If It Gets Real Bad, Think About Space

Well, the public option amendments were both voted down yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee. Three questions: first, why? Second, what happens next? Third, what can we do?

1) The reason this amendment was voted down was lobbyist money. One of the votes that almost nobody counted in the press, and which I overlooked as well, was that of Max Baucus himself, the chairman of the Finance Committee -- who kept repeating that the bill didn't have 60 votes in the Senate, so he couldn't vote for the amendment. But Baucus, as 538.com points out, has told his own constituents that he "wants a public option too" and there's a strong argument to be made that his leadership alone could have motivated a fence-sitter like North Dakota's Kent Conrad. The Senate as a whole, when they take up the debate, could easily strip the Finance Committee's public option amendment -- the HELP committee didn't seem to have any trouble putting a public option into their bill, whether it would pass the general vote or not. For the Schumer amendment, Baucus and Conrad alone would have been enough for passage -- just these two senators. But Baucus (as well as Blanche Lincoln, and frankly all the 'no' votes on the public option) is a MASSIVE recipient of health insurance lobbying money. Here is a graphical representation of the clouds of buzzing health insurance industry lobbyists that feed on the Montana senator (explained here). A comparison of 'no' voting Democratic senators with the money they accept from industry lobbies is here -- Baucus is at the head of the list with 7.7 million dollars raised over the course of his career, and Lincoln is second. We could have had this amendment: we should have had it. Voters and activists have done their part and the nation wants it. It is very specifically the political patronage of the health insurance industry that has prevented the passage of a public option.

2) Nobody really knows what happens now. The Baucus Bill will have to be merged with the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee (HELP) bill, which contains a public option, and it will have to go up for debate on the floor of the Senate, and it will have to be merged with the House bill, which also contains a public option. It seems true that there are more than 50 votes to pass a public option in the Senate -- but to prevent a Republican filibuster, we need 60 votes, which means all 58 Democrats, plus Sanders of Vermont, plus one other vote. Nobody can work on that one vote, though, and nobody can really put together a strategy to pass parts of the plan through budget reconciliation (a legislative option that only requires 51 votes) until Senate Democrats get it into their heads that a public option is what the nation wants, that it is overwhelmingly what the party wants, and that the coming election will be much harder for everyone if the health care plan they end up passing is a give-away to insurance interests.

3) What we can do now is much more than what we could before we knew what was going to happen in the Finance committee -- in the coming floor debate, we will be well served by Senators of all stripes, from all states coming forward to support the bill. Signing up with HCAN or just using their service to call your senator sends a clear message that supporters of the public option have supporters among the public. If your senator's for the public option, tell them to get up and speak out for it. If they're waffling (this list is a good source to figure out who's a trustworthy supporter, and who's weak), tell them how much you hate waffles, and threaten to make pancakes of them in the 2010 elections (or some such metaphor, which is better constructed and less threatening).

And if you find yourself wanting to hock a lugie at Max Baucus for selling us out, maybe it'd be a good idea to take a second, chill out, and listen to Carl Sagan sing techno about space.

Who's protesting?

I have to stop reading the New York Times -- I read their headline today, "Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government" and eagerly clicked in -- news, news! But the article never once told me who organized the protest. Who's out there? Who's in charge? Who rented the microphone? No answers -- and a group with some kind of specific opposition to some particular policy or government priority is transformed into a faceless checkmark on a party-politics scorecard.

So I figure, hah. Liberal media bias. And I go over to the Drudge Report -- nothing. There isn't even a headline today, but buried somewhere down the page is an article "Bomb Threat Forces Evacuation of DC TEA Party Planners" from which one can find out that the demonstration was planned by FreedomWorks, headed by former House Majority leader Dick Armey. So -- as opposed to the groundswell of opposition to health care reform that the Times (and FreedomWorks) would like us to believe this demonstration represents, let's look at FreedomWorks specifically.

FreedomWorks, formerly called Citizens for a Sound Economy, is funded in part by donations from MetLife, Phillip Morris, and the Scaife family fortune. Their stated goal is to increase individual freedom by decreasing taxes; they were organizers of the April 15th tea parties (pictures here), although they generally prefer to label their events and websites as 'grassroots' in an attempt to prevent the devolution of responsibility onto them personally. The term NPR uses, daintily, is 'faux grassroots'.

