While perusing the Innerwebs today, I ran across this over at something called Washington Scene - The Hill:

Oh, please. Are you freaking kidding me? A reception to honor your accomplishments? Is that necessary, you twit? First question, who is paying for this wing ding? It certainly had better not be taxpayers and if it is, I want to go. I'd feel a lot better about how my tax dollars were spent if I actually felt like I got to use the things that they were spent on once in a while. (And don't tell me that the roads I drive on are paid for by some sort of tax dollars. The roads I drive on are crap, at best.)

Seriously, how out of touch is she (and the rest of them)? They need to throw themselves a little wing-ding so that the entire self-congratulatory bunch of them can stand around and reinforce how great they think they are? That doesn't sound all that necessary to me. You know, y'all haven't exactly turned this country around all the way quite yet. What say you hold off on your narcissistic tea party until the unemployment rate is at least at a manageable level again, OK? Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Sadly, apparently so.

Now We Know What's In The Bill. Or Do We?

Here are four words I never thought I'd think, much less type: Nancy Pelosi was right.

On March 9, 2010, Speaker Pelosi (who I'm pretty sure is missing a human soul and warms her body by sunning herself on a rock) gave a little speech to the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties and during said speech, she actually said what I thought might have been the most ridiculous thing to ever come out of her mouth. She said, in reference to the then-pending health care bill, "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it". Um, what now?

That's what she said. I swear. The text of the entire speech is over at her website. That particular little gem is about six paragraphs up from the bottom. But it turns out, she was right. How did I determine that? I came to that conclusion after reading an article by the extremely talented reporter William La Jeunesse of Fox News. The article outlined a provision of the bill, which is now law, called the Class Act, "...otherwise known as the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act" which "...is the federal government's first long-term care insurance program."

Now, why we didn't hear about this beforehand is beyond me. No, wait. No, it's not. We didn't hear about it because people out there in the media are simply not doing their jobs. It's not like this bill wasn't available for review beforehand. (Right? It was available, right?) Granted, the thing clocked in at over 2,000 pages long. Am I supposed to read all of those 2,000 pages? Technically, I think that I should want to. And don't get me wrong, I DO want to want to. I DON'T want to, though. But again, technically, I don't think that I should have to. (Don't get me started on how I don't think that ANYTHING should be 2,000 pages long, unless it's a document telling me how great I am, and even then that would be pushing it. My greatness can easily be summed up in a thousand pages or so.) It's not my JOB to read the damn thing. That's the job of the media. Their job is to report. They can't report unless they know what they're reporting on. The only way to know that is to do their damn job and read all 2,000 freaking pages. But no one did, otherwise we would have heard about this before now.

Ready for this? I hope you're either sitting down or sharpening your pitchfork tines. "...The program will allow workers to have an average of roughly $150 or $240 a month, based on age and salary, automatically deducted from their paycheck to save for long-term care." Wait. What now? How much? A month?!

Now, call me silly, but can't you get long term care from the insurance that you're already supposed to be mandated to be purchasing thanks to the passage of the health care bill? I'm thinking that something along those lines would make the most sense. Ohh. That's why they didn't do it that way. It would have made sense. Carry on.

Now, this is a policy where you are automatically opted into unless you opt out. That is the complete opposite of what I thought that things were supposed to be being done. I thought it was supposed to be that you were automatically opted out of something unless you wanted to opt in. Oh, right. That's for things that the federal government isn't trying to siphon money from you for. Got it.

According to William's article, here are some of the more pressing details that you need to know about:

The deduction will work on a sliding scale based on age. Younger workers will be charged less, older workers more. The Congressional Budget Office pegged the average monthly deduction at $146. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services put it higher, at $240. Wait. The CBO and the Medicare/Medicaid folks have figures that differ in cost of around a hundred bucks? Shocking, I know. Who am I going to believe? I'm going to go with the Medicare/Medicaid folks, as they are already ridiculously underpaid, thus the CBO's low estimate would seem to be wrong, all things considered. I'm also going to with with how that seems like an awful lot of money to be deducted monthly from folks. (And just remember, those figures are an "average". That means that some people will pay more than that and some people will pay less than that. My guess is that some people will pay much, much less.)

