RomneyCare: Par For The Course

Caption: No, that's not Mitt Romney, that's Micheal Moore. The rubber glove seems appropriate, though.

It's hard to believe, but if the Los Angeles Times analysis is correct, Mitt Romney may have come up with a worse health care plan than President Obama and the Democrats did. Talking Points Memo summarizes:

What the Times arrived at is a plan broadly similar to the widely derided blueprint John McCain ran on in 2008.

The underlying idea is to wipe out one of the main fiscal tent poles of the existing health care system [tax breaks for employer-provided health care], and use the resulting revenues to finance billions of dollars in subsidies to buy insurance on the existing private market. The result, according to experts, would likely be a significant increase in the number of uninsured Americans, in an economy where, for better or worse, employers would likely no longer provide their workers with health care coverage.

Romney Hints At Radical Health Care Reform Plan To Replace ‘Obamacare’

For those who don't have to buy their own health insurance, let me introduce you to the central idea of this situation:

It's you against the insurance companies. That means you will lose.

When a medium- or large-sized company buys health insurance from an insurance company, it has some power in that relationship. If it decides to change insurance plans, the insurance company will lose a significant amount of revenue. While the company is not as motivated as its employees, it still will want its insurance provider to actually provide coverage for its employees, so they aren't sick all the time or leaving for an employer with a better health plan. Individual buyers, on the other hand, have little to no power in that relationship.

Of course, as the LA Times notes, this is another case when the Free Market Pony will gallop to our rescue, according to the "experts":

Conservative healthcare experts offer several reasons for such a change. The main one is that the tax law needs to be revised to bring free-market competition to the healthcare system.

"It is absolutely essential if you are going to reform the health insurance market to change the tax treatment of health insurance," said Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "It is the 800-pound gorilla in the healthcare debate."

Moreover, the current system effectively discriminates against Americans who do not get health benefits at work. They must buy coverage on their own and do not get the same tax break.

Romney's healthcare plan may be more revolutionary than Obama's

There are any number of things wrong with what these "experts" are saying, not the least of which is that health insurance is not, and will never be, a "free market". It is a risk pool, and that in itself says it's going to be rather less than free, because bigger risk pools are inherently safer. Since market forces are almost inevitably affected by costs, it pays to leave people out of those pools who actually need health care services. Leaving insurance companies to compete has gotten us where we are now - with people who need insurance not able to buy it or afford to use it.

Which is a long way of saying that the LA Times is right when it says this:

For example, if workers had the ability to shop anywhere for a health plan, and if companies no longer got tax breaks, some employers would likely stop providing health coverage. That might be fine for young, healthy workers who could buy plans on their own. But older or sicker workers would lose the protection they now receive by buying insurance within a group. If young adults opted to buy low-cost plans that provided limited benefits, prices could rise sharply for middle-aged workers who are more likely to have chronic health problems.

Under the [Presidential candidates John] McCain [health care reform] plan, more than 9 million fewer people would have received health benefits through their jobs, according to an estimate from the Lewin Group, a healthcare consulting firm.

Romney's healthcare plan may be more revolutionary than Obama's

There's little reason to doubt any of that analysis, assuming the Times is correct about Romney's intentions.

So, what about the individual mandate, perhaps the most unpopular notion in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and certainly one I've objected to often enough? Don't get your hopes up. The LA Times notes that Romney pooh-poohed the mandate during the primary campaign, but I remain skeptical. Obama and the Democrats gave the insurance companies the chance to put millions of uncovered Americans over the fence and bone the daylights out of us. They won't give that up without expecting something else in return. With our two current political parties, the insurance companies get what they expect.

Ergo, if you're expecting "RomneyCare" to be mandate-free, you're even dumber than the folks who expected Obama and the Democrats would hold out for a "public option". After all, when he was on the campaign trail, Obama's health care plan didn't have a mandate, either.

RomneyCare will, if implemented, be a fitting successor to ObamaCare. ObamaCare managed to make things worse than they were already, and RomneyCare will make them worse still. It's sad, when the GOP could have put forward a plan to change the ACA that would have followed their stated principles, and yet improved the system at least slightly, that they have chosen not to do so.

Quote Of The Day

Not because he has the politics even close to right, but Robert Reich made sense yesterday when he wrote:

Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their strategy has been to demonize government and seek to privatize everything that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars (see Paul Ryan’s plan for turning Medicare into vouchers). Then they go to court and argue that any mandatory purchase is unconstitutional because it exceeds the government’s authority.

Obama and the Democrats should do the reverse. If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them — as will the Supreme Court.

Healthcare Jujitsu

All of which, I think, is true. Certainly, the Supreme Court should not object to a payroll tax for an expanded Medicare program that includes everyone, though this one might. Certainly, the public would be behind such a program, because by and large, we like Medicare.

Unfortunately, this is never going to happen. I doubt that the President would even try to use it as a campaign issue this year, though I'm usually only wrong when I underestimate the Obama Administration's cynicism. It's not going to happen, because in contrast to what Reich seems to think went on during the health care "reform" effort, what actually happened was that the Obama Administration made a deal with the various lobbies involved, then pushed that deal through Congress. Anyone who recalls Obama's choice of advisors on health care ought to realize that nothing else was going to happen but what did.

So, yes, it would be wonderful if somehow our President woke up one day ready to be the progressive folks like Robert Reich seem to have always dreamed he'd be. That's not going to happen, though. He is what he is, and he is a conservative, maybe as conservative as the last President. He's certainly as effective at advancing a conservative agenda as the last President was.

Dream all you want, that's not going to change. The only thing that will change Democratic Party politics is if they finally have reason to believe they will not again have access to power unless they change. This will not happen until progressives change.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Occupy Together

Rose Aguilar writes in a column at Al Jazeera, on the U.S. Catholic Bishops' determination to battle the recent decision by the Obama Administration to require health insurance policies to cover contraceptives with no co-pay charge:

Catholic bishops in the US want every single act of sexual intercourse to result in the birth of a child, but once that child is born, they are on their own, especially if their priest abuses them.

The birth control bishops

She also wrote something else in that column that I found impossible to believe - none of the witnesses called have any medical background. All were clergy of some sort. Of course, all were men.

Of course.

