On a separate thread where folks are discussing possible legal challenges health care bill, I said I'd look around to see if there have been any challenges to Massachusetts mandatory coverage law and how they fared. This is by no means comprehensive:

Mass.
Against the Mass. law, I could find only one challenge and that was thrown out on what seem to be procedural grounds rather than on the merits. (I can't find the slip op. online to confirm).

Tea Party Challenges

[I thought I'd update and re-post this, since with HR3962 our GENIUS Dems have really outdone themselves their indefatigable efforts to preserve the two-party system by giving the Republicans ever better odds in 2010 and 2012. Not that it matters to them; they're all made in Versailles by now anyhow. --lambert]

Obviously, I'm not a member of that curious breed, the "Democratic Strategist," nor do I play one on the teebee, nor do I have an interest in joining the League of Triple-A Democratic Strategists as a way to make it into The Show; and anyhow, if I were any good at strategerizing, somebody would be paying me to do it (Inside Rotisserie Baseball commenters take note).

Then again, because I'm not paid [except for your donations!], I can't ignore the obvious on health care insurance reform, and it seems to me that the "some bill, any bill" that the current Congress is going to emit will have some problems down the line. Among them:

1. Pffft. That deflated feeling, as of air escaping from a tire, will come when people compare the promise of "hope" and "change" to what is actually delivered -- and when (2013). As far at the [a|the] [strong|robust]? public [health insurance]? [option|plan], I still think my "baseline scenario" -- the mandate will force millions to buy junk insurance, bailing out the insurance companies -- is the most likely outcome, and it's not going to play well over time, especially with Obama's youthful base [UPDATE See Ian Welsh]. Then again, we might think that the electoral process has become a stepping stone to lucrative jobs on K Street or on the teebee, and so what we think of as the politics or optics of it all is just not relevant to insiders and wannabe insiders.

Timothy Jost is an extraordinarily readable health care wonk [I've borrowed from him before on Switzerland and the Netherlands] and he has a 3-part series on HR 3962 at the Health Affairs blog, if you're interested.

Don McCann says abort. Then reboot:

The five reform bills passed by House and Senate committees will not control health care costs, and yet these are to be merged into one bill – that will not control health care costs.

What is the worst that could happen?

The second worst is that the final bill could be defeated and everyone would walk away with yet another failed attempt at reform. (Everyone would understand that very soon we would have to return to start over since the status quo is totally unacceptable.)

The very worst is that this bill could pass and everyone would walk away insisting that we have successfully reformed health care when all we have done is to establish an unnecessary and unethical ten-year long experiment that will cause financial hardship, physical suffering and even death – adverse outcomes that could be prevented with reform based on policy evidence rather than markets.

I think Dr. McCann is an optimist.

Oh, good Krist, this is wonderful Combined with this, I nearly fainted today, it's so nice to see this sort of thing. Stark is showing the Way, for those truly interested in being a New Media or whatever. It's so frakking simple.

Let me put it this way: I always thought I couldn't take good pictures. Trad film and I don't get along. Then they invented fancee digi cams that I can sort of use, and voila! I'm ansel adams, or something. But anyway, my point is that there should be a lot more of this, please.

AP gets the date, in full why oh why can't we have a better press corps mode:

Under the Democratic bills, federal tax credits to help make health insurance affordable for millions of low- and middle-income households won't start flowing until 2013 — after the next presidential election. [Quelle surprise!] But Medicare cuts and a sizable chunk of the tax increases to pay for the overhaul kick in immediately. [Quelle surprise!]

The eat-your-vegetables-first approach is causing heartburn for some Democrats. Three years is a long time to wait for dessert...

Oh, health care is dessert? I guess to the press, who have insurance, it is!

... and opponents could capitalize on misgivings about the complex legislation to undo what would be a signature achievement for Obama.

Obama administration officials and Democratic lawmakers say the reason for the three-year wait is the time it's going to take to set up insurance marketplaces, write consumer protection rules and reconfigure the bureaucracy to carry out the legislation. It took President George W. Bush's administration two years to phase in the Medicare prescription benefit, a more modest undertaking.

Right, and it took LBJ only 1 year to implement Medicare -- before computers! Why?