After a five-year vesting period, enrollees who need help bathing, eating or dressing will be eligible to take out benefits, estimated to be around $75 a day for in-home care. Only a five year vesting period? And then you're good? How do they figure that? By my calculations (and I'll go with the higher figure just to give them the benefit of the doubt), if you're paying in $240 a month, after five years, you'll have contributed $14,400. At benefits of $75 a day that you can tap if you need to after those five years, you'll have yourself a whopping 192 days of care. That's not a full year. That's barely over six months. Now, I don't know what your definition of "long term care" is, but mine is definitely more than six months. Six months isn't what I'd call "long term". Six months is "just gettin' started".

Here's the other frightening part of this: The money that is put into this fund (generously and likely erroneously estimated to be $109 billion in collected premiums by 2019 after being implemented as early as 2012) will not be in a "lockbox" sort of situation. No, it's going to be more of a general fund sort of situation. You know how Social Security money is supposed to be just for Social Security? You know how the Social Security funds have been tapped by everything else AND how it will give out more than it takes in next year? You know how that works? Sure you do. Now, do you expect that this thing will work any differently? Of course you don't. Thus, it's going to end up being what? A mitigated disaster, that is correct.

Of course "The statute says the program is designed to be self-sustaining, with an advisory board to assure the fund remains solvent. But opponents say the fine print already tells another story. Unless modifications are made, according to a CBO analysis of the bill, "the program will add to future federal budget deficits in a large and growing fashion." Sounds great. Good thing that this was passed into law so that we could find out that this was in it!

Since I enjoy math and numbers, let's look at a few more, shall we? If this thing starts in 2012, $109 billion in premiums by 2019 equals out to be $15.57 billion a year. If folks are paying $240 a month, that's 5,228,125 people needed to sustain that figure. If folks are paying $146 a year, that's 8,594,178 people needed to sustain that figure. That's a difference of 3,366,053 people. Um, that's kind of a lot. How do they figure this is going to work? AT ALL! And let's not forget, those are the figures to make it all work out without money being drawn out of the fund. Those are just the numbers for money being theoretically deposited into the fund.

But let's say you participate in this charade starting from the time you're 20. And let's say that you're paying the low, low rate of $146 a month. Fast forward forty five years. You're now sixty five and you're going to retire. You'll have amassed for yourself, after forty five years of paying premiums and at the flex-rate of $75 per day allotted to you for long term care, a whopping three years of long term care. Three. Forty five years, $146 a month for a total of $78,840. That gets you three years of in-home long term care. That doesn't seem like a lot to me. Wouldn't you be better off taking that $146 and investing it somewhere or even setting up a 401k type of dealio so that you can take care of your own expenses? Wouldn't that $146 amount to a hell of a lot more than the $78,840 after 45 years? I'm kind of thinking that it would.

This is ridiculous. And it's now law. Congratulations, Nancy Pelosi. Thanks for saddling the country with another obligation that it cannot afford. What in the hell happened to people taking care of themselves when they retire anyway? (Has she not noticed the high unemployment rate which is still besieging the country? Perhaps she has overlooked the still sagging economy? The perpetually high foreclosure rate? And she's thinking that folks in "times like these" are going to be OK with forking over another $200 a month? Not to be unjustifiably disrespectful to the soulless snake, but she's high.)

I don't say things like this very often, but please read William's article and pass it along to your friends. I guarantee that the majority of them, if not all of them, have never heard a single word about this. I guarantee that the majority of them have no idea that they've already been opted into a plan that is going to cost them a minimum of $146 a month unless they opt out. And again, the reason that people don't know this is because people in the media are not doing their job. Well, except for William. William rocks at his job. But everyone else just sucks. I can't wait to find out what else is in the bill now that it's passed into law. How exciting!

Spring Break Is Here! + Health Insurance Bills Pass + Immigration Reformers Rally in DC

My grades are now in, which means that Spring Break week begins. It's more of a symbolic break--and brake--than a real one, though, since I still have to finish a syllabus for a new course I'm teaching next quarter, but that's always an enjoyable task. (Well, all except the document-scanning part.) I'm hoping the weather stays beautiful here so that we can start planting by this weekend, before I head back to Chicago, where, I read and heard, it snowed. Yikes. It was 70F here on Saturday, and between the scaling of prose I did get out and about. Spring, please, hang around.

