Great piece by Ryan Cooper at the Washington Monthly on Herman Cain’s role in defeating the Clinton health care plan.
In a surprising swing in the Republican presidential field, Herman Cain has rocketed to second place, just behind Mitt Romney. Like all the other candidates, he has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and even claimed (falsely) that he would have died from his liver cancer under Obamacare. Cain actually got his start in politics helping to defeat the 90’s health care reform plan. Organizations from several different areas attacked the Clinton effort, but some of the most effective opposition came from small business organizations, led by the National Restaurant Association and the National Federation of Independent Business. That effort to kill health care reform, coupled with the total failure of the right to pass (or even seriously propose) their own plans, ultimately hurt small businesses.
Cain is a lot clearer about what he is against that what he is for. He opposed the Clinton reform, Ted Kennedy’s Patient Bill of Rights of the late 90’s, Canada-style healthcare, and SCHIP (the children’s health insurance program). He opposed both the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the House proposal to allow negotiation with drug companies in order to control the program’s increasing costs. And, of course, he opposed the Affordable Care Act.
I live and work in a rural county in Ohio where lots and lots of low-wage and part-time working parents rely on S-CHIP to cover their children. The program is wildly popular. I would like Herman Cain to address his opposition to the state childrens health insurance plan, given that his entire claim to fame is that he ran a pizza chain, which is a low wage service sector employer.
Herman Cain, when he got cancer, could call up T. Boone Pickens to get him into a top-notch facility in Houston. But his efforts to defeat reform, in the end, did no such favors for small businesses or their employees, who were increasingly left twisting in the wind.
Health care for me, but not for thee, and not for the children of my low-wage employees, either. Cain was wrong about the Clinton plan, he’s wrong about the ACA, but he was also wrong about S-CHIP. The difference between S-CHIP and the Clinton plan and the Obama law is that we know S-CHIP is a great program that millions of children currently rely on. S-CHIP works. Parents love it. Covering millions of children was the right thing to do. In fact, the one and only reason we were able to pass and then expand S-CHIP over conservative opposition, including last-ditch vetoes by former President Bush, is because the public knew it was the right thing to do.
Herman Cain should have to address the parents of the millions of children covered under S-CHIP and explain why he opposed providing basic health care to their children, and whether he regrets that.
harlana
He already reinforced, in so many words, his overall philosophy at the last debate. These kids have not pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and gotten jobs to pay for their healthcare. Hence, they have only themselves to blame.
jnfr
I was very sick as a child, and my mother had no health care (we were on welfare, no SCHIP back then). It was not an experience I would wish on my worst enemy.
Certified Mutant Enemy
To a conservative, something only has value when it is denied to others.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@jnfr:
— applause line —
MikeJ
Millions of people are already relying on the ACA too.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Republicans: Still the party of “Mine!”
PS. I play a drinking game reading Balloon Juice. If a post has “Ohio” in it, I check the author. If it’s Kay, I drink. I’ve yet to make it through to Page 2 :D
El Cid
@harlana: These kids should have been angry at the government for subsidizing all those other lazy people.
jl
Thanks. I will watch for Cain’s bump in the GOP primary polls.
Mark S.
Herman Cain would have died under ObamaCare! It’s true because he said it in a debate.
catclub
There was a post, I think at Yglesias, that basically asked ( and answered) why small business was against health insurance reform. Big business is pretty happy with it. They can either negotiate with the inusrers, ro self-insure if they are really big, but small businesses are over a barrel and know it. The small businesses will benefit from this. The answer: rich people solidarity.
I always thought that GM would be the company that really wants health insurance reform, since they were paying zillions in health insurance for retired workers. THEY woudl benefit from it, but again, rich people solidarity overcomes any cracks in the facade. The very few companies that have left the Chamber of Commerce over either its anti-healthcare, or anti-climate change stances, are a small, ignorable anomaly.
harlana
@Mark S.:
I would say something clever right now but I don’t want to go to hell.
The Moar You Know
More good news on a day when Walmart, America’s largest employer, announces that they will no longer be providing any health insurance to part-timers or their spouses.
Because apparently working at Walmart isn’t shitty enough, or something.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
The Herman Cain Health Plan: T. Boone Picken’s phone number
harlana
@catclub: Alex Bennett had another good point the other day. These folks think if they kiss up to and look out for the interests of the mega-rich, they will one day get to be a member of the “club” as their reward – they, too, will be rich and privileged. What they don’t realize is that they will never be invited to the party and if they so much as entertain the thought, Smithers will be releasing the hounds.
amk
bachmann’s NH team thinks she is toast, quits enmasse
WereBear
I have long thought so, too. A kind of “sympathetic magic.”
JCT
Given the mess Cain made out of what it means to be “Pro-choice” the other day he probably thinks S-chip is something you eat. And well, if you don’t have any money to eat — too bad for you.