Tristero recently caused a bona fide flame war at the normally staid and Serious Hullaballoo comment community, in those two posts about food. I didn't really find too much of what he said outrageous or stupid, and I respect the fact that he came right out and admits that he eats what he likes because it tastes good. I confess I didn't think the Hullaballoo community had it in them, way to sling that pizza across the lunchroom, kids!

I just wanted to make a couple remarks and see what others think, because I believe that food is a critically important topic in many political debates, from those on the environment, health care, racism and more.

From my perspective, it's beyond obvious that far too many Americans aren't eating well. I was shocked, moving to this Heartland community where I now live, by the contrast of people's shapes here, vs places like DC and Chicago. That is, people in flyoverland really run to fat, in my eyes. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but the 'beautiful body' culture of my previous environment is almost nowhere to be found here, except among the Greek set of the local big state university. And I suspect those young women are not unfamiliar with some unhealthy food habits like binging and the dangerous, speedy drugs that make crash dieting an easy task.

Anyway, I bet I could get most of you to agree that the problem isn't just a regional one, and that there are many areas in which the quality of our food and the habits people have consuming it could be improved. But as the comments at those two posts remind me, a lot of people seem to have the attitude of "You can take my daily Twinkie when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands." What can be done to change that?

Further, I guess I don't understand the idea that people like me are overly righteous food snobs. Do people really want to have diabetes and be obese? I can't believe that. I understand that not all people have good food choices, but I would hope that if they did, they'd make them, at least most of the time. I'd also think people would enjoy the benefits that come with "progressively produced" food, organics and locally grown, food free of synthetics and chemicals and suchlike. That kind of food really does taste better. And if food is about satisfaction, well...I guess I just don't get the resistance to that.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to a terrific restaurant in this area, after long months of my despairing of ever finding a place that compares to the upscale, "progressive" dining option I had when I lived in big cities. It's in a town that defines "podunk backwater." It serves locally produced, organically grown, reasonably priced, fucking outstanding tasty food. And it's doing really well as a business, apparently, even in this Depression we're having in this state. So I know there's 'a market' for better food. My question is: why are so many people resistant to good food and healthy eating habits, in favor of unfood horror found at fast food restaurants or the junk food aisle? Marketing? Ignorance? Addiction to unhealthy but "good" tasting things like corn syrup and trans fats?

Also: consider this a Saturday Morning open recipe thread, if you've got any. I'm always looking for new cooking ideas, especially now that "chef" is practically my 4th job.

NOTE Great to see all those great "progressive" bloggers giving this the attention it deserves. Oh, wait.... They've been too busy helping the FKDP hustle single payer advocates away from the table to do anything else. My bad.

(Via.)

Asses to asses, mush to mush. [pounds head on desk]

[Cross-posted to OpenLeft. Feel free to add comments over there, too. --lambert]

The blogosphere is all atwitter over Alan Grayson's powerful rhetoric on health care insurance reform -- and don't get me wrong, I'm all for effective rhetoric.* Grayson said:

44,789 Americans die every year according to the Harvard study. and you can see it by going to our website at grayson.house.gov. That is 10 times more than the number of Americans who have died in Iraq and who died in 9/11. but that was just once. this is every single year. That's right. every single year.

Take a look at this. Read it and weep. And I mean that, read it and weep, because of all these Americans who are dying because they don't have health insurance. Now, I think we should do something about that and the democratic health care plan does do something about that. It makes health care affordable for those who can't afford insurance and it saves these peoples' lives.

Leave aside the fact that co-authors of Harvard study Grayson cites are single payer advocates; we're used to the public option crowd stealing the good stuff. The more the merrier!

What really gets me is that Grayson's wrong on one very obvious and important fact:

As the Democrats busily work on plans to make us all captive consumers of the private health insurers, the rich are cutting loose from the system. While we'll be stuck in costly Exchanges, the rich will be moving on toward their own privately reformed health system. Welcome to the world of concierge medicine.

Leaders Absent at Health Care Demonstration in Midtown

Sure enough, President Obama got out on the road, briefly, to shore up support for health care reform. Yet it is his opponents that have monopolized the airwaves and framed the health care reform debate to such a degree that the public option has been all but abandoned in the corridors of power (Baucus' proposal makes no mention of it), while the people are still chanting in support of a 'single payer' system in the streets of the nation's cities.

