Kaplan “economics columnist” Robert Samuelson has a bizarre, content-free, anti-Obama screed today. I’m not going to link, but here’s a sample:
Barack Obama’s quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America’s long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He’s championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country’s long-term interests. “This isn’t about me,” he likes to say, “I have great health insurance.” But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved “universal” health insurance. He’ll be disappointed.
[….]What it’s become is an exercise in political symbolism: Obama’s self-indulgent crusade to seize the liberal holy grail of “universal coverage.” What it’s not is leadership.
There is very little substantive criticism of the plan and a lot of citations of poll numbers.
I’ve had a hard time figuring out where the media’s arrogance meme comes from. I don’t think Obama strikes many voters as arrogant, whatever their problems with him might be. I tend to think it comes from the obvious contempt he has for media elites.
There’s something rich about such a self-absorbed group accusing of Obama (or anyone else) of thinking it’s all about him.
John Cole
Uppity.
Lolis
Hate to say it, but bloggers are becoming more and more like Villagers. They are obsessed with each other’s opinion. Bloggers also think they represent America’s True Feelings about any given subject.
Napoleon
Thanks for not linking.
It is just amazing how bad the daily Kaplan’s columnist are.
They get it from the Republicans who use it as code for “uppity”. It really is that simple.
Betsy
@John Cole:
Beat me to it. I was about to write, “They say he’s ‘arrogant’ because they aren’t allowed to call him ‘uppity.'”
Will
I have never been able to decipher any of Grumpy Samuelson’s columns. For the past 15 yrs I have tried reading them. They’re always filled with half-truths, strawmen, and noxious Beltway CW dressed up as “contrarian”. He’s not just wrong on everything: he’s really bad at arguing it, too.
Senyordave
After reading this online my first thought was that this never would have been written if Obama were white. My second though was thought I am so glad of my decision to cancel the WaPo three months ago.
His screed could have been written by almost any GOP senator.
Sentient Puddle
Threatens the country’s long-term interests how? Because you say so?
Persia
We all know the bill is increasingly unpopular, because we’ve told people it’s increasingly unpopular for weeks!
Violet
Uppity and doesn’t suck up to Villagers. Ergo, must be arrogant. That’s the only reason their petty little minds can come up with.
Jim
David Broder once typed and published a sentence pretty close to this one: “Midwesterners like me are turned off by know-it-alls like John Kerry and Al Gore”
Steerpike
“Arrogant” indeed! Who does he think he is, the president? Sheesh.
Zifnab
Remember when poll numbers didn’t matter?
CT Voter
Projection. It’s epidemic these days.
Whatever a Republican says about a Democrat’s motives or behavior, you can rest assured that they’re actually describing their own motives and behavior.
Increasingly, that’s what the Village Idiots are engaging in.
“Obama is arrogant” really means “We are suffocatingly arrogant (and ignorant) about teh little people — and hey, how about that salad bar at Applebees????”
DougJ
Hate to say it, but bloggers are becoming more and more like Villagers.
Yes, I sort of agree. But not because they care a lot about each others’ opinions (which I think is perfectly healthy, if you respect someone, you might naturally care what that person thought). What was Villager-like to me was it how it was all about who Obama and Rahm disrespected and whether they were giving “netroots” enough face (someone used this expression the other day and it’s right on at, at least as I understand the term from Hong Kong movies).
El Cid
Sour grapes taste sour.
r€nato
You know what REALLY cheeses me off about Obamacare?
He wants to kill grandma with his government death panels, and all so he can get a few votes and polish his ‘legacy’.
Jennifer
@John Cole:
Bingo.
Raoul
Content free indeed- I am now curious what he wrote about the economy 2002-2004.
Tyranny of the Minority
Mary Matalin railed against Democrats for pushing forward with health reform efforts. “They’ve been on this jihad for 70 years.” Moments later, she smeared the prior efforts to establish Social Security and Medicare as “entitlement jihads” as well. “Jihadists?” Goes with the “Democrats are terrorists” meme I suppose. Yes Mary – we’re tired of your worn out G(NO)P minority party obstructionist talking points, please STFU!
thinkprogress.org/2009/12/21/matalin-jihadists/
Jim
I suppose it’s a bit unfair of me to say this since I haven’t read the whole column, and I’m not going to, but this sentence is completely incoherent. Word salad with petulant dressing. I’m assuming the gist of RS’s extended whine is that getting President McCain’s approval would’ve been an act of “leadership”?
