Representative Wilson says he apologized for merely interrupting the President.
My statement to Rahm Emanuel was a general apology to anyone and everyone about speaking out of turn. Period.
Really? If you raise your hand next time, we’ll forgive the fact that you called the President of the United State “a liar” and trampled all over the truth.
A variety of sources have proved Wilson’s unequivocal lie. H.R. 3200 does not include health care for illegal immigrants:
H.R. 3200: Sec 246 — NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS
Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.
Yet Wilson continues to assert illegal immigrants will be covered. Is Wilson misinformed? Does he understand only what he wants to understand? I reject the cynicism that all politicians are crooks. Exaggeration is inherent in political debate. It’s an art form. It’s also common in boardrooms, at dinner tables and in bars. Rational people have a sense for when an argument is waged unfairly. We have a sense for when exaggeration goes too far. It’s called distortion and eventually, dishonesty.
A half truth is a whole lie.
~Yiddish Proverb
Normative values and social standards influence the rise and fall of corporate corruption over time. The same is true for the rules of political engagement. The neglect and subjugation of facts, empirical evidence and independent thought corrodes our political discussions. In an increasingly complex world, our collective expectations for truthfulness and comity in American politics have reached dangerously low levels.
If you need further evidence, observe the rallying around Wilson’s “boldness” and get your free t-shirt!
Sarah Palin is worried about “Death Panels”. Chuck Grassley is worried about “pulling the plug on Grandma”. Seniors are worried that nefarious socialists will conspire in turning “their medicare” into government run health care. Zach Braff, from Scrubs, is worried about removing excess nipples. What’s my irrational fear? I’m extremely worried those stingy government bureaucrats won’t include coverage for my hair transplant. I demand health reform too!
Regrettably, the Republican strategy to scare elderly Americans about health reform appears to be working. To be sure, Democrats have employed identical tactics when Republicans have attempted to reform Social Security and Medicare. In both cases, fear mongering poisons the opportunity for much needed reform.
Politics is fiercely competitive. Policy debates matter. Brazenly perpetuating disgraceful misinformation about health care “death panels” and “rationing” goes too far. Moderate, reasonable Republicans must say enough. A functioning democracy presupposes an informed electorate and a constructive opposition. The current antics of the GOP imperil the balance and long-term effectiveness of American democracy. Joe Klein’s Time column captures the lamentable state of affairs.
How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? And another question: How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?
I’m not going to try. I’ve written countless “Democrats in Disarray” stories over the years and been critical of the left on numerous issues in the past. This year, the liberal insistence on a marginally relevant public option has been a tactical mistake that has enabled the right’s “government takeover” disinformation jihad. There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees’ unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don’t retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.
It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama’s plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush’s presidency has been obliterated. The party’s putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama’s political prospects. In 1993, when the Clintons tried health-care reform, the Republican John Chafee offered a creative (in fact, superior) alternative — which Kristol quashed with his famous “Don’t Help Clinton” fax to the troops. There is no Republican health-care alternative in 2009. The same people who rail against a government takeover of health care tried to enforce a government takeover of Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life decisions. And when Palin floated the “death panel” canard, the number of prominent Republicans who rose up to call her out could be counted on one hand.
The cost of the current American health care system threatens the competitiveness of American business and the financial security of many American families. Conservatives recognize that we cannot afford our health care system. Will the Grand Old Party please stand up?
Hey Maria, you need to be 65 to receive Medicare! In the rapidly devolving cable news world, staged debate and provocation replace reporting and information. Armed with prepared questions, talking points and a cursory understanding of the topic, news personalities referee debates. These “talk” programs are much less expensive to produce than traditional news programs that rely on large teams of reporters, mobile camera trucks, researchers, etc. The ratings are better and it’s a trend that is unlikely to change. Unfortunately, these news personalities increasingly editorialize about subjects they do not completely understand. CNBC Anchor Maria Bartiromo provides the latest example as Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) attempts to explain that Medicare is government managed health care and patients are very satisfied:
Bartiromo: How come you don’t use it? You don’t have it. How come you don’t have it?
Weiner: Because I’m not 65.
Bartiromo: Yeah… c’mon!
As we’ve noted in other posts, CNBC and Larry Kudlow don’t have a sterling record of providing reliable or objective economic assessments either.
The misinformation and ignorance of Sarah Palin’s recent Facebook posting speaks for itself:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
By comparison, Andrew Sullivan offers some advice to fellow Conservatives about health care reform:
Real conservatives should point out that the current proposals are not tough enough on costs – and criticize Obama for that, not for fantasies like a communist takeover or euthanasia program for special needs kids . . .
I’ve come to accept that the fiscal and economic costs of the current system, however wonderful it has been for a few decades, simply cannot be sustained much longer. I say that not because I have become a socialist, but because the US is on the brink of the kind of bankruptcy it will be very hard to recover from if we do not tackle its source now. Taking measures to avoid fiscal collapse even greater than today’s is a conservative impulse. Letting one sector of the economy destroy the rest of it – and public finances too – is sheer recklessness.
What do you want, GOP? A permanent populist culture-war? Or actual solutions to pressing problems? Let us know when you’ve matured enough to answer that question.
The House chart was a clever tactic. In reality, the existing health care system is no more complex, as demonstrated in a chart by the New Republic .
The speed and repetition of the use of this chart reveals the coordinated anti- health reform agenda of these specific cable programs and their operating mantra: if you say it over and over again, it becomes true . . . at least in the minds of some viewers.
It also underscores the dreadfully low standards for newsworthiness at these outlets. A mocking health reform chart is the domain of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart and late night comics.
