In New Haven, Not Black People

Bwah! The whole thing is below:

One of the ways the proposal is being attacked and tamed is by looking to “cut costs” in order to bring the price down to under $1 trillion over ten years.

Well, fuck that. I don’t want to hear one single goddam [sic] word about the cost from any GOPper, any Blue Dog, anybody who voted for money for the Iraq War. Not. One. Single. Word.

They were prepared to spend, in fact they demanded we spend, well over $100 billion a year on the war in Iraq (as well as scores of billions more for the war in Afghanistan). You were an un-American terrorist-lover if you objected. At no point during those years, at no point in the face of the repeated off-the-budget “supplemental appropriations,” at no point as the costs spiraled higher with no end in sight, not once did they go around gnashing their teeth and wailing “Oh dear God, the cost! How are we ever going to find the money?” No, it was just the money had to be found. Somehow.

Well, dammit, if they can demand somehow finding the money to spend $100 billion a year to kill people in Iraq, they fucking well can accept somehow finding the money to spend that same amount to keep people alive here. And if they can’t, I’d say they were un-American.

If there’s one thing I admire about LarryE, it’s his stoicism. Seriously, though, I agree with everything he wrote in that excerpt, and the last paragraph in particular.

Footnote: On the overall content of his original post (above the footnote I excerpted here), I’d normally fear that his preferred course of action would make the perfect the enemy of the good, as the saying goes. Suffice it to say that while my preference is toward a single payer system (think France or Switzerland; don’t think UK), if we can get something done that gets virtually everyone covered, that’s a huge step in the right direction, and one I’m willing to take. I don’t make care about the how.

Now, in past instances where my pragmatism has been pitted against his idealism, he’s tended to point that “stoicism” in my direction, with me responding in kind. It hasn’t been pretty. But in this case, I think he’s right: starting from a position of compromise is never a good thing (and it’s a very different thing from showing a willingness to compromise), and Obama has thus far done too much of that. He’s offered far too many concessions to political opponents who obviously aren’t arguing in good faith in the first place. I’ll admit, this frustrates the hell out of me. So, again, I’m right there with him on a subject I normally wouldn’t be.

Democrats on a key Senate Committee outlined a revised and far less costly health care plan Wednesday night that includes a government-run insurance option and an annual fee on employers who do not offer coverage to their workers.

The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The AP obtained a copy.

By contrast, an earlier, incomplete proposal carried a price tag of roughly $1 trillion and would have left millions uninsured, CBO analysts said in mid-June.

So, with the more progressive plan, we can cover 97% of the country for less than the bank bailouts and keep the current system of employment based insurance (this is not something I care about, but it does allow people to keep their current plans.) The “moderate” plan cost 1.6 trillion dollars and did not provide a real choice for people.

Now, the details will be important. It sounds like companies might be allowed to drop employees and just pay a 750 dollar fine per employee per year. The AP says that provision will work to prevent companies from dropping employees, but I don’t see how. The subsidies for people who cannot afford insurnce are important, as well s the details of the public plan. The TNR health blog likes the plan, but seems to think that the public plan would be state based, something that scares me. But t the end of the day, this appears to be a giant step in the right direction and a strong rebuke to the so-called moderates who would charge more for much less in defense of insurance company monopolies.

It appears that Kennedy, the old liberal lion of the Senate, had at least one more roar in him.

EDIT:

Looks like a national plan, so the bargaining power and thus the full benefit of the plan remain in place.

Now it’s possible that these teams will just beat up on each other and resolve little. In fact, that wouldn’t surprise me at all. But I can’t shake the feeling that one or two teams are going to fall off the map a little bit. The Brewers, Cubs, and Reds all have that kind of fade potential. And don’t forget the Astros: they’ve been quietly sneaking up on everyone in the division.

Anyway, it should be an interesting few weeks of baseball.

P.S. Note to the Brewers: When your pitching staff gives up 1 run on 5 hits at home, you really ought to win that game. Payback for what we did to the Cards’ pitchers earlier in the year, I guess.

