…the public has been very supportive of Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, for children whose family income is too high for Medicaid but too low to afford private coverage. Nevertheless, the president and his allies are reduced to reminding people that, “Pssst, it’s government health care so you’re supposed to be afraid of it.”
Hopefully, George Bush is right and S-CHIP is the first step towards guaranteeing all people, child or adult, have access to healthcare.
(Media Matters suggests you call Premiere Radio Networks at (818)377-5300. – promoted by Bob Brigham)
From Glenn Beck today:
I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today. (MediaMatters 10/22/07)
Besides the obvious lack of knowing what he’s talking about, this is so inappropriate that it’s practically laughable. First of all, has Beck even ever been to SoCal? First, they are called wildfires, next, the areas that are buring are some of the redder in the state. Funny, except, that people are losing their homes and becoming homeless. And this jerk has the gall to call other people anti-American? Perhaps the guy laughing at people’s loss shouldn’t be the one too judge others. More of the offending remarks over the flip, and audio at Media Matters.
BECK: Schwarzenegger came out over the weekend and he said the Republicans need to run to the center and they need to grab the center. And the headline — I looked at it, and I went “OK, OK, what is this? What is this? Oh, it’s Schwarzenegger. I’m probably going to disagree with it.” And then I started reading it, and I absolutely disagreed with it. He said they need to start talking about health care and education. That’s not the way to win.
Let’s talk about health care and education? That’s not the way to win. That’s not the way to win on any front. I’m not even talking about — the least I care about is winning the election. How about winning the war? How about saving our country? And, you know, it made me think. I want to make this very clear. When I say on the air, and I’ve said it a lot lately, that we need to come together and we need to get back into the center, we’re being pushed on to the edges — I want you to understand, that is not on policies. I don’t mean that we come in the center on policies. We come to the center on principles. We come back to the center of the melting pot, that we’re all one America, that just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean you hate America, and I love America. We all love America. We just disagree on how we should function, what we should do, big government, small government. It doesn’t mean you hate America. I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.
Today our campaign released a new ad, entitled “Only One,” which details a hostage situation in Iraq that then-Congressman Richardson was called upon to defuse. In the 60-second spot, Bill Barloon, the late David Daliberti, and his wife Kathy Daliberti praise Richardson for obtaining the release of the two men from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in July 1995.
Forest fires like those we see sweeping the Southland today are a collateral piece of damage from an environment that has grown more vulnerable through overdevelopment, neglect, and the continued harm from climate change. There is no question that a hotter, drier climate makes the land more susceptible to wildfires which can expand and change direction in a split second. We have had drought-like conditions all year in Southern California, which makes things worse. The state has made efforts to reverse this pattern through strict regulation of tailpipe emissions, but has been stymied by a slow-walk from the EPA, who since December 2005 has refused to grant the waiver necessary to make this regulation law. On Wednesday, California’s patience will run out, and they will sue the Bush Administration over this obstructionism. The US Supreme Court has already ruled that states can regulate greenhouse gas emissions, now the EPA must relent and allow the states to govern their own regions in the manner they see fit.
This is more than an abstract concept. We’re talking about lives and property and untold destruction. And this lawsuit will hopefully spur Senate Environmental Committee Chair Barbara Boxer to move quickly at the federal level on a global warming bill that is not a massive giveaway to coal companies, but which takes definable steps to solve the problem. Fortunately, there is real movement toward a carbon-neutral future and away from the delaying tactics and greenwashed “solutions” that have characterized the past decade. The terrible fires today should be a powerful reminder of what we must do for a better environment in California and around the world.
George Skelton's on the warpath, today calling California “ungovernable.” Or, I should say, at least under the current system. In Monday's column he gives his top 5 things that suck about California governance.
(Man, will this thing ever die? – promoted by Brian Leubitz)
This morning the GOP’s Steal the State Electoral College Initiative was put back on the list of petitions being paid for at $2 a signature. With only 6 weeks left, it would be difficult to collect the over 400K signatures needed, but still possible.