But then again, one would expect NFL widereceiver, Keyshawn Johnson, to peddle his new reality show, Tackling Design, on day time programs like the View and Oprah, not serious, substantive programs like Hannity’s America.
The health care reform debate engenders what attorneys call a “parade of hypotheticals”. If Congress passes x, then y will happen. In a departure from conjecture and hypothesis, I share some empirical evidence from Capital Words, which tracks word frequency in the Congressional Record.
There’s been an enormous amount of consolidation in the health insurance industry over the last several years. Aetna bought a lot of competitors. It reached 21 million members. And, but what it realized and what investors began to see is that a lot of the businesses that it had bought were not all that profitable. . . . among the things they did was bring Ron Williams in. And Williams, among the first thing he did was order a revamp of the IT system . . . so that the company could determine more about which accounts were not profitable or marginally profitable. So with that new system, he was able, and the other executives to identify the accounts that they wanted to get rid of. And over the course of a very few years, they shed eight million members.
I reject the view by many on the left who demonize Aetna, Cigna and other private insurers. These corporations are rational actors who are doing exactly what they should be doing — maximizing profit. Unfortunately, the sick, the poor and the elderly are not profitable groups to insure at affordable rates. As a result, I share Potter’s conclusion.
That we shouldn’t fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it’s been proven in [other] countries . . . You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
As mentioned in prior posts, AOR are fierce capitalists. Free market solutions are nearly always preferred, except when there is a market failure. Despite phony protests from Republicans, the U.S. health insurance market exhibits two characteristics of a market failure: 1) certain segments (elderly and poor) are neither profitable nor well-served and 2) the market lacks sufficient competition.
The bottom line is that, when it comes to health care, all the market is really capable of doing is providing reasonably affordable care to the young and healthy, people for whom the risk profile is essentially random and therefore the economic model more closely resembles that of other major types of insurance (car, home, life). But a system that only covers the young and the healthy is, by definition, a failure. That’s why every other industrialized country has long since adopted some sort of government insurance system.
Local health insurance monopolies represent another failure. The American Medical Association, a traditional opponent of health reform, reported that in 2008, 94% of commercial markets were “highly concentrated” according to standards set by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department:
Market shares and concentration (HHI) measures are presented for 314 metropolitan areas and 42 states. This study finds the vast majority of markets are highly concentrated and are dominated by one or two health insurers. These findings, coupled with higher insurance premiums, higher profits, lower scope of benefits and high barriers to entry, leads to the conclusion that health insurers are exercising market power in many parts of the country.
More evidence of a failed system of incentives is found in Dr. Gawande’s excellent New Yorker article. He concludes that the incentives to overuse medical care explain dramatic cost differences across regions and markets for equivalent care.
In a 2003 study, a Dartmouth team, examined the treatment received by a million elderly Americans diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, a hip fracture, or a heart attack. They found that patients in higher-spending regions received sixty per cent more care than elsewhere. They got more frequent tests and procedures, more visits with specialists, and more frequent admission to hospitals. Yet they did no better than other patients, whether this was measured in terms of survival, their ability to function, or satisfaction with the care they received. If anything, they seemed to do worse.
To Republicans alarming the public about the imminent rationing of health care, I submit that any health care system rations care. The U.S. just does it indiscriminately and insufficiently. It’s irrefutable that we prescribe and pay for too much unnecessary health care. Let’s move beyond the debate about whether we need a public insurance option. We do. Let’s debate the most relevant and most difficult question: how should we pay for comprehensive health reform?
Remember Joe the Plumber? On CNN’s State of the Union this weekend, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, perhaps preparing for a 2012 presidential bid, invoked John the Farmer as he recited familiar Republican criticisms of a public health care option:
The government is going to come right into the marketplace and compete. So it would be equivalent to say, you know, John, you’re a corn farmer and the government is going to put up a row of corn or a farm next to you and compete with you. We don’t do that in the United States, it’s a different kind of model with a different kind of culture and society.
Pawlenty’s perfunctory, distorted description misses the mark. The proposed public option is an insurance not a provider alternative. The government no more puts up a row of corn or a farm next to John the Farmer than it seeks to build hospitals or employ Tim the doctor. It would continue to employ Carl the claims processor who already works for Medicare.
If by “that” Pawlenty means government involvement in insurance markets, we do indeed “do that in the United States” in the specific industry he cites. The Department of Agriculture’s Federal Crop Insurance Corporation provides crop insurance to protect farmers from unexpected disasters. An unexpected disaster sounds a bit like an expensive health emergency. Medical problems caused 62% of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers.
The farming industry is hardly a model of unfettered capitalism and a large recipient of government subsidy. According to the EWG’s Farm Subsidy Database, MN farmers received $10.3B in subsidies from 1995 – 2006. One would expect the governor of the state that received the 5th most federal farm subsidies to have a better grasp of market dynamics.
Markets almost always yield lower cost, better service and higher quality, but individual markets involve varying degrees of government influence and competitive dynamics. Health insurance may be an exception, a market where profit motives do not yield the traditional benefits of greater efficiency and innovation.
On the contrary, health care costs are rising by as much as 9-10% per year, without any concomitant increase in the level of service. If JetBlue were raising the cost of its fares by 10 percent per year, they’d be out of business. …
What Will’s position reflects instead is ideology: who cares that the federal government could build a better mousetrap? They’re the government and that’s bad. His argument is really no more sophisticated than that.
“Government is bad” is neither a terribly thoughtful or constructive contribution to the health care reform debate. Surely Governor Pawlenty, George Will and the Republicans can do better.
