Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kans.) told a group of local Kansas reporters on Wednesday, that opposition to the president’s health care package had been driven by knee-jerk partisanship and urged Congressional Republicans to get on board a version of reform.
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“Sometimes people fight you just to fight you,” he said, according to The Kansas City Star. “They don’t want Reagan to get it, they don’t want Obama to get it, so we’ve got to kill it…
We’ve also seen an AP poll today that shows a rebound in President Obama’s approval rating and the approval for health care reform, along with a score from the CBO that shows the Senate Finance bill would actually reduce the deficit by over $80 billion, which would give plenty of negotiating room for liberals who want to expand certain parts of the bill.
Jon Stewart calls out Beck for grossly flip-flopping on the quality of U.S. health care. Beck has either lost his mind or is a total hypocrite. You be the judge.
Ezra Klein has an excellent summary of the health care debate and where it currently stands. He does a great job of separating the actual policy debates going on in Congress from some of the silly issues being argued by the public.
Anyone who wondering why health care premiums are exploding just needs to take a look at the insurance industry.
Schumer pointed to the profits of the 10 largest insurance companies — which shot up 428 percent between 2000 and 2007, from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion — as a reason health care reform is needed.
The insurance industry has not been playing ball on reform, and now Senate Democrats are getting fed up.
With other industry groups pledging savings to help pay the cost of health care reform, Senate Finance Committee Democrats slammed insurers for holding out — and threatened to impose new fees on the industry that could cost it as much as $100 billion.
The Finance Committee members are currently hunting for hundreds of billions of dollars to help finance reform, and with the hospital and pharmaceutical industries having pledged $235 billion, the senators said it was time that the insurers paid their share.
“We need the insurance companies to step up to the plate and be part of the solution. Most of the negotiations so far, the insurance industry has been at the table but you can only sit there at the table with your arms crossed for so long,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
Schumer and Sens. John Rockefeller (D-WV), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) pounded the insurers, who they portrayed as unwilling to help pay for reform even while they have enjoyed exploding profits.
“The insurance companies are the people who are just rapaciously, greedily and unstoppably making money by underpaying the patient, by underpaying the provider and by overpaying, therefore, themselves,” Rockefeller said.
We’re seeing a new urgency from the White House and other Democrats on the health care reform issue, and it’s refreshing to see them ratchet up the pressure on the insurance industry.
Health care month is here. President Obama wants the House and the Senate to both pass health care reform bills before the August recess. It will be very difficult to get his done, but the House made progress as the Democrats released their proposal yesterday.
The Process Is the Message: Three separate committees — Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor — have come together on one bill. This is an incredible achievement. If you read histories of the 1994 health-care reform fight, all of them have a substantial section on the committee crack-up: One passed a version of single-payer, another a variant of Bill Clinton’s reform, another went further to the right. There was no unity.
There is unity now. And if it holds — if the House of Representatives manages to pass this plan with a substantial majority of enthusiastic Democrats — that significantly strengthens the House’s hand in its eventual negotiations with the more fractious Senate. That’s a big “if.” But so too would have been the idea that three separate committees could cooperate on a bill of this size.
The House proposal includes a tax surtax to help pay for the bill.
If I’m reading this correctly, about half is paid for through $500 billion or so in savings from Medicare and Medicaid. The rest comes from a surtax on the richest 1.5 percent. The surtax is 1 percent on income between $350,000 and $500,000; 1.5 percent on income between $500,000 and $1,000,000; and 5.4 percent in income above $1,000,000. The surtax can vary if the bill is less or more expensive than initially anticipated. There are also revenue expectations from the employer and individual mandates, though they’re relatively modest ($200 billion over 10 years is one estimate I’ve heard).
I’m not a big fan of this part of the proposal, though it’s important to get something on the table. Obama’s proposal to limit charity deductions for high-income taxpayers made more sense. A small surtax in the neighborhood 1% would be fine, but going up to 5% seems like a bad idea.
I would much rather see a tax on soft drinks. Liberals don’t like it because it’s regressive, but as we’ve seen with cigarette taxes an increase in price does affect consumption, and the American people are getting way too fat. That alone contributes to our soaring health care costs, so a tax on sugary drinks, just like taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, makes sense when we’re considering ways to fund health care reform.
Perhaps a compromise can be struck where we include a much more modest surtax along with a soda tax.
David Broder has been in Washington for a long time, and President Obama seems to have stunned him with the breadth and boldness of his agenda. Broder sees Obama taking on significant risks, and he’s right about that. Obama doesn’t want to play it safe – he wants to seize the moment and make real efforts to solve long-standing problems.
The size of the gamble that President Obama is taking every day is simply staggering. What came through in his speech to a joint session of Congress and a national television audience Tuesday night was a dramatic reminder of the unbelievable stakes he has placed on the table in his first month in office, putting at risk the future well-being of the country and the Democratic Party’s control of Washington.
It was also, and even more significantly, a measure of the degree to which he has taken personal responsibility for delivering on one of the most ambitious agendas any newly inaugurated president has ever announced.
Most politicians, facing an economic crisis as deep as this one — the threatened collapse of the job market and manufacturing, retail and credit systems here at home, along with the staggering, unprecedented costs of the attempted rescue efforts — would happily postpone tackling anything else.
But not Obama.
Instead, no sooner had he finished describing his plans for spurring economic recovery and shoring up the crippled automotive and banking industries, he was off to the races, outlining his ambitions for overhauling energy, health care and education.
The House chamber was filled with veteran legislators who have spent decades wrestling with each of those issues. They know how maddeningly difficult it has been to cobble together a coalition large enough to pass a significant education, health care or energy bill.
And here stood Obama, challenging them to do all three, at a time when trillions of borrowed dollars already have been committed to short-term economic rescue schemes and when new taxes risk stunting any recovery.
Is he naive? Does he not understand the political challenge he is inviting?
Broder ends this column with the following line: “When we elected Obama, we didn’t know what a gambler we were getting.”
In one sense, he shouldn’t be surprised. Obama was clear about all these initiatives during the campaign. On the other hand, Broder is used to seeing politicians who are too worried about politics and too timid to take bold chances. Obama is not one of those politicians.
Harold Meyerson sums up George W. Bush’s entire presidency with that phrase. It’s amazing how a man can be so good at politics can be so bad at governing.
