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http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/squandered_a_golden_.php
Dr. Carol Paris, in an irate letter to a Maryland newspaper editor, writes of the newly passed House health care bill:
I agree with Wendell Potter, the former head of public relations for CIGNA, that this legislation could more accurately be titled “The Private Health Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.”
The readers should know that this legislation was written by the insurance industry, for the insurance industry. We are being mandated to purchase a defective product from an industry that has demonstrated for the past 60 years that it puts profits before patients. Even the so-called public option will be administered by the private insurance industry and will enroll, at most, 6 million people in a multitude of anemic markets; it will not be a robust Medicare-like market at all.
This public option is like sending in a peewee football team to compete with the NFL. It will not compete with the private insurance industry; it will become the default insurer for our sickest, least profitable citizens, leaving the younger, mandated, profitable citizens to enroll in the private plans provided in the exchange.
http://www.counterpunch.org/murphy11092009.html
John Murphy in an article in Counterpunch pulls no punches:
On Saturday, November 8 the Democrat Congress gave us a corporate driven healthcare bill which amounts to nothing more than a de facto bailout of the healthcare insurance companies. The carnival conducted by the Democrats, masquerading as a debate around healthcare, demonstrates conclusively how craven are Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats.
We have witnessed cynicism in other administrations but the Obama administration has as raised cynicism to a veritable science. Imagine promising the poor and desperate people of this country healthcare reform and passing legislation which will not only hurt the working class but strengthen the very forces which oppose real reform – the healthcare insurance companies.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/is_the_house_health_.php
According to Dr. Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School, on the newly passed House health care bill:
Is the House bill better than nothing? I don’t think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry.
[snip]
To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn’t regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates.
So it expands Medicaid, a good thing. The half rather than full good provision is for the non-denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, but as Dr. Angell points out, there is no regulation on pricing which means that the price alone can nullify a supposed opportunity for help for someone with said pre-existing condition.
Feeling as angry as Mr. Murphy above with the betrayal to the single payer medicare for all advocates by Pelosi, et al., and the horrifying inclusion of the anti-abortion amendment, I am scrambling to collect some educated feedback on what the real story is on this House health care bill based on commentary from Dr. Angell and others. Here is my list, a work in progress.
1) Again, according to Dr. Angell on the 1990-page bill: “And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.”
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/the_reform_thats_mi.php
Rhonda Swan:
A Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen study found that health insurance bureaucracy – billing, sales and marketing, profits and executive pay, which have nothing to do with health care – costs $399.4 billion a year. Money that could insure every American.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/april/testimony_of_david_u.php
David Himmelstein: “And doctors in the U.S. waste about $95 billion each year fighting with insurance companies and filling out useless paperwork.”
http://www.citizen.org/publications/release.cfm?ID=7675
Dr. Sidney Wolfe:
As an example of administrative waste, over the last 30 plus years there have been maybe two and a half, three times more doctors and nurses, in proportion with the growth in population. But over the same interval, there are 30 times more health administrators. These people are not doctors. They’re not nurses. They’re not pharmacists. They’re not providing care. Many of them are being paid to deny care. So, they are fighting with the doctors, with the hospitals to see how few bills can be paid. That’s how the insurance industry thrives by denying care, paying as little out as it can, getting the healthiest patients.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/er_doctor_analyzes_h.php
Dr. Michael T. Rey:
Third-party payers (health insurance companies, preferred provider organizations and HMOs) have tried to improve efficiency and increase profits by controlling the behavior of doctors and nurses, rather than by reducing paperwork and redundant documentation. Thus, under the current system, doctors focus on producing patient records that are designed less to document important clinical events or enhance patient care, and more to maximize revenue and reduce liability. Nurses spend less time at patient bedsides and more time at computer workstations. Medical conferences now allocate large blocks of time to coding and billing strategies.
Each insurance company has its own forms, fee schedules and documentation requirements, resulting in wasteful duplication of effort. Out of every health care dollar, a cut must go to the transcription service, the company that assigns billing codes and makes sure the physician’s documentation supports the codes, and collection services. Hospitals hire less clinical staff (nurses and medical technicians) and more clerical staff (billing, coding, and insurance collections experts). Entire floors of hospitals are devoted to appeasing the administrative requirements of hundreds of third-party payers.
2) It makes no provision for Medicare to negotiate discount medicine for patients, promoting profit-making for the pharmaceutical industry over the economic welfare of the taxpayer patients.
Dr. Angell:
Repeal the provision of the Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. (The House bill calls for this.) That prohibition has been a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. For negotiations to be meaningful, there must be a list (formulary) of drugs deemed cost-effective. This is how the Veterans Affairs System obtains some of the lowest drug prices of any insurer in the country. Costs: If Medicare paid the same prices as the Veterans Affairs System, its expenditures on brand-name drugs would be a small fraction of what they are now.
3) It is inhumane and unconstitutional in its anti-abortion amendment for poor, working women who under the public option lose their right to choose an abortion, promoting a double standard of freedom according to degree of wealth. It is also empathy-less to those “illegal immigrants” in this country.
The anti-abortion amendment was successfully inserted into this bill, a fresh hell that deserves major protest and investigation. On Ron Reagan’s Air America radio show this week, there was speculation that a woman being subsidized by government health care assistance, if she were willing to pay for an abortion out of pocket, would then be denied ANY governmental health care coverage. How gratuitously and unfairly punitive on poor and working women! This political powerplay by the Right enabled now by the Dems in the House is one more obnoxious, exploitive, amoral, constitution eroding action and should not go unchallenged in this corrupt Congress, so busy mentoring their true constituency, the profit-making corporations who enable their campaigns. The vast, vast majority of members of Congress seem to be willing to throw out, one at a time, the legitimate rights of citizens.
http://www.counterpunch.org/murphy11092009.html
John Murphy in Counterpunch expresses his disgust for the disdainful regard by political leaders toward what he calls “economic refugees” in this country:
Obama is so ignominious that even in this miserable mockery of health care reform he will deny benefits to the slave population in the United States as well as to women who need abortions. Obama continues to refer to the slave population created by the heinous William Clinton as "illegal immigrants". We have 13 million slaves; they are not illegal immigrants. They are economic refugees created by trade agreements like NAFTA which allowed companies like Archer Daniels Midland and ConAgra to ship billions and billions of tons of cheap corn into Mexico destroying the Mexican family farm. We are not talking about dirt poor farmers but farmers who employed 10-15 people. Having lost their farms, they wandered into the streets of Mexico City looking for jobs in those corporations that moved to Mexico thanks to the beneficence of that ever hated sperm stain, the successor to Ronald Reagan, who murdered a million innocent Iraqi men, women and children with bombs and sanctions.
When the US corporations closed up their plants in Mexico and moved off to China and Bangladesh where they could pay people $.50 an hour and $.35 an hour these former farm owners had the option of watching their families starve in the streets of Mexico or live as slaves in cardboard boxes in the underpasses of the United States. They have now become a new slave population, paying taxes and Social Security using phony identifications but denied even what would be considered hospitality anywhere else in the world – health care!
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/massa_says_he_cant_.php
4) According to D-NY House Rep. Eric Massa, who bravely voted down the House bill facing down what must have been tremendous peer and Presidential pressure not to, “The bill does not address ways to incorporate medical practice reform or ways to eliminate waste and fraud. In this accountability coma of an Obama administration, and after the “anything goes” Bush administration, this is serious and needs to be addressed more deeply.
Dr. Angell recommends for a more functional health care bill:
Medicare should monitor doctors’ practice patterns for evidence of excess, and gradually reduce fees of doctors who habitually order significantly more tests and procedures than the average for the specialty.
5) THERE IS NO REGULATION OF PREMIUM PRICING! With no controls on what insurance companies can charge, they can claim to honor rulings of eligibility and simply price a client out of the right for life-enhancing and/or saving procedures.
Dr. Angell further writes:
What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers — those least likely to use their insurance.
The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65’s will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That’s OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn’t age be considered a pre-existing condition?)
Insurers also won’t have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an “option” at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it’s been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.
6) The loss of the Kucinich amendment.
Mr. Murphy writes:
The bill even was stripped of the Kucinich amendment which would have permitted states to develop their own single-payer options. Americans will now be forced to buy health care plans from private insurance corporations. Forced!
7) It criminalizes and fines those who do not purchase insurance, guaranteeing economic and physical hardship to those who don’t have enough income to sustain insurance coverage at the same time the insurance companies enjoy colossal-sized new profits.
Dr. Angell, again:
What about those people who don’t get coverage through their jobs or who have their health insurance dropped at work because there will now be an incentive to dump benefits? History already provides us the answer to that question. Most of the adults who tried to buy insurance on the open market never bought a plan because they could not afford it or they could not find a plan that met their needs. Now the prices will be higher! What a choice: buy insurance coverage or pay a penalty of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per family if they decide to forgo insurance.
(8) Only a tiny portion of the population will be eligible for a public option. Those who have employer sponsored health care are dependent on the employer’s choice. The employer-sponsored system is not portable, and when a person loses a job, they lose their health care. When they enter a new job, they must go into a brand new health care system dimension, causing new paperwork and a search for new health care providers and thereby causing stress and money and time in terms of the bureaucratic transition as well as stress in terms of time, emotion, and deciphering the rules of the new system for the taxpaying patient client. NY-D House Rep. Anthony Wiener has expressed his concerns with an employer-sponsored health care system.
