FW: Northern California Regional Conference Call, Tonight, 12/16/09, 9:00 PM
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Galen Swain
Dec 16, 2009, 7:09:28 PM12/16/09
to Santa Clara For Obama, southba...@googlegroups.com, BOC CD 15
We have an important conference call tonight on Health Care for all volunteers. I hope you can hop on. We are 1st & Goal to go on making history on health care in this country. I hope to see you on the trail making history.
Galen (Respectfully)
$
Galen Swain 408 772-3209
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:23:42 -0800
Subject: Northern California Regional Conference Call, Tonight, 12/16/09, 9:00 PM
Northern California Community Organizers,
Because of all of the rumors floating around, we are going to hold our Northern California Regional Conference Call tonight, Wednesday, 12/16/09 at 9 PM for all volunteers.
Link To Sign Up:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gpc5gk
Linda Leu from HCAN will be on the call to provide their organization's perspective on the Senate Bill and we will relay information we got today from the OFA National Political Director, Addisu Demissie.
As we are still waiting for the CBO report to come out on the Senate Bill, there may be quite a few questions that may have to be deferred to the Statewide call that will address the CBO report directly. But we will do our best to answer your questions and listen to what your volunteers are concerned about on the ground.
Please pass this around to your teams.
(218) 339-2500
Pass code: 1052665
If you haven't gotten around to reading the articles from Ezra Klein about the Senate Bill today, we definitely recommend it. They are both attached below.
We recognize that this is probably one of the toughest times for many of your volunteers since this health care fight began. We all knew that the biggest hurdles to achieve health reform were going to come near the finish line and here they are. It is our job now to make sure we see this through and get the best bill possible on the President's Desk, as we cannot wait another 20 - 60 years for health care reform. We all know too many people whose lives are dependent upon us passing health care by early 2010.
We look forward to having a discussion on how we can still achieve that on tonight's call.
Thank you for all of your work,
--
--
Ruby Reid & Jeff Harry
Organizing For America (OFA)
Northern California Regional Directors
This was, for progressives, a frustrating vote. But the flip side of it being morally unconscionable for Joe Lieberman to put the bill at risk over something as small as Medicare buy-in for 3-or-so million people is that the absence of Medicare buy-in -- and of the weak public plan -- is not reason enough to oppose the bill, either.
The core of this legislation is as it always was: $900 billion, give or take, so people who can't afford health-care insurance suddenly can. Insurance regulations paired with the individual mandate, so insurers can't discriminate against the sick and the healthy can't make insurance unaffordable by hanging back until the moment they need medical care. The construction of health insurance exchanges so the people currently left out of the employer-based market are better served, and the many who will join them as the employer system continues to erode will have somewhere to go.
That's all policy. And as I spent yesterday arguing, it has a tendency to overshadow the lives in the balance. You can choose your estimate. The Institute of Medicine's methodology says 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn't have health-care coverage. A recent Harvard study found the number nearer to 45,000. Since we talk about the costs of health-care reform over a 10-year period, may as well talk about the lives saved that way, too. And we're looking, easily, at more than a hundred thousand lives, to say nothing of the people who will be spared bankruptcy, chronic pain, unnecessary impairment, unnecessary caretaking, bereavement, loss of wages, painful surgeries, and so on.
A lot of progressives woke up this morning feeling like they lost. They didn't. The public option and its compromised iterations were a battle that came to seem like a war. But they weren't the war. The bill itself was. When liberals talked about the dream of universal health-care insurance 10, 20 and 30 years ago, they talked about the plight of the uninsured, not the necessity of a limited public option in competition with private insurers.
"This is a good bill," Sen. Sherrod Brown said on Countdown last night. "Not a great bill, but a good bill." That's about right. But the other piece to remember is that more than it's a good bill, it's a good start. With $900 billion in subsidies already in place, it's easier to add another hundred billion later, if we need it, than it would be to pass $1 trillion in subsidies in 2011. With the exchanges built and private insurers unable to hold down costs, it's easier to argue for adding a strong public option to the market than it was before we'd tried regulation and a new competitive structure. With 95 percent of the country covered, it's easier to go the final 5 percent. And with a health-care reform bill actually passed, it's easier to convince legislators that passing such bills is possible.
