True, if Republicans had played ball, they would have been in a position to eliminate the public option, demand deficit neutrality, and so forth … but they had Democratic centrists to do that work for them, and they won all those battles, to some extent at least, without having to vote for the final bill. Whereas winning the larger war, over the design of the legislation, was probably beyond their capabilities whatever negotiating strategy they took.
According to the CBO, the Senate bill saves 130 billion over the first decade. Isn’t that BETTER than deficit neutral? Or are we just aiming to meet the soft bigotry of low expectations we’ve come to expect from the GOP?
Just Some Fuckhead
Either a heart or a brain. I get you two confused.
Ian
Chunky Reese Witherspoon
EarBucket
It’s this weird thing where everyone’s required to pretend that Republicans are better at fiscal responsibility than Democrats, even though Bush blew through Clinton’s budget surplus and turned into a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit. You could put the CBO score in Douthat’s face and he probably wouldn’t even be able to see it. His brain would just edit it out of reality and he’d lecture you on why liberal taxing and spending is wrong.
Just Some Fuckhead
Douthat, claiming Republicans got everything they wanted from Democrats. On the pyre, fatboy!
Mark
I was at a party on Saturday where they were passing out the drugs that Ross takes.
asiangrrlMN
You’re missing that it’s Douthat. ‘Nough said.
beltane
I like what Douthat is saying. Since centrist Democrats are so powerful, and since Republican concerns are ignored, the Republicans may as well slide quietly into oblivion. That’s probably not what he means, but still, I like it.
Zifnab
What you don’t seem to understand is that Douthat continues to have no flipping clue what he’s talking about. He sees “$800 billion health care bill…” and stops reading, while you have the common sense to get all the way to “… paid for with savings in Medicare, cuts in pharmacy expenditures, and a tax on some insurance policies.”
Douthat wants all the savings to get plowed into deficit reduction, so we can cover the price of these outrageously expensive wars. Health insurance subsidies and health care research programs are a waste of taxpayer money, dontcha know.
itsbenj
Why didn’t they take that extra $130 billion and make sure the subsidies were adequate? Would still be deficit “neutral”. Why pretend the Repugs are going to give the Dems credit for anything? Budgetary savings!? They’ll just say it’s imaginary. Why not put the money to good use instead of catering to the knuckle-draggers?
Lev
I miss The Atlantic’s version of Douthat. This new version consistently sucks. I even took him off my RSS reader.
beltane
@Just Some Fuckhead: Sounds like he’s trying to declare victory while waving the white flag of surrender. Douthat really sucks at the role of conservative pundit; Kristol was so much more optimistic and exuberant in his wankery.
jenniebee
I don’t get it either. McCain could have gotten credit for the cuts in Medicare that he, after all, called for in the campaign. Shit, he could have insisted that the cuts all be in an amendment with his name on it, if he’d wanted it. Instead, the victory for repubs is that they were powerless to stop death panels and commies and the end of America as we know it. Now that’s a bumper sticker!
Just Some Fuckhead
@beltane: He’s prolly trying to sour your sweet, sweet victory.
Sentient Puddle
This bill is good news for conservatives!
Jules
I always read Douthat as DoucheHat….
SteveinSC
Its the Goldfinger Sanction. The main game is to regain seats and whether the reform was a not just money neutral, but turned a profit, the republicans would try to kill it–as Jim DeMint said, it would be Obama’s Waterloo. That their DINO friends make sure the HI Lobby is protected is just icing. Now the strategy will be to crank up the Teabaggers to find death and destruction in the signed bill.
Lev
@jenniebee: Well, they COULD claim that they got the Death Panels out of the bill. I hope that the conference committee includes the end-of-life counseling in the final bill anyway. Maybe call it the Sarah Palin End-of-life provision.