There was no one there to discuss the relative merits of contraception versus abortion, other than some people who have little or no personal experience with these things. There were no witnesses with a secular point of view, of any sort, like for instance, the cost and disadvantages of unwanted childbirth. Even in a hearing ostensibly about religious freedom in America, there's reason to ask the people who are most affected by those freedoms what their opinions might be. For instance, they might ask them if it's freedom of religion when it's not religious institutions that are affected, but, rather, the businesses those churches own.

At least, there would be in a democracy.

This is how things are decided, apparently. It's why there are Occupy movements. The people most profoundly affected by the decisions government makes are almost never the ones whose opinions matter.

Afterword: Why did I choose that particular Occupy poster to lead this article? Simply, it's because this is really about power. The Catholic church has the power to swing elections. If they were some little splinter sect out in the middle of nowhere and they held these views, there would be no one paying attention. The religions represented at that hearing have lots of money, and in the new post-Citizens United world, they can spend as much as they want making the faithful believe anyone who supports contraception is the anti-Christ.

Quote Of The Day

New York Times columnist Gail Collins, on the U.S. Catholic bishops' attempt to paint the Obama Administration's decision to provide access to free contraceptives to women who want it as the work of the devil:

[T]he bishops have totally failed to convince their own faithful that birth control is a moral evil and now appear to be trying to get the federal government to do the job for them.

The Battle Behind the Fight

I don't think anyone has put this quite so baldly, at least not in a dead-tree publication. Catholic women overwhelmingly use birth control. Catholic doctrine is clearly not important to them, let alone to the rest of us. All the pontificating about how religious rights of churches that own hospitals and other businesses will be violated if they're forced to pay for contraception ignores the fact that Catholics have freely chosen to tell their religion's leaders to take a hike on this issue. In summing up a recent poll on religious belief and contraception, the Guttmacher Institute wrote:

• Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same among Catholic women (98%).
• Among sexually active women of all denominations who do not want to become pregnant, 69% are using a highly effective method (i.e., sterilization, the pill or another hormonal method, or the IUD).
• Some 68% of Catholic women use a highly effective method, compared with 73% of Mainline Protestants and 74% of Evangelicals.
• Only 2% of Catholic women rely on natural family planning; this is true even among Catholic women who attend church once a month or more.

Contraceptive Use Is The Norm Among Religious Women

As USA Today points out regarding a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute:

58% of all Catholics agree employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception. That slides down to 52% for Catholic voters, 50% for white Catholics.

New surveys: Catholics want birth control coverage

For those who aren't good at math, that 58 percent figure means that there are at least some Catholic men who believe birth control should be available for free, too.

And why not? When you get right down to it, this decision benefits most of us in some way or another. Preventing unwanted pregnancy leads to less expense later, from preventing birth-related health problems to lowering crime. Oh, and as Media Matters notes:

Catholic United's Executive Director: "There Is A Silver Lining In Today's Ruling. Increased Access To Contraceptive Services Will Dramatically Reduce The Abortion Rate In America." James Salt, executive director of the group Catholics United, issued this statement in response to the contraception ruling[.]

New Polls Showing Catholic Support For Contraception Coverage Further Undermine "War On Religion" Claim

It's a winning idea for anyone who isn't married to some baseless idea of when a human life starts.

For once, the Obama Administration confounded me by doing the right thing. Of course, he did it in such a way as to avoid directly confronting the religious fanatics, so at least in that regard he stayed in character. He won't make a habit of it, but this definitely is a good decision, and anyone who thinks it violates his religion needs to take a step back and ask himself whether enforcing his religion's point of view on an entire society makes sense when its leaders can't even convince their own adherents.

And frankly, I don't even care what they think about that question.

UPDATE/Afterword: Just to belabor the obvious for a moment, it seems pretty clear to me that a newly elected President Ron Paul or a newly elected President Santorum would make short work of this new insurance requirement on taking office. I'm not sure whether Mitt Romney would, and as Art Pronin points out at TM.com, neither is he, but there's enough reason to suspect he would to give anyone who valued this policy pause.

So this is a smart political move for the President, which is something I've mentioned before. What amazes me is that he did it anyway.

UPDATE 2: Fixed attribution of the quote about Mitt Romney in the previous update. I had said it was Taylor Marsh who wrote it, but it was an article by another writer at her site.

The Value Of A Study

Image credit: Silver Star/Wikimedia


Quite some time ago, I wrote this about a member of the blogroll:

But after reading a post in which Pat wrote (in the comments):
...
I realized these guys weren't just [ideologues]. It's easy to recognize nonsense coming from the other side. When you recognize it from your own, you're a thinker.

One Proud Puppy, Part II

Which, for a blogger, is something that's always good to keep in mind.

The other day, I noted that the McKinsey And Company report on management attitudes about health insurance for their employees wasn't a terribly useful source of information, thanks to the fact that McKinsey had not disclosed the method they used to conduct the poll. I also wrote that I'd been tempted to believe its supposed conclusions, based on my own views. That this was a poll, however, seemed obvious from the descriptions. I suspected it was of rather limited value as a result, as Paul Krugman explained yesterday:

So what do we learn? It was basically a poll — which is a really bad way to assess how firms will make decisions about whether or not to maintain health coverage. Such a decision is, after all, a big issue, one that won’t be taken without careful study of the numbers and consequences. A relatively casual answer to a poll probably isn’t a very good predictor of that decision.

McKinsey Pulls Back the Curtain

Yesterday, McKinsey released that information, as Krugman notes. Here is an interesting quote from the introduction, to which I've added emphasis in a key passage:

The survey was not intended as a predictive economic analysis of the impact of the Affordable Care Act. Rather, it captured the attitudes of employers and provided an understanding of the factors that could influence decision making related to employee health benefits.

As such, our survey results are not comparable to the healthcare research and analysis conducted by others such as the Congressional Budget Office, RAND and the Urban Institute. Each of those studies employed economic modeling, not opinion surveys, and focused on the impact of healthcare reform on individuals, not employer attitudes.

Employer Survey on US Healthcare Reform: Details regarding the survey methodology

I didn't check what the RAND Corporation did, but the CBO and the Urban Institute both use economic models, at least partially, to justify their conclusions. RAND being the place that it is, I'd expect its predictions were based on lots of such analysis, too.