===

The Democratic Leadership
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi celebrates
with other Democrats after
the health care reform
bill passed through the House
of Representatives by a vote
of 219 to 212 Sunday.
(Kevin Dietsch/UPI)

Perhaps it was always so, but politics these past few years have sometimes seemed more thrilling than the most artfully created dramas. To put it another way, there's an art and some farce to--and tremendous artifice in--our political system that was greatly on display yesterday. As I read short and marked up stories and essays and cooked, and C did his thing, we periodically would stop and watch the speechifying and punditizing and all the other lead ups to the dramatic vote last night for the terribly flawed, Republite, but still necessary Senate Health Insurance Reform and Reconciliation bills which passed last night, 219-210 and 220-209 respectively, in the US House of Representatives. We should all give great credit to President Barack Obama and his administration, and to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her caucus's leadership, for pulling off this major and longtime-coming accomplishment.

The recent path to last night's momentous events, easily the most important of President Obama's presidency and one of the landmark non-military votes of the last 35 years, involved ugly scenes and behavior of the sort that have been all to common in our history. Tea Party protesters massed outside the Capitol Building called civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) and a fellow Democrat, Indiana Congressman Andre Carson "nigger"; they spat on black Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver (D-MO); and hollered "faggot" at out gay Congressional leader Barney Frank (D-MA).  In addition someone hurled bricks through the windows and doors of Representative Louise Slaughter's upstate New York office, and someone shattered a window at Congresswoman Gabrielle Griffiths's (D-AZ) Tucson-area office window.  These acts mirrored some of the most hideous racist, homophobic, and violent rhetoric that emerged during the 2008 campaign, and which has reappeared in various forms in the Teabaggers' protests and gatherings over the last year; in all cases, fear, ignorance and hatred of the Other is motivating these people as much as any economic or economically ideological concerns.



In the House chamber itself, GOP supporters had to be escorted from the gallery, and some of its leaders repeatedly used extremist rhetoric to denounce a bill that in essence was produced by a right-wing think tank and heavily drafted by an insurance company lobbyist.  Things reached such a feverish, unreal pitch last night, in keeping with the GOP's testeria over doing anything to help the less fortunate using GOP-friendly approaches, that after diehard anti-abortionist Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI, and Michael Moore's Congressperson!) who had repeatedly misstaked the facts about the Senate bill's abortion provisions and attempted to take the bill down completely, shifted his position to vote for the legislation based on an agreement with Obama, who issued an executive order setting the Hyde Amendment as the law of the land, an even more extreme Republican, Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), shattered what little decorum remained and screamed out "baby killer." This echoed GOP behavior during the President's address to the joint session of the Houses of Congress last September, when Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled out "You lie!" Neugebauer apologized today, but his actions made clear how difficult any real bipartisan comity or agreement with the extremist-dominated Republican Party rump that now sits in Congress, unless the topic is warmonger and warmaking.

But back to the bill: it falls far short of many of the goals Obama outlined during the campaign. There is no affordable, government-funded public insurance option. There is no drug importation, nor can Medicare negotiate for lower prices. The bill bans rescission based on pre-existing conditions for adults, but not for several years. The bill does not halt the profit-making motives or slash waste and overhead for private insurance companies enough. It includes some well-known and some last-minute giveaways to the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries. It also incentivizes (a horrible word, I know) higher-deductible plans at the cost of more ample, affordable ones. It mandates that all American adults buy often costly private insurance at penalty of an IRS fine. For some individuals and families who don't qualify for Medicaid or fall at the lower, subsidy-ready end of the spectrum, or, conversely, at the top, the costs will be a burden. As the 18% non-enrollment level in the structurally close Massachusetts health care program, introduced by Republican Mitt Romney when he governed that state, demonstrates, affordability should have been a greater consideration. And, despite the deranged outbursts by Wilson, Neugebauer and others, this bill strikes a severe blow to abortion rights, particular for working-class and poor women, and to equality for all US residents, particularly undocumented immigrants. Firedoglake lays out some six of the bill's most egregious flaws here.