(9) It does nothing to change the out of balance economic rewarding of specialists as opposed to primary care physicians.
Dr. Angell recommends that a functional health care bill include the following:
Increase Medicare fees for primary care doctors and reduce them for procedure-oriented specialists. Specialists such as cardiologists and gastroenterologists are now excessively rewarded for doing tests and procedures, many of which, in the opinion of experts, are not medically indicated. Not surprisingly, we have too many specialists, and they perform too many tests and procedures. Costs: This would greatly reduce costs to Medicare, and the reform would almost certainly be adopted throughout the wider health system.
[snip]
Provide generous subsidies to medical students entering primary care, with higher subsidies for those who practice in underserved areas of the country for at least two years. Costs: This initial, rather modest investment in ending our shortage of primary care doctors would have long-term benefits, in terms of both costs and quality of care.
(10) The present House health care bill is not all inclusive. Not “everbody in, nobody out.” What advantages a new bill will provide also will undoubtedly not kick in for years, and the assembly line of premature deaths each year, an undetermined number right now re the present bill will undoubtedly still be substantial, will continue. The bill and our Congress do not treat health care as a universal right, as does every health care system in every industrial nation in the world EXCEPT for the United States. The United States honors the corporations and their need for profits over US citizens and their very survival.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/the_singlepayer_alt.php
Dr. Andy Coates, member of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-chair of Single Payer New York asserts that the Single Payer Medicare for All Plan, HR 676 or S 703, is “the only alternative that can solve the crisis of the health care non-system.” Dr. Coates:
Yes, Massachusetts mandated that everyone buy health insurance. And this hasn’t made premiums affordable. To reduce premiums, policies have things like very high deductibles and large co-pays.
Dr. Coates explains that the Single Payer Medicare for All plan is the only plan that has a solid, 5 prong foundation: 1) affordable costs, 2) quality care, 3) guaranteed access, 4) lessened disparities and 5) protection of the provider-patient relationship.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/cnannoc_statement_o.php
What follows is a message from the awesomely active California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, a group (like many, PNHP, Health Care-Now, Single Payer Action, etc.) that is willing to stay in the good fight for Single Payer Medicare for All for the duration. It continues to role model courage and faith in this vital American marathon that requires tremendous fortitude and patience in its activists:
Only the remarkable, and persistent effort of our members and allies has kept the flame of the single payer/Medicare for all movement moving forward in Congress. And, we’re not done.
Our focus now turns to two remaining efforts for single-payer in this Congress. Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce S 703 in coming weeks. In addition, Rep. Kucinich’s amendment to allow states to more easily implement a single-payer system may be reinserted into the bill during the conference committee between the House and Senate. All of these efforts are crucial to building the movement for the best solution to our healthcare crisis – single-payer national healthcare.
While the current bills will provide limited assistance for some, the inconvenient truth is they fall far short in effective controls on skyrocketing insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital costs, do little to stop insurance companies from denying needed medical care recommended by doctors, and provide little relief for Americans with employer-sponsored insurance worried about health security for themselves and their families.
People are suffering – they die needlessly. The Democrats, who control the White House and Congress, bear the responsibility for changing that. Republicans cheerlead to deny care and humanity. The Democrats act as though they care and block the best solution. The heroes in this debate are the Medicare for all proponents who have stood by the American families.
I am scoping out the best ways to continue the good fight for me on a personal level. Writing this is one. Calling 10 federal representatives a day, often late night voicemails, to remind them I am a part of their constituency, NOT corporations, and to voice my backing for a Single Payer Medicare for All Plan, my support of the Kucinich amendment, my loathing of the Stupak amendment, as well as part of the many, many issues I have with a government that taxes without representing the lower 99% of its constituency.
I am also hoping this FDL support community and others like it will become focused more on the good fight for Single Payer Medicare for All and use their networking skills on its behalf.
107 Comments
I’m for tossing this bill. This bill is something we pushed for if we don’t like it why pass it? Passing a bad bill is not going to shut us up we Lefties are a computer literate group we work together. You Libby know more about this bill than I do I read your stuff and get informed.
The Dems can’t just make a complex bill and hope nobody reads it we have people who read it, we have people who understand it and thanks to the Blogs the details get spread instantly.
Passing a bad bill and calling it Healthcare won’t work. Amateur Hour trickery.
Here are some other really good points
Obama says GOMER (Get Out of My Emergency Room)
I don’t know if the bill will eliminate this but if it does …
Thanks libby, recommended. Great selection of quotes highlighting how bad this bill is and how important it is to do Medicare for All, single-payer. I got into the discussion on Jane’s Kucincich diary even later than you did. But I did put in a very lengthy comment attacking the bill and defending the view that it’s worse than no bill at all, including a critique of Jane’s position.
I so agree, TCU. About the bill needing to be scrubbed .. since it has Trojan Horse sabotage for the citizenry for profits for the VENDORS! .. and also I agree about the importance of each of us carrying along the ripples of information. I am grateful to have access to people who can read this stuff and make it clear and human-framed. Staying awake. There is a strong backlash to us, the awakened ones. We so disturb the comfort of the corrupted status quo. We are to a great extent detached from the seduction of cronyism and koolaid drinking of the political and corporate elite and sophisticated enough to take mainstream media with a huge grain of salt. Jefferson was it who said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” For my part I dropped the ball sadly, as did many, but am working on the vigilance now. They say if 100 monkeys become knowledgeable about something it spreads like wildfire finally through the whole monkey nation. Let’s hope the exponential wakefulness about health care, as well as the wars, will happen sooner rather than later. I am hoping truth and integrity will out. I think Ms. Paris above in her letter quoted Churchill as saying America will do the right thing only after exhausting all of the wrong things first. I look at Obama and hope he will get to the right things but it sure seems like he is determined to take the wrong ways first, sigh. Thanks so for commenting! :)
John, what a wonderful article, I predict I will borrow from in a future diary. :) thank you.
It really emphasizes the war on empathy in our society which health care reform is carrying on rather than reversing.
I know about temping. We all have our unique and extenuating and vulnerable conditions or our loved ones. But to a “sociopathic bottom line profit” corporation, we are commodities and sources of profit not human beings. There is no mutual contract but self-aggrandizing opportunism for VENDORS who have taken over, pirated, the partnership of government with citizen.
lets, I did read your wonderful comments and should have commented on them. you inspired me. this is not as tight and even as your wonderful analyses, hard to tick off reasons and adequately explore each one, in a timely way, too, and some points above are mentioned but not researched enough, but I wanted to post to help with our collective analysis. And am eager to see more feedback on the bill.
lets, I see there is more you left on that thread and will read up on soon. Thank you!!!!
Can’t wait for the Dems to be back in the minority where their sorry asses belong. This country will have to sink a lot lower before people finally wake up to the fact that we no longer have a functioning democracy and get off their asses and into the streets. A couple of more Republican administrations ought to do the trick.
Was your comment in the latest ‘Lets make fun of Kucinich and all things related to
single-payermedicare for all’ thread?I read about 2/3 of the comments
Really sad about about the vitriol, antipathy and seemingly seething hatred for SP that continues on the front page. I honestly don’t understand it
Here we were hoping, praying, fighting and working to get healthcare. Now most are seeing what they might get is a poor excuse at best even if it does get passed.
Like I said before we are looking to the people who caused the problem Congress to fix the problem.
All the talk of what’s in or what’s out masks the insanity of hoping the Congress can do the right thing.
Face it boys and girls your beloved Congress is going to stab you again, please will the last believer shut out the lights on the way out.
I found your piece well defended and I am sympathetic with your opposition to the cynical health care bill the house and senate are moving toward. Too bad the progressives in congress have less of a spine than the Blue Dogs and Obama-Rahma. Without their opposition the insurance companies win with only a small sacrifice of allowing a weak sauce PO that could, with very low probability metastosize into single payer. No reason to believe this would ever happen, however, not with the corporatist underpinning of the Democratic Party. I will oppose the DNC and the DCC and the DSC with all I have.
How are you a constituent of ten federal representatives?
————————
There’s a lot of stuff in the bill to like but they are minor things that we would have got anyway. The main thing is the huge tax increase on the poorest which is, I think, the Democrats way of telling us they don’t want to win the 2016 elections, whereas the delay of the start date until 2013 is their way of saying they do want to win in 2012….
The huge giveaway to the rich is just…. so common in US politics all I can say about it is that I was surprised there was any blood left in the stone– and maybe there isn’t. How many people ordered to buy expensive junk insurance will simply refuse?
So letsgetitdone:
What’s your strategy for getting the Senate to kill this bill?
I very much agree with letsgetitdone.
libbyliberal, thank you for this diary!
Great synopsis of the problems with H R 3962 and selection of voices on how this bill went from so-so to not-good-at-all just before it passed.
Frankly, the Dems are between a rock and a hard place. As of now, it looks like they can’t pass health care reform and get the stupak out of it. So, until they find a way out, they either lose votes because health care reform fails or they lose votes because they will have passes, as you put it, legislation that is “inhumane and unconstitutional” and that promotes “a double standard of freedom according to degree of wealth” in order to get health care reform.