I'm not sure what the McKinsey report summary means by "predictive", though. I understand the word, but it seems to be used here in a way that is more designed to get McKinsey out of trouble than to explain something. What I get from the fact that it is a poll is that it can't be used to say accurately that X percent of companies that now carry health insurance for their employees will dump it starting in 2014. It can't be that precise.

What it does, however, is tell us something that's very important, and this is something that Prof. Krugman fails to note. What it's telling us is, if economic conditions are more or less the same as the CBO and others assumed, that there will almost certainly be more companies dropping health coverage than those other "predictive" estimates say.

Despite Krugman's assertion, management decisions are not made solely on the basis of some scientific analysis of the economic situation of the company. They are, to a great degree, value judgments. By "value judgments", I do not mean that they are sentimental. What I mean is that they are a product of managements' view of where the company is going, the relative value of its employees, its stock price, and its market, and other concerns that I might term "fashion", in other words, the management trend of the day. Businesses, particularly smaller ones or those that are engaged in manufacturing, that have employees who have developed either skills or professional knowledge that makes them more effective will tend to value their employees more highly. Retailers, on the other hand, are likely to be mostly about their markets.

Plus, as Krugman and others have noted, chief executive officers (CEOs) and other top management are becoming more important in the decision making processes of companies, thanks to the inflated value those companies put on their services. That makes decisions like this more subject to whim and intuition, not less.

What the McKinsey report is telling us is something that most American workers will not be surprised to hear, which is that if there's any doubt about the economics, the management will come down on the side of boning the workers and giving themselves celebratory bonuses.

Of course, anyone who has read my attitude about economics and economists (not to mention the mainstream press's coverage of economics) should recognize that I view economic modeling much more skeptically than Prof. Krugman. Such models are only as good as the assumptions they make, and the verification applied to those models. Plus, any report from a respected institution like the CBO or RAND is likely to affect decisions of business leaders and politicians, which in turn has an effect of its own on the economy. If, for instance, the CBO, et al, had predicted that no company would drop its health insurance based on changes mandated by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), then I feel reasonably sure that some companies would not have bothered to think much about them. Even rather good economists seem to forget that human beings often do not make decisions based on economic principles.

This is not good news for anyone who thinks the ACA is a good idea, because it's a clear sign that things will not be even as good as what the CBO and others predicted, which wasn't all that great. It was predicted that somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen million workers would lose their employer-provided health insurance. The McKinsey report tells us it will probably be more.

One has to wonder if Paul Krugman looked at this report with a bit of skepticism for his own views.

A Study In Worthlessness

Paul Krugman writes at his blog today:

The story so far: McKinsey released the alleged results of a study showing that large numbers of firms will drop health insurance coverage once the Affordable Care Act goes fully into effect. This is very different from the results of other studies, notably the Congressional Budget Office assessment of the act.

So when the McKinsey alleged study made headlines, the firm was pressed to explain how the study was conducted. And it has refused to answer.

McKinseyGate

Krugman's take on the health care "reform" bill is radically different from mine. He thinks it's just peachy, well, there are a few problems, but it's a step in the right direction. My take is that not only was it a step in the wrong direction, but we are screwed in ways we previously weren't.

Nevertheless, I agree with him about this study. If the people who produced it won't explain where the data came from, then it's worthless. It doesn't matter what it says.

I am so glad that I didn't quote from this study. I hadn't looked at it, nor at the other studies, but still was tempted to write something about its apparent implications. That should be a cautionary tale for bloggers trying to form opinions faster than anyone else does. Just because you think something ought to be true doesn't mean it is. Being wrong is a whole lot easier than being right.

2012: Dueling Cults Of Personality?

This article originally appeared here on Thursday, May 12, but disappeared thanks to a malfunction at Blogspot, the blog's host service. It has been restored with one minor change in the introductory sentence.

There is so much going on in this quote from Talking Points Memo that I just think I'll just note it all in "bullet points":

Seeking to defuse his biggest vulnerability in the GOP primaries, Mitt Romney is set to deliver a speech outlining his position on health care on Thursday. The issue has been his glass jaw ever since 2009, when Democrats launched a successful push to pass health care reform modeled on a Massachusetts law widely considered Romney's signature achievement as governor.

The element of both laws that is most despised by those on the right is a requirement that people purchase insurance, leaving Romney in the awkward position of fiercely defending his own law's use of a mandate while labeling it an unconstitutional government takeover on a national level.

"Governor Romney has made it very clear over the last many years, including during the 2008 presidential cycle, that he opposes a federally imposed individual mandate," a Romney spox told NRO this week.

Mitt Romney's Epic Health Care Journey: How He Flip-Flopped On Mandates

* I believe "spox" means "spokesperson" in this context. This article could use some editing.

* It isn't just the right who think that individual mandates are a bad idea. I've criticized them repeatedly, particularly after any form of public option was dropped. Ian Welsh, Marcy Wheeler, and Lambert Strether, among others who have looked into the idea deeply, have criticized it as well, in some cases even if there was a public option. It's a bad idea, and most people on the left who are in any way acquainted with what it is to be living from paycheck to paycheck are well aware of that.

* But the final observation I have to make is this - Romney is the presumptive front runner among Republicans. Like Barack Obama, his likely Democratic opponent, Romney is against an individual mandate when he is talking to his supporters, and for it when it comes to actually drafting the legislation. And let's be honest here, Obama and his administration drafted that proposal, as I've explained repeatedly.

Read the quoted article through, and you will note that there's no mention that Obama was once against individual mandates, then "flip flopped". He was, you may remember, criticized for it at that time by folks like Paul Krugman. Krugman,et al, were woefully wrongheaded on this issue, thanks to their not bothering to check whether their assumptions about how economic forces worked in this area were actually true.

So, is this a great country, or what? Of all the politicians and would-be politicians in this country running for President, we will end up with these two con artists?

The only enduringly interesting thing about this issue is whether Romney's supporters will be as reality-challenged as Obama's are. Will they, too, insist that he just signed the Massachusetts health care plan because he was forced to by all those dark forces that run our government? My guess is that they probably will.

Cults of personality are like that.

Quote Of The Day

Taylor Marsh, after discussing the first anniversary of the health care "reform" law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with its effect on health care, and Sarah Palin's effect on the effort to pass it:

The only thing more unpopular and polarizing than Obama’s Affordability Care Act is the woman who helped scuttle Democratic efforts to make it successful.