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill, March 21, 2010.  (Official White House/Pete Souza)

The bill is riddled with problems. And yet...it was worth passing, because it does improve in some key ways on the status quo even as it doesn't challenge or undermine some of the serious structural problems affecting US health care, chief among them reining in corporate interests and the for-profit model of health insurance and coverage. Linguist and critic Noam Chomsky stated in a Raw Story interview today that were he in Congress he would have "held his nose," given how awful this bill is compared to what it could and should have done, and voted for it. Deferring again to Firedoglake, here are some of the realities of what's just been passed: Fact Sheet: The Truth About the Health Care Bill. Ugh! So what good does it do? Among its immediate benefits, it bans insurance companies from dropping children with pre-existing conditions (adults must wait until 2014); it ensures that people with pre-existic conditions will be able to get insurance through a temporary high-risk pool; it offers small businesses tax credits to provide insurance for workers; it does remove lifetime cost caps; it closes the prescription drug "doughnut-hole" for seniors; it allows parents to carry their children on their plans until the age of 26; it ends recissions; insurance must pay out 80% of premiums in claims; and they have to create greater transparency in their operations.

Now that the bill is passed, where do we go? First, we should keep in mind that, once the Reconciliation sidecar bill passes the US Senate, this historic bill is still only a first step. Its flaws need to be fixed. Second, what we who care about real, progressive health care reform can do is to push our Senators to hold an up-or-down vote for a robust government insurance plan, a true public option. Not only President Obama, but several score US Senators claimed to support a public option, and the initial House bill also included a weakened but viable public insurance option. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said he'd bring a public option bill up for a vote, but I don't trust him as far as I can throw him; demanding unrelentingly that he, Obama (who dealt away the public option on the gaming table of insurance industry concessions), and so-called progressives in the Senate and House support, pass and sign into law a public option is the main way to make this happen.  US health care costs per person are double or in some cases nearly triple those of comparable industrialized nations; cost-effective care, alongside expanded coverage, must be a goal, and a public option--or single-payer insurance--is the road to ensuring this. At the state level, pushing for changes that allow a public option or to ensure one is also a needed move. Also pushing for expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, drug reimportation, and Medicare drug negotiation also are important. And having more people speak out about the crucial importance of abortion rights and equality of funding, across class lines, and for fair and humane treatment of immigrants, including coverage for them if they become ill, neither of which is popular right now, will also be important.

Nevertheless, it marks the major achievement of Barack Obama's presidency thus far. It also is the major achievement of the post-2006 Congressional Democrats, and huge credit goes to the leadership of the first woman Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.  The president and Congress were able to push through a form of social legislation that over a dozen predecessors, including President Bill Clinton in 1994-95, and several past Republican presidents, could not, and did so with the support of a majority of his party members in both houses of Congress and without any support of the opposition party. It is a victory for the country, and the GOP's "Waterloo." Now it'll be up to President Obama and Congressmembers to sell this new legislation, to ensure that it runs smoothly, and to steadily and regularly improve it. Above all they cannot run away from it; once its decent provisions start to kick in, it will become as popular and vital as Social Security or Medicare, neither of which many opponents of this legislation are willing to give up, especially once they've started to rely on it.

===

Protesters waved signs from a flatbed truck on Sunday during the March for America immigration rally in Washington Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

Overshadowed by the health insurance reform votes yesterday was the massive march yesterday in Washington, DC, for immigration reform.  More than 200,000 immigration reform supporters called for action on the US's broken system, in which many millions of immigrants now resident in the country are undocumented, living in a legal limbo and thus open to exploitation by businesses and citizens who've gamed the situation to their benefit.

While the rhetoric on the right, and sometimes at the center and on the left often paints the immigrants as the source of the problem, what's less often broached, particular in the mainstream media, are the larger issues of what a functioning, enforceable immigration system for the 21st century United States would look like, and what corporate America's role in such a system would and should be.  The result over the last 10 years was a massive influx of immigrants, often lured by businesses of all sizes to work for lower wages, thus depressing the earnings of US citizens, without protections either for the immigrants or native workers, accompanied by an increasingly strident attack against those same immigrants, and minimal inforcement whatosever against businesses via the nation's standing immigration laws.

