Policy 12/02/2009

• What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? – The New York Review of Books

  tags: Policy

  • The welfare state had remarkable achievements to its credit. In some countries it was social democratic, grounded in an ambitious program of socialist legislation; in others—Great Britain, for example—it amounted to a series of pragmatic policies aimed at alleviating disadvantage and reducing extremes of wealth and indigence. The common theme and universal accomplishment of the neo-Keynesian governments of the postwar era was their remarkable success in curbing inequality. If you compare the gap separating rich and poor, whether by income or assets, in all continental European countries along with Great Britain and the US, you will see that it shrinks dramatically in the generation following 1945.
  • In the US today, the “Gini coefficient”—a measure of the distance separating rich and poor—is comparable to that of China.^[1] When we consider that China is a developing country where huge gaps will inevitably open up between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the fact that here in the US we have a similar inequality coefficient says much about how far we have fallen behind our earlier aspirations.
  • What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage.
  • But when the state sells cheap, the public takes a loss. It has been calculated that, in the course of the Thatcher-era UK privatizations, the deliberately low price at which long-standing public assets were marketed to the private sector resulted in a net transfer of £14 billion from the taxpaying public to stockholders and other investors.
  • A bus that provides an express service for those who can afford it and avoids remote villages where it would be boarded only by the occasional pensioner will make more money for its owner. But someone—the state or the local municipality—must still provide the unprofitable, inefficient local service. In its absence, the short-term economic benefits of cutting the provision will be offset by long-term damage to the community at large. Predictably, therefore, the consequences of “competitive” buses—except in London where there is enough demand to go around—have been an increase in costs assigned to the public sector; a sharp rise in fares to the level that the market can bear; and attractive profits for the express bus companies.
  • We must revisit the ways in which our grandparents’ generation responded to comparable challenges and threats. Social democracy in Europe, the New Deal, and the Great Society here in the US were explicit responses to the insecurities and inequities of the age. Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse.^[7] We find it hard to conceive of a complete breakdown of liberal institutions, an utter disintegration of the democratic consensus. But it was just such a breakdown that elicited the Keynes–Hayek debate and from which the Keynesian consensus and the social democratic compromise were born: the consensus and the compromise in which we grew up and whose appeal has been obscured by its very success.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 11/28/2009

• Ezra Klein – Let Congress be Congress again

  tags: Policy

  • How about a simpler change? Go back to the previous wording of Senators “present and voting” instead of “duly chosen and sworn”, which would allow the minority to continue to filibuster but impose some costs on it: enough of them have to stay in the chamber to keep the majority under three-fifths.

    Right now it’s nearly cost-free for the minority to filibuster, as they only need one member in the chamber, and extremely expensive for the majority, as they need to keep enough members in the chamber to prevent the minority member from noting the absence of quorum.

    This would allow highly-motivated minorities to continue to filibuster if they deem it necessary and are able to hold the line, but it would get rid of routine use of the filibuster, which is toxic to Congress as an institution.

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Policy 11/25/2009

• Not For All the News in China, Part I : CJR

  tags: media, Policy

  • I don’t think that [the press] have gotten it right, to put things very simply. I think that part of the problem is not especially China-related but strikes me as a reflection of something that’s happening in the culture, particularly in the news culture, partially in response to the habits of television coverage and the increased pressures that come from digital media. There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.

• James K. Galbraith: Old Mistakes Die Hard

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that “credit would flow again” if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn’t.

  • Low interest rates prove this: despite all the dire predictions, there is no difficulty in placing Treasury debt. Hence, we are free to pursue high employment, if we choose to do it.

    Can anything be done now? Well yes, technically: the same steps that could have been taken in January 2009 could be taken in January 2010. But they won’t be, because for the moment we are seeing the inventory bounce, a productivity surge, real GDP growth, and other “good signs.” So we’ll be told to wait, to be patient, and to make sure we don’t buy what we can’t afford. And double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger — perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections. After which, what will be possible is anyone’s guess.

• Ezra Klein – Why must we have double-digit unemployment for the foreseeable future?

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • James Galbraith points fingers:

    Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate.

  • I’m with hughmaine, who is also spot on. What happened to that tease about another stimulus a few weeks back (I’ve been out of touch)?

