Dem Leaders To Rank And File: Public Was Closely Divided On Medicare, Too!
Democratic leaders have a message for nervous rank and file Dems: The public was also closely divided on whether to pass Medicare in the 1960s. And now look at how much the public loves it!
In an effort to stiffen Dem spines, senior Dem leadership aides are circulating among House Dems some polling numbers from the 1960s that underscore how controversial Medicare was in the months leading up to its historic passage.
Dem leadership staff is highlighting a series of numbers from 1962 on President John F. Kennedy’s proposal. In July of that year, a Gallup poll found 28% in favor, 24% viewing it unfavorably, and a sizable 33% with no opinion on it — showing an evenly divided public.
A month later, after JFK’s proposal went down, an Opinion Research Corporation poll found 44 percent said it should have been passed, while 37% supported its defeat — also showing an evenly divided public.
Also in that poll, a majority, 54%, said it was a serious problem that “government medical insurance for the aged would be a big step toward socialized medicine.”
After Lyndon Johnson was elected, a Harris poll found only a minority, 46%, supported a Federal plan to extend health care to the aged. Today, of course, Medicare is overwhelmingly popular.
To be clear, it’s not clear how reassured nervous House Dems will be by these numbers. A half century has passed since the passage of Medicare, while Democrats in Congress will face the voters in around nine months.
But perhaps some of them will take this blast from the past as a reminder that passing dramatic, history-making reform in the face of intense organized opposition has never been politically easy.
Posted by Greg Sargent | 03/16/2010-WhoRunsgov.com
What Failure Would Cost the Democrats-A Cold Analysis of This Weeks Vote
Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party. Caddell and Schoen close their Washington Post article with the following warning: “Unless the Democrats fundamentally change their approach, they will produce not just a march of folly but also run the risk of unmitigated disaster in November.”
The case Caddell and Schoen make parallels the one made the previous day by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal, and that is made daily by a parade of Republican pollsters and lawmakers: The Democrats’ health reform plan is wildly and deeply unpopular, mirroring the unpopularity of Washington and big government. If it passes, it will result in a huge political backlash, especially if Democrats use reconciliation, which Caddell and Schoen call manipulation and liken to the “nuclear option” that Senate Republicans threatened during the Bush administration. For Rove, the use of reconciliation will open the way for Republicans to use the same technique to repeal health plan when they recapture the majority.
We fundamentally disagree; the surest path to political debacle for Democrats is to fail to enact health reform, and the best way to avoid a rout in November is to show that the party in charge can actually govern. The reconciliation process is entirely appropriate for amending the Senate-passed bill; in any case, the public will judge the Democrats on the basis of the results, not the inside-baseball process. In fact, the Democrats most reluctant to support health reform–those from more conservative, Republican-leaning districts and states–are the ones most likely to lose in November if health reform is defeated.
The obvious first antecedent to examine is 1994. Democrats went into the midterm elections after a presidential contest in which they grasped the full reins of power in Washington for the first time in a dozen years. Early momentum disappeared when first President Bill Clinton’s modest stimulus proposal went down in the Senate and then his deficit-reduction package staggered to the finish line after eight long months and without a single Republican vote in either house. It looked more like a setback than a victory. This was followed the next year by a lengthy struggle to enact sweeping health care reform that ended in a complete collapse, without even a vote on the Clinton plan. A shocking loss in the House on a crime bill, though ultimately reversed, reinforced the image of a president and party that could not govern competently.
What followed was a disastrous midterm for Democrats—losses of 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Heading into that election season, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, described the Democrats’ condition bluntly: “Imagine it’s October, and the Democrats are going to get up and make the following case: ‘We’ve run the House for 40 years, we’ve run the Senate for eight years, we have the White House, and the Republicans are so much more clever than we are that they’ve obstructed us. We need you to elect more dumb Democrats so we can overcome those clever Republicans.’” Conservative Democratic Senator John Breaux, of Louisiana, echoed that point on health policy, saying, “We can blame the Republicans for filibustering, but we have the responsibility to govern.”