Wait a minute…
arguingwithsignposts
Douthat. The NYT could do much better with those dollars. Sigh. Real journalists getting laid off all over the nation and this douchbag keeps a column.
jibeaux
If the Republicans had played ball, they could’ve gotten a kabillionty dollars shoveled into their states instead of Nebraska, but they would have to have been willing to be on the right side of history. Obviously, this is not a compromise a principled conservative is willing to make.
Zifnab
Yup.
Douthat is full of shit. Per usual.
SATSQ Vol XXI, Chapter 421
qwerty42
Sullivan used this part of Douthat’s piece:
Left it alone for 15 years, now concerned about needing more time to “do it right”. Yeah.
I do think the choices the Republicans made this year will come back to haunt them, but I’m not getting paid by the NYT for my opinions, so …
Sly
Douthat Translator GO:
Republican Senators might have been able to negotiate a bill that was more favorable to our terms, but the psycho shitbirds in our party, which I will take great strides not to mention at all, would have massacred them and feasted on their bloody entrails for doing so.
Zifnab
@arguingwithsignposts:
Not a bug. A feature.
TaosJohn
Meanwhile, in a clear sign that insurance companies hate the bill, their stock prices are shooting up.
MattF
Oh, poopie-doopie… You keep letting stupid facts get in the way of the deeper, truer, higher understanding of issues that Douthat possesses.
Stooleo
I just cant read FDL anymore.
geg6
As is always the case, Ross Douthat is talking out of his pasty, fat ass just like he did when he told the fairy tale of his adventure with Chunky Reese. If Douthat ever got lucky enough to get NEAR a girl beautiful enough to resemble Reese Witherspoon, chunky or not, chances were she laughed in his face at the thought of fucking the pasty fat boy with the sanctimonious whine. I know that is how it really went down and I think of that every time someone says what the hell is Douchehat saying. Just make it the opposite of whatever he says and you probably will have the right picture. I don’t have like the bill to know that Ross is lying about it.
Lev
@TaosJohn: Because companies set their own stock prices, of course!
Eh, insurance companies will probably make more money when the whole thing is over. But they’ll not be able to cut corners in the same way they used to.
cyntax
Republican politicians can totally phone it in?
…I dunno where he’s going with this.
Just Some Fuckhead
@TaosJohn:
Suckers, all of ’em. I’m buying stock in the IRS.
asiangrrlMN
@Sly: Pure poetry.
@geg6: Thanks for the visual. Just what I needed. An image of Douthat’s pasty white ass.
arguingwithsignposts
More Douthat idiocy:
Yeah, because Medicare is such a shite program. sigh.
And the GOP’s “remake”? Really? Does this guy even live on the same planet?
ETA: note there are no comments on his “blog” so ppl can’t say “sir, you are an idiot.”
Zandar
Douthat is stupid. (Also, grass is green.)
The thing is nobody in the beltway actually believes the 130 billion savings because they know there’s going to be at least that much graft in the program to make it deficit neutral, effectively.
mantis
In circular firing squad news, Hamsher has taken to flat out lying about the HCR bill. I’ve had enough of so-called “progressives” who have no interest in progress, only self-righteous indignation and abject failure.
Sentient Puddle
@TaosJohn:
I don’t exactly get this point. Are you saying that the stock prices of insurance companies are a more important factor in the bill than the fact that some 30 million more people (or whatever the crap that number is) get insured?
MikeJ
I think he’s saying that if we fail to punish those we disapprove of it doesn’t matter how good the bill is.
mr. whipple
@mantis:
What’s left for someone like her to do? She could thank the troops for fighting like hell and saying that even though they didn’t get what they wanted, the fight was still worthwhile and important.
Instead, we get double down on crazy.
It’s kind of like how the GOP reacted after the last election.
John Cole
@TaosJohn: Please go read Al Giordano.
beltane
@mantis: Come New Year’s, Hamsher will be out there demanding to see Obama’s long-form birth certificate. Or maybe she’ll team up with Larry Johnson to uncover the long-suppressed Whitey Tape.
