cleanup funds and eliminate the money for the F-22. The move came after months of Republicans issuing dire warnings about the consequences of suspending the F-22 program: Frank Gaffney, for example, declared it would lead to “diminished military capability, emboldening enemies, and alienating our friends.”

On a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund this afternoon, Frank pointed out Republicans’ hypocrisy in railing against the deficit while simultaneously funding a $2 billion air force jet that has never once flown a mission in Afghanistan or Iraq. Frank said so-called deficit hawks act as though the Pentagon is funded with “Monopoly money”:

I am of course struck that so many of my colleagues who are so worried about the deficit apparently think the Pentagon is funded with Monopoly money that somehow doesn’t count.

Frank also dismissed concerns that eliminating the F-22 will cost jobs:

These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.

Listen to it:

Indeed, conservatives declare that canceling the F-22 would result in thousands of lost jobs. However, as Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb pointed out on the call, the administration has also ramped up production of the F-35, which is produced at many of the same facilities — and by the same workers — as the F-22.

Frank called the F-22 fight an important “test” for the Obama administration’s efforts to cut wasteful military spending. “If we cannot hold the line on this, then it’s very bad news for trying to hold down any kind of excesses in military spending,” he said.

Glenn Greenwald:

The single most significant event in shaping worldwide revulsion towards the violence of the Iranian government has been the video of the young Iranian woman bleeding to death, the so-called "Neda video."  Like so many iconic visual images before it — from My Lai, fire hoses and dogs unleashed at civil rights protesters, Abu Ghraib — that single image has done more than the tens of thousands of words to dramatize the violence and underscore the brutality of the state response. 

For the last question at his press conference yesterday, Obama was asked by CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux about his reaction to that video and to reports that Iranians are refraining from protesting due to fear of such violence.  As Obama was answering — attesting to how "heartbreaking" he found the video; how "anybody who sees it knows that there’s something fundamentally unjust" about the violence; and paying homage to "certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression" — Helen Thomas, who hadn’t been called on, interrupted to ask Obama to reconcile those statements about the Iranian images with his efforts at home to suppress America’s own torture photos ("Then why won’t you allow the photos –").

The President quickly cut her off with these remarks:

THE PRESIDENT: Hold on a second, Helen. That’s a different question. (Laughter.)

The White House Press corps loves to laugh condescendingly at Helen Thomas because, tenaciously insisting that our sermons to others be applied to our own Government, she acts like a real reporter (exactly as — according to Politico‘s Josh Gerstein — White House reporters "could be seen rolling their eyes and shifting in their seats" when Obama called on The Huffington Post‘s Nico Pitney, who has done some of the most tireless work on Iran, gave voice to actual Iranians, and posed one of the toughest questions at the Press Conference).  The premise of Thomas’ question was compelling and (contrary to Obama’s dismissal) directly relevant to Obama’s answers:  how is it possible for Obama to pay dramatic tribute to the "heartbreaking" impact of that Neda video in bringing to light the injustices of the Iranian Government’s conduct while simultaneously suppressing images that do the same with regard to our own Government’s conduct?

The reason Thomas’ point matters so much is potently highlighted by a new poll from The Washington Post/ABC News released today — not only the responses, but even more so, the question itself (click to enlarge image): …

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Karen Tumulty of TIME:

As we have noted here before, two recent polls have shown three-quarters of the public support the idea of giving people the choice of a government-run health care plan similar to Medicare. But a new Washington Post survey throws some caveats on that proposition, and gets a very different result:

Survey questions that equate the public option approach with the popular, patient-friendly Medicare system tend to get high approval, as do ones that emphasize the prospect of more choices. But when framed with an explicit counterargument, the idea receives a more tepid response. In the new Post-ABC poll, 62 percent support the general concept, but when respondents were told that meant some insurers would go out of business, support dropped sharply, to 37 percent.

Here’s that data (and you can read the entire poll here):

This is important, because it tells us how the two sides are going to frame the debate going forward. Supporters of a public plan will emphasize choice and remind people how popular and successful Medicare has been. Opponents will raise the prospect of losing what you have. (And depending on how that public plan is designed, both arguments could be true.) Which meme takes root will very likely determine the outcome.

