Why isn’t this story getting more attention? 
Michael Moore (who seriously pissed me off last week) has a diary up on Huffington Post, talking about the health insurance industry’s smear campaign against him when Sicko came out.
Essentially, a bunch of big ass health insurance giants like Cigna, Humana, and United Health, banded together in order to lessen the impact they feared Michael Moore’s film Sicko would have on the public’s perception of the Grand Ol’ USA’s Shitty Ass Healthcare System. These companies formed a front group and funneled a bunch of money into an effort to smear him professionally and personally. They pledged to “push him off a cliff,” so to speak.
I don’t know if you remember, but when Sicko came out, there was a huge kerfuffle over whether or not the statistics he used were accurate, and whether or not he made shit up, and whether or not he’d ever eaten vegetable or had sex in an airport bathroom stall. (Oh, you know I had to make some sort of joke. It’s practically obligatory when discussing Michael Moore.)
According to Moore, the smear campaign failed insofar as the movie went on to become the third highest-grossing documentary in all the land since the beginning of time, but the campaign did put a dent in the growing movement for socialamist medicinez:
Yesterday, on the TV and radio show Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman, the former Vice President of CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, revealed that CIGNA met with the other big health insurers to hatch a plan to “push” yours truly “off a cliff.”
The interview contains new revelations about just how frightened the health industry was that Sicko might ignite a public wave of support for “socialized medicine.” So the large health insurance companies came together over a common cause: Stop the American people from going to see Sicko — and the way to do that was to cause some form of harm to me (either personally, professionally or… physically?).…
Potter believes his work to defame Sicko succeeded, as the film didn’t end up posting Fahrenheit 9/11 grosses. To be clear, Sicko went on to become the 3rd largest grossing documentary of all time at that point. And as the release of Sicko in June of 2007 was the first time since the defeat of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare bill in 1994 that the issue of health insurance was brought to the forefront of the national media, I believe it helped to reignite the issue during the 2008 election year by exposing millions of Americans to the truth about the health insurance industry. More than one person on Capitol Hill will admit that Sicko was a big help in rallying public support for the compromise bill that eventually passed earlier this year. But I agree, their smear campaign was effective and did create the dent they were hoping for — single payer and the public option never even made it into the real discussion on the floor of Congress.
So there you have it. By all means, keep hating Obama for murdering the public option in cold blood. It’s your right. But maybe think about how much is at stake when it comes to healthcare reform and how the richity riches will do whatever it takes to make sure they get theirs, including creating and funding an entire movement of mostly idiots led by the Grand Wizardress of Idiocy herself (you know who I’m talking about), and including personally going after a filmmaker out of fear that the people in this country will, at some point, pull their heads out of their collective asses and realize that the one single-minded goal the Republican party is to make sure that the richity riches stay rich. That’s why they want to repeal healthcare which, in the long term, will reduce the deficit, while extending the Bush tax cuts to the richity riches, thereby adding 700 billion dollars to the deficit. They can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense. So they are just hoping you stay stupid.
But you’re not going to stay stupid, are you?
Of course you’re not. Because you’re not that stupid.
[cross-posted at ABLC]
Bulworth
because the media is more interested in Charley Rangel and the Democrats “changing the rules” and electing an assistent minority leader or assistant minority whip or something.
Culture of Truth
“Angelina Jolie Chased Out of Bosnia”
geg6
Right on, ABL. Right on.
I can never say this enough. My own Dem congresscritter is a former lobbyist for UPMC, which, in addition to being a great research hospital and training top-notch nurses and doctors, is also a health insurance provider. Guess which way he voted on ACA?
Gordon Schumway
Dear ABL,
Have you ever thought of hiring an illustrator to add some drawings to your posts? I’m going to start some sort of monetary collection so we can fund this for the good of humanity!
Martin
Obama should give Potter one of those Medal of Freedom deals. This country would feel quite a bit different if we had 100 more of that guy.
Southern Beale
Well, this isn’t a surprise. Remember that right-wing California GOP-affiliated group Move America Forward? Pro-war group founded by Howard Kaloogian and Melanie Morgan? The name a direct take on “MoveOn.org?” They were formed originally to protest Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 movie. Tried to pressure theaters and theater chains into not showing the film. Published names and phone numbers of theaters. We all know how THAT turned out … epic FAIL! They actually drummed up MORE attention to the film, convincing theater chains there was big $$ to be made by showing it.
Moore has always been a target by the professional right, but I wonder how effective their attacks really are. In 2004 I was involved with a group that brought Moore to Nashville to speak, we ended up drawing over 7,000 people for a Kerry fundraiser. We kept hearing from groups like Protest Warrior (remember them?) that they were going to picket the venue. Well, four protestors showed up. FOUR. It was absofucking hilarious.
Capri
The criticism about Obama and health care bill, which is the criticism about him in general, is that he doesn’t pander to his base. He goes straight to what he thinks is going to work, and saves the “bully pulpit” steps his followers want to hear, so that they can say that at least he tried.
The GOP has no such problems. They can run on abolishing the Department of Education in order to stoke up their voters, then say that was just one of those things people say during a campaign the second after the votes come in.
Like so much, the best approach is probably somewhere in the middle.
dr. bloor
@Capri:
More precisely, he goes straight to what he thinks he can get. Which is unfortunate, because he’ll never know what he left on the table.
If he actually thought the stew that ended up in the reform bill is going to work, we’re in big trouble.
geg6
@Capri:
After the last 30 years here in the US, you can actually say that with a straight face?
Seriously?
Lee from NC
@dr. bloor:
Exactly. He gave up the public option before everyone had sat down at the table to begin bargaining. Whether he would have gotten it or not (probably not) he gave up the chip before the hand was even dealt. To mangle a metaphor or two.