Sentient Puddle
I was pretty inarticulate in what I just said, so I’ma turn it over to Ezra to clarify my point:
Ana Gama
Yep, I agree. It will be the frosting on the 15-years-of-neglect-cake-of-shit they served.
WaterGirl
@Sentient Puddle: I thought the implication was that we passed a bill the insurance companies like, which would mean that we got it through but it is not a good bill.
Rock
It is taken as a matter of faith that a Dem healthcare bill must involve lots of taxpayer money being wasted. Everyone from people on the streets on up to NY Times op-ed people believe this. I doubt John Q. Public or Douthat actually know any facts about the cost of a bill that does not fully exist yet. But they are sure it is not cost-effective as it is not a “free-market” solution.
John Cole
@MikeJ: Once Lieberman was on board, certain people would never agree to the bill. This is the Ned Lamont campaign all over.
Martian Buddy
Out of morbid curiosity, if the progressives clamoring “kill the bill!” have their way, what’s their plan B? Is the entrenched opposition just supposed to vanish into the aether when they hit the reset button?
ds
Oh John, don’t feign naivety on this.
It’s been obvious for DECADES that when Republicans talk about the “deficit” they’re not talking about the actual balance of revenues and outlays of the government.
The “deficit” for them is a concept that relates to their distaste for social spending on groups of people they don’t like.
Thus, cutting taxes for wealthy people doesn’t add to the deficit. Starting two wars and doubling the Pentagon budget doesn’t add to the deficit.
But, of course, spending on health care for the uninsured adds to the deficit, no matter how it is actually financed. I’m pretty sure most of them are convinced that gay marriage adds to the deficit.
Lindsay Graham just went on TV claiming that Medicaid is program only for black people. Literally. The main health care safety net is a blacks-only program. That’s just how they think, and they’re sticking with it.
mcc
I think what D-hat is saying is that Republicans could have negotiated to end the public option and get deficit neutrality. But they didn’t, but that’s okay (D-hat says) because instead the public option ended and deficit neutrality was put in the bill solely because of the result of internal interactions within the Democratic party.
For some reason, this is supposed to be interpreted as the Republicans being genius tacticians who masterfully managed to get deficit neutrality into the bill without even leaving any external visible signs they were trying to do such, and not just yet another sign that Democrats care about the deficit and the Republicans don’t.
John Cole
For the record, New Rule: If your blog spends all god damned day telling everyone how much Obama and the Democrats suck, you are not allowed to cite polls telling us Democrats are demoralized.
joeinoklahoma
yes, even Douthat realizes that the GOP can count on Dems to do their work for them.
ds
They’re going to join arms with teabaggers and together smash the corrupt centrists in both parties to pass single payer!
Because teabaggers are all about social justice. And judging from their signs, they and Jane Hamsher both seem to love blackface.
xian
I’ve been waiting for them to pivot from “deficit-busting” to “tax and spend.”
I just read something, perhaps Timothy Noah on Slate, saying that CBO rules suggest that if the medical-loss ratio had been pegged at 90% CBO would have had to treat the insurers as part of the government!?
harlana peppper
@Martian Buddy: Um, mebbe come up with a bill that actually provides competition to insurance companies and take away the mandate so people won’t be forced to buy crappy insurance whose premiums will continue to rise? That would be a beginning.
beltane
@Martian Buddy: They feel that defeating the bill will empower progressives at the expense of DC Democrats like Rahm Emanuel. Perhaps the defeat of the bill would result in Rahm’s firing. And then the president would be so weakened that he would be vulnerable to a primary challenge, but not from Howard Dean who has been bought-off and now supports the bill. This will cause the country to WAKE UP and vote in huge progressive majorities that will institute single-payer because everyone knows that’s how things work in this country.
Have I missed anything?
ds
His argument is based on some faulty assumption that the GOP cares at all about the nation’s finances, or governing at all.
Reducing the actual deficit is NOT a GOP goal. Every Republican president since the conservatives took over has dramatically increased the deficit.