Problem solved!

Meanwhile, Vinny takes CNBC to taks for one of their talking heads’ similar rant.

Anyway, go forth and check it out, and feel free to jump in.

Cool thing is, you can not only buy one for yourself for $15 plus shipping, but you can also donate one at $12.50 and free shipping; IAU will bundle the donated ’scopes up and distribute them to places that can put them to good use, especially schools and third-world communities.

Great program. Great price. Check it out.

No one seems to know how old Mohammed Jawad was when he was seized by Afghan forces in Kabul six and a half years ago and turned over to American custody. Some reports say he was 14. Some say 16. The Afghan government believes he was 12.

… The treatment of the young captive was so egregious that the decorated U.S. Army officer assigned to prosecute him — a man gung-ho to secure a conviction against a defendant he believed had committed a serious crime against the American military — ended up removing himself from the case and declaring that he could no longer “in good conscience” participate in the military commissions set up to try accused terrorists.

… In a sworn affidavit, Colonel Vandeveld said, “This abuse included the slapping of Mr. Jawad across the face while Mr. Jawad’s head was covered with a hood, as well as Mr. Jawad’s having been shoved down a stairwell while both hooded and shackled.”

Jawad’s account had the ring of truth. As Colonel Vandeveld said in the affidavit, the interviewer “later testified as a defense witness … that Mr. Jawad’s statement was completely consistent with the statements of other prisoners held at Bagram at the time and, more importantly, that dozens of the guards had admitted to abusing the prisoners in exactly the way described by Jawad.”

Proud of that, are you? Proud of the US torturing children and then keeping them locked away forever? Is that your idea of strength? Is that your idea of justice and the American way? If it is, then know yourself for the thumb-sucking, wetting-yourself coward that you most certainly are. Anyone who justify that kind of treatment is a coward, so afraid of the bogeymen they have built up in their own mind that they are willing to throw away American prestige, the rule of law, common sense and basic human decent. Bin Laden has already beaten those people. The Obama Administration should know better than to listen to them.

When you become a monster fight a monster, all you get is another monster.

Defenders of the status quo on health care like to point out that a public option will destroy the system of robust free-market competition that currently exists.
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), speaking earlier this month on Fox News, called President Obama’s plan the “first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known.” A public option, Shelby added, would “destroy the marketplace for health care.”

But the notion that most American consumers enjoy anything like a competitive marketplace for health care is flatly false. And a study issued last month by a pro-reform group makes that strikingly clear.

The report, released by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), uses data compiled by the American Medical Association to show that 94 percent of the country’s insurance markets are defined as “highly concentrated,” according to Justice Department guidelines. Predictably, that’s led to skyrocketing costs for patients, and monster profits for the big health insurers. Premiums have gone up over the past six years by more than 87 percent, on average, while profits at ten of the largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007.

Part of me wonders why the Obama Administration doesn’t ask the DOJ anti-trust lawyers to look into these situations. It might be because the anti-trust law is now so weak that these monopolies and near-monopolies are not actually illegal. It might be that the Obama Administration sees that moves as a kind of nuclear option. It might be that the move would be counter-productive.

One of the surest ways for an insurance company to remain profitable is to become as large as possible. Now, this is obviously true of almost every business, but it is exceptionally true in the insurance business. Insurance companies can keep costs down and thus profits up by denying care, by becoming more efficient, by spreading risk and by negotiating lower costs. Becoming huge is a massive advantage in all but the first option. The last, in particular, is critical: insurance companies do best either when they can guarantee that their clients will not use the services. Short of a crystal ball, one of the best ways to get to that point is to have a large enough pool of clients that the odds are the mass will pay in more than they take out in services. So if you break these companies into smaller units, you might have the effect of driving prices even higher.

A health insurance market, then, might not be possible absent a real public option. Because of the odd requirements of an insurance market, it may not be possible for real competition to exist without a government plan and thus impossible for the market to do anything but exacerbate and already bad situation. In order to have a market in health insurance, then, we may need quite a bit of government participation.