Very, very public:

I have this idea. It’s pretty simple and I think it will appeal to a lot of people.

Here it is.

I want every uninsured man and woman who comes down with swine flu to go sit in the waiting rooms of their elected representatives.

That’s it. Just sit there – coughing. Throwing your used Kleenex in their trash receptacles. If they want us to suffer, they should have to look at at the logical consequences of their inaction. Tell them you’re going to keep coming back until they manage to pass something that’s actually going to help people instead of lining the pockets of the insurance companies.

Vincent Navarro in CounterPunch:

Programs that are not universal (i.e., do not benefit everyone) are intrinsically unpopular. This is why antipoverty programs are unpopular. People feel that they are paying, through taxation, for programs that do not benefit them. Compassion is not, and never has been, a successful motivation for public policy. Solidarity is. You support others with the understanding that they will support you when you need it most. The long history of social policy, in the U.S. and elsewhere, shows that universality is a better way to get popular support for a program than means-testing for programs targeted to specific vulnerable groups. The limited popularity of the welfare state in the U.S. is precisely due to the fact that most programs are not universal but means-tested. ... .

Accept the principle that health care is a right, and truly universal coverage follows:

Read all of Wendell Potter's testimony. This caught my eye, however:

And, I know there is a perception out there that we cannot achieve major reform because the insurance industry employs so many people. But, in general, the companies today have fewer employees than they did when I first started working in this field. Many jobs that used to be in-house have been outsourced. And, the most numerous jobs are low-paying positions that are tasked with helping to deny peoples’ claims for coverage. If a public option were adopted, I bet new government jobs would be created that would provide employees like these not just more secure positions but more satisfying ones, which would not have the high burn-out and turn-over rate in the industry right now where these workers suffer tremendous stress from being on the front-lines of telling desperate families that the insurance company is refusing to allow or pay for needed medical treatment. The existence of so many jobs devoted to denying coverage should not be an excuse to thwart reform. Surely, there has to be a better way.

Maybe some of those jobs could deliver health care to people?

Sure, Reuters, but it's still good:

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.

Emptywheel has the latest on Payola Patty:

In all, Ceci presents a landscape in which the most important players--aside from two Senators who have been slighted in the process thus far--are trade industry groups. And the most important issue for them is the profit they stand to make off of taxing America's middle class to make them wealthier.

I would love to know if any of the private industry sources for the article has ties to Warren Buffet.

Salt Lake City Tribune:

Five days on the road, and a group of physicians from Washington, Oregon and Arizona are truly mad as hell about the nation's health-care system and the way the reform debate has shaped up.

Especially infuriating, the self-named Mad as Hell doctors said during a town-hall meeting at the Salt Lake City Library on Saturday, is President Barack Obama's apparent dismissal of a single-payer system which they say would insure every American and cost the least.

Even Obama's Wednesday night health-care speech was nothing more than "a Band-aid clinging to the edges of a gaping, stinking wound," said Salt Lake City attorney-physician Clark Newhall, whose stemwinder call to action prompted a crowd of 75 to shout out their disapproval.

"Health care is a right," Newhall cried. "We have a moral obligation to take care of our fellow citizens. Everybody in! Nobody out!"...

The traveling Mad as Hell Doctors -- Katharine Ottaway from Port Townsend, Wash.; Paul Hochfeld, of Corvallis, Ore; Joe Eusterman, of Wilsonville, Ore.; and Tim Jordan, of Phoenix -- are just as angry as Beale, and with other physicians have filed a formal request to meet with Obama sometime after they arrive in Washington on Oct. 1.

They want to talk about one thing: single-payer health care. The president has yet to respond, the group said.

Starting in Portland, Ore., on Monday, the doctors have traveled in a rented recreational vehicle throughout the northwest to Salt Lake City. They will travel on to at least 15 more cities before mustering with anyone who wants to join them in Gettysburg, Pa.

Well, my only question is how Rahm will respond:

[or was that "entitlement reform is health care reform"?]

Public option! Look! Over there! Sarah Palin! Now with Death Panels! Public option! And a Congresscritter with the audacity to call the President a liar! On national TV no less! Public option!

Martha Burk:

Dammit President Obama -- we support you. Women put you in office, and stuck with you when the crazies were beating you up with "death panels" and "socialized medicine."

