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Should We Laugh? Cry? Both?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Nov. 23 (News Analysis) - The ritual is becoming familiar. Health care reform passes a major political hurdle. And progressives don?t know whether to laugh or cry. Last time, the occasion was a vote in the House of Representatives. Health care reform passed by the slimmest of margins, but not before conservative Democrats had extracted a major concession on abortion rights. This time, it was a vote in the Senate--not on whether to pass a bill, but whether to begin debating one. This measure, too, passed by the slimmest of margins, but not before conservative Democrats and one notorious independent made clear they were prepared to shut things down later if legislation includes a public insurance option. It?s no fun to watch this unfold. And yet this is the exactly the sort of drama you should expect for the next few weeks, as the Senate deliberations play out. The bill Majority Leader Harry Reid introduced last week is not everything it could be--not by a long shot. And progressives will try their ...

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Docudrama

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Nov. 18 (Special Report) - Sometime in August, McKinsey & Company created a PowerPoint document called “Health Care Reform and Implications for Key Stakeholders: What this Could Mean for Client X.” Over the course of 44 slides full of charts and graphs, the firm examines the potential impact of reform on insurers, doctors, hospitals, and the drug industry. McKinsey tells Client X that the presentation’s purpose is to “help inform your understanding of the broader healthcare system impact and what this might mean for your key customers and Client X going forward.” After a source supplied me with the document--which is marked “confidential”--I contacted McKinsey. A spokesperson told me that “Client X” is not a particular company. Instead, he explained, the document is a broad overview of how McKinsey expects health care reform to play out. (It also appears to be a presentation that McKinsey consultants could adapt based on a client’s particular situation.)

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Anti-Statism In America

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By John B. Judis - Nov. 11 (News Analysis) - Liberals and progressives have fared poorly in the face of this staunch anti-statist tradition, but there have still been periods when they have broken through and enacted major reforms--during Woodrow Wilson’s first term, Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, Lyndon Johnson’s first two years, and Richard Nixon’s first term. They succeeded for different reasons at different times, but several conditions recur.

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The Drama Was In The History

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Nov. 08 (Opinion) - Do not be fooled by the Beltway conventional wisdom, which has repeatedly treated House legislation as inferior to its counterpart in the Senate. If anything, the opposite is true. Should the House bill or something like it become law, the vast majority of Americans would have health insurance--protecting them from financial calamity and giving them access to medical care when they need it.

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On the Job

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Republic - By Anthony Wright - Nov. 05 (Opinion) - It’s strange that on-the-job coverage gets relatively little attention in the debate, even though more than half of Americans have health coverage through their employers. That's more than the Americans in programs like Medicaid and Medicare (around a third of the population) and much more than the Americans who buy coverage as individuals (less than a tenth of the population).

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Senate Dems to Obama: Um, a Little Help Here?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 26 (News Analysis) - After a weekend of furious activity, Democratic leaders in the Senate think they are close to getting the votes they need in order to pass an "opt-out" version of the public option. But they feel like President Obama could be doing more to help them, with one senior staffer telling TNR on Sunday that the leadership would like, but has yet to receive, a clear "signal" of support for their effort.

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Making Sure The States Don't Pay (Too Much) For Reform

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Suzy Khimm - Oct. 25 (Comment) - The House is still deliberating between two versions of the public option, as Cohn laid out earlier: a stronger version that would tie public option pay rates to Medicare “plus 5” percentage points, and a weaker version that would have negotiated rates, but also separately raise Medicaid eligibility from 133% to 150% percent above the poverty line to save money. (It’d be cheaper to cover Medicaid patients than in the public plan.)

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What Is Nancy Pelosi Doing?

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 21 (News Report) - Armed with favorable cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and emboldened, perhaps, by the self-destructive behavior of the health insurance lobby, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to propose that her caucus unite behind a reform bill with a strong public insurance option. She will do so at a Wednesday meeting of House Democrats, according to The Hill ?s Mike Soraghan, who was (I think) the first to report the story. Pelosi?s actions have provoked two very different reactions from within the reform community: Glee and fear. The glee comes from people who think Pelosi is making a smart strategic move. Yes, a strong public plan remains a tough sell, particularly with centrists in the Senate. But precisely because the Senate will ...

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The Top Ten Things Worth Fighting For

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 14 (News Analysis) - As deliberations continue, in the floor debate and eventually in the House-Senate conference committee, the question is how these bills will come together. The best case scenario is that we get the best of both approaches--the far-reaching coverage and insurance reforms in the House and HELP bills, combined with the CBO-certified cost control of Finance. The worst case is that we get cost control like House and HELP, with coverage that looks like Finance.

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Is the Insurance Industry Declaring War?

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 12 (Opinion) - Over the weekend, America's Health Insurance Plans circulated a study it commissioned from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In a memo to AHIP members, reproduced here, president Karen Ignani explained its significance

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Against Transparency

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Lawrence Lessig - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

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The CBO Just Released Its New Health Care Score. Reason for Relief?

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 07 (News Analysis) - The good news, substantively and politically, is that CBO expects the measure would reduce budget deficits by $81 billion over the next decade and by even larger sums in the following decade, although it won't quantify that amount specifically because estimates are so imperfect that far out.

