Monday, February 2, 2015

White House Fool Report: The Heritage Canard

Via.
So apparently Eugene Robinson and Sam Stein were trolling Mr. Joe Scarborough the other morning on the subject of how deeply accommodating the president has been to his opposition and brought up as a case in point the Affordable Care Act: Robinson saying something along of the lines of "when he wanted to do universal health care he came up with a Republican plan out of the Heritage Foundation" etc. etc. etc., which I saw over at Crooks & Liars and and went, as I'm wont to do on this point, almost as bonkers as Mr. Joe did.

Scarborough went bonkers, of course, because it was evidence that the president really does try to cooperate with the GOP, in contradiction to his narrative of the moment, adopted from Mr. Jonah:
If Obama believed in negotiating, he would have used the Keystone pipeline as a bargaining chip. He would trade the higher taxes he (always) wants for tax reform. He would acknowledge that the GOP won an election in 2014 and that its interests matter.
Of course from our point of view oy, does Obama believe in negotiating! Not well, but too wisely, or is it the normal way around?

I went bonkers, on the other hand, because, well, for quite different reasons, which I'm just starting to understand and will come to below, but in the first place because I always do: whenever anybody says online that the ACA is a Heritage Foundation idea, and Scott Lemieux is not around to tell them it isn't, I do. So I dropped a comment, which led to the following utterly futile exchange:


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      It's a weird day when Scarborough is right and Eugene Robinson is wrong, but this is one time. The Affordable Care Act is not, repeat not, the health insurance plan proposed by the Heritage Foundation in 1993. It is far more liberal, with the employer mandate and Medicaid expansion and many other highly progressive features, than anything Heritage would have dreamed of accepting. It is similar to the Massachusetts law (designed by the Democratic state legislature with plenty of assistance from Edward Kennedy, who was also the prime architect of the ACA) because the legislature overrode Romney's eight vetoes (including of the employer mandate; Romney takes credit for it now because it's popular but he fought it tooth and nail). It's not the greatest health program in the world but liberals should start taking some pride in it. For more see Scott Lemieux http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblo...


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        Pity you missed the Heritage foundation plan from 1989.....it IS available on the interwebs sparky.


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          Calls for taxation of all employer provided health benefits, individual mandate for 100% and no mandate on employers, turning Medicaid into HMOs without expansion, cutting Medicare There's a kind of "subsidized risk pool" equivalent to the Exchange, but the aim of the whole plan is clearly to eliminate employer coverage, not supplement those who couldn't get it. No reforms to insurance industry such as coverage with preexisting conditions or kids under 26 or fair billing, no programs to move doctors from fee for service or no-copay wellness care, etc. etc. It's a typical piece of Republican shit with virtually nothing in common with ACA, which strengthens and extends employer insurance coverage and will levy fines on companies that refuse.


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            Again pity it's not interesting enough to waste time reading it.


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              So you're going to go on spreading lies about Obama because it's too boring to find out what the truth is. Nice. You and Glenn Beck.


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                Are YOU mental? I voted for Obama twice and I'd vote for him again if I could. I have ONLY voted for Democrats for almost 50 years....NEVER ever once for someone who wanted to trickle down.
                I'm NOT interested in reading anything authored by the Heritage/Koch Foundation......learn how to discern meaning in a sentence by referring to the previous reply!!


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                  It's not a question of who you vote for but your cognitive process. In clinging to an irrational belief ("ACA is a Heritage program") and refusing to look at the evidence you are acting like Beck even if your beliefs are different. Or like the Trotskyists who said there was no difference between FDR and Hoover. It bothers me because it plays into the politics of hopelessness that says "Don't vote, they're all the same", and then the conservatives, who always vote, win.
                  Obama is no leftist, and the ACA is not socialism, but it's still the most progressive,working-class-oriented legislation we've had since Johnson was president. If people don't stop calling it conservative, it could be the last. You need to appreciate it for what it is and think about how to improve it, not call it names.