Deficit reduction is a Democratic goal, and they won it against the objections of the entire right wing shrieking about how Obama was going to kill grandma to save on costs.
cleek
@TaosJohn:
go look at a 5 year chart of their prices (Aetna, for example – be sure to look at the 5 year view. also, you an add other stocks to the graph: “UNH” is United Health Care, for example).
you might find it interesting to learn that they are shooting up so much that they are barely back to where they were this time last year. and even that leaves them far below their price this time in 2007.
but, i guess “shooting up, compared to last week” is a lot more exciting than “inching back up after an 18 month pounding”, especially when you’re looking to wag fingers.
Just Some Fuckhead
.. the boat?
cleek
@beltane:
i always operate under the assumption that any plan that requires the country to “WAKE UP!” is a plan that was made by a crank.
Grand Obstructionist Party
Everybody knows the health care debate has become more and more contentious, and dominated by a Republican parliamentary effort to delay the debate. But an under-appreciated aspect of this whole controversy — exceedingly rare, if not unprecedented — is the fact that it’s even affected defense spending, with Senate Republicans having worked to hold that up, too!
Republicans blocking defense spending? Sounds desperate to me.
How about this clip by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse?
youtube.com/watch?v=tAHJt5b5Ex4&feature=player_embedded#
Martian Buddy
@ds:
One of Erick the Erick’s contributors actually has a dire warning up about the dangers of collaborating with the enemy. I draw a small measure of consolation from the fact that they’re too paranoid about commie-nazi Dems corrupting their essence to even form a temporary coalition to advance their agenda.
(Edited to fix blockquote and link.)
namekarB
@Sentient Puddle:
Exactly. And why did not John file this under that category? He needs to hone his Librarian skills.
Persia
@Mark: Did you see chunky Reese Witherspoon?
Morbo
Sweet Mary in a condom, you’re reading his blog now, too? I thought his column was bad enough; you, sir, are some kind of masochist.
Zifnab
@John Cole:
Lieberman’s precondition for getting on board was “kill the public option”. I think you’re causality is seriously flawed here. Lieberman is a jackass because he single-handedly killed the hallmark of the bill, just to show that he could.
He was at the far right of the Democratic Party, demanding the central focus of debate as his personal scalp, in exchange for the last vote needed to secure moving the bill out of the Senate.
But yeah, this is just about Lamont in ’06.
Comrade Mary
Not content to let Tom Coburn subtly allude to the need for Byrd’s death, Confederate Yankee sinks to his usual standards. (Link goes to Sully’s extract, which includes a link to the original, which I am NOT putting here.)
Keith G
@geg6:
@arguingwithsignposts:
To me, Douthat’s work is noteworthy by it absence of human passion or maybe I should say humane concern. Writing about HCR, he dwells on the political, on the horse race. He does not even attempt a nod at the notion that there are people who are in trouble and who need help. I know he went to a pricey prep school and on to Harvard, but so did a Kennedy or two so I am thinking that it is not inconceivable that he might have a scintilla or two of human empathy that could spill out into his evaluation of reforming how we do health care.
Instead, he seems just to be another kid of privilege writing about how Republicans can preserve privilege.
Zifnab
@cleek:
What happens if it is predicated on the public no longer being sheeple?
gwangung
@Zifnab:
Might work only if they’re counting on only 5-10% to do that.
Meyer
Sure, it now looks like reform will pass. It is now possible to assess the impact on their businesses (moderate, but liveable), so their prices have returned to about where they were in 2007. The market hates uncertainty more than anything else, and those guys had uncertainty.
That said, who cares? I mean, seriously, I hate the health insurers with the white hot passion of a supernova (I’m an employer, I deal with them every freakin’ year, and it is always a bend-over-grease-up fest for me, so you really cannot imagine how I hate these guys.) But. I *want* them to make a profit. I want them to have cost controls and I want them to look at those control and say to themselves, I know how to drive down costs so I can make the entire 15% I am now allowed to make as pure profit. And then they can all pay themselves $200MM a year, so long as they drive down my costs, cover everyone, stop with the shitty policies and earn my business.
