'Um, Pathetic' (title of the essay), Hendrik Hertzberg, the New Yorker)

[swag]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/01/11/100111taco_talk_hertzberg

Excerpt:

When Congress reconvenes a few days from now, it will be on the cusp of enacting a sweeping reform of American health insurance and health care that could be, as the President put it on Christmas Eve, just after the Senate passed its version of the bill, “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the nineteen-thirties and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties.” Perhaps he was exaggerating, but not by much. Jonathan Cohn, the New Republic’s health-care correspondent, calls the bill “the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation—a bill that will extend insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans, strengthen insurance for many more, and start refashioning American medicine so that it is more efficient.” Paul Krugman, the Times’ resident Nobel laureate (and a frequent Obama critic), calls the bill “a great achievement” that “establishes the principle—even if it falls somewhat short in practice—that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.” Princeton’s Paul Starr, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” calls it “the single biggest measure on behalf of low-income Americans in more than forty years.” How big? The University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack has done the sums. By the time the reforms are fully implemented, “the Senate bill would provide about $196 billion per year down the income scale in subsidies to low-income and working Americans.” That’s more, Pollack notes, than the federal government spends on the earned-income tax credit, Head Start, assistance to single mothers and their children, nutrition programs like food stamps, and the National Institutes of Health combined.

None of these people, from Obama on down the wonk scale, deceive themselves that the Senate bill, which now must be merged with its (marginally stronger) House equivalent, comes within hailing distance of perfection. All of them recognize that the final bill, in the now overwhelmingly likely event that it surmounts the remaining hurdles, will be flawed and messy. All of them also understand that, compared with the status quo—and the status quo, not perfection or anything like it, is the alternative—it will constitute a moral and material advance of historic proportions.

Nevertheless, a nontrivial portion (though far from a majority) of the Democratic left, particularly its Internet cohort, feels alienated and disappointed, with the bill and with the President. As the Senate vote neared, Markos Moulitsas, the chief of Daily Kos, sent his followers a tweet: “Insurance companies win. Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate.” MoveOn.org called on “progressives” to “block this bill.” Arianna Huffington dismissed it as “reform in name only.” Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s Savonarola, lectured the President that he was about to consign his countrymen to a “Chicago stockyards of insurance” that would be “immoral and a betrayal of the people who elected you.” Even Dr. Dean himself—Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, Presidential candidate, and Democratic Party chairman—wrote that the Senate should defeat the bill, claiming that it “would do more harm than good to the future of America.” And in the nether reaches of the left blogosphere the epithets flew. Obama is a “sellout.” He’s a “liar.” He’s a “Judas,” a “fraud,” a “corrupt fool.” He’s a “Liebermanite.” (Ouch!) He’s “an Uncle Tom groveling before the demands of the corporations that are running our country.” (This last not from some anonymous blog commenter but from Ralph Nader, without whose efforts Joe Lieberman would be just another former Vice-President.)



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/01/11/100111taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz0blnq29Qk

[babylonsister]

1. This is pathetic? By your standards?

When Congress reconvenes a few days from now, it will be on the cusp of enacting a sweeping reform of American health insurance and health care that could be, as the President put it on Christmas Eve, just after the Senate passed its version of the bill, “the most important piece of social legislation since the Social Security Act passed in the nineteen-thirties and the most important reform of our health-care system since Medicare passed in the nineteen-sixties.” Perhaps he was exaggerating, but not by much. Jonathan Cohn, the New Republic’s health-care correspondent, calls the bill “the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation—a bill that will extend insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans, strengthen insurance for many more, and start refashioning American medicine so that it is more efficient.” Paul Krugman, the Times’ resident Nobel laureate (and a frequent Obama critic), calls the bill “a great achievement” that “establishes the principle—even if it falls somewhat short in practice—that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.” Princeton’s Paul Starr, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” calls it “the single biggest measure on behalf of low-income Americans in more than forty years.” How big? The University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack has done the sums. By the time the reforms are fully implemented, “the Senate bill would provide about $196 billion per year down the income scale in subsidies to low-income and working Americans.” That’s more, Pollack notes, than the federal government spends on the earned-income tax credit, Head Start, assistance to single mothers and their children, nutrition programs like food stamps, and the National Institutes of Health combined.

Makes me question your standards vs. the likes of Krugman, Pollack, et al.

[frazzled]

3. Psst: click the link /nt

[babylonsister]

4. I stand corrected; it is pathetic!

:blush: :hide: :hi:

[swag]

6. I've tried to clarify the subject line.

Thanks.

[frazzled]

2. Oh dear, I thought you were calling Hendrik Hertzberg pathetic

Thank heavens I clicked the link and saw this was his own (or the New Yorker editorial staff's) title.

Good read, good historical perspective. Thanks, Hendrik (and you for posting).

