Shinseki Falls on Sword

Not a huge surprise that Eric Shinseki took one for the team and tendered his resignation as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.  Either he knew or he should have known that his minions were not stretching their budgets far enough to satisfy everyone and provide the level of service the American public thinks it has promised our veterans.  What remains to be seen is whether or not some of the heads of VA hospitals in various states also admit they were in on the concealment and inability to cope.

But what I'm waiting for is the mass resignation from Congress of all legislators who repeatedly voted against sufficient resources so that the VA could, in fact, comply with the expectations of the American public and veterans.  Will the lackeys of the Koch brothers publicly admit they fully understood the VA had no chance of providing the levels of care they were demanding with the budgets that were being approved?    Pretty sure I'll have a long, long disappointing wait.

AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

I must be missing something, maybe several somethings. Why do so many of my peers & friends detest and oppose the Affordable Care Act? Many people who are either Medicare eligible or federal retirees or both have, if they will admit it, benefited from aspects of “socialized medicine” for significant portions of their professional lives. Yet they now lambast the decisions taken by the country in 2009 and subsequently to extend the availabililty of medical care to large portions of the populace. Why? I do regretfully understand the position taken by some in the 20s – 30s age groups who prefer to roll the dice on their current state of good health and avoid the cost of insuring that it continues. That is and should be their “right”, perhaps. Except that the whole concept of insurance has always been that resources are produced by large portions of a population for concentrated use by isolated individuals when unplanned needs arose. And while a person may choose to go without automobile insurance coverages that address replacement or repair of their car if damaged, they cannot likewise decline liability coverages for dealing with what happens if their wreck damages someone else’s car and injures others. In this vein, I could agree with the libertarians that people should be free to pay or not pay for health insurance. If . . . and only if the hospitals and “the people” were free to decline to treat the uninsured. I also am totally missing the argument in the news the last few days that the ACA represents such a huge “tax”. Which specific taxes are set to rise?? And by how much? The “penalty” or “tax” for those who opt out of the “mandatory” coverage would affect a fairly small segment of the population. But what other taxes besides that will be exploding?

COMPROMISE_Concluded

Well it only took 14 months from inauguration to final passage of what is now touted as "Health Care reform". And to my mind it represents almost a textbook example of compromise. Want proof? Advocates on both sides hate it. The Republicans are screaming for "repeal" and vowing to defeat at the polls all Democrats as a result of it. Left-wing Democrats, especially pro-choice ones, held their nose and finally accepted that this bill was better than no bill, but not much.

Don't look for a "Second verse, same as the first" any time soon. I got a feeling Obama will tell himself and others that he gave bipartisanship a try but the Republicans don't intend to play fair. Some other template will be sought for the next contentious issue.

COMPROMISE _ Continued

I first posted on this back in Nov/Dec. But if I go back and stick this as a mere comment on that thread, it'll be basically buried. So a new post is in order.
Almost three months later, the Democratic Party in Congress is now lumbering toward possibly passing some form of health care reform legislation. And as of today it still remains to be seen if they can keep their eye on the ball long enough to actually get a hit here. After the initial bills passed their respective chambers the ideologues and caucuses on both ends of the spectrum declared that compromise was probably not possible since their pet issue couldn't be sacrificed on the altar of passing any bill.
Now, however, they are talking as if they realize a partial or "bad" bill would indeed be preferable to no bill. And they are seemingly realizing that if the Republicans are going to hide behind the Senate's filibuster cloture rules (which means 60 vote minimum to pass anything) then perhaps the Democrats can use a parliamentary procedure to thwart this, namely "reconciliation". Reconciliation would allow the Senate to vote on the bill on an up or down, simple majority basis instead of the super majority.
But all this has yet to transpire in the coming couple of weeks. So we'll see. If compromise is indeed struck and some bill is passed it will indeed represent one of the first important such events in Congress in several decades.

Health Care "Summit" at White House

I watched as much of today's spectacle as I could stomach. And in recent days I've read several Op-Ed columns on various aspects of the topic. It kinda all runs together in my pea-brain.
One pundit had mentioned that to date the Republicans have prevailed in their strategies over Obama and the Democrats. To wit: They have found that if they refuse to compromise one bit, one iota, on any point, that the Democrats will move toward them and say, "OK, your turn". And in this way the Democrats have moved or given in four or five times and the Republicans not once.
The primary two "ideas" offered by Republicans, if I may simplify and summarize, are as follows:

1. One change that would be beneficial would be to allow health insurance to be sold "across state lines".
2. The other big ticket item would be to address medical malpractice tort reform, thereby supposedly eliminating expensive "preventive" medicine in the form of unnecessary tests that are performed only to indemnify the physicians from liability.

