Obama Injects Himself Into Health Talks, Despite Risks
Writer David Kirkpatrick confirmed from sources what many have understood for months – that the White House will support a compromise health plan being crafted in he Senate Finance Committee, even though it lacks the public option the president has repeatedly demanded.
Health lobbyists and Capitol Hill insiders told Kirkpatrick that the White House has been a shadow negotiator in the ongoing talks in Sen. Max Baucus’ offices, while letting the rest of the process work itself out.
The first challenge for the White House is to get anything at all passed, which seems less likely given the plummeting approval ratings for the president and health plans discussed. A watered-down, less-expensive bipartisan plan could help, though.
The second challenge is that once the president appears to sell out, he will have to assure liberals that he’s lying to the other guys – that the plan will do what Obama suggested in his now-famous 2003 speech on single-payer health care and be a stalking horse for a national health plan.
And it likely would be just that, since a non-profit, private co-op system would be unlikely to deliver the kinds of coverage or competition Democrats demand. When the co-ops flop, in comes the national health plan.
“The House has largely been a sideshow,’ said Representative Jim Cooper of Tennessee, a member of the so-called Blue Dog caucus of conservative Democrats. ‘The Senate Finance Committee is where it really matters. That’s the bottleneck.’
Members and staff of the four other committees say the White House has largely stayed on the sidelines. ‘They have been — what is a good way to put it? — available for consultation,’ Mr. Cooper said.
Mr. Obama and his top aides have immersed themselves in the Senate Finance Committee process. The president talks to Mr. Baucus several times a week, people briefed on their conversations say. Mr. Obama has also held a few calls with the panel’s ranking Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.”
Politico — The Democrats’ senior problem
Liberals lament that Democrats have not done a better job of selling the merits of health care changes being proposed in Congress to senior citizens.
But there’s no reason that seniors should like any of what’s being discussed.
A plan that expands coverage to uninsured people by cutting Medicare can hardly be appealing to a group that has 100 percent coverage… thanks to Medicare.
Just as Social Security reform had no appeal to those old enough to be getting checks, Medicare reform has no appeal to those already getting subsidized treatment.
The promise of future savings? Doesn’t matter if you expect to be dead by then. The suggestion that cutting Medicare will make it better for recipients? Sounds silly.
That’s why poll numbers show abysmal support for the president’s agenda on health among those 65 and over, a group that went big for their comrade John McCain. The threat is potent to Democrats up in 2010 in swing districts. They know that the unique coalition that came out for Obama won’t be there next year and seniors will resume their disproportionate place in the electorate.
Writers Victoria McGrane and Chris Frates got some of this right, but managed to somehow write a piece on the problem for Democrats on health care with older voters without talking about the presidents’ AARP gaffe. President Obama said Tuesday that AARP endorsed his still unknown health plan, prompting the retiree group – already taking heat from its members for giving the president a positive platform from which to pitch his not-yet plan – to distance itself from the president’s remarks and make very plain, very publicly that they do not endorse his proposals.
“‘Why would you want to cannibalize Medicare in order to create a new plan? Why wouldn’t we fix Medicare first? I think those are the concerns that are being raised,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said during a conference call Tuesday.
The proposed cuts to Medicare Advantage are real, but Democrats are also fighting full-blown myths that have gained traction, attacks claiming that reform would create government “death panels” authorizing euthanasia.’”
Wall Street Journal — Cap-and-Trade’s Unlikely Critics: Its Creators
One of the reasons Democratc leaders jammed through cap and trade legislation in n ugly House vote was to create a little pressure on the Senate – not just on global warming but on the rest of the president’s agenda, especially health care. But the plan isn’t working out that well.
Not only was the house bill badly corrupted and passed with a two-vote margin achieved by Speaker Pelosi herself voting and pulling a Kennedy out of rehab, but as the plan sits on the shelf, Senate skeptics gain ammunition by the day – including a new study that shows 2 million jobs lost under the cap and trade bill..