One Year Later, People Still Hate the Affordability Care Act

While Palin's nonsensical criticisms of the ACA had little to do with what the bill turned out to be, her effect on it certainly does point out how stupid our national discourse has become. The woman isn't qualified to judge the merits of anything, as near as I can tell. She certainly never came up with a legitimate reason to object to the ACA. There were no death panels in the bill. It wasn't more expensive than what we had before, according to the most thorough estimates. It just shifted the burden of who pays for it. It didn't limit anyone's choices in health care any more than they were limited already. Yet this woman had a profound effect on the debate, for no more reason than that she seemed to share the same prejudices as the people who believed her.

The effort to pass this bill, though, shows something even more depressing than Palin's effect on America's vast reservoir of stupid people - it showed that progressives, as a group, can be just as stupid. Read that last paragraph. Notice how I keep saying how the ACA had no effect on this and that? That's the real problem here. The ACA had no effect on the cost of health care. It had no real effect on the choices that many of us have in that area, which are far too few. It expanded Medicaid eligibility, which is almost certainly going to be contracted again, thanks to the government's current "austerity" fetish. It fixed some problems with Medicare, including making a pass at fixing the drug benefits issue. Those changes might actually last, who knows.

On the whole then, it didn't fix much of anything, and it made us even more dependent on the component of our private health care that is its biggest failing - health insurance. It also effectively eliminated coverage for family planning services, thanks to the Stupak Amendment.

This is why progressive proved themselves to be stupid - this law didn't fix anything, if one takes it in total. The bad, at best, balances out the good, and I think I'm being very generous to put it that way. It is not, to quote the damn fools who said this, a step in the right direction. It's another step in the direction we were already headed. Yet far too many progressives supported it, because they were afraid they wouldn't get anything. Instead, what they got is something that will be undone eventually, and for which many in this country will be glad when that finally happens.

Progressives settled for something that wouldn't work, and they called themselves realists for doing so. A lot of people, including me, explained why it wouldn't work, yet they chose to believe otherwise. People who can believe something that stupid are just as foolish as the people who believed there were death panels in the bill. They'll continue to do things that are equally foolish, because the root cause of such stupidity is not wanting to face facts.

If the health care reform debacle showed anything, it's that we may be too stupid to govern ourselves. Sarah Palin isn't the reason for that. She's just one of the many symptoms.

Afterword: In contrast to my usual practice, I didn't provide links supporting many of the assertions in this article. I included links I could remember easily, and left it at that. Frankly, the rest wasn't worth finding, because, despite my assertions to the contrary, I really don't enjoy belaboring the obvious. I also don't enjoy saying "I told you so", because to me that's one of the saddest phrases in the English language. Sometimes the reasons I predicted something are interesting or informative, but in this case, as I said, people just don't want to know.

For anyone who is interested, I'd suggest going to the health care keyword, and then following links from there. A particularly succinct link is this one that FireDogLake did on the myths of health care reform.

Mark This One In Your Calendar

Yesterday may mark the day when Republican hypocrisy on health care reform finally surpassed the Democrats':

Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) was recently able to get an ad from a liberal group, attacking him on his vote to repeal health care reform, taken off the air on the factual ground that he has not accepted federal health care benefits as the ad stated. However, it turns out that he gets even better government-provided health benefits -- from the state government in New Jersey.\

GOP Rep. Didn't Take Federal Health Insurance -- He Already Had Better State Benefits

Yes, you read that right - this guy demanded that Blue America PAC, a political action committee that supports Democratic candidates, retract an ad because it said that he had government-provided health insurance, because he gets better coverage from his state.

It's going to be a while before anyone tops that one, I think.

Someome Needs Better Optics

Caption: The 24-inch Clarke telescope at the Lowell Observatory, in Flagstaff, Arizona. Maybe our President and his new pals should get one of these so they can find out what the little people are doing.

Image credit: Cujo359

President Barack Obama was quoted as having said this Thursday night at an "event" in Connecticut:

Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get -- to see the glass as half empty. (Laughter.) If we get an historic health care bill passed -- oh, well, the public option wasn’t there. If you get the financial reform bill passed -- then, well, I don't know about this particularly derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven’t yet brought about world peace and -- (laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.)

Mike Allen's Playbook: Sept. 17, 2010

Yes, I know who I am, jackass. I'm one of the many people in this country who can't afford to go to an "event" like this one, as described by the Hartford Courant:

The White House released the transcript of President Barack Obama's remarks at the home of Richard and Ellen Richman, who live in the exclusive Conyers Farm development in Greenwich's famed "back country'' neighborhood.

Conyers Farm is the 1,500-acre gated community where Republican Linda McMahon also lives. Her opponent, Democrat Richard Blumenthal, attended the dinner with the President at a 20-acre estate that was not far from McMahon's home.

President Obama's Remarks At Greenwich Fundraiser At Conyers Farm, Where GOP's Linda McMahon Lives

The Greenwich Time adds another little detail:

The location of the Democratic National Committee dinner with the president was the estate of Richard and Ellen Schapps Richman, Richard Richman runs The Richman Group of Companies, a Greenwich-based real estate, investment banking, construction, mortgage banking, and asset and property management conglomerate that touts itself on its website as one of the nation's 10 largest residential property owners. Ellen Schapps Richman is an active philanthropist and adjunct professor of marketing at Pace University's Lubin School of Business, according to her biography on the United Way of Greenwich website.

Guests shelled out more than $30,000 per plate for the exclusive evening with the president.

Faces in the crowd at Conyers Farm Obama dinner

Isn't that special? The President goes to the home of one of the richest people in America, whose holdings include portions of the investment and financial industries that have distinguished themselves recently to the tune of $20 trillion in government-backed bailouts, to talk about how silly the little people can be.

Jane Hamsher makes the case that Obama's whiny outburst ignores the fact that he promised to do exactly what he did not do, provide what he called "a public option" to buy insurance from the government instead of from folks like Mr. Richman. Glenn Greenwald makes the case that the idea that Obama has done lots of wonderfully progressive stuff is, to put it charitably, utterly absurd. I've made the case that he's failed at plenty besides the health care reform issue, in lambasting his running mate. I'll save myself the trouble of doing that again.

