David Frum, The Honest Conservative

Remember Jim DeMint?

Here's what American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum has to say about that:

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

...

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
...
There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

The Cards Are Starting to Fall

I know it's painful to watch when our President uses his strategy, but it works. It's not even that hard to figure out.

1. Let your opponent take the initiative, while appearing to be caught off guard


2. Offer weak enough resistance to make them think they have the advantage


3. Make public attempts to compromise with your opponent, which will be refused


4. Present your case while (rightly) pointing out that your opponent has:
   a) staked out an extreme position
   b) refused your repeated efforts to work together (or in the case of the campaign, to find common ground)
   

It's no secret that this is his approach. It's exactly what he did in the campaign. It continues to be effective with the conservatives (Rs & blue dogs) because they are so willing to charge ahead and overreach.

This is not "37 dimensional chess", it's poker.

Liberals have the right and the duty to pressure their elected officials to be responsive to our agenda. I won't tell others to STFU, but I will say that there is an observable pattern here. Remembering that, I suggest not wasting energy on the "Obama is selling us out" drama.

I suspected that he would make his play toward the end of the recess. It's coming a little earlier than I thought. I think the "public option is not essential" talk was designed to elicit the response we saw both from the left (getting stirred up and active) and the right (Republican Senators stating publicly that it doesn't really matter what's in a HC bill, they're not voting for it).

And I bring up C&L today to see...

White House may ditch Republicans after all on health care reform

Anderson Cooper of CNN did a report last night that echoes the NY Times piece.

Cooper: After negotiating with republicans, conservative democrats and seemingly themselves over parts of a plan CNN has learned that the administration could be getting closer to a very big change. Namely crafting a health care bill and try to ram it through the Senate even if it passes by only a single vote.

Henry: Well Anderson there is no final decision, but Democrats close to the White House are saying that they are now actively considering the possibility of doing a go it alone strategy. It's a budget maneuver, very obscure known as reconciliation where they would only need a simple majority, 51 votes instead of 60 votes to push through health reform. Republicans would scream that this is a power grab, it's an underhanded move but White House officials privately are already laying out the ground work by saying look, we've been working with republicans for months. If they don't get something done in the next weeks we're going to have to take drastic measures....

John Amato attributes the change solely to pressure from the netroots. That may be true. I think it's also possible that Obama didn't leave his brain and soul at the door when he got to the white house and actually has a left of center agenda and a plan to implement it...

Best. Healthcare. System. Ever.

From the Washington Post:

Many Americans pay higher premiums for the freedom to go outside an insurer's network of doctors and hospitals. When they do, insurers typically pay a percentage of what they call the "usual and customary" rates for the services. How insurers determine the usual rates had long been opaque to consumers and difficult if not impossible for them to challenge.

As it turns out, insurers typically used numbers from Ingenix, a wholly owned subsidiary of the big insurer UnitedHealth Group. Ingenix had an incentive to produce benchmarks that low-balled usual and customary rates and shifted costs from insurers to their customers, the report said.

Ingenix got its data from the same insurers that bought its benchmark information, the report said. Insurers that contributed information to Ingenix often "scrubbed" their data to remove high charges, and Ingenix further manipulated the numbers, removing valid high charges from its calculations, the report said.

Cuomo found that insurers under-reimbursed New York consumers by up to 28 percent, the report said. A dozen insurers have reached settlements agreeing to change their practices; UnitedHealth agreed to the largest payment, $50 million, to help a nonprofit organization set up a new database to replace Ingenix.

In March testimony to Rockefeller's committee, UnitedHealth chief executive Stephen J. Hemsley said UnitedHealth stands by "the integrity of the Ingenix data."

No wonder these guys are so scared of competing with the government (which is funny, given how the government is so incompetent and all). Who came up with this insurance (protection) racket, the Mafia?

Americans Ahead of Politicians (water is wet, also)

The CBS News/New York Times poll on healthcare shows that 72% of Americans (including 50% of Republicans) support a public healthcare option (pdf of full poll results here). Gee, I wonder why all Republican congress members and some Democrats are opposed to a public option. I tried to contact them, but they were busy counting the $$ from insurance and drug company lobbyists...

The Best Health Care System in the World

From Roll Call:

House Republicans presented a four-page outline of their health care reform plan Wednesday but said they didn’t know yet how much it would cost, how they would pay for it and how many of the nearly 50 million Americans without insurance would be covered by it.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who heads a GOP health task force, said that when the details are drafted in the coming weeks, they would present a plan that “costs far less than the Democrats’ [plan] and provides better results for the American people.”

But Republicans who stayed at the press conference to answer questions — the leaders made statements but didn’t stay — could not answer whether their plan would include a tax increase to pay for such costly items as refundable tax credits for low- and middle-income workers to help pay for insurance.

Other reforms proposed by the GOP were largely minor tweaks to a system that House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said is already the “best health care system in the world.”

“We want to work within the existing market structure,” said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

In other news:

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

Doctors Fighting for Real Health Care Reform

Over on DKos there's a diary that I thought needed more exposure, so I'm linking to it here so 1 or 2 more people will see it :) When you start seeing all the BS ads about how public health care will make your life so bad, ask yourself why these 8 doctors were willing to get arrested in an effort to keep the publicly funded option on the table...

On May 5, eight health care advocates, including myself and two other physicians, stood up to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the Senate Finance Committee during a "public roundtable discussion" with a simple question: Will you allow an advocate for a single-payer national health plan to have a seat at the table?

The answer was a loud, "Get more police!" And we were arrested and hauled off to jail.

The fact that a national health insurance program is supported by the majority of the public, doctors and nurses apparently means nothing to Sen. Baucus. The fact that thousands of people in America are dying every year because they can’t get health care means nothing. The fact that over 1 million Americans go into bankruptcy every year due to medical debt — even though most of them had insurance when they got sick — means nothing.