Why the Public Option is a Bad Idea

I've been thinking a lot about the current status of the health care bills in Congress, and I've come to a surprising conclusion: I don't think the so-called public option is a good idea.

Last night Sen. Charles Schumer went on the Rachel Maddow Show to say that he and Sen. Jay Rockefeller had proposed amendments to the Senate Finance Committee health care bill that would insert a public option into it, and that if the public option passed through the Finance Committee, it had a very good chance of being in the final bill that comes to a vote in Congress.

Polls have shown that most Americans support the public option, which the Obama Administration and many Democrats support as a way to "keep the insurance companies honest." Schumer, in his TV appearance last night, spoke of how the public plan would not need to spend billions on advertising and other things that private-sector companies must do to attract and keep customers, and make profits. Therefore, it should be able to provide lower-cost care and pressure private carriers to become more efficient and cheaper themselves.

And this is precisely the problem.

Private companies in all likelihood will have no hope of ever being able to compete with the government. The playing field will not be level. The government plan, if administered efficiently (and I'll grant you this is a big "if"), should ALWAYS be able to deliver cheaper, better care.

The best example of this dynamic: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two government-sponsored enterprises, while technically not owned by the government, enjoyed huge advantages over banks and other fully private mortgage lenders. Investors, thinking Fannie and Freddie were backed by the full faith and credit of the US government (because Congress had established both companies in the interest of broadening homeownership), lent them money at lower interest rates than private competitors could garner in the market. This enabled Fannie and Freddie to build gigantic mortgage portfolios that ultimately contributed to massive systemic risk and prompted the US government to bail them out.

I don't think that a public health plan would contribute to that kind of systemic financial risk, but it would have a similar, unfair, advantage over private insurers in the market. Now I'm not saying insurance companies haven't been responsible for some truly heinous behavior. Nor am I saying that our health care system does not have serious, fundamental flaws that need to be reformed. What I am saying is that you cannot force private companies to compete in the market against a government plan that does not have the same profit motive.

We must either go all the way and establish a single-payer, Medicare-for-all-type system, or find a way to achieve reform while preserving free-market competition among private insurers. Perhaps prohibiting insurers from dropping sick people and boosting safeguards against Americans losing coverage when they change jobs, among other steps, could accomplish the latter task. But we can't expect private companies to compete effectively against the government. Sometimes compromises yield really bad outcomes.

The Know Nothings Are Back, and They're on Elephant Steroids

Our national political discourse has been hijacked by Sergeant Schultz.

If you're too young to remember the TV sitcom "Hogan's Heroes," a little background: On the show, Sgt. Hans Schultz was the hapless guard that Allied prisoners serially outwitted during their World War II internment in a German prison camp called Stalag 13. "I know NOTHING," Schultz would routinely exclaim when superiors blamed him for failing to halt the POWs' scheming.

Sadly, Schultz's motto — but, unfortunately, not his utter fecklessness — has been taken up with gusto by a small but extraordinarily vocal corps of paranoid, infantile jerks who have somehow managed to gain a measure of influence over public affairs.

They call themselves patriots, purportedly protecting the US constitution from all manner of injury at the hands of President Obama and other Democrats in positions of power. Invoking the mantle of the country's founders, they stage self-styled "tea parties" to protest what they deem to be a takeover of capitalism by the government. The conduct of some of these "teabaggers" has been breathtakingly hateful. Witness a few of the signs displayed at these All-American patriot gatherings:

Many also have rudely disrupted public meetings that members of Congress scheduled to discuss health-care reform with their constituents during the summer recess, by shouting insults, screeching epithets and making not-so-veiled threats of violence — the kind of behavior that even my 3-year-old daughter would dare not broach on her worst day.