The current bill looks like it at least starts to get them aligned that way. We’ll see.
A Mom Anon
@Comrade Mary:
Jesus Wept.
Honest to gawd,there is no such thing as compassion or changing your mind once you realize you were wrong(like Byrd and his association with the kkk) with these nitwits is there? I’m often left wondering WTF happened to people like this,because no one is born being this nasty and disgusting.
beltane
@Comrade Mary: They should be careful what they wish for. Robert Byrd has been in the Senate so long that it is likely his ghost will haunt the chamber for centuries to come. The Republicans have enough problems without adding malevolent spectral enemies to the list.
Martian Buddy
@harlana peppper: Believe me, I can sympathize with wanting a better bill. The question remains, however, as to how that better bill is supposed to advance in the face of opposition whose answer to health care reform is “KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!” The opposition has had a year to see exactly which scaremongering tactics resonate best with the public. They have access to all the same dilatory tactics they used with the current bill, and now they have the advantage of knowing where the fault lines in the House and the Senate are (there would be a round 2 with the Stupak amendment, for example.) How does restarting the process resolve any of that?
Comrade Jake
So what’s the over-under on how long the HCR circular firing squad will last for the left? I give it another couple of months.
qwerty42
We all need to take a look at what the other side is saying even now. Sullivan comments on a recent Kristol article advocating endless fighting against the administration, and concludes with
I believe that all of this will fail, though it may serve well in the short run. I believe Kristol and his colleagues see it that way too.
Sentient Puddle
@A Mom Anon:
Unless the person doing wrong is a Republican, of course.
gwangung
Given that the left have been the primary practitioners of the circular firing squad for the past three decades, you are optimistic indeed.
arguingwithsignposts
God, shoot me now…
mcc
This entire site is basically a big health care open thread now, right?
Someone I know on IM just claimed that he just saw Howard Dean go on MSNBC and endorse the bill, based on the changes made last Friday. I’d be curious if anyone else knows anything about that.
Demo Woman
@mcc: OMG, Now Joe will say he can’t support it cuz Dean does..
Rhoda
I don’t think Republicans realize how effed up they are right now. Health care reform that covers 94% of all Americans, reduces the deficit, and creates insurance reforms is going to pass without any Republican votes. The Democrats will have done this alone. And the democrats will build on this to argue for more reform.
The Republicans will have stood in the way of the stimulus, financial reform, health care reform, and climate change legislation.
The Party of No sounds good as a bumper sticker; but no one wants to vote for the wacko that isn’t going to be there for them. Democrats will have gotten something huge done come the state of the union and they’ll run on getting it done and argue they need more help since the Republicans filibuster everything.
I think that’s a message that can work in 2010; especially coupled with the Republicans are Bush and they screwed the country thing.
Tsulagi
Yeah, and the war will pay for itself too.
Have you read the CBO scoring? Fair number of assumptions affecting projected savings. Like revenues of $150B from an excise tax on those who have unpatriotically good plans. Of course no one could predict insurers could pass along those taxes to employers in increased premium which might have the effect of employers downgrading their plans to avoid those costs. Nope.
Also counts on a 23% hit to Medicare payment rates to physicians in 2011 that won’t be changed. While noting in the past legislative and/or administrative action frequently has put off such reductions. Also like the assumption that due to increased productivity you can count on the cost of many health care services to be below the rate of inflation. No doubt.
When do we get to see the new Mission Accomplished banners?
Barry
John Cole: “According to the CBO, the Senate bill saves 130 billion over the first decade. Isn’t that BETTER than deficit neutral? Or are we just aiming to meet the soft bigotry of low expectations we’ve come to expect from the GOP?”
As has been pointed out above, Douthat’s a liar – and that’s giving him credit for actually knowlingly lying, rather than simply being a fool.