The problem with torturing people you only suspect of crimes is that you will inevitably torture innocent people. Think Progress:

The BBC recently interviewed 27 former detainees who were held at the Bagram Airbase detention facility between 2002 and 2008. All but two of the detainees said they had been ill-treated. According to the investigation, the detainees were “beaten, deprived of sleep, hung from the ceiling and threatened with dogs. Four claimed officials had put a gun to their head and threatened to kill them.” One inmate said:

‘They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans.

‘They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death.

‘They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you.’

All the detainees were ultimately released without charge.

Update: Lieutenant Colonel Mark Wright, a Defense Department spokesman, claimed that conditions at Bagram “meet international standards for care and custody.”

Maybe the CIA can actually learn how to do interrogations instead of just torture. Spencer Ackerman:

The task force charged with fleshing out President Obama’s ban on torture in interrogations is likely to recommend the creation of small, mixed-agency teams for interviewing the most important terrorist targets. Representing an implicit demotion of the CIA, which currently has responsibility for interrogating high-level terrorists, the teams would report jointly to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The teams are the brainchild of three members of the Intelligence Science Board, a panel that reports to the director of national intelligence: forensic psychologist Robert Fein, former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann and former CIA official John MacGaffin. About five years ago, the three security experts began researching the available social science literature concerning interrogations in a variety of nations, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Japan, in order to inform a humane and effective interrogation regimen. A two-volume report the panel produced — the first phase was released in December 2006; the second, completed last month, is still classified — both repudiated torture and attributed interrogation-related abuses in part to a “shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods at a time of intense pressure from operational commanders to produce actionable intelligence from high-value targets,” Fein wrote in the first volume, ‘Educing Information,’ which The Washington Independent reported on last year.

Last month, J. Douglas Wilson, the Justice Department official who leads the Obama administration’s Special Task Force on Interrogation and Transfer Policies — a panel created by President Obama’s January 22 executive order banning torture — invited the Intelligence Science Board members to Washington to brief the task force on their recommendations. In an oral presentation and a five-page summary of hundreds of pages of work, Heymann said, he and his colleagues recommended the creation of “an organizational structure that could draw” on the experience of a small corps of the best interrogators currently working for the government who “could produce what would very likely be the best non-coercive interrogation or interviewing capacity in the world.” That corps would serve as the first wave of interrogators under the new structure while preparing a syllabus on proper interrogation guidelines for new recruits to the teams.

“The group would be mobile, and go where it needed to go,” said Heymann, now a Harvard law professor, envisioning teams of three to five interrogators at a time who would “only deal with major interviews and major occasions to get information from a terror suspect” of the order of Abu Zubaydah or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, two of the most senior al-Qaeda captives held by the CIA and later the Defense Department. While emphasizing that the task force might not adopt every detail of his proposal and that modifications were likely, Heymann said that the teams would “report both to the Justice Department and to the intelligence world,” a move intended to ensure that interrogations do not compromise prosecutions of detainees, a significant departure from the Bush administration.

The task force — officially chaired by Attorney General Eric Holder and co-vice-chaired by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — has embraced the proposal, according to an official familiar with its work. “It’s highly thought out and sophisticated,” the official said. “This is going to be part of the draft recommendations. It may or may not make the final cut, but I’d be very surprised if it did not.” The task force is scheduled to deliver its recommendations to the White House by July 21. Spokespeople for Holder and Blair declined to comment on the task force’s recommendations while its work was ongoing.

Heymann said that interrogators from across the military, CIA, and FBI, would be charged with creating a “syllabus” of best interrogation practices that fall within the boundaries of the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogations, which complies with the Geneva Conventions. Heymann said that the social science research supporting the Intelligence Science Board’s work ruled out all forms of physical and psychological torture as methods for soliciting information. “What I mean by ‘non-coercive’ is in line with what our major allies do — Britain, France, other European nations — and not out of line with what’s accepted by western nations,” Heymann said. “We would not do anything to other people that we would complain about if done to Americans abroad in other circumstances, we wouldn’t do something we wouldn’t do to an American in the U.S., and we would be pretty well in line with the views of our major allies,” a perspective adopted in order to ensure robust intelligence cooperation with U.S. allies concerned about torture can continue.