    What we’ve seen is the stimulus work, such pitiable amount of it that actually went into the productive economy. It’s not complicated. But perhaps the Democrats are tired of holding office.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/24/2009

• White House to Reid

  tags: Policy

  • where does the corruption of our government come from? It comes from business.

    From non-regulated, non-accountable, non-responsible business. Something outside of the political process that the people participate in.

    How do we the people fight back against the lobbyists and the corruption? Not by eliminating government.

• Ezra Klein – How the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists cost America $378 billion

  tags: Policy

  • Actually the article is about lobbying, and the money spent by the biologics companies to hold exclusivity of patent on the new miracle drugs before the generic companies can make them too.

    Generics have saved $734 billion in a decade with the other drugs.

    But biologics is a new plateau of medical treatment only recently attained. Biologics are derived as always in medicine on the back of the standard model of the basic research being performed by government and other tax-funded entities, and with the final manufacturing end then handed away at no charge to business.

    Nontheless, the industry argues that too short a period of time for exclusivity of manufacture will not allow companies to recoup their development costs.

    Before biologics, drug companies had five years to make their margin. Obama as a compromise is suggesting 7 years. The companies want 12 years as a minimum.

    The article concludes by asking if the government will have the strength to resist the massive lobbying dollars (which cloud the air with consultants and dire prognostications) and to conduct this negotiation – where the asking party of course overstates as we all do in a negotiation – to the benefit of the dying patients who can’t afford more life, or to the profits of the biologics companies.

  • visonbrkr you crystallize the underlying dilemma here with your support for the “liberal” position.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all deliberate this matter so that those with more liberal (“give to the people”) leanings could spar with those who held more conservative (“but don’t take from the owners”) leanings, and between the two extremes a representative balance could be struck.

    What damages this process for all of us is the distortion of lobbying, especially as it over-advocates, clouding the issues with spurious argument, and actually wearing opponents down with a kind of fatigue.

    I’ve said before that I think we have a good political system except for the corruptions upon that system. But I’m starting to realize that a system susceptible to those corruptions indicates a systemic flaw itself.

    How to strengthen the immune system of our political process?

• health-care and taxes

  tags: Economics, Policy

  • We’re not talking about more taxes, we’re talking about redistribution, narrowing that widened gulf between the holders of wealth and the dispossessed.

    We’re talking about redressing the massive shift in equities of the last 30 years, from Reagan on.

    There are reasons that the culture records a lack of progress in recent decades of that old American Dream – it stopped happening, and regresssive ideologies rolled back a lot of the well-being of ordinary people.

    Every chance, every micro-opportunity arising in the legislative chamber to redress this imbalance will be taken I trust, and should be taken, by the Democrats who were elected in general principle to do this very thing.

• America’s unusually democratic democracy

  tags: Policy

  • I think the system really does work along the lines of the upper house acting as a cooling process for hot legislation from the lower.

    Also it takes much to develop an involved interest in any particular field, and each house has its acknowledged “experts” – you can’t just develop ideas on a dime. This is especially so at the Senate level perhaps, which, as said, is less the originating arena and more the finalizing arena.

    Especially with some study over the years I’ve always thought we have a pretty good system of government – it’s the corruptions upon that system that cause most of our heartburn I think.

    It’s not that the system is rotten, or government inept, more that money is rotten and inept, but carries the most weight and and has its way against all reason.

  • well if this thread is continuing this morning, let me add that the word “democracy” is a loaded one, since the founders of our system wanted a republican form of representation, not a fully typical democracy, which they equated with mob rule and its contemporary menace, the guillotine.

    So they wanted – and created (and this is what we’re dealing with) – a system that embraced proportional representation (one man one vote) somewhat equally with non-proportional representation.

    Bicameral systems of upper and lower houses seemed to be working well, in Europe and the current states, so as the Union was devised the states became the upper house with one state two votes.

    They debated if non-landowners should be given a vote at all, but eventually settled for yes. However, the brake of the states in the senate was intended to destroy the possibiity of “democracy,” precisely so that states with large populations couldn’t so easily prevail upon the inhabitants of the less populated states. This was a deliberate, and very liberal, altruistic conception.

    Personally I think it works well, but you have to take the long view to think this perhaps.