All of this childishness is woven together with one very important common thread: the expression of beliefs that have zero basis in fact. Let's examine a few of the most commonly voiced teabagger and town-haller tenets and hold them up to the light of reality here on planet Earth.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama is a socialist. Or, worse, a Communist. Planet Earth Truth: Obama over and over again states his belief in the power of free-market capitalism. But upon taking office, he was confronted by the most severe financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The banking system was on the brink of failure, as was the US auto industry. I happen to disagree with the bailout of Detroit, because Asian and European auto makers had already eclipsed the US big three and could easily have carried the industry and absorbed many displaced workers if GM ceased to exist. But the institutions at the very heart of global capital markets absolutely needed to be bailed out, even if their own misdeeds were perhaps the biggest factor contributing to the collapse. Without massive government aid, the economy would have plunged into the abyss. We got a hint of this possibility in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers being allowed to fail one year ago. More broadly speaking, public stimulus was a sorely needed shot of adrenaline for a private sector that had simply stopped functioning. Yes, too much of the stimulus either has yet to be spent or was shamelessly diverted by myopic, greedy legislators to pork projects that didn't do as much to stimulate the economy as investment in infrastructure and renewable energy production would have. But some federal economic stimulus was absolutely necessary. Most importantly, all of this extraordinary government intervention is expressly designed to be temporary — an emergency intervention that will cease once the financial system and the economy recover. Already several banks have paid back billions in TARP money, resulting in substantial investment gains for the federal government. The Federal Reserve is winding down several of its programs that were designed to shore up the financial system during the crisis. Citigroup is pushing a plan that would reduce the government's 34% ownership stake. And Obama has directly and emphatically said that he wants to shed the government's ownership of GM as soon as possible. Next!

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama wants to create "death panels" that would euthanize old people rather than provide them with critical care. Planet Earth Truth: There is nothing in any bill, outline of a bill or any public statement ever uttered by the president or anyone affiliated in any way with the White House that would establish, or states an intent to establish, "death panels." This is a heinous distortion of language in one of the Democratic reform bills that would have covered completely benign and quite compassionate end-of-life counseling for the terminally ill. Such counseling would include advice about living wills and durable powers of attorney, for instance. A far cry from slipping some hemlock tea to Great Aunt Tillie.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama wants to replace private health insurance with a system in which the federal government employs all doctors and other health care providers. Planet Earth Truth: A canard. Obama supports (albeit half-heartedly, because of all the fake outrage about "a government takeover of health care") making a government-provided plan one of many health-insurance options for Americans to choose from. The idea is to give private-sector plans an incentive to become more efficient by letting them compete side-by-side with a federal plan. His plan also mandates that everyone have health insurance -- a policy that has insurers, drug companies and other health-care companies positively drooling because it will boost their revenues by billions annually when 47 million people suddenly have to sign up for a plan. So much for socialism.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama's health care plan will use tax revenue to provide coverage for illegal immigrants. Planet Earth Truth: There is absolutely nothing in Obama's plan or any of the bills in Congress — and there never has been — that would permit tax dollars to be spent on covering illegal aliens. Following Addison Graves Wilson's toddler-esque "you lie!" tirade, Democrats went even further and added language expressly prohibiting any such expenditure. Still, this bogeyman continues to be raised regularly on the Fox News/Teabagger circuit.

• Teabagger Truth: President Obama's health care plan will create government panels that issue mandatory, un-appealable decisions about whether citizens can see doctors, have surgeries and receive all manner of other care. Planet Earth Truth: Just one of dozens of lies being spread about Democratic health reform plans. Factcheck.org has a great analysis of these that is worth checking out if you want the truth.

So how did so many people grow so far removed from reality?

A big part of the answer is that an alternative reality has been created for them — by elite millionaire entertainers posing as journalists, and by huge, organized Republican and corporate lobbies posing as little grassroots groups.