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How Health Care Reform Won

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Chait - Oct. 07 - The biggest story in health care reform this year has not been the town hall meetings, or President Obama?s big speech on health care. It?s that the Senate Democrats have decided they?re going to pass a bill. You just haven?t heard much about this story because it?s mostly taken place behind closed doors. Yesterday?s Roll Call has some details. Here?s what I think is the key passage: As a fallback, Senate Democratic leaders have stepped up their pressure on centrists to stick with the party on procedural votes. At a minimum, leaders have asked all 60 Democrats to allow them to bring a health care bill to the floor in order to make sure Republicans cannot filibuster it. Democratic Senate aides ...

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Stocked Exchange

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 06 (Opinion) - Ten years from now, if health care reform is a boondoggle, you might be able to trace that failure back to a decision in the wee hours of last week's Senate Finance Committee hearings. It happened on Thursday night, just before midnight, when John Kerry put forward an amendment. It was amendment C-8: "Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers." The title may sound innocuous, if a bit arcane. But if you've followed the health care reform debate, then you know (or should know) that anything involving the insurance exchanges is important.

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Dr. Frist's Prescription

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 02 (Opinion) - that's three former Republican Senate Majority Leaders who have endorsed the sorts of reforms President Obama and his allies are pushing. Previously, Howard Baker and Bob Dole signed on to a plan they negotiated with Tom Daschle and George Mitchell, former Democratic counterparts, through the auspices of the Biparitsan Policy Center.

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Madison Weeps

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - Sep. 22 (Editorial) - Our sense of alarm has been growing for some time. From the moment Barack Obama entered the White House, the Republican Party has cast itself as the Party of No. Whether it was the stimulus bill--which garnered not a single Republican vote in the House--or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court--which only nine of 40 Senate Republicans supported--the GOP has defined itself in its opposition to Obama. But our alarm has been tempered by the knowledge that, in a way, this is as it should be: In our form of government, the minority party should be the opposition party; and, while the Obama administration did make overtures to the GOP on the stimulus and its selection of Sotomayor, those overtures were largely symbolic. The factionalism, while regrettable, was understandable. But, this week, as the health care reform battle reached a crucial juncture, the violence of faction has become gratuitous.

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Unemployment Numbers May Put Democrats Out Of Work

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By William Galston - Sep. 16 (News Analysis) - In recent weeks, senior Obama administration officials have suggested that historically high levels of unemployment could persist for many years. Indeed, the most recent OMB projections show unemployment remaining above 7 percent until 2012, and above 5 percent through at least 2019.

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The Centrists’ Take On The Speech: Pretty Darn Good

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Suzy Khimm - Sep. 10 (News Analysis) - The moderates and centrists critical to ongoing health care negotiations seemed to have found a good deal to their liking in the president’s speech tonight.

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Why Reform Survived August

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 08 (News Analysis) - The August recess began with critics attacking health care reform because of its high price tag. It ended with critics attacking health care reform because of how reformers proposed to reduce that high price tag.

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Americans Still Don't Trust Government—But They Could Go For A Health Care Plan Modeled Like This...

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By William Galston - Sep. 06 (Opinion) - Mistrust of concentrated power is part of America’s cultural DNA. Most Americans regard government as at best a disagreeable necessity. Even this March, at the low point of the recession and confidence in the future, and at a time when a majority of Americans favored more government control of the economy to stave off disaster, only 40 percent opted for a bigger government providing more services, versus 48 percent who preferred a smaller government providing fewer services. In this context, health reform must be spoken of by its defenders not as a positive good, but rather as medicine needed to arrest a disease—namely, the erosion of wages and the employer-based insurance system—that will eventually damage even the healthy parts of the body.

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Party Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Sep. 04 (News Analysis) - During the past year, Republicans have frequently said they want to work with Democrats. But the real story of the last few months is how unserious those pledges turned out to be. Although you wouldn’t know it from their rhetoric or the media coverage, there are not one but two ostensibly bipartisan proposals out there right now. Either of them could be the template for successful reform if even a few Republicans started pushing them seriously. But, even the ostensibly reasonable Republican senators whom Democrats have tried to engage--Mike Enzi, Charles Grassley, and Hatch--just aren’t interested. And it appears they haven’t been for a while.

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The Courtship

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Gabriel Sherman - Aug. 31 (Special Report) - In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

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Crazy Train

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Chait - Aug. 24 (Opinion) - What we are witnessing is the convergence of the mainstream Republican culture with the right-wing political subculture. Last year, the two remained clearly distinct. During the presidential election last fall, angry people began showing up at John McCain's rallies, screaming out various lunatic conspiracy theories.

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Squeeze Play

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Aug. 12 (Opinion) - There’s a lot of grumbling these days about the way President Obama and his allies are selling health reform. According to this argument, they haven’t offered a simple, straightforward answer of how reform will work--and why it won’t do all the awful things critics say it will.

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I Didn't Wake Up Planning to Write About Samuelson

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Aug. 10 (Opinion) - Samuelson may not think these reforms are aggressive enough--or that the plans emerging from Congress don't live up to these promises. Those are reasonable arguments; I might even agree with them, up to a point. But surely he could have acknowledged and engaged them, however briefly, rather than harrumphing--and nobody harrumphs like Robert Samuelson--that "Obama took a pass."

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