Chris
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
This is one of the most concise and accurate things I’ve ever read regarding their view of economics.
piratedan
@amk: well this is obviously good news for John McCain. Because now he has a running mate to turn to once a brokered convention realizes that he’s their last, best hope ;-).
harlana
@amk:
I’m really gonna miss her. I hope she can hang on for a few more debates purely for my own, selfish entertainment purposes.
MeDrewNotYou
Cain is the same on abortion rights. Steve Benen wrote about it yesterday. Basically the government ought to ban abortion because its awful and life begins at conception. But if a woman in Herman Cain’s family might need to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason, the government ought to butt out. ‘Cuz we don’t need Big Government always telling us what we should and shouldn’t do.
harlana
@WereBear:
It’s an easy concept but it’s taken me a while to figure that out, too. I guess I had been trying to give people more credit than they deserve. This, too: The rich are rich because God loves them. If you are poor and underprivileged, God obviously hates you, otherwise he wouldn’t have let you be born poor. Hence, you are unworthy of compassion, because if God doesn’t love you, why should we?
trollhattan
@amk:
I will, uh, miss her special brand of lunacy. Now it’s an all-boys club and all the boys in the club are the ones who keep missing recess because they screwed up so badly on their homework. Weaksauce is the new Republican normal.
I’ll kick Cain in the nuts, Cartmanstyle, if he ever appears in front of me. His schtick became tiresome weeks ago and now all I hear out of him is evil.
Also, too, where’s jwest to warn us DFHs about how much we’re going to hate president Bachman. I “miss” that, too.
cmorenc
@catclub:
I remember how so many small business owners were persuaded to be against the ’93 Clinton efforts at health-care reform. They became convinced that the effective cost incidence for employee coverage would fall mainly on the owners, and they would be forced to choose between eating those costs out of profitability, or else raising prices to cover the insurance costs at the risk of becoming uncompetitive. In short, they feared Clinton’s health care proposal might drive them out of business or at best make it much tougher to make a decent living out of their businesses.
amk
@harlana: Even in this tough no-jobs economy, paid staffers want nothing to do with that batshit crazy nut is telling.
MeDrewNotYou
@Mark S.:
If they say it on TV, it must be true! They wouldn’t let people lie on television, especially not a news network. That’s how you know you can trust Fox News!
Davis X. Machina
You can mortgage the house on at least 40% of them — if they vote — voting for people who voted against it, tried to kill it, tried to shrink it, or have vowed to end it.
amk
@trollhattan: Many will miss her gas under $2.00 per gallon too. (:<
gbear
@harlana: You could always try to lure her into relocating and running for office in your state. We in MN wouldn’t mind if you did that…
It’s quite possible that she’s finally gone too far to get re-elected in her wingnut-filled district. It’ll be fun to watch her run as a mere congressperson in a non-glamorous MN district after her brush with national fame. Especially after she hasn’t done diddly-squat for her district for the last two years (She didn’t even have her re-election party in her own district – she had it next to the Mall Of America and the MSP airport so that the press could fly in for the party).
Martin
OT: Progress is still being made:
Martin
@harlana: Well, thanks to the SuperPac money laundering system, she has incentives to stay in the race. She should be able to churn what she continues to raise into her House re-election bid. So long as she’s in the prez race, she’s got a hell of a fundraising advantage.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Lordy, I can hear the Cal Chamber’s mewling “job killer, job killer” even with the radio cranked and windows closed. They miss them some Megs.
Also, too, EPA announces regulation of fracking wastewater disposal. What, they didn’t before?
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/20/3991422/epa-to-regulate-disposal-of-fracking.html
Jay in Oregon
@harlana:
There’s an actual name for that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
Martin
@trollhattan: Ah, yes, and in the backdrop of our jobs-killing regulation the state unemployment rate finally dropped below 12%.
And EPA doesn’t pre-regulate anything, so, yeah, they wait until a problem develops and then addresses it. I think that’s fine, so long as the EPA is being run effectively and tackles problems as they develop. If they’re run by a GOP appointed director, however…
gbear
@efgoldman: I haven’t heard anything about it since the census. I know that Bachmann was telling people that the census was an evil government plot that they shouldn’t fall for. Someone finally whispered in her ear that if she kept up with that, she just might put her district in jeopardy. She quickly and quietly backed off her campaign against the census.
BDeevDad
Herman Cain’s only regret is that it still passed.
BDeevDad
One of the ex-Bachmann staffers has already switched to Perry. A reporter should probably just follow the staffer to see who will be out of the race next.
ericblair
@amk:
Based on the track record of these gooper assholes, it might be that being a Job Creator might not actually mean being a Paycheck-On-Time Creator.
fasteddie9318
Herb totally has a plan to fix his health care plan, but he’s just not going to up and tell you about it just like that. He was waiting to see if you liberal fascist racists would attack him for this, and then he’d tell you. You have to earn it, I guess.
r€nato
So one of Cain’s few proposals for health care reform is a health care tax credit?
First of all, this flies in the face of his proposal to simplify the tax code. The tax code got as complicated as it is today, due to a slow but steady accretion of tax credits and deductions.
