Paul Krugman, of The New York Times, made us aware yesterday of a mail piece being sent out by the Obama campaign on healthcare. Via Ezra Klein, I discovered that TPM has scans of the piece and there I found the link to the YouTube video from the original ad.
The mailer was briefly discussed on Bill Maher’s show last night. (I have to admit that I’ve stopped watching Maher because a) he’s turned into a misogynist jerk and b) gratuitous use of foul language just isn’t funny.) Outside of NLS, the VA blogosphere has all but ignored this, perhaps because, as I alluded to in an earlier post, many of them are too young to remember what the 1990s were really like.
There are those who think that this mail piece was a horrible error on the part of the Obama camp and, in fact, has provided fodder for the Republicans to use in the fall campaign. Others are not so sure.
What do you think?
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VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I think that it’s a cheap shot that was completely unnecessary. I’d pick Clinton’s plan between the two of them. That said, she’s going to have to find a better way to handle the mandate issue (which I think has much harmful potential, as an easy bludgeon) than simply attacking the lack of a mandate in Obama’s plan.
Fodder how? In that they can keep using it against Clinton? Because I’m sure someone on the Right has been rubbing their hands together and just waiting in anticipation of firing this one again. If Clinton can’t survive it in the primary it’s going to be a long general election.
Oof, sorry, that came out a whole lot more snarky than I meant for it to.
I’m just wondering what the “fodder” might be. If it’s what I assumed above, it’s nothing new, but if it’s something else, I’m curious to know what. Just on the outside looking in and all.
You know, the whole mandate thing confuses me. How is mandating the purchase of health insurance different from mandating the purchase of car insurance?
Jason – it’s not just an issue against Clinton, it will be an issue against Obama as well. Another point made by a number of the posters in the links is that this will be a negotiating point down the road and to start by giving it away is to start from a position of weakness. Add to it recent comments that Obama’s plan leaves 15 million uninsured.
I found this comment to be interesting:
OT: And isn’t is a bit disingenuous of Obama to say that Hillary’s plan has penalties if you don’t buy (as does Medicare Part D, BTW) when he admitted that those who try to “game” the system will have to pay back premiums? Isn’t that the same as a penalty?
I find all of this Health Care talk mind numbing. Health Care is an individual need, that should be tailored to the individual, and chosen by the individual. (Free Market hint hint)
There are those that truly need help, but these blanket policies are wasteful and shold be handled at the local individual level. This should help weed out the “scammers” from those truly in need.
Health care in America isn’t “broken” it’s rife with fraud… this is where the focus should be,,,
Two immediate thoughts:
(1) No one cares.
(2) If we do start caring, the issue won’t be what kind of plan, but whether we can even afford it.
The only reason Obama used the piece? Because they knew it would drive the Clinton camp up a wall.
Mission Accomplished.
Bottom line is, on the right, we want Clinton as the Dem nominee. Give us a good, clean, polarizing fight on Hillarycare and the Clinton-era vs. John McCain… nothing will re-energize our base more (and that’s not hyperbole — we really do want Clinton).
My butt puckers when I say this, but what if she wins?? 😦
Shaun -first, a lot of folks care, as evidenced by the number of comments in the linked pieces above.
Second – I ain’t buying what you’re selling 😉 I don’t believe for one minute that the Rs want Hillary. Something about protesting too much makes me think you guys are stretching the truth here. See, TRM, that’s the whole point. They really don’t want her simply because she will win.
If she wins Vivian hows about you and I moving to Utah, starting a cult and claiming independance from the U.S.?? 🙂 We could wear purple jumpsuits and worship, uhhh lets see, Tom Cruise!!!
It’s a little unnecessary; however, the issue of mandated coverage is problematic because you really do have to figure out what to do with those who don’t pay for it. As for the analogy to car insurance, of course that’s only if you want a car. If you don’t have a car then insurance is not an issue. This is where the mandate gets tricky. When you have someone who declares that he just doesn’t want health insurance and you try to force him to pay for it anyway, aren’t you intruding on his right to choose whether or not to be stupid? Aren’t you raising the prospect that he and others like him will simply resist and force the government to figure out ways to collect from him? Wouldn’t this increase governmental involvement in peoples’ lives in the way that fervent GOP’ers are always claiming will happen if the Dems get into office? How much governmental energy should be directed at ferreting out those who don’t want the insurance?
