Making The Court A Priority For Progressives
This week the U.S. Supreme Court opened a new term, for the first time in Barack Obama’s presidency without a new Justice joining the high court. Also this week, two of the Justices testified before Congress in an historic hearing on the role of judges under the U.S. Constitution. A new national conversation about the third branch and the Constitution is gaining the attention of more Americans every day, and it’s one all of us should join.
History shows that nearly every major political issue ends up in the courts. Our nation’s federal courts are where social security appeals are heard, employment cases decided, immigration issues settled, and where Americans vindicate their most cherished Constitutional rights. This year is no different.
This Supreme Court term, lasting through June 2012, promises to be a significant one, with decisions affecting every American. The cases the court will decide this term alone highlight what’s really at stake for all Americans, far beyond any single election or individual term in office.
Consider these important questions the Court is poised to decide: the constitutionality of the Obama Administration’s landmark health care reform legislation; the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance of Americans using GPS tracking devices; the constitutionality of Arizona’s controversial racial profiling immigration law; questions relating to the Family and Medical Leave Act; the constitutionality of religious organizations discriminating in hiring decisions; constitutional questions about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases (a key issue in the recent Georgia execution of Troy Davis).
This is a veritable hit parade of issues progressives, independents—indeed all Americans—care deeply about.
Until recently, the courts were generally friendly to progressive public policies. Indeed the federal courts helped to enable the social and economic progress that has made our country stronger and more inclusive over time. Courts were able to do so by adhering to the text and history of the U.S. Constitution and its amendments, and applying the Constitution’s core principles and values to questions of the day.
Conservatives, unhappy with idea that the Constitution guarantees more opportunity all our citizens instead of just for the already privileged few, have in recent years mounted a concerted political effort to remake the federal judiciary in their image: to be more activist and more closely aligned with their political views. Americans used to be able to sleep at night knowing the federal courts were good guardians of our most cherished constitutional principles. Now, the rights many Americans take for granted, like equal access at the voting booth and the ability to challenge discrimination at work, increasingly find a hostile and activist audience in the nation’s courts.
But progressives have a chance to turn the tide. Today, there are a record number of vacancies in our federal courtrooms, as a new Center for American Progress study released this week shows. Unprecedented obstruction by conservative U.S. Senators has led to an abysmal rate of judicial confirmations. This has left a level of empty judgeships not seen at any time under any president in U.S. history. Fully two thirds of the country is living in a jurisdiction without enough judges for the cases that are piling up. It means less access to justice and longer delays in court for the American worker and small business owner.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Progressives need to work together to support making our judiciary more progressive—and to support the confirmation of President Obama’s nominees. It’s time for the judiciary to be a priority for progressives.
The judges progressives want on the bench are judges for all Americans—judges who follow the text and history of the Constitution and apply it faithfully to the questions before them. At a time when the Tea Party is cherry-picking select provisions of the Constitution and discarding others to win short-term political arguments, we need the federal judiciary to be a strong guardian of all of our Constitution’s provisions and amendments for the long-term. With increasingly conservative state legislatures rolling back gains progressives have championed for decades, we need our courts to protect our Constitutional values from the political winds of the moment. These values—liberty, freedom, equality—have driven America’s progress since its founding, and are what make America exceptional around the world today.
Our courts matter for all Americans. And who is on the courts should matter to anyone who cares about the Constitution and the opportunities and protections it promises. It’s time for progressives to unite and support getting more progressive judges on the federal bench. Nothing less than the long term health of our democracy depends on it.
By: Andrew Blotky, Center for American Progress, Originally Published in Huffington Post, October 20, 2011
Sharp Rise In Premiums Exposes Health Insurers’ Greed
According to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 2011 health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored family healthcare benefits rose 9 percent over last year’s prices, leaving employees to pay, on average, $4,129 and employer contributions at $10,944. The number represents a surprising rise given that increases experienced in 2010 were just 3 percent.
So, why the sudden increase?
We know that Americans are using fewer medical services since the economy took a dive as people are staying away from the doctor and putting off non-life saving surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, until they have more confidence that they will have the money required to pay deductibles and co-pays. We also know that fewer medical services are being utilized as a result of the increased popularity of Health Safety Accounts which require deductibles in excess of $2,000 per family, and employer provided policies that have increasingly large deductibles and co-pays.
As a result, can it possibly make sense that medical costs are increasing by the 9 percent reflected in the hefty premium hikes? In a word, no.
