There’s lots to say about what happened today, but I need a little time to get my brain around it.
But this is — I hope — a sure thing: despite Scott Brown’s promise to be the 41st vote against “Obamacare,” he won’t be. There will be a health care bill enacted this year, and quite possibly this month. Most likely, the House will simply accept the Senate bill, which means it goes to the President without ever returning to the Senate. And bam, we’ve got health care reform. Woohoo.
There’s lots of damage that Brown can, and no doubt will, do on cap ‘n’ trade, financial reform, and other things. But health care? Nope. He’ll never have the chance.
UPDATE: And it’s just possible that my assumption is wrong. House Democrats appear to be hell-bent on getting nothing accomplished this year, or perhaps ever. Awesome.
A number of progressives say that they still can not vote to pass the Senate bill in the House, even though that would wrap up the reform project once and for all…. “If it comes down to that Senate bill or nothing, I think we’re going to end up with nothing, because I don’t hear a lot of support on our side for that bill,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA)…. “If she loses, it’s over,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) said this evening in New York.
Two high-profile progressives–Reps. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)–said the only way they could sign on to the Senate bill is if it was accompanied immediately, or even preceded by, a separate bill, making a number of major preemptive changes to what they regard as an inferior package…. “You should do the other stuff first and then pass the Senate bill,” Nadler told me. “I don’t see how I could vote for the Senate bill,” otherwise.
Oh great, guys. Look, I don’t much like the Senate bill either. But is nothing really the better option? That’s going to be a tough case to make. I was holding out hope that, post-conference, we’d end up with a somewhat better bill than what the Senate passed. That, it now appears, isn’t going to happen – it’s Senate bill or bust. And to Reps. Nadler and Weiner: how are you planning to get that preemptive fix-it bill through the Senate now? Just suck it up and do it, like Charley says.
2. Why does much/most of it kick in after 2012?
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p>I could be very wrong, but I think something’s up. Can somebody talk me down?
The big rally on Wall Street indicates that investors were clearly betting today on a Scott Brown victory. As the article I linked to states:
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p>The notion that insurance companies “loved” the reform bill in Congress, an idea peddled by some so-called “progressives” in order to link arms with the Republicans and kill reform, was always a flat lie. The insurance companies and Big Pharma scored a big victory with Scott Brown’s win.
I do not think that as of today Paul Kirk represents Massachusetts in the US Senate. I might be wrong, but you no longer have 60 votes.
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p>Even you this is false, Jim Webb wants to wait until Brown is seated.
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p>All stop.
until Brown is sworn in. The “Republican lawyers” who have been pushing this line are, AFAIK, wrong.
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p>But it’s pretty clear that there will be no health care votes in the Senate until Brown is in.
The Senate Secretary has to verify the election per Senate Rule 2, which says that the appointment must be certified by both a state’s governor and the state’s secretary of state.
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p>Once that happens, the Secretary can accept the election results and seat the Senator.
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p>However, that doesn’t take into consideration Massachusetts laws regarding certification of the results of a special election before that process begins.
I think they should just pass the Senate bill, and then develop a bill that modifies that revenue issues and allows for a Medicare buy-in, a version that can get 50+VP in the Senate. But just pass the Senate bill in the House ASAP.
I was in the VIP & media areas at the Park Plaza, and I heard one comment from Scott Brown that got a pretty big positive response. Don’t know if it was televised.
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p>That was his “no more back room deals” comment.
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p>You reap what you sow. The Dem leadership long ago abandoned any and all respect for the American people by unilaterally crafting “health care reform” behind closed doors, without disclosing legislative language let alone giving time for debate, ramming through votes, and creating a Frankenstein of a bill larded with favors (unions, Nebraska, Louisiana …)
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p>Unbelievable hubris far surpassing ANYTHING in the Bush/Cheney years.
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p>I await the town-by-town cross-tabs from tonight’s earthquake national election, but I’ll guess that enough MA independents were disgusted by the process.
