http://www.crikey.com.au/
5 . Rundle: a win to Obama, but the Senate battle awaits
Guy Rundle writes:
President Obama has won a first, though hardly decisive, victory in the health care campaign, with the passage of HR 3200, the Affordable Health Care Act 2009, through the US House of Representatives.
Passage of the bill is the first stage in reforming the US non-health care system. Importantly, it contains the all-important "public option" -- a state-owned health insurer which can offer coverage at lower rates than the private carriers, thus forcing their exorbitant premiums down.
Other provisions within the 2000-page bill include a ban on excluding people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance, new controls on provider (ie doctor and hospital) charges, huge funds for integrating and computerising health care records across the country, and much more.
The bill seeks to limit the ballooning cost of health care by making cutbacks in "Medicare" -- the open-ended 65+ public care which half of the "Obamahitler" protestors are covered under -- and bringing in some controls on the ludicrous amounts big Pharma can charge the government for drugs.
However the bill only just squeaked through the House, with a majority of 5.39 Democrats voted against it, and only 1 Republican -- a Vietnamese-American from Louisiana, pretty much the unhealthiest state in the Union -- voted for it.
While getting any sort of a majority is seen as a triumph for speaker Nancy Pelosi -- the vote occurred on Saturday night after a week of near round-the-clock arm twisting -- there were serious misgivings about some of the deals that had to be made.
One in particular, which excluded abortion from public insurance or from any subsidies to private insurance, was an exceptionally bitter pill. Since non-emergency abortion is scarcely available under public provision currently, the amendment does not make coverage any worse, but it now makes termination an even more "special" case than hitherto.
Others are whackier still -- an amendment (supported by Republican Orrin Hatch and previously by the late Ted Kennedy, for negotiating purposes) that allows public funding for spiritual healing -- ie Christian Science intercessionary prayer at $20 a pop.
Mad stuff, but the bill is through, and as Mark Steyn notes -- ruefully -- that's the important thing. To get something passed in the House is further than Bill and Hillary Clinton's 1993 bill got.
Now however, there's the Senate. Pelosi had about 38 Democrats she could lose (with a 77-seat House majority), and some of them were released from the whip, so that their Big Insurance backers can be assured they got their moneys worth, but the Senate is on a knife-edge.
Ted Kennedy hasn't been replaced yet, and slimy Joe Lieberman, who usually votes with the Dems on social issues, has indicated he won't support a bill with a public option in it. He won't even support "cloture", the vote that prevents a filibuster, and allows the bill to go to a simple majority vote.
That leaves the Democrats with, at most, 58-41, against a filibuster, and needing a 60-40 split. Their best bet is to convince Maine's moderate Republican senator Olympia Snowe over, and one or two others from godknowswhere.
But that presumes a 100% Democratic whip, and that looks unlikely, with a half-dozen "blue dog" Democrats having already vowed to vote against a public option.
Should they be able to persuade the Blue Dogs to vote for cloture, and then against the bill, the bill will come to a majority vote and pass around 53-46, and the Blue Dogs' blushes will be spared.
But if they can't get them to yes on that, the Democratic leadership has another option, which is to make them perform an actual filibuster.
Currently, all you have to do to filibuster -- ie to prevent the bill from coming to a majority vote -- is for 41 senators to indicate that they would filibuster it if required.
That removed the need for senators to stay on their feet reading from cookbooks, Dickens, etc, with a series of explicit rules governing their behaviour (no leaning on surfaces, no physical support by other senators, no toilet breaks).
The automatic filibuster dramatically changed the nature of American governance, but by stealth -- the Senate became a de facto supermajority chamber, an inherently conservatising option.
However, at any time, by a simple majority vote, the automatic filibuster can be removed -- and the minority opposition would have to talk the bill out to the end of the current Senate session.
The advantage of this is that the US public would see the filibuster for what it is (the word comes from a dutch word for pirate or 'freebooter'), a mad obstruction tactic being executed by people desperate to hold back change.
Will the Dems go there? Or will they observe what has become a sort of collective Senate alignment against the House - that it is in the interest of all Senators to keep the automatic filibuster, and hence their vastly increased power within the bicamera.
The look-out is that they won't even let the bill come to the floor before the Senate breaks for 'the holidays', as the Christmas season is very multiculturally called. This will allow the Democratic leadership to craft a complex "trigger option" -- one where there is no public option immediately and lowcost health care is provided by non-profit insurance co-operatives effectively, big insurers pool resources to offer more basic coverage at cheaper prices, on a sliding scale that ensures near universal coverage of some description.
The problem with co-ops is that they would have no power to affect the prices health insurers set for their regular premiums so individuals and businesses continue to pay a mozza for cover. Worse, as Alexander Cockburn pointed out in Counterpunch, this would be combined with a mandating system, similar to car insurance, where you would be required to have health insurance -- effectively the state would be holding the gun while Big Insurance picks your pocket. Only in America.