On its own terms, the bill is the most important social policy achievement since the Great Society. It will save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of suffering. But moving forward, it also makes future improvements and expansions easier. A lot of the hard work of health-care reform -- in particular, the money for subsidies -- will finish this year. If reformers want to come back for the public option or more subsidies in a future year, they won't be doing it atop a $900 billion price tag that's being battered by tea parties and industry and everyone else. This bill doesn't have all the good stuff it should have, but reformers can stand atop what good stuff it does have and focus their energies on what good stuff is left to achieve.
______________________
Joe Lieberman's compromise, it seems, is no compromise. And he's infuriated so many Senate and House Democrats, not to mention so many in the Democratic base, that his bitter reversal might have made the prospects of any compromise a lot more remote. Based on chats I've had today, tensions are higher, both in the House and the Senate. And as the grudge begins to seem more personal, the liberals are both more resistant to being rolled, and more worried about it. It's one thing to swallow your own pride, after all. It's quite another to infuriate your base.
Democrats will look toward Olympia Snowe at this point, but if nothing works out, they may have to open the question of reconciliation once more. The irony is that the strange workings of the reconciliation process would strip the bill of the parts that Lieberman, Snowe and others favor and replace them with the exact policies they oppose.
For a detailed primer on the reconciliation process, head here. The short version is that reconciliation, which short-circuits the filibuster, can only be used for legislation that directly affects the federal budget. Anything that "indirectly" affects the budget -- think insurance regulations, like the ban on preexisting conditions -- would be ineligible.
What would be eligible? Well, Medicare buy-in, for one thing. Medicaid expansions. The public option. Anything, in short, that relies on a public program, rather than a new regulation in the private market. That means we'd probably lose the regulations on insurers, many of the delivery-side reforms, the health insurance exchanges, the individual mandate and much else.
Reconciliation, in other words, tips the bill towards an expansion of the public sector rather than a restructuring of the private sector. That makes it much less congenial to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans (not to mention more conservative Republicans). But it also doesn't need as many of their votes, as it can pass the Senate with 50, rather than 60, in support.
To be very clear, this is not a trade I'm eager to see reformers make. You lose too much in reconciliation, and gain too little. The exchanges are too important, and so too are the insurance regulations and delivery-system reforms. But if Democrats end up in reconciliation, this bill is going to get a lot worse from the perspective of its skeptics.
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Galen (Respectfully)
$
Galen Swain 408 772-3209
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:23:42 -0800
Subject: Northern California Regional Conference Call, Tonight, 12/16/09, 9:00 PM
Northern California Community Organizers,
Because of all of the rumors floating around, we are going to hold our Northern California Regional Conference Call tonight, Wednesday, 12/16/09 at 9 PM for all volunteers.
Link To Sign Up:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gpc5gk
Linda Leu from HCAN will be on the call to provide their organization's perspective on the Senate Bill and we will relay information we got today from the OFA National Political Director, Addisu Demissie.
As we are still waiting for the CBO report to come out on the Senate Bill, there may be quite a few questions that may have to be deferred to the Statewide call that will address the CBO report directly. But we will do our best to answer your questions and listen to what your volunteers are concerned about on the ground.
Please pass this around to your teams.
(218) 339-2500
Pass code: 1052665
If you haven't gotten around to reading the articles from Ezra Klein about the Senate Bill today, we definitely recommend it. They are both attached below.
We recognize that this is probably one of the toughest times for many of your volunteers since this health care fight began. We all knew that the biggest hurdles to achieve health reform were going to come near the finish line and here they are. It is our job now to make sure we see this through and get the best bill possible on the President's Desk, as we cannot wait another 20 - 60 years for health care reform. We all know too many people whose lives are dependent upon us passing health care by early 2010.
We look forward to having a discussion on how we can still achieve that on tonight's call.
Thank you for all of your work,
--
--
Ruby Reid & Jeff Harry
Organizing For America (OFA)
Northern California Regional Directors
Is the Senate health-care reform bill still worth passing?