Again, I don’t want to be alarmist, but it is a solemn reminder that the Republicans will stop at nothing to make sure we don’t take back the White House.
Please make sure you are on the look out for signature gatherers asking people to sign for the Electoral College Initiative and email [email protected] or call the CDP office (916) 442-5707.
(Nice action diary from the United Farm Workers. – promoted by Julia Rosen)
E-mail CA officials today!
A little over a week ago, the EPA approved the use of methyl iodide–a dangerous toxic, mutagenic pesticide. The EPA is refusing to listen to us and the dozens of prominent scientists who have repeatedly pointed out the dangers associated with this pesticide.
California is one of the largest users of fumigant pesticides. The state must give a separate approval to methyl iodide before this toxic chemical can be used. We asking for your immediate help to encourage California authorities to do the right thing and refuse approval of this deadly compound.
By sending an e-mail today, you can help protect the tens of thousands of farmworkers who work and live in California along with consumers who eat the California-grown produce.
There is still time to pressure the CA Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR). The California’s state review of methyl iodide isn’t scheduled to be completed until late 2008. Up until this point, DPR has been cautious about use of this pesticide. A February 2006 letter that the California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) submitted to the EPA expressed serious reservations about the chemical’s high toxicity and the potential harm it posed to “workers and bystanders, as well as residents living near treated fields.” However, it’s very important that you give DPR immediate feedback, in order to let officials know you are watching their actions in light of the EPA’s disastrous decision.
As an October 11, Sacramento Bee editorial, entitled “New danger in the fields – State should keep methyl iodide out” points out, “While [methyl iodide] does not damage the ozone, methyl iodide is more acutely toxic than methyl bromide. It is so dangerous that chemists who handle tiny amounts of it in laboratory settings must first don protective hoods and double gloves and use specially sealed bottles and syringes to ensure none of the chemical escapes…The EPA ignored objections raised by 52 eminent scientists, including five Nobel Laureates for chemistry, who signed a letter last month advising the EPA not to register methyl iodide. ‘As scientists and physicians familiar with this chemical,’ they wrote, ‘we are concerned that pregnant women and the fetus, children, the elderly, farmworkers and other people living near application sites would be at serious risk if methyl iodide is permitted in agriculture.'” (For background information, click here to see last weeks’ UFW alert to the EPA)
Please E-mail Mary-Ann Warmerdam, Director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation TODAY and tell the DPR to protect the public and the environment by not allowing this pesticide to be used.
For months, politicians in big states like California, Florida and Michigan have griped about their lack of influence in the 2008 presidential race, pushing up their primaries to try to diminish the sway of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Now, thanks to those efforts, Iowa and New Hampshire appear more important than ever.
It’s mainly a process story about how candidates must score an early victory to be able to gather enough money to compete on February 5. It was all so eminently predictable, and the relative absence of any Presidential candidates or buzz in this state with a little more than 3 months to go until the primary is further proof. The only way to end the prospect of Iowa and New Hampshire picking the nominee is to… stop having them pick the nominee.
Are we right to debate health care from the perspective of what is “politically possible?” Or even from an analysis of the specifics of proposed policies? According to George Lakoff and his fellows at the Rockridge Institute the answer is a resounding no.
Last week they rolled out a campaign called Don’t Think of a Sick Child: The Logic of the Health Care Debate. In it, the Rockridge Institute argues that the health care debate is a moral debate above all else. If we are to achieve progressive ends – ensuring every Californian has access to health care – we must employ progressive means.
Their analysis turns on an assessment of the “neoliberal” argument that has seduced many Democrats and even some progressives, that the market can be harnessed for progressive health care outcomes. As the Rockridge Institute explains, it simply does not work that way:
Neoliberal thought accepts a conservative version of market principles that guarantees profits to insurance and drug companies. Often, this is done in the name of political pragmatism, as a way to mute expected conservative opposition. This creates an inherent tension between the moral mission of government to provide for the protection – in this case the health security – of all of its people and the profit-maximizing insurance marketplace, which works only by denying care….