The result has exacerbated the country's already severe economic problems, both for the immigrants and for US citizens, and, after George W. Bush's failed effort at immigration reform, left immigrants as targets for even more abuse and exploitation, detention, sometimes severing families and leaving children without their parents, and deportation.  Under Obama, enformcement has taken the form of rising detentions and deportations, slightly increased enforcement against businesses, and pantomime on the border.  If it and the nation's ports and airports aren't as porous as they were 5 years ago, they are still quite open. In short, not much has changed for the better, though many things have gotten worse. I don't know whether Obama is serious about immigration reform; what I'd look for is where businesses fall on this issue. Wherever that is, we should expect that the Obama administration will follow. Given the Republicans' behavior surrounding the utterly Republican bill that Obama just pushed through, I cannot see them working with the administration much, if at all, on this issue, which some of their best known Congressional figures, entertainers and intellectuals, and their Teabagger base have demagogued the issue beyond reasonability, so it'll be up to the Democrats, who view many of the potential new Americans as their constituency, to lead. The question on this issue, as on all others, remains: Will they? Let's see.

More rallies are planned for April 10, the final day of the Congressional recess, and according to Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, immigrant groups will be releasing scorecards of every Congressmembers record on immigration issues on May 1.

Let Me Point Something Out

This whole ordeal with the Christmas Crotchfire Bomber is really starting to bug me. Aside from the fact that it seems as if no one is going to lose their job, the rhetoric that President Barry is throwing around is laughable. He says that he doesn't want any finger pointing, but yet that he wants people to be held accountable. I don't know how you're going to be able to hold someone accountable if you don't at least point a little bit in their direction. A point. A head nod. Maybe you shuffle one of your feet in their direction like you're Mr. Ed with some sort of nervous twitch or something. I don't know. But I do know that you're going to have to single out who or what it was that failed the system that was in place and you're not going to be able to do that without a little pointing of one form or another.

But President Barry is adamant that there will be no finger pointing. Um, yeah, good luck with that. First of all, from what I can tell, President Barry does plenty of finger pointing himself. Here's the President and his finger now! Oh! And what are they doing?! That's right! Pointing! Behold!

And look, here he is pointing again!

And again!

And again!

He's even got his wife doing it (sort of)!

Man, for someone who doesn't want there to be any finger pointing, he sure is coming off looking like the guy who invented it or something. And it's not just him. I didn't realize how much finger pointing there was in politics until I started looking around after hearing the "no finger pointing" rule that has apparently been implemented whenever there is a such a major screw up that there shouldn't be anything other than finger pointing. Let me just tell you this: There are a lot of fingers being pointed all over Washington, DC. As you saw above, President Barry? Quite a prolific finger pointer. His Vice President? Ol' What's His Name? Jim? John? Joe! (Dammit! I'm going to get that on the first try one of these days! Joe!) He points! Behold!

Nancy Pelosi, third in line for the Presidency of the United States if something extremely tragic happens (mostly tragic because something would have happened to the first two guys and not to her, as I see her as desirably expendable). A pointer!

What about Hillary Clinton? A pointer? I think so! Behold!

And if Hill's a pointer, what about Bill? I think he might be! Let's find out!

Oh. Unfortunate. Got anything else? Anything post the Lewinsky era?

Oh. Yeah, that does seem post that whole affair-while-in-office incident. Still not quite was I was looking for (but I'm guessing he sported that pose a lot). One more try.

All right! All right! That's enough. Look, he points, all right?! My point is he points! Bill Clinton points! For cryin' out loud....

We've got other folks that made it closer to the White House than Hillary did that are pointers. Old Man McCain. He points!

Well, he tries to point. The point is that he's trying! And his running mate, the former barely half term Governor of Alaska, Mrs. Sarah Palin. She points.

God bless Tina Fey. That Russia joke just never gets old, does it?

There's pointing (sort of) from President Barry's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Robert Gibbs, Press Secretary, a notorious pointer.

Barney Frank, that Senator from Massachusetts who looks and talks like a cartoon dog. (What kind of a dog? Probably a pointer, yes, that would be funny.)

Even ol' G.W. was known to point from time to time.

The point is (pun probably intended, but I'm not proud of it or anything) that for a guy (President Barry) who doesn't want to do any finger pointing, there sure is an awful lot of it going on. Maybe it's because they're all just pointing the fingers at themselves that he's not very fond of it. Whatever the reason, please get over it and please start firing people. And President Barry, if you need me to get in touch with a reasonable substitute for Mr. Ed that can lift a hoof in the general direction of who needs to be fired, let me know. Just point in my direction and I'll get right on that.