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p>If the Obama administration decides any reform is better than none, no matter how awful and tortured, and they continue to act unilaterally along with the Dem leadership, they will doom Dem reps and senators in red states to defeat this fall.
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p>The best thing may be Scott Brown’s win, forcing compromise and possibly a fresh start.
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p>If not, nothing will pass, Republicans gain effective control of Congress in Nov., and the Obama administration will flame out in 2012.
Can you expound on what “compromise” looks like?
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p>It’s not like the Democrats came up with a bill and the Republicans said “that’s pretty good, but here are some improvements”.
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p>It was more like “Our version of health care reform is corporate tort reform and allowing health insurance companies to cross state borders, and we won’t vote for anything else”.
I don’t think, with respect, that it was as simple as that, but I could be wrong.
You need to view corporate tort reform with the context of what a corporation is: an artificial entity designed to limit liability to the entity rather than its owners. People can get thrown in prison for doing bad things; corporations can only be sued. By making it difficult for an individual to sue a corporation, you are giving enormous strength to that corporation. Likewise, limiting the financial penalties that a doctor or hospital faces for malpractice errors provides little incentive for a doctor to guard against such errors.
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p>Tort reform is the equivalent of mandatory MAXIMUM sentences for criminals. Like every crime would be at most, 5 years in jail. What’s the conservative opinion on that? Remember, corporations have no conscience, no morals. They only respond to incentives and disincentives, so if you take away a large disincentive for acting a certain way, they will act that way.
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p>Allowing health insurance companies to cross state borders would result in a Delaware-like rush to the state with the most favorable laws. It would take power away from the people in the states. If Massachusetts decided that health care companies should not be able to exclude someone for a pre-existing condition, companies would simply leave the state, move to the LCD state, and sell to MA residents.
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p>I’m open to being convinced otherwise, please feel free to do so.
Thanks. I love the analogy about criminal maximums. That is just perfect.
I’ve been very interested in the issue of “tort reform” (firmly, honorably, opposed) for years and have never heard it explained as similar to mandatory MAXIMUM sentence legislation. Extremely well put.
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p>And, yes, the irony of the “across state borders” argument is that it goes against fundamental conservative values by eliminating the state’s rights to govern themselves and effectively replaces state laws with (weaker) federal control.
This type of secrecy was typical in the Bush/Cheney years: closed door energy policy, environmental cutbacks defined by corporate interests, closed door torture policy, secret executive orders, and the secret classification of documents that had no vital national secrets. It has been called the Imperial Presidency for a reason.
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p>The problem is that once all these lawmakers saw this in action, their response was to do the same thing in return. But seeing how Senators Dodd and Dorgan have already retired, it’s obvious that some of the long-term Senators see this as the culmination of their life’s work. How do you punish lawmakers who aren’t up for re-election? Maybe they’ll all decide to cash out and take far more lucrative jobs in the private sector.
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p>As for Brown’s election forcing compromise? The Republicans have shown no ability to compromise from the beginning. He actually has to show that he’s willing to vote for a health care bill to have any legitimacy and nothing in his record actually shows this. Since the assumption is that he will be a “NO” vote, the only choices are to go around him or to start a new voting process that doesn’t require his vote in the Senate. If anything, I think Brown’s election makes it MORE likely that the House will rush the Senate bill through, rather than less.
Bush left with low approval ratings. And now, with the same hubris (but an order of magnitude greater) Dem Congressional leadership made Scott Brown’s election possible. Whether or not it’s voluntary retirement, many red state Dems are TOAST. Ram something through, and ALL red state Dems are toast.
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p>Ignore the political signals just sent, and Dems will lose control of Congress this fall. A majority of Americans do not like “reform” as crafted, so go ahead and ram it through. It will create a backlash so great whatever legislation you get will be neutered, and then repealed.
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p>The Dem leadership is legislating by fiat. The majority of Congress had not, and probably have not still, read the language. Voters know this and they are furious.