The politics aside, it’s just plain immoral to accept something so rotten just to say you got something (that was spoiled before you got it).
Essentially, the House passed a so-so bill that, imo, almost could have been acceptable had they not added stipulations to it that are infinitely immoral in that they require women to voluntarily surrender some of their rights in order to benefit from it at all.
letsgetitdone: I also tried to understand Jane’s position in her Kucinich thread and found myself unhappily having to disagree with her. She’s right that she didn’t address abortion or reproductive rights re health care reform, but that doesn’t change the fact that she and we all got sucker punched and that the victory was all undone in the eleventh hour.
It’s a disgrace. No victory. And they can’t hide their failure in having passed something so immoral no matter how many of our brightest activists they stick into the veal pen.
Thank you. yes, a few other things, the most substantial are the replies to Ryan and drlora2. There are a few comments by selise also. I have the feeling that Jane was overwhelmed by contrary sentiment in that discussion. It seemed that most folks weren’t buying her analysis.
Hi John, I’m not sure I’d describe the anti-sp sentiment that way. I guess I’d characterize it more as faint ridicule motivated by conviction that sp just isn’t feasible right now. I agree that it’s not feasible, but only because everyone holds to the idea that it’s not. Its lack of feasibility is purely do the reflexivity inherent in choosing to believe “No we can’t” rather than “Yes we can.” So I often focus on showing that the PO ain’t practical because it won’t work and that “Medicare for All” is actually easier to sell and would be harder to defeat politically if only progressives would just believe in the possibility of it.
Anyway that was the thread which began with snarky comments about Dennis. It developed however, into a lengthy discussion of whether we should be still working for a PO, or whether the present bill was worse than no bill at all. A large number of people argued for no bill at all and renewed advocacy for SP. I don’t think most people were buying Jane’s view that we still had to work for bill with the weak PO, because there was really no chance of getting no bill at all. I reached the thread at comment 373, and tried to buttress all of the anti-arguments while showing the flaws in Jane’s reasoning.
I’m afraid most people had left the thread by then and few saw my comment. Jane certainly didn’t reply, but there was some good discussion thereafter from others who also were opposed to the “front page” point of view.
Just got back from reading your long Monday comment in the Kucinich thread (in link above @ 3).
Among other points you made. This one is excellent:
I’ll say more about sp ‘medicare for all’ in a moment.
I’m not sure why Jane switched from her reaction late Saturday night (which was very much Jane) to the position she decided to stake out by Monday morning.
In the thread to the Kucinich post Monday morning, I provided a link Jane’s response Saturday night. Click here to see my Monday morning comment that has the link to Jane’s Saturday night response, which was to react to the sucker punch by coming back with a fight for single payer.
Good post. An excellent
As far as Jane’s position in her Kucinich thread the other day, what I found so distasteful was the attempt to claim a quasi-victory, and then backpedaling on what a real public option meant. Then soon after another call for fundraising by someone else. Do they subtract administration from donations, not that I think that is bad, but it was all a bit tone deaf when I think many were still dizzy from being stabbed in the back by leadership, and angry over the progressive caucus giving up.
But I appreciate what FDL does, don’t mistake me.
On a whole, it seems like many “progressive netroots outlets” are willing to shut up and go along, except their members won’t let’em. Good! I think the Stupak Amendment has countered that, but winning that alone is not enough. Healthcare Reform must be good for the community, and the people, and the progressives and democratic party in the long run, not just the 2012 election.
Something insane is going on in the entire Democratic Party. OFA called on members to go thank Rep. Jim Cooper at the airport in Nashville for his “hard work” on health care reform, but once they realized what Cooper would actually be facing because he’s a shameless weasel, they canceled the event and pretended that his flight had been changed.
The Democratic leaders are in a deep hole and they know it. There’s no way in the universe they can silence us if they don’t fix the problem they created, and they know that, too.
Hi cassiodorus, I think that in the Senate there’s lots of help from Republicans and blue dogs to be had. I think the first step is to force the Reid and the Administration to get away from 60 votes. This can be done if they can’t get 60 votes. We know that Lieberman is a difficulty for them in a 60 vote frame. They have to deal with him and weaken the bill further to get that 60th vote. On the other hand, if they weaken the bill, then they may well lose Bernie Sanders. So Sanders is key. We need to support and encourage him to filibuster the bill, until Reid is forced to turn to reconciliation ot the nuclear option. If that happens then it’s a victory for us. Because with filibusters prohibited, our side or the anti-side can try to amend the bill, either to kill it or to improve it sufficiently so that it really is a first step toward SP that will work.
Sanders and the progressive Democrats have always had the power to make sure Lieberman doesn’t win, and they may even have the power to strengthen this bill if they have enough courage. A bloc of Sanders, Al Franken, Pat Leahy, Sherrod Brown, Sheldon Whitehouse, Paul Kirk, Jay Rockeller, Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Roland Burris, Maria Cantwell, Carl Levin, Tom Harkin, Barbara Mikulski, John Kerry, Russ Feingold, Patty Murray, and Ben Cardin makes 18 Senators.
If they choose to organize, 11 of them can bloc any reform without a very strong PO. If they did that and stood firm, the leadership would have to use reconciliation or the nuclear option and also begin whipping for a stronger PO among the other Democrats. We could even get a better bill out of the Senate than we’ve gotten out of the House.
Of course, I don’t expect this to happen. The expectations people have of these people, and their own expectations of themselves, sadly, are much too low. But if they were higher perhaps this group could step up.
Can we get them to step up with a campaign of writing and pressuring, suggesting that they form a bloc? Can we get Sanders to take the first steps by filibustering and resisting the White House? Probably not, if it were only a matter of our influence. But Sanders is inclined to go against this bill anyway without seeing further improvements in it. We might be effective in encouraging him to go through with bargaining with the leadership and the White House. He may be the bravest man in the Senate, so a little encouragement may go a long way. Since Reid can’t capitulate to Bernie without alienating Joe, Bernie’s firm opposition may force him to go through with reconciliation. In that case we should encourage the bloc to form, since it is large enough to block passage of any bill even if only 50 votes + the VP, are needed for passage.
Once the Administration is faced with that bloc and demands for a much better PO, the opt-outs, triggers, and I think Stupaks become a thing of the past. Moreover, if Wyden can work on this bloc to stick together to demand not only a PO, but also a universal exchange, we could suddenly have a much better bill out of the Senate than we thought possible, and the stage would be set for an interesting conference between the two Houses.
At that stage we have to try to work on the progressives in the House one more time to oppose any bill coming out of the Conference like HR 3692, and we need to try to get them to threaten to defeat it unless the conference bill is much stronger.
Thank you. This is wonderful. I’m using it in my arguments [with all those friends I bugged to support Obama a year ago] on why this bill should die.
If Dems were smart, they would let the Repubs “defeat” this travesty. Then they could hang “party of no” and “blocked reform of health care” around THEIR necks. Instead, if this piece of crap passes, Dems are going to be saddled with ALL of the defects and failures of this horrid bill.
they run the risk of making their attempts at a PO and other issues seem hollow, and possibly only a means to support a org they benefit from. I don’t know. I hope not. If that is the case, the netroots could end up setting the progressive movement back.
Or maybe they are afraid to stick their necks out against Obama.
The progressives lost in the House. Maybe Reid is gonna pull it out.
My honest fear is how “reform” plays out for real people. Mandates without real regulation and cost controls is a disater for Americans and our treasury.
The more I look at it, the more Obama seems like the new face of the DLC. And his triangulation and backroom deals are just like NAFTA, and this reform is gonna be an awesome win for corporations and hurt real people.
Having Insurance through your work, and being too poor to actually use it is real today. It has happened to me, and others I know.
Hi Knoxville, I agree with your analysis very much, but two things: 1) even without Stupak it was a terrible bill because the PO was too weak and had no chance of success and also because of the band-aid period. That’s just unacceptable.
And 2) the final result included the Stupak Amendment because Pelosi caved. She should have prevented Stupak from reaching the floor and gotten the vote on 3962 without Stupak. This would have been a challenge to the 64 who voted for Stupak, because they would have had to have gone on record as voting against the bill. No way Marcy Kaptur and many of the others would have voted no for the sake of this Amendment, and if they did and it failed. All Pelosi would have had to do would have been to sit back, wait for a week, while all the progressive and Democratic organizations beat the hell out of the 64, and she would have had the votes she needed to pass the bill. Many times Pelosi is very slick. But I can’t remember when she ever showed any real backbone in a test of wills. If she had done so this time, I think she would have passed HR 3962 and it would be much harder for us to try to kill it than it is now.
The only way they can get Lieberman on board is to remove the po (otherwise, give him a second chairmanship? – joking, though he’s vain enough that that might just bring him around to liking a po).
And Sanders isn’t the only Senator I’ve heard say “no po, no cloture.”
And now Nelson’s pushing for stupak language in the Senate bill.
It’s a mess with a few angles to exploit, loose threads to pull.
And yet I’m not sure Medicare for All will get much farther with the current configuration of real leaders and total a$$holes in the Congress and administration.
Mostly, I think finding a new way to return to the fight for what Jane was orginally calling for – a strong po w/ no opt-outs etc, though adding that it’s not ok to screw anyone by forcing them to choose between benefits of the po and the exchange or their constitutional rights in a matter of conscience – makes the most sense as a step toward single payer.