As far as I can tell on their website, FreedomWorks formally opposes: the bank bailout, the stimulus package, environmental cap-and-trade legislation, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, and most other government initiatives that require significant spending or limit corporate power (which they equate with individual liberty) in any significant way. As a group, they also seem to be strong supporters of Israel, strong opponents of abortion, and Christians generally. This has led to them being confused for rank-and-file Republicans, but although they were real supporters of President Bush (who was the right religion, and passed big tax cuts for the wealthy), the last presidential candidate they really loved was Steve Forbes, who serves on their board of directors.

Much of the press online about FreedomWorks centers around discoveries of the extent to which they are willing to go to lie to their own members and the public about their tactics. The Washington Post caught them out secretly signing up members through insurance sales (i.e. want a low group rate? Sure! Just sign this contract -- um, petition/membership form/contract) and they are particularly energetic astroturfers -- creating fictitious sites and conversations online in order to expand positive perception of their issues (we'll see if tagging their name and linking to a bunch of stories about them as I do here attracts some 'concerned democrats' who are worried that government is 'just too big').

Anyway, this is still developing -- if they break 50,000 demonstrators (by any estimate other than their own, which I'm sure is already at like 4 million people) in Washington, I'll do a little bit about Dick Armey tomorrow. He's a colorful fellow!

EDIT: I seem to be getting some traffic from searches for estimates for the size of the rally, so I'll bite: ABC is going with the DC Fire Department's estimate of 60 to 70 thousand people; CNN is elaborately silent on the issue of size; the New York Times's headline says that "thousands" came to the capital; the Washington Post says only that 30,000 people registered for the protest. It seems like all the links estimating 2 million (which, if it really happened, would be larger than the Inauguration, FIFTY times larger than the largest sourceable media estimate, become immediately visible to any onlooker of any party, and be the lead in any news story that wanted to be credible) go back to Michelle Malkin. For a complete debunking of the 2 million figure, see here.

Late Game Gunk

Let's say you're a fence-sitter. You like fences -- you're from Arkansas and they've got a lot of them, and you like to sit on them. No problem! You can be a Senator; you can be a senior senator. All you have to do is make statements that hedge and shift. Arkansas has a lot of hedges, too, often placed directly adjacent to fences.

All you've got to do is watch out that you don't get pushed off the fence by a fire-hose intensity gush of insurance industry money. This will be delivered with particular force, since your previous health care advisor now works for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

And if you do drop off, Lord forbid, the fence? Make sure you don't get embarassing, money-green gunk all over your nice clothes, Senator.


The price of one senator to vote against legislation that will save lives, money, and prevent human suffering -- especially in her home state of Arkansas, where 20% of the state is uninsured? That price is apparently $325,350.

Her move today to come out strongly against the public option in the late days of the debate is a live-action dramatization of this cartoon -- by waffling for months instead of choosing a policy and negotiating for it (the attitude of several more principled senators who are also not firm 'yesses' on the public option -- those who are pulling for their own plans), she helps ensure that no reform at all passes this year.

What a shame! You know how hard it is to get gunk off a nice silk suit.

EDIT: Forgot to give you fine people a way to contact the Senator with advice on repairing expensive fabrics. There's still time to apply stain stick before the grease soaks all the way through!

DOUBLE EDIT: You can donate to an ActBlue campaign to run a pressure advertisement pushing Senator Lincoln to represent her constituency here.

Heavy Is the Chest that Wears the Gunk

I taught myself to use the GIMP to create this masterpiece:

Well worth it, well worth it.

So why junk up a perfectly good centrist? Because centrism doesn't mean chase money and votes in a completely self-servingly strategic fashion. Here's the NYTimes analysis of why Lieberman voted repeatedly to limit damages that could be awarded to people that sue insurers:

"Many of Mr. Lieberman's friends said he had no alternative but to take this position because it was the one favored by the insurance industry. The industry is important to Connecticut's economy and has generously donated to Mr. Lieberman's campaigns over the years."

Well, you know, everybody has constituents, right? At least he's a continuous and strong supporter of private health insurers, right? Lieberman in 2004, during the Democratic primary:

"LIEBERMAN: There is a morally scandalous fact-that that 43 million Americans don't have health insurance, 2 million more than when George Bush became president. I'm proposing to create a national health insurance pool like the one that members of Congress get our insurance from. If you don't have insurance now, you'll be able to get it, probably free, if you're among the low-income working poor. If you're a child, you will be covered by insurance at birth. If you are fired from your work or lose your job, you will not lose your health insurance."