The trigger option would allow for a rollout of a public option if, after three-five years, average premiums had not come down to set levels. Since they wouldn't, this is a public option by stealth. It would allow Republican Senators Snowe and Collins from Maine to support it, and one or two others, while able to save face with their constituents and soft-money corporate donors.
Should that fail, there is a final option, which is to abandon HR 3200, and roll it into the 2010 budget bill as a series of provisions -- it is then subject to a "reconciliation" vote, which is a straight majority in both houses, and guaranteed to pass. The White House could then argue that the will of the people was expressed in the HR 3200 and the Senate obstructed it -- reconciliation is then in the spirit of the original vote. Indeed, that may be the overall game plan.
Whatever the case, HR3200 is an enormous victory, the first serious universal health care bill to get through a House of Congress ever. The Senate will be tough, if not insurmountable, but this has months to run. Quite aside from the manifold improvements any sort of serious bill will offer in American life, it will give Obama a victory he can go back to his base with, and fire them up anew for the Herculean labour of making change in America.
Rupert Cornwell: Why can't the US learn to love its government?
Out of America: Suspicion of rulers dates to the founding of the nation – and even Obama is unlikely to change that
What is it about Americans and government? The tea-party crowd were back in town the other day – more than 5,000 of them, gathered on the West Lawn of the Capitol to rail against the historic healthcare reform bill that the House of Representatives is expected to pass this weekend.The passions the measure has generated among its Republican opponents have been remarkable. One Republican Congresswoman has declared that health reform was a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden and global terrorism, while John Boehner, the party's leader in the House, urged the protesters to join Republicans in "defending our freedom".
A neutral observer would not know whether to laugh
or cry at this so-called "Super Bowl of Freedom", featuring inter alia
a giant banner describing the proposals as "National Socialist
Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945". Yes, the tea-party movement,
currently touring the country, contains more than its share of cranks
and nutters. But the fringes, too, can express political truths. This
particular truth is that Americans just can't bring themselves to love
government.
When President Barack Obama came to power, the stage seemed set for government activism unmatched in decades. The parallels with the early 1930s were palpable. Talk of a second Great Depression was everywhere, economists were urging a "new New Deal", Franklin Roosevelt was suddenly back in fashion. Nine months on, however, the urgency seems to have vanished. And why this cooling of reformist ardour? True, the economy has improved (though not by much, as evidenced by the news that unemployment last month rose to 10.2 per cent, the highest level in a quarter of a century.) The huge deficits being run up by Washington are also legitimate cause for concern. A more important reason though is America's ancestral suspicion of government.
The governors' elections in New Jersey and Virginia last week, in which Mr Obama's Democrats were soundly defeated, were largely local affairs. But in so far as they sent a message to the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, the message was plain: slow down, the voters said, don't force change down the people's throats. With a young and charismatic President who won power by promising change, it's easy to forget that the US is a conservative country. Mr Obama triumphed in 2008 not by harnessing a vast tide of liberalism, but by persuading the wavering centre that he was a better bet than another four years of discredited Republican policies. In Virginia and New Jersey, exit polls showed, the centrists (moderates, independents, call them what you will) changed their minds and decided to put on the brakes.
A fascinating Gallup survey last month found that despite the Democrats' victories in 2006 and 2008, fully 40 per cent of Americans, more than ever, describe themselves as conservative, while 36 per cent call themselves moderates. Only 20 per cent are avowed liberals. It's not a question of government having failed the country. It's just that Americans aren't comfortable with the beast when its role, as now, threatens to expand – even when the deficiencies of the unfettered free market have never been more glaring.
Mr Obama secured his record-breaking $787bn stimulus package last February, albeit with virtually no Republican support. But that might be it. Yes, the House will probably pass a version of healthcare reform, but the measure could yet founder in the Senate, where party discipline is weaker, and a 60 per cent majority is required to pass anything of significance. If it does fail, it will basically be for fear that the reform amounts to a "government takeover of healthcare". The most contentious part of the bill is the "public option" – whereby a publicly financed scheme would be set up to provide some competition to rapacious private insurers. But that option now hardly dares speak its name. Leading Democrats prefer to speak of a "consumer option".
And health care is but one of three massive public policy issues on the table, beside a green energy programme to combat climate change, and regulation of the financial markets, aimed at preventing a repeat of last year's crisis. But there's no guarantee any of them will get through. For Europeans, all three would be no-brainers: assured health coverage for all (or rather almost all), steps to reduce both pollution and imports of costly foreign oil, and curbs on the excesses of Wall Street. Not so in the US – because each implies a substantial increase in the role of government.
And it has been ever thus. Suspicion of government is as old as the Republic. The movement that turned up on Capitol Hill again last week takes its name, of course, from the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Americans like to see their War of Independence as a revolution against government – back then the far-away government in London that taxed the colonies without allowing them representation – and the habit has never died.