Additionally, the Intelligence Science Board recommended that …

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Amazing:

Source: AlterNet, May 25, 2009

Retired U.S. Col. Ralph Peters has written an essay calling for military attacks on journalists. Writing for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Peters calls the media "a hostile third party in the fight … killers without guns," and writes, "future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. … The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win. Our victories are ultimately in humanity’s interests, while our failures nourish monsters."

This is the most over example of the ends justifying the means I’ve read: do anything at all so long as you win. Murder civilians—fine, if you win. Lie to the public—fine, if you win. Torture prisoners and anyone else who strikes your fancy—fine, if you win.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Following up on my earlier post [see below - LG] about how Attorney General Eric Holder dodged Sen. Russ Feingold’s (D-Wis.) questions at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today on warrantless wiretapping, Feingold just put out this statement:

I was disappointed by Attorney General Holder’s unwillingness to repeat what both he and President Obama had stated in the past – that President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal.  For an administration that has repeatedly stated its intention to restore the rule of law, this episode was a step backward. While the Attorney General restated his belief that the program was inconsistent with the FISA statute, his testimony today, and the administration’s delay in withdrawing the Bush Administration’s legal justifications for the program, are troubling.

Here’s a video of their exchange earlier today.

Here’s the earlier post. Holder doesn’t come off any better than Alberto Gonzales:

Pressed by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) on his view of whether the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal, Attorney General Eric Holder said the program was “inconsistent” with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, but repeatedly refused to say it was “illegal,” or that President Bush broke the law — despite previous statements he’s made suggesting just that.

Here’s an excerpt:

Feingold: Is there any doubt in your mind that the warrantless wiretapping program was illegal?

Holder: As it was put together at the t time it was certainly unwise … It now exists with congressional approval, so the concerns I addressed in that speech [referring to a speech at the American Constitution Society before he became Attorney General] no longer exist.

Feingold: I asked if it was illegal, not unwise.

Holder: I thought actions the administration had taken were inconsistent with the dictates of FISA.  And as a result I thought the policy was an unwise one.  The concerns I addressed then have been remedied by Congress.

Feingold: Was it illegal?

Holder: I said it was inconsistent with the dictates of FISA.

Feingold: That sounds awfully mild compared to a very clear statement and very clear principle here … Many people like me believe that if the statute is that explicit then it is unconstitutional for the president and illegal for the president to override the express will of the Congress.

Holder: I think what I’m saying now is consistent with what I’m saying in the speech.

While it seems clear that Holder still thinks the previous administration violated the law (I assume that’s what “inconsistent with the dictates of FISA” means), Holder is obviously reluctant to use the word “illegal,” likely because it suggests that he, as attorney general, might have to prosecute someone for it.

Too bad the environment doesn’t have millions of dollars to give to Representatives and Senators. I bet if it did, we’d get much better environmental legislation. Businesses, of course, by law care nothing about the environment except as it affects profits. Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

House lawmakers announced a deal last night on their sweeping proposal to tackle climate change, but not before the bill’s sponsors were forced to bow once more to a polluting industry that would be affected by the proposal.

Observers of this debate might recall that Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), both ardent environmentalists, have already diluted their bill considerably in order to win the support of House Democrats from states with powerful gas, coal and auto industries. In the latest episode, it was the Democrats representing the farm states who threw the fuss, threatening to kill the bill if two key provisions weren’t changed.

The first involved a program allowing polluting farmers and agricultural companies to offset their emissions by planting trees or investing in green technologies. The Waxman-Markey bill proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency would oversee the program, arguing that the agency would be the most reliable monitor of an initiative designed to protect the environment.

But farm-state Democrats, rallying behind Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, insisted that the U.S. Department of Agriculture be given that responsibility — a scenario opposed by environmentalists, who fear the USDA will prioritize farm industry concerns above the effectiveness of the offset program.

Indeed, The New York Times reports today of USDA’s shoddy record when it comes to overseeing environmental programs under its jurisdiction.

In particular, the department’s conservation agency “routinely ignored” compliance standards when giving out wetlands and wildlife grants, an investigator for the House Agriculture Committee found. The Government Accountability Office said there is potential for duplicative payments with the conservation programs, allowing the agency to release billions of dollars in payments to landowners who do not deserve them.

