There ought to be no doubt by now but that the health care reform bill before the House is a deficient piece of legislation. About the only thing standing between the bill and final passage is Bart Stupak and his caucus of pro-life Democrats. If they waver, a bad bill passes. And the concern is that they may waver:
Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who leads a group pressing for the tougher restrictions, is planning a press conference today to discuss his request for an abortion vote. His legislative director, Nick Choate, declined to comment.
Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for Pelosi, said he had no immediate comment about the matter.
DeGette said Pelosi, a California Democrat, told the pro- choice Democrats that Stupak wants a vote on a resolution that would instruct a congressional clerk to insert into the overall bill stricter House-passed abortion language than is in the health-care measure the House will on tomorrow [sic].
Up until now, Stupak has been a hero to what remains of the conservative Democratic tradition, not to mention to Republicans and independent conservatives who are opposed to the bill. If Stupak throws it all away, and allows a bad bill to get passed in the process . . . well . . . I really wouldn’t want to occupy his place in history.
An admission from the Congressional Budget Office: Factor in the “doc fix”, and one finds that $59 billion is added to the deficit over the next ten years.
Remind me why anyone is supposed to think that the health care reform bill before the House is the best bill that we can get.
Look how poorly Barbara Boxer polls against all of the Republican candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat Boxer currently holds. She is barely beating Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore, and getting beaten by Tom Campbell. In each case, she is polling under 50%. Well under 50%.
For an incumbent, that’s horrible. For Republicans, that’s a reason to lick chops. It remains possible, of course, for Boxer to win at the end–California is a heavily Democratic state, after all–but the odds against her winning are looking longer and longer.
Democrats are ecstatic about the score given to the health care bill by the Congressional Budget Office. One wonders why, given a close analysis of the bill and the score. Let’s turn the mike over to Jeffrey Anderson:
For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.
But even that wouldn’t come close to reflecting the bill’s true costs. The CBO projects that over the next four years, less than two percent of the bill’s alleged “ten year” costs would hit: just $17 billion of the $940 billion in costs that the Democrats are claiming. In fact, the costs through President Obama’s entire presidency, should he be reelected, would be $336 billion. What would the president leave behind for his successor? According to the CBO, he would leave behind costs of $837 billion during his successor’s first term alone. If his successor were to serve a second term, he or she would inherit a cool $2.0 trillion in Obamacare costs — about six times its costs during Obama’s own tenure. This legislation is a ticking time-bomb.
To see the bill’s true first-decade costs, we need to start the clock when the costs would actually start in any meaningful way: in 2014. The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.
But $2.0 trillion wouldn’t be the total ten-year costs. Instead, that would merely be the “gross cost of coverage provisions.” Based on earlier incarnations of the proposed overhaul, the total costs would be about a third higher (the exact number can’t be gleaned from the CBO’s analysis, which is only preliminary and is not a full scoring) — making the total price-tag between $2.5 and $3 trillion over the bill’s real first decade.
So, in fact, the CBO score drastically misrepresents the true cost of the health care reform bill. Now, if wavering Democrats get a chance to see Anderson’s analysis, there shouldn’t be a sand castle’s chance in an earthquake that they will vote for the health care reform bill. The question, of course, is whether they will see Anderson’s analysis–and others like it–or whether the mainstream media will overwhelm the senses with false advertising concerning the health care reform bill’s supposed cost savings, and fiscal soundness.
At the very least, it appears to be worth a shot. As mentioned, unlike the case in Marshall Field, an actual Constitutional provision–Art. I, Sec. 7–is implicated. As Jonathan Adler notes, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may be willing to analogize any challenge to the one that was issued in Public Citizen, thus causing it to rule the same way that it did in Public Citizen. But since the Supreme Court may well think differently, and since there is ample cause for it to think differently, a Constitutional challenge to the use of the “deem and pass” rule should very much be found to be on the table.
Of course, if we could just have a straight up-or-down vote in the House on health care reform, perhaps we could avoid any litigation altogether. But that apparently is not going to be a luxury we can enjoy, now is it?
So, there may be no vote on the health care package this weekend because House Democrats suddenly decided that they want to wait for the CBO score? I don’t know about anyone else, but I read this as meaning that the House Democratic leadership believes–the pledges of “yes” votes from the likes of Dennis Kucinich notwithstanding–that they don’t have the votes.
Astonishingly, Obama is repeating the key tactical mistake of his failed efforts to restart Middle East peace talks over the last year. Though Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze to help restart negotiations was legitimate, he went a step too far by including building in East Jerusalem. Every Israeli government over the last four decades has built in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; no government, let alone one headed by the Likud, could possibly agree to a freeze there. Obama made resumption of negotiations hostage to a demand that could not be met. The result was that Palestinian leaders were forced to adjust their demands accordingly.
