Capitolism

Your Questions About Health Care Reform Answered

By Christopher Hayes

Ok, so there's been a lot of misinformation about proposals to reform the health insurance industry and provide (near) universal coverage. Understandable! It's complicated stuff. Herewith, I'll try to answer some questions

1) Is it true that all of the bills currently proposed would end the practice of "rescission," whereby health insurance providers refuse to treat customers who've paid their premiums simply because they've become ill?

No! That's a common misunderstanding. Actually, all of the bills would ban incisions, that is, they would legally bar surgeons from performing surgery until a panel of twelve gay illegal immigrant government bureaucrats unanimously signed off on the procedure.

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August 11, 2009

Healthcare Disinformation: A Case Study

By Christopher Hayes

Ezra Klein links to some interesting polling today that shows a (slim) plurality saying Obama's health care reform proposals are a "bad idea," but a strong majority supporting the actual content of the bill when "when the interviewer read an accurate, neutrally phrased description of the main features of the plan."

The reason for the difference, of course, is the tremendous amount of lies, distortions and misinformation being thrown up by opponents of reform, the most extreme of which would be funny if they weren't so macabre: the government is going kill off the elderly! They'll mandate you give up your organs when you turn 67! You'll have to pay for gay married couples' abortions!

I recently got to see first-hand how this happens. A few weeks ago I was on Al Jazeera English debating health care reform with a conservative named Josh Trevino. Josh was a nice enough guy, genuine and polite, if extremely conservative. We went back and forth about the degree to which the current system is broken, whether healthcare is a right, and why it is that the US spends so much more per capita on healthcare than any other industrialized nation. When I noted that this year the US will spends more than 17% of GDP on healthcare, Josh shot back with a pretty amazing statistic. He said that, sure we spend a lot on healthcare, but 5.6% of GDP, or a third of all healthcare spending, is spent on pharmaceutical research. That's way more than any other country he said, and in fact, our research dollars find the drugs the rest of the world uses. If you take away all that high-minded spending on research, then US healthcare costs are totally in line with the rest of the world.

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August 6, 2009

How the Tea-Baggers are Like ACT-UP

By Christopher Hayes

There's been some very interesting back and forth about the right-wing disruptions of health care town halls in the Twitterverse and Blogosphere (oh God, did I just type those two words back-to-back?). One of the fascinating aspects of a political culture in which governmental control has flipped, in a relatively short period of time, from the right to the left, is that each side now finds itself making arguments the other side was making only a little while earlier. The Left accused (rightly!) Bush of using fear-mongering to push the nation into pre-emptive war. During the stimulus debate, the Right turned around and used the same talking points, accusing Obama of using fear-mongering to push through $770 bn in public spending.

I don't want to create a false equivalence here. There are very real differences between the rhetoric and approach of left and right, but it's certainly the case that we often use formal arguments (so and so is fear-mongering) as a way to widen the possible appeal for our substantive, ideological pre-commitments. In the case of the Iraq war, it was a terrible idea no matter how it was sold, and I think the right-wing would say the same about the stimulus.

I'm on a team in American politics: I'm proudly, vigorously on the left. So there's no need to bend over backwards to be formally consistent. That said, intellectual honesty requires one to separate out one's formal objections from substantive ones and I've been given pause by the remarks of some right-wing activists like Jon Henke. He and others have been saying: wait a sec, when the left shows up and makes noise somewhere it's activism, but when the right does it it's thuggery and mob rule?

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August 5, 2009

If We Want Health Care We Have to Fight For It

By Christopher Hayes

I come from a family of organizers (my dad and my brother), so I'm intimately familiar with just how much work good organizing is. I also have a lot of guilt about the fact I'm not one. As hard as writing can sometimes be, it's orders of magnitudes easier (not to mention confers a lot more recognition and praise) than the unglamorous job of calling through lists, finding suitable meeting places, negotiating personalities, motivating busy and harried volunteers, etc...

For that reason, I'm always reluctant to use my writing platform to urge other people to organize. It feels cheap and easy. But with that disclaimed out of the way, I have to echo what Josh Marshall says here.

If you want health care, then do something about it. We are now in the middle of a fight. Fights are good. Democracy is fundamentally about the non-violent resolution of conflict, and we've got conflict. There is a small but very mobilized constituency of people and interests that want to kill health care reform. They have the advantage of being on the attack, or tearing down and criticizing and expressing their outrage. The job of advocates of reform is trickier, but unless there is a mobilization and concerted organized attempt to push elected representatives in a progressive direction they will succumb to the braying and bullying of tea-baggers. Find out if your congressman is having a town hall, and go. Find others to go with you. Let them know you will punish them if they don't support real reform. Call their offices. Show up at their offices.

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August 4, 2009

This Week On The Hill

By Greg Kaufmann

The House has already hit the road -- gone until September -- so the Senate has the joint to itself. I asked one Senate staffer what the rationale is behind the House taking off a week earlier?

"What is this thing you call a ‘rationale?'" he replied.

The Senate will vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor -- the only mystery there is how many deadbeat Republican votes she will pick up along the way.

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August 3, 2009