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p>Scott Brown is a wake up call. Ignore it at your peril.
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Democrats shouldn’t rush reform through before Brown is seated. I’m not as Blue as you guys, but I think it would be foolish for Pelosi to not follow this advice. If Democrats did this, it would damage the legitimacy of any reform and give the Republicans their ideal issue to run on in November.
Than the House passing exactly what the Senate did. If they don’t, HCR will be dead for another generation or two along with the Democratic majority.
More accurately, “Unpopular, progressive, government-controlled health care reform will be dead for a generation.”
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p>A majority of Americans are opposed to your HCR. Go ahead an detonate you political suicide vest. Pass the senate version.
Bring back the PO and numbers go up, which without the pretense of 60 you might as well do via reconciliation. Going that route we can afford to lose Lieberman, Nelson, Landreiu, and Lincoln along with any deal-sweetners they were given, which also brings down costs that people were concerned about. People seem to be objecting at least as much to the process as the substance, but as with the Clinton plan they still like many of the specifics.
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p>Thing is, that’s just not true. First of all, the Dems have 60% in the House and Senate. That’s not just a majority, that’s a strong majority. The threshold for most bills is 50%+1 … they’ve got long past that. They’re not obligated to get a set percent of Republicans to sign on.
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p>Secondly, it wasn’t behind closed doors. There was months and months of debate and hearings. If anything, it took too long.
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p>Thirdly, the fact that it was a Frankenstein of a bill indicates that there was give and take — bills written behind closed doors by leadership don’t look like that. It gets Frankenstein’ed up by amendments, by compromise. Who compromised? The Dems did. They didn’t all like the same parts, but they worked together using the rules to get a bill they could live with. Who didn’t compromise, not one iota? The Republicans. Their goal was to stall, delay, and then sink the thing. Period. They didn’t care about improving health care — they cared about Democrats failing, and to hell with their constituents in the short term. The Democrats let them get away with it, as did the media and the citizenry.
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p>You’ve got rose glasses, a short memory, or both. That, sir, is a complete laugher. COUGH! mission accomplished COUGH!
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p>Fresh start? So the Dems have 59 senators (well, peel off Lieberman, Landreau, and Nelson and it’s still 56)… and do you really think the Republicans will play ball now? Hell no. They’ve got momentum, and they got what they wanted when they were a mere 40. They’ll be even more entrenched. They won’t work for a solution, they’ll work to tar and feather Democrats all summer long to try and win more seats in 2010.
A majority of Americans do not like or want your progressive vision of health care reform (also a majority of MA voters!) All those tax increases. All those backroom cut deals (why are unions exempted from the Cadillac tax?) So many politicians NOT reading the legislative language.
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p>I, personally, do not want Sec. Sebelius dictating what benefits I shall receive in my health plan. But that where we’re going, and Americans don’t want it either.
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p>”Mission Accomplished”? Hubris? Maybe. Even if so, it’s a political marketing gaff. BFD. HCR in which the government takes control of 15% of the US economy? That’s hubris that matters.
Depending on the question, a majority of Americans do or don’t want “my” progressive version of health care reform.
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p>I, personally, don’t want some middle manager getting a salary bonus for denying my insurance claim when I need health care. So there.
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p>Maybe?!
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p>You can be sure his hubris matters to the loved ones of over 5000 US Soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can be damned sure.
If you don’t campaign, there is never any guarantee of winning any political campaign, for any apparently “safe” seat. Martha Coakley simply did not campaign until it was too late.
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p>Voters need to be constantly cultivated, like crops –not assembled at the last minute like machine parts. You can’t “cram” an election victory any more than you can force crops to grow an entire season in two weeks.
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p>All the infrastructure, support and voters were there, but as turnout numbers show, Coakley apparently did not think she would need to cultivate them for the general election.
This was a campaign to much given to robo calls. Since they didn’t get their message out clearly enough and early enough we got to hear phone calls from every Democrat from the Mayor to the County Commissioner to the President himself.