That will not stop the anti-Obamacare forces, of course, from putting the blame squarely on healthcare reform. In a sense, I suppose the Affordable Care Act does bear some of the responsibility—if you can consider motivating the health insurers to falsely inflate their prices, by forcing them to do the right thing, to be a blamable offense.
Beginning next year, health insurers will be required to justify any increases in premium rates above 10 percent. They will further be obligated to refund money to customers if an insurer is found to have spent less than 85 percent of their premium income on medical expenses. Thus, it is hardly a stretch to conclude that the insurers are simply taking their last chance to raise premium rates before they find themselves having to be more accountable to the government, particularly when they are pretty much admitting to as much.
As noted by Reed Ableson in The New York Times:
Throughout this year, major health insurers have defended higher premiums—and higher profits—saying that their expenses would rise once the economy recovered and people believed they could again afford medical care. The struggling economy will probably keep suppressing demand for medical care, particularly as people pay a larger share of their own medical bills through higher deductibles and co-payments, according to benefits consultants and others. About three-quarters of workers now pay part of the bill when they go see a doctor, and nearly a third have a deductible of at least $1,000 if they have single coverage, up from just one in 10 in 2006, according Kaiser.
So, the insurance company defense is that they expect prices to rise sometime in the future (clearly an undefined period) and they want to be ready. Somehow, this justifies them to dramatically raise their premium prices now, at time when their costs are actually less and their profits are through the roof.
Not only is such behavior astoundingly predatory, the insurers are playing a major role in keeping the economy in the dumps, as it is precisely this sort of unnecessary premium increase that causes employers to avoid hiring more employees.
For those who believe that we should leave it to the free market to establish the prices in the medical system (of which insurance will always be a necessary part), maybe they can explain how the system is working in this instance? In a time where patient control has risen dramatically as consumers decide if and how they will—or will not—spend on medical services now that they have greatly increased responsibility for the familiy medical bills as a result of much higher deductibles, and at a moment where there are substantially reduced claims coming onto health insurers’ balance sheets due to diminished use of medical services, exactly what is the free market concept that justifies an insurance company raising their premium rates? What’s more, at a time when fewer people are using physician’s services, why would costs go up?
Free market principles would suggest that lower demand should produce lower prices. But that is clearly not what is happening.
I know what some of you are thinking—but before you say it’s all the government’s fault, I would hasten to point out that, with an apples-to-apples comparison, there are no substantial new regulations hitting physicians this year that did not exist last year. And before you blame the president’s health care reform program for the insurance companies’ usurious behavior, note that the two million young people who have been added to the insurance roles as a result of Obamacare’s permitting these people to stay on the family insurance policy, would not increase an insurance company’s costs by 9% over last year’s prices. Indeed, adding all of these healthy kids to the insurance pools should help insurers spread risk more effectively while collecting additional premium revenues.
The bottom line is that there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for the health insurance industry hitting employers with a 9 percent increase. It is a simple matter of greed and it is precisely that greed that has long made access to healthcare continuously more difficult for middle class Americans.
By: Rick Ungar, Mother Jones, September 27, 2011
Republicans Stampede Toward The Cliff
Interesting findings from the NBC/WSJ poll. Asked about deficit reducing options, the options the public overwhelmingly favors are ones Democrats favor, and the options they overwhelmingly oppose are ones Republicans are promising to propose:
[The survey] listed 26 different ways to reduce the federal budget deficit. The most popular: placing a surtax on federal income taxes for those who make more than $1 million per year (81 percent said that was acceptable), eliminating spending on earmarks (78 percent), eliminating funding for weapons systems the Defense Department says aren’t necessary (76 percent) and eliminating tax credits for the oil and gas industries (74 percent).
The least popular: cutting funding for Medicaid, the federal government health-care program for the poor (32 percent said that was acceptable); cutting funding for Medicare, the federal government health-care program for seniors (23 percent); cutting funding for K-12 education (22 percent); and cutting funding for Social Security (22 percent).
But the public demands deficit reduction, right? Well, actually, they care more about jobs:
In the poll, eight in 10 respondents say they are concerned about the growing federal deficit and the national debt, but more than 60 percent — including key swing-voter groups — are concerned that major cuts from Congress could impact their lives and their families.
What’s more, while Americans find some budget cuts acceptable, they are adamantly opposed to cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and K-12 education.
And although a combined 22 percent of poll-takers name the deficit/government spending as the top issue the federal government should address, 37 percent believe job creation/economic growth is the No. 1 issue.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, says these results are a “cautionary sign” for a Republican Party pursuing deep budget cuts.