[SteppingRazor]

5. I thought it was a great article.

After all, Hertzberg concedes that Obama's critics on the left do have a point:

"The left-wing critics are right about the conspicuous flaws of the pending health-care reform—its lack of even a weak “public option,” its too meagre subsidies, its windfalls for Big Pharma, its capitulation on abortion coverage, its reliance on private insurance. And there are surely senators and representatives whose motives are base or, broadly speaking, corrupt. But it is nonsense to attribute the less than fully satisfactory result to the alleged perfidy of the President or “the Democrats.” The critics’ indignation would be better directed at what an earlier generation of malcontents called “the system”—starting, perhaps, with the Senate’s filibuster rule, an inanimate object if there ever was one."

[swag]

7. Me too. "Um, Pathetic" was the title of the essay.

Glad you liked it. I thought it was good too.

[SteppingRazor]

8. Yeah, I got that only after I had posted.

In any case, I think it's a pretty good summation of where the whole hoopla stands now, and I'm pretty much in the same place as the author -- yes, Obama's critics on the left have a point. But at the same time, the health-care bill remains by far the lesser of two evils, when the other option is doing nothing.

[Berry Cool]

12. But is the other option really "doing nothing"?

It's easy to make your case when you set up a zero-sum straw-man game. "It's either this or nothing."

[SteppingRazor]

13. Yes. The other option really is doing nothing.

You can't dismiss reality as a straw man. Certainly, at the outset, there were a variety of options available in reforming health care. But we are where we are. We can certainly complain about the roads not taken -- and as pointed out in the article (and as I'd certainly agree with) many of those complaints are valid. But, recognizing the impossibility of going back and starting over at this point, it becomes necessary to choose between, yes, this or nothing.

[Berry Cool]

15. No it isn't. What nonsense!

We COULD start over. We could say "To hell with the idea that we can't touch this again for generations, we are and we will." The problem is, no one is brave enough.

[Berry Cool]

9. He called Keith Olbermann "MSNBC’s Savonarola"?

That was enough right there to tell me this guy is talking out his ass.

That's the most ridiculous comparison I've ever read.

[zipplewrath]

10. False comparison

Two months later, Kennedy’s bill was defeated in the Senate. It took his assassination, a huge Democratic victory in 1964, and the legislative talents of President Lyndon Johnson to get Medicare enacted. The health-care bill now being kicked and prodded and bribed toward passage will not “do the job,” either—only part of it. Are Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress doing enough? No. But they are doing what’s possible. That may be pathetic, but it’s no fallacy.

That bill "did it's job" if quite imperfectly. The "job" of health CARE reform was to reform the costs of healt CARE. Unfortunately, this bill does not really do that. It regulates health INSURANCE. It will still lead to the bankrupting of individuals and ultimately the federal government. We cannot continue to sustain the rate of growth of the cost of health CARE. The addition of the profit margins of health insurance companies is only a small portion of the problem. This is the "status quo" with some lipstick on it to make it look pretty. Folks will still be bankrupted by their health care cost issues. The cost to the federal government will continue to rise at unsustainable rates. And quoting from the article, all this legistlation does is to:

"...establishes the principle—even if it falls somewhat short in practice—that all Americans are entitled to essential health care".

We already had that, albeit how to pay for it was always a question. We've decided how to pay for it, even if it will still be an unsustainable burden on both the individual and the government. What we DIDN'T accomplish with the legislation, and what it was suppose to do, just like virtually all of our major economic trading partners around the world, was to control the COSTS of health care. That's what's "pathetic".

[Berry Cool]

11. He says:

..."it is nonsense to attribute the less than fully satisfactory result to the alleged perfidy of the President or 'the Democrats.'" He says it's the system and the structure of Congress that are wholly to blame. He's wrong--just plain wrong--about that.

Yes, the structure of Congress and the way it works are partly to blame. But we really DID get sold out by Blue Dogs--not to mention Republicans--beholden to big business. For him to say it's ALL the fault of the way the sausage gets made in Washington is just disingenuous.

And I say this not as a person who has given up and turned my back entirely on Obama or the Democratic Party, but rather as a person who is deeply disappointed that on this issue, they started out conceding and just kept conceding all the way down the line.

I would like to think things are going to get better someday in the HCR arena, but right now I despair of it.

[SteppingRazor]

14. But without the problem of needing 60 votes, conservative Senate Democrats would be irrelevant.

The author specifically references the filibuster as being the problematic issue here, and I agree with that. The filibuster is demonstrably used far, far more often now than at any other time in the history of the country, and has given power to a small group of Senators in the middle between the two parties. (Note that that middle isn't necessarily a "centrist" position as far as political ideology, as folks like Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe -- the Democratic and Republican senators most often cited as examples -- are certainly to the right of center.)

Without the filibuster, needing just a simple majority, we could have had a health-care bill far more amenable to progressives. As a result, the structure of Congress is, in fact, to blame. Now, one could certainly point out that if Democrats such as Nelson had gotten on board with a public option, it would have passed, and that's certainly true too. But, without a doubt, the lack of a filibuster in the Senate would have resulted in a far more progressive bill, with or without the "alleged perfidy of the President of the Democrats."

[Berry Cool]

16. Agreed. But this guy is actung as if the Dems had NOTHING to do with it

or, well, it really just doesn't matter what they did or didn't do. That's not true.

[swag]

17. k for the impractical twats