Another assessment from the USDA inspector general found shoddy accounting at the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The agency was unable to provide sufficient information on transactions and account balances.

No matter. The result of the Waxman-Peterson negotiations was to give USDA the job.

The second sticking point revolved around a controversial EPA initiative — mandated by Congress — designed to ensure that the country’s shift to biofuels like ethanol doesn’t lead to a spike in greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere around the globe. This happened in Indonesia, for example, where there was a widespread clearing of rain forest a few years ago to make way for palm plantations to feed Europe’s emerging biofuels market. The EPA proposed to take such global events into account as it pertains to the U.S. shift to food-based fuels.

No matter. For Peterson and the other agriculture-friendly Democrats, the so-called indirect land-use plan was a non-starter. The result? Under the compromise, EPA won’t be allowed to account for indirect land-use when calculating ethanol-production emissions until the USDA has signed off of the methodology.

“We have reached an agreement that works for agriculture and contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States,” Peterson said in a statement last night.

The House is planning to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill Friday.

Interesting idea: grow plants and raise fish. Take a look.

I finally tried popcorn with bacon salt last night. Quite tasty, I thought. And the Waterpik is FABULOUS as a post-popcorn teeth cleaner.

Interesting book review:

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

by Ryan Grim

A review by Gerry Donaghy

Back in March of this year, President Barack Obama’s team hit on a novel way to interact with the vox populi by holding a virtual town hall meeting over the Internet. Most of the questions dealt with issues he had addressed while on the campaign trail: health care, the mortgage crisis, education, and chronic unemployment. One question that made it past the vetting process asked if marijuana legalization couldn’t be a tool for creating both jobs and tax revenue for the government. The President quickly laughed the issue off, saying that he "didn’t think the strategy was good." It was a frustrating response for legalization advocates, and perfectly illustrated the disconnect between their ideals and political reality. If Obama had given even a hint of entertaining the idea, the outcry from Republicans would have been deafening and distracting. In Obama’s political calculus, it’s easier to deal with a bunch of disgruntled potheads then it is to deal with the minority party.

Huffington Post correspondent Ryan Grim’s book, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America, explores the myriad of disconnects that inhabit our conventional wisdom when it comes to drug use and drug policy. Why is it, for example that in order to receive the mandatory minimum jail sentence for powder cocaine you must possess 500 grams, whereas for crack cocaine the amount is only 5 grams? How can a plan for addict treatment, which was effective in reducing use at the expense of only $34 million, be thrown out in favor of a plan featuring military tactics (raids and interdictions) and mandatory minimum jail sentences, with less demonstrated efficacy and a price tag of $783 million? Why is it that Drug Abuse Resistance through Education (aka D.A.R.E., founded by notorious L.A. police chief Daryl Gates) seems to elevate kids’ interest in drugs instead of discouraging it?

Grim, who has waded through a staggering amount of research, ranging from government statistics on drug use in America to the impact of the North America Free Trade Act on the drug trade between the U.S. and Mexico, presents his results in a way that is informative, yet neither strident nor didactic. He is equally quick to point out that in California, while some medical marijuana dispensaries can be overly generous with whom they distribute to, one shop alone contributed approximately $875,000 to the state’s tax coffers. His reporter’s instinct keeps the book from becoming mired in either partisan or policy arguments. Instead, he sticks to facts that show how our country’s relationship with drugs is frequently adversarial, and frequently motivated by passion rather than evidence, and that it is always, in his words, a "never ending game of Whack-A-Mole."

There are two aspects of Grim’s research that I wish would receive more attention in the mainstream media. One is …

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Good article by Sirota at Salon.com:

Most of the great advances we remember involve reimagination and dreams, not merely tweaks and tinkers. The Wright Brothers’ plane wasn’t a newfangled horse and buggy, Einstein’s theories weren’t a simple update of old physics, and Edison’s creations didn’t aspire to make a brighter-burning wax candle. It’s been the same thing in politics. The Founding Fathers’ Constitution didn’t replicate monarchy, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal wasn’t just tinkering with Hooverism, and Ronald Reagan’s revolution didn’t merely dismantle the welfare state.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for "a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business," as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

On healthcare, even as the Obama administration pushes to create a public option for consumers to buy into, most of the proposals for universal healthcare being debated in Washington still imagine a system integrally involving private insurance companies. In fact, the one proposal that sees a new healthcare system without those companies — a single-payer system — has been shoved to the side by both parties as too radical.