He points out that the Americans who are most concerned about spending cuts are core Republicans and Tea Party supporters, not independents and swing voters.
“It may be hard to understand why a person might jump off a cliff, unless you understand they’re being chased by a tiger,” he said. “That tiger is the Tea Party.”
By the standards of these things, those are extremely sharp comments from McInturff. Leaders are usually more worried about internal threats than external threats. Boehner needs to make sure he doesn’t get deposed as speaker before he worries about winning a showdown with Democrats.
The specifics of the fight — Republicans promising to cut overwhelmingly popular programs, being willing to shut down the government, and pushing a plan that private analysts predict will reduce jobs — put them in a very tough position. Republicans are working really hard to buck each other up and ignore data about public opinion. Democrats have the upper hand here. President Obama may decide to cut a deficit deal, but both the politics and the policy say he should hand the Republicans their head first.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, March 3, 2011
Ineffective and Unfair: Conservatives Target Preventive Health Care for the Ax
It seems we’ve entered the season of shortsighted thinking. With 50.7 million uninsured Americans, Republicans are on a rampage to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Adding insult to injury, the most recent House Republican plan to cut the federal budget deficit this fiscal year took a scalpel to $10 billion in federal grants that provide health care to indigent women and children, slashing $2 billion in federal funding that is bound to have very expensive consequences.
Funding for community health centers will be cut in half by the Republican cuts. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who was a co-sponsor of the legislation responding to President George W. Bush’s call to expand funding for these centers in 2008, says that “since 2001, additional funding has allowed health centers in more than 750 communities nationwide to provide care to about four million new patients. These centers provide affordable and quality care to at-risk Americans who otherwise might have to do without.”
He’s right on the mark. No health care costs will be avoided by cutting this $1 billion out of the budget because the absence of care doesn’t stop you from getting sick. It simply means you get sicker and you turn up at the emergency room or a hospital when your illness has progressed to the point that your care needs are exorbitantly expensive.
On top of this cut to care, which more often than not is the safety-net care for women and children, the proposals would also cut the maternal and child health block grant by 30 percent. This block grant pays for child immunizations and prenatal care for tens of thousands of women and children. It’s obvious that without access to immunizations more will have to be spent to care for kids sick with easily preventable illnesses.
And reducing access to prenatal care is both life-threatening and costly. A preemie baby’s health care costs are 10 times higher than a full-term, healthy-weight child, according to the March of Dimes. The organization estimates that the full lifetime health care costs for these fragile children hit the $17 billion mark. It’s simply penny wise and pound foolish to cut $199 million out of a program that has a proven track record of delivering health to babies and driving down America’s health care costs.
Among the programs slashed is one of the most efficient programs to improve child nutrition: the Women, Infants and Children program run by the Department of Agriculture. This program gives expectant mothers with very small children important tips on how to feed their children healthy meals. And it provides them with coupons to incentivize them to purchase the best foods for their children. Research shows that without this intervention the nutritional intake of these children would be higher in fats, salts, and sugars, according to a recent U.S. Food and Nutrition Services study.
Instead of spending $1,400 a month in extra medical care for an obese child, for just $41 per month this program shifts these young mothers and children into healthy eating patterns, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Clearly, the WIC approach is a useful and relatively cheap way to stem the rising tide of childhood obesity.
An unsurprising but equally shortsighted cut is the complete elimination of family-planning services. If you just listened to their sound bites, you would think these funds could be used for abortions. But we all know that’s not permitted. These federal funds make it possible for uninsured women and men to get access to critical contraceptive services, pregnancy counseling, and tests for sexually transmitted infections, cervical cancer screening, and other critical health screens. Without access to these health care services, the health care needs of these adults will not disappear.
Instead, these adults will end up with unintended pregnancies and preventable health conditions that could have been avoided had they had ready access to commonplace family-planning services and screenings. Indeed, every dollar spent on family-planning services saves taxpayers $4 in Medicaid-funded prenatal, delivery, and postpartum services alone, according to a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute.
The absurdity of these cuts to the block grant, community health care centers, and family-planning services is that none of this funding would be necessary if we had a fully functioning national health care system where every American had access to high-quality care.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Millions more Americans will lose access to health care as a result of these cuts and as a result more will have to be spent to address the real health care consequences of these cuts. Franklin also invented bifocals so his aging colleagues could see the important documents they gathered to draft. Perhaps the Republican leadership needs to adjust their glasses so they more clearly see that $2 billion in cuts they propose to the health care services for poor women and children will cost the taxpayers billions more in unnecessary health care expenses.