Sounds great, Joe. People really should have health insurance, and since this is the electoral primary and public options for health care are really popular among Democrats, I'm sure this will really help your primary numbers! But what's this business about "probably free"? Oh, right. It's wiggle room, so that he can crawl back to the insurers that fund his campaigns, tongue lolling like an overheated spaniel:

"I don't favor a public option," Lieberman told Bloomberg News in an interview broadcast this weekend. And I don't favor a public option because I think there's plenty of competition in the private insurance market. We have a unique opportunity, a real opportunity to do this year what we've been trying to do for years, which is to reform American healthcare, I think the one thing that will stop that is pressure on the so-called public option. Let's get something done instead of having a debate,"

So the new message is threefold. One: we are doing GREAT. Helluva job. It is absolutely not true that the senators most likely to oppose the public option come from states with the least competition in health insurance or that Lieberman's home state of Connecticut is dominated by Wellpoint, which commands more than 50% of the state market (although the people of Connecticut are fed up -- their state legislature just overrode a Republican veto to establish universal healthcare statewide). Second: Lieberman is on the side of a nebulously defined 'we' -- which doesn't mean Democrats, exactly (Lieberman is technically an independent) or his constituents (see above state policy, which is overwhelmingly supported by residents of Connecticut). I'm guessing that health insurance companies make up a good bit of this 'we', and it's true -- they've been trying to write health policy for decades. Third: shut up already! Why is everybody debating what's best and not just jumping in with some halfhearted, bandaid-on-a-sucking-chest-wound reform-lite package? This, I think, is a very respectful echo of what we could call the Bush Doctrine.

So all told, until you get on board, Joe, you're going to have a chest full of poorly Photoshopped gunk.

EDIT: Also, there is a rhymey bunch trying to kick you out of the Democratic Party.

Gunk Club redux

Still thinking about FIRM, Objectivism, and health care reform. A few things:

-- It occurs to me that what liberals and conservatives disagree over are which community values should be most important -- equality? Christian morality? Financial security? Competitiveness? Defense? -- but I think that liberals and conservatives would both easily agree that we should have community values in the first place. That's where both groups differ with the Objectivists, and the reason that Objectivists almost never identify themselves or their philosophy when they write articles. They don't hide it -- at least they don't put much effort into hiding it -- but they prefer to identify themselves with meaningless abstractions like 'reason' or 'objectivity'. I suspect that there are fiscal and social conservatives who read articles by Hsieh and company who would probably disagree with FIRM's fundamental beliefs, and I know that there are much stronger arguments against a public option than "doing things for other people is an immoral weakness."

-- Here's an interesting post on Objectivism in popular culture, in the video game Bioshock and the movie The Incredibles.

-- It occurred to me this morning how weird it is to call yourself FIRM. I mean, don't get me wrong -- I'm the founder of RIPPED (Rationalists In Peril of Perpetrating Educated Debate) and a signatory member of TURGID (Tactical Understatement Really Gets It Done), but FIRM strikes me as odd, somehow.

-- I found this entertaining tidbit on reddit.

In non-FIRM news (inFIRM? UnFIRM?), the New York Times published a solid introduction to health care reform today -- good on them for replacing their horse-race analysis of whether the bill will pass and who will win or lose with an actual investigation of the issue at hand.

The Gunk Club

I had thought there was an almost infinite amount of health reform debate on the web -- but I was sort of wrong, because it seems that about 25% of it is the work of Dr. Paul Hsieh, the co-founder, most prolific author, and most furious reposter of the group FIRM (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine). So hey, I like freedom, and I'm real big on individual rights -- what's not to love?

Oh, right. Gunk. FIRM's other co-founder is Lin Zinser, JD (if you squint hard enough, it looks like 'MD'), who is an employee of the Ayn Rand Institute (scroll to the bottom) in charge of "outreach to professional communities". In fact, almost all links going to and coming from FIRM's web presence go to magazines and communities associated with Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. But hey, I like philosophy. No philosophy could possibly be made of gunk, could it? It couldn't, under any circumstances, be positively dripping with gunk, now, could it?