To be sure, there were many reasons for Democrats’ massive losses in 1994, including scandals and angry gun owners. But the failure to fulfill their responsibility for governing contributed mightily to the debacle. That was the conclusion of pollsters from both parties in the aftermath of the November contests. Two weeks after the election, Republican pollster Bill McInturff found that “one of the most important predicates for Republican success was not having health care pass.” He noted that the collapse of the plan reinforced voters’ belief that Washington was in a dysfunctional state of gridlock. At the same time, Democratic pollster Mike Donilon, who worked on the losing campaign of Pennsylvania Senator Harris Wofford, said he believed that Wofford would have won had health reform passed.
It is undeniably true that a Washington plan to reform health care is not overwhelmingly popular. But that’s mostly because Washington is unpopular these days. When the component parts of the Democrats’ plan are parsed out, surveys show high approval for nearly all of them, including removing preexisting conditions, ending lifetime benefit caps, providing tax credits to small business to get them to cover employees, subsidizing low- and middle-income families to enable them to buy insurance, and creating a health-insurance exchange to shop for policies.
We also know that voters are warming somewhat to the idea of a reform plan, in part because the president has ramped up his efforts on its behalf beginning with the State of the Union and the health-reform summit—letting voters know what is actually in the bills. The actions of insurance companies like Anthem and Wellpoint, raising premiums sharply before enactment of reform, has also contributed to a public receptiveness to change. And we know that there was a noticeable bump in public approval when bills passed the House and the Senate—voters like action, and like success. Even where we are skeptical about the benefits of government programs, we want government to work.
It is also true that the health-reform plan, contrary to conventional wisdom, will not simply frontload the costs and backload the benefits. The plan will move quickly to erase the unpopular “doughnut hole” that results in a costly jolt for many seniors buying prescription drugs, to end discrimination based on preexisting conditions for children, to ease the insurance burden on those losing or leaving their jobs, and to enable parents to carry children up to the age of 26 on their family policies. Many House and Senate Democrats are understandably nervous about voting to enact health reform. We are convinced that the political damage will be far, far worse if they fail to do so.
By: Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. They are co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back On Track. March 15, 2010-The New Republic
In Search of Plan “C” for Health Care Reform?….Stick With Plan “A”
The Washington Post has an editorial this morning that doesn’t exactly oppose the President’s health reform proposals, but gives the President a rap on the knuckles for not being more aggressive controlling costs. They are particularly aggrieved that the President proposes to delay the implementation of the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans to 2018.
“Count us among the worriers. The tax is key for two reasons. It would raise revenue needed to pay subsidies to the currently uninsured; Mr. Obama chose the politically easier option of extending the Medicare tax to unearned income of the wealthy, thus making it more difficult down the road to prevent Medicare from going bankrupt. And, by discouraging expensive plans, such a tax would be the single most effective tool to reduce the cost growth that threatens the nation’s well-being”.
This editorial is one of the more exasperating documents to appear during health reform.
I happen to favor the “Cadillac tax,” though I wish it were more explicitly limited to affluent taxpayers. This is a sensitive issue. Workers have made wage concessions to expand or to preserve generous health benefits that might be affected by the new policy. I see nothing inherently wrong with giving unions and firms more time to adjust collective bargaining agreements in light of new tax policies.
Especially perverse is the Post’s criticism of proposals to raise Medicare taxes on the wealthy. Viewed outside the context of health reform, this provision provides one needed corrective to the regressive tax cuts enacted during the Bush years. The idea that it is simple political expediency to raise taxes on capital income of the wealthy comes as a great surprise to anyone who has followed American tax policy over (say) the past 30 years. Three other issues are especially irksome in the Post’s editorial.
First, President Obama proposes many features designed to reduce the level and growth of medical spending. He has gotten little political credit for these complex and controversial measures, but they are there.
Insurance exchanges will reduce administrative and marketing costs in the markets for individual and small-group coverage. This idea enjoys wide Democratic and Republican support. The President would reduce significant overpayments to Medicare advantage plans. He supports bundled payment models and other innovations designed to improve quality and cost-effectiveness of care. He supports greater use of comparative effectiveness research to provide an evidence-base for improved resource allocation decisions.