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p>It also seems to me that every year GOTV is going to get harder and harder as the Democratic base gets more and more tired of being harassed by telephone.
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p>Could someone maybe think about this? Hello? Anyone there? click!
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p>We seem to be pretending that every campaign is The Most Important One Ever, so it’s okay to harass our base because this is the Most Important Election ever. Eventually, we’ll shed voters over this.
Initial turnout reports from many Democratic urban strongholds was extremely low (Brockton, Chelsea, New Bedford, Holyoke, Springfield, etc.)
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p>Clearly, committed Coakley voters were not ID’d in those places for anyone to “Get Out” on election day.
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p>And that’s because the Coakley campaign did not do any meaningful campaigning in those places during the general election.
I heard when called by GOTV volunteers, registered Dems waved them off.
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p>Whether or not they even voted may not have been a function of GOTV machinery but one of enthusiasm (lack of.)
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p>Keep blaming it on optics and poor campaigning. Turn out was exceptional for a special election. Brown won on the merits of his political arguments to which Coakley had no effective response.
I’ve been saying for months that as a blogger, all I’d seen was campaign by press release (like, sometimes 2-3 a day, especially near each election). How hard would it have been for some low level staffer to pick up the phone or email account and contact the bloggers? Even en masse? Invite them to be part of the campaign? I blogged not a whit about this race, there was nothing to blog about until this week.
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p>Not to be a circular firing squad, but we do need to know how NOT to go about a campaign and it seems to me that we need to examine this one.
Even in a short election, even in January.
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p>You go to your most organized town committees, and you ask them to set up precinct captains and block captains. Even if they don’t have coverage for all precincts and wards… and then you get them walk lists and you knock on doors.
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p>You take that VoterID and you bring it back to HQ. Your 1s: you ask them to contact a few neighbors, to talk up Coakley once you give them talking points. A few lawn signs even. Your 2s: work on a bit.
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p>In the mean time, you use chain of command — town committee to precinct captain to block captain — to clean up your lists. Who’s moved? Who’s “U” but can be more reasonably be described as a “D” or “R”? Who has key issues, and what are they? All of this should have been done before Jan 1, so that on January 1 the campaign has good lists, at least in some places. Then, you just push for more and more, building up your IDs and your favorables. This way GOTV isn’t just blind, it’s focused.
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p>In the mean time, the Democratic Party of Massachusetts has to develop better Town Committees, and precinct captains in every precinct. Every single precinct. The state convention has to be about training field organization. The state party has to do a better job with their database.
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p>Would it have been enough to make up 110,000 votes? You betcha. Obama got 800,000 more votes than Coakley did — those voters are out there.
I don’t think this election was lost by failed campaign tactics.
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p>I think our party offered a TERRIBLE candidate, and then attempted to bulldoze that candidate down our throat because Scott Brown was so bad.
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p>The trouble is that a majority of voters concluded that the party and the candidate was worse than Scott Brown. No campaign strategy could solve that problem.
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p>When we appeal to people’s hearts and guts as well as their heads, we win. Deval Patrick did that in 2006. Barrack Obama did that in 2008.
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p>The Democratic Party has not done that in this year’s legislative campaigns, and we did not do that in this campaign for what is now Scott Brown’s Senate seat.
Coakely lost by virtue of voters’ concern about health care “reform”, it’s cost, the taxes, the secretive, back-room Democratic legislative process, the wholesale political bribery, and looming government control of their health plan.
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p>Brown made these points. It comprised the majority of his campaign message. Voters — very liberal Massachusetts voters at that — agreed with Brown’s message.
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p>There was no political slight of hand, mostly political ideas with which a majority of MA voters agreed.
your insight on the failure of the Democratic candidate is neither genuine nor helpful.