Southern Beale
@Capri:
You know, call it pandering if you want but it looks more to me like the Dems just caving on every fucking issue. We never even have the damn debate, we never get to even discuss things like, oh, what “single payer” really is.
The big joke about this is that even the fucking REPUBLICANS expected the Democrats to float single payer! Remember Betsy Kulman? Rick Scott sent her to Britain to interview people about the National Health Service, then selectively edit the interview to make it sound like the British totally hate the NHS and blame it for killing their loved ones.
That might have been useful except we never even saw those ads because single payer was never on the table, so they spent all of that time and money on a campaign they never even needed.
bemused
Hmm. In the Huffpo piece, Moore teased about a felony affecting the success of Sicko and to stay tuned to his website. Well, that has me curious.
bemused
@Martin:
I know I’d feel a lot better if we had a hundred or more visible like him.
Southern Beale
You know, in re-reading my Betsy Kulman post from August 2009, I was reminded of this question:
Wonder if anyone has looked into that yet?
sherifffruitfly
“Because you’re not that stupid.”
Uh…. you realize you’re talking to Americans, right?
Sarcastro
Like so much, the best approach is probably somewhere in the middle.
If I may give you a few of examples of how well this works;
“You say black people are humans, they say they’re not. How ’bout we go to the middle… three fifths of a human.”
“Let’s make Kansas a free state and Missouri a slave state!”
“Perhaps if we gave him Czechoslovakia…”
liberal
Let’s be clear here: we’re talking about government owned or controlled medical insurance, not medicine.
(IMHO medicine itself should be socialized, like in Britain, but that’s not the same as socializing insurance.)
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Southern Beale: The Blue Dogs are Republican-lite. That is, within the Democratic party there are elected representatives that will fight tooth and nail for the same things that Republicans do (Ben Nelson anyone?). They campaigned in the midterms on their opposition to Obama’s policies. Many of those Blue Dogs lost but some got reelected or newly elected (see Manchin, West Virginia, or Altmire, Pennsylvania).
I don’t see how you get things passed without acknowledging that reality. So do we want to be purists like the Republicans have been with their moderates and send our conservatives packing? I’m sure there could be a viable third party filled with Republican moderates and Democratic conservatives but it hasn’t formed just yet.
By the way, I’m frustrated at the Blue Dogs but recognize that they are needed to maintain a winning coalition (otherwise, Dems just give up on many purple and red states).
Allan
Olbermann had Potter on last night, and said that he would have Moore and Potter on together next week. Should be good television.
Rhoda
I genuinely don’t know what the fuck to think about all the progressive anger over the health care reform bill. The amount of money that went up against this legislation was AMAZING and then after it passes they spend another half billion to kill any potential “hey, the world didn’t end maybe HRC wasn’t bad we should do more” feelings.
And the corporations that would actually benefit from reform; didn’t step up because it’s to their benefits to nurture and anti-regulatory feelings in this country so they can pull their own shit.
When folks say Obama left x, y, or z on the table I say bullshit. He had to fucking claw every single soul that will get subsidized health insurance and to force insurance companies to spend their money on INSURANCE. It’s insane. But ya know what, it is what it is.
England created their NIH in the aftermath of WWII and the shattered country had to join together because no one had a pot to piss into. That’s how it happened. In Canada, it was a decades long fight to create basically universal medicare that started in the aftermath of the great depression and WWII. They had a socialist government, however, so it’s not the same. Truman tried at the same time as Douglas to get us universal health care as did FDR but a combination of racism and a libertarian bent basically killed it.
If in the aftermath of WWII and in the midst of the Great Depression we still couldn’t get to universal health care; I don’t know why the fuck people felt Obama would make it happen.
Citizen Alan
This strawman bores me beyond words. Most people who are still mad at Obama (I said, most — Firebaggers are their own species) aren’t mad because he personally killed the public option. We’re well aware of the powerful corporate interests that wanted to kill the public option. What we’re mad about it that he surrendered preemptively on the issue while claiming otherwise in his public remarks. What we’re mad about is that he seems to have accepted that he, being merely the President of the United States, is impotent before the Big Money interests that oppose him so there’s no sense in even trying. What we’re mad about is that his presidency so far seems to provide strong evidence that our democracy has failed and that we live in a plutocracy in which the needs, desires and hopes of anyone not one of the super-rich are irrelevant.
Personally, what I’m mad about is that right now, I can’t afford to move to another country, because I really don’t have a lot of hope for this one.
Zifnab
@Capri:
The GOP would abolish public education in a second if they thought they had the votes. But they do this will-he-won’t-he dance straight through the elections. To the moderates, the GOoPer just wants reform. To the rabid base, he wants teachers’ heads on pikes. And whenever the media calls him on it (which is damn rare now), he dances around saying every quote is out of context while he blasts away at the reporters for being so mean.
The GOP has no problems because it is a party founded without any kind of ethical code, and a base willing to swallow whatever swill it feeds them.
KG
The Grand Wizardress of Idiocy? Did Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage acquire another title?
Suck It Up!
hmmm…..could be he knows who and what he’s working with?
pretty amazing to watch the left scold Obama for trying and for not trying.
Karmakin
It is unfortunate that people do not realize why to Obama single payer or even a public option were DOA. The efficiency gains would put hundreds of thousands out of work. Single payer will need to be part of much broader economic reforms which are focused on passing productivity gains to the lower classes via getting the unemployment rate to aggressive full employment at any cost.
Suck It Up!
@Citizen Alan:
you acknowledge that its hopeless but think Obama is The One to fix it. demand of Obama what you think is impossible.
got it.
artem1s
I was in an arts administration class that invited Dennis Barrie to speak about the Mapplethorpe controversy at the Cincy museum when he was the ED there. He spoke at great lengths about the PR and education efforts that they undertook knowing that the show was going to be a lightning rod (the Corcoran had already canceled). He felt they had done a great job of preparing for event given the circumstances but admitted that the thing that caught them most by surprise was how organized and rapid the fundies were in their organizing.
legacy of the fundies lives on. its only one of the tools the GOP learned from them and encompassed as a culture.