Progressives who adopt a neoliberal mode of thought, or align themselves with others who do, could inadvertently undermine progressive values and policy goals, surrendering them in advance – anticipating conservative resistance even before negotiations occur – and before the public has a chance to even consider such values.
“Don’t Think of a Sick Child” can not only help us understand why health care reform has completely failed so far in California, but what we must do in order to make it succeed. Further explanation and assessment is below.
Rockridge and the Three Modes of Thought
The Rockridge analysis begins by stating a fact that is obvious to anyone who has had to deal with the health insurance industry lately, but is too often forgotten even by Democratic politicians:
American insurance companies make money by providing as little treatment to as few individuals as possible and by offering coverage to as few sick people as possible, while collecting premiums from as many healthy people as possible….The basic fact is this: the sicker you are, the more you cost and the less the company makes by covering you.
The health care crisis in America is often misframed by the media and by politicians as one of a lack of insurance. We often see reports of the number of uninsured Americans (I am among that number), but much less commonly explained is the lack of health care that even those with insurance experience. Because of this framing, politicians like Hillary Clinton offer an individual mandate and say it will solve the health care crisis – as if they passed a law making everyone buy food and declared they solved hunger.
This framing implicitly assumes that the insurance market works. As we saw above, it does NOT actually work. But the framing serves another purpose: the reinforcement of what Rockridge calls the “Conservative Mode of Thought” regarding health care:
In the conservative mode of thought, securing health insurance is a matter of individual responsibility. In this view, health care is a commodity that should be bought and sold through insurance policies in the market. If someone wants a commodity, they should work hard to afford it. In a free market economy – given that America is a land of opportunity – they will be able to do so. Anyone without health insurance for himself or his family just isn’t working hard enough and doesn’t deserve it….This is, above all, a moral issue for conservatives, which is why economic efficiency arguments alone will not carry the day with them.
The notion that Republicans – who almost to a man espouse this conservative view – will ever sign on to a health care reform that serves progressive goals is just not credible. And as Rockridge notes, Republicans have vehemently argued for a market-based solution to health care anywhere reforms have been proposed. Some, like Arnold and Mitt Romney, are willing to perhaps help subsidize a few people – but only as a condition of forcing everyone else into the insurance market. After all, Arnold did not add his name to the pro-SCHIP letter sent by some Republicans to Bush a couple weeks back.
Most of us instead espouse the “Progressive Mode of Thought”:
The progressive mode of thought begins with progressive morality – the morality of empathy and responsibility, for oneself and others. Others, because life is interdependent; “no man is an island.”…Progressive views on health care flow from this understanding of the moral mission of government. Empathy requires taking the viewpoint of the person cared for, the health care recipient as well as their family and community. From a policy perspective, health care is a matter primarily of protection, but also of empowerment.
In other words, for individuals to be empowered to fulfill their potential in life, for them to be truly and completely free, they need help – because we are all interdependent, but also not on an equal footing. We look at the market the conservatives worship and instead see a rapacious, exploitative, even violent system that creates and sustains inequality and suffering. And we want to end that suffering. We want to liberate people from it. It is from this basis that we look to a single-payer system and support it. Virtually everyone at Calitics, including Steve Maviglio, seems to believe single-payer is the best solution, even if we disagree on its “political viability.”
But there is a third view – the “Neoliberal Mode of Thought.” It is a view that is fundamentally conservative, but has been constructed over the last 30 years to appeal to Democrats, to get them to support corporate policies inimical to most Californians (and most Americans).
Neoliberalism is a term that refers not to the political left, but to a concept of political economy that reasserts the primacy of free markets. David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine provide good explanations of neoliberalism. They explain that it is the set of policies that guts the public sector, slashes wages and jobs, and enriches a small elite under the cover of free market economics. The Rockridge Institute explains how, in the realm of health care, Democrats and even some progressives have been taken in by neoliberal thinking:
Though conservatism sees the market itself as defining moral ends, neoliberalism shares with conservatism the idea that the market can be efficient and serve moral ends. This is why neoliberal thought has no problem with health care solutions that involve profit-maximizing private insurance companies.