An irony is that the Democrats in Congress are going to see this as a repudiation of progressives, rather than a repudiation of their failure to deliver on progressive issues. The health reform bill was a major factor in Brown’s win. The bill is so unlike what most people on both the right and the left want that they preferred that it die. Will the Democrats regroup and come back with an actual progressive reform bill, and pass it through reconciliation? No, they will either build something even more friendly to insurers and pharma, in an effort to appease Republicans, or they will come up with nothing.
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p>We voted for change in 2008. It has not been delivered, and the electorate is annoyed by that. Unless the Democrats start actually doing something to benefit the middle class, they’re in for a rough November. The President could make a start by saying goodbye to Geithner and delivering some of that “Main Street” help we’ve heard about so often, but which has not materialized.
The electorate took a sharp turn to the right because the bill wasn’t progressive enough?
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p>I think the Dems nominated a crummy, hard-to-believe candidate, and the national Dems decided to wreck their majority, again, on the health care issue when we’ve had 18 months plus of tough recession and double digit unemployment.
The lesson Bill Clinton took from his aborted health care reform was to tack back to the middle.
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p>Rahm Emanuel’s take is the Republican sweep in the 1994 mid-terms were a result of NOT passing radical reform.
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p>Bill Clinton, and Central Mass Dad, are more correct.
EVEN SCOTT BROWN VOTERS WANT THE PUBLIC OPTION, WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER
The electorate did not take a sharp turn to the right. They elected the alternative to the a crummy, hard-to-believe candidate.
The electorate has not taken a sharp turn to the right. If anything, the electorate is tending left. That direction is being led by the Hispanic and African-American communities, which are fast becoming a majority.
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p>The Democratic Party has taken a sharp turn to right from the party we elected. The mainstream media is turning right.
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p>Martha Coakley was a pawn, a cardboard standup, in this “race”.
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p>Do we have polls for minority turnout in Boston yet? When we talk about Martha Coakley’s disappointing numbers (in comparison to the 2008 presidential election), how do those minority turnouts compare?
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p>We aren’t paying attention, guys.
…if you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody.
First of all, a massive (40%) tax thrown at the middle class, per the Senate bill, will hurt Obama more than a lack of health care legislation. If they shove that through, things will be a disaster in November — and the House knows that.
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p>Secondly, the tool of reconciliation is still available.
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p>Thirdly, if Harry Reid is going to lose his Senate seat anyway, he may as well go out in a blaze of glory by ending the filibuster altogether. I’m not aware of any other legislative chamber in the Western world that demands a 60% supermajority for the simplest of bills. It was very rarely used until about ten years ago, and has no place in a true democracy — and if you’re not going to take a chance on health care, it’s fair to ask what you will take a chance on.
You are so smart
The founding fathers made it that way!!!
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p>At least that’s what I keep getting told.
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p>It was useless to us in the minority and it is being used to basically make the Dems look ineffectual now. END THE FILIBUSTER! Pull the nuclear option. The RepubliClones would be for that, right? I mean, they almost did it when THEY were in charge so they wouldn’t flip flop now??
The test of effectiveness is in what gets accomplished. The Dem Congress has been ineffectual. We gave them the keys to the car, but they never took it out of Park.
They took the car out of the park, but got liquored up and drove at breakneck speed in the wrong direction. Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, at the wheel, drunk driving.
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p>All red state Dems are trapped in the rear passenger seat terrified of the impending high speed collision and certain death.
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p>Will they be able to jump out of the speeding car?
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p>”Going out in a blaze of glory” is antithetical to all politicians.
The 40% excise tax is more viewed as a lever to move employer plans to lower cost, higher deductible alternatives. But on the other hand both the House and Senate bills (to pay for all of this largess) cripple HSA and FSA accounts. Dull, boring stuff, but that “gut feeling” of the middle class that they’re going to paying thousands of dollars more for the same or worse starting in 2011 is correct. Do the math and look at both bills.
I have a person in my office right now who is older with health issues. She currently is setting aside $6,000 each year to cover her out of pocket medical and dental expenses (and uses that amount each year). Remember, FSA accounts are pre-Fed, pre-State, and pre-FICA so nontrivial benefit.
