healthcare
mikethemadbiologist | March 23, 2010Granted, the healthcare reform bill is an improvement, at least for the poor Republican welfare states of the South (and they're 'real' Americans too!), but, as I've said before, this is a conservative, not centrist, healthcare plan. Brad DeLong:
...the essence of the reform -- which is that the insurance market has been restructured to remove those adverse-selection and moral-hazard problems that have broken our private insurance-based health-financing system....
The conservative DNA of ObamaCare is hardly a secret. "The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney's…
gregladen | March 22, 2010People are complaining that the health care bill that is currently on the verge of being law is flawed.
Well, duh. People who actually claim that this bill should not become law because it is flawed come in two flavors:
1) Those who are simply against all health care reform and are just blowing this out of one orifice or another. Birthers, teabaggers, Republicans, heatlh care lobbyists, other undesirables.
2) People who have little knowledge of how these things work and just woke up to find that reality is not what they assumed, in their ignorance it to be. Have you ever heard of the EPA…
gregladen | March 22, 2010The current health care bill, which we DO need to pass (Stop whinging that is not perfect. Neither are you. We let you pass.) has two more steps to go through. Reconciliation and signing by the President. Barack will take care of that second part, but we need to pressure congress to take care of that first part.
Harry Reid has a petition for you to sign to help develop this support.
Click Here to Sign
Does Anyone Know If the HCR Does Anything to Stop Hospital Price Gouging? The Coakley Report Edition
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2010Since the Congress passed Romneycare, it's worth looking at the major driver in Massachusetts of medical inflation--price gouging by hospitals and physicians groups that are able to set prices due to de facto monopoly power. From the MA Attorney General's office (italics mine; underscore original):
In a presentation at the hearing, Attorney General Coakley, with the assistance of staff from her Health Care Division and two expert witnesses, outlined seven key findings that have powerful implications for the health care marketplace in Massachusetts...
2) Price variations for hospitals and…
mikethemadbiologist | March 21, 2010There's nothing like the prospect of a black person receiving a government service to rile up the Republican base. Anyone who has spent extended time in the South, when listening to the Tea Partyers, has heard this ugly, racist dogwhistle. But with the possible passage of Romneycare--for people who aren't white, too!--which apparently portends The Demise of Western Civilization As We Know It, all bets are off (italics mine):
Abusive, derogatory and even racist behavior directed at House Democrats by Tea Party protesters on Saturday left several lawmakers in shock.
Preceding the president's…
mikethemadbiologist | March 20, 2010Chris Bowers and Digby both comment on the failure of the Congressional progressives to exact demands on healthcare (and many other issues), as opposed to the conservative Democrats who really did drive the debate. Digby writes:
In the case of health care, as I wrote way back when, the congressional liberals were always going to be jammed at the end because the Medicaid expansion alone is something they desperately wanted for decades and couldn't ever get (which doesn't excuse why they negotiated with themselves the whole way along.) There was just no way that a progressive bloc strategy was…
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2010Readers will know that one of my pet peeves that I inflict upon you, dear readers, is my dislike of misinterpreting data. In the healthcare debate, one of the key studies that many have relied on, including the Obama Administration, is the Darmouth Atlas of Health Care Studies. A major finding of the DAHCS is that there were tremendous regional differences in costs for various procedures. Some, including the Obama Administration, have argued that these regional differences mean that many doctors and hospitals overcharge and overtreat, and that massive savings could be realized if these…
razib | March 3, 2010Since Canadians seem to have an obsession with American health care policy (a nation of Ezra Kleins?), I thought I would pass along this weird Intrade screenshot:
OK, I assume my liberal readers have cleaned themselves up after seeing that screenshot. I check Intrade as part of my "morning reads" and I really don 't know what's going on here, the health care prices have been between 20 and 50 for all of 2010, and usually between 30 and 40. Perhaps a speculative bubble driven by the magic of Obama's voice? Or Democratic staffers with "inside knowledge" starting buy up shares because they knew…
mikethemadbiologist | February 28, 2010Or as I like to say--people have to like this crap. Two events over the last month, the reappointment of Bernanke to Fed Chairman and some Senate Democrats' new-found opposition to using reconciliation to pass healthcare reform with a public option, highlight one reason why Democrats lose elections: rather than focusing on outcomes, they focus on the process, on the 'atmospherics.' Consider the reappointment of Bernanke. It's pretty clear that he's more concerned with keeping inflation ludicrously low, which will fail to combat massive unemployment--which is one of his legally mandated…
mikethemadbiologist | February 6, 2010A recent question posed by NY Times columnist demonstrates just how far to the Palinist right our political and social discourse has shifted:
I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to…
mikethemadbiologist | January 25, 2010In the battle of ideas, what things are called matters (e.g., the 'death tax' instead of the estate tax). So I'm utterly puzzled as to why Paul Krugman is calling the current state of play in healthcare centrist:
The fact is that the Senate bill is a centrist document, which moderate Republicans should find entirely acceptable. In fact, it's very similar to the plan Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts just a few years ago.