Now, in case TRM and Shaun think this makes their arguments valid, not so fast.
TRM has a fantasy that “Health Care is an individual need,” sort of like my need for chocolate. TRM’s probably young, healthy, and has never known a really sick day in his life, or he had insurance for it and has no clue what life is like when you have no insurance and you’re up a creek with a nasty health problem. It may be an individual need, but it rapidly turns into a societal problem as your family struggles with insurmountable medical debt, hospitals and doctors expend resources trying to collect from you, your immediate family members feel compelled to dip into their own resources or expend their own time on a second job to help you, and businesses must absorb their losses as you declare bankruptcy and leave everyone holding the bag. The lack of health insurance is an individual problem with effects that morph like a rock dropped in a pond. Lots of ripple effects like family deprivation and hardship, bankruptcy, and negative economic consequences.
Now, TRM would rather think it’s about “fraud”. How’s that, TRM? Who’s defrauding whom? Of course there IS fraud in the system, I’ll grant TRM that, but WHY? Why do people steal others’ identities in order to obtain health care? It’s because they don’t have their own health insurance and can’t afford to get it or have been squeezed out of the system by pre-existing medical conditions or have exhausted their policy limits. Make health care coverage available to all and a huge incentive to commit fraud goes away.
Shaun says no one cares. Sheesh, he must be as young as TRM. I’ll tell you when you start caring, Shaun, and that’s when you wake up one day and realize there’s a lump that wasn’t there before and you decided to let your extremely high-priced health insurance go because you changed jobs, or you’re self-employed, or you just got divorced and can’t afford the COBRA payments. It’s when the lump is a recurrence of a problem and you know that when you apply for insurance you will not only be charged a higher premium, but the problem will excluded from coverage as a pre-existing condition. It’s when your kid tells you he has a really, really bad headache and you take him to the hospital and find out he’s got a blown blood vessel and has to spend the next two weeks in the hospital getting daily, very expensive, brain scans. It’s finding out you need radiation treatment after they’ve taken out your little lump. Or it’s just you telling yourself the lump probably isn’t that big a deal and ignoring it for the next few months or years, or telling your kid to suck it up and take some aspirin and see if the pain goes away. Yeah, you always have that “choice”.
So let’s talk about affordability. Shaun wants to know where we find the money. Well, the first thing we know is that no one can afford what I just described. That’s why we have so many bankruptcies in this country and why hospitals are sometimes going bankrupt and why they’re hiring cheap H1-B visa workers on contract instead of Americans who’ll want, among other things, higher pay and actual health insurance. Do you have any idea how crappy the health insurance for medical workers in this country is? Talk to my sister, the nurse, who has some of the worst insurance ever. I assume that Shaun would agree that personal bankruptcies, hospital bankruptcies, and other negative economic thingies are bad. So how do we make health insurance affordable?
Republicans: Set aside for a moment Dubya’s brilliant suggestion last year that if you have a health problem you should just go to the Emergency Room because they can’t turn you away. His naivete would be almost charming if it weren’t coming from the leader of the free world. So, let’s turn to McCain. McCain wants to allow people to shop nationally for insurance rather than within their own states, and proposes expanding access to association related health insurance. Yeah, I was in one of those plans once. The premiums went up at least $60 a month every year that I had it, and I had it for at least 5 years. Moreover, there was a million dollar lifetime limit to my coverage and my pre-existing salivary gland tumor condition was excluded. It was a cafeteria plan, meaning you had to choose which riders you wanted, and that’s how I discovered when I came down with walking pneumonia that I had absolutely no coverage for illness-related doctor visits. It being walking pneumonia and all I didn’t get to go to the hospital, which would have been covered. Instead, this “insured” person paid hundreds of dollars for uninsured medical expenses.