Obama is directly responsible for one of the most absurd turns in the history of Middle East negotiations. Though Palestinian leaders negotiated with Israeli governments that built extensively in the West Bank, they now refused to sit down with the first Israeli government to actually agree to a suspension of building. Obama’s demand for a building freeze in Jerusalem led to a freeze in negotiations.
Finally, after intensive efforts, the administration produced the pathetic achievement of “proximity talks”—setting Palestinian-Israeli negotiations back a generation, to the time when Palestinian leaders refused to sit at the same table with Israelis.
That Obama could be guilty of such amateurishness was perhaps forgivable because he was, after all, an amateur. But he has now taken his failed policy and intensified it. By demanding that Israel stop building in Ramat Shlomo and elsewhere in East Jerusalem—and placing that demand at the center of American-Israeli relations—he’s ensured that the Palestinians won’t show up even to proximity talks. This is no longer amateurishness; it is pique disguised as policy.
Who’s briefing the President? Or, more accurately perhaps, what’s the President’s problem?
When we consider the nature of the problems to be solved in our day, it seems–to many of us, at least–that these un-English arrivals are correct, that intelligence is the virtue we particularly need. Courage and steadfastness we cannot do without, so long as two men dwell on the earth; but it is time to discriminate in our praise of these virtues. If you want to get out of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get that, have courage and steadfastness. Perhaps the modern world has got into a kind of prison, and what is needed is the key to the lock. If none of the old virtues exactly fits, why should it seem ignoble to admit it? England for centuries has got on better by sheer character than some other nations by sheer intelligence, but there is after all a relation between the kind of problem and the means we should select to solve it. Not all problems are solved by willpower. When England overthrew Bonaparte, it was not his intelligence she overthrew; the contest involved other things besides intelligence, and she wore him out in the matter of physical endurance. The enemy that comes to her as a visible host or armada she can still close with and throttle; but when the foe arrives as an arrow that flieth by night, what avail the old sinews, the old stoutness of heart! We Americans face the same problems, and are too much inclined to oppose to them similar obsolete armor. We make a moral issue of an economic or social question, because it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a question for intelligence. Like the medicine-man, we use oratory and invoke our hereditary divinities, when the patient needs only a little quiet, or permission to get out of bed. We applaud those leaders who warm to their work–who, when they cannot open a door, threaten to kick it in. In the philosopher’s words, we curse the obstacles of life as though they were devils. But they are not devils. They are obstacles.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backs off of building new housing developments in East Jerusalem, his government will fall.
Because the Prime Minister doesn’t want to have his government fall, he won’t back off in response to the Obama Administration’s public denigration efforts.
If the Obama Administration wants to convince the Prime Minister to back off, they will have to use private diplomacy, and throw a sweetener into the deal in order to make it easier for the Prime Minister’s government to survive.
Eric Cantor seems to know this, which is why his advice to the White House to back off in public ought to be listened to. Whether it actually will be listened to is an open question; as the Obama Administration has made clear in a little over a year in office, its actual ability to do foreign policy right is not nearly as great as was advertised during the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Law professor and former Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell puts the issue succinctly on Speaker Pelosi’s proposed “deem and pass” scheme. I don’t have a WSJ subscription, but fortunately, Michael Cannon does, and he has excerpted the pertinent analysis:
Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.
The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”
And because it is apparently necessary, Cannon helpfully refers us to this:
Really, it is embarrassing that Congress has been reduced to needing Schoolhouse Rock lessons.
Michael Franc, meanwhile, points out that there is a potential remedy available to House Republicans; the use of a privileged motion that would preempt debate on the health care reform bill, and be considered immediately by the House. One hopes that someone on Capitol Hill is listening.
Representative Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and assistant to the speaker, said Republicans were trying to deceive the public about the legislation that Democrats were working on.
“They want to send a signal to the American people that the product that is going to come out of the House is the Senate bill, but the fact of the matter is we are amending the Senate bill,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “We are going to get rid of the Nebraska deal. We are going to get rid of other provisions in the Senate bill that shouldn’t have been there.”
If the House gets to amend the Senate bill, then the Senate gets another crack at the bill. Art. I, Sec. 7 of the Constitution demands no less. If Democrats don’t want the Senate to get another crack at the bill, then they cannot amend it, and must pass the Senate bill word for word, comma for comma, period for period, colon for colon, and semicolon for semicolon.
This isn’t difficult to understand, of course. But policy preferences on the part of Congressional Democrats–and for that matter, on the part of the Obama Administration–have trumped Constitutional requirements. That’s pretty shocking, and not a little embarrassing, given our self-styled image as a nation of law, and our reverence for the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
Dan Twining rips the Administration both for its Asia policy, and for misrepresenting the Asia policy of the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration’s Potemkin pretensions to concern and interest in Asia policy ought to be exposed by more pundits and observers. Here’s hoping that Twining started a trend.
How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.
A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.
You probably think that insuring the uninsured will dramatically improve the nation’s health. The uninsured don’t get care or don’t get it soon enough. With insurance, they won’t be shortchanged; they’ll be healthier. Simple.