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p>Let’s say her Fed rate is 25%, 5.3% MA, 7.65% FICA. She is going to have to spend this $6,000 each year. For the sake of argument, let’s say she’s making $80,000 per year.
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p>Right now, she gets to set aside $6,000, so she has taxable income of $74,000.
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p>Now we introduce a cap of $2,500 in 2011. She sets that amount aside and now has taxable income of $77,500. But she now has to pay the remaining $3,500 on an after-tax basis. But we have to gross up that $3,500 to cover the taxes. So to get $3,500 after tax, she’s going to see a reduction in her taxable income of $3,500/(1-.25-.053-.0765) = $5,641.
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p>Net effect of the new FSA cap: her taxable income goes from $74,000 to $71,859, a decrease pre-tax of $2,141 with an equivalent after-tax reduction of $1,328.
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p>So both proposed Health Care bills are going to impact this person’s net pay by $1,328. Personally, right now I’m covering my wife and 2 kids with my FSA deferral. The bills have no provision to recognize coverage status, so a married person with 2 kids is in effect seeing an effective cap of $625 per person (while a single person still gets the full $2,500).
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p>When the press (say Beth Healy, who seems to sense some problems with the Cadillac plan approach as far as MA residents go) finally starts working out the numbers and what the real impact is going to be as part of this reform…
replace him with an aggressively progressive Democrat from a strongly blue State.
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p>His title is “Senate Majority Leader“. A Senator who must constantly look over his shoulder to protect his seat cannot lead.
that I made in November. You didn’t believe it then.
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p>Having said that I don’t believe that Martha was the entire problem. Brown didn’t make any mistakes that I could see. He got a boatload of money from out of state and ran a “I’m just like you” campaign. I actually heard someone say they voted for him because he wore a “barn coat.”
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p>Beyond that he tapped into voter dissatisfaction with the Dems, much of it deserved. Yes, I know it’s like biting your nose to spite your face. Brown voters aren’t interested in an intellectual discussion of the issues. They voted from the gut.
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p>We’ve got two years to fix this problem. It’s going to be very hard to do.
We only have a couple of months because if you polled the gubernatorial race today it would cause shivers in all our spines. For the most part Democrats win elections win they can demonstrate positive results in the economic lives of working families. What has this Congress done?
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p>It passed a critical economic stimulus package that helped us avoid a depression…but screwed up the PR because of fear of taking on the economic royalists in the banks, insurance and financial services sectors. It passed a measure moving forward the cause of equal pay for women (which no one talks about) and it has spent months getting nowhere on health care reform, the environment (which now has the warm and fuzzy name “cap and trade”) and financial regulation.
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p>All these things should be marketed as huge benefits for the middle class in this country. We let the Rethugs define everything as job killers and over regulation, instead of preserving people’s health, income, jobs and dignity.
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p>After spending the last two weeks getting yelled at by people on the phone and at the polls I can guarantee you this was the backlash of the angry white male (and sometimes their wife). They feel we orient help to those who don’t want to work (when we actually struggle to create jobs), hand health insurance to the poor at the expense of their middle class benefits (when much of health care reform is designed to protect the middle class from the issues of pre-existing conditions and limitations on benefits).
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p>Still a bit burned out but I think you get my drift.
… going the way of Australopithecus.
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p>TAKE A HINT — MA voters, the most liberal in the country, have declared loud and clear that government isn’t about “preserving people’s health, income, jobs and dignity.”
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p>A majority of them believe it will do JUST THE OPPOSITE. Isn’t that the political take-away from this campaign?
NO
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p>As KBusch would say, this has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
Is it not that none of this would be happening had the general court not so arrogantly changed the senate appointment rule in 2004?
Politicians don’t even get the consequences of setting special election conditions, how do they discern the unintended consequences of a 2,000 page bill most haven’t read?
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p>Ocham’s Razor.