Shorter Congressional Dems: Rather than hang together, let’s hang separately.
The “scaled-back” version of health care reform under discussion would cover less than half the uninsured people that the current bills would. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
This is quite a commentary. Here’s a description of the pared down approach being considered on Capitol Hill …
The consensus measure would be less ambitious than the bills approved last year. It would extend insurance coverage to perhaps 12 million to 15 million people — and provide political cover to Democrats, who said they could not simply drop the issue after spending so much time and effort on it.
The pared-back approach would cover fewer than half of those who, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would gain coverage under the House and Senate bills. But it would not put the government on the hook for what critics say is a new entitlement, a change that would appeal to some Republicans.
So the House won’t pass the current senate bill because it’s not progressive enough. So the solution is to come up with a new bill that will cover half as many people. And lots of Republicans are going to vote for it. Even better.
Paul gets it …
So, House Democrats have a choice: do they pass the Senate bill, or do they go back to the drawing board and spend several months cobbling together a plan that’s worse in almost every dimension, generating thousands of stories about hapless Democrats — and almost surely find that Senate Republicans block the new plan, too.
There were unconfirmed reports floating around this week that Cuban doctors providing aid in Haiti had run out of anesthesia and that the U.S. embargo of Cuba prevented the U.S. military from replenishing their supplies. Considering the number of amputations being performed down there on trauma victims, it’s a gruesome scenario to contemplate.
We’ve not been able to confirm that the embargo ever got in the way of resupplying the Cubans. But we did call the State Department, which says the U.S. stands ready to help and has communicated that fact, though to whom is not clear: “The United States has communicated its readiness to make medical relief supplies available to Cuban doctors working on the ground in Haiti as part of the international relief effort.”
Justin Elliott has been tracking this down for us.
Take a moment to read this story. Virtually all the top health care policy experts on the progressive side have gotten together to ask the House to just pass the friggin’ Senate bill and then follow-up with an amending bill which can go through reconciliation in the Senate.
It’s sort of a perennial issue in progressive policy reform, balancing what works in policy terms with what make sense politically. And so often the two calculations don’t dictate the same course. What makes this situation so bizarre, however, such a watershed in some ways, is that each calculus points to the same conclusion. Everybody can see it. But a lot of members of Congress want to drop this bill and pretend that they’re going to pass a bunch of smaller bills later in the year.
“Reality-based” was one of the Democrats’ great touchstone phrases of the Bush years. And like so many self-identifications it started off as derision. The phrase came from this passage in a 2004 article by Ron Suskind in the New York Times.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The phrase, grabbed from the Bushies and latched on to by progressives explained so much about the Bush White House mentality, that facts and realities weren’t “stubborn things” but fairly soft impediments in the way of willful self-assertion. Read More