Joe Beese
“Contempt for media elites”. Really?
politico.com/blogs/dinnerdish/0509/All_of_you_voted_for_me.html
The Grand Panjandrum
What I enjoy most about this is that he is either the same age as, or younger than most of these fuckers. Must be a bitch to work your entire career to become a Very Serious Person and then have to call some guy you never heard of until a couple years ago, Mr President.
Clinton had a similar problem with the media. He wasn’t an insider and it drove them completely nuts. The establishment media is completely comfortable with people who’ve be acclimated to the “ways of Washingtion”, as it were.
Lolis
@DougJ:
Good example. Bloggers also want Obama to draw a line in the sand, be macho, be a man. They want Obama to make us feel secure in his ideas no matter how nonstrategic that may be. Bloggers want to be reassured by Obama. Bloggers want Obama to validate them and their belief system. They want immediate gratification, besides approval and respect. It is a little vomit inducing.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Not linking is *very* important. The douche nozzles now track their unique hit count extreeeemely closely, I’ve seen some of the sports beat reporters admit to this.
Taking away the only metric the corporate overlords have to judge these useless sacks of shit means their soapbox might, just might, eventually go away.
Samuelson is another Poster Child of the Village Heather mindset. Just call me Capt Obvious.
The Republic of Stupidity
@zinfab:
Or deficits, for that matter…
Or the Constitution, too, also…
calipygian
I’m wondering how a bill that reduces the deficit this year $130B and over a trillion over a decade threatens the future of the country.
Oh yeah…SOCHALIZM!
Jim
@The Grand Panjandrum:
That infamous Sally Quinn column–which I believe is where Digby got the term ‘Village’–really was valuable, too bad so few outside the Village paid attention to it. I’ve never been sure whom I (perversely) admire more out of that, Broder for realizing what a complete asshat he sounded like when expressing what he clearly believes, or Tweety for blithely sticking to his asshat guns.
Ash Can
@John Cole:
Reiterated, in block quote, for emphasis. The same qualities that made previous presidents “leaders” in the eyes of these journalistic carbuncles make Obama “arrogant.” Gee, I wonder why that is.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
It just occurred to me, did the Village Idiots ever accuse the lead members of the Cheney Regime of being arrogant?
Nope, didn’t think so.
Golly gee Beav, they sure missed the boat on that one.
Fucking wankers. All of em.
Ash
@Joe Beese: I don’t quite understand. Are you citing that joke as proof that Obama’s well-documented contempt for the village and cable idiots is some giant ruse?
AngusTheGodOfMeat
Kaplan is right. George Bush, for example, was a real leader.
For example, when he said, “I want Bin Laden dead or alive” and then a few weeks later said “I don’t care where he is, really” that was real leadership. Let people know that you are thinking outside the box, right?
And when Bush said that certain big problems “were something for the next president to worry about” that was good leadership. A good leader knows when to act and when to let the next president lead. That’s leaderiness we can believe in.
GregB
Samuelson is an insufferable cock.
-G
danimal
Isn’t Samuelson the deficit scold? He’s upset because the bill doesn’t fit into the “Dems are bad cuz of the deficit” mold. How dare he achieve a policy that increases coverage and decreases the deficit?
Gotta make it personal when there’s nothing else to attack.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
@Lolis:
It is a lot vomit inducing.
The WATB is one of the scariest creatures on earth. I think the ultimate manifestation is the Dick Cheney. That’s what can happen when the WATB turns his fear and misplaced anxiety into anger and aggression.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Real presidents make shit up in order justify the invasion of a country that poses zero threat to the U.S. while breaking off the pursuit the maniac who actually instigated a plan that resulted in the deaths of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
And then they strut around in flight suits with XtraBulgee(R) jocks.
@John Cole: This. Also.
Balconesfault
Arrogant seems to mean you actually believe that government can be a tool to solving people’s problems.
How dare you build a bridge across the river to help Joe get to work, instead of letting Joe work that out for himself?
licensed to kill time
They’re just green with envy.
DougJ
“Most of you covered me (pause)… All of you voted for me.”
No one in politics has contempt for people who vote the way they want them to.
That’s why Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff had nothing but kind, respectful words for evangelicals in their emails and private conversations.
simonee
Ha! Obama’s approach has yielded the most substantive reform of healthcare in a generation. Sure, he could his stuck his neck out some more, but he’s about to accomplish something no other president in recent times has been able to. They can all just STFU.
Napoleon
@DougJ:
Funny, I was just reading those e-mails in Max Blumenthal’s book last night.