Southern Beale
@dr. bloor:
Eggg-zackly. And more to the point: it overlooks the “teachable moments” created when we actually discuss what’s left on the table. If you never talk about the pros and cons of things like single payer then people are left believing the right wing spin about death panels and Canadians lining up at the border to get into US hospitals. There’s never a counter to that propaganda.
And finally, by going straight to what he thinks he can get, it leaves people (i.e., that pesky “Professional Left”) with the impression that he’s not interested in getting the big enchilada, that he has no spine and is as much a corporate suck as the Republicans are.
Sometimes the pragmatic approach isn’t always the best approach. Democrats always forget that politics is theater as much as anything else, and there’s much to be gained by putting up a fight, even when you know you’re going to lose.
Kryptik
Speaking of unemployment…vote for the extension fails in the House.
dr. bloor
@Suck It Up!:
When the WH puts out a weak-ass, way-too-long and put-you-to-sleep statement about their “disappointment” that the Republicans in the Senate killed the Paycheck Fairness Act–that fails to use the word Republican once–it is not at all unreasonable to hypothesize that they don’t know who they’re dealing with.
Southern Beale
@Citizen Alan:
Hmmm … maybe. I think we’ve always known we were in a plutocracy, and what we’re mad at (or what I’m mad at) is that I had hoped Obama could start the push-back on that, but he didn’t. So I guess that’s sorta the same thing. But I blame the Democratic Party for that, and I blame the media for not giving any attention to liberal activism but showing up en masse for every Tea Bag gathering and I blame the vast mushy middle of the American electorate for not being interested in what’s going on right under their noses.
Also.
Suck It Up!
@Citizen Alan:
the votes weren’t there in the senate. if the senate wanted a public option, there was nothing Obama could do to stop them from including it. the senate is not obliged to accept any deals allegedly made by the WH.
this grudge over a watered down tiny portion of hcr needs to stop. I believe there are waivers or opt-outs in the bill that would allow states to create their own public option(?). If you guys are so committed to the PO then that’s where your focus should be not nursing a grudge.
eemom
ssshhhh, ABL! John is trying to her to wuv him again.
Anonne
We readers of Balloon Juice may not be that stupid, but America as a whole is.
Obama is just as much a corporatist Democrat as either Bill or Hillary Clinton – look who he had advising him: Robert Rubin’s protege in Larry Summers, while Paul Volcker was pushed off to the side and only trotted out to lend some credibility.
All the huff about him being “the most liberal president” since [pick one] was a load of hooey. It’s a meme that sticks because our cretins in the media keep playing that angle to generate controversy. He’s very much a preserver of the status quo, and many of the changes he has made have mostly been painfully small and incremental. I appreciate that we would be hella worse off if it were President McCain and VP Sarah Palin, but when the White House signals that it’s going to waffle on the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% instead of maybe modifying the number, I get a sick feeling.
I agree with Brad DeLong, I never thought I would think it but I find myself thinking I’d be a happier camper if Pelosi was president instead of Obama.
Southern Beale
@Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people):
Eh fuck ’em. I don’t see what we get out of it, other than committee chairs. If they’re going to threaten to sink every piece of legislation unless things like the Public Option are yanked out of it, then I’d rather have a Republican in that seat. All they do is further pull the Democratic Party to the right.
Democrats can be competitive everywhere if we have the right candidates who are able to articulate their message.
Living in Tennessee where every Blue Dog save my own Congress Critter got axed, I have to say: being Republican-light didn’t do any of these so-called Democrats much good. Lincoln Davis voted against the healthcare bill, and he STILL lost.
Kryptik
Modest proposal for Twitter folks. Just starting on it, but figuring with the GOP shitstorms (of which the HCR debate is a part of), we start compiling words that the GOP has twisted the meaning of, under hash #wordsahavemeaning . Saw people having fun with #NPRGoesNazi, but felt a more serious approach might be worth trying.
Pamela F
Here’s what I don’t get re: Moore. He writes about how easily the MSM is manipulated to ruin his good work yet fails to acknowledge that same MSM does the same to our president.
Don’t get me wrong, I admire Moore’s work. Plus he’s rightly soliciting us to have HIS back. Well, I do and I will: I just wish he’d extend the same analysis/logic to our president. Otherwise, it smacks of it being more about him.
NR
Only Obama supporters could complain about how evil the insurance companies are while simultaneously celebrating the fact that we just forced everyone in America to give money to them.
GregB
The right wing digital brown shirts are on the march. Ailes must be getting ready to offer a show to James O’Keefe where O’Keefe drugs and rapes liberal women and then calls them out for being sluts.
This is only going to get worse.
terraformer
It’s not that the richity riches won’t be rich if single-payer health care is in place, it’s instead that the richity rich won’t be as richity rich. That’s their tell. A chilling cocktail of pathological greed and avarice mixed with a dollop of misanthropy disguised as empathy.
terraformer
It’s not that the richity riches won’t be rich if single-payer health care is in place, it’s instead that the richity rich won’t be as richity rich. That’s their tell. A chilling cocktail of pathological greed and avarice mixed with a dollop of misanthropy disguised as empathy.
gene108
@Southern Beale:
And yet, somehow, the most sweeping health care bill ever was passed.
I really do agree part of the Democratic problem was messaging. No law will be close to 100% of what the supporters want, but when the Democrats have to fight teabaggers on the right and firebaggers on the left, who have declared what passed is the worst bill ever, it is hard to get your message out that something positive was accomplished.