There are a couple of points, though, that really bother me. First, Obama's remarks here completely ignore that almost none of us have complained merely because there wasn't a public option. We complained that the bill as passed simply made things worse for many Americans, and did nothing to fix the costs of health care. In short, it was not health care reform. And all that after a year long kabuki play that ended up with the very bill Obama negotiated in secret with the insurance, pharmaceutical, and medical care industries with no input from consumer groups.

Obama, in short, was talking utter nonsense. We aren't pouting because there's no public option like the one he based his health care proposal on during the Presidential campaign. We're angry because he managed to make things worse. That's not the thing that's most annoying about this, though. After all, he's lied about this all along. Why would he stop now?

Here's the part that's really annoying. Not only did Obama stoop to using a strawman version of the argument against the health care reform that he negotiated with the interests that were doing the most to make our health care as expensive and inaccessible as possible, and not only did he ignore his promise to provide the very thing he called us stupid for expecting, but he did it in front of people who paid $30,000 to hear him say this.

Sure, they got dinner with that, too, but face it - it probably wasn't substantially better than something you could pick up for $3.00 at your local grocery store's freezer section. That $30,000 is more than a lot of people in this country make in a year. No one earning minimum wage earns that much in a year, unless they're getting lots of overtime. Very few of the official sixteen-plus percent of the population who are currently either under- or unemployed are earning that much. Yet these people paid that much for a dinner and a lousy comedy act.

None of those people, either Obama or the people attending, have any worries about being able to afford health care if they can afford to shell out that kind of money. Yet the President and the smug rich folks in his audience think we're all kinds of stupid or childish for expecting that he would keep his promise to make things better, and not make them worse instead.

We're the ones dying at the rate of 25,000 or more a year thanks to a health care system that he resolutely refused to fix. Yet that condescending little jackass thinks it's funny we're unhappy with that fact.

There's a bit of slang political bloggers sometimes use, "optics", which means "how does this look?" In this case, I think the optics of a President joking about the foolishness of the people who needed his help and didn't get it being upset about that, in front of the people who have benefited the most from his actions the last couple of years, don't look all that good.

Even on a strictly political level, this has to rank among the stupidest things this man has done since taking office.

It's amazing to me that anyone still respects him.

UPDATE: Over at FireDogLake, diarist Niland comments on the high-risk pools that were set up by the health care "reform" bill:

I had high hopes for this, as my Mother is a 61 year old widow who has low income but is too young for Medicare and who we (my brother and I) have been paying $1,000+/mo for Anthem Blue Cross individual market insurance for the last three years to keep her insured. I thought the new high risk plan was going to be standardized with a 4-1 age ratio and also “affordable” for people who cannot get affordable coverage in the individual market. I looked up the rates for California where she lives, and her premium will be $799/mo with no subsidy under the new plan . Meanwhile, the premium for a child under 15 is $142/mo…how is that 4-1? How is that even remotely affordable?

Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan — Out of Reach

If I had a dollar for every time some uninformed fool told me that I didn't know this stuff was going to be worthless, I'd be able to buy my insurance with the proceeds, and I could buy Niland's mother's, too. Not that it would do me any good, but given that their foolishness helped get us this piece of crap system, I'd much rather waste those jackasses' money than my own.

UPDATE (Sep. 22): I just noticed the typo in the article's title today. In my defense, I was away from the Internet for the past few days, or I might have picked up on it sooner. Anyway, the current spelling appeals to my sense of humor for some reason, so it stays as is.

They Never Learn

Image credit: Kristian D.

My real world self received this e-mail today from our state's governor, who was trying to raise support for Suzan Delbene, the party's latest chosen candidate to run for the Eighth Congressional District:

Like me, Suzan supported the passage of the health care reform bill because she fundamentally understands the financial strain our current system is placing on both large and small businesses in our state and on so many of our families.

I responded:

Unlike me, she clearly isn't capable of adding up those costs and strains. The health care bill put us at the mercy of insurance companies for our health care, and to add insult to injury, makes us either pay money we can't afford for insurance we can't use, or pay a penalty to the IRS. That Ms. Delbene doesn't understand what a lousy bill this is would seem to demonstrate that she'll be a lousy advocate for ordinary Americans.

Let her be the latest to lose to Dave Reichert. I have to save up my money to buy worthless insurance.

If you ever want this system to be made right, Democrats need to hear this from you, too. They need to hear it a lot. They seem to think that this health care bill is some kind of selling point for them. They're sadly mistaken.

Much as I'd love for someone who is at least nominally progressive to replace former law enforcement spokesmodel Dave Reichert, it's not going to happen this time. The Democrats have screwed that pooch big time, and they continue to screw it over and over again while looking quite pleased with themselves.

Let Them Wash Pelicans

Caption: Maybe Blanche Lincoln could help this critter after she's through screwing up the country.

Image credit: Screenshot of this Euronews video by Cujo359




For once, I'm in complete agreement with Taylor Marsh:

I don’t see a good reason to vote for one incumbent today. If you have one I’d like to hear it, but it will take convincing. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Congress has reached a new low. That’s because we don’t have a Congress like the founders intended anymore. They either obstruct or suck up to the Executive Branch. It’s been a sorry spectacle for a long time, with Democrats as bad as the rubber-stamping Republicans of the Bush-Cheney era.

Primary Tuesday Not Quite ‘Throw the Bums Out’ But It Should Be

In addition to Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), who is running against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is running, sadly unopposed. There are, of course, a dozen or so other Democratic Senators who are running this year at some time or another, and a whole bunch of Democratic U.S. Representatives. I'm quite sure Taylor is smart enough to know all that.

As far as I'm concerned, none of them deserve my vote. In a day when I've been surfing the 'Net, reading stories about Obama's continued fight against low-level leakers contrasting with his unwillingness to prosecute former Bush Administration officials for the illegal acts they committed, and after watching them all fail to deliver effective health care reform, financial reform, and relief to Americans who are now looking at a decades long recession these jackasses didn't lift a finger to ameliorate, there's no reason I can think of to want any of these useless individuals returned to power.

Oh, and remember how the government didn't bother to find out if BP's estimates of the oil discharge at the Deepwater well were accurate? Turns out that the Coast Guard announced today that the new "Top Suck" attachment is capturing about three times the 5,000 barrels per day the government was insisting for weeks was all that was coming out of the well. To make matters even more amusing, the USCG is estimating that they're only capturing "between 58 percent and 92 percent" of what's coming out of the well.