The key points of the Rockridge Institute campaign come in this section. Here, they explain that by turning to the market – which is fundamentally hostile to progressive goals – those who espouse neoliberal solutions are deeply undercutting themselves, and setting themselves up for a catastrophic failure:
Neoliberal thinking can lead to a dangerous trap. We call it the Surrender-in-Advance Trap. With an exaggerated emphasis on system-based solutions, neoliberal thought may lead one to surrender in advance the moral view that drives an initiative in the first place. Those who pragmatically focus on appeasing what they assume will be unavoidable political opposition to their proposals also run the risk of moral surrender. Empathy, the moral force that holds together our democracy and the engine of community, is reduced to sentimentality and shunted aside.
The entire point of the Rockridge Institute, of George Lakoff’s work, is to argue that progressives win ONLY when they foreground the moral power of their argument in clear and unhidden language. The moment you compromise that language, and compromise those moral tenets, you will lose the debate because you are implicitly ceding the moral ground to the other side. You are adopting their language, their frames. And as Lakoff has consistently argued, this is a major reason why conservatism has done so well in the last few decades:
But people using a neoliberal mode of thought do not view a market-driven, profit-maximizing approach as a surrender of any kind. They deeply believe that progressive moral principles can be served through neoliberal methods and forms of argument. We want to stress, however, that the consequence is dire whatever the motivation. The failure to articulate a clear progressive morality in favor of more technocratic solutions to profit-maximizing markets puts the progressive cause at a disadvantage on health care and other policy issues as well. It doesn’t matter whether one is simply trying to avoid conservative and insurance company opposition or whether one truly believes in one’s heart that the market will cure us. The progressive moral basis for providing health care for all – empathy and responsibility, protection and empowerment – is not stated. As a result, Americans don’t get to hear the progressive moral basis for extending health care to all Americans, and they don’t get to decide whether they agree with that moral premise. Americans only hear the conservative moral view. That moves them in a conservative direction, not only on this issue, but on all issues.
The Rockridge Institute then goes on to make the point that numerous others have made – that by surrendering in advance, Democrats and progressives create a bad bargaining position that does nothing to advance their core agenda. That they’ve wandered into a situation where they’re playing a conservatives’ game and have little leverage to force a better outcome.
Applying the Above to California
Indeed, that seems to be exactly what’s happened here in California with the special session. Democrats passed SB 840 again, but Democratic leaders preferred to table it and instead offer up AB 8, a neoliberal solution if ever there was one. But this did not place them in a strong negotiating position. Already weakened by having a Republican governor and with the idiotic 2/3 rule, Democrats gave away their best negotiating position. By arguing for a market-based solution, even one that is regulated as in AB 8, they left their best appeals at home. And Arnold, predictably, offered a poison-pill proposal that has achieved its likely intended effect of setting the Democratic tent against itself and making it unlikely the Dems and Arnold can produce anything this session.
Some who have worked for AB 8 and in the special session might bristle at this, and argue that they have been working for the right goals, to get Californians health care. I do not for a moment doubt their sincerity. Nor do the authors of the Rockridge article. But what Rockridge is saying, and what I agree with, is that they’ve not adopted a successful approach. Arguing for technical “system tinkering” does not generate political momentum that can break a Capitol logjam, or give a badly needed boost to Democratic efforts. After all, the AB 8 approach has not worked. The “politically viable” solution has not, in fact, proved so viable after all.
But we have a model that suggests the Rockridge approach works. That’s the recent SCHIP debate. No, we did not successfully override in the House of Representatives – but we came extremely close. We DID get 67 votes in the US Senate, which in the 110th Congress has voted more conservatively overall than the House. We won a large number of Republicans over to what is in some ways a single-payer plan in miniature.
