Bill Moyers Journal - Taibbi and Kuttner - the Health Care buck stops at Obama
Bill Moyers (one of the reasons I’m a member of WXXI) delivered yet another blockbuster episode last night as he hosted Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and Economist and American Prospect Editor Rob Kuttner. They commented on Heath Care - the bill and the process.
Bottom line - the Democrats blew it but it was not to be unexpected and more importantly - President Obama can recover - easily - if he so chooses. Read the snips below or click over and read the entire transcript. (they covered health care and the financial reform - all of it is worth reading)
There was this exchange about what exactly the health care bill does, who benefits, and a way of looking at mandates.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Rahm Emanuel, the President’s Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton’s Political Director. And Rahm Emanuel’s take away from Bill Clinton’s failure to get health insurance passed was ‘don’t get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.’ So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we’re not going to attack your customer base, we’re going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it’s not surprising that this is what comes out the other side.
ROBERT KUTTNER: [.....] Once the White House made this deal with the insurance companies, the public option was never going to be anything more than a fig leaf. And over the summer and the fall, it got whittled down, whittled down, whittled down to almost nothing and now it’s really nothing.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, and this was Howard Dean’s point this week was that this individual mandate that’s going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it’s going to be extremely unpopular and it’s going to be theirs for a generation. It’s going to be an albatross around the neck of this party.
I really like this part about mandates - and the upcoming shell game.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Think about it, the difference between social insurance and an individual mandate is this. Social insurance everybody pays for it through their taxes, so you don’t think of Social Security as a compulsory individual mandate. You think of it as a benefit, as a protection that your government provides. But an individual mandate is an order to you to go out and buy some product from some private profit-making company, that in the case of a lot of moderate income people, you can’t afford to buy. And the shell game here is that the affordable policies are either very high deductibles and co-pays, so you can afford the monthly premiums but then when you get sick, you have to pay a small fortune out of pocket before the coverage kicks in. Or if the coverage is decent, the premiums are unaffordable. And so here’s the government doing the bidding of the private industry coercing people to buy profit-making products that maybe they can’t afford and they call it health reform.
Got that? We are forcing people to buy private insurance. Yeah we are subsidizing them but in the end forcing them to buy private insurance. We hold up Massachusetts as a model but mandates didn’t really control costs over there. How does this happen? Well, here is the case for Clean Money Clean Elections.
MATT TAIBBI: And I think, you know, a lot of what the Democrats are doing, they don’t make sense if you look at it from an objective point of view, but if you look at it as a business strategy- if you look at the Democratic Party as a business, and their job is basically to raise campaign funds and to stay in power, what they do makes a lot of sense. They have a consistent strategy which involves negotiating a fine line between sentiment on the left and the interests of the industries that they’re out there to protect. And they’ve always, kind of, taken that fork in the road and gone right down the middle of the line. And they’re doing that with this health care bill and that’s- it’s consistent.
How does Obama Recover - well, this snip was in reference to lack of Wall Street oversight but applies to Health Care - in the end you have a choice- lead people away for the status quo or deliver them to it.
BILL MOYERS: If you were Barack Obama in a city that’s overrun by money, how would you try to fix it?
ROBERT KUTTNER: I would go over the heads of the special interests to the people. I think there’s a lot of sullen apprehension, frustration out in the country. And I think the people are hungry for leadership. He’s not doing that sufficiently.
MATT TAIBBI: It’s absolutely a political winner for the president to hit Wall Street very hard and do all the things that he’s supposed to be doing right now. You know, that all the things that FDR did. If he did those things, if he remade Wall Street in the way that it needs to be remade, he would do nothing but gain popularity. And I think that’s the strategy he should have pursued.
BILL MOYERS: But what if by nature, that’s not what he wants to do? What if, by nature, he prefers to head the establishment, than to change it?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Then he runs the risk of being a failed president. And I do have the audacity to hope that he’s a smart enough, principled enough guy, that some time in his second year in office, he’s going to realize that he’s at a crossroads.
I’m with Kuttner with that last line - I too think that Obama is savvy enough to realize this - the question is which path does he choose.
Let’s show Obama that he needs to lead us away from the status quo.
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