Yes, I saw your earlier comment and also Jane’s undertaking of an SP project. But I was never sure what it was.
folks here, on this thread, may actually appreciate some Arthur Silber, right about now.
Libby, you may appreciate him as an incredibly impassioned, articulate, moral voice. He has written deeply on the importance of empathy, and the importance and irreducibility of individual lives.
This is insane. You’re probably right. They must be beginning to accept the idea that they are losing their base, and that we will not positively support the bill coming out of the House.
I agree. This is what the progressives ought to do unless leadership and the blue dogs change their tune and are willing to create a strong bill in the Senate and in Conference. What do I mean by a strong bill?
1) HR 676
2) A Jacob Hacker-type PO, or
3) Three separate bills passed using the strategy I outlined here.
Exactly. Apologies for making an analogy to a game, but.. in the game of chicken, she lost big time. And, you’re right. Had she shown more courage and told them A) no to the Stupak Amendment, and B) vote against H R 3962 if you think you can survive the backlash, I think she would have won, especially if Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and others had applied more pressure to the blue dogs all along.
This has also made me dislike Jim Cooper even more. He’s most certainly one of the leading sphincters who created this mess. Did you see David Dayen’s post last night re Cooper? Once again, he wanted it both ways. But this time I think he miscalculated.
In the thread to my latest diary, I wrote:
Check out what happened with OFA tried to organize a “thank you” for cooper at the Nashville airport (link above @ 19).
I agree if we went for it without a campaign backing it. But if we blocked the present bill and the began a campaign for it, I think we might make it because it is a helluva easier to market than the PO. HR 676 is so short. So easy to understand. So beneficial. I don’t think the industry and the Republicans could stand against it if the White House and all the eval pen organizations got behind it and campaigned for it. It’s so easy to believe in. We could get everyone caught up in it. And as the momentum built the blue dogs would come along too. If we make the wave, they won’t be able to stand against it.
In response to letsgetitdone @ 27
I don’t think they are accepting losing their base.
I think they thought that they could get anything out of the House that had “public option” in it and that the majority of Americans wouldn’t care about the details.
See my diary from Sunday morning re the Reverse Rope-a-Dope here.
They thought they could declare a po victory and allow conservadems to go home to say they voted in favor of denying women the rights in a matter of conscience.
But they were very wrong.
Thanks I hadn’t seen those things yet, and am sure I’ll get a kick out of them.
I’m still trying to figure out why Stupak was so successful, while Kucinich couldn’t get a few votes against H R 3962 if Pelosi didn’t allow a vote his amendment allowing states to opt-in for a single payer. Isn’t that was K was trying to add, an opt-in for sp?
I didn’t mean accepting in the sense that they were finding it acceptable, only in the sense that they were beginning to realize that it is happening and that if these things go on much longer, the veal pen organizations will be empty shells, never to be the hand-maidens of a political movement again.
I had seen your excellent diary and made a number of comments in the discussion as well.
I think Stupak was so successful because he bluffed Pelosi; but Kucinich couldn’t do that because the other progressives wouldn’t demand what they favored because they’ve all been indoctrinated with “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and other such excuses for giving in on principle.
Stupak and his people on the other hand, viewed what they were doing as a moral issue, and they had the courage of their convictions. That’s why they could run their bluff. After all, all they could do is lose, but, for them, that’s not as bad as never having tried at all. The only way to beat them was to meet their principle with another principle: reproductive rights. The progressives should have voted against the final Stupakified bill. They could have. What would have happened? Pelosi would have ranted and raved, and in the end she would have made a deal, because the only thing she can’t tolerate is not having a deal.
Thanks. I seem to be all about boxing references lately (rope-a-dope, sucker punches). Too many are stepping into the veal pen, either to get stuff or just to save face. Sad. But you’re right about the veal pen becoming useless empty shells at this rate!
If you have a moment, please take a look at my diary Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN): Before He Was FOR the Stimulus, He Voted AGAINST It.
libbyliberal, thank you for this excellent diary.
And thank you all for renewing my spirit to fight. I started to get down when it was looking like everyone here at FDL was just going to follow Jane in quietly moving on. But conversations at this thread and mine (thanks to cbl2 for sending me that link to OFA’s fiasco in trying to thank Cooper and failing!) have put perspective on the undeniable truth that far too few will accept the mess that the Democrats created in this fight for health care reform.
Gotta go to bed. G’nite all!
“Stupakified” :D nice
All K would have needed were three to join him in voting no to H R 3962. Just three would have left P with 217.
Honestly, all K would have accomplished was to get a vote for his amendment on the floor, where I’m thinking it would have lost anyway. Maybe that’s part of the reason why the progressives weren’t as willing to push for it and why stupak and his stupid friends were more willing to fight, knowing that they would have a whole lotta Republican votes to get stupak’s amendment in.
alright. must sleep! g’night.
Hey AD. They say in 12 step programs, an addict … even an addict nation … can hit a low bottom or a high bottom. What you are saying and I am agreeing with is we are still needing to go to a lower bottom before getting honest and going for serious sustainable recovery.
The election united so many of us in hope. But Obama’s call for change was hollow. He doesn’t really seem to think systemic change is necessary or doable. He wants to coax those abusing the privileges of their ranks to “do the right thing.” Like asking an addict to stop being addicted, and waiting hopefully for it to happen. He is “enabling” the addicts to continue. And his cold shouldering of the progressives is so betraying.
And step 1 is acknowledging how bad things are. No longer “faking it” and denying the dysfunction. Bush was hurtling the country to what I thought was the lowest bottom but if Obama will not acknowledge how bad things are and how much reform is needed, rigorous honesty, then he signs on to the status quo dysfunctionality. If he and his crew, not fresh thinkers but the messer uppers, join up with the corrupt system, start swigging the group think kool-aid and disdaining those crying out for honesty and real change, then we are lost … NO, we are not lost, HE IS. Which is too bad, because having an empowered and enlightened leader can really turn things around.
How lost the country is to the corporate grip. with our money and jobs. With our health care. And we don’t have many champions on the upper level of power. But we have grass roots champions to turn to and rally with. With the wars being inflicted on the planet in OUR name but not by us or for us, just using some of the young people of America lost to patriotism at least while signing up as cannon fodder. By the military industrial complex and military gamesman and corporate profiteers sharing their loot to corrupt our representatives in Congress and without empathy.
But the bullies and the narcissists have always been around. And look at how McCarthyism had such a grip on the country. Edmund Burke has that great line about evil prevails when “good” people do nothing. So we have to stay a part of the solution, not the problem. Tough to do when one is feeling so disenfranchised from the national denial especially as the media keeps on encourging it and confusing us. But I do think there is an awakening. And the status quo and its sharks will attack those willing change. It is a marathon fight for sure.
john, this is a window of opportunity for the progressives to unite and put the line in the sand not between each other, but between real integrity and faux reform bull shit. I think there was another opportunity a while back and it didn’t happen. I hope it happens this time.
Moveon.org was it is sending out a thank your Dem Congressman link about the bill. Wow. The 80 million of us not on the same page now.
I heard a jock on Air America going on and on about how wonderful this House Bill is and making excuses for the Stupak Amendment. He said it would be gone eventually. He said it showed how committed Pelosi was to the bill to put up with Stupak amendment like it was a good thing. He was being an apologist.
Obama is turning us into apologists or the negative disenfranchised. Wish he would community organize us. But we gotta work with what we got, huh?
I realize how not long ago I would watch my tv and have such a shallow awareness of what was happening in my government. I guess I was an authoritarian follower, the comfort of denial and assuming those in charge deserve the public trust. Sure there are some not nice people but the system was not poisoned. Though the Bush years made people clued out a lot like me begin to get what was happening. I mean I got it during Viet Nam years and let go of that vigilance. And now I feel back there feeling like .. wow… something is really rotten in the US.
Yes, I know the ship of state is like an ocean liner that can’t make hair pin turns, but does our captain have any intention of turning it around seriously, anyway? Does he feel empowered to. Or enlightened to?
Obama maybe had a great political imagination and intuition to get elected but does he have the moral intuition and moral imagination. There is a BIG difference.
thanks, cb. I think single payer is so solid a concept that it can be a firm foundation for us to continue on with the fight.
Obama wants to give more than Bushco without inconveniencing the special interests, not doing the “tough love” with the corporate cronies. He can’t have it both ways, but trying to leads to bankruptcy. Single payer getting rid of the $400 billion a year gratuitous overhead pays for itself. He wants to bring in some advantages but that $400 billion to keep the insurance industry happy is still there. It is the only long term WIN/WIN solution without a WIN for the big fat cats … but the fat cats have obamaco protection still, sadly. Their profits are obscene. Amazing the lack of empathy of that top 1%.
When I heard that only 36 House Reps stood up to the Israeli lobby on the Goldstone Report it shows just how much a minority the non-compromised are. But we got to cover their backs now. And push hard.
David, one of my reasons to leave voicemails is that I am not quizzed on my zipcode cuz it seems if you call out of state, your voice/message is less heeded. I do lean heavier on my own district people, of course.
