Ask yourself whose votes Joe Lieberman needs to win in 2012. He serves them. Anyone else can jump off a cliff. Or be pushed.
Archives for 2009
On HCR: Two Great American Traditions – Corn & Fusterclucking
In the December 14 New Yorker, Atul Gawande has another fascinating article on health-care-reform incrementalism. If genius lies in seeing the unexpected connections, it’s surely genius to compare our current broken, fragmented, frustrating medical-delivery systems with the state of American agriculture at the turn of the last century:
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the [proposed Senate] bill makes no significant long-term cost reductions. Even Democrats have become nervous. For many, the hope of reform was to re-form the health-care system. If nothing is done, the United States is on track to spend an unimaginable ten trillion dollars more on health care in the next decade than it currently spends, hobbling government, growth, and employment. Where we crave sweeping transformation, however, all the current bill offers is those pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet—here’s the interesting thing—history suggests otherwise.
At the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development…
Please read the whole article, if only to improve your mood. Gawande goes on to describe the gradual development of the USDA’s “scientific farming” innovations — one farm plot, one county, one pilot program at a time. It was inefficient, clumsy, wasteful, and duplicative. And yet, however slowly and painfully, it worked.
On HCR: Two Great American Traditions – Corn & FustercluckingPost + Comments (52)
Question
Now that Lieberman clinched the Monday morning headlines and will get the most attention on Morning Joe, what will drama queens John McCain and Ben Nelson do to get back in the news?
In the Niebuhrian sense
I’ve noticed that the word “Burkean” is slowly being replaced by “Niebuhrian” in certain circles, perhaps because the latter is harder to spell and therefore more impressive.
You all were very helpful with Burke. I now understand that his philosophy was essentially starbursts for Marie Antoinette. Can Niebuhr be summed up as succinctly? Does “Niebuhrian” mean more or less the same thing as “Burkean”?
Thanks in advance for your help with this.
The View From Your Couch
I seem to have solved my firefox problem- now my desktop will not connect to the internet.
Tech Question
Anyone running Windows Seven noticing a real problem with Firefox. Mine hangs all the time giving me the “not responding” stuff and I am about to say to hell with it and move to Chrome.
Repeat After Me
They are never going to vote for any health care bill.
They are never going to vote for any health care bill.
They are never going to vote for any health care bill.
They are never going to vote for any health care bill:
Two key senators criticized the most recent healthcare compromise Sunday, saying the policies replacing the public option are still unacceptable.
Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) both said a Medicare “buy-in” option for those aged 55-64 was a deal breaker.
“I’m concerned that it’s the forerunner of single payer, the ultimate single-payer plan, maybe even more directly than the public option,” Nelson said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Lieberman said Democrats should stop looking for a public option “compromise” and simply scrap the idea altogether.
Lieberman and Nelson were two of the ten Senators who crafted the god damned compromise. They are now shitting all over the compromise THEY crafted and saying it is a non-starter.
And if you ditch the compromise and the public option, they will find something else to grandstand about. For Nelson, he’ll be back to abortion. Who knows what Lieberman will start whining about, but I am sure Marshall Wittman is, as we speak, cooking up some fatuous bullshit.
They are both in the pockets of insurance and other industries who do not want this bill passed in any shape or form, so they will keep making excuses. They are not going to vote for any health care bill. Period. You might as well be taking input and courting votes from Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn.
And the fact that no one in the Democratic party has the balls to call Nelson on his bullshit is just disgusting.
*** Update ***
My bad. Apparently Lieberman was asked to be part of the group but declined. Probably cut into his time furrowing his brow while mugging for cameras.