Same thing, again, for efforts to address global warming…

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From the Center for American Progress:

Tonight, ABC News will host “Prescription for America,” a discussion with President Obama about his plans to reform the health care system. Critics have charged that Obama’s proposal to enact a new public health insurance plan to compete directly with private insurers would lead to a “government takeover” of the health care system. During yesterday’s White House news conference, Obama defended the plan, but stopped short of calling it “non-negotiable.” “If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care, if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical,” the President said. Progressives have long argued that a public health insurance option is essential to controlling skyrocketing health care costs and expanding the choice of coverage. Moreover, a recent CBS News/New York Times poll found that “a clear majority of Americans — 72 percent — support a government-sponsored health care plan to compete with private insurers.” The Tri-Committee health care reform legislation in the House includes a robust public option and the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee bill is expected to include a similar provision. Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) have started Citizens for a REAL Health Care Reform and a Public Option, a petition in support of a public health insurance plan. But while a public option is certainly an essential element of health care reform, any overhaul of the health care system must also include a host of other progressive reforms, including robust affordability standards, shared responsibility principles, and payment reform.

ENSURING AFFORDABILITY: Health reform that fails to make insurance more affordable is at best an incremental improvement. The problem of affordability is most apparent for the nearly 47 million Americans who lack health insurance. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that while “15.8 percent of adults spent more than 10 percent of their family income on health care services in 1996, by 2003 the proportion of adults bearing what has historically been considered catastrophic financial burdens had increased to 19.2 percent of the population, or 48.8 million individuals.” According to the Center for Studying Health System Change, one in five Americans had trouble paying their health care bills in 2007. In fact, even moderate levels of out-of-pocket spending — spending that is well below the 5 or 10 percent of family income — created difficult financial hurdles. Health care reform must expand safety net programs like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) for low-income families and provide help with premiums for middle-class families. While both the House and Senate health care proposals provide subsidies to families on a sliding scale of income up to nearly 400 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), Karen Pollitz, a professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, insists that health reform must also include “a maximum out-of-pocket limitation” for both in network and out of network coverage. Moreover, “depending on what premiums are charged for qualified health benefit plans, subsidies capped at 400 percent of FPL may prove to be insufficient to ensure affordable health care for all Americans,” Pollitz explained in yesterday’s testimony to the House Education and Labor Committee. “The Committee might consider instead a rule that no individual or family will have to pay more than 10 percent of income on health insurance premiums….cutting subsidies off entirely at an arbitrary income level can leave families vulnerable.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Check out Healthcare Now! (and thanks to Constant Reader for pointing it out). I donated, and I signed their petition pushing HR 676—universal single-payer healthcare, the only solution that makes economic sense. Also from that site, this video (which begins with a plea for donations, but hang in there):

Robert Kuttner in the Huffington Post:

I’m sure I’m not the only reader who noticed the juxtaposition of two front page stories in Sunday’s New York Times dealing with health care. The first article cited a new Times-CBS poll showing that 72 percent of Americans favored a government run health plan comparable to Medicare, which would be available to everyone.

The second reported on a rogue radiologist at a Philadelphia VA hospital who botched 92 prostate procedures.

The right will doubtless go to town on that one, as what we can expect of government-sponsored medicine. I’ll have more to say about the VA in a moment, but first let’s consider the poll findings.

The poll is relevant because Congress will soon decide whether to include the so-called "public option" in the Obama health reform bill. As drafted by three House leaders and unveiled last Wednesday, the 852-page bill would include a government-sponsored, Medicare-like public plan.

Republicans and the health industry have been kicking and screaming that this is socialistic. But the poll suggests that defenders of the public plan have nothing to fear politically, and that Republicans are in danger of getting on the wrong side of a popular issue.