We still support you, but like millions of women who were watching, we wonder why you have to always use our most intimate health issues as a bargaining chip to give away, when you're not going to get anything back. You did it at Notre Dame, and now you've done it again.

K Street preps for healthcare Round 2

“August recess was a missed opportunity. So much discussion was focused on whether or not to create a government-run insurance program. That was a distraction,” said Robert Zirkelbach, the spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).

We need Dave Johnson to do justice to this article.

For the so-called "public option" (or "plan") to work, the insurance companies must be tightly and successfully regulated, as its advocates will admit. This is true for several reasons: First, so they don't sell junk insurance to the people who will be forced to buy it via the mandate; so they don't deny coverage to those who have paid their premiums via scams like rescission; so they don't cherrypick those who are less likely to need insurance, throwing the rest of the burden on taxpayers; and finally, so they "play fair"* as contractors, when they manage and administer the "public plan" (or "option") for the government.**

Will tightly regulating the insurance companies work? Fortunately, we have a controlled experiment we can look at that compares single payer and the privatized approach directly: Medicare, and Medicare Part D. Don McCann writes at PNHP:

What’s beautiful about the Medicare Advantage program is that it has provided us with a real-life laboratory experiment which allows us to compare the functioning of highly-regulated private insurance plans as contrasted with the functioning of a public insurance program: traditional Medicare. The results are in, though that would be tough to ascertain if you simply observe the response of Congress.

What have we learned? The private plans take away the choice of health care providers that the traditional public program offers. The private plans insert intrusive interventions between the patient and the physician – interventions that are not found in the public plans. Private plans divert more resources to excessive, wasteful administrative services while increasing the administrative burden on the health care providers and on the public stewards who must provide oversight of our tax dollars that are diverted to this industry. Private plans also provide more entry points for the criminal element to cheat the taxpayers, patients, and providers. And for this we are paying far more of our tax dollars than we do in the traditional Medicare program for comparable levels of care. ... Our Medicare Advantage experiment has demonstrated that it is the private plans that must be jettisoned, and it is Medicare that must be granted to everyone after modest, appropriate reengineering so that it works even better than it does now.

In an Op-Ed for Washington Times, no less. Here's the description:

One little-noticed proposal has attracted an ideologically breathtaking span of senators and seems to have been unjustly overlooked in the debate: the Healthy Americans Act, sponsored by liberal Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and conservative Republican Sen. Robert F. Bennett of Utah. The amazing list of 15 co-sponsors includes eight Democrats, from Bill Nelson of Florida to Maria Cantwell of Washington, and seven Republicans, from Bob Corker of Tennessee to Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

I had heard about this bill but never took the time to look it up and research it. How is it possible we know so little about it? And why hasn't Mr. Obama invited these 15 senators to the White House to have them explain it better? Maybe he should before his speech Wednesday.

The basic idea of the proposal is, in effect, to "liquefy" everyone's current employer-provided health insurance policies -- i.e., require all employers to pay in cash to each employee the actual cost of that individual's insurance policy, and that extra compensation would have to be used by each employee to purchase health insurance policies. All those receiving this boost in pay would receive a tax deduction, varying in amount according to their income -- i.e., you get some or all of the tax deduction the employer currently gets for paying your insurance.

So, it's another backdoor way to get rid of the employer exclusion, yes?

Times:

In a last effort to give the Senate a bipartisan health care bill, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee circulated a comprehensive proposal on Sunday to overhaul the health care system and proposed a new fee on insurance companies to help pay for coverage of the uninsured.

Mr. Schumer said, “The health insurance industry should pay its fair share of the cost because it stands to gain over 40 million new consumers under health care* reform legislation.”

Translation: We bailed you out with the mandate. Now, give a cut to the uninsured with this fee.

Of course, the insurance companies will immediately pass the fee on to their existing policy holders:

President Obama appears to have completely "sold out." His approval rating plummeted, not because of Republicans, but because of how he is "negotiating" health care reform. Single-payer should have been used as a bargaining chip.

To compromise both single-payer and a public opton is to trade out health, financial stability and our nation's solvency in exchange for Blue Dog and Republican votes. This is a direct affront, and duplicitous act, against the very people who put him in office and gave him a majority in Congress to work with.