Show us the real birth certificate.
Already happened.
Never really existed in the Democratic party - they seem to have created a tent big enough to attract a bunch of disagreeable nutcases. This is why Howard Dean can go on national television and recommend voting against the health care bill and not be promptly set on fire. You have to give the Republicans one thing - at least they’re consistent across the whole party.
They’re all unpopular. Holding the discussions and debate behind closed doors actually makes it easier to stick up for something that would be a legitimately good idea because the thing is public poison right now. Americans hate hate hate hate this thing for a lot of complicated reasons, not the least of which is that nobody will shut the hell up about it. Republicans who want to derail the bill want to open up the proceedings because it will make it much, much easier to exact a political cost. Democrats who want to do it…well, they’re either Deanatical idiots who would let the perfect be the enemy of the good or they’re just plain stupid. In any case where the public has turned against a change that needs to happen, having the discussion in private is always better than having it in public because people who actually know their asses from a hole in the ground can stand up and make actual arguments without having to listen to a chorus of hooting rhesus monkeys shriek about shit that they never even said and busily fling their poop thither and yon.
Oddly enough, this isn’t really the issue. Republicans reject health care reform as a matter of strategy - not sound economic principles. Democrats failing to pass health care reform is a bigger win for them than health care reform that does anything at all. The ideological problem only really exists between the smelly green-ass hippy jackwads on the left who refuse to capitulate to anything that isn’t straight-up medical communism because IT’S JUST NOT RIGHT!!! and the gun-toting, John Birching fuckwads on the right who think that any kind of intervention into any kind of public marketplace is always a bad idea, whether you’ve been able to conclusively prove that it’s a good idea or not. I’m pretty sure that they think that the Invisible Hand of the Market is, like, the fourth spiritual incarnation of God or something. Either way, the people with legitimate ideological differences haven’t been talking to each other for a long-ass time.
This was a dramatic failure of execution on the Democratic Party. If they could have come up with a little bit more subtle way of getting the bill into closed conference, that would have been the best. As it stands, talking about it out of the spotlight is better for the finished legislation than talking about it in public. If you disagree, I recommend an experiment. Go to a homeopathy board and convince them that they are wrong. It should be easy - it’s the most absurd concept in the history of absurd concepts. They honestly think that water has magical memory capacity that lets it recall that at one point in the past it might have been approximately close to an infinitesimally small amount of some mineral or compound that theoretically might potentially motivate your energon particulates to chase off the negative wave forms from your spiritual beingness. When you finally give up that errand, imagine that all of those idiots followed you around everywhere you went and shouted in precisely the same manner as what you just experienced about anything and everything you said. That’s the problem we’re dealing with here.
And see, Republicans would say the same thing about the Democrats.
Just another broken campaign promise, so much for hope and change.
blah blah cynicism blah blah BORING
Meh, when the only things I liked at all about Obama, his promises of more openness in government, promising to have the full text of all bills put online for a period of time before they are signed, and other such things, are the campaign promises he has ignored and broken, then yes I will be very cynical about him.
Bill Moyers, Taibbi, and Kuttner on the subject. A lot of nice detail covered quickly.
wahoo
1648
I’m a bit bummed and shocked that Jon Gruber was so frigging stupid to be on the Obama payroll and not disclose it. I still think he’s right on the excise tax but jeez, he was bought and paid to shill for this health care program. What a disappointment that one of the leading health care economists, indeed one of the gatekeepers of that field, has apparently no common sense.
Please explain to me how the administration and congress paying an expert to analyze the outcome of the health care proposal means that the only reason he would be hired would be to be a shill.
And what is he supposed to do? Not take the job? You do realize that experts in the field are often paid for their analysis, as well they should be. What reason would he have not to take it? And do we really want to create a climate where experts in the field aren’t willing to take paid positions to analyze government policy for the government because they’re afraid of repercussions? Good way to ensure that no expert would ever give their analysis to policy makers.
So I don’t get what the complaint about him is. Is it just that he is a vocal advocate for that position and the bill in general? But he’s giving his own opinions. Why should he be silent for an issue he is passionate about?
wahoo
1650
Journalists quote him b/c he’s an MIT economist who’s an expert in the field. They turn to him for serious expert opinion. He must disclose that there are asking questions about a health care bill, that he was paid substantially to shape. The fact that is a paid consultant absolutely should be disclosed so journalists and readers can understand that he has a vested interest in analyzing plans.
How is Gruber’s analysis of the health care bill different from a paid health insurance study? The Administration doesn’t pay you $400K to expect that you’ll produce results that work against their plan. Same with a consulting firm hired by AHIP.
I still think Gruber is a solid economist. I think he has no common sense and his fairly unethical doing commentary for the Post and NY times without disclosing his contract with the Administration. I’d feel the same if Feldstein was being paid by Bush or something.