I’ll add that Republicans are especially fond of these sorts of policies, as opposed to Democrats who tend to favor direct subsidies. So if Republicans are unhappy about the complexity of the tax code, they really need to look in the mirror.
Secondly, this is yet another ineffective, near-useless patch upon the current crazy patchwork quilt of tax credits and tax deductions which we have used for the last few decades in an utterly failed attempt to address rising health care costs and the ever-present threat of losing everything due to medical bankruptcy, as well as to avoid the widely-proven policy of public health care as the most effective and economical approach.
These policies are predicated on the assumption that average people would be able to afford health care if only they weren’t being taxed so much. This is absurd and it only takes a couple moments of consideration to put the lie to this crapola.
fasteddie9318
@r€nato:
So, in other words, change the punitive fine for people who don’t have health insurance from the commie, America-destroying ACA into a tax credit for people who do have health insurance, and, um, success? FREEDUM?
Oh, right, this way we don’t have to subsidize insurance for the poor, so they can go back to dying and, well, being free or whatever. Freely dying? Dying freely?
joel hanes, sp4
This news item from yesterday’s Pioneer Press seems apposite:
r€nato
@fasteddie9318: I’ll add that the right’s rebuttal to the OWS movement is that 53% of people pay income tax while 47% don’t.
So… what good would a tax credit do for the 47%? Unless it was possible to actually get a rebate check for the balance of the tax credit that remains after one’s taxes are reduced to zero.
And then… Republicans would surely whine about the freeloaders and moochers whom they enabled to not only pay zero federal income tax, but actually get a check from Uncle Sam.
This is really another version of, ‘fuck you I got mine.’ Republicans are fundamentally opposed to any government policy which redistributes wealth in any way whatsoever.
gbear
Those two battling it out in a primary would be too sweet for words. Cravaack has been awful in his first term.
trollhattan
@gbear:
Is Cravaak the Aflac duck? I’d pay to watch Michele debate the Aflac duck.
Tuffy
If SCHIP is so “wildly popular”, why is rural Ohio so fucking red?
jibeaux
Apparently he also did an interview with Piers Morgan in which he started with abortion should be illegal in all circumstances to a full-throated endorsement of choice without any government intervention in the matter.
In the same interview.
Your move, Mittens.
kay
@Davis X. Machina:
A lot of them don’t know where it comes from.
Medicaid is, after all, a “program for the poor” (read: “people I don’t know and will never encounter”) although it’s not, really, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Medicaid is a program for “the poor” and the working class, and very sick old people, and disabled people.
When parents tell me “the kids are on Buckeye and thank God for that” (or words to that effect) I tell them “your kids are on Medicaid”. I’m glad their kids are on Medicaid, but I can’t really blame them for sort of gliding by what’s really going on.
Maybe the next time they hear some conservative policy analyst pompously opining on Medicaid and “the poor” they’ll make that connection.
One of the problems that I began to recognize in the health care debate was that everyone who stood to benefit from health care reform was excluded from the debate. We heard from people who have health insurance. We heard from college educated people most of whom have health insurance. People like Herman Cain were the loudest voices. That’s a shame.
kay
@Tuffy:
It’s a good question.
SCHIP goes by different names in different states, and that’s part of how we ended up with a disconnect between “Medicaid” (which is for those other deadbeat people) and “SCHIP” (which is for “my kids”).
A bigger problem is that poor and working class people, especially working class young people with small children, don’t vote in the same numbers as higher income and more educated people.
I don’t know how to fix that. It’s not that they’re voting conservative, in my experience (and there’s data). It’s that they’re not voting at all.
kay
@Tuffy:
Here’s more on SCHIP.
I don’t know what to do about the fact that beneficiaries of the program don’t know where it came from or whom to credit.
In my personal opinion, Democrats could make huge gains toward “selling” single payer by screaming about the fabulousness of SCHIP constantly, but they don’t.
.
SCHIP is a no-brainer. Kids are cheap to cover (mostly) and if they get consistent care they’re less likely to get sick. In my experience, parents worry less about the fact that they don’t have health insurance and more about the fact that their kids don’t. That doesn’t actually make sense, because kids are less likely to need health insurance, but there it is.
Cain opposed it. Why?
Triassic Sands
Most stupid people are.
Note: Definitions of “stupid” vary. Cain fits one of mine perfectly.
kay
@Triassic Sands:
I didn’t get “stupid” from him, in the video of he and Bill Clinton’s exchange.
What I got was a really cold calculation and a strange disconnect between “people” and “employees”. In the current climate, despite all the put-on “straight talk” and “I’m the authentic, folksy Republican!”, he comes off COLD.
He sounds like an accountant, or the person on the other end of the phone who denies your insurance claim. That may have been a great political strategy in 1994, or even 2000, but I don’t think “CEO/beancounter/Leader” flies now. That “brand” has been damaged by, well, actual CEO’s.
xian
@Martin: yes, but would Steve Jobs and other captains of industry approve? You know it’s so much easier to do business in China…