President Obama is trying to rally his team behind a health care bill lambasted as “an insurance company bailout,” and a Federal Reserve nominee who has engineered a slew of bailouts for Wall Street’s biggest banks. While Obama’s explosion of government spending and regulations has stoked conservative fury for months, the naked corporatism on display this month has finally sparked an insurrection on the Left.
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean has called on Democrats to kill the current Senate bill, because it lacks the Left’s favorite provisions, such as the public option, but it contains the insurance company’s wish list including federal subsidies and, incredibly, a mandate that every person hold insurance— perhaps the greatest subsidy any industry could ever ask for.
Dean blasted the bill as “an insurance company’s dream,” and many on the Left have followed in this line of attack.
The White House blog Wednesday called Dean’s “a somewhat perplexing new line of argument.” (Though, it’s not that new, considering I have been making this argument in The Examiner since February.)
The White House’s Dan Pfeiffer’s rebuttal to Dean begins “This bill will finally wrest power away from the insurance industry and put it in the hands of American consumers,” because the bill would prohibit “denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, charging exorbitant premiums based on gender, age, or health status. …”
If this sounds familiar to you, you may have been reading the policy proposals from America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lobby for health insurers. AHIP issued a paper in December 2008 titled “Now is the Time for Health Care Reform,” which called on Congress to “combine guarantee-issue coverage with no pre-existing condition exclusions with an enforceable individual mandate.” Later, AHIP would get behind “community rating” regulations that limit price-discrimination based on gender, age, and health.
Obama has long opposed two proposals that would impose competitive pressures on insurers — allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines and eliminating subsidies for employer-based health insurance — and neither of those provisions is in the bill. And the White House is also proposing to subsidize the insurers’ product and require everyone to buy it.
While insurance companies may not like every policy in the bill, they probably give the package a solid B-Plus.
Liberal MSNBC host Keith Olbermann used to argue that Obama was the scourge of the insurers, and that those opposing “reform” were owned by industry. Olbermann posited in August that after the health industry’s record-breaking $19.4 million in campaign contributions to Obama, “somebody in the Health Trust, somebody responsible for buying influence, got fired over what Obama’s done.”
But this week Olbermann has turned against “reform” as a sop to insurers, pledging on Wednesday night to personally disobey the federal insurance mandate if there is no public option.
We’re simultaneously witnessing a liberal rebellion over Obama’s renomination of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Bernanke was the chief architect of the 2008 Bush bailouts of Wall Street, starting with Bear Stearns, ramping up with AIG, and climaxing with the $700 billion Robin Hood-in-reverse heist known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP.
But Bernanke and Obama have also kept the bailout ball rolling, with the Public Private Investment Partnership and the proposed institutionalized bailouts in Obama’s Wall Street overhaul.
The left-most U.S. senator, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has joined forces with conservative leader Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., in trying to block Bernanke’s confirmation. It’s a coalition of the anti-Wall Street Left and the anti-Washington Right.
Bernanke, unlike Obama’s health care bill, is certain to gain the Senate’s approval, but the fight over his nomination is just a warm-up act in the effort to audit the Fed and curb its powers — another battle that puts the Obama administration and Big Business on one side, and liberals and conservatives on the other.
This could be the shape of things to come: Sanders, Dean, and DeMint against Obama, AHIP, and Goldman Sachs.
Timothy P. Carney is The Washington Examiner’s Lobbying Editor, His K Street column appears on Wednesdays.