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Policy 10/17/2009

• Olympia Snowe’s Conservatism — and Ours

  tags: Policy

  • msoja, you know where all your principled framework falls down? It falls down when the insurance companies monkey with government.

    If every corporate lobbyist that perverts and corrupts our political process because they have irresistible amounts of money to withraw from competitive investment and throw at our representatives instead would simply stop it, and let the government simply be a government – then maybe we could start looking at your side of the fence, at the correct and perfect balance of representation versus individualism.

    But we don’t have a government ripe for that kind of philosophizing, because private enterprise has evaded the social police power in drastic measure, and made sure we’ll never be able to have a rule of law with any integrity.

    It’s not too much government that we have, it’s too little of the right kind.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/14/2009

• Ezra Klein – Bad Language

  tags: Policy

  • Ezra keep pondering this stuff, there’s a lot of potential there.

    I’ve often wondered why the “soft” people let the “hard people take their language away from them, when marketing 101 says if the opposition hold the buzzwords, that’s where the battle is: you have to fight for the language itself, and steal the keywords from the enemy.

    Witness: billions of dollars spent branding Coca Cola, and 7-up takes a free ride on that investment with the “un-cola”.

    So, two forks to this: either take “strong” and demean it with qualifiers like “blindly” “rigidly” “scared” and such;

    or, better, take their word “strong” and show how it applies to your position best, as in “strong caution,” “strong restraint,” “strong open-mindedness” – the playground is pretty large once you decide to be strong about your softness, and strike instead of wilt.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/10/2009

• Ezra Klein – What Good Are States?

  tags: Policy

  • I read the story you linked, and Alec MacGillis actually tells the story about the Senate existing to cool down legislation – but then he dismisses it. He never grasps the point that this safety check will inevitably disappoint people tied to immediate outcomes.

    The States weren’t “enticed” into joining a Union, they banded together and formed one because it was the clear imperative of the times. We are the result, and you have the luxury now to speak from that Union as if its existence was a given, as if we have always been one Society – the Founders would be proud of their achievement.

    Today the House majority is trying to vote its way into something I (very dearly) want, but tomorrow it won’t be. So we look to the checks and balances, the Senate and the President and the Supreme Court.

    The answer to one’s current frustration is not to abolish the Union or the States or the Senate, but to buckle down to the work required to pass legislation that will carry all of the component institutions of our system. Then one will have some legislation worth passing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 10/03/2009

• Ezra Klein – Will 2010 Be Another 1994?

  tags: Policy

  • One of the key differences between ‘93-’94 and today, I think, is that the Clinton adminstration was curiously tone-deaf to the political impact of many of its actions (gays in the military, a complex, government-centric health care reform proposal), while the Obama adminstration has been, extremely cautious (IMHO, too cautious) about taking actions which would ruffle anyone’s feathers. Numerous surveys have shown that the vitriol toward the Democrats that Cook cites is almost exclusively a Southern phenomena, and despite the fact that it is un-pc to say it folks, the issue is race, race, race. I have no doubt that the GOP will gain seats in the South in 2010, and that some of the Blue Dogs Rahm Emanuel so carefully courted may lose their seats, but the more that Republicans become identified as a Southern party, the less appeal they will have in the rest of the country, because the stereotype of the backwards Southern/Appalachian redneck will even more unattractive as the population continues to diversify.

    Posted by: exgovgirl | October 2, 2009 11:52 AM
    | Report abuse

    that’s a compelling perspective, exgovgirl, and makes a lot of sense.

    The Civil War is not very far in the past, and the seed of it was brought into the Union with slavery. From the beginning we’ve had this dirt to wash off. Perhaps we’re still washing, perhaps not, but the Republican party would be a great baby to throw out with the bathwater.

    Posted by: rosshunter

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Policy 10/02/2009

• Ezra Klein – I Endorse

  tags: Policy

  • so really, this blog thing worked pretty well. Ezra made a point and supplied links. His tremendously valuable commenters added greatly to Ezra’s seed piece, as we count on them to do. Ezra even found himself pulled back into the thread.

