The Clown Car Comes To MN-04

The Pioneer Press‘ Bill Salisbury must have had a tough time not laughing out loud as he typed this up concerning the four announced Republican challengers for Betty McCollum’s seat, three of whom attended a GOP candidate forum last Thursday:

[Joe] Blum, 29, who recently resigned as an ice rink manager’s assistant and hockey announcer to campaign full time, said the “tea party atmosphere” that is sweeping the nation would help him win.

“I’m a firm believer in the tea party. It’s going to thrive,” he predicted.

Well, gee, tell that to Doug Hoffman over in NY-23. I’m sure he’ll love to hear it.

[Teresa] Collett, 53, has a more developed plan for winning. No Republican candidate has spent more than $250,000 to defeat McCollum, she said, and she thinks it will take at least $1 million and an “army of volunteers” to win. She’s confident she can raise that sum from a nationwide network of contacts.

After money and volunteers, her strategy calls for one more ingredient: “Give me three debates with Betty,” she said.

I hope, should those debates occur, that Betty asks for them to be held at Rumours, and that she brings up Prof. Collett’s homophobia.

But I digress:

[Brad] Lee, 60, said he decided to run last summer because he was concerned about Congress’ “uncontrolled spending” and the debt it is heaping on his children and grandchild.

With 35 years of business experience, Lee said, he knows what it takes to expand the economy. He’d start by cutting federal taxes and reducing tax burdens.

A Navy Vietnam veteran and Cardinal Stritch University graduate, he managed manufacturing plants before starting his financial-services business. He has been active in Republican campaigns since 2002 and already has the endorsement of the White Bear Lake Chamber of Commerce.

Lee thinks he can win, in part, because he sees strong signs of support everywhere he goes, including cheers from the crowd at the St. Paul St. Patrick’s Day parade. “People are really energized this year,” he said.

Dude, it’s St. Paddy’s Day. People are drunk. Drunks cheer anything.

[Gene] Rechtzigel, the fourth Republican candidate, did not attend the forum and declined to be interviewed before the party’s April 17 endorsing convention in Vadnais Heights.

Probably a wise move.

In which we learn to read more deeply than headlines

The headline was “Health care companies pull stock market higher“

But reading more deeply, we learn that “Hospital operator Tenet Healthcare Corp. rose 9 percent, while insurer UnitedHealth Group Inc. fell 3.2 percent.

So, instead of jerking our knees (or whatever part of the body is involved in reflexive reaction to headlines), we investigate. Screening American stocks for Large and Midcaps in the same sub-industry as United vs. the same sub-industry as Tenet, we find the following for the 1-day reaction to the passage of healthcare (hospital groups are smaller than health insurance groups):

Insurers Hospitals
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UNH $40B -3.17% THC $3B +9.04%
AET $15B +0.52% BKD $2B +0.64%
CVH $4B -0.42% CYH $4B +6.16%
HNT $3B -1.30% HMA $2B +11.32%
HUM $9B -1.36% LPT $2B +5.78%
WLP $29B -1.05% UHC $3B +6.18%
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx WOOF $2B +2.17%
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-1.1% +/-1.2% 5.90% +/-3.7%

Why would hospitals rise while insurers sink? Maybe hospitals think they will get paid more regularly, while insurers think that their prospects are not unlimited.

One-day stock market results don’t mean a lot. But clearly there’s more to the headline than those who paint this as an unmitigated victory for the healthcare industry would have us think.

In which Michael Moore and Robert Reich (and even Noam Chomsky) reassure Phoenix Woman

Robert Reich, minimalist (via t/o):

It’s not nearly as momentous as the passage of Medicare in 1965 and won’t fundamentally alter how Americans think about social safety nets. But the likely passage of Obama’s health care reform bill is the biggest thing Congress has done in decades, and has enormous political significance for the future….

Obama’s legislation comes from an alternative idea, begun under the Eisenhower administration and developed under Nixon, of a market for health care based on private insurers and employers. …

So don’t believe anyone who says Obama’s health care legislation marks a swing of the pendulum back toward the Great Society and the New Deal. Obama’s health bill is a very conservative piece of legislation, building on a Republican rather than a New Deal foundation. …

The significance of Obama’s health legislation is more political than substantive. For the first time since Ronald Reagan told America government is the problem, Obama’s health bill reasserts that government can provide a major solution. In political terms, that’s a very big deal….

We will not return to the New Deal or the Great Society, but nor will we continue to wallow in the increasingly obsolete Reagan view that we don’t need a strong and competent government. Today’s vote confirms our hope that we can have both strength and competence in Washington. It is an audacious hope, but we have no choice.

Michael Moore, optimist:

To My Fellow Citizens, the Republicans:

Thanks to last night’s vote, that child of yours who has had asthma since birth will now be covered after suffering for her first nine years as an American child with a pre-existing condition.