Phoenix Woman
I like how Samuelson doesn’t say WHY the polling for Obama’s plan is tanking — namely, because the most popular part of it, the public option, was stripped out, leaving the bill without a way to effectively control insurance prices (just ask Massachusetts residents how much their insurance costs have risen under RomneyCare, which the Senate bill in its current form closely resembles), but with the presence of highly unpopular mandates (whose removal, by the way, would save the taxpayer money)
khead
You missed the best part Doug.
Shalimar
That didn’t make any sense, the only thing I got out of it is that Samuelson doesn’t like Obama personally. At least with Hamsher you can tell what specifically she doesn’t like and why. She might be wrong about whether Obama supported a public option in negotiations or not, and wrong about whether he supposedly stabbed liberals in the back, but at least it’s clear what she wanted the bill to look like.
I can’t tell what Samuelson wants. If the bill threatens the country’s long term interests, then what does Samuelson thing we should do instead?
J.W. Hamner
How much longer is Robert Samuelson going to work in Washington before someone tells him about Congress?
It’s all about Obama because Samuelson completely ignores the branch of government that actually wrote the legislation.
CMcC
You quote Samuelson: “He’s championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country’s long-term interests…. What it’s become is an exercise in political symbolism: Obama’s self-indulgent crusade to seize the liberal holy grail of “universal coverage.” What it’s not is leadership.”
In what value system, on what planet, is “universal coverage” — meaning access to good health care for all citizens (I would have said all human beings, but I’m trying to be realistic here) — not in a “country’s long-term interests”? Do conservatives really want to make this a “liberal holy grail”?
Then again, conservatives have degenerated into asking themselves, what country would Jesus invade (with borrowed money, of course) and who would Jesus torture.
Serious questions for conservatives: if “universal coverage” is merely a “liberal holy grail,” why was Terry Schiavo such a big deal? And who did you think was going to pay?
Meyer
I’m wondering that myself. In all seriousness, assuming you believe the CBO at all, what’s your fiscal issue with this bill?
Here, we’ve increased health insurance coverage by 30MM people and saved the tax payers about a trillion bucks over 20 years.
I can well understand the beefs from the left. This is a bend over for them. But from the fiscal conservatives?
MNPundit
Well he’s right in that whatever we’ve seen so far from Obama, leadership is about the farthest thing from it.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Fxd to account for wankery.
General Winfield Stuck
LOL. Harwood just said on MSNBC that “progressives” who are saying that this bill should be brought down “ought to have their heads examined’.
jeffreyw
Mrs J is baking cookies. Pics at 11
itsbenj
may I suggest that full-of-it WaPo columnists are more deserving or your rage than hippies…?
Maus
“bizarre”
It’s historic. The “niggers get angry” meme is hardly new, nor surprising.
Ignore the opinionators that exploit it.
Maus
I also agree that quotes should be posted and the attention-whores delinked so that we can avoid giving them any more traffic.
jenniebee
It’s part and parcel of the right wing cultural mythos of proud humility vs arrogant cooperation. Sarah Palin’s an excellent case study in this – check out her tweets sometime, or her book. She’s full of how the big crowds turning out for her are “humbling” (not nearly as humbling as the teeny groups turning out for McCain were for him, I’d imagine) and then last week blasted Copenhagen for “arrogance” – specifically the arrogance of believing that man can change his environment.
She may have tweeted that soon after her appearance in Utah so it’s not unlikely that the electricity that powered that tweet was generated by the Hoover Dam. Anyways, arrogance, etc.
TR
Yep. Samuelson hasn’t been worth linking to since … well, ever.
YellowJournalism
Who would have thought that arrogance means trying to get 30 million+ uninsured a chance at affordable health insurance?
Zifnab
@YellowJournalism: And humility means corporate tax cuts.
jeffreyw
If I claim these are the bestest cookies evah, does that make me arrogant too?
GReynoldsCT00
@jeffreyw:
oh yum, can we have some?
Libby
Bless you for not linking to it Doug. That is the first step to marginalizing these idiots.
jeffreyw
@GReynoldsCT00: Savin a couple for sandflea.
Robin G.
Doug, I have a hard time believing you didn’t know “arrogant” meant “uppity.” Was this just a brain fart, or some kind of Christmas Spirit-induced lapse in cynicism?