Moreover, the fight over SCHIP has damaged the Republicans and the conservatives on health care immeasurably, and will likely play a major role in the 2008 campaign. And it’s because Democrats put the morality of SCHIP at the center of the debate. Using the Frost family, for example, Democrats appealed to the American people’s sense of justice, fairness, and decency. They argued that it was fundamentally WRONG to put children’s health care at the mercy of the market. Instead, health care should be guaranteed to children, even – especially – those children of middle class families.
It generated a nasty conservative backlash, but in the process several Bush Dog Democrats came back to the fold and change their vote in favor SCHIP. And that nasty conservative backlash hurt the Republicans, as even Mitch McConnell tried to distance himself from the wingnuts.
With more time and planning, Democrats could well have won the SCHIP override vote. As it stands, they can use it to divide the Republican coalition, force the GOP to publicly distance itself from the wingnuts, and defeat Republican candidates in the 2008 elections.
All because Democrats took a strong and popular stand in favor of having the government pay for children’s health care, even for middle-class families.
Meanwhile, Sacramento Democrats have had little success mobilizing the public, or the media, behind their efforts on health care. Not because those Democrats are uncaring or heartless – neither I nor Rockridge are saying that – but instead because by definition, you can never mobilize the public behind the preservation of the for-profit insurer-based delivery of health care in America.
It’s not that the AB 8 approach is morally wrong – It’s just that it isn’t progressive. And it will never achieve progressive ends. It doesn’t get us closer to single-payer care, because it is going in a completely different political and ideological direction, a direction that preserves the basic failed approach to health care, that does little to address the issues of affordability and guaranteed access to care. It will fail practically, has so far failed politically, and it fails in the long-term goal of providing guaranteed health care.
If universal single-payer care is what we want, then we need to make the case for it, and not beat around the bush. When Dems made the case for SCHIP it got 2/3 in the Senate and nearly that in the House – it proved politically popular and forced Republicans and moderate Dems to back government-paid health care for children, backed by a tax increase.
Some argue that voters won’t go for it, that they rejected it last time around. Not only has the practical delivery and public perception about health care dramatically changed since 1994, but in ’94, Democrats did not make the case for it.
Real leadership from the top, combined with a powerful movement from below, CAN make this happen. But if we continue to surrender in advance, sell ourselves, our values, and our fellow Americans short by saying single-payer is impossible, then we’re never going to get there at all.
Note: following is an explanatory text about the video linked atop the post, provided by the Rockridge Institute.
George Bush doesn’t want you to think about sick children. He wants you
thinking about the fine print of health insurance policies. He wants us
to debate types of coverage, premiums and the size of networks, and
whether we can afford catastrophic, comprehensive, limited, mini-med or
scheduled health insurance. But George Bush doesn’t want you thinking
about all the sick children left behind in America. And insurance
companies don’t want you thinking about all the children they will bar
from care,just so they can maximize profits.
Senior fellows at the Rockridge Institute, including cognitive linguist
George Lakoff, author of the best-selling “Don’t Think of an Elephant,”
have joined together to examine the hidden truths in our raging national
debate over health care. And to bring their new report, “The Logic of
the Health Care Debate” to life, the Rockridge Institute has produced a
video spot that dramatizes the way in which our current health care
system is based on excluding nearly half of the American family —
concluding with the provocative question: “Which one of your children
would you leave unprotected?”
The video, written by Rockridge senior fellow Glenn W. Smith and
produced by Margie Becker of Austin, TX, can be viewed online at
www.RockridgeInstitute.org/health.
AKA the media. John Doolittle (CA-04, Roseville) thinks knows the media is the cause of all of his problems. It’s not the DOJ, not the fact that he took money from some pretty shady characters, it’s the “press”. But, don’t worry media types, ol 15% Johnny’s still got your back on the shield law:
“Much as I love the press,” he said, with a scornful emphasis on the P word, “I decided it was appropriate to support this, because I think there needs to be some limits to executive authority, and I think that the freedom of the press is a real check on government power. Although I sometimes wonder about the bias and impartiality of the press. I wonder about it all the time, not sometimes. It’s clear in my mind it exists.” (SacBee 10/22/07)