    That annoying assertion about Obamacare being a Republican or Heritage or Romnesque idea has two completely different attitudes. When Eugene Robinson says it, as a citizen in good standing of Cokie's Village, a person of no doubt liberal and generous views but a Villager bred in the bone, it's meant to be something nice about the president: Villagers are all about getting Something done without an excessively close concern with what the Something might be, and the way to do that is to pick the Something that gets the right number of votes. I guess that's where my poor interlocutor there was coming from: she doesn't see how anything coming from the Heritage Foundation must inevitably be deadly poison (don't touch those tax-free health saving accounts, Barack! they'll make all your skin fall off!).

    Whereas I'm concerned with the members of the Eeyore Caucus, who mean to say something bad: that Barack Obama is essentially indistinguishable from Willard Mitt Romney, and just as determined as Romney would have been to turn our lives over to the Masters of the Universe. Which, if it were true, I would agree with (as I'd have agreed on the subject of that ghastly Grand Bargain we were talking about throughout 2010). So that it's important to me, in my position as Marxist Obot, to see both of these—Cokie on one side and, say, Matt Stoller on the other—as wrong. I didn't vote for anybody who was going to give me a Republican health policy and I am very reluctant to think I could have been cheated to that extent.

    But the Villagers are entirely wrong about the aim of negotiation, which is to get what your side needs and try not to give too much to the other, and Obama has actually been a very skilled negotiator sometimes, in particularly in the 2011 budget wars, and I think he did something even cleverer with the ACA.

    The big thing that came out of this exercise for me is the way the Heritage and Obama approaches are different, which is really diametrical: the object of every Heritage health care proposal is to relieve employers as much as possible of their responsibilities, pinning them as much as possible on individuals, leaving government to take up the slack; and the object of every Democratic proposal worth the name is to give as much responsibility to employers as you can, leaving to individuals only what can't (yet) be given to government.

    This is unfortunately not how the Obama administration has explained it, and they've really done such a bad job it's as if they'd been sabotaging themselves‚ and I do mean you, Mr. P. The way the Act has been sold is almost entirely negative, the line that nothing is actually going to happen: "If you like your health insurance you can keep it."

    The Republicans call it a lie, but what's worse than that is that it's almost true. We're going to move heaven and earth and Max Baucus to get the end result that basically nothing is going to change?

    Practically the whole of Obamacare is the two things that hardly get discussed: the requirement that every boss of a business with 50 or more workers has to buy them insurance (yes, most did already, but Walmart and Macdonalds didn't before the ACA was passed, and they were very far from alone; and they were getting stingier and stingier, too, providing less and less worthwhile insurance and making their employees pay a larger and larger percentage, a situation which is being reformed under the Act); and the expansion of Medicaid. All the attention has been focused on the five or ten percent of the population that was going to have to insure itself—who had been very difficult to insure before, because they didn't have one steady employer, and they had too much money to be taken care of by the government but too little buying power to do it on their own, who have been provided with the Exchange. Putting them into the kind of risk pool that was described in the 1989 Heritage proposal, but was meant by Heritage not just for the between-the-cracks cases that didn't fit into the more comprehensive approaches, but for every person of working age in the United States.

    In demanding that employers provide their workers with health coverage, as employers throughout the civilized world do either through taxation or by buying insurance, the Obama administration was doing exactly what the Republican party and its think tanks have been fighting against since the 1930s, and what the Heritage plans of 1989 and 1993 were designed in particular to forestall.

    It makes me crazy when people suggest this is not a progressive thing, just because it's not the same thing they have in England (it's not so radically different from the German or Dutch or Swiss systems, which some think are better than England's true single-payer approach anyway). Could it be improved? You bet! So could Social Security, which still doesn't provide anybody with enough money to live on. So improve it! Don't just sit in your mudpuddle weeping because you got your shorts wet, stand up and do something! And say Thanks, Obama!

    Via ebaumsworld.

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