I don’t think America is geared for single-payer. You are proposing a radical shift in how we manage the largest segment of our economy, which I think can lead to some very unintended consequences.
Hospitals don’t run on huge margins. If all payments were dropped to Medicare rates, how do they make up the short-fall in revenue and maintain the same level of service? There are probably other issues that’d come up.
I don’t know. No system is perfect. It is usually choice between the lesser of evils.
@Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people):
I can’t blame Blue-Dogs for being Republican-lite. Ever since the 1970’s or so, the Democrats and liberals have slowly abandoned parts of this country and trying to explain the benefits of their agenda to folks.
The Democrats abandoned places like Colorado, North Carolina, etc., until 2004, when Dean pushed his 50 state strategy.
Even then, until you can convince people that they are better off voting for Democrats because Republicans don’t have their best interests at heart, you aren’t going to get more liberal people voted into office from places like NC-11, Heath Shuler’s district.
The Republicans aggressively play to these people’s views on social issues, so the ignore the economic ones. When economic issues come up, Republicans promise to let people keep more of their money, rather than letting Washington, D.C. bureaucrats redistributed it to some unworthy bum.
In 40 years, the Democrats and liberals have yet to come up with a coherent response to “we support lower taxes and oppose wealth redistribution”, for example. Until that’s done, you can’t blame people for voting the way they feel their constituents want them to vote.
eemom
@NR:
only an ignorant troll would complain about a law giving money to insurance companies on a thread about insurance companies paying money to stop that law from happening.
gene108
@NR: Insurance companies aren’t evil.
Hell, in the 1980’s, they actually got the rate of medical inflation to go down and controlled costs, but consumers didn’t like managed care, so the insurance industry gave people what they wanted with more open access to doctors but medical costs skyrocketed.
Switzerland has a private insurance companies giving everyone universal health care, without a single-payer or government run option, without the abuses you have here.
I think the reason insurance companies are able to behave badly here is many people view health care, like voting, as a privilege and not a basic right.
As long as access to health care is viewed as a privilege and not an inalienable right, guaranteed in the Constitution like the right to own a gun, there will always be a cross section of people, who see nothing wrong for you to have to a pay price for accessing a special privilege.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
This is only partly true. In Tennessee, Democrats have long been the majority party and only in the past 15 years or so have the Republicans come into power as a political force. The conventional wisdom around here and in places like Kentucky used to be, people voted for the Democrats in local and state elections and voted Republican in presidential elections.
It’s not that the Democrats gave up on the red states — Clinton was from Arkansas, for crying out loud; Al Gore is from Tennessee — it’s that the party in many of these states became entrenched, corrupt, lazy and stopped doing any fucking work. They got used to not having to fight for their seats. There is zero candidate development going on. The TNDP Executive Committee is a joke, especially in rural counties where these folks are used to not having to do a thing except get together for a golf retreat a few times a year.
The party needs to be completely rebuilt on a state by state basis. It won’t be the same everywhere. I do know you don’t get much sadder than the Tennessee Democratic Party and trust me, our problem is not that we’re too liberal. Our Democratic candidate for governor was more right wing than the Republican candidate.
People get hung up on “too liberal” and “too conservative” labels. That misses the point. The point is how well candidates can resonate with the public. Can they effectively present a position?
Seriously, does *anybody* think the American people sent Republicans to Washington D.C. so the very first thing they could is try to defund NPR? Is that what this last election was about? I don’t think so.
Rob
The insurance companies spent tons of money to stop single payer and the public option – not PPACA.
Suffern Ace
@NR: @NR: If I remember right, we also forced people to buy much better insurance. So yeah, if the insurance companies want to attack the bill to undo the parts about recisions and not paying for pre-existing conditions – those things that we hate about insurance companies now – so be it. What insurance companies want is to force people to buy their product but then not pay for illnesses as often as possible. That practice becomes a little harder for them under the legislation.
So yeah, we took a few steps forward and now we need to defend that against attempts by the chamber of commerce to undo even those that. If we were smart, we’d make the chamber talk about defending the shitty practices of the insurance industry that they want to re-institutue as much as possible and not get all bent out of shape that people need to buy subsidized but reformed insurance products.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
I’m pretty sure the Swiss system, like the Irish, Japanese and every other private insurance system outside the U.S., is not-for-profit. The problem with health insurance in the U.S. isn’t that it’s private, it’s that it’s private and for-profit.
And that is why they are evil. Exploiting the sick, the infirm, the elderly …. profiting off of people’s illnesses, and people’s desire to stay healthy. Sick system we have. Inefficient, immoral, and unprecedented. It will fall, eventually.
maus
@Pamela F:
It’s irrelevant because the President isn’t a fool, he makes the decisions he does and has the presence he does with the full understanding of how the Media will skew his decisions and statements. Of course he doesn’t deserve it, but the President of a country has a lot more power over his coverage than a simple, independent filmmaker like Micheal Moore.
gene108
@Southern Beale:
I think the Teabagger Overlords would be very happy to cut out all funding for NPR, because such a cut would send a statement about being serious about deficit reduction.
The education done about what constitutes the budget is pretty poor. Most people don’t have a clue on the fact what they want cut, like earmarks or NPR, aren’t a significant contributor to our budget problems.
You mention cutting defense spending and stop waging wars, as a way to balance the budget, and they think you are a terrorist, because they think we probably spend too little on defense and they are patriotic and want America to be strong and not overrun by the Chinese and / or al-Qaeda.
I don’t know how to get through to the Fox News crowd, but the fact is these are not very serious people. As long as they feel like “they” are being paid attention to and government is not working for “them”, they really don’t worry about holding politicians accountable, unless shit goes very bad like the war in Iraq, circa 2006 or the economy circa 2008.