Writer Jon Hilsenrath finds one of the two inventors of the cap and trade approach who explains that the idea was never intended for dealing with global problems, but for localized pollution. Want to deal with mercury emissions? Cap and trade. Need to deal with global CO2 levels? Better get India and China on board before you do anything.
Like other conscientious enviros, inventor Thomas Crocker favors a carbon emissions tax. It is straightforward, less prone to lobbyist mischief and is easier to adjust to reflect perceived environmental damage than a cap.
In 1966, Mr. Crocker, still struggling to finish his thesis at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, sketched out the cap-and-trade idea to deal with air pollution produced by fertilizer plants in Florida. Mr. Crocker first pitched the idea of trading at a conference in Washington. He had been asked to attend as a stand-in for a professor who couldn’t go and present data on the Florida plants. He didn’t have all the data yet and came up with the theory instead…
Their logic went like this: When governments capped smog emissions from power plants or the runoff of pesticides by farmers into local streams, it was indirectly putting a value on these emissions. Some farmers and some power plants could reduce these emissions more efficiently than others, and some placed a higher value on them than others. By setting caps on pollution but then allowing the polluters to trade these rights, the economists theorized, the polluters themselves would figure out the cheapest way to meet new targets.
Another economist, David Montgomery, advanced their ideas in the 1970s, converting their theories into the complex mathematical formulas to demonstrate that they weren’t merely an idea but were also economically feasible. Mr. Montgomery, too, is a skeptic of cap-and-trade for greenhouse gases. He prefers an outright tax.
‘You get huge swings in carbon prices with a cap, which creates more volatility and uncertainty for business,’ he says.”
Fearing another defeat, the proponents of an effort to overturn a gay marriage ban that won approval by big margins in the 2008 election, are pulling he plug on an effort to brig the matter up in 2010.
It’s significant nationally because it shows what the climate is like in California these days – not very liberal and very crabby. America is pretty fed up and the absence of an economic freefall won’t be sufficiently good news to prevent Democratic losses next year.
In California, it’s good news for Democrats in Congress who didn’t need a divisive social issue churning up conservative votes in what will likely be an already bad year.
“One of the state’s largest gay rights groups announced Wednesday it will wait until 2012 to push for an amendment to the California Constitution permitting same-sex marriage, but other organizations with the same agenda insisted they want to bring the issue back to voters in 2010.
Leaders of Equality California, which spearheaded the campaign against Proposition 8, said they planned to wait until the next presidential election and released a road map for repealing the 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage.
‘If we thought November 2010 was the best time to go, the time when we thought we could win back the freedom to marry, we would go . . . But we don’t,’ said Marc Solomon, Equality California’s marriage director.”
Wall Street Journal — Clinton Urges Overhaul of Nigeria Elections
It’s time to come home, Madam Secretary.
Hillary Clinton’s troubled trip across Africa (“He’s not the secretary of state. I am.”) kept the news of the weird coming as she explained to Nigerians that they shouldn’t feel too bad about their super-corrupt country and it’s stolen elections, after all even the U.S. of A. had one recent election stolen by George W. Bush and his brother. In 1996, her husband had the “Sorry Safari” to travel across Africa to apologize for slavery, colonialism, etc. but a secretary of state making a comparison between American democracy and an African kleptocracy? That’s a new one. The good news? Only two more stops left on the tour.
Writer Will Conners has the details from Abuja:
“While chiding Nigerian elections, Mrs. Clinton said, to a big laugh from the audience, ‘I know a little bit about running in elections, and I have won some elections and I have lost some elections. And in a democracy there have to be winners and losers.’
‘Our democracy is still evolving,’ she added. ‘You know we’ve had all kinds of problems in some of our past elections, as you might remember. In 2000, our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of the man running for president was the governor of the state, so we have our problems, too.’”
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