    The original point is now greatly rounded and enriched, and I’m off to read some entries.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/26/2009

• Reading the McChrystal Report: Interesting Times : The New Yorker

  tags: Policy

  • Obama has Kennedy’s confidence in his own judgment, which Johnson tragically lacked. Gordon Goldstein’s very good book “Lessons in Disaster,” about McGeorge Bundy—national security adviser to both J.F.K. and L.B.J.—pretty much proves that Kennedy, if he’d lived, would not have committed ground troops to Vietnam at the start of his second term. After the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy stopped trusting his military advisers, and went on to overrule them during the Cuban missile crisis and, again and again, on Vietnam. Perhaps this is Obama’s J.F.K. moment. We’ll know in a few weeks. And if so, perhaps he would be right.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/21/2009

• Karel van Wolferen

  tags: Policy

  • To be considered “professional” journalists could no longer “take sides”. They had to be neutral. Court reporting, local political conflicts between equals, and party political platforms were suited to such an approach. But when there were no two sides to choose from, when there was one overwhelming side, or when there were perhaps six sides, the reality had to be reduced to fit the mandatory two equal sides.
  • Objectivity was the big loser as the result of this passion for neutrality. The blindness to the difference in meaning of neutral and objective continues to rule the trade. American reporters are not supposed to insert themselves into the stories they write, in the sense of trusting their own brains to do the filtering of the buzzing, cacophonous reality around them. The neutrality command also means that reporters must pass on to their audience utterances and explanations that they know for sure are bullshit.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/16/2009

• The Bush Presidency in One Line

  tags: Policy

  • I suppose in a way this indicates the neutralizing of the 9-11 powerbase.

    Prior to that pivotal event Bush was portrayed in political cartoons as a child with a short attention span, while “Mr. Cheney” took care of the dull, adult things.

    Without that terrible event in 2001 Bush by 2004 would certainly have been running on the “competence” issue, trying to demonstrate that his laughing-stock administration wasn’t the most incompetent in decades, and that he himself wasn’t some kind of simpleton.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/12/2009

• 9/11

  tags: Policy

  • In the sadness of the days following I think most of the country was prepared to set aside partisanship and see political difference laid to rest for a common cause.

    It could have been a great uniter, a transcendent event.

    Instead, we know what happened. Within days it was converted into a kind of high-octane political capital by the administration and the Republicans in Congress, and used self-servingly to drive a very tangible division through our society.

    I agree with everyone who says it’s a personal thing, but I’ll never forget how quickly it became a political tool, and used to inflict great damage on our Union.

• Ezra Klein – The New Bipartisanship

  tags: Policy

  • It’s like the old joke that you don’t have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the other guy. Obama doesn’t have to be bipartisan. He just has to look more bipartisan than the Republicans.

  • I have always seen Obama as having a vast meta message, operating through all his moves: he actually believes we can have civil discourse, and that our political process can represent its nation.

    As time passes, if he can also muscle through the things that need to be done, we will see the country change, and regain some of that character he talks about. I believe this is his real agenda, and the plays and ploys we agonize over daily are just small-scale compared with his true reach.

    Unfortunately for punditry, but fortunately for sanity, this will take the passage of time to become clear.

    Posted by: wapomadness | September 11, 2009 11:38 AM
    | Report abuse

    more to Ezra’s point, I’ve always thought Obama was just outrunning the other guy – the Republicans are throwing themselves deep into the moral low ground, while the game being played is for the high ground.

    Obama by his existence has changed the stakes, and I’m sure he knows this very well.

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Policy 09/11/2009

• Facebook | Home

  tags: Policy

  • thinks President Obama’s health care speech was great.
  • Ross Hunter

    yep, me too. There’s a meta message about Obama, and he held to that all through the focus on health care. The meta is that he believes we can have civil discourse.

    As time passes and we see him continue to express this belief and act accordingly, and still muscle through what needs to get done, the country will change. And regain some character.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/10/2009

• Ezra Klein – Gang of Six Death Watch: Moving Forward

  tags: Policy

  • Baucus is clearly slow-walking this and Grassley has publicly predicted a “miniscule” bill by Christmas.

    The claim that Democrats are obstructionist is silly. The House passed a bill, Senate HELP passed a bill, Baucus himself put out a plan last September called “Call to Action: Health Care 2009″ which itself would be a fine place to start a final compromise, But for reasons of his own Max Baucus just decided to say “No”.

    That is NOT a useful spirit to forge good public policy, at this point arguing that Baucus is operating in good faith is a fools game.