Let's look first at the entertainers. A cadre of red-faced, hyperventilating, even weeping commentators call the teabaggers to action by exploiting their basest fears and insecurities. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other entertainers amplify the rankest lies, hatred and misniformation for the masses and, worse, lend them a patina of credibility because their acts happen to be carried by a network that has the word "news" in its name. This is not news. It is hysteria, carefully packaged to appeal to the disaffected, who tune in religiously and support the multi-million-dollar salaries and rich-and-famous lifestyles of the elite broadcasters who purport to "stand up for the little guy."

Then there are the astroturf movements. Groups like Freedom Works, essentially an organ of the Republican party, are the driving force behind the tea parties and town-hall tomfoolery. They not only are promoting the events, but stocking them with professional political operatives who are bused and flown in from around the country to create the impression of grass-roots activism. This exposes the lie that somehow millions of Americans are rising up in a massive, spontaneous movement fueled by disgust at the Obama administration.

Racial animosity is certainly part of the package here. No one can look at the photos above of teabaggers claiming that Obama plans "White Slavery" or holding up signs depicting the president as an ominous-looking assailant threatening to slit the throat of Uncle Sam and deny with a straight face that a significant measure of Obama hatred is in fact racism. This is not, as one family member of mine recently suggested, a case of "lose the argument and blame racism." In fact, there is no argument to win or lose. The core beliefs motivating the teabagger "movement" so obviously lack any basis in fact that there has to be something else going on here. For some, it is undoubtedly the inability to come to terms with the fact that a black man has decisively been elected our president.

But there is also a broader anxiety being exploited here. Anxiety over the massive social, economic and cultural changes that began in the post-World War II era but accelerated drastically over the past decade. The economy has grown more efficient, more globalized, more dependent upon technology, information and a highly educated — often foreign-born — workforce. At the same time it has become less dependent upon manufacturing, industry and unskilled, less-educated workers. Computers, the internet and other technology have so permeated our culture that many who lack technological savvy not only find themselves losing in the global economy but also feeling left out of popular culture. And all of these forces are triggering dramatic social change. Perhaps the most significant manifestation of this has been the drastic growth in income inequality and shrinkage of the middle class in the United States. The great irony here is that this is patently the outcome of the Reagan Revolution. The idea that government is always bad, and should get out of the way of the private sector, freed giant corporations and Wall Street to lobby for policies that allowed them to eviscerate the American middle class. Laws and rules that were put in place following the Great Depression to ensure it did not happen again, including the Glass-Steagall Act, were repealed. The unfettered capitalism that resulted gave us today's financial crisis and Great Recession.

And the folks who have drawn the short straws as a result of all of this change are often the very same people who, in some cases, see in Obama the "other" to blame for their degraded lot in life. They can't possibly be worse off and have dimmer prospects than their parents because supposedly 'conservative' politicians have spent decades dismantling sensible government regulation of the private sector and drastically increasing income inequality. It must be because this black, Jesus-hating, baby-killing Communist managed to get elected president — in a landslide — by the Sauvignon Blanc-sipping coastal elites, even though we all know he is a militant Muslim that has been plotting to destroy "the America I grew up in" since the very day he was born in Kenya.

Reason and truth matter not to these people. This is how we wind up with Samuel Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. "Joe the Plumber," rejecting the Obama fiscal policy that would cut his income taxes and somehow becoming a hero to others like him and a desperate, late-inning centerpiece of the hapless McCain 2008 campaign. It's how GOP governors including South Carolina's Mark Sanford, the holier-than-thou-Bible-thumper-turned-very-public-adulterer-and-duty-shirker, justify rejecting federal stimulus funds — In the Palmetto State's case, funds that would have provide desperately needed help to millions of unemployed and the nation's 39th-out-of-50-ranked public school system. And it is the ugly foundation beneath last week's outburst on the floor of the House of Representatives by Rep. Addison Graves Wilson, also of South Carolina (he's known as "Joe" to the good ol' boys flying the Confederate flag over the state capital building), during which he yelled "you lie!" at the president, who had just told the truth about his health care plan not covering illegal immigrants.