This is not a centrist bill. After one considers everything that those left-of-center bargained away, it's hard to see how this bill could be any farther to the right…
mikethemadbiologist | January 22, 2010Well, he didn't say it in Latin (that would have been very French. Or something). But this report is very encouraging:
Democratic insiders say they are weighing several options to save health care reform, and one actually may be bold enough to revive a depressed, turned-off Democratic base: use the obscure reconciliation loophole to pass a public option.
"Let's do a public option, or let's go back and do a single-payer plan," a frustrated senior Democrat told the Mouth. "You can have people say, 'Look, if we're going to do reconciliation, let's get more, not get less.'"
"If you're going to…
mikethemadbiologist | January 21, 2010Keep in mind that eighteen percent of those who voted for Obama in 2008 voted for Brown--if Coakley had kept half of these voters (or even a third), she wins. Now my head goes boom:
HEALTH CARE BILL OPPONENTS THINK IT "DOESN'T GO FAR ENOUGH"
by 3 to 2 among Obama voters who voted for Brown
by 6 to 1 among Obama voters who stayed home
VOTERS OVERWHELMINGLY SUPPORT THE PUBLIC OPTION
82% of Obama voters who voted for Brown
86% of Obama voters who stayed home
OBAMA VOTERS WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER
57% of Brown voters say Obama "not delivering enough" on change he promised
49% to 37% among…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2010These will have to be some quick hits, since I'm at a meeting; I'll try to revisit them later this week:
1) The absolute numbers indicate that Democrats lost this election:
In 2008, Obama received 1,904,097 votes; in 2009, Coakley received 1,058,682.
In 2008, McCain received 1,108,854 votes; in 2009, Brown received 1,168,107 votes.
This is a massive defection by Democrats--it's nearly a 50% drop for Democrats versus the Republicans holding steady in absolute numbers. 20% of Obama voters crossed over to Brown.
2) Following on #1, the entire active rank-and-file warned the Democratic '…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2010...that Lieberman and Snowe were not acting in good faith on healthcare. First, TPM on Republican Senator Olympia Snowe:
Hindsight's 20-20, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now thinks he and leading Democrats, at the behest of the White House, flushed months down the toilet courting Sen. Olympia Snowe's (R-ME) support for health care reform.
"As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with [Snowe]," Reid is quoted as saying about the White House in a forthcoming New York Times Magazine piece, "because she had no intention of ever working anything out."
And Lieberman:
In a preview of…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2010To follow up on Tuesday's post about Massachusetts' healthcare, it bears repeating: healthcare reform has to make people's lives better. In other words, people have to like this crap. And this isn't cutting it (boldface mine; italics original):
When it came time to renew my own insurance, I asked the insurance broker, what it would cost to buy good insurance in New York State. She said, "sit down". I held my breath in anticipation, she said, "$1300 a month."
When it came time for me to renew my health insurance which was a barely adequate policy with a $500 deductible, the new premium…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2010One of the claims that has been going around is that healthcare in Massachusetts is affordable; in fact, MIT economist Paul Jonathan Gruber, who has come under fire for conflicts-of-interest, has made this claim:
In considering affordability for a group, we need to establish a sensible benchmark whereby insurance is considered affordable if "most of" a group can afford it. We can disagree about what "most of" means, but it would be wrong to define "most of" only as "very close to 100%."
Well, that's good to know. Because most humans, as opposed to MIT economists, would think, when it comes…
mikethemadbiologist | December 31, 2009Add this to the list of symptoms of post-partisanship depression. Do you remember Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who was originally nominated by Obama as Secretary of Commerce because he was viewed as a moderate? Well, 'moderate' Gregg (did I mention that he almost joined the Obama Administration were it not for opposition from we Dirty Fucking Hippies?) has this to say about recent legislation:
American government changed last night. "We are now functioning under a parliamentary form of government," says Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) in a conversation with NRO. "An ideological supermajority in…
mikethemadbiologist | December 26, 2009Assuming that the House progressives fold, and the healthcare reform legislation resembles the Senate's (and why wouldn't one assumes this), let's not mistake what this is: a victory for conservatives. As I've argued before, this legislation is better than no legislation (probably), and, at this point, we should take what's possible.
But we never should have reached this point. While I agree with Amanda Marcotte about the legislation (pass what you can), I'm far less sanguine about what this means. Amanda (italics mine):
If we want better legislation, we need better politicians. And if…
mikethemadbiologist | December 23, 2009A measly $100 million? This was the great principle that Nelson was fighting for:
Nebraska will receive $100 million in assistance for its state Medicaid program under provisions negotiated by Sen. Ben Nelson (D) in the Senate's healthcare reform bill....
Nelson managed to win a share of the section of the manager's amendment on Equitable Support for Certain States, which will provide Nebraska, along with Massachusetts and Vermont, support in paying its share of additional costs to Medicaid in the health legislation....
"Well, you know, look, I didn't ask for a special favor here. I didn't…