Hell, even in September 2008, after the conventions McCain and Obama were deadlocked in many polls. I think if McCain didn’t tap Palin, but picked a more serious running mate like Romney, the election results would’ve been much closer than they were.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
I’m sure you’re right but we’ll never get there if we don’t even start the conversation. What always amazed me is that the right wing somehow got people to rally to the defense of the most hated hated industry in America. NOBODY likes their insurance company, EVERYBODY has had to do battle with some insurance flunkie denying coverage/ How the hell did the Democrats fuck that message war up?
I know health insurance companies employ too many people, are too vested in Wall Street, are too entrenched in our economy for anyone to suddenly wave a magic wand and make them go away. The Public Option would have been a good start — give them some real competition. But it was not to be.
gene108
@Southern Beale: Wouldn’t make a difference in the U.S. The line between for-profit and non-profit health insurance companies is pretty blurry at best.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
I don’t think we should try. They’re brainwashed. They’re also a very small % of the American electorate. It’s fucking CABLE NEWS people. If you look at the numbers for Rush and O’Reilly and Hannity, they are pitiful, when viewed in context of network television. All of the attention we liberals heap upon Fox News just inflates their importance.
The only attention we should be giving Fox News is to laugh at them, mercilessly, the way Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do. Make them the butt of every joke.
And try to reach the “sane” part of the American electorate, the people who are too busy to really pay much attention to any of this shit.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
True because in countries not Murka they have very strict governmental oversight and controls over the non-profit insurance companies. But that’s too soc1al1st for us red-blooded Americans so let’s continue to lose the competitiveness battle by making employers responsible for healthcare. How’s that working for people? Not very well.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
Aw fuckit my response to you is awaiting moderation. I give up ….
gene108
Darn you Balloon-Juice. Unmoderate her response NOW!!!
Sue
My take on this is that our president went on the air the day after the midterms, when politicians who went out on a limb to vote for health care reform lost their seats because of it, and basically put health care reform back on the table by stating that he was “happy to consider” modifications proposed by Republicans. He didn’t communicate that he was willing to fight for what finally was passed, he communicated that he was ready to open up the wound again.
Don’t tell me I’m wrong for having a problem with this.
Bob Loblaw
@Suck It Up!:
I find your username endlessly ironic. Do you even remember how to say anything anymore that isn’t sorry whining about unfairness towards Obama? Talk about purity police; clearly it isn’t an illness confined to that cracker-assed firebagging contingent you hate so much.
For the record, I too find it hard to believe that people still think the health insurance bill was a sop to insurers. They got off relatively light, in that they got off at all to eke out the rest of their existence on large corporate accounts, but their time as a major profit-generating industry is on the outs. Now, the bill was a pretty magnificent handjob to health care providers and suppliers, but then again, what isn’t these days? Still better than Medicare Part D.
Southern Beale
@gene108:
What I don’t get is, why didn’t we just work with the Medicare program already in existence? Modify that to make reimbursements better for doctors, open up the program to more people?
We already have a completely socialized healthcare system, it’s called the VA. The other alternative is to expand our VA system. Open it to more people, more kinds of service: firefighter and police, for example. I don’t think that’s what people want to do, people want to chose their own doctors for one thing. So it seems like improving and expanding Medicare is an easier way to go about it.
J. Michael Neal
Gah. Somehow, a lot of liberals have bought into the idea that you can start out with maximalist demands and fight every step of the way during negotiations, giving up each one of them grudgingly, and end up at some objective place of “not leaving anything on the table” that represents some absolute of the maximally achievable.
You’re being idiots. You wouldn’t leave anything on the table, because you would have burned it to the floor.
Let’s look at what would really have happened if the administration had done what you want: pushed a strong and meaningful public option hard from the very beginning and gone down swinging on it. You would have had both the health insurers and the medical providers as implacable enemies from Day 1, rather than as lukewarm ass kissers and staunch allies respectively. The airwaves would have been filled with ad campaigns savaging the whole idea. Not the town hall craziness, but full scale, Harry and Louise ad campaigns.
Worse, having alienated the medical providers, you would have turned the group involved most highly respected by the general public into a foe. The trajectory of the debate matters, and if the AMA and the doctors had come out as opponents of the bill, it would have died. There would be no health care reform.
In real life, negotiations don’t usually work in the simple game theory fashion you people are using as your model. Obama needed to have some allies, and there weren’t a lot of choices for who he could pick. You think the Blue Dogs were useless in the debate we had? Exactly how do you think they would have responded the first time kindly old Dr. Smith appears on his constituents’ televisions, pleading with them to call Congressman Bob and prevent this gutting of our national health care system? They’d have fled for the exits in a stampede. Doing things the way you wanted to would have meant that the bill never gets out of committee.
NR
@eemom: Only an ignorant troll would fail to realize the fact that by spending all that money fighting the bill, the insurance companies were able to strip it of all meaningful reform.
If they had preemptively surrendered on the issue, like the Democrats did, things would have been very different.
Mike E
@terraformer: I listened to Matt Groening on Fresh Air describe his shopping to Fox a “live” spinoff of The Simpsons, featuring Dan Castellaneta wearing greasepaint as Krusty the Clown. Never mind the viability of such a show with such an outlandish premise; Matt created the longest running scripted program in the history of television, and it made Fox a mint. If anybody could make something like this work…
Anyway, Fox held the rights, so onward they negotiated, going back and forth many times, until finally they reached an impasse. Groening: “I told them, if they took the 2nd most greedy position, we can do this… but,they could not take the 2nd most greedy position.” The Moral: who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with here?!?
J. Michael Neal
As for the main post, are my options really to believe either the insurance companies or a self-promoting, dishonest blowhard like Michael Moore? Can’t I get something from behind Door C?
NR
FIFY.
gene108
@Southern Beale: It really depends on how the White House wanted to approach HCR.