The saddest part of all this is that the virulent teabagger movement is quite small. Glenn Beck's audience on a good day is about 2.8 million people — less than one percent of the current US population of 305 million. And the teabaggers are clearly self-conscious about their size, as evidenced by the fake photo they circulated to create an aura of ample attendance despite official estimates that only about 70,000 people showed up for their recent march on Washington. But organized Republican and corporate interests, teamed with Fox News and other paid liar-entertainers, whip up such hysteria among this small group, and make so much money doing it, that the rest of the media goes along for the ride. When they're not wasting time on celebrity non-news and promoting the other products of their conglomerate-owners, supposedly respectable newspapers and broadcast outlets devote precious space and time to covering the outbursts of the Know Nothings. All this comes at the expense of serious coverage and debate of the real, considerable problems that confront us as a nation.

We've seen this movie before in the United States. Other periods of swift, deep socioeconomic change have triggered paranoia that expresses itself politically. Candidates of the Know Nothing Party, formed in the mid-19th Century by well-off Protestant New Yorkers who were alarmed about an influx of poor, Irish Catholic immigrants, actually won election to mayoralties in Philadelphia and San Francisco and the governor's mansion in California before the Lincoln-led Republicans muted their influence (the likes of Limbaugh would ravage a politician like Honest Abe as too effete, too eloquent and too tolerant, ensuring he'd never make it through a GOP primary for dog catcher in Osh Kosh today). Industrialization and continued waves of immigration in the late 19th century gave rise to populist Democrats like William Jennings Bryan, who preyed on the fears of southern and agrarian America that cities were growing to be the dominant force in the country. Demagogues like Father Coughlin exploited the sheer economic privation of the Great Depression to conjure opposition to the New Deal. And more recently, the success of the civil rights movement, feminism and the 1960s counterculture helped launch George Wallace's Dixiecrats and the "Silent Majority" of disaffected ethnic and suburban whites that Nixon rode to power. A similar dynamic influenced the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.

Most of the time these political movements don't amount to much. It seems, however, that the teabaggers are exerting an outsized influence on public affairs today. Some argue that the best way to combat this is to simply ignore them, which will cause them to go away. I've tried that. I don't think it works in this case. The organized interests whipping up this faux hysteria will keep doing it until the rest of the non-wacko country — another Silent Majority, if you will — speaks truth to its mounting power.

Tom Ridge Confirms a Shameful Truth

At first I was far from shocked at the news that former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge says he was pressured by two Bush administration cabinet members to raise the government terror alert level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. After all, it seemed pretty clear to me at the time that the color-coded system was being manipulated for political purposes. Whenever things started to look bleak for the White House and the Republican party, presto, we went from Yellow to Orange. Ridge, Cheney or Bush started talking about "chatter" and "specific threats" and everyone fell back into line (perhaps the know-nothings parroting Hannity and Beck's ridiculous talking points about Obama's supposed totalitarian tactics at the health care town hall meetings should consider the real and proven totalitarian tendencies of their own party, but I digress).

And, truth be told, I'd rather focus on the present and the future than get caught up in past battles. But the more I see the headlines today and really think about what happened, the angrier I get.

That's because no matter how many different angles I employ to analyze the situation, I can't help but come to the same conclusion: Bush, Cheney and the GOP not only badly mishandled 9/11 and its aftermath, but added insult to injury by shamelessly exploiting the horrific deaths of 3,000 people for their own grubby political gains.

First and foremost — and a fact that seems to constantly get lost in this debate — Bush knew what was coming and failed to stop it. Eight years ago, in August 2001, he began his day with a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The briefing went into detail about Al Qaeda wanting to hijack commercial aircraft to attack US targets. The CIA and FBI were standing on second base stealing the catcher's signs, telling the president to expect the fastball. But instead of taking a swing, Bush and Cheney struck out looking. That's a fact.