Over considerable opposition from within his own party, the President supports an Independent Medicare Advisory Board modeled after the commission that recommends military base closings. The Congressional Budget Office gave the President little credit for this in the scoring numbers. Yet this change could have a potentially revolutionary impact on Medicare policy–which is exactly why so many pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers, many medical specialties, and many elected politicians are unhappy with this measure.
Some of these measures are buried in the fine print. Others were included despite deep opposition from self-avowed fiscal conservatives whose concern for the federal budget precisely stops at the boundaries of their own states or their own favored constituencies. (The most powerful cost-control measure, a strong public option, was brought down by Republicans, insurers, and virtually the entire supply-side of the medical economy, but that is another story.)
These obvious realities underscore the second reason why the Post’s argument is so irksome. Although the House and Senate bills include many specific elements favored by (for example) officials in the last Bush administration, Republicans have made a basic strategic decision to filibuster and to vote in lockstep against the signature policy initiative of the Obama Presidency.
As a result, President Obama needed to corral every single Democratic vote to pass the signature measure of his presidency. The President was willing to deal on tort reform and other difficult matters. Although the gang of six talked interminably, no Republicans were willing to deal.
Proposed piecemeal, the cost-control measures already contained in the President’s proposal would command little public or interest-group support. These measures would command little enthusiasm from a Congress freed from the fiscal constraints required to pass a comprehensive bill that simultaneously provides critical benefits to millions of people.
The Post seems oblivious to the fact that defeat of the President’s comprehensive reform would damage any future cost-control effort. Interest groups that oppose specific measures–certainly including the “Cadillac tax” –would cite this defeat in discouraging politicians from supporting similar efforts. They would cite the success of crudely demagogic “death panel” rhetoric to deter serious measures to improve the quality and economy of Medicare services.
Progressive politicians desperate to help millions of uninsured people would learn from this episode that the smart move is to propose a politically attractive package of benefits without offsetting spending reductions or taxes to pay for it. I would hardly blame them.
Then there is the third reason. The Post writes: “We think that it is not asking too much, given the dire fiscal straits, for Washington to show that it can swallow distasteful medicine while, and not after, it passes out the candy.”
No candy is being distributed here. The bill whose survival is at stake is not some pork-barrel agriculture or weapons bill. After decades of failure, this bill would provide critical protection for 50 million uninsured people. It would help millions of others facing medical bankruptcy because they are underinsured or because they have serious illnesses leading them to exceed lifetime insurance caps that would be immediately ended under the President’s proposal.
This very morning, our local Catholic church presented an appeal from a family whose infant son was diagnosed with Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis, a rare and deadly disease. As the costs of his care approach $1 million, the family has established a website appealing for help. They have no plan B. There is no plan B for states, either, which desperately need this bill to avoid even more dire fiscal difficulties than are projected for the federal government.
The President has spent the past year, and has risked much of his presidency, to address these critical needs. After this bill is passed, he and the Congress should pursue further serious cost-containment efforts. The current bill provides the best platform to do this.
There is a moral urgency to passing this bill. The President, House and Senate leaders might have done more to cut costs if they had even secured one or two moderate Republican votes. They had to cut some messy deals to get this done. There were good reasons to do so. Against heavy odds and several decades of failed efforts, President Obama and his allies are close to getting this done. By fetishing a single imperfect aspect of the President’s proposal, the Post mischaracterizes the policy dilemma. The Post also misses the magnitude of what is at stake.
By: Harold Pollack- the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment-The New Republic, March 7, 2010
How to Make Something Controversial
People say the media is more viscerally sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans. But working in the other direction is the fact that Republicans understand the media much better than Democrats do. Take the reconciliation process. The media is giving blanket coverage to this “controversial” procedure being used by the Democrats. But using reconciliation for a few fixes and tweaks isn’t controversial historically, and it’s not controversial procedurally. It’s only controversial because Republicans are saying it is. Which is good enough, as it turns out. In our political system, if Democrats and Republicans are yelling at each other over something, then for the media, that is, by definition, controversy. This is something Democrats did not understand when George W. Bush was in power.