In short, empirical evidence may soon show that the original estimates were off by a factor of six. As it has demonstrated so well with how it's dealt with classified information, the Obama Administration is far more interested in controlling the message than in fixing the problem.

Both we, and the rest of the world, would be far better off if the people who are now making these ridiculous decisions were instead cleaning up after them. Put these people out of office, and let them join Robert Reich's pelican washer corps at minimum wage for a few months. They made that mess, the least they can do is try to undo the effects of their incompetence. Plus, maybe a few months of washing foul-tempered creatures who are covered with toxic substances will give them an appreciation for how the rest of us make a living.

And when they're done with that, our economy could use a fresh coat of paint.

UPDATE: As James Ala pointed out in a comment, it's actually possible that there now could be as much as 100,000 barrels of oil pouring out of that well:

[UCSB researcher Ira] Leifer noted that BP had estimated before the April 20 explosion that caused the leak that a freely flowing pipe from the well would release 100,000 barrels of oil a day in the worst-case scenario.

The oil was not freely flowing before the top kill or before they cut the pipe, Leifer said, but once the riser pipe was cleared, there was little blocking the oil's rise to the top of the blowout preventer. Video images confirm that the flow of black oil is unimpeded.

BP well may be spewing 100,000 barrels a day, scientist says

It just keeps getting better ...

Rep. Andre Carson: Another Symptom of Democratic Cluelessness

Rep. Andre Carson (IN-07) wrote this in a political spam e-mail the other day:

Do you have high cholesterol?
Do you have diabetes?
Do you have high blood pressure?

Congratulations dear friend, this historic healthcare legislation will guarantee that you will not be denied coverage due to your pre-existing condition! I am happy to say that this law will also expand coverage to over 32 million Americans; nearly 95% of our population!

Casting my vote to pass health care reform is just one of the many items we’ve been tackling in Washington to help Hoosiers and American alike. But I couldn’t be in Congress without your support.

To which I replied:

"this historic healthcare legislation will guarantee that you will not be denied coverage due to your pre-existing condition!"

This is patently absurd. The Congress and President deliberately made sure that there was no means of enforcing this provision in the HC"R" bill. For all the good it will do, they could have been legislating an end to rainy days.

They still don't get it. Given what Steve Benen was willing to write on the Democrats' behalf yesterday, I continue to doubt they will anytime soon:

It seemed like a good strategy at the time. With Robert Wexler (D) giving up his U.S. House seat in South Florida, a special election would offer conservatives a chance to create a "referendum" on the Obama presidency. After all, the election, held yesterday, would be the first since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, and Republicans could ride the wave of voter anger to an upset.

Indeed, the Republican candidate, Ed Lynch, ran on a strictly anti-Obama platform, vowing to repeal the new health care law and railing against the recovery efforts that rescued the economy. Lynch sought to position himself as the "next Scott Brown."

So, how'd that referendum turn out? The backlash against Democrats and the president propelled Lynch to a 26-point defeat.

'Referendum' Falls Far Short In Special Election

What Benen fails to mention, of course, is that the FL-19 district is rated by Cook Report as being a D+15 district, meaning that Democratic candidates do 15 percent better in this district than average. Wexler, the incumbent, has never won by a percentage of less than 66. The candidates also had a considerable disparity in fundraising:

Lynch is running against Democrat Ted Deutch, who represents Palm Beach County in the state Senate and is heavily favored to retain the seat left vacant by the retirement of Democrat Robert Wexler. Through March 24, Deutch had spent nearly $1.2 million, more than 14 times as much as Lynch's $83,000.

April 13, 2010: Dem Favored In First Election Since Health Care Vote

The Democrats should have won here. They may take a bit of comfort in the fact that it wasn't a nail-biter, but that's about the only good news for the Democratic Party I see coming out of this.

The bad news is that the Democrats will continue to view the health care "reform" bill as some sort of plus for them, and there are plenty of folks willing to abet them in that delusion.

Health Care Reform: Cleaning Out The E-mail

I spent part of yesterday going through all the self-congratulatory e-mail that various "progressive" organizations sent me last week when the health care "reform" bill was passed. Some of the celebrants included:

• Democracy NowTrue Majority


• Democracy For America


• Democrats.org


• Progressive Congress Action Fund


• Washington (state) Democrats


• MoveOn.org

There were also a number of congressmen whose mailing lists I was on only because they promised to not vote for a health care bill that didn't have a public option.

I unsubscribed myself from all of them. If you're incensed about how these organizations helped make us all hostages to insurance companies by supporting the bill, I'd recommend you do the same. These organizations' only real power to raise money is in their e-mail lists. They use them for direct appeals, and as the basis for requesting grants and other support from big donors. If you remove yourself, you remove a little bit of that power. Failure needs to be punished more among America's political class. This is one small way of making that happen.

As for the politicians, I responded to them somewhat along these lines:

When Rep. <insert name here> lied to us that she would never vote for a bill that had no public option, she declared that she didn't want my support. That's the only reason I was on this list in the first place.

If I receive further e-mail from this list, I will add it to the spam filter.

In other words, don't expect me to thank you for screwing us.

If nothing else, you'll be less likely to miss important e-mail for all the political spam.

UPDATE: I don't know how I got them mixed up, but True Majority should have been on the list, and since I can't find evidence of offending e-mail from Democracy Now, they should not have been. Apologies to the latter, and thanks to selise for pointing out the error.

UPDATE 2: Here's a video of Democracy Now's Amy Goodman on CNN discussing the health care bill. She didn't sound happy with the bill.

Quote Of The Day

Quote of the day honors go to Ian Welsh, for summing up so eloquently what's going on with our federal government right now:

The bottom line in America today is that while everyone who isn’t paid not to know, knows how to fix what’s wrong with America (for example, instead of the mess called Health Care Reform, pass single payer), nothing that really fixes anything fundamental will be allowed to occur.

America is controlled by what economists call rent-seeking behaviour. Virtually everyone important has a revenue stream, and they don’t want anyone to take that revenue stream away. So pharma and insurance companies, who would have been damaged badly by single payer (they would have lost hundreds of billions) made sure that a plan to provide everyone with better health care for a third less than current costs was never even considered.