Thanks to last night’s vote, that 23-year-old of yours who will be hit one day by a drunk driver and spend six months recovering in the hospital will now not go bankrupt because you will be able to keep him on your insurance policy.

Thanks to last night’s vote, after your cancer returns for the third time — racking up another $200,000 in costs to keep you alive — your insurance company will have to commit a criminal act if they even think of dropping you from their rolls.
Yes, my Republican friends, even though you have opposed this health care bill, we’ve made sure it is going to cover you, too, in your time of need….

So don’t feel too bad. We’re a long way from universal health care. Over 15 million Americans will still be uncovered — and that means about 15,000 will still lose their lives each year because they won’t be able to afford to see a doctor or get an operation. But another 30,000 will live. I hope that’s ok with you.

Added: Via David W. at Avedon Carol’s Sideshow, Sahil Kapur at RawStory:

“If I were in Congress,” he said, “I’d probably hold my nose and vote for it, because the alternative of not passing it is worse, bad as this bill is. Unfortunately, that’s the reality.”

In which Dean Baker tells Phoenix Woman that she’s probably mostly wrong

Dean Baker, an economist with whom I often agree (except for thinking he is totally full of it on the pharmaceutical industry) says this:

The passage of President Obama’s health care reform will make a difference in the live of tens of millions of people. The subsidies will make insurance affordable to millions of families who could not pay the unsubsidized rate. More importantly, by prohibiting insurers from discriminating against people with serious health conditions, those who are currently covered will have real insurance for the first time. People will no longer have to worry that a serious illness will cause them to lose their job and then their insurance.

This is real progress, but the bill does little to change the fact that health care in the United States is ridiculously expensive and, if current trends continue, will grow more unaffordable through time.

He unfortunately proposes medical tourism (like your average family can take off for Thailand for an appendectomy?) and destroying the financial incentives that formerly made the US pharmaceutical industry the envy of the world (before globalization allowed companies to do their research in Bangladesh and then ship it to the US) as solutions. These are not solutions. But this part of what he says is very true:

We can yap all we want about health care reform, but the reality is that Washington is a cesspool. The special interests own the place and there is no plausible story in which legislation that seriously challenges the interests of the medical industrial complex has a prayer of passage any time soon.

The Democrats had a chance to do something really transformational. They have instead succeeded in putting a Bandaid on a broken system. It will slow the bleeding, but not heal the wound. Costs will continue to plague the system, but now they will become budgetary problems. While Obama is president, there’s a chance of fixing this horrible mess. The first time that Republicans seize political control, they will cut medical coverage in the name of deficit reduction until enough people die that they lose power again. Or until the whole country dissolves into anarchy from a loss of faith in government.

In Which I Wish, Desperately, That I Was Wrong

As I write this, Congressional Democrats are about to give, at great political cost to themselves, the insurance, pharmaceutical and other health-care industries in America a big fat gift that will further enrich them at our expense, that will eventually eliminate all coverage for abortion in all insurance plans nationwide, and that will force the 45-million-odd Americans who aren’t on the health-insurance company rolls because they can’t afford health insurance to cough up thousands of dollars they don’t have to buy insurance that will be even worse and more expensive than it is today, or face the wrath of the IRS. And all of this without a robust public option to provide the competition needed to keep the insurance companies from gouging us.

Why are they doing this? Apparently because they’ve been told, over and over again, that President Obama is doomed if they don’t. The irony is that, in being forced to vote for this massive turkey, they have not only sealed their doom come November, but their loss will bring about the very 1994-style electoral doom for Obama that they’re told they must prevent at all costs. Republicans are licking their chops and are already hurling a flurry of anti-mandate amendments at the bill, amendments they know will fail, just so they can use their opposition to insurance mandates to score points with voters in the coming campaign ads we’ll be carpet-bombed with for the next six months.

Aside from a stimulus bill that was half the size it needed to be, and now a bill that gives trillions to the health and insurance industries and sticks us with the bill even as it aims another blow at Roe v. Wade, Obama and the Democrats haven’t got very much done over the past year even when they had 60 seats in the Senate and 257 in the House. What happens after they get their clocks cleaned this November? They won’t be able to “fix” the bill even if they wanted to — and so long as they value the deals of May 11, 2009 more than the wishes of their constituents, they won’t want to anyway. (Not that the currently-fashionable crop of corporate-owned Democrats have done much revisiting of bad bills they’d promised to “fix”. See also: NAFTA and DADT.)

I wish, desperately, that I was wrong. I fear that I am not.

(Crossposted at DailyKos.)