  • BTW it is my opinion that the stalling point is not the Public Option but the potentially very strict profit controls built into Sec 116 of the House Bill. The wording seems deliberately innocuous but its effect would be to gut the current insurance industry model of making money by denying care. The insurance companies are already publicly gunning for Sec 113 which limits the premium gap you can charge between young and old, but 116 is actually more deadly to them. Watch for Finance to push out a bill against some deadline hoping nobody notices what they did to Secs 111-116 which together are the core of insurance reform.

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Policy 09/09/2009

• Why the public option matters – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

  tags: Policy

  • Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.

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Policy 09/05/2009

• The Primacy of Congress

  tags: Policy

  • I’m glad to see this point made Ezra, please keep addressing this theme. The executive is one of three powers, and no president gets to buck a Congress that doesn’t want to allow it, not for long, not in the end.

    I know there’s a lot of doubt about Obama’s skill at using his one-third piece of the leverage, but I will quietly wait a good couple of years yet to make that judgement, despite the wavering nature of daily appearances. I think he plays his limited power over a very long hand. Time will tell.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 09/02/2009

• Should the Polls Doom Health-Care Reform?

  tags: Policy

  • practically since the Inauguration I’ve considered that Obama’s greatest contribution to our nation in its current state is to stand unwaveringly as a voice of reason, and illustrate the noise-to-signal ratio across the land.

    What happens to subdue all this noise, I don’t quite know. I’m not sure if Obama himself has a plan beyond this, or simply intends to prevail with reason even if it takes eight years. Or fail trying even, perhaps.

    But the media having bite-size words to describe it, and the people beginning to see its insanity, are together the sine qua non for progress out of it.

    Posted by: wapomadness | September 1, 2009 3:46 PM
    | Report abuse

    and I neglected to say thank you to Ezra – I appreciate your making the effort to put this into words, to help cut through the cacophony.

    It’s not about health care, or even politics. It’s about the overthrow of reason through sheer scale of unreason, by actions unskillful and meaningless, but coldly willing to inflict massive violence on the truth.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 08/29/2009

• Pentagon Official Questions U.S. Message to Muslims – NYTimes.com

  tags: Policy

  • “To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate,” Admiral Mullen wrote in the critique, an essay to be published Friday by Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal.
  • “I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all,” he wrote. “They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.”
  • Admiral Mullen expressed concern over a trend to create entirely new government and military organizations to manage a broad public relations effort to counter anti-Americanism, which he said had allowed strategic communication to become a series of bureaucracies rather than a way to combat extremist ideology.
  • “That’s the essence of good communication: having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves,” Admiral Mullen wrote. “We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us. That isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.”
  • Admiral Mullen did not single out specific government communications programs for criticism, but wrote that “there has been a certain arrogance to our ‘strat comm’ efforts.” He wrote that “good communications runs both ways.”

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Policy 08/27/2009

• The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  tags: Policy

  • They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 08/26/2009

• Ezra Klein – The Other Klein Says True Things

  tags: Policy

  • well, you guys sure know how to crowd out a discussion.

    Don’t you know that people gave up on this thread, and went back to a more fruitful source, namely Ezra’s other posts?

    I stopped when I read this:
    “I’ve seen your stats on tort reform and I don’t buy them. I believe that…”

    Which translates as, “I’ve seen your facts and prefer this version of reality, with no facts supplied to get in its way.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 08/19/2009

• Ezra Klein – The Liberal Revolt

  tags: Policy

  • The problem, I think, is that there is a tendency to understand heath-care reform as an equal negotiation in which all sides want a deal, and you can game out various bargaining stratagems. But health-care reform is not a negotiation. It’s a campaign. Reformers wants a deal, even as some differ on its precise shape. The opposition wants to kill the deal entirely. And that gives the opponents a lot more power to say “no.” “No” isn’t their fallback position. It’s their position. The supporters — if they’re not sociopaths of some sort — actually do want to extend health-care coverage to 40 million people and regulate the insurance industry and create out-of-pocket caps and make life better for millions and millions of people. That makes it hard to say “no.” Being a decent person turns out to be a terrible weakness. And the pressure is even greater because the history of this stuff is that you don’t get a deal at the end of the day. Failure isn’t an unlikely outcome. It’s the default.