The most important game in America today is the contest for control of government, so that government can directly or indirectly give you money. Health care “reform” in which the government decided to force Americans to buy private health insurance or be fined is merely the latest (and most blatant) example. Virtually every industry, from finance to telecom to agriculture is involved in this game. It is in all their interests to make sure the game continues, but they do fight amongst each other for the spoils.

The Tea Party and the Ancien Regime

What's really depressing is that there will always be a crowd of meatheads like the ones who were urging that we "pass the (health care "reform") bill already" so we can start making "progress". The will to make our government do what needs to be done is so weak right now that our elected officials clearly have no fear of failing to do it. They aren't even trying, and there are lots of people who are willing to make excuses for that behavior, and to describe the objections of people who see where this is taking us as "shrill" or "unreasonable".

Accepting this level of malfeasance has become as American as overeating.

Bookmark This Page, Too

Reply hazy, try again

There were a couple of predictions I neglected to make in my earlier prophecy. One reason was that these two predictions don't fit neatly into a timeline. The other is that I just didn't have the heart to think about them. The phone call from the robo-clowns reminded me about them though, so let me get caught up.

First, thanks to the anti-abortion language in the bill, having abortions covered by health insurance will soon be a thing of the past. Why? Because when the government makes a regulation that affects a large segment of the market, the rest of the market will usually follow. Insurance plans will standardize on offering no family planning services, which in turn will either be covered by supplemental insurance that won't be worth the cost, or won't be offered at all. My guess is that will happen within a few years of the time when all the provisions of the act are in force, which puts it somewhere in the range of 2016 to 2020.

Second, the next step in the Obama Administration's "reform" of the health care system will be to do as much as it can to privatize Medicare. This will, of course, completely obviate the usefulness of Medicare, but that won't stop them. You can also bet that the same group of assclowns who cheered on this health care bill will initially state their undying opposition, and then fold when Rahm Emmanuel threatens to get their funding cut off. This has been on the Republicans' agenda for years, but they've gotten nowhere with the idea. Now they've finally figured out a foolproof way to screw the middle class and the poor - get the Democrats to do it for them. Look for lots more of that in the future.

I'm not going to bother with finding the links that support all this, largely because writing about this subject clearly is a waste of time. I've written more than ninety articles on this subject, and people who claim they read this blog still don't believe what I wrote in the first few, even though I clearly saw this coming more than a year ago.

I just wanted to vent. Have a nice evening.

Got Em Right Where You Want Em, Do You?

It's become one of my personal political axioms that you can tell who won and who lost a political battle in America by the statements of the two sides. The people who lost are the ones who declare victory. The people who won are the ones who say "The battle still continues. Keep sending those contributions."

For example, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) is quoted as having said this today:

Dodd (D-CT) told reporters this morning that "The health care thing kind of changed the atmospherics around here."

"I think, frankly, there are a number of Republicans who went along with the strategy of 'just say no' who were never really happy with it, but if it worked they would go along," Dodd said. "They saw it fail. And now they've had enough of it. and they really want to be involved in crafting things."

Dodd: Republicans Are Getting Tired Of The 'Just Say No' Strategy

Yes, that strategy has worked out really well. Here's how the Congressional generic ballot has gone, according to Pollster:
Image credit: Screenshot of Pollster page by Cujo359

It's going really well, isn't it? The national generic congressional ballot is normally just slightly more meaningful than the number of living hair follicles on Chris Dodd's head for determining the outcome of an individual congressional race. As a statement of how the country feels about the job Congress is doing, though, it's a somewhat useful metric. It's also somewhat relevant for open Congressional seats (seats where the incumbent is not running), which is typically where most of the change in these elections happens.

Here's what the country thinks about how Congress is managing health care, courtesy of Talking Points Memo:
Image credit: Screenshot of Talking Points Memo page by Cujo359

Oh, yeah! That's what I'm talkin' about! High fives all around! Nothing like a minus eight rating on an issue of prime importance to boost those re-election chances, is there? But it gets even better, as Rasmussen reports:

Eighteen percent (18%) of voters now say Congress has passed legislation that will significantly improve life in America. Fifty-seven percent (57%) disagree. Twenty-five percent (25%) more are not sure.

On the eve of the House health care vote, just 40% said that Congress is at least somewhat likely to seriously address the most important issues facing the nation. Fifty-five percent (55%) said that was not likely to happen.

Seventy-six percent (76%) think most members of Congress are more interested in their own careers than in helping people. Just 12% say most in Congress are more interested in helping people.

Congressional Performance: March 22, 2010

The overall disapproval rating of 64 percent is the second worst in three and a half years, surpassed only by last month's.

Gallup isn't quite so gloomy, but they now rate Democrats as only a slight favorite to hold onto the House. That could change, however, since Gallup isn't yet using likely voters as their polling group:

Historically, Gallup has found Republicans more likely than Democrats to vote in midterm elections, meaning their electoral strength is typically underestimated in survey results based on all registered voters. Gallup will institute its traditional "likely voter" model closer to Election Day (narrowing the sample of voters to the subset deemed most likely to vote). Until then, historical trends would indicate that the Democrats need to hold a better-than four percentage-point advantage among registered voters nationally in order to have a reasonable chance of leading among likely voters and, ultimately, in House seats.

Race for Control of Congress Remains Close

Translation: Expect things to get gloomier once our polls are more accurate. That article rates the Democrats as being ahead by three points.

Approval for health care reform got a slight bump thanks to Congress having finally passed it, but even this is not good news. Anyone who decides he likes this bill because it passed is an idiot. Next week, such people won't like it for some other reason. Skeptics aren't likely to be convinced by seeing benefits - none will kick in until 2011. Even forgetting my own abiding distaste for the bill, it's pretty clear that Democrats aren't going to get much benefit. On timing of benefits alone, they've screwed the pooch, at least for this election.

Meanwhile, the economy is about to get worse, thanks to the effects of the stimulus having about run their course, and there being no real recovery, and no new government programs, to replace it.

This will be a very tough year for Democrats. Considering that they're losing to these Republicans, they should be embarrassed. But embarrassment seldom plays well in politics, so what we see are statements like Dodd's.

Those of you who are on Republican mailing lists can expect another appeal for contributions real soon.