The inmates run the asylum

Citizens for Tax Justice:

Arizona’s budget-balancing techniques have bordered on the comical in recent months. Lawmakers have enacted legislation that would help balance the current year’s budget by selling off state buildings, including the state capitol — and then immediately leasing them back, providing a one-shot revenue boost for this year, and then actually worsening the state’s budget deficit in every ensuing year as the state pays a variety of new landlords. As a “Daily Show” interview displayed horrifically, state lawmakers simply had no answer to the question “what happens next year?”

Well, now they do. On Thursday, Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that repeals the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), making them the first state in the nation to take this drastic, short-sighted step.

Some truth leaks into the WSJ editorial pages

Imagine my amazement to read the following:

Socialism, or social democracy, or whatever else you want to call it, doesn’t seem to have hurt stockholders overseas too badly. Over the past 10 years, according to MSCI Barra, stock markets across socialized Europe have produced total returns of about 2% a year in U.S. dollar terms, according to MSCI Barra. The figure for France is just over 2% and for left-wing Britain and Holland nearer to 3%. Pinko Denmark has boomed by 10% a year.

Meanwhile, here in the land of the free, investors have made zero….

Socialized medicine may not be so bad for your wealth after all.

Now, of course this is an OpEd, not an editorial– a classic Murdoch scheme to stir up rage among readers and draw attention to his properties with their declining levels of actual journalism. In fact, Europe as a whole does not have socialized medicine. What it does have is a universal, state-paid guarantee of medical care, but the medicine ranges from fully socialized (e.g., the UK) to essentially all private (e.g., the Netherlands). The reasoning is also shallow post hoc ergo propter hoc, e.g. there is garbage and there are flies. So the flies created the garbage. But since Murdoch properties have no editing standards, sloppy writing like this is the norm.

Anyway, basically, the question is this: We spend 16 points of GDP on healthcare, mostly because our insurance system creates perverse incentives. A typical country with state-guaranteed medicine spends 10. The outcomes are approximately equal (although the US scores poorly on most measures of the effectiveness of its medical system, it also has a much higher poverty rate, and that could explain the difference). And most of that excess spending does not cause stronger growth. An operation that extends someone’s life by two days may increase this year’s GDP, but it doesn’t increase the productive capacity of the nation as a whole.

If instead we spent those 6 points of GDP on almost anything else, there would be more money for all sorts of things, including real investment in companies. Not stock purchases, which mostly amount to asset inflation, but R&D. After all, who pays inflated medical costs? Individuals, yes. Governments, yes. But companies, as well– and then they have less money for R&D. Furthermore, when governments pay more, eventually taxes go up. When individuals pay more, consumption droops.

And that’s what we’re seeing. US companies are falling behind. They are desperately substituting cheap labor for technological advantage. It’s a quick road to Third World status.

We absolutely must lower the costs of medicine while maintaining quality, and increasing the number of people who get decent care. The survival of the country depends on it.
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Bonus! Via John Cole, Swampland’s Kate Pickert has a hysterical story about what can go wrong when you put a drug-addled demagogue in charge of organizing very stupid people.

After you read the story, try dialing (206) 666-6666. Or just imagine all the right-wing posters you have ever known, after they run into facts and bruise their egos.

The face of evil

ProgressOhio — March 17, 2010 — SEE THE VIDEO RESPONSES: Interview with Bob The Parkinson’s Hero!

COLUMBUS – In a scene reminiscent of non-violent civil rights confrontations from the 1960s, Ohio Tea Partiers quickly turned ugly when facing off with health care advocates in front of Ohio Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s office Tuesday.

In shocking video taken by a Columbus Dispatch reporter Doral Chenowith yesterday, Tea Party protestors mock a seated counter-protestor with a sign indicating he has Parkinson’s disease. They then proceed to hurl wadded up bills at him shouting, “I’ll decide when to give you money!”

On March 17th outside of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s (D-OH15) district office teabaggers mocked and scorned a man who had a sign stating that he had Parkinson’s. They told him “he’s in the wrong end of town to ask for handouts”, called him a communist and threw dollar bills at him to “pay for his health care”.

My comment: As a Christian, it’s fascinating to watch both the video and the responses to it.

Bob is brave just for hanging in against his illness and not succumbing to self-pity. For him to face angry, shouting political opponents is angelic. In gospel terms, he is one of the least of these.

Those who attack him are the face of evil: not horned monsters, but ordinary people who [are] blind to what they are doing. Like Cain, they are filled with anger.

Saddest of all are those who see, yet defend evil.

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Added: Digby links to a Forbes article by Bruce Bartlett in which David Frum, of all people, interviews teabaggers and finds their knowledge of what’s going on to be sadly lacking.

Digby titles it, “Willingly Brainwashed.” I would title it, “Nothing in the Laundry Basket.”

Friday Cat Blogging

This Is For “Mule Rider”

John Ensign’s just been served.

Subpoenas.

Yum, yum.