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Policy 08/15/2009

• Ezra Klein – Time Heals All Wounds

  tags: Policy

  • ” If anything, the suspicion that public popularity would make it impossible to roll back changes that I oppose on principle gives me even more reason to oppose something like the public option.”

    Bingo.

    That, in one sentence, summarizes the conservative argument against health care reform.

    The principle is the key thing. The government must be made small enough to drown in a bathtub. Obama must be destroyed.

    The facts that our health care is destroying our economy, that many people are now unable to get the health care they need, that in a decade or two MOST people will not get the health care they need all mean nothing. Trying to fix the system means nothing.

    It is the principle that counts.

    Posted by: PatS2 | August 14, 2009 5:51 PM
    | Report abuse

    ah, thank you PatS2, a breath of clarity. The blurry logic of this opposition makes me lose sight of things that were once clear.

    After the last administration ended I relaxed and lost sight of that stance of denying all evidence of the senses in favor of the pre-conceived doctrine.

    Now the shape of all this “ruckus” comes back into focus for me.

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Policy 08/14/2009

• Ezra Klein – What Health Care Can Learn From Whole Foods

  tags: Policy

  • Whether he’s “right wing” or a “libertarian,” John Mackey is a rich man whose views reflect his economic status. People like my son, who has Type 1 diabetes through no fault of his own, do not factor into his mindset.

    If an insurance company won’t insure my son at an affordable rate — and they won’t of their own accord — he should look to charity for support, according to Mr. Mackey.

    So whatever you call it, this is pretty much the same view that would have been put forth by Cornelius Vanderbilt or any of the other Gilded Age plutocrats. It is a disgrace in our era. People who aren’t rich and yet agree with Mr. Mackey are dupes.

    Mr. Mackey, you may be smug about the high-deductible policies you offer your employees, but this is the end of my support for Whole Foods.

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Policy 08/04/2009

• The Optimist | The American Prospect

  tags: Policy

  • Strange as it is, there is something admirable, tough, and consistent in Obama’s cockeyed optimism about our institutions. It’s not like he doesn’t know that our democratic institutions have failed. Rather, by asserting that they are capable of actually governing, he is, in effect, demanding that they do so, calling them out in much the way that he has called out conservatism: by taking it seriously.

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Policy 08/01/2009

• Health Care Spending Disparities Stir a Fight – NYTimes.com

  tags: Policy

  • Published: June 8, 2009

    WASHINGTON — President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, with Mr. Obama even citing it at a meeting last week with two dozen Democratic senators.

  • “He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’ ”

• Health industry is generous to Blue Dogs – Washington Post- msnbc.com

  tags: Policy

  • A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money — about 25 percent — from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

    Most of the major corporations and trade groups in those sectors are regular contributors to the Blue Dog PAC. They include drugmakers such as Pfizer and Novartis; insurers such as WellPoint and Northwestern Mutual Life; and industry organizations such as America’s Health Insurance Plans. The American Medical Association also has been one of the top contributors to individual Blue Dog members over the past 20 years.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 07/31/2009

• Ezra Klein – Obama Speaks About Speaking

  tags: Policy

  • This quote from LBJ: “…it is so clear indeed that we marvel not simply at the passage of this bill, but what we marvel at is that it took so many years to pass it.”

    I trust that we will pass some kind of reform this year. And this will be the start of more to come. It all takes time.

    And btw I love Calvin Jones’s point about health care being tied to a job – what a damper on an efficient labor market this has been.

  • and getting back to the point of Ezra’s post – I fully expect Obama to figure out how to communicate all this to the nation, clearly, cleanly, and in a time of subverted and corrupt media communications.

    First, I’m in awe of his desire to do it, and second, this is one of the greatest tests so far of the reach of his abilities.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 07/29/2009

• Ezra Klein – For, And Against, Reappointing Ben Bernanke

  tags: Policy

  • I agree with RobbL about the (de)merits of the situation. It was a disgrace and even in this disgraceful age there should be at least some token punishment (justice would be too much to hope for).

    And I’ve argued that the Fed should be reformed along the lines that William Greider is advocating currently:
    http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/the_problems_with_the_federal.html

    However, as I’ve also said before, Obama obviously has never wanted to mess with the finance system, at least not at this stage of his game. He was ambushed by the meltdown, a red-hot coal tossed from the outgoing regime. He has other things to do, and he’s content for now just to restore the status quo.