Second, the GOP is a pack of liars.
Third, the GOP (and the centrist dems and L-maggot) are the sort of people who have happily spent trillions of $ on the rich, on waste and on destruction, but whine about spending pennies on doing some good in this world.
This is important – they *like* wasting money and enriching the rich and killing poor people and destroying their meager possession. They *hate* when the government is used for good.
Once you understand that, most of their actions make sense.
thomas Levenson
Douthat is an ignorant and uneducable hack. He is no gentleman either — the “chunky RW” stuff is the sort of thing that should earn him sneers till the day he finally shuts up. And he is either or both a fantasist or a witting propagandist for the worst elements of village power. This sentence is the tell:
They didn’t, because there are no “free-market, cost effective” solutions to the combined problems of health care cost and access. Everyone who actually pays attention to policy knows this, just as they know that the very large for-profit interests in the health care business rely on systematic distortions from the magic-pony ideal of an Ec. 10 “perfect” market to secure immense riches from a product that is, in essence, human misery.
Douthat either (a) knows this and prefers not to dwell on such uncomfortable, nay, even un-Jesus like thoughts or (b) has (deliberately?) chosen to remains sufficiently ignorant enough of how health care actually works that he can say these things with a straight face.
Because I aspire to be a better man than he, I can say that I hope he never has to confront in his own or his family’s experience the rude awakening that so many others have.
qwerty42
@thomas Levenson: …They didn’t, because there are no “free-market, cost effective” solutions to the combined problems of health care cost and access. Everyone who actually pays attention to policy knows this,…
I agree; I am somewhat surprised that the Republicans, with their penchant for magical thinking, did not do this maybe 6 years ago and claim it was working based on metrics only they believed in. I mean, it worked so well with other stuff (at least they still believe so many fantastical things); the level of denial is deep.
les
@Sentient Puddle:
No, see, Aetna stock is almost up to where it was a year ago, so obviously HCR legislation is a massive give away to insurance companies. The stupid is strong in this argument; yeah, insurance companies are going to add customers. They are also going to have to quit fucking those customers quite so egregiously, they’re looking at forced limits on percentage of premiums going to overhead (which, ya know, includes profit, also) and once they’re getting serious gov’t subsidy dollars, taxpayers and congresscritters are going to be peering at them at lot more closely. The “bailout for insurance” arguments are in underpants gnome territory.
les
@cleek:
Geeze, people who read fast(er than me) are annoying. Also.
Martin
So, Ross is saying that Democrats actually accomplish everything Republicans promise.
So why do we need Republicans, then?
Martin
@TaosJohn:
The market hates uncertainty. Now that the Senate and House bill are known, investors know what they are investing in. I doubt that investors care much about the direct impact on the insurers, rather they’re focusing on the fact that nothing much will happen to them in the near term, so business as usual for a little while.
justcorbly
It’s rather telling that Douthat thinks the Blue Dogs are “Democratic centrists”.
Xanthippas
Yeah okay, but what these people who seem to be saying that complete opposition to health care reform was a good move for Republicans politically keep missing, is the fact that a few more seats in the mid-terms is a long way from being a majority party again.
Sly
@justcorbly:
In Douthat’s world, where centrism is the point where the extremes of the right and left cancel one another out, kind of like a political Lagrange Point (nerd alert), it all makes perfect sense. It’s simple and neat and explains everything and is completely wrong.
Ruemara
@Martian Buddy:
Been asking that for the past week. So far, no answers but plenty of suggestions that I am pro-corporations or an O-bot.
Sly
@ds:
Par for the course. Jeff Sessions tried to exploit Katrina as a justification for abolishing the estate tax. Large numbers of black people drowning? Save the wealthy.
The GOP doesn’t have a race problem. No sireeeeee….
Martian Buddy
@Sly: Someone on LGF was saying that they were forwarded a particularly charming photoshop of Obama shining Palin’s shoes. No subtext there, you betcha.