Stroszek
@Phoenix Woman:
While removing the mandate would save a small amount of money for the government, it would cause an immediate 60% jump in premiums for everyone who has/wants insurance. If you’re worried about political costs, causing an immediate, massive rise in premiums across the board would be a hell of a lot more damaging than giving young people a choice between subsidized insurance and a 2% tax hike. It would also cause a lot of collateral damage in terms of hindering the expansion of coverage.
jenniebee
@YellowJournalism: Yeah, they really do see it that way, actually. It’s “arrogant” to think that one man (forgetting, for now, the 300+ in the congress that are a little more than tangentially involved in this) could save 45,000 lives a year. Maybe if he blew some foreign shit up, but not like this.
It’s inseparable from the rest of the right wing ideology that cooperative effort is necessarily doomed and can’t do anything right because humans are sinful and there are all these parasites who won’t work except through threat of starvation and/or imprisonment. Of course, the more you hope to build and achieve, the more people you need working together to accomplish it, so progress and building and growth are necessarily unachievable and anybody who believes otherwise is arrogant to think they can overcome human nature. But it only takes one asshole to blow shit up, so destructive action is natural and humble.
GReynoldsCT00
@jeffreyw:
I got an awesome chocolate cookie recipe from the Food Network’s 12 Days of Christmas a few years ago. They look a lot like your photo.
Chocolate is my favorite food group.
Stefan
We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America’s long-term interests.
Like, say, invading Iraq….ok, bad example.
AhabTRuler
What we need is a link-aggregator that doesn’t actually have any links, and has synopses of the story at the not-linked site, maybe with some background on the subject.
Like a newspaper.
Brachiator
Disagree. The whole point of the InterTubes is to allow people to get to sources of information and opinion — without filters.
That said, I agree with other posters who rightly conclude that Samuelson could have saved everyone a lot of time by just calling Obama “uppity.”
Which, by the way, has never been an exclusively Republican thing.
General Winfield Stuck
@jeffreyw:
I will not click to see virtual chocolate cookies I lub. You evil man.
Stefan
What it’s become is an exercise in political symbolism: Obama’s self-indulgent crusade to seize the liberal holy grail of “universal coverage.”
When the entire rest of the developed world has “universal coverage” (why the scare quotes? Your guess is as good as mine) then it’s hardly a liberal holy grail, is it?
Rick Taylor
I think it’s about race.
__
Remember how Sotomayor, who graduated from Princeton cum laude, was derided as weak intellectually, and an affirmative action pick? Eventually you have to put two and two together.
dr. bloor
Partly about race, but Obama clearly doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and, well, our national media…
He’d also win the stenographers’ hearts and minds if he’d only come up with belittling, controlling nicknames for each of them.
jeffreyw
@GReynoldsCT00:
these are from a FN recipe:
triple chocolate cookies
jeffreyw
@General Winfield Stuck: bwahaha
DougJ
Doug, I have a hard time believing you didn’t know “arrogant” meant “uppity.
No, I think there’s more to it than that. This just had a different feel to it. It’s hard to quantify.
General Winfield Stuck
Senate wingnuts will play the Baby Jeevus card to thwart passing the HC out of the senate.
You can read between the lines of what he means.
AhabTRuler
@General Winfield Stuck: Yes, but Senate Wingnuts would also invoke the Baby Jeebus to explain there “hookers ‘n’ blow” budgets if they had to, so it’s not too surprising. ;-)
eemom
on Saturday, I was trying to figure out why I felt so lighthearted and free…….my brain so relieved of the burden of toxic bullshit that often irritates it in the morning………. and then I realized it was because the snowstorm had prevented the delivery of the WaPo.
The Sunday paper made it through, but I just left it sitting in the mound of snow on the driveway and let the dogs pee on it.
I think I’m on to something here……..
frankdawg81
If Clinton had been elected the meme would be moody and difficult to deal with
The Republicans say it & the liberal media is just so gosh darn polite that they wouldn’t dream of pointing out the obvious. Even when elected Republicans and their media mouthpieces have used the word ‘boy’ to describe the POTUS.
Almost makes me long for the days when “States Rights” was the code word. At least the media eventually got around to admitting that it was code for “we need to lynch a few of em from time to time else wise the Jews will start gettin ideas”
Robert
Um, wasn’t it actually Bush who reversed this with his tax cuts? They were popular in the short term but disastrous for the country in the long term. But, Samuelson didn’t have such a negative reaction to the tax cuts, writing in a 2001 Newsweek column:
Hoocoodanode.
Mari
@Meyer:
No, Liberman-Stupak will not provide 30m people with health care. Liberman-Stupak will force 30m people to spend up to 8% of their income on insurance that they can’t afford and won’t necessarily pay out if they ever get sick enough to need care.