The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts — a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word “reconciliation” in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.
And that’s more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn’t run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words “reconciliation” and “senate.” Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.
Cable news didn’t care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word “reconciliation” in passing — but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.
And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.
And why was there nothing? Because Democrats weren’t complaining. The tax cuts might have been controversial, but they weren’t creative enough to polarize the procedure the Bush administration was using to pass them.
But some of the credit for that has to go to the Bush administration, which took seriously the need to institutionalize reconciliation when they were strong and popular rather than weakened. When Bush came into office, he used reconciliation for his first tax cuts. That was a sharp break with precedent: Reconciliation had never been used to increase the deficit, and the process was so poorly suited to the purpose that the Bush administration had to let all of them sunset after 10 years. It was a bizarre, bizarre bill. But by using it for his popular first round of tax cuts, Bush normalized it such that Democrats couldn’t really complain when he used it for his much more controversial second round of tax cuts.
By Ezra Klein | March 5, 2010; 9:53 AM ET
The GOP’s Astonishing Hypocrisy on Health Care and ‘reconciliation’
For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president’s determination to press ahead and get health-care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief.
Obama’s critics have regularly accused him of not being as tough or wily or forceful as LBJ was in pushing through civil rights and the social programs of his Great Society. Obama seemed willing to let Congress go its own way and was so anxious to look bipartisan that he wouldn’t even take his own side in arguments with Republicans.
Those days are over. On Wednesday, the president made clear what he wants in a health care bill, and he urged Congress to pass it by the most expeditious means available.
He was also clear on what bipartisanship should mean — and what it can’t mean. Democrats, who happen to be in the majority, have already added Republican ideas to their proposals. Obama said he was open to four more that came up during the health-care summit.
What he’s unwilling to do, and rightly, is to give the minority veto power over a bill that has deliberately and painfully worked its way through the regular legislative process.
Republicans, however, don’t want to talk much about the substance of health care. They want to discuss process, turn “reconciliation” into a four-letter word, and maintain that Democrats are just “ramming through” a health bill.
It is all, I am sorry to say, one big lie — or, if you’re sensitive, an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy.
All of the Republican claims were helpfully gathered in one place by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in an op-ed in Tuesday’s Washington Post. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, “ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill.”
No. The health-care bill passed the Senate last December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the “reconciliation” rules established to deal with money issues.
Near the very end of his article, Hatch concedes that reconciliation would be used for “only parts” of the bill. But then why didn’t he say that in the first place?
Hatch grandly cites “America’s Founders” as wanting the Senate to be about “deliberation.” But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone “reconciliation.” Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.
Hatch quotes Sens. Robert Byrd and Kent Conrad, both Democrats, as opposing the use of reconciliation on health care. What he doesn’t say is that Byrd’s comment from a year ago was about passing the entire bill under reconciliation, which no one is proposing to do. As for Conrad, he made clear to The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein this week that it’s perfectly appropriate to use reconciliation “to improve or perfect the package,” which is exactly what Obama is suggesting.
Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for “substantive legislation” unless the legislation has “significant bipartisan support.”
But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were “substantive legislation.” The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about “ramming through.”
The underlying “principle” here seems to be that it’s fine to pass tax cuts for the wealthy on narrow votes but an outrage to use reconciliation to help middle-income and poor people get health insurance.
I’m disappointed in Hatch, co-sponsor of two of my favorite bills in recent years. One created the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. The other, signed last year by Obama, broadly expanded service opportunities. Hatch worked on both with his dear friend, the late Edward M. Kennedy, after whom the service bill was named.
It was Kennedy, you’ll recall, who insisted that health care was “a fundamental right and not a privilege.” That’s why it’s not just legitimate to use reconciliation to complete the work on health reform. It would be immoral to do otherwise and thereby let a phony argument about process get in the way of health coverage for 30 million Americans.
E. J. Dionne, Jr-Syndicated Columnist-March 4, 2010
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