I have questions about these two notions that that is all that is needed to take large portions of cost out of health care. If these questions were answered today it was after I had tuned out in disgust or was not one of the soundbites covered by the media. The questions are as follows:

1. Doing #1 above would involve a federal mandate overruling states' control of "their" insurance industries. This sounds to me the opposite of the kinds of trends states righters (Republicans) normally advocate. How do conservatives square proposing this with their normal preference for allowing states to control as much as they wish to control?
2. The poster child for how #2 above would be wonderful for the nation is the state of Texas, which enacted medical malpractice tort reform some 4 yr. ago. John McCain trumpeted it today in some of his televised remarks. He offered impressive sounding statistics about how the outflow of physicians from the state had been reversed and that Texas was supposedly attracting all the doctors it needs now. But if all that is true, then why does Texas rank something like 48th in #s of uncovered children and very high in numbers of Texas residents who have no health insurance coverage?? If medical tort reform is the silver bullet, why isn't Texas a state where medical care is excellent and cheap?

I would welcome the opportunity to be enlightened as to how I am so far off the reservation on all this.

COMPROMISE

The networks and cable news channels won't do it. But somebody ought to remind everyone of the meaning of and the rightful place of "compromise" in the political setting.
This weekend the US Senate has apparently reached a compromise on the health care bill that is claimed to be backed up by 60 Democratic votes. We'll see. The actual votes are scheduled later today and in the coming days.
But even if the Senate bill passes, we are a long way from final legislation getting signed by the president. The Senate compromise contains provisions that liberal House Dems had previously said would be deal breakers. So there is still some compromising to occur if agreement is to be reached.
And if those who are commenting are accurate and honest then the chasm still to be bridged is quite wide. Several important votes on opposite sides of the debate have declared that they will not move beyond certain specific lines drawn in the sand. And the "No Man's Land" appears large.
So, do people on both sides prefer no bill to one that violates whatever mandate they've declared must be met? Perhaps. They seem to act as if a "no decision" is a valid fall-back position if they can't round up enough votes to support their preferred position. Such thinking, however, seems to me to be faulty. Keeping the status quo in the absence of a bill is not a "no decision". It is a conscious action to allow current unencumbered powers to proceed as they wish. Costs will rise without the benefit of extending coverage. Insurance companies will feel empowered to act with impunity. (After all, if they were not suppose to protect their own interests and profits then Congress would have passed something addressing the question, right?)
It reminds me of football teams that play a weak zone defense. They are fine as long as the other team runs pass plays where they have adequate coverage. But the other teams don't play fair, do they? No, they run the play to the "seam" of the zone coverage. They throw the pass to right where the zone defenders each think his neighboring partner defender will take over.
But, back to the health care debate. I hope a compromise does get worked out. A compromise bill, even if called a "bad bill" by extremists on both ends of the debate, would represent an improvement over the status quo. Take what the defense gives you. Kick your field goal and wait for a later opportunity to sneak in a touchdown. That's my game plan.

Obama agrees with Nave

I was going to post this as one of the followup responses to my post a few days ago about the President's health care initiatives. But then I decided it warranted its own separate "headline".
In his speech to the joint session of Congress the other night, President Obama used the argument I had offered in that previous post, that they ought to be comparing the value of "public option" in health care to the existence of both public, government colleges and private (for profit) colleges. Yeah, President!
I never did claim, and still don't, that this was my exclusive idea or eve that I was the first person to think of it. But my blog post did occur several days before any of the networks or cable pundits had ever even thought of it or uttered the words. Therefore, I think I'm on safe ground to go ahead and claim ownership of the idea and to magnanimously share it with the President.

"Public Option"

Haven't written anything political in a while. Had a pleasant two week road trip to see relatives and attend a wedding Then had to get in high gear for start of new semester preparing to dispense "discount knowledge at the junior college". But I have been paying some attention to the discussions about proposed legislation on health care . Particularly the "public option".
I'm mildly surprised that one comparison has not been made. (Maybe it has and I just haven't found it on the Internet. I'm sure none of the cable and broadcast pundits have mentioned it. Nor have I seen any elected politician quoted as offering this up. So I'll lay claim to it as mine.
Proponents of "public option" plans believe that existing for-profit insurance companies would be challenged by the direct competition of a government supported plan for the uninsured and underinsured to obtain health insurance coverage. They think this competition would be good and healthy.
Opponents claim it would be unfair because the government sujpported plan would be subsidized by taxpayer funds and that private insurance plans would not be able to compete. Therefore, they claim, the private plans would wither and all that would be left would be the public option and it would be a hated "single-payer" scheme in "public option" clothing.
My comparison is this. What has happened over the course of the last 150 years or so with regard to college education? Don't we have both tax supported, subsidized colleges and purely private colleges and hybrids of private schools that accept some public money? Isn't this comparable to what it would be like with health care? Have all the private colleges been forced out of business because public and state schools are cheaper than the private colleges? I don't think so. Even at double the cost or worse of public education, many private schools get far more applicants than they can take each year.