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Edited on Fri Jan-22-10 09:14 AM by karynnj
Many of the Democrats need John Kerry's resilience and sense of perspective. The hardest thing is the perception that we were on the verge of getting the healthcare bill done, but were we really? The truth was the House would not pass the Senate version and the conference bill was looking like it would have significant changes, most to the better. But, everyone assumes that before agreeing, Reid was getting buy-ins with likely problem Senators. Think back to the "deal" that Medicare buyin was accepted .. then fell apart. Or, when the state opt out plan had 60, until it didn't. Reid was right when he said he had been wrong to spend so much time on Snowe. Had he spent one month less, this all could have possibly been sorted out. Now, even if Coakley had won, I think there would have been problems.
All Senators have been home and likely all of them heard the complaints that the whiners got better deals for their state - and asked why didn't their Senator. When you then throw in the union exemption, this has to make it seem "unfair" to non-union heavy states. Someone like Lincoln, will have to answer her constituents about why Nebraska doesn't have to pay the extra Medicaid costs ever and Arkansas, which is poorer, does and why a union contract that costs any amount will not be taxed until 2018, but non-union ones will. Neither of these pass a red face test. (Can you defend them without being embarrassed?) There is no justification to treating Nebraska so differently on such a basic component, where there is nothing you can point to and say - here, this is why that benefits the system as a whole. (Consider that you can defend the various pilot program, because they test future enhancements.) Arguing that the unions negotiate multi-year contracts doesn't cut it either. There are no 9 year contracts and the years already negotiated actually help the union and hurt the company, which may have to pay more for the negotiated package if it is over the threshold. This was a union power play because they controlled a sufficient number of Congressmen.)
One thing this race did identify is that even the extreme donor states are hurting and are hearing the arguments against subsidizing the taker states. This is scary because the donor states are mostly the blue states. In the past, although NJ Republicans always hit Democratic Senators with the ratio of taxes in to what we get, which is always low, people understood that it was because we were a rich state and there was a progressive tax structure. That altruism is harder when real cuts that hurt are being made in the state. While that makes it a harder sell, it is impossible to sell things that are completely unfair on the surface - and both these examples are. It sounds like this is the case Brown made in MA. I know that Senators on the fence are always working deals, but rarely are they so utterly blatant. I know that getting to 60 was a very tough job, but I really think that there had to smarter deals than these and suspect that that is where Senator Kennedy would have really made a difference.
It also doesn't help that the left spent their time whining about single payer, which was and is not going to happen any time soon, and treating the public option as the Holy Grail, followed by backing the union exclusion on the excise tax in addition to the defensible changes that should have been enough. (Even the final package didn't convince one union because they said there would be a problem beyond 2018 and spoke of how they would have a problem because premiums would continue to rise 15 to 20 percent a year. Simple mathematics shows this can't happen - companies could not possibly agree to pay that, with or without the tax and even if you assume that inflation and GDP increase much faster than anyone predicts - that would lead to medical costs being over 50% of GDP, rather than the current 16%, within a decade. Yet the article on that had everyone except me and one other person bashing the tax, not the union President's logic.) The right shifted from ideological arguments to an argument of basic fairness and used words like "payoffs", "corrupt", "bribes" and worse in Landrieu's case. (Now, they ignore that in fact the blue states provide huge subsidies to the red states and their base, for the most part, does not know that.)
That's not to say that it isn't harder now after the loss - it is. In addition to keeping Nelson, Lieberman and the other problem Senators, we need to gain Snowe, Collins or Brown. One problem is that there are not more potentially reasonable Senators I could list here. This might be where Obama needs to get personally involved to see if the package, which really does have many good features, could be cleaned up and reworked to get 60. Maybe throw the Republicans a bone by adding (or passing separately if something not in either bill can't be added) a torte reform similar to that proposed by Kerry, modeled after MA's law, not the Ensign one which cap the plaintiff's but not the company's legal bills. I know this won't make a big dent in cost, but it is a good, fair idea. Not to mention, giving Snowe or one of the others the ability to claim that she/he removed the "payoffs" could be more than enough in basically moderate to liberal states to counter the anger they would get from the party of "NO" Republicans.
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