These days, one thing unites every presidential candidate: a readiness to denounce the federal government in Washington and all its works. That the candidate in question might have made a long and comfortable career in that den of corruption and iniquity makes not a scrap of difference. Usually – as now – the sentiment works to the advantage of Republicans, but not always. Sometimes, the beneficiary can be a genuine outsider like the eccentric Texan businessman Ross Perot, who in 1992 came closer to winning the White House than any independent in 80 years. Sometimes it takes on the hyperbolic aspect of the tea-party crowd, and last summer's raucous town-hall protests against health reform. And on occasion it spills over into tragedy, into the raw hatred of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
No one is more aware of how distrust of government is part of America's collective political DNA than Mr Obama. Whether he can tame it is another matter.
Hat tip to Lil Treva. I thought this was worth posting here. So often I read conservatives nitpicking health care in countries with Universal Health Care. I wonder what they have to say about this example of "the best health care system in the world".
I have a confession to make. We don't have a dishwasher. We did have one thirty years ago but decided not to replace it when it entered dishwasher heaven. We figured that by the time we filled it we could have the dishes washed and dried, anyway. So, every night Mrs Snowy and I go through the daily dish washing ritual. She washes, I wipe. It seems that I can't be trusted with the technical side of things. Besides, after thirty-three years of marriage, Mrs Snowy is smart enough to know that the World's Greatest Procrastinator would be washing dishes at midnight if it was left to him. Or next day, more likely, just as in his bachelor days. Or next week. Whatever...
So, I like to give her a little peck just to show her my appreciation for being rescued from a lifetime of dishwasher procrastination. She doesn't even notice it now. Or maybe she does, and just puts it down to another of my little oddities. She's gathering quite a collection.
So why is FNP about something as frivolous as this? Have you looked at the world lately? That's why. So I thought it would be a nice change to talk about love.
US productivity soars as jobless benefit claims lowest since January
- From: Dow Jones Newswires
- November 06, 2009
US productivity, or output per hours worked, surged in the third quarter to hit its highest level in six years as the world's largest economy emerged from its worst downturn in decades.
Meantime, the number of US workers filing new claims for jobless benefits fell by more than expected last week to its lowest level since the start of the year, data from the Labour Department showed.
Non-farm business labour productivity rose by an annual rate of 9.5 per cent in the July-to-September period as the economy recovered and employers saved money by slashing staff. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had predicted a 7.0 per cent increase in third-quarter productivity.
A rise in productivity is ultimately good for companies, workers and the economy. More productive companies have greater profits, which allow them to pay higher wages. That also allows the economy to grow faster without generating inflation.
But during a difficult time for the economy, a short-term productivity rise can be a sign that companies slash workers faster that they cut output. In other words, stretching existing workers means hiring fewer new ones.
Still, economic recoveries have in the past generally followed a consistent pattern: first productivity grows, then employment rises, and finally wages increase.
Over the past few weeks, economic data have continued to show that the worst recession since the Great Depression appears to be winding down, with clear improvements in manufacturing and the housing sector.
Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic activity, rose by an annualised 3.5 per cent in the third quarter as the US government's massive stimulus plan boosted consumer spending.
"Message to the Fed: subdued inflation trends it is," said Jonathan Basile, economist at Credit Suisse, in comments on the two latest economic reports.
In its declaration that interest rates would remain near zero for "an extended period," the Federal Reserve yesterday included new qualifiers explaining the conditions that would justify keeping rates low: "low rates of resource utilisation, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations."
The Fed voted to maintain the target federal-funds rate for interbank lending at a record-low range of zero to 0.25 per cent to bolster the fragile economic recovery.
Productivity is defined as output per hours worked. It rose 6.9 per cent in the second quarter of the year, revised up from a previously estimated increase of 6.6 per cent.
A key gauge of inflationary pressures within the productivity report plunged. Unit labour costs fell 5.2 per cent last quarter at an annual rate. Economists had expected a 4.5 per cent decline.
"Modest unit labour costs indicate that there are few short-term worries about inflation," said Steven Wood, chief economist at Insight Economics.
Big productivity gains are common at the end of a recession or beginning of a recovery. But the increases come at the expense of jobs.
The US employment report for October, out tomorrow (AEDT), is expected to show that the jobless rate stayed close to a 26-year high of 9.8 per cent in September.
In a separate report, the Labour Department said new claims for jobless benefits decreased by 20,000 to 512,000 in the week ended October 31. That is the lowest level since January 3. The previous week's level was revised to 532,000.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected a decrease of only 5000 claims.
The four-week moving average of new claims, which aims to smooth volatility in the data, fell by 3000 to 523,750 from the previous week's revised figure of 526,750. That is the lowest level since January 10.
Initial claims still remain at a fairly high level, suggesting the job market has a long recovery ahead.
But some economists still see positive signs in the recent decreases in the four-week-moving average, and the latest 20,000 decrease in initial claims also may suggest an improvement in labour conditions.
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