"Insurance companies win," Markos Moulitsas tweeted last night. "Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate."This was, for progressives, a frustrating vote. But the flip side of it being morally unconscionable for Joe Lieberman to put the bill at risk over something as small as Medicare buy-in for 3-or-so million people is that the absence of Medicare buy-in -- and of the weak public plan -- is not reason enough to oppose the bill, either.
The core of this legislation is as it always was: $900 billion, give or take, so people who can't afford health-care insurance suddenly can. Insurance regulations paired with the individual mandate, so insurers can't discriminate against the sick and the healthy can't make insurance unaffordable by hanging back until the moment they need medical care. The construction of health insurance exchanges so the people currently left out of the employer-based market are better served, and the many who will join them as the employer system continues to erode will have somewhere to go.
That's all policy. And as I spent yesterday arguing, it has a tendency to overshadow the lives in the balance. You can choose your estimate. The Institute of Medicine's methodology says 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn't have health-care coverage. A recent Harvard study found the number nearer to 45,000. Since we talk about the costs of health-care reform over a 10-year period, may as well talk about the lives saved that way, too. And we're looking, easily, at more than a hundred thousand lives, to say nothing of the people who will be spared bankruptcy, chronic pain, unnecessary impairment, unnecessary caretaking, bereavement, loss of wages, painful surgeries, and so on.
A lot of progressives woke up this morning feeling like they lost. They didn't. The public option and its compromised iterations were a battle that came to seem like a war. But they weren't the war. The bill itself was. When liberals talked about the dream of universal health-care insurance 10, 20 and 30 years ago, they talked about the plight of the uninsured, not the necessity of a limited public option in competition with private insurers.
"This is a good bill," Sen. Sherrod Brown said on Countdown last night. "Not a great bill, but a good bill." That's about right. But the other piece to remember is that more than it's a good bill, it's a good start. With $900 billion in subsidies already in place, it's easier to add another hundred billion later, if we need it, than it would be to pass $1 trillion in subsidies in 2011. With the exchanges built and private insurers unable to hold down costs, it's easier to argue for adding a strong public option to the market than it was before we'd tried regulation and a new competitive structure. With 95 percent of the country covered, it's easier to go the final 5 percent. And with a health-care reform bill actually passed, it's easier to convince legislators that passing such bills is possible.
On its own terms, the bill is the most important social policy achievement since the Great Society. It will save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of suffering. But moving forward, it also makes future improvements and expansions easier. A lot of the hard work of health-care reform -- in particular, the money for subsidies -- will finish this year. If reformers want to come back for the public option or more subsidies in a future year, they won't be doing it atop a $900 billion price tag that's being battered by tea parties and industry and everyone else. This bill doesn't have all the good stuff it should have, but reformers can stand atop what good stuff it does have and focus their energies on what good stuff is left to achieve.
______________________
The unintended consequences of reconciliation
Democrats will look toward Olympia Snowe at this point, but if nothing works out, they may have to open the question of reconciliation once more. The irony is that the strange workings of the reconciliation process would strip the bill of the parts that Lieberman, Snowe and others favor and replace them with the exact policies they oppose.
For a detailed primer on the reconciliation process, head here. The short version is that reconciliation, which short-circuits the filibuster, can only be used for legislation that directly affects the federal budget. Anything that "indirectly" affects the budget -- think insurance regulations, like the ban on preexisting conditions -- would be ineligible.
What would be eligible? Well, Medicare buy-in, for one thing. Medicaid expansions. The public option. Anything, in short, that relies on a public program, rather than a new regulation in the private market. That means we'd probably lose the regulations on insurers, many of the delivery-side reforms, the health insurance exchanges, the individual mandate and much else.
Reconciliation, in other words, tips the bill towards an expansion of the public sector rather than a restructuring of the private sector. That makes it much less congenial to conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans (not to mention more conservative Republicans). But it also doesn't need as many of their votes, as it can pass the Senate with 50, rather than 60, in support.
To be very clear, this is not a trade I'm eager to see reformers make. You lose too much in reconciliation, and gain too little. The exchanges are too important, and so too are the insurance regulations and delivery-system reforms. But if Democrats end up in reconciliation, this bill is going to get a lot worse from the perspective of its skeptics.
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