I don’t think this is right, not heeding out of staters calling and writing, since all these federal/state reps are making decisions that impact all of us. Our tax dollars. Making horrifying decisions re war, etc. On their varying committees. You can leave most messages with their assistants, though not all emails can go through without right zip. I don’t know what happens to the messages, and I hope I can keep it going, but it will at least keep me in the proactive mode rather than frustrated reactive one.
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness as they say.
thanks, knoxville.
that says it all. The Dems failed the test for sure. Obstructionist Repubs. The Dems are in the majority. They fight like they are not. The Repubs made them dishonor themselves and sell out not only progressives but human rights.
Sometimes you shouldn’t hold your nose and vote to be pragmatic!
sorry, cass, i see you are asking lets, but my response would be to get as many of us as possible to back Sanders S703 bill, make calls for that and NOT support the corrupted House bill. Maybe it will be symbolic, but those cowardly reps with Pelosi didn’t want to show their support of HR676 as symbolic because they didnt’ want to discomfort their non-progressive constituencies, even though to really awake and aware citizens the wisdom and sanity of single payer medicare for all is the only way to go. I think they don’t trust the citizens will ever wake up and will be jingoistically exploited by the Repubs which has been happening. Truth will set us free, not pandering to the ignorant.
I just put another comment on the Kucinich thread responding to a remark Jane made about SP orgs and not wanting to interfere with them.
I hope the FDL progressives LED BY JANE will ALL back SP S703 coming up soon. Why the hell not? It is the prize everyone wants eventually, is it not?
Don’t treat the SP fight like it is on another planet! I know I am talking to the choir probably on my thread, but I think we need to reunite now behind SP.
I also think so many many citizens are so sadly clueless and ostrich like about the rape of the economy by corporations … they still do not get it … tv media doesn’t bad mouth insurance ccmpanies and they don’t see what they are not being shown. I think progressives need to not only yell for reps to hear but also do more communicating in our social networks.
yes, lets, yes, a thousand times yes on this comment. GREAT!!!!
Why not take it to the mattresses with S703 right now. Can FDL get behind it? Use its whippin’ power????
indie, thanks so much. yes, I appreciate your sensibility.
The “public option” in the hands of poliically adept spin-meisters became all things to all people temporarily. An illusion.
Single Payer structure comes to the table making sure the insurance VENDORS are NOT at the table. There is no allowance for the erosion of their heavy handed money bags bribing. NONE.
SP is solid and threatening to the status quo controlling profiteers. But this is the line in the sand. The moral one. And we have to rally the citizenry to this awful truth. We have to fight like hell for our country back.
Reps and Prez are asking Progressives to eat shit and smile. That is unforgivable.
Mau, thank you! I was so happy to go to PNHP site and have Angell and others spell this out for me.
I hope we can go for morality! It is horrifying the degree of sell out on the part of our Congress.
thanks, knox. I am hoping progressives say don’t put lipstick on the house health care bill pig … let’s switch to Sanders S703 now coming up!
Make that 9 things. Not that this will convince anyone here to be happy with the House bill (and not that it should, necessarily).
First you say:
Then you quote Dr. Angell:
If your point is that the House bill is inadequate, then even Dr. Angell acknowledges that this is something that it fixes. We still don’t know whether the Senate bill will include a provision allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, but at least one of the bills entering conference will.
And I would add one more positive thing – the closing of the Medicare Part D “doughnut hole.” It’s going to be done gradually, but this is a significant improvement over the way Medicare is currently run. Again, this may not convince anyone here, and I’m not arguing that it should, necessarily.
Say no to this bill. Great post Lib.
We need to get better pols into office and do this right even if it takes a few more years.
One of the reasons nobody wants to organize single payer supporters is because its strongest adherents attach themselves to extreme, impossible solutions and then attack anyone who doesn’t follow them. It makes it impossible to do anything constructive, and so nobody even tries.
We’re trying to change that, and channel all that energy into tactics that have a chance of succeeding. But every diary like this says to me “don’t bother, it’ll never work.”
I’ll never organize people behind getting a symbolic vote. It’s a pointless tactic, but that’s what everyone was wedded to. I would’ve tried to use the clout of single payer co-sponsors to demand a CBO score, and then used that to make the argument that single payer was the most cost effective choice. But everyone was convinced that getting Weiner or Kucinich to the floor was the be-all, end-all. That didn’t turn out so well.
Rather than come up with yet another unrealistic plan, or blame others for their own failures, maybe a better idea is to look at what those who fought the single payer battle could’ve done things differently. And getting other people to do the work is not the answer.
Thanks Knox, I read your great diary calling attention to Cooper’s trying to have it both ways on key issues, and you did a great job of calling him out on it.
I thought the fighting spirit was also reflected in the comments to Jane’s Kucinich diary and in the fight with her on whether the best tactical approach at this point was to support the PO in the bill or to kill it.
I have some thoughts on cbl2′s comment on your diary which I’ll add after I’m finished here.
Hi Knox, it’s late morning now. I hope you had a good night and slept better. I know that a few of us here have had a bit of trouble sleeping since the House bill passed. Anger keeps you up at night. Anyway, I agree that Dennis didn’t have the Republicans to pass his Amendment, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are enough progressives to have killed this bill, and prevented it from passing. Remember when Pelosi laughed at the progs back in August? This is exactly why. If they’d defeated this bill and demanded 1) a universal PO, 2) removal of the Stupak language, and 3) the Kucinich Amendment as the price of their support, Pelosi, Hoyer, and Rahm wouldn’t be laughing anymore.
Btw, if they had tanked the bill, there would have been a storm in the country and a scramble to pass something. The progs could have come back with three separate bills 1) optional enrollment in Medicare for everyone under 65 with subsidies based on need under reconciliation, 2) A regulatory bill eliminating all insurance company abuses, i.e. rescissions, pre-condition-based refusal to sell, price discrimination based on preconditions or age, and 3) A bill mandating coverage to prevent “free-riding” and establishing a universal exchange. Then the progs could have let leadership and the Ameican public chew on that one for awhile.
lib, Obama has to understand Community organization isn’t the kind of leadership we need, as much as it’s distasteful to him it worked for him during the campaign because it was backed by a mass movement. His policy betrayals have killed the movement, so now community organizing won’t do any good. In fact, he can’t even get the community organizers without the movement. His yes we can has turned into no we can’t.
SP would save more than 400 B per year. It would be almost twice that and perhaps as much as 1 Trillion per year, once what I call Problem Solving Pattern (PSP) Management approaches were implemented in the Medicare for All system. We’re looking at saving 10 $Trillion in the first 10 years we could then apply to reconstructing our economy along green lines and ending dependency on oil and fossil fuels.
I don’t know, but I’m for it. Bernie is modifying S 703 to make it more like HR 676, so this is even better I think. There are 18 prog Senators who ought to be willing to go en bloc and refuse to pass anything else but S 703. That’s enough to block any POS bill the Administration wants. They should begin by not bargaining at all and wait for teh Administration to come to them. The key to this is unreasonableness and bloody-mindedness. People need to teach Obama a lesson or two.
I’ve acknowledged the positives in the House bill in the first 3.5 years here. But I really wish that the proponents of that bill or those who want to take a more moderate view on it than we see in this thread would acknowledge its downsides in the same detail. I think my diary does that, and I honestly can’t see how this bill can be supported in the face of these downsides.
I’ve also argued, in a very lengthy reply to Jane, here, that what we should work for now is killing this bill, though I am open to turning around again if people will pay enough of a price to avoid its death.
The answer to your question has been a clear and definitive “No,” since Obama selected Rahm to be his Chief of Staff and they excluded progressives from his cabinet. They believe progressives are their enemy and they are hostile and opposed to considering the issues that concern us.
Single payer is the only solution that makes any sense. I respect Jane and her efforts to shape the debate into producing a robust public option, but the monster birthed by the House over the weekend must die.
I appreciate the efforts to figure out a strategy to follow in the Senate to pass something better than the awful stinker the House passed and get rid of the Stupak Amendment, but I’m absolutely certain Obama will vigorously oppose anything y’all attempt to do.
I believe Mauimom has the right idea: maneuver the Republicans into taking the blame for the failure of health reform and kill it before it gets any worse.
Thanks, Libbyliberal. Your diary is excellent.
Another view of the health bill: it’s as much progress as can be made in a 2009 America that is severely behind the times. There are a bunch of restrictions on private coverage which will eat into the bottom line of insurer’s profits, therefore the cost of private coverage will actually go up, in my opinion. At the same time we get a sliver of a public option, with some suggestions for how to kick open that door in the future. Then, in 5 years, when people realize that the private insurance reforms haven’t lowered costs, they will be clamoring for door-kicking to open up the public option. That is how I think they’ve structured this trojan horse for single payer.
The problem is that the PO is so neutered and small that it will have no effect on reducing costs and it will cost more than private plans. Therefore, it’s guaranteed to have a lousy track record so that the insurance companies can claim that the numbers show they’ve delivered better service for less money than the PO.
We must avoid this trap, even if we have to give up reform to do it.
Do you see Single Payer advocates going for the expanded Medicare for All as a hopeless waste of time and energy? Do you see most of us as unreasonable and attacking? I am sorry if this is true, because you are a leader I thought of us, too, those who come here. I say they, we, are moral and principled and embracing universal health care as a constitutional right. I say we recognize the need to put that moral line in the sand to a Congress and Prez that have lost their moral compass.