    Maybe in the future we get to reform all this. I’m sure Obama would back it if the country would show the muscle for it. We’ll have to do the heavy lifting.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 07/25/2009

• Lexington: The Obama cult | The Economist

  Obama became President six months ago, in the middle of a worldwide financial meltdown brought about by the laissez-faire “policies” so admired by “The Economist”. In those six months, a good measure of confidence and viability has been restored to the economic system, and reforms are being introduced to prevent another similar debacle (until the Republicans can sell the next Hoover-Nixon-Reagan-Bush, and rape the system yet again). Obama has begun to unravel Guantanamo, and ended the use of torture. He has nominated a Supreme Court Justice who will win confirmation easily, and reverse the trend toward appointing flat-earthers too stupid to memorize an Oath of Office less complex than a nursery rhyme despite having three years to master it. He has pushed the debate on universal health care and energy policy farther in 180 days than all of the Presidents before him did in the history of the country. He has begun the withdrawl from Iraq, and changed course (for better or worse)in Afghanistan. He has restored the belief of the world at large that America can lead, and can behave rationally, without divorcing her selfish interests from their world context. Not bad, given the all-out attempt of the ultraconservative Rump that is now the Republican Party to sabotage him at every turn.

  Very few Obama supporters saw him as a Messiah; most saw him as a welcome change from a befuddled fool and his incompetent lock-step cronies, and a return to the progressive narrative of world and American history that was so rudely and disastrously interrupted by the Bush Administration. Given the financial straits he inherited (unlike the peace and prosperity that Bush was handed), it’s remarkable that he has kept so many balls in the air so successfully.

  The demagoguery of the American right (Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Faux News, etc.) is what got America and the world into the mess they’re in. It’s sad to see “The Economist”, which has had a tradition of at least maintaining its intellectual integrity while trying to explain why failed 19t

  tags: Policy

• Ezra Klein – Obama Returns to Campaign Footing

  tags: Policy

  • The reason I visited the Cleveland Clinic is because along with the Mayo Clinic, they have been able to drive down costs more than any other health care system out there, while maintaining some of the highest quality.

    Now, when I asked how did you go about doing it, well, they started this thing — when was it started, Cleveland Clinic? 1921. And they — what they’ve done is — for example, doctors who are part of the Cleveland Clinic get paid a salary instead of being paid fee-for-service. So that makes it easier for them to make some of these changes, because people don’t feel like maybe they’re losing some money out of pocket; they just know that they’re getting a salary.

    Now, that’s not maybe the thing that every doctor is going to want to do. But there are other ways that we can take that same approach where they start thinking in terms of what’s needed for the patient, and making sure that they’re getting reimbursed for what’s good for the patient, and they don’t then have to worry about what’s the government saying, or what’s the insurance company saying;

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Policy 07/23/2009

• Obama Talks Health Care With Fred Hiatt – washingtonpost.com

  tags: Policy

  • I’ve been in office six months. I think sometimes people forget the fact that I think at this point in Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidency, their major initiative hadn’t even gotten off the ground yet. I mean, in some ways we’re our own worst enemy because we’ve gotten so many things done in these first six months, a lot of them dealing with extraordinary circumstances, that the sense is somehow that we have been putting off things that are also important to us. I just can’t do everything at once.

  • So I think that the perception that we haven’t been worried about this is partly subject to circumstances. You had — we had to come out with a stimulus early. That was not what I would have preferred to do. I then had an omnibus because the previous administration and Congress had not been able to sort through their problems. And I will confess that there were aspects of that that I did not like, but I had to make a decision — at a time when I wasn’t clear whether or not the economy was going to get even worse and we potentially were going to have to take even more extraordinary action — about the consequences of being embroiled in an enormous budget fight about last year’s business.

    We then had, by law, we had to introduce our budget, and then we had the supplemental, all at a time when government revenues are tanking.

    And so I understand why a deficit hawk would be nervous. I’m nervous about this. And if you talk to my senior advisors, they’ll tell you I’m on them every day about how are we going to make sure that we’re positioning ourselves to take care of this long term.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.