I think what your suggested would’ve worked, but it would be a piecemeal incremental approach and probably wouldn’t have generated the same backlash trying to overhaul the system and achieve some semblance of universal coverage did.
Of course people on the left, who are unhappy with the pace of change in the current bill, probably wouldn’t be happy with the incremental approach either.
Same with the teabaggers on the right, who would view it as socialism gone wild in America.
It’s the folks, who don’t have strong partisan opinions who’d feel like they were getting some benefit from these changes.
The fatal flaw in HCR reform is the big parts of the program don’t take effect until 2014, so most people haven’t had it impact their lives yet. I know there’s no real change for me, with regards to health care because of law, since I, like most Americans, have employer based coverage.
I think that’ll make it easier to unravel, especially if Republicans retake the White House in 2012 and all the work to get it passed will be for nothing.
gene108
Reply to Southern Beale. The first response is awaiting moderation.
It really depends on how the White House wanted to approach HCR.
I think what your suggested would’ve worked, but it would be a piecemeal incremental approach and probably wouldn’t have generated the same backlash trying to overhaul the system and achieve some semblance of universal coverage did.
Of course people on the left, who are unhappy with the pace of change in the current bill, probably wouldn’t be happy with the incremental approach either.
Same with the teabaggers on the right, who would view it as socialism gone wild in America.
It’s the folks, who don’t have strong partisan opinions who’d feel like they were getting some benefit from these changes.
The fatal flaw in HCR reform is the big parts of the program don’t take effect until 2014, so most people haven’t had it impact their lives yet. I know there’s no real change for me, with regards to health care because of law, since I, like most Americans, have employer based coverage.
I think that’ll make it easier to unravel, especially if Republicans retake the White House in 2012 and all the work to get it passed will be for nothing.
J. Michael Neal
@NR: It’s particularly hard to get out when people who don’t understand the bill or how it works insist on telling us how bad it is despite that lack of understanding.
This describes both you and the tea partiers.
KG
@J. Michael Neal: sorry, it’s a two party system, those are your only valid choices.
Linda Featheringill
I have a suggestion:
Let us ignore all those people who are still mad at Obama for whatever reason and move on.
I am getting old and a coworker has entered hospice. Life is short and fragile. I don’t have time for a lot of this.
We really do have to take the world as it is today. We don’t have to love yesterday and don’t have to forgive yesterday. We do have to live today.
Instead of listening to temper tantrum number 3,507, why don’t we:
a. contact somebody in congress and recommend Kucinich for ranking member of that oversight committee that Issa is on
b. tell Nancy Pelosi that it was a positive thing that the dems and Obama could have a nice meeting about extending tax cuts
c. tell Reid that is was probably a good thing to put Shumer in a position where he can improve on the message that Dems put out
d. write Cantor a letter and tell him to stfu [it doesn’t matter how long it takes for it to get to him, it will still be a timely and appropriate message]
e. celebrate GM’s successful IPO
f. or any one of probably 25 other things
and of course
g. start a travel fund for whiners who are angry because they can’t afford to move to another country, or if you don’t have money you can volunteer to help pack bags
Edited because I apparently cannot spell
El Cid
Newt Gingrich, as ever a highly quotable sage elder statesman policy expert.
Good thing that Gingrich is uniquely positioned to return us to Cadillac welfare and T-bone steak buying young buck policy themes.
In the last election, the fairly typical turnout between older whites and younger people of all backgrounds means that America desires above all to return to the days of, say, Calvin Coolidge, or hopefully William McKinley.
Martin
@Southern Beale: Only part of our system is for-profit. Most of the BC/BS are not for-profit, for example.
Insurance profits are only a tiny bit of the cost of healthcare spending <4%. Granted, you win this battle by eliminating 4%s all over the place, but the real money is in the care market – which is even MORE for-profit than insurance is. And where insurance profit margins are typically <10%, there are hospitals out there with 50% profit margins, and 20% is pretty common. How come nobody complains about the extra $5 large in profits they gave the hospital for that last medical procedure?
That's where the real savings are. Democrats are WAY too worried about the consumer interface and are ignoring the massive problem behind that interface. Knock out those bigger profit margins in care, and then we'll talk about insurance company profits. And because there are relatively few insurance providers out there, and LOTS of care providers, giving the insurers a pass for now and getting them to help will make this far more likely to be successful.
gene108
Southern Beale in reply to your post, which I tried but is awaiting moderation, in short: Expanding Medicare or the VA would be an incremental approach and not achieve covering most people, like the HCR bill will eventually do.
You can’t have Medicare for all without seriously revamping the taxes we pay and I don’t see that happening.
Emerald
@Rhoda: Amen.
Also, LBJ wanted to try for universal coverage, but didn’t because it just wasn’t possible. He settled for Medicare.
And LBJ lost big in the midterms right after that. Americans don’t like change. They say they do but they don’t.
A L
I’d like to remind the OP (and apparently a few people in this thread) that Obama is one of those richity riches, so appealing to him is beyond futile. He hasn’t been poor/middle class for a long time, so he most likely has less than no regard for what anyone here thinks.
eemom
@NR:
and that is just more ignorant bullshit. No rescission when people get sick, no refusal to cover preexisting conditions, no lifetime caps. AND — a point which is overlooked all the time by you and the rest of your moronic ilk — the requirement that 85% of premiums be spent on HC costs and not profits.
Why are they — that is to say their lackeys in the Teapublican Party — fighting tooth and claw for “repeal,” if it’s a massive windfall to them without any “meaningful reform”?
GOD you’re an idiot.
dr. bloor
@J. Michael Neal:
Which, as it turned out, happened anyways.
No, it would have alienated insurance companies.
The AMA and “the doctors” are two different groups, and there were varied opinions among MDs and other healthcare providers.