I am more of a “feeling/intuiter” temperament, Jane, and I can’t parse a principle like this I have embraced. It is a right. We fight for it to be given to us. Parsing it out with the sharks makes no sense. We can’t go incrementally on this since we are no longer honoring if you will the basic principle. We are asking for croutons over crumbs on this if we do ask for such increments and we are in dire times. While 45,000 a year are dying prematurely and $400 bn is going mostly to the insurance FAT CATS.
As we watch people here and progressives reps on TV being interviewed say, “Well, ultimately universal insurance, the ideal, but we can’t get there from here right now.” Who is slowing progress? The progressives who aren’t going for progress out of pragmatism and it is not “feasible” talk. Obama talked the generalized talk of reform and the citizenry, 80 million rallied. And then our champion got so very pragmatic about it all. Change you can believe in … I thought meant change … not status quo coaxing. not kitten to shark negotiation. Or was it all frontman for corporate agenda stuff?
If the phrase “Single Payer” had been given the drumbeat that the “public option” was given, something that could be explained and fought for, instead of something that was remote and ambiguous and not yet real. If the corporate media fed citizenry could be influenced by a united progressive block that was fighting heart and soul for something solid, a structure that is already set up, like Single Payer, that was making the demand, yes a very great demand, that we FIRE THE VENDORS, the insurance companies that are eating up $400 billion a year and are causing 45,000 Americans TO DIE prematurely every year, that fight by impassioned progressives would have been contagious and would have impacted more of the public to help us all.
If that had been the angry one note drumbeat. Like when people finally got it with the Viet Nam war. Enough people were crying out ENOUGH!!!!
So Bernie Sanders is putting forward S703 and it has a structure. And Medicare has a structure in this country that is working. And it is for those over 65. And we can reduce the age on Medicare to zero. There is the structure. It can be done. Why not back Sanders S703 bill and not watch our Dem leaders put lipstick on the House health care bill pig that has an anti-abortion amendment stuck to it. Holy crap. Why not? Why not say you guys have lied to us, betrayed us. We are going for what we deserve. Universal health care without the damn parasitic insurance company vendors (I say that because they should not be in charge and the deciders) bloodsucking us.
Again, the only block is the avaricious insurance corporate executives who used campaign finance to bloat their power from third party vendors to “DECIDERS” on who lives and dies, and sorry folks, but the greed now has 45,000 people dying each year. That should be our simple message. Stop the $400 billion draining out to the insurance industry and stop the 45,000 deaths.
Other industrial nations do not allow that citizens die because of no health care. They get it as a human right. And this country … holy crap. Why can’t we get it? The moral imagination of some presidents went for it, but then the AMA stepped in long ago. And now we have the corporatists who are causing these deaths. And the corporatists who are causing deaths of our soldiers and millions of others in other countries.
“Enough.” was a slogan during the Viet Nam protests. It says it all. Enough. We need to stop it. We need to call them out, those without empathy. The corporation has a personality of a psychopath. Ruthless and self-aggrandizing without any pause for human situations. It has taken over our leadership, the agenda of corporations.
They say in terms of dealing with “addicted” people, the secret is not trying to win with them, it is refusing to play their game.
Broken record assertiveness. Universal health care as a human right. When do we want it? NOW!!!!!
Extreme and impossible solution? Single payer has justice on its side, universal health care for all that EVERY OTHER industrial nation has established for its citizenry except the “free market capital”, nation without pity U.S. And it is the right thing to do and it is the most cost effective thing to do. The crony corporatists are so enmeshed with our Congress. And we need to declare our universal coverage a human and civil right. We have to believe it is a human and civil right. We have to appeal to the moral imaginations in each other and in this country.
People need to fight for the substantial. Principles above personalities.
Thanks, Jane, for responding to me. I know you have a sense of honor and you have great power, well deserved. I hope we all as progressives can get behind a strategy that will work for all of us. I feel like all my calls for single payer were not against the public option call, I am sure you see they weren’t.
We progressives, even the righteously strident stubborn ones like me, need a leader like you to help unite us and focus us. This is a serious marathon.
Can you explore the possibility of fighting for Bernie’s bill?
Thanks, for this WNCBlue. Point taken.
I am sorry if I overgeneralized parts of the bill, but I think we need to fsst get the essence of those 1990 pages that will be hammered out more, probably watered down more, in the Senate. So much gets jammed through without discussion and as the dust settles the citizenry gets more and more disempowered.
Thanks, Nancy. That is being done, calling for more empathetic to citizens candidates. FDL is good at working on this for sure.
But that seductive group think in the halls of power, the cronyism and disengagement from the plight of real Americans is heartbreaking and infuriating at the same time!
lets, I am glad you see the hope in Bernie’s bill. I think we need that vote and must insist on it, symbolic or not. These guys have got to go on record that they are willing to abandon our human rights.
Mason, I appreciate your sensibility on this!!!
or will it demoralize, mike, and show the public that see … the wimpy progressive attempts made little difference to the plight of America. What is the use of trying. The public option is set up to be the default for those expensive cases the insurance companies don’t want. they want the easy premiums and will dump into the public option if it is not protected the bankrupting cases.
That is why there is not a big backlash from big insurance. Did they get their $1.4 million a day’s worth. Dear God what good that money could have gone to to reduce human misery.
I realize I sound negative so I’m going to mix metaphors and restate my message in the form of a warning.
Be careful strategizing with the shark, lest you wake up in the belly of the trojan horse with no way out.
One more thought:
Those who think Obama was taken advantage of by Big PhRMA and the insurance companies might want to consider the possibility that their backdoor deals were mutually engineered to accomplish two objectives only; that is, increase profits and neutralize the left by declaring single-payer off the table and hamstring its effort for reform — as well as get lots of laughs — by trapping it into explaining what the hell a public option is.
Would Obama really do something like that?
You can bet your life he would!
Jane, I’m not much for symbolic votes myself and I also think that this idea:
is a good one. And we certainly ought to do that.
But first, I want to sharply distinguish strategy from tactics. I think strategy is about overall orientation toward health care reform, while tactics are about the low-level things you do to get from point-to-point in getting the strategy implemented. Tactics are influenced by strategy in the sense that tactics need always to be evaluated from the viewpoint of whether they advance strategy or not.
In my view, much of the hcr reform movement made a great strategic error in this fight. And that error was to make the strategic goal a Public Option solution, rather than to make it a Medicare for All solution. That error has shaped everything else the hcr movement has done for the last year, and is the one thing primarily responsible for the sorry outcome we have on our hands now. I think we have to learn from that and stop boosting the PO, even a very strong PO, as a strategic goal. Medicare for All, should be our standard, and we should evaluate our success or failure in political activity by how far we’ve moved the ball toward this goal, not by how far we’ve moved the ball toward getting a PO. The PO, even a Jacob Hacker-type PO, is at best a tactic relative to the overall strategic goal of getting to SP, and we should never forget that or let other people forget that. Since it is a tactic, we should be treating it as a tactic, something we resort to overcome blocking or resistance, not something we pre-compromise on before even testing the strength of resistance to our efforts.
I think, also, that treating the PO as if it were our strategic goal was a very bad tactic. It did not elicit the limited opposition and pragmatic but useful compromise for our side that many progs anticipated, and talked about as a benefit of going the PO route, and its messaging has been and still is horribly confused and disingenuous and has elicited all kinds of fears from the public that Medicare for All would never have elicited.
Since tactics are not independent of strategy, but are always shaped in the context of it, adopting the PO as a strategic goal has shaped our tactics, by constraining us from doing some things. We could never call on a mass movement to support us in getting hcr, because who can really get excited over a PO that won’t produce universal coverage? We could never develop simple messaging that was honest, because all the simple verities about stopping the fatalities, providing universal coverage, making things really affordable, and really saving money for the country, don’t really apply to the half-based PO plans we’ve been seeing from the Congress.
These kinds of claims are honest justifications for SP, but dishonest ones for the PO plans we’ve seen. And who can get excited and fight hard while using messages that you know are not true? Maybe conservative apparatchiks can do that, but liberals and progressives find that very hard. They need to believe in what they are doing and what they are saying.
I agreed with you that we ought to ask what SP advocates could have done differently, but I think an important related question is what can SP reform advocates do differently now? What can give a different result that is closer to the strategic goal we’re pursuing? And I think the answer to that at the level of high-level tactics is that we have to build a mass movement in the background of what we do day-to-day, because without that we aren’t going to get Medicare for All through the Congress. Some groups out there are trying to build that movement, and it may be gaining steam. This terrible hcr bill will fuel the movement for Medicare for All, but realistically, I don’t think that movement will be a factor for a few years at the earliest. So what do we do now day-to-day?
I think we ought to pressure progressive politicians in the House and the Senate to become movement politicians. Movement politics is different from conventional politics, and movement politicians often have to use different tactics because they are trying to get principles adopted, and so they have to defend those principles, and not easily compromise them except perhaps at the end of a lengthy legislative process, when there is no other alternative and they can get something very very valuable for the compromise. It’s important to get people to understand that movement politics is not about not compromising. Instead it’s about not pre-compromising, or abandoning one’s strategic goal, or making compromises that mortgage the future of movement possibilities. One of the worst things about the current House bill is that it risks wholesale rejection by the public of the very idea that support of progressives and Democrats can really help them against the insurance companies and in getting affordable health care. That’s why this bill must be killed. It has been oversold and the backlash from it is very dangerous to the whole hcr movement.
