Too complicated

One of the factors that killed the Clinton health care plan was that it was hard to understand, with all that talk about "health care exchanges." And that idea - a purchasing group that individuals could join in order to obtain insurance under group health terms - hasn't gone away.

But what is making it so difficult to understand now, and engendering a certain amount of fear, is not only that the plans under discussion are complex, but that there are too many of them. We have the House plan, two Senate plans, whatever it is that the White House wants, whatever it is that President Obama wants (I'm assuming that people who speak for the White House are speaking for themselves, not for him), and every cockamamie idea that absolutely anyone, in government or out of it, might have floated.

No wonder people believe such bizarre things about "the plan" - no matter how strange an idea is, it's very likely that someone, somewhere, has introduced it

But The New York Times has published a comparison of the major plans being discussed:
.http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/08/12/us/politics/0812-plan-comparison.html#tab=0

Disclaimer: all of this could change at any moment.

The facts about health-care reform

This article separates facts from some of the fictions being spread around.

NYT: A Primer on the Details of Health Care Reform

Medicare & the public option

My U.S. representative, apparently trying to be a blue dog even though our district is in New York State, has come out against health reform on the specious grounds that it might harm Medicare.

Meanwhile, protesters around the country are screaming "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare."

Well, I have news: Medicare is a government program and always has been. Is it really possible that people who are old enough to be eligible for Medicare have lost track of this?

If so, maybe their medication needs to be adjusted. Or, more charitably, perhaps the fact that they file their claims with private insurance companies (which have contracts to administer Medicare claims), or sign up with a non-governmental HMO operator, has misled them.

I'm not yet eligible for Medicare, but I'm old enough to remember the fight to enact it. And I remember the panic when it started: my mother's sister was in the hospital at the time, and the hospital was determined to discharge her even though she needed hospital care. Everyone thought that all the old people would immediately come to the hospital!

Of course, that didn't happen. But there was a good reason to fear that it might, because until the beginning of Medicare, most old people had no health insurance and many rejected or postponed treatment because of the cost.

It's the relative success of Medicare that created the demand for a national health program that could include everyone. Medicare is far from perfect, but people who have it certainly don't want to give it up.

I believe that a robust public option for health care is essential for any genuine improvement in the situation. Merely expanding the current, dysfunctional system will make things worse, not better. (Actually, I believe that replacing the current non-system with a single-payer system would be best, but I despair of its ever being enacted.)

One suggestion that I've heard is simply to open up Medicare (or a plan just like Medicare, but financially separate from it and called something else) to everyone, at a fair price for those who can afford it. That idea includes a multi-year phase-in, e.g., make it available immediately to anyone 55 or older who wants it (thus taking care of everyone my age who has been forced into early retirement without health benefits, or who would retire voluntarily if health insurance were sure to be available), and then gradually reduce the minimum age.

Oh - on the idea that Medicare isn't the Gummint:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/get-your-goddamn-governme_b_252326.html

President While Black

Andy Borowitz has it right: the whole point of this bizarre "birther" conspiracy is to harass Barack Obama for being president while black.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-borowitz/president-while-black_b_248742.html

In fact, if there was any doubt about a candidate's eligibility to become President in the last election, it applied to John McCain, who was born in the Canal Zone. While there was no question of Sen. McCain's citizenship, it was uncertain that he qualified as a "natural-born" citizen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/politics/28mccain.html

http://www.snopes.com/politics/mccain/citizen.asp

Role of government

Oh, and the right-wing commentariat is still insisting that government spending is wasteful and ineffective — that is, that government never creates anything of value.

Fact: private enterprise skims the easy profits. Big investments in infrastructure, as well as in R&D, usually require government participation because profit is too far in the future for private businesses and investors to want to do what's needed.

Tax Cuts

So Gov. Bobby Jindal — who thinks it's OK for public schools to teach religious doctrine in place of science — says that the economic stimulus bill relied too much on spending instead of on tax cuts.

The fact: the stimulus bill made the largest tax cut in the history of the United States — just as Candidate Obama promised.

But it only reduces taxes for 95% of working people. It doesn't reduce taxes for the wealthiest 5%. If you earn more than $250,000 per year, the Republican party wants to be your friend.

No such report?

Republicans in Congress have been citing a Congressional Budget Office report stating that most of the money in the proposed economic stimulus package wouldn't be spent before 2011.

There's no such report. There are some unpublished figures that the CBO gave to some members of Congress, but they don't prove that. They apply only to the portion that the Appropriations Committee deals with (not with the Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce portions), they're based on a previous version of the bill, and the CBO is recalculating them.

Ryan Grim explains it here.

Common sense should tell anyone that investment in infrastructure will take some time to gear up. You don't just run down to Walmart and buy a bridge, a highway, or a national fiberoptic network. Even repairing what we've got isn't instantaneous.

But that's a good thing. Including big infrastructure investments in the plan ensures that we won't waste all the money on crap from China.