Bookmark This Page

Answer unclear

Image credit: Mostlyrecords/Wikimedia

Bookmark this page, so that in 2015 we'll see how I do as a prognosticator. Assuming that the Republicans don't undo this bill:

• In 2015, there will still be 50,000 people dying a year because they don't have access to the medical system.


• If you have insurance by then, and don't get it through one of the few organizations that still have enough financial clout to make insurance companies behave, your insurance will not pay for what you need.


• We'll be paying even more than we are now relative to the rest of the world for health care.

If the Republicans undo the health care bill, then that just means that we can't blame the health care bill for those same things being true.

Of course, as I just mentioned there are plenty of progressive bloggers and organizations congratulating themselves for passing this insane, unworkable, and regressive piece of crap. So, I'll make another prediction for this November:

• When the Democrats lose the House, they'll blame all those ungrateful people who "let the perfect be the enemy of the good" for their downfall, rather than their own uselessness and inattention to the fact that they did exactly the opposite of what any sane politicians would have done.

And don't I look forward to those insane shitheads lecturing me. To them, I repeat, I saw this coming, long before you even figured out what you were willing to jettison so you could say that Congress finally did something.

Furthermore, to make that prediction I employed the same principles of human behavior that I used to decide that this health care bill won't work. In both cases, the principle is the same: Those who don't have the power to make people do things will be depending on the humanity of the people who do to get what they need out of the system. In many cases, the people who have such power have it because they don't have that much humanity.

Someone whom I've regrettably lost touch with over the years used to say that his attitude about warnings was "When I tell you not to touch the stove, don't expect me to be sympathetic when you get burned." That's my attitude now. There's a price for stupidity, and the price for your stupidity is going to fall on all of us.

So, if you feel inclined to lecture me about how much worse things will be under Republican rule next year, I ask you to explain what you saw coming, and why that wouldn't have happened if this crew of Democrats hadn't been in charge.

You'd better have a bookmark handy.

UPDATE: In response to this article by David Dayen on the Republicans' rhetoric about repealing this bill, I'll make these predictions. If the Republicans get the power to repeal this bill:

• They'll repeal the Medicaid expansion


• They won't eliminate the insurance subsidies


• They won't eliminate the individual mandate

They won't cross the insurance industry, either. If you think that, you're even more delusional than the people I was writing about in the original part of this article.

The truly depressing thing about our current situation is that there is no party we can turn to to fix things.

My Day Is Already Complete

Here's an example of how far the mind rot has spread in Washington, DC. I received this in an e-mail from the Progressive Congress Action Fund, an organization that had largely been critical of the Congress' lack of useful action on health care reform until recently:

We're proud of the role the progressives in Congress played in making the health care reform package sensitive to the needs of diverse communities, tough on insurance companies and more likely to cover more Americans who need healthcare the most.

They provided a link for a virtual "Thank You card" to congressional progressives for the wonderful job they did. This organization is run by former Slobber And Spittle Blue candidate Darcy Burner. If there's anyone in DC who knows that these people need a kick in the ass and a few months of unemployment to focus their minds on what really matters, it's she. Yet she wrote this tripe.

Needless to say, I unsubscribed from that list immediately. I find it interesting that an organization whose purpose, to use its words:

Connecting the progressive movement, ideas, and Congress.

doesn't have a place on its form to explain why you're unsubscribing.

Anyone else who has unsubscribed is welcome to use the comments section here as the missing part of that form.

Put them in the screw them all bin with the rest of the people who have outlived their usefulness to the people they thought they were there to help.

Meanwhile, thanks to having unsubscribed to several lists in the last few days thanks to the utter uselessness of these organizations, I'll be getting less junk e-mail.

Health Care Reform: Lessons To Learn

As followers of FireDogLake undoubtedly already know, the Obama Administration and the House "leadership" have reached agreement with the last group of undecided voters in the health care "reform" bill effort:

Today, the President announced that he will be issuing an executive order after the passage of the health insurance reform law that will reaffirm its consistency with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion.

While the legislation as written maintains current law, the executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation's restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.

White House Statement On Abortion Compromise

That means that the health care bill will now pass. There is no longer any doubt, not that there really could have been much doubt when the vote was announced. Effective political leaders don't invite defeat on bills this important, and both Pelosi and Obama have made clear that not passing this bill is a defeat. That meant that they figured they'd be able to accommodate the representatives who are part of Bart Stupak's anti-abortion bloc enough to get their votes on the bill.

Why are the wishes of these eight or so Representatives more important than the sixty plus who signed the letter saying they wouldn't vote for a bill that did not include a public option? Why is restricting women's rights more important to the Democrats than providing health care to the 40 million or more who will still not have access to health care?

No one who's been reading here for a while should be surprised at my answer - it's because the Stupak bloc stood up for what they believed, while the public option bloc didn't. That's a lesson we need to take away from this.

The other lesson we need to take away from this is that a great many so-called progressives don't understand what it's like to be one of the recipients of their largess. Paul Krugman was perfectly willing to ignore his earlier warnings and throw them under the bus. He was willing to write that he was "enough of a card-carrying economist" to believe that lower insurance costs on the part of employers would lead to wage increases, but he wasn't enough of an economist to find out that this was nonsense. I've mentioned others, like Jonathon Cohn and Ezra Klein, whose ability to perceive the truth seems to not include understanding how many Americans live, and there are certainly others. Check the comments of some of their articles on the subject, and you won't have trouble finding some that explain this disconnect to them, and yet they still don't get it.

The sad truth is that the cliche "limousine liberals" isn't entirely baseless. There are people who genuinely deserve the appellation. That doesn't make the things they write untrue, but it's important to understand that this is where they're coming from. If you're living from paycheck to paycheck, they aren't going to understand your problems, and chances are they don't want to.

What that all means for the future, I'm not sure. Or maybe I just don't want to think about it. These are lessons to keep in mind, though, whenever progressives try to decide what we need to do in the future.

Afterword: I know someone will be tempted to mention that the CBO estimates have said that there would be roughly 24 million Americans left uninsured by this bill. That is true. But, as I've mentioned many times, "insured" does not mean "able to get health care" in this environment. Most of the roughly 15 million who will be forced to buy insurance by this bill will not be able to get the care they need.

Thus, the 40 million figure.