We need to persuade, cajole, urge, threaten, and organize their constituents to get our Congress people to become movement politicians. We have to call on them to believe again, and rip the hell out of them when they act as if they don’t. When they produce a piece of crap legislation we need to not be balanced and moderate in cataloging the pros and cons of the legislation in two matching lists. We have to evaluate their legislation from the point of of view of the principles and strategic goals of our movement, and we need to call a spade a spade if their legislation gives up core principles, gets us no closer to our strategic goals, and even falls short from a moral point of view.
Progressive politicians in Congress are not acting like movement politicians who are coming from principle, they are acting like politicians trying to get something, anything, done at any cost as long as it carries the hcr label. This may seem practical, because “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and they don’t want to go against their leadership and their President, but in the long run, it’s a tactic that won’t get them and us to SP, because a) it makes them look like corrupt politicians, and b) no one will take SP seriously, unless its advocates are willing to make everyone pay a price for trying to marginalize their strategic goal and laugh at it in the legislative processs.
In my view, the first thing for SP advocates in Congress to do is to defeat any other hcr bill that either 1) doesn’t provide a clear possibility of getting to SP in a reasonable time, or 2) threatens the political prospects for getting further reforms that will provide that clear possibility. There were how many, 86 co-sponsors of HR 676 in the House? That many representatives would have blocked any hcr bill that wasn’t Medicare for All the first time around if they were playing movement politics. Unfortunately they were playing at merely symbolic stuff – kabuki, in their co-sponsorship, not making a real commitment to Hr 676.
Had those progressives put themselves on the line and made the leadership and the Administration taste defeat for trying to marginalize HR 676, people wouldn’t laugh at SP or progressives anymore. Instead the leadership and the Administration would start to bargain, and the SP people would have had an opportunity to drive a hard bargain. That bargain could have ensured 1) or 2) above, even if the resulting bill was no more than something like ending all insurance company abuses and stopping there.
In writing all of this, I’m painfully aware of not answering the question, yes, but what do we do right now? I think the answer to this is implied above. It is to do everything we can to kill this bill. First in the Senate and if that fails than turning again to he House to once again try to get enough of the progressives to stand up to the leadership and vote against it when it comes out of conference. For hcr, that won’t mortgage the future, we need to kill this bill and in the process we need to get the Democrats and the progressives to stop lying about what it does and does not do. Then, when the leadership and the Administration goes back to the drawing board, which they certainly will very soon, go back to HR 676, and don’t compromise until the end of the process when they need progressive votes to put it over and then adhere to principles 1) and 2) above in negotiating any compromise.
mikesong, People won’t act that way. They’ll just reject the efficacy of Democratic Government both big and small “d” for solving their problems. people need help in a much shorter time frame. The deaths, bankruptcies, and foreclosures due to lack of insurance need to be ended in the short-run. This bill is immoral because it doesn’t solve those problems. It needs to be defeated.
I agree. But lots of other things are wrong with the bill. Here’s an analysis of the first 3.5 years for which supporters of this bill will certainly pay dearly.
And he did!
I agree that our goal, or strategy is to enact single payer and our tactic to get what we want should be to advocate for extending Medicare to all. Medicare is simple and it works. It’s also easy to explain, whereas the PO is vague and nebulous because of the word “option” and threatening because of the word “public.”
For example, who would be willing to buy any product, no matter how good it was, if it were named “the public option.” Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle, the biggest long shot Louie at Hialeah wouldn’t put a fin on Seattle Slew, if he were named Public Option. A parent would be busted for child abuse and jailed forever if she named her kid Public Option.
Obama and his rich corporate cronies saddled us with this awful idea knowing as they did so that we’d never be able to sell it. That Jane came so close to pulling it off is proof of how good she is, but now its morphed into a hideous monster threatening to eviscerate Roe v. Wade and forever consume reform.
Time to step back, take a deep breath, and rethink this.
Methinks a bullet to the back of the head of the PO is medically indicated.
Come to think of it, I’d buy an Edsell before the little beauty parked over there behind the curtain called . . . the Public Option.
Here, take a look. In the immortal words of one Jerry Lundegaard, “We can knock $100 off that Tru-Coat.”
EEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
the whole Public Option charade was a Great Snipe Hunt, with the Democrats always going “look! over there! under that bucket!”
and the Progressives going and examining the bucket, and writing long long long posts about why the snipe could not be under that bucket, and then Democrats could say “oh well, over there!” and so on and on.
It was just a game to tire the campers out, there never was any Snipe.
Spork and Mason, great posts about the wonky PO. You know the first time I wrote here at the seminal about Medicare for All, Jason Rosenbaum informed that the PO people didn’t like “Medicare for All” because it was the wonk’s solution. Just incredible!!!!
libby, just wanted to say thank you very much for this and all your diaries and for what it’s worth, i strongly disagree with most of jane’s comment. more later, when i have some time/energy to gather my thoughts.
If it wonks and tonks like a solution, it’s a __________________________!
Ahem, for the pretend cognoscenti, the secret word is “solution.”
The PO doesn’t wonk and tonk. It sniffles with the onkset of swine flu.
Mystery date,
Are you ready
for your mystery date?
Don’t be late
for your Mystery Date.
Wow, you’re really cute, you Public Option, you.
Uhm, where do I pin this corsage?
For Jane, and fdl, the PO was never about containing costs, or offering competition. If I understand her argument to me, what the House passed is awesome, a win, and a dumping ground is what this site is hoping for.
I kinda skimmed this list and then recommended it. On that basis, it’s a good accounting of what’s wrong with the current health care bills. I’m going to come back and read this later.
I have mixed feelings about this point. On the one hand the U.S. government already “insures” the most expensive portions of the population – the old (Medicare), veterans and military (VA and DoD), and the poor (Medicaid). On the other, the public option will be available only to people who are not already covered. To me, that latter point, combined with the necessity that the PO will cost as much or more than private insurance, makes it almost useless. There is no point to a PO if it doesn’t either reduce costs or keep the insurance companies honest. This PO will do neither.
I agree. If the end goal is a public option that offers no competition to the inductry, there is no reason to donate to any cause or group that is fighting for such a dumping ground. Save your monyey, you’ll need it.
If there is a mandate, and insurance must except all comers, who needs a PO. People will jsut have to suck it up and find a way to afford it.
I doubt Jane was hoping the PO would turn into a dumping ground. I think she wants it to succeed in comparison to private plans leading to the removal of restrictions on membership until it eventually eliminates private insurance for all but the filthy rich who can afford insurance that pays for private rooms, gourmet meals, health spas, massage therapists, and personal trainers to assist in their recovery.
If the PO is so restricted in membership that it’s more expensive than private insurance and its coverage turns out to be no better than or even possibly worse than private plans, what would be the point in creating it or allowing it to continue in any form except as a dumping ground?
Where would the need for systemic change come from and what would the solution be if the government solution — exemplified by the “failure” of the PO — isn’t the answer?
I agree. If the PO in its final form will cost as much as or more than private insurance, then for God’s sake, let’s euthanize the damn thing ASAP before it attracts more trouble like the Stupak Amendment’s backdoor attack on Roe v. Wade.
The PO and its corollary the exchange was a trojan horse for the insurance industry. We need to put it out of our misery.
This is brilliant, lets. Maybe you should post it as a separate diary. It is thoughtful and wise and straightforward and very insightful. I nodded my way through it.
There are people in SP going to jail, committing acts of civil disobedience. Professional people, people from all walks who have been burned by insurance companies. Our media is ignoring them. Our blog media is not staying clued in to them, they are beyond the public option line, or they were, I am hoping that line will melt away now. I am ashamed I haven’t given them more attention myself. Going to a rally made me nervous even when it was a supposedly legal one. Ya never know. Our policing in this country is militarized now.
Your advice if I may paraphrase using MLK’s phrasing wasn’t it, “Keep your eyes on the prize.” Yes, this is about a movement. And we must sustain our fight on this day after day, be in it for the marathon. And stay supportive to each other to sustain the political and emotional and moral will!
I think of that movie Bridge on the River Kwai. I think the bill may be our bridge on the River Kwai. So much effort and then exploited by the baddies and the weakies.
I have been reading a lot about what is not in the media, the corporate carptebagging going on in Afghanistan. The Afghans are starving, and the military is losing legitimate jobs to the outsourcing corporations importing workers from E. Europe is it and SE Asia. So unemployment is 40% in Afghanistan. And we as taxpayers give $40 billion a month over there and people are starving and without work. And the insurgency. Over the military, the Taliban, or the corporate carpetbaggers. And corporate media blocks that. So we wait around to see what Obama, the backroom deal maker … not transparent at all…. who would have thought… anyway… they are investing so much money to contractors over there and the building jobs for ths economy but not about us but transnational carpetbaggers.. deregulated everywhere … are over there. So we are not about to leave. Cuz our soldiers give up their lives for contractors making 10X what they make.
The reason I am going on about this is that it seems we and the Afghans are both getting burned by the amorality of corporations with inappropriate and deadly power.