Mitt Romney received kudos for his Massachusetts plan, the one which is somewhat unfairly criticized in the video, but he’s skittled backwards on that and has turned to the “free market and federalism” according to his web site. Romney would expand the tax deductibility of premiums and give some tax breaks to businesses, etc., etc. Not the worst thing in the world, but clearly not addressing the problem. What about pre-existing conditions? What about people who don’t make enough for their tax break to mean that much to them? What about people who are not on employers’ health insurance plans? What is it with the Republicans and their silly belief that a tax cut can fix everything? He still wants to leave it up to the private insurers and to “encourage competition”. Well guess what, Mitt? The first goal of a business is to clear a profit, and competition will only be vigorous for those viewed as desirable customers, and this means that we’re still up a creek because all the people who will cost money to the insurers will still be considered undesirable and the insurers will simply collude on finding ways to exclude them. Who wants to compete for someone who’s going to lose you money?
God, Catzmaw, you’re all yelling. Don’t you ever shut up? Okay, okay.
I like the idea of having a default position of being able to opt for the same type of coverage our congress-critters and their families get. Here’s my offering of alternatives in a nutshell:
a) whichever Dem makes it into the White House must get legislation passed which does away with the pre-existing condition as a basis for exclusion;
b) if we’re going to keep association related cafeteria plans then there must be a floor established for coverage under which they may not go, and they must be required to fully and completely explain to prospective customers what is and is not covered. By a floor I mean they must have minimum mandatory coverages for illness-related doctor visits, hospitalizations, and prescriptions. The days of only offering such coverage as a “rider” which the customer must opt for should be over.
c) All insurance programs must offer minimum mandatory coverages for dental, vision, and mental health care.
d) The savings that accrue to the health care system from having coverage for virtually everybody should not be underestimated.
e) If coverage is voluntary and not mandated then how do we get people to buy it? I would suggest that we allow an above-the-line deduction from gross income of a substantial chunk of whatever the taxpayer is paying for premiums. Above-the-line means of course that the amount of taxable income to the taxpayer will be reduced, which will result in tax savings to the taxpayer. The taxpayer receives an immediate benefit and does not have to rely upon the tax tables as current proposals for tax deductions do. It becomes just another line on the computerized forms businesses use for payroll so it’s not a lot of record-keeping if you get it through the business. Right now, the four person family making $40,000 per year doesn’t really pay income tax. There’s no benefit to the taxpayer in offering him a tax deduction for buying the insurance. But tell the taxpayer that he can exclude, say, 15% of his taxable income up to a cap of about $10,000 per year from his taxable income, and you’re going to see a lot of people jumping on it. Even TRM and Shaun wouldn’t mind being taxed at the lower rate a 15% cut off the top of their gross income would give them. It would have the same attraction as investment in tax-deferred savings like 401Ks and SEP-IRAs.
f) All plans should be portable, meaning easily transferable from one plan to another.
g) I agree with the rest of the Dems’ plan – frankly, once you do away with the mandate issue and some of the funding issues they have a lot of similarities.
I haven’t spent much time researching this issue, so some of my notions may seem quaint, but this is just my rough take on the matter. Suggestions, comments, or snarky asides are always welcome.
Cat – um, that wasn’t the question but OK 🙂
(Seriously, though, someone pointed out to me last week that the Clinton plan is the only one that offers dental coverage, which I see is one of your minimums.)
I’m not that young Catzmaw,,, sorry but that’s about as snarky as I can be right now…
Dang, I did go on a rant, didn’t I? I’ve been looking at my monthly $500 premium for health insurance. That always sets me off.
On one point, Mitt Romney is not “going backwards” in supporting federalism on the issue of healthcare. His healthcare plan in Massachusetts is in fact a state program. He encourages other states to have similar programs, but would allow each state to come up with their own plan to deal with the issue of healthcare. He always supported federalism in dealing with healthcare; that is why he dealt with the issue as governor.
I don’t have time to discuss the rest right now, but I just thought I’d try to set the record straight on that particular point.
A nicely inspired rant, Catzmaw.
~
TRM, I’m thinking you’ll have more fun elsewhere. Take care.