However, that’s only the beginning of the story. The reform package, as drafted by the Obama administration and the House leadership, is dubious legislation even with the inclusion of a public option. Basically, it leaves the two worst aspects of the system intact. First, private insurers will continue to dominate. Second, most people will continue to get their insurance through their employers. Given these two bedrock realities, there is no way that the bill can make serious inroads on cost without cutting back on care. The high cost of the approach is already causing key legislators to back off. The current system wastes huge sums, but because it is so fragmented the money flows to profit opportunities and not to the most cost-effective forms of health care.

Also, as my American Prospect colleague Paul Starr warns, a mixed system with a public option effectively invites the most expensive and hard-to-treat people to opt for the public plan, while private insurers will seek to insure the young and the healthy. This is a familiar problem known as adverse selection. The private insurers will then smugly point out that the public plan is less "efficient," when in fact it simply will have a more costly population. The only way to avoid this problem is to have everyone in the same universal plan–what’s otherwise known as a single-payer plan.

The public option is a not-very-good second best–because our leading liberal politicians lack the nerve to embrace the one reform that simultaneously solves the problem of cost, quality, and universal inclusion. The policy that dare not speak its name is of course comprehensive national health insurance, or Medicare-for-All. I try to avoid using the term "single payer," because a technical, policy-wonk phrase not understood by most civilians has become insider shorthand for national health insurance. Let’s call the thing by its rightful name. Medicare-for-All is something regular people understand.

The Times-CBS poll is evidence that this is what more than two Americans in three really want. Most voters have not followed the nuances of how the public option in the Obama plan would compete with private insurance. The poll simply indicates that voters want access to a straight-up, Medicare-style plan to be available to one and all. In past polls, when Times-CBS pollsters ask whether people favor national health insurance, responses generally favor Medicare-for-All by margins of about two-to-one.

In the current debate, liberals find themselves fighting to keep the public option alive, so that some form of efficient, publicly-run health insurance will stay in the mix–but knowing that it is embedded in a reform package that is far more costly and inefficient than it should have been. Instead of validating the common sense and reformist demands of ordinary Americans and identifying the insurance, drug, and corporate elites as the obstacles to real reform, too many of our liberal leaders from President Obama on down hope to co-opt business elites with a convoluted scheme that undermines the efficiencies of a comprehensive and universal system. And just wait until it gets watered down further in order to retain the support of these same elites. A plan that all of these groups would endorse would not be worth having.

So what’s the matter with our politicians? Why are the people so far ahead of their elected leaders on this one? …

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Madison Powers in Congressional Quarterly:

Knowledgeable observers have long said that the public option — some form of government-sponsored alternative to existing private insurance plans — is one of the two main stumbling blocks to serious health care overhaul.

The second major obstacle is the unanswered question of how to pay for a guarantee of universal coverage for all Americans and the cost of including the almost 50 million who are now uninsured. More on that point in a moment.

In an earlier column immediately after the insurance industry lobby promised cooperation with President Obama’s overhaul efforts, I argued that this was not a commitment to be trusted and that the reasons for doubt were based on the well-known (in Washington) fact that a public option would turn out to be a deal-breaker.

A public option can take many forms and the pros and cons depend heavily on the details. In broad stokes, however, advocates such as Howard Dean like to press the analogy to the highly popular Medicare program. The idea is that individuals get to choose their own doctors and hospitals in the same way they can under traditional private sector insurance, and they get “indemnified” for costs by the sponsoring agency. As Obama highlights at every opportunity, if you’re satisfied with your current insurance, you can keep it.

The overhaul plan is billed quite smartly as simply adding options. Americans like choice. As anyone who witnessed the media campaign against the Clinton plan will recall, the threat of taking away the options currently available to those who saw themselves as doing reasonably well — under the admittedly dysfunctional system — trumped any moral imperative to risk any possible sacrifice for the sake of those who are left out completely.

Thus far, the public seems to have responded well to the administration’s near-perfect pitch. The New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 76 percent of Americans think that a public option is an important part of any reform package that might be passed, while only 20 percent think it’s not important.

The Obama narrative thus deflected the initial thrust that doomed the Clinton plan. The promise of more choice pre-empted the familiar threat of overhaul ideas that threaten fewer choices as the price to pay for fairness to those excluded. Score one for the Obama team.