Appreciate your humor and sensibility, Mason. Yeah, we need to lick our wounds after profound betrayal … but we don’t have time anymore for the 5 stages of grief, or we have to ramp up the speed of them. So many fresh hells. Bushco era of anything goes, Obama’s accountability coma.
Thanks, Cujo. So nicely explained.
Yes, lib, That’s what is going on, and thanks for the kind words about my comment. Actually I’ve thought of posting both the comment above and the earlier one here. I haven’t posted that much this week, but have been captured by the need to comment. So much is happening. The next few days look busy with other things apart from blogging and commenting, so I’ll just have to see how things go.
spork… ever droll, ever sharp!
thanks, selise. i always appreciate hearing your good sense on things.
1. A CBO score won’t sell single payer, because that considers government spending only. Single payer will only shine when a “full analytical study” is performed, that takes costs and benefits system- and society wide into account.
2. “Nobody wants to organize single payer advocates.” Do you mean “nobody who is anybody”? If not, can you give me the link showing where the public option advocates in the progressive blogosphere reached out to PNHP?
3. “[M]aybe a better idea is to look at what those who fought the single payer battle could’ve done things differently.” I agree, and when the battle is over, no doubt a post mortem will take place. Do public option advocates plan to do the same?
[applause].
Yep. So one obvious “lessons learned” — Jane’s things that “could have been done differently” — that we don’t have to wait for is don’t get involved in “progressive” snipe hunts. I put a great deal of energy into clarifying the various evolutions of [a|the] [strong|robust]? public [health insurance]? [option|plan]. In retrospect, that time was, if not wasted, certainly mis-allocated. My error was thinking that the blogosphere c. 2009 was something like the blogosphere 2003-2006. In fact, it isn’t, as the presence of staffer Rosenbaum proves. All that energy should have gone into movement stuff, and not to debunking the various stages of the snipe hunt. Never again.
Thanks, lamb, for comments. I think the division among the Progressives, the two dimensions of activism, pragmatics and harder lefties, really diluted our power and momentum, along with the confusion and stages of grief dealing with a remote and reactive not proactive new Prez. We thought the status quo would be softened up enough for reforming post-Bush, but the corruption was accelerated by Bush but its foundations are much longer term and horrifyingly formidable.
Hi lambert, Nice to see you.
I think the handwriting is on the wall about that already. With HCAN, given all its money, it’s doubtful that any lessons learned sessions it performs will include consideration of whether its whole PO strategy was ill-advised. Though I suspect that George Soros, reality-based thinker that he is may well do such a post-mortem for them. As for FDL, Jane only recently, and well after it was apparent that this hcr bill was shaping up as a very bad one, went ahead and formed an organization called “Public Option Please.” So I doubt ant post-mortem done by FDL will admit to the strategic error of accepting the PO as the goal of hcr.
Glad you liked it lambert. Haven’t seen any reply from Jane though. There’s some pretty good discussion around these issues also going on here, and here. There’s a lot of soul seaching going on at FDL right now.
I found a soul in the dirty laundry this morning. Ain’t mine.
Anybody round these parts still missing a soul?
You are solely responsible for its contents.
letsgetitdone, thanks very much for your excellent (even for you) comment.
if i step back from even strategy and tactics, this is what i see:
the goal is universal comprehensive healthcare
there are any number of ways this could be accomplished (although, to my knowledge, no country has been able to do it by financing healthcare through private for profit health insurers, so we should be very skeptical and wary of any policy proposal that leaves for profit insurers in place (let alone makes them stronger).
analysis of the possible policies to achieve our goal should be a critical step to understand our options. in this we are lucky because we can start with what has worked (and not worked) in other countries and also in the usa. if there is more than one option they can be compared on quality of healthcare delivered, institutional strength (how easy would it be for privatizers or others to undermine the system), and difficulty in implementation (which includes political, bureaucratic, ease of explanation to the public, ability to inspire the public, etc) i haven’t followed all that, but it seems that until hickey et al. made their pitch, sp was uniformly seen by progressives as the policy of choice. and personally, i still think it is but only because i haven’t heard of any other that makes any sense to me in our current political reality.
so, i guess i see the process (oversimplified) as :
goal –> policy –> strategy –> tactics
good tactics aren’t just successful in and of themselves, they must flow from and support the strategy which is devised to implement the policy which flows from the goal(s).
stupid tactical blunders (which jane rightly points to) are of course a disaster, but imo usually so are brilliant tactics separated from a strategy and/or policy that advances our goal (which i think is part of the point you, lets, are making?). different people have different strengths and interests and if we could find a way to work together, with people doing what they do best, i think we’d be much stronger. at least that’s what i’ve seen — although i’ve only done some small scale local organizing (and only observed others doing large scale international organizing).
the thing is, there is so much anger i don’t know how to help that to happen. the po advocates are pissed off at sp advocates for lack of political savvy and for not getting behind the po, which i think they honestly thought was the right thing to do (for example, do you remember kirk’s post implying that sp advocates were killing his patients?). and sp advocates (who, let’s face it were the only genuine progressive grass roots hcr activists) are pissed off about being shut out and excluded by po advocates from even discussions since before the summer of 2008. how do we or can we overcome that? it seems to be getting even worse to me now that po advocates seem mostly wedded to (or at least not actively opposing) a dem bill that sp advocates see as taking us a step back from our goal of universal healthcare.
i’m stumped.
………
one other disconnect i see, but don’t know if i can explain, is based on my thinking about how social movements develop and mature. in this i am greatly influenced by bill moyer’s (not the pbs bill moyers) book, doing democracy. have you ever read it? if you have, then maybe you will understand when i say that imo the social movement for universal healthcare is at stage 2 (prove the failure of official institutions) sometimes with bits of stage 3 (ripening conditions). whereas, it looks to me as if the po advocates are treating the issue not as a social movement but instead as business as usual which can be worked by insider compromise and/or normal electoral politics.
anyway, i think this may be another reason we (sp advocates and po advocates) seem to be talking past each other.
i’m stumped about what can be done about this one too.
…..
to libby and all with regard to jane’s comment… i see the passion and inspiration of sp advocates as a positive and not a negative. it’s just frustrated enthusiasm. give people a productive and hopeful avenue (one that respects their goals and aspirations) for all that energy and what was frustrated enthusiasm will look quite different (commitment, dedication, etc). in other words, an organizer’s dream. in my book that’s just organizing 101.
but i’m not smart enough to think of something that can do that in our current state of affairs.
…..
anyway, these are just my rambling thoughts at this moment. i may have it all wrong and may have to change my pov tomorrow if not sooner.
@101, Selise.
Just wrote a long, heartfelt comment and my computer rebelled and lost it.
Don’t have time to share fully again, but thank you for your calming and re-uniting sensibility.
Hope more than just I have the privilege of reading your empathetic take on the situation.
libby, coming from you “empathetic” is about the highest praise i could ever hope for. thanks. hoping someone smarter than me will find my comment useful for sparking ideas….
Thank you selise. I completely agree with the interpretation in your comment.
In my own work I also distinguish goals, policies, strategies, and tactics, and sometimes use distinctions even finer than these. I also agree with your analysis of the anger and mistrust existing between PO and SP people.
I don’t think this mistrust can be easily overcome until the PO people have the experience of failure, and begin to question their intuition about how much more feasible it would be to try to legislate a strong PO-based, rather than a Medicare for All. I hope the PO folks will evaluate the outcome of their efforts realistically, but I’m afraid that won’t happen and that we’ll have years more of delay until they learn that the PO wasn’t such a good idea, after all. In fact, they may never learn that lesson, because their attempts to push the PO have given some jobs and careers and institutions committed to the PO. It’ skind of hard to change directions when you’ve reached that point.
I haven’t read Moyers’ book, but social movements and Democratic Theory are areas I’ve studied since graduate school in the 1960s, and my Ph.D. thesis and early writings were in closely related areas, so I’m keenly attuned to the social movement aspects of hcr politics.
In fact, a lot of the differences between myself and the PO people are due to the observation you made that they seem to approach hcr as business as usual. In this I think they’re taking their cue from Obama, and have made his mistake that getting a good program passed is a matter of pulling and pushing the levers of politics that have produced results during the 1990s and more recently before the crash of 2008.
My own view is that times have changed and that there’s much greater scope now for movement politics, which is often more about saying no and sticking to principle and not compromising on measures that mortgage the future. Anyway, the next three years will tell us more about whose interpretation is correct.
Sometimes I’m convinced I must be among the youngest, and least educated, people around here. :-)
Must be why I like reading this site, better to be around a bunch of people smarter than you, than to be the smartest one around!
:-)
holy cow! i’m going to have to think of
1001000 questions to ask you. i’ve only been thinking (and reading and experiencing) a little bit about these things since after 9/12/01 when i decided it was time to start paying attention to politics, foreign policy, etc.….
based on our at least similar understanding of some of the things that divide po/sp advocates, i’d like to brain storm a little about the possibility of alternatives for po/sp collaboration, but it’s way too late tonight so it will have to wait…. will try to catch you here or on another thread. thanks very much for the reply.
lol. dude, i read your comments and posts. you give as good as you get. imo it’s just that we’re all smarter when we can work together with the mutual goal of figuring stuff out.