So how did they redeem themselves? Instead of focusing all of our military and diplomatic efforts on finishing the job of finding Osama bin Laden and crushing Al Qaeda where it was headquartered — in Afghanistan and Pakistan — Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq, which, despite being one of many reprehensible totalitarian regimes in the world at that time, had nothing to do with 9/11 and was not a state sponsor of Al Qaeda.

And instead of doing everything possible to protect the homeland from further attacks, the government under Bush and Cheney diverted millions in Homeland Security funds to protect tiny towns in Kentucky and other rural, Republican, Christian strongholds that should have been fortifying actual terrorist targets in godless, Democratic New York and other big cities. As a result, our ports, chemical plants and nuclear power plants lack the protection they need. My family and millions of others are at risk because of this. That makes me very, very angry. With real anger, not the faux froth that Republican operatives posing as ordinary citizens are using to quash reasoned communication and debate at health care town hall meetings.

Indeed, the examples I cite here are all facts, not fake, outrageous rhetoric that gets dreamed up at RNC headquarters and parroted to an anxious country by the reprehensible, hateful little maggots at Fox News for the purpose of stirring up anger and resentment for political purposes (and for rating$, let's not forget). Click the links in each of the above examples and read for yourself (or don't, if you'd rather just believe what you want to believe).

I'm not normally given to angry rants. But I was in New York City on 9/11. I knew people who perished in the World Trade Center. Other friends and business associates narrowly escaped. I watched one of the buildings collapse with my own eyes. I lived close enough to Ground Zero to see the smoke rising from the site and inhale the sickening smell of death for weeks following the attack. It took about a year before I could see a shabby-looking guy wearing a backpack on the subway without my pulse quickening and my stomach getting a bit queasy. And to this day, eight years later, I still commute to New York City. And I still wonder what's going on behind the scenes when, on some days, the cops at the PATH station or on the streets of the financial district are suddenly brandishing assault rifles, or national guardsmen turn up, when they weren't the day before.

It was bad enough for all these years to see and hear 9/11 constantly invoked as a political weapon by the very people who so badly mishandled the attacks and their aftermath. And I can only imagine how the families of 9/11 victims felt. But now I know for a fact that my president and his minions shamefully exploited our sorrow — and exacerbated our fear with their public warnings — with no basis other than their own grubby desire to remain in power.

How could they? And followers of Christ, these people? Where was their sense of basic human decency? Shame, shame, shame.

There Sarah Goes Again - Makin' Things Up

I promised not to let another three months go by without posting, and I am hereby keeping my word — even if I'm doing it with a bit of fudging. Truth is I've been far too busy to post regularly but I did just read something that could very well have been a post on Citizen. It's Timothy Egan's New York Times piece on the health-care-demagoguery hoo-ha. So I'll link to it here, paste the content below (with certain passages nearest and dearest to my heart in bold) and let him do the work for me. Thank you, Mr. Egan!

August 9, 2009, 11:24 PM

Palin’s Poison

In Egypt, 43 percent of people think Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks in America, a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org found last year.

In the United States, six percent of Americans say the moon landing of 40 years ago was staged, according to Gallup.

And in Alaska, the former governor, a woman who was nearly a heartbeat away from the presidency, now tells followers that “Obama death panels” could decide if her parents and her baby, Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, will live or die.

The United States, like most countries, has long had a lunatic fringe who channel in the flotsam of delusion, half-facts and conspiracy theories. But now, with the light-speed and reach of the Web, “entire virtual crank communities,” as the conservative writer David Frum called them, have sprung up. They are fed, in the case of Sarah Palin, by people who should know better.

For a democracy, which depends on an informed citizenry to balance a permanent lobbying class, this is poison. And it’s one reason why town hall forums on health care, which should be sharp debates about something that affects all of us, have turned into town mauls.

The lies and shouts have had the effect that all crank speech has on free speech — stifling any real exchange. In my state, Representative Brian Baird, a veteran of more than 300 town hall meetings during his 11 years as a Democratic congressman from southwest Washington, has decided not to hold any such forums this recess after receiving death threats.