Think again. I’ve written before that expanding health insurance would result, at best, in modest health gains. Studies of insurance’s effects on health are hard to perform. Some find benefits; others don’t. Medicare’s introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn’t find gains. In the Atlantic recently, economics writer Megan McArdle examined the literature and emerged skeptical. Claims that the uninsured suffer tens of thousands of premature deaths are “open to question.” Conceivably, the “lack of health insurance has no more impact on your health than lack of flood insurance,” she writes.
Be sure to read the full thing to see the links Samuelson has included for reference.
And remember: We are preparing to base national health care policy on the myths that Samuelson debunks. Is anyone at the White House listening?
Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the health care reform debate? Well, think again:
After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.
Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.
The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.
“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”
Republicans quickly condemned the strategy, framing it as an effort to avoid responsibility for passing the legislation, and some suggested that Pelosi’s plan would be unconstitutional.
“It’s very painful and troubling to see the gymnastics through which they are going to avoid accountability,” Rep. David Dreier (Calif.), the senior Republican on the House Rules Committee, told reporters. “And I hope very much that, at the end of the day, that if we are going to have a vote, we will have a clean up-or-down vote that will allow the American people to see who is supporting this Senate bill and who is not supporting this Senate bill.”
Members of Congress get paid a pretty nice salary in order to take tough votes. Now, apparently, they might be able to earn that paycheck while hiding from the voters.
This is a pretty appalling maneuver, to say the least. The cynicism involved in promoting it is mind-boggling. And while the story seems to indicate that there isn’t that much of a chance that this “self-executing rule” will be used to pass health care reform, the fact that it is even being considered ought to tell people what the Democratic leadership thinks of the democratic process.
Michael Steel, spokesman for John Boehner, points out the following:
. . . Over the past 24 hours, the White House has highlighted the story of an Ohio woman named Natoma Canfield in an attempt to make the case for their government takeover of health care. Yet, ironically, Ms. Canfield would benefit far more from House Republicans’ health care plan than the President’s.
Why? Under the President’s plan, she would theoretically get a subsidy and new insurance rules four years from now, in 2014. That isn’t going to help her now. Our plan immediately puts more money into state high-risk pools, or establishes them in states where they currently do not exist (the President’s plan does, too, but we do more – and we forbid waiting lists for those pools. The White House plan does not.)
–Dan Drezner. As I have written before, Krugman deserves his Nobel Prize. But it is exceedingly difficult–at best–to take him seriously as a pundit, or a would-be policymaker. More justly-earned criticism from Free Exchange.
Andrew Biggs critiques the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’s own critique of the Ryan fiscal roadmap. Key passage:
What’s a little disappointing is that the Congressional Budget Office report on Ryan’s plan has been available since late January, so there’s no need to rely on outdated Social Security Administration analyses of older versions of Ryan’s proposals.
Well, yes there is, if one wants to attack Paul Ryan for partisan purposes. But that’s about the only excuse.
As the title to this post makes clear, my impressions of Peter Graves were more shaped by Airplane! than they were by Mission: Impossible. Airplane! is, in fact, a not-so-guilty pleasure in my family, and Peter Graves helped make it a tremendous success. His deadpan approach to comedy was brilliant, and the decision to include him in the movie was utterly inspired. He helped make Airplane! a success, and in doing so, helped give me and my loved ones a lot of laughs, and a lot of happy memories.
He lived a long and full life, but it ought to go without saying that we would have liked to have had him around for much longer.
I am not a neoconservative myself, but that doesn’t stop me from being displeased over the way in which neoconservatives have been attacked and parodied for purely political purposes. It is one thing to take on the neoconservatives and their vision of the world in a straightforward and honest manner, and to use criticism to sharpen neoconservative thinking so as to ensure the most vibrant, and intellectually stimulating foreign policy discussions possible. It’s quite another to simply make the movement into one giant piñata for the purpose of thrashing it, thereby gaining partisan advantage.
Fortunately for the neoconservatives, Steven Cook has come out with a more honest appreciation. He is not a neoconservative either, and he criticizes the neoconservatives for various issues, but at least he is a good faith critic. And he acknowledges that the image of neoconservatives as a group that has gotten everything wrong simply doesn’t match the reality. As Cook writes, the neoconservatives got Syria, Iran, and democracy right, and they ought to be given credit for that.
The jury should still be out on the neoconservatives; not enough time has passed in order to properly judge their legacy. But in many ways, the neoconservatives have gotten a bad rap, and the bad rap has come from people who want to be able to profit politically from the perceived misfortunes of the neoconservatives. That’s unfair and dishonest, and it only serves to degrade the general foreign policy debate. Kudos to Steven Cook for resisting the temptation to just mindlessly pile on the neoconservatives. Hopefully, his writing on this issue will serve as an example to the rest of the punditocracy.