Liberman-Stupak is taxation by a private party without representation or compensation. In other words, it’s theft.
MCA
I don’t read race into this like many of you – this is straight-up Republican anti-intellectualism in my eyes. Obama used big words on the campaign trail and wasn’t ashamed of his Harvard Law degree. So the (failed) meme began that he thought he was better than everyone else by being unapologetically intelligent and well read. Small, petty people can’t stand someone who makes the best of their potential and succeeds. Anyone who’s migrated upwardly on the socioeconomic scale, or left their small town to live somewhere where their talents can blossom, has experienced this. Republicans learned from Nixon that this jealousy is exploitable. Ergo those people are marked as arrogant. End of story.
Anya
As far as I can think Obama arrogance meme started with Andrew Sullivan and then it was pushed by different columnists.
July 10, 2008 Sully “The Hubris Of Obama?”
In his July 30, 2008 Washington Post column, Dana Milbank Accused Obama of hubris, to prove it he cropped quotes, inserted bunch false insinuations
“Barack Obama and Guarding Against Hubris” by Jackson Williams, posted on on HuffPo, July 31, 2008
MSNBC First Read, July 30, 3008 “OBAMA: THE HUBRIS FACTOR”
On that week I remember everyone using “hubris” to describe Obama or say, things like “some are critical of preserved hubris”
Tim I
The media elites despise President Obama’s arrogance in denying that it’s all about them.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@AhabTRuler: Bravo.
Zifnab
@General Winfield Stuck:
Senator Vitter has some diapers and a paddle, and is waiting in the coat room, if anyone is interested?
kormgar
Among the things that I still really like about Obama is his relative lack of arrogance (by presidential standards at least).
This is a man who thinks deeply about problems and then talks to his fellow citizens as if they were rational adults who are worthy of respect. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a president who did that.
I’m still mad as hell at him about some other things (mostly government secrecy, ongoing expansion of unaccountable executive power, etc) but overall I am still very impressed with him.
I don’t really see myself campaigning for him in 2012 the way I did in 2008 (unless he wins me back somehow), but I’d still rather have him be the president than any of the likely alternatives.
danimal
@General Winfield Stuck: The whole “pray for a senator to miss a vote” would be twisted into a call for murder if the parties were reversed. Sometimes I wish there were a Dem on the nooz that would indignantly say Senator Coburn wants Senator Byrd to die so that the HCR bill gets killed. An explicit charge that the GOP would have to deny. Put ’em on the defensive. That seems to have been the GOP game for decades and it works pretty well.
Jim
@Mari:
Liberman-Stupak is taxation by a private party without representation or compensation. In other words, it’s theft.
I don’t think you understand the whole “without representation” thing. We have representation. Shitty representation, but representation. Every single one of those assholes was elected.
tc125231
@danimal: It works great if you think “stewardship” means destroying that for which you were supposed to care.
cyntax
Just to be clear. This isn’t arrogant:
But a black guy in the Oval Office, who isn’t cleaning it and does speak in complete sentences, is arrogant.
Awesome.
Sly
@Mari:
It will force some people to buy insurance with a great deal of subsidies and the ability to participate in larger risk pools, thereby reducing costs, that will force insurers to spend 85% of premiums on care. It will exempt others for which those same subsidies would not make insurance affordable, and it would raise the limit underneath which those same people could apply for Medicaid.
Why do you hate
good argumentsAmerica so much?geg6
Personally, I think Obama’s leadership has been quite glaringly lacking on domestic and civil rights/constututional issues, but I don’t think this asshat would agree with my thinking there. However, if the idea of his arrogance is in any way based on his barely concealed contempt for the Village media, I applaud that, loudly and enthusiastically, and would encourage him to do it more often and with greater fervor. It’s frankly the very best stance he’s taken on just about anything.
policomic
What really kills me about this is that the people so eager to characterize Obama as “arrogant” were the same ones who kept telling us that George W. Bush was a down-to-earth, regular guy.
In spite of all the alleged “cultism” surrounding him (which is mostly an invention of his critics, rather than an accurate picture of his supporters), Obama has a hell of a lot more personal humility than either of the last two presidents. Though admittedly, that’s not saying much.