By: Donna Cooper, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress, February 10, 2011
Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798
The ink was barely dry on the PPACA when the first of many lawsuits to block the mandated health insurance provisions of the law was filed in a Florida District Court.
The pleadings, in part, read –
The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty, that all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage.
It turns out, the Founding Fathers would beg to disagree.
In July of 1798, Congress passed – and President John Adams signed – “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen.” The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.
And when the Bill came to the desk of President John Adams for signature, I think it’s safe to assume that the man in that chair had a pretty good grasp on what the framers had in mind.
Here’s how it happened.
During the early years of our union, the nation’s leaders realized that foreign trade would be essential to the young country’s ability to create a viable economy. To make it work, they relied on the nation’s private merchant ships – and the sailors that made them go – to be the instruments of this trade.
The problem was that a merchant mariner’s job was a difficult and dangerous undertaking in those days. Sailors were constantly hurting themselves, picking up weird tropical diseases, etc.
The troublesome reductions in manpower caused by back strains, twisted ankles and strange diseases often left a ship’s captain without enough sailors to get underway – a problem both bad for business and a strain on the nation’s economy.
But those were the days when members of Congress still used their collective heads to solve problems – not create them.
Realizing that a healthy maritime workforce was essential to the ability of our private merchant ships to engage in foreign trade, Congress and the President resolved to do something about it.
Enter “An Act for The Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen”.
I encourage you to read the law as, in those days, legislation was short, to the point and fairly easy to understand.
The law did a number of fascinating things.
First, it created the Marine Hospital Service, a series of hospitals built and operated by the federal government to treat injured and ailing privately employed sailors. This government provided healthcare service was to be paid for by a mandatory tax on the maritime sailors (a little more than 1% of a sailor’s wages), the same to be withheld from a sailor’s pay and turned over to the government by the ship’s owner. The payment of this tax for health care was not optional. If a sailor wanted to work, he had to pay up.
This is pretty much how it works today in the European nations that conduct socialized medical programs for its citizens – although 1% of wages doesn’t quite cut it any longer.
The law was not only the first time the United States created a socialized medical program (The Marine Hospital Service) but was also the first to mandate that privately employed citizens be legally required to make payments to pay for health care services. Upon passage of the law, ships were no longer permitted to sail in and out of our ports if the health care tax had not been collected by the ship owners and paid over to the government – thus the creation of the first payroll tax in our nation’s history.
When a sick or injured sailor needed medical assistance, the government would confirm that his payments had been collected and turned over by his employer and would then give the sailor a voucher entitling him to admission to the hospital where he would be treated for whatever ailed him.
While a few of the healthcare facilities accepting the government voucher were privately operated, the majority of the treatment was given out at the federal maritime hospitals that were built and operated by the government in the nation’s largest ports.
As the nation grew and expanded, the system was also expanded to cover sailors working the private vessels sailing the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.
The program eventually became the Public Health Service, a government operated health service that exists to this day under the supervision of the Surgeon General.
So much for the claim that “The Constitution nowhere authorizes the United States to mandate, either directly or under threat of penalty….”
As for Congress’ understanding of the limits of the Constitution at the time the Act was passed, it is worth noting that Thomas Jefferson was the President of the Senate during the 5th Congress while Jonathan Dayton, the youngest man to sign the United States Constitution, was the Speaker of the House.
While I’m sure a number of readers are scratching their heads in the effort to find the distinction between the circumstances of 1798 and today, I think you’ll find it difficult.
Yes, the law at that time required only merchant sailors to purchase health care coverage. Thus, one could argue that nobody was forcing anyone to become a merchant sailor and, therefore, they were not required to purchase health care coverage unless they chose to pursue a career at sea.
However, this is no different than what we are looking at today.
Each of us has the option to turn down employment that would require us to purchase private health insurance under the health care reform law.
Would that be practical? Of course not – just as it would have been impractical for a man seeking employment as a merchant sailor in 1798 to turn down a job on a ship because he would be required by law to purchase health care coverage.
What’s more, a constitutional challenge to the legality of mandated health care cannot exist based on the number of people who are required to purchase the coverage – it must necessarily be based on whether any American can be so required.
Clearly, the nation’s founders serving in the 5th Congress, and there were many of them, believed that mandated health insurance coverage was permitted within the limits established by our Constitution.
The moral to the story is that the political right-wing has to stop pretending they have the blessings of the Founding Fathers as their excuse to oppose whatever this president has to offer.
History makes it abundantly clear that they do not.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes-Originally Posted January 17, 2011
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