The gunkiest part of Objectivism, first theorized by Russian-American exile Ayn Rand during the height of the Cold War (she served, actually, as a friendly witness to the House Un-American Affairs Committee, which kicked off the Red Scare), is its ethics. Objectivist ethics are founded on what they call rational self-interest, with an emphasis on the self-interest. One of her most famous characters, John Galt, makes this oath: "I swear — by my life and my love of it — that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." In another of her novels, The Fountainhead, when architect Howard Roark feels that the vision of the building he's designed has been altered, he blows it up, regardless of the fact that he didn't physically build it and doesn't own it.

"Rational" self-interest is what Objectivists like Hsieh and Zinser are talking about when they publish articles like "Health Care is not a Right" or insist that "the law must respect the individual rights of doctors and other providers, allowing them the freedom to practice medicine. This includes the right to choose their patients, to determine the best treatment for their patients, and to bill their patients accordingly." The vision of a doctor as someone who serves others out of love for humankind, or in order to create a more perfect society, never enters into the equation: doctors have the skills to heal, and they exchange them for profit. That's all. If it is more profitable for doctors to enrich themselves by treating a few people and ignoring the rest, then they should do it -- they have to do it, it's their moral responsibility.

What is most infuriating, though, about Objectivist self-interest is that it willfully ignores the contributions of others towards creating the very privilege that gives doctors their special knowledge and skills. Paul Hsieh got his MD from the University of Michigan, and Lin Zinsler attended not one but two state schools -- taxpayer funded, socialist education -- but even if they had been private school graduates, and hadn't received any government loan options, scholarships, or other community support, they would still be constantly dependent on the rest of us for day to day survival. Paul Hsieh is a radiologist -- he spends his days, I would guess, with complex CT, MRI, X-ray and other scanning machinery, each having hundreds to millions of parts, each part requiring its own manufacture, its own raw materials, and its own know-how. It is incontrovertable that one of those miners, manufacturers, plastics assemblers, or welders is uninsured or underinsured. That without the labor of people who Objectivists look down on, and intentionally refrain from helping, they would be unable to perform the tasks that bring them such pride and wealth.

Saying that doctors should have 100%, individual, self-interested control over who to treat and when is counter to the Hippocratic oath, which promises that "in every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients." To accept public funds and support for your own medical education, and then claim that public health care is immoral, is what we call the classic, creamy-style, industrial grade gunk.

Gunk

There are some things about Sandy Szwarc's blog "Junkfood Science" that I really like -- but where the public option for health care reform is concerned, she's gone off the deep end.

"An ongoing debate has been unfolding among the public and medical professionals about whether the healthcare reform bill really requires mandatory counseling for every senior that will steer them to make advance healthcare decisions that could end their lives sooner, perhaps in order to lower healthcare costs."

This immediately makes my nostrils dilate, as if I have smelled fresh feces in strong sunlight. What she is opposed to is counseling? And is it even possible to force anyone into counseling outside of the legal system? I don't see any words like 'mandatory' in the legislation she quotes -- the only use of 'shall' I see is one that describes what counseling session 'shall' include, and I certainly don't see an enforcement mechanism -- i.e., what happens if people don't go. She claims that they will be identified as "noncompliant", which doesn't sound so bad to me.

While we're asking questions, though, who are "the public and medical professionals" that Sandy is talking about? They're debating, you say? Who exactly are those professionals? After a long excerpt from the legislation, she name-drops the "Bioethics Defense Fund" (I won't link you to them, because I find them pretty lame), which is an anti-stem cell, anti-choice, anti-cloning outfit that seems to be made up of as many lawyers as it is doctors. Any "Ethics Defense Fund" worth paying attention to doesn't resort to lame tactics like calling American health reform "Obamacare" or sponsoring bills to avoid "Octomom abuses". She also dings Wesley J. Smith, who works for the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute. I would expect, if health legislation threatened the individual right to life, to see real organizations like the ACLU or the Catholic Church to step in -- not these ultra-right think tanks.

But they're not wasting their time, because this fear and outrage is just made up. Seniors will benefit greatly from the public option -- from not having to change doctors like they do now during the transition to Medicaid, from not being targeted by greedy and unethical 'additional insurance' scams, and most of all, from cheaper drugs whose cost is driven down by the government's ability to negotiate prices.

In any event, the shrill, alarmist tone, completely weak argument (Counseling! The horror!), and constant dependence on untrustworthy source material all lead me to sadly pin the first Medal of Gunk on the lapel of "Junkfood Science".


Image courtesy of:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/woodysworld1778/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

POSTSCRIPT: The people at Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact look into claims similar to those that Szwarc makes and find them to be unequivocally false.