DC10
The arrogance meme (code: Uppity N) is widespread, with others buying into it, like Frank Rich, who frequently pushes it without any real basis. (Not to mention Rich’s last article repeating the ridiculous insulting attempts to draw stereotypical links from Obama’s presidency to Tiger Woods’ cheating on his wife, At least, Joe Klein, of all people, did a fair job refuting this lazy crap.) This is the same President who has been routinely criticized for “apologizing” too much for America’s past mistakes, for lowering himself too much to follow customs of “bowing,” for not being strong enough (a la Jimmy Carter) or not being assertive enough (actually expecting legislators to do their jobs). Based on his seemingly unending patience with disrespectful, uninformed, lying interviewers/reporters and members of Congress, he’s doesn’t seem nearly arrogant enough.
Ruemara
Maybe if the president would just have a barbeque and invite all these bloggers. One with a tire swing… while wearing a flight suit.
mcc
@Phoenix Woman: There are enough problems with this that I literally can’t point them all out without triggering balloon juice’s two-links-per-post spam filter. I will have to split this post in three.
You offer no evidence for this claim, and the evidence I’ve seen indicates it’s wrong. I mean, the public option consistently polls as being much more popular than the health care plan itself, and it’s probably accurate that it’s the most popular part of the plan.
But that other thing you say, that the reason why the polling for Obama’s plan is tanking is because the public option went away. Can you back that up in any way or do you just want it to be true? Everything I’ve seen has been pretty consistent that the lack of a public option constitutes a minority of the opposition to the bill– for the most basic demonstration if you go to Pollster’s roundup here and compare poll numbers before and after the public option was dropped, you only find about 5 to 10 % of the populace at maximum could be switching from favor to oppose based on whether the public option in specific makes it in or not. This is both much less than the amount that support dropped after the GOP’s intense smear campaign back around September, and also indicates that a minority of bill supporters were supporters conditionally on just the public option. The reason why the support for Obama’s plan is tanking is because the GOP has been extremely effective at spreading disinformation and fear about the bill, and has been at it for months and months; drops in support among the democratic base due to objections about the public option are a smaller effect.
Meanwhile, some incredibly recent polling (which I’m not sure I’d take seriously until there are some more polls to check it against) indicate the health care plan’s approval actually spiked once the Democrats finally got all 60 Senators on board.
mcc
Your statement here is also contradicted by available evidence. That is, you say that the public option was a way to control insurance prices, and that taking away the public option removes the way of controlling insurance prices. In fact the CBO repeatedly found that the public option, once it was moved to negotiated rates, did not have any impact positive or negative on insurance premiums; they found the public option would slightly lower the prices of private plans by stealing away the riskiest, most undesirable customers, but that the public option itself would have higher premium prices than a private plan would, leaving no net effect whatsoever on average premium prices and, it would seem, destroying any cost-controlling effect. You can see this in the CBO’s report on what happens to premium prices under Reid’s Nov. 18 bill (see page 5 for the CBO’s projections of what happens to premium prices under the bill, or the bottom of page 15 for their discussion of the public option’s effects) or the CBO’s findings after the public option was removed. The version of the public option that served as a check on insurance prices has been gone for a long time.
mcc
Here again you don’t offer any evidence that it’s actually possible to check against, and if we do look at evidence we don’t find what you want to find. For example, here’s an roundup of the effects of the Romney health care plan from the Cato institute; the Cato institute strongly opposes both the Romney health care plan and the idea of a health insurance “mandate”, so we can assume they will not sugarcoat its effects. Their own numbers, which they suggest, health insurance costs went up by 40% in Massachusetts from 2003-2008, whereas they went up by 33% in America as a whole. That’s it. Prices raised by 7% versus what would have happened anyway– and not all of that is due to the mandate, which is the component you’re trying to identify Romney with here. If we take the most pessimistic view of the Massachusetts data possible and say that the HCR bill will cause premiums to rise by 7% more than it would have otherwise, this is still less than the CBO projects premiums to decrease under the health care bill for the groups the bill actually covers.
les
@AhabTRuler:
I’m fascinated with this idea, and would like to subscribe to your…what did you say?…”newspaper.”
JD Rhoades
It’s all part of the dumbing down of America, where one of the worst things you can say about someone is “he thinks he’s so smart.” Even if someone really is smart, it’s a colossal sin to act like it.
Maus
with a full set of long-johns stuffed into his codpiece.
Ken
Terry Pratchett, in one of the Discworld books, said something like “The editorial column is always of interest, since it is based on the premise that the world would be a better place if it were run by journalists.”
mclaren
Anyone who states documented facts nowadays gets accused of “arrogance.” Anyone who proposes sensible solutions to pressing problems gets called “insane” and “dangerous.”
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Baffling Questions.