For the record, I don’t think a public option was ever viable, if indeed Obama wanted it at all. The bill is fine if only because there will be a Square One in place 3-5 years from now when it becomes obvious that this wasn’t enough. But there were a number of other things (medical loss ratios is the first thing that comes to mind) that could have been better.
dollared
ABL, Obama pisses me off precisely because of this story.
He doesn’t seem to think that he is in a war. And in a war, you do every goddamn thing you can to WIN. And you scream and yell and call the other side “Malefactors of Great Wealth.” And you point out how the insurance companies lie, cheat and steal. And every time you catch them, you call another press conference, you show the cheat, and you call them cheaters.
Obama wants to “change the tone.” F that. I want health care without paying 25% f-in overhead out of my family savings to keep health insurance execs rich.
Of course I’ll vote for him again. But he is not the change we were hoping for.
Southern Beale
Shameless plug for which I receive no renumeration whatsoever:
If y’all haven’t read Margaret Atwood’s The Year Of The Flood yet, stop what you’re doing and do so now. Her futuristic vision of a privatized America (indeed, the world) dominated by corporations is so on-target, it’s chilling. The evil HealthWyzer Corporation, which sells health supplements laced with biogerms to use the population as human guinea pigs, seems especially relevant to this conversation.
That is all.
FlipYrWhig
@J. Michael Neal: I also think that it’s improper to view the whole thing as “negotiations,” because that presumes that two parties want to make an agreement to begin with. The number of Republicans who wanted _anything_ in the area of HCR was minimal from the start. You can’t negotiate with someone who’s saying “No” and has decided he’ll only ever say “No.”
When telemarketers call to pitch time-shares, I hang up. It doesn’t matter how sweet they seem to make the deal, I don’t want that shit and I want them to stop talking about it. That’s what Republicans were doing with HCR. It didn’t matter how sweet the deal _might_ be, they didn’t even want it, and the few who made any gesture of engaging at all, like Grassley and Enzi, were just doing their version of what I do when the telemarketers call and I decide to let them talk just to waste their time.
Anyway, the point is, applying a “negotiation” framework to the way HCR unfolded between Democrats and Republicans is misleading from the start.
gene108
The AMA has historically been one of the biggest opponents to government expanding access to people and successfully killed every push for universal coverage proposed, since the 1930’s.
The opinions of medical professionals and the AMA, given the mess the current system is in, has changed towards wanting reform and actually wanting an easier system to deal with.
From a historical perspective, getting the AMA to “sit this one out” and not fight against it was a big deal.
J. Michael Neal
@Martin:
Unfortunately (for this purpose at least), the providers are really, really popular. Passing legislation that would cut those profit margins would be more difficult than what we had, and that just barely got through. I agree with you that that’s what is going to have to be cut to control health care costs, and I’d love to hear a way that it’s at all possible to do it.
gene108
@J. Michael Neal: The evil insurance companies did this a bit in the 1980’s, by ramming everyone into HMO’s and not letting people run around getting procedures done without seeing a general doctor first.
Of course this was very unpopular with the public and was scrapped, but it did bend the cost curve while it lasted.
J. Michael Neal
@dr. bloor:
Only very late in the game. The dynamic is very different if they start up immediately, as we saw in 1994.
No, it would have alienated providers. That’s the whole point of a public option that uses Medicare rates: it doesn’t take money from the insurance companies; it takes money from the providers. Medicare pays significantly less for procedures than insurance companies do.
The providers would have been utterly opposed to it. The AMA didn’t come on board until it had been made clear that it wasn’t going to happen.
Could have been better? They’re in the bill.
TimmyB
Sure, health insurance companies paid over $80 million to fight against healthcare reform. And this was after they reached an agreement with Obama whereby he would not support the public option.
However, just because the healthcare industry can hold two thoughts at once (spend big money to defeat reform & co- opt Obama with false promises) I’m not going to clap louder for Obama just because the insurance companies’ fought reform.
Nor am I going to cheerlead for the Heritage Foundation — 1994 GOP health care plan that the Dems foisted upon us. It sucks.
Watching the Obama administration run the country is like watching a friend you love drink themselves to death. No matter how many times you say “please, please stop–you are hurting yourself” & no matter how much you care about them, they insist on following through on their self-destructive behavior. Its just sad. So much promise– wasted.
J. Michael Neal
@gene108: Actually, HMOs didn’t bend the cost curve at all. They produced a very substantial one-off drop in prices. That’s not nothing, but it isn’t bending the curve, either.
Mike E
@dollared:
This goes to eleven.
Dems go to a knife fight bearing cheese, bread and whine about there being so many knives.
dr. bloor
@FlipYrWhig:
Of course it’s a negotiation. Neither party expected to convince the other of its position, but the “negotiation” was in how well they could present their arguments to the American people. One side gave us “DEATH PANELS!” while the other side….crickets.
dr. bloor
@J. Michael Neal:
Better than the ones in the bill. Don’t be so fucking obtuse.
NR
@J. Michael Neal: I understand the bill just fine, thanks. It’s a piece of shit that’s nothing more than a sop to the insurance companies, big Pharma, and the big medical providers. Progressives were blackmailed into supporting the bill because of the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies; well, it turns out that the Medicaid expansion isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on because the states have no money to fund it, and insurance still won’t be affordable for millions of Americans even with the subsidies.
Also, the “pass the bill now and we’ll fix it later” crowd is looking pretty fucking stupid right about now.
A L
@Mike E:
The Dems are not on your side.
FlipYrWhig
@dr. bloor: That’s not the notion of “negotiation” that usually comes up in these contexts. Usually the idea is that Obama and Democrats should have started with single-payer, then worked their way down.
