CT Progressive

Apparently HELP (Kennedy’s committee, currently being overseen by Dodd) has finally put together a public option for inclusion in their health reform bill – and it’s due tomorrow:

The new HELP framework allows the public plan to “reimburse health care providers at rates which will be no more than the average reimbursement rate paid by private plans offered through Gateways.” Under this arrangement, the new public plan would have to negotiate its own rates and play by the same rules as other private insurers within the Gateway (i.e. Exchange) — it “would follow the same rules as private plans for defining benefits, protecting consumers, and setting premiums.” What’s more, the public option would be responsible for attracting providers and would thus have to rely on competitive rates (instead of Medicare-like rates) to retain enough participants.

This is a “level playing field” plan, not a “strong” public plan – meaning that it won’t be able to go as far as the House version in controlling rising healthcare costs. We’ll see how it scores on cost when the Congressional Budget Office rates it over the next couple of weeks.

I haven’t spent a lot of time keeping the old blogroll up to date (there are dozens of great sites that I haven’t included in that sketch over on the right), but it’s worth mentioning that MLN super-friend Jon Kantrowitz has recently started up his own blogging franchise under the auspices of the CT Post and affiliated papers. Check it out.

Ned Lamont celebrates Iraqi Independence Day with an editorial on the Huffington Post (found via Sonoma County DFA):

It’s hard to believe, but today finally marks the beginning of the end of America’s front line military role in Iraq.

Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has named today, June 30th, 2009, an “Iraqi Independence Day” of sorts, a national holiday which he said would celebrate the “great victory” of Iraqis who have repulsed the foreign occupiers (aka their American liberators). With fireworks filling the night skies over Baghdad, all American combat troops are moving out of the major cities and towns, and, ready or not, the Iraqi military and police are taking charge - with plenty of American trainers in tow just in case.

It’s great news that we’re finally leaving the cities – and surprising that it hasn’t been more widely remarked upon elsewhere in the world o’blogs. Even Ned, though, can’t resist a little bit of backseat diplomacy:

As the violence there has subsided, sadly the warring factions have not used the lull to make the tough political compromises necessary for lasting stability. Prime Minister Al Maliki has still not been able to draw up a just division of the oil revenues between Kurds and Sunnis and Shias, he has commandeered the military and been loath to include Sunnis in a national force, and he has been slower still to pay the Sunni Awakening councils whose allegiances could flip again.

That may be true, but that’s a domestic problem – just like we worry about paying off the right religious groups (via the Office of Faith Based Initiatives) and dividing up Federal spending equitably between our different states.

Via Steve Benen, a story in the U.S. News and World Report about how Obama’s “common ground” on reducing abortions by means of expanded access to birth control, sex education, and prenatal care is being rejected by conservatives:

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.

The White House declined a request for comment. Advocates for both plans say the administration has offered no hint about how it will come down on the matter. But with the White House expected to announce its plan on abortion and related issues this summer, advocates on both sides are strenuously lobbying for their plan, arguing that it offers the only true hope for common ground on very thorny issues.

“We welcome the opportunity to seek common ground with this administration . . . and to work on behalf of pregnant women and unborn children,” says Deirdre McQuade, a spokesperson for the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, which is pressuring the White House to decouple pregnancy prevention from supporting pregnant women. “But issues of pregnancy prevention are much more divisive and would only slow down much-needed assistance to pregnant women.”

There’s also one encouraging sign of progressives learning how to not get played:

But supporters of the all-in-one approach say that passing a support-only plan is unrealistic in Democratic-controlled Washington. “There would be a strong reluctance in the pro-choice community to trust that if Congress moved support-only, that a prevention-only package would also pass,” says Laser. “There’s also a fear that support-only would be defined as the new common ground. For the pro-choice side, the most important part of common ground is pregnancy prevention.”

Rosa DeLauro is the principal sponsor of a “more-pro-choice” alternative to the expected White House plan, the “Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act.” The scare quotes are for the fact that the bill doesn’t expand Federal funding for contraception, which – after a decade at shoveling cash to fundamentalists to preach abstinence-only to young adults in public schools – seems like it should be relatively non-controversial (or at the very least, eminently-defendable as a matter of equal treatment to both pro-choice and right-to-life groups).

… to the mighty barcode, friend to retail workers and political canvassers alike.

Actually, I’ve heard it said that the barcode was the first step of two in a fight that radically scaled back the need for labor at grocery stores: the widespread adoption of barcodes led to the end of individual pricing laws, and today prices on the shelves are updated remotely by radio frequency — meaning fewer “stock boys” counting and labeling the inventory. So maybe it hasn’t, in the end, been such a great friend of retail workers.

For political purposes, though, they’re still great, and on a related note I’m considering doing a series of how-to posts on creating a voter file using Connecticut-based data sources. I ran across a series at the blog “Overdetermined,” which touched on many of the challenges involved in setting a file up, but glossed over how to solve most of them. (And, it seems to assume both a flat-file database design and working knowledge of SQL - both problematic.)

Meanwhile, we have turned into a public-relations society. Much of the news Americans get each day was created to serve just that purpose—to be the news of the day. Many of our headlines come from events created by public relations—press conferences, speeches, press releases, canned reports, and, worst of all, snappy comments