But Republican lawmakers are opposed categorically, and many key Democratic senators are noticeably anxious about supporting a public option.

What’s the problem with the public option? …

Continue reading. Of course, it’s obvious to the meanest intellect that the best solution is a single-payer healthcare system that provide universal coverage: this eliminates almost all of the administrative expenses that bulk up the US healthcare bill. Countries with single-payer UHC systems enjoy good medical coverage at half the per-capital cost that the US pays. One would think this approach would be a slam dunk—and it would be if the healthcare industry did not funnel so much money to members of the House and Senate, skewing their votes by their self-interest and lack of interest in the public good.

This should be interesting:

Former Executive Warns Congress: Don’t Be Fooled by For-Profit Industry’s Misleading Campaign

Washington, DC – Wendell Potter, a former health insurance industry insider, will testify before the full Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday June 24, 2009 at 2:30 p.m. EST, exposing the health insurance industry’s resistance to needed health care reform.

Mr. Potter spent more than 20 years as a public relations executive for two large health insurers – Cigna and Humana – but left the industry after witnessing practices he felt harmed American health care consumers. To him, there was a heart-breaking discrepancy between Americans struggling to find affordable, comprehensive coverage and wealthy insurance executives who based their premium charges – and coverage decisions – on profits rather than people’s health care needs. He has decided to come forward in the hopes of stopping the health insurance industry from once again derailing meaningful reform.

He will testify about how big, for-profit insurers have hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street investors and how the industry is using its massive wealth and influence to determine what is (and is not) included in the legislation currently before Congress.

WHO: Wendell Potter, Former Health Insurance Executive (Cigna and Humana Inc.) and Senior Fellow on Health Care with the Center for Media and Democracy, exposing the industry and telling Congress, “Don’t buy the hype.”

WHAT: Hearing on “Consumer Choices and Transparency in the Health Insurance Industry,”
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation

WHEN: Wednesday June 24, 2009 Hearing Start Time: 2:30 pm Press Pre-Set Time: 1:45 pm

Interesting article by John Fritze at USA Today:

Like millions of employees, lawmakers choose from a range of private insurers. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management does not track how many members of Congress enroll in individual plans, but a Blue Cross Blue Shield preferred provider organization (PPO) is the most popular for all federal employees, according to the agency.

That Blue Cross plan scored well in an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. The report found the federal plan had lower deductibles and co-pays than "typical" PPOs but did not rate as well as an average health maintenance organization (HMO). Most people insured through work, 58%, are in PPOs, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Roland McDevitt, director of health care research for consulting firm Watson Wyatt, which performed the analysis in the report, called the federal plan "slightly more generous."

A Kaiser survey found the average PPO premium for individual coverage was $4,802 in 2008. For a family, the premium was $12,937. The federal plan’s premiums were higher ($5,386) for individuals but lower ($12,335) for families, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

The government paid 69% of that premium for a family, less than the 73% average.

"These aren’t the wonderful, exemplary plans … that many people think they are," said Jon Gabel of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "They are not the Cadillac plans."

Lawmakers can also utilize taxpayer-subsidized care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had bypass surgery at Bethesda in 2003. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., battled cancer last year with treatments received at both sites.

Pete Sepp, a spokesman with the National Taxpayers Union and an expert on benefits received by members of Congress, questioned whether those additional perks skew how lawmakers look at health care.

"It sure can’t help their perception of what the average consumer has to deal with," he said.

Here’s money that we could better use to insure the health of the American public:

Source: Advertising Age, June 17, 2009

As members of the U.S. Congress consider options on how to fund Obama administration plans to extend health care coverage to those currently uninsured, the drug and advertising are digging in to defend tax breaks on direct-to-consumer advertising. Representative Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said that "one thing that’s not off the table is that you can pick up $37 billion knocking out the deduction for [drug] advertising." The possibility that the tax deduction on drug promotion could be removed has angered the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). "What, anytime somebody doesn’t like a particular product category, they’re going to take away their tax deduction?" asked Dan Jaffe, ANA’s Executive Vice-President. In a media statement, the ANA objected to any change that would make "advertising more expensive" as, it claimed, "advertising is critical to the economic recovery of our nation." The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America did not respond to Advertising Age‘s request for a comment.

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