But is it any wonder that some are moved to violent threats, given the level of misinformation being injected into the system? If you really believed that Obama was going to kill your baby and euthanize your parents, well — why not act in self defense?

Here’s what Palin said on her Facebook page Friday, in her first online comments since quitting as Alaska governor.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

This is pure fantasy, fact-free almost in its entirety. The nonpartisan group FactCheck.org said there was no basis for such a claim in any of the health care bills under consideration in Congress. One House bill would pay for counseling for terminally ill patients — something anyone who has lost an elderly loved one of late, as I have, will find essential.

Palin was given some cover Sunday by the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a master of slipping innuendo into his arguments. Defending the “death panel” post on ABC’s “This Week,” Gingrich said, “you’re asking us to trust the government.” By such reasoning, American foreign policy is not worth its word, the currency is worthless, and the moon landing was indeed a fake.

The last time Gingrich went so far was when he called Justice Sonia Sotomayor a racist. He retracted it then. We’ll see what he does now. As for Palin, she should follow her own advice to the media of a few weeks ago — lay off the kids and “quit makin’ things up.”

America Needs a Healthy GOP

I know. I've been away. For a long, long time. 

I won't try to explain, because that will bore you. Let's just say I've been busy and uninspired — the latter being in large part a consequence of the former. 

Well, I read something today that inspired me. 

I know, it comes from the New York Times. The same Times that so many of you regard as incurably biased in favor of the left. Let's leave that debate aside for a moment, so that I may share said inspirational passage. It comes from Gail Collins, a former editorial page editor and now a witty op-ed columnist. Collins' column today riffs on the travails of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has been in the news lately for leaving the Palmetto State leaderless while he spent a week in Argentina breaking up with his mistress. Collins writes:

Until Wednesday’s unpleasantness, Sanford was chairman of the Republican Governors Association, otherwise known as the Association of Possible Presidential Contenders Plus Arnold. Over the past few years, he has tried to woo the party’s base with antics like bringing two piglets into the Capitol to protest political pork and refusing to accept $700 million in federal stimulus money aimed at preventing massive layoffs of public school teachers. For a state with an unemployment rate above 12 percent, that ranks 39th in public school performance, that last caper might not seem all that entertaining. But it did draw the attention and affection of right-wing commentators, who nudged Sanford right up the potential-contender ladder.

This, like much of the rest of Collins' column, made me chuckle. For a moment, it also injected my moderate-liberal veins with a rush of schadenfreude at the pitiful state of the Republican Party. It seems the only way for a Republican to gain nomination for high office is to appeal to an increasingly lunatic fringe commentariat, thereby ensuring doom with the general electorate. 

But then, it made me sad for America. 

For our constitutional republic to live up to our founders' promise, we need robust competition — not just in the market for goods and services, but also in the marketplace of policy ideas. And as the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt degenerates into the party of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, none of us is well served. A sick GOP emboldens the Democrats who control Washington to make policy that would not survive a stronger, more thoughtful opposition. The extreme left is likelier to make bad ideas into the law of the land. 

We've seen this movie before, and it ends only when the country winds up in such bad shape that we can no longer tolerate single-party rule and finally throw the bums out. The Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s and the repudiation of Bush-Cheney Republicanism in 2006 and 2008 are two recent examples. 

So what can we do to prevent a sure-to-disappoint sequel? Well, if you haven't read my other rants about civic responsibility, I'll repeat my broken-record mantra here: be at least partially engaged in a mature, serious debate about public affairs instead of wholly immersed in popular culture. That means ignoring the yellers and demagogues and actually reading something now and then. Or, if you simply can't give up that America's Got Talent and Real Housewives of New Jersey habit for a steady diet of Congressional Quarterly and C-SPAN, at least throw in a dose or two of CNN here and there. 

I'll do my part: I promise not to let another three months go by before I post here again. 

See you soon.