I don’t want to get into the whole thing all over again for the umpteenth time, but IMHO there were many public events, many presentations, and repeated articulation of the agreed-upon premises of HCR. All of which were hampered by the continuing presence of skeptics like Lieberman, Landrieu, Lincoln, Baucus, Carper, the North Dakota Senator who kept talking about co-ops, et al. And, after all that, something actually got done. And people will continue to find things that they don’t like much, but, you know, what they did end up with managed to please, to some degree, a very wide range of conservative-to-liberal politicians, so, given the way our political system works, we should probably thank our lucky stars that anything happened, and then _continue to push it further_ knowing that we will most likely be frustrated along the way.
But, generally, I think you’re right: a bit of consciousness-raising and public argument-having goes a long way to prepare the ground _before_ legislating happens. I don’t think our side does that enough.
NR
@eemom:
Yeah, that 85% requirement (which, btw, is only 80% for small-group and individual policies)? Well, guess what? The insurance companies are already finding loopholes in that requirement that allow them to count operations and overhead (taxes being one major example of this) under the definition of medical care. Hoocoodanode!
So, that 85% (or 80%) requirement doesn’t mean what you think it means. Idiot.
Angry Black Lady
@KG: Oh no, I was referring to Palin. This is an example of “knowing one’s audience” also “making sure one’s writing is clear.”
I’m not talking about “her.”
What this comment needs is “more” quotation marks.
J. Michael Neal
@dr. bloor:
How much “better” did you want them to be? They get 15-20% of their revenues with which to pay for all of their overhead and then collect a profit. There comes a point at which they no longer have any incentive to keep payments to providers down, because all that will do is reduce the amount of money they have to run the companies.
Great. How many TV ads were you prepared to run?
Suffern Ace
@FlipYrWhig: No, our side definitely does not do that enough and it should be very clear after the past 20 years, there are very few outlets that will do that for us.
eemom
@NR:
“some say the insurers are ALREADY finding loopholes……”
link??
idiot.
FlipYrWhig
@Suffern Ace: For example, a small financial transaction tax would do wonders. But nobody talks about it. “Green jobs” was the last thing I remember hearing about well in advance of legislation about it: the “Apollo Alliance” and all that.
RosiesDad
So they are just hoping you stay stupid.
But you’re not going to stay stupid, are you?
Of course you’re not. Because you’re not that stupid.
ABL: Having read a few of your posts both here and at your place, I know that YOU are not that stupid (and you are also pretty sarcastically funny) and I would stipulate to the fact that most of the folks here at Cole’s place are probably not that stupid either. But when I look at that portion of the electorate that reliably goes out to vote, I wouldn’t bet a rotten tomato that those folks aren’t that stupid. Because, sadly, their track record says otherwise.
matryoshka
@Southern Beale: I just finished The Year of the Flood last week, and I concur. Oryx & Crake also, too.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Martin: A simple google search will illustrate that not for profit insurers are as wasteful and avaricious as for profit insurers, in some cases worse.
But you are correct, the real problem is skyrocketing costs on the delivery side, something the most incredible health care bill ever basically ignored.
joe from Lowell
I was a regular on Reason Hit & Run at the time, and if some of that AHIP money didn’t make its way into the Reason Institute’s coffers, I’ll wear this underwear for a week and then eat it. Which is way longer than I usually go.
They were “All Sicko, All the Time, ZOMG! Doctors In England Deny People Care Then Cackle About It!” at exactly the time Moore is talking about.
Buncha ho’s.
Surly Duff
@El Cid:
Return? Umm…that ridiculous theme has never left the public discourse regarding welfare and food stamps. It can just be used as a better bludgeon now.
dr. bloor
@J. Michael Neal:
Given that everyone is forced to buy into the system, and given the free market’s obvious superiority over the gummint to administer a system, the first number after the decimal should be a “9.”
Admiral_Komack
“Michael Moore (who seriously pissed me off last week) has a diary up on Huffington Post, talking about the health insurance industry’s smear campaign against him when Sicko came out.”
Well, if he would just take the pink tutu off his fat ass, then the health insurance industry wouldn’t try to smear him, poor baby.
Triassic Sands
@gene108:
Hmmm. Is that why Medicare is so unpopular?
The American people are geared to be manipulated. Sit down with any average American and discuss heath care and the advantages and disadvantages of a single-payer (or even multiple-payer system, as long as for-profit insurance companies are gone) and if you know anything about the subject you’re going to be astonished by the average American. And not in a good way.
Since private insurance companies are never going to be part of a workable system that manages both care and costs efficiently, it is important to begin laying the groundwork for getting rid of them. Refusing to even discuss a “single-payer” system, because it can’t be accomplished today, simply means we’ll never get there.
On an issue as important as health care, what is wrong with a president simply announcing “Everything is on the table; and has to be, because we need to find the best possible system and automatically eliminating something (basically the only thing) that works in other countries is just plain stupid? Why shut down discussion before it ever begins? Especially, if, like Obama, you claim to think single-payer would be best.
Incrementalists who refuse to even talk about an option are never going to get a workable system. By workable I don’t mean what we have now — the most expensive system in the world with among the worst outcomes for an advanced economy.
Coming out of the health care reform debate, one might easily believe that the unachievable holy grail of health care is a private option competing with a horde of for-profit insurance companies. In fact, based on the experiences of every other developed country, that system won’t work. “Single-payer” is bandied about like it describes the important distinction between our system and other, more efficient systems with better outcomes. But it isn’t the difference. Both Germany and Switzerland have multiple-payer systems. What they don’t have — and no one else has — is FOR-PROFIT insurance companies.
The entire way Obama framed the debate about health care reform ignored the important distinctions between workable and unworkable systems. That’s not a good way to advance the debate.
Martin Gifford
No danger of people pulling their heads out of their collective asses while Obama is busy shoving their heads back in.
Things would be very different if Obama had properly embodied the leadership role the people gave him.