Bill Moyers message for Obama re: health reform

pokersloper - brilliant, intelligent discourse! I hope your job in the schools isn't one that can influence any minds.

Obama isn't really failing so much as staying true to what a lot of us already knew: he's a moderate, not a progressive.

He wants bipartisanship, not real reform.

Am I disappointed? Yes. Am I surprised? No.

Obama's health care reform isn't failing. It will get passed, it just won't be progressive. Because he's not progressive.

If you and the NYTs reporter want to predict that Obama won't get a reform bill passed, you're free to do so. I feel pretty strongly otherwise, even if the bill falls short of what I or other Dems want.

During the 2008 campaign, part of Obama’s platform was that he was going to work so that female contraceptives were covered by health insurance. Of course, I can’t recall President Obama mentioning this since the campaign.

zomg! a candidate mentioned something during a campaign that he failed to follow through with!!!

The President is having to get accustomed to the fact that Bush hate might get him elected, but it won’t run his government. Watching President Obama is like watching a woman flirt who has lost her looks but doesn’t know it yet. I need more popcorn, but am so full already. Watching this President for four years is going to make me fat.

Based on the health care debate, you're labeling his presidency a failure, got it.

And lol @ labeling a candidate standing in opposition to the Bush/Cheney/Neocon machine as "Bush Hate", as if the disagreements were as inconsequential as a high school girls fight.

If ending the war in Iraq and not starting a new war in Iran is simply 'bush hate', then I find that to be a perfectly wonderful principle of our new President.

Who exactly has brought this country to the brink of ruin? Obama sure didn't.

Healthcare reform by any Republican:

So to summarize, as you've said over and over:

In early September 2009, pokersloper predicted that Obama won't be able to pass a health care bill.

Got it.

I look forward to upping this incorrect prediction post just like I did with those awesome predictions that Palin was a 'coup' for McCain or that Obama will never get Hillary supporters to vote for him.

pokersloper wants America to fail? Now that's not very American of you, of all people.

MeredithB wrote: pokersloper wants America to fail? Now that's not very American of you, of all people.

Pokersloper wants Obama to succeed, but as long as he is failing, and folks are still clinging to Bush hate to fix the country, Pokersloper will kick back and enjoy it.

I argue that Obama is failing in the best of possible political environments for his plans. God help us when Obama’s ratings plunge, Democrats lose seats, and Obama retreats even further.

The convenient fantasies of President Obama
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
September 9, 2009

The resignation over the Labor Day weekend of White House "green jobs" czar Van Jones tells you some interesting things about the Obama administration. One of them is that a man who proclaimed himself a "communist" in the 1990s and signed 9/11 "truther" petitions suggesting Bush administration complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks was considered fit for a White House appointment. Liberal columnists have been attacking Republicans because some of their voters are "birthers," believers in the absurd charge that President Obama was not born in Hawaii and thus is not a natural-born U.S. citizen. But they have failed to identify any "birther" who occupied a position in the Republican firmament comparable to that of "truther" Van Jones in the Obama administration.

Another interesting thing about Jones is that the administration seems enamored of his "green jobs" concept. There's an understandable political reason. Legislation to restrict carbon emissions that is supported by the administration would undoubtedly kill a large number of jobs by increasing the cost of energy, and so you can see why its advocates might want to argue that there will be a compensating number of "green jobs" created -- at least if the government spends a lot of money on them.

But this sounds like fantasy. If there were money to be made in green jobs, private investors would be creating them already. In fact big corporations like General Electric are scrambling to position themselves as green companies, gaming legislation and regulations so they can make profits by doing so. Big business is ready to create green jobs -- if government subsidizes them. But the idea that green jobs will replace all the lost carbon-emitting jobs is magical thinking.

Obama's approach to health care legislation, unless he makes a major course correction in his speech to the joint session of Congress tonight, is of a piece with his hiring of Van Jones. By ceding the task of writing legislation to congressional Democratic leaders and committee chairmen, he has been following a "no enemies to the left" strategy.

By refusing to rule out the government option -- which its architects see as the road to a single-payer government insurance system -- Obama has prevented the emergence of a set of policies that have a chance of passing the Senate. The Senate Republicans in the "gang of six" who have been negotiating with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus are not going to agree on a bill without assurance from the White House that they won't get rolled by hard-left House Democrats in conference committee.

Yesterday Baucus came out with his own plan, which includes a tax on high-value health insurance policies. But this is likely to be rejected by the Left, by labor unions that have negotiated such benefits from employers, and by members of Congress from states like New York, where, because of state policies, almost all health insurance costs that much.

There is an element of convenient fantasy as well in Obama's health care statements to date. We are going to save money by spending money. We are going to solve our fiscal problems with a program that will increase the national debt by $1,000,000,000,000 over a decade. We are going to guarantee you can keep your current insurance with a bill that encourages your employer to stop offering it.

The list goes on. We are going to improve health care for seniors by cutting $500,000,000,000 from Medicare. We aren't going to insure illegal aliens, except that we won't have any verification provisions to see that they can't apply and get benefits.

Most politicians like to promise voters all good things at once. Democrats got in the habit of doing this over the past 14 years when they could not pass legislation by themselves. Van Jones' moment in the White House is over. Exposure of his record in conservative media made him politically unacceptable, even though mainstream outlets like the New York Times ignored the issue entirely.

The Democrats' health insurance bills remain under consideration, and with large majorities in both houses, passage of some bill cannot be ruled out. But August town hall meetings and national polls have put the Democrats on the defensive. No-enemies-to-the-left and convenient fantasies may work in Chicago. They don't work so well when your constituency is the whole United States.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/The-convenient-fantasies-of-President-Obama-8215470-57862907.html

eggcream wrote: The convenient fantasies of President Obama
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
September 9, 2009

Yup. Healthcare reform is going to be painful and expensive and is going to take decades to fund.

Shame it got to this point, but here we are.

What proposal do you support to keep health care from bankrupting lower and middle class Americans eggcream?

Deductibles have risen 50% on average in this decade alone. What's your alternative plan eggcream?

AGH! i hate the "young people who opt against insurance BS". how long has it been since you've really had to think about buying your own insurance on the kind of jobs most young people can get right out of college? you know, the kind of jobs that often come without benefits?

i "opted" to have insurance even at that age, but i worked in crappy jobs to keep it, unable to take the kind of chances that might well have been better for my career because i would have been uninsured.

oppose health care reform if you want, but leave that scenario out of your argument.

as for picking insurance companies across state lines -- fine, great. no problem with that except that there's not some magic state where health insurance awesome.

MeredithB wrote: Health insurance costs up by 97 percent since 2000, says study

And wage increases are basically flat and people still say we don't need reform. Crazy.

Most people, I dare say all people, I know and hear speak to this issue say that health care reform is desperately needed. Unfortunately, we have a president who can’t get it done in the best of possible political climates. What, Obama’s mandate wasn’t big enough for him?