I’ve never heard of the guy, for what it’s worth.
He’s extremely respected, even by those who disagree with the excise tax
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/01/08/reinhardt-grubers-simulations-better-than-private-sector-ones/
After I learned that Jonathan Gruber–one of the biggest pitchmen for the Administration’s health care reform–had also gotten a significant sole source contract from HHS, I wanted to get a sense of how sound the justification for the sole source on it was. I asked Dr. Uwe Reinhardt about the contract. Reinhardt, a professor at Princeton, has himself testified on health care financing to Congress. And he has been critical of the whole hocus pocus that lies at the heart of the excise tax proposal.
“The consumer-directed-health-care crowd argues that with high cost-sharing, patients will do the only legitimate . . . cost-benefit calculus — but that surely is nonsense,” said Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt. “None of these proponents has ever shown that patients are even capable of evaluating the clinical merits” of treatment options."
That said, Reinhardt does vouch for the quality of Gruber’s simulations. When I asked him whether he could have applied for this contract (given that he, like Gruber, is an acknowledged expert in the financing of health care), he said,
[i]If I had constructed as a sophistiated a simulation model for health reform as has Jon Gruber, I certainly would have been in the running for a competitive bid. But there are not many sophisticated models of this sort around.
Gruber is one of the brightest young health economists (and public-finance specialists) in the field. He thinks and writes twice as fast as most of his peers (although David Cutler at Harvard comes to mind as well). So I am sure that, too, weighed in his favor with this contract. Just have a look at his textbook in Public Finance to get a feel for the man.
All simulation models suffer from the fact that their predictions are a function of a series of assumptions that must be fed into the models. I certainly would trust one of Gruber’s simulations more than those produced for much higher fees for trade associations.[/i]
Mind you, that doesn’t excuse Gruber’s disclosure lapses, nor does it recommend having the top pitchman for a policy also be the guy running simulations to see how it’ll turn out. But at least according to Reinhardt, we’re not going to get better simulations than we’re getting from Gruber
In other words, there’s little reason, outside of pure cynicism, to come to the conclusion that the administration just hired him to be a shill. Given that there are very few people to go to if you want a high quality model to run health care cost simulations, and even those who disagree with him on some issues recognize he’s one of the best.
If a policy maker was trying to devise the best health care policy they would certainly pay (or at least should pay) someone who is a notable expert in the field, even though there was a chance they would come up with results that disagree with their policy. Especially if the services they provided were rare.
Let’s remember though that not all of Gruber’s findings validated the administration’s plans.
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=E59244F1-18FE-70B2-A8AFC2A0DA31E996
Gruber, the favorite economist of the White House, said the bill “really doesn’t bend the cost curve.”
“But I think this bill starts us down the road to the point where we can do that,” Gruber said. “The alternative is doing nothing. Relative to doing nothing, I think we are a lot closer to bending the curve.”
Reminded that Obama demanded a bill that lowers health care spending, Gruber said: “That is what he would like to do. But he’s not doing it.”
I agree both him and the white house should have disclosed their ties though.
JeffL
1654
I see another opportunity for unintended consequences:
Reading about some of the arguments going on between the House and the Senate, and one seemingly trivial note was made about a part of the bill that the House has included that requires insurance companies to spend no more than 15% of their income (which comes in the form of premiums) on salaries, advertising, basically any company expenses. The Senate has the same rule, just at 20% instead of 15%.
The idea sounds laudable: premiums must go to paying medical costs of the insured. But what do you think the companies will do in response to this? You’ve said “OK, only 15% of the money you take in from payments can be used to pay for the company operating expenses.” Think they will fire people? Drop salaries? Lower advertising? Or will they simply raise premiums such that the 15% is enough to cover their current and future costs?
Duh. Another force to raise the price of insurance.
jeffd
1655
So it looks like the Democratic candidate for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat is in real trouble. If the GOP picks up that seat, it all but puts the nail in the coffin for healthcare reform.
If that happens - and I don’t have a good feel for how likely it is - the only option to evade a filibuster is for the House to pass the Senate bill as-is.
Yeah, ignore the sturm und drang. The recent poll is an outlier, and she’s been consistently ahead by double-digits elsewhere.
jeffd
1658
Hopefully. There seems to be a lot of nervousness around this race though. I think the actual likelihood of the GOP nominee winning is pretty low, but it’s still alarmingly high given a) how much of a Democratic bastion Massachusetts is and b) how high the stakes are.
Its going to be a closer race then people think, she has been running like the seat is something just to be given to her and people dont like that. Now I still think she will win, but its going to be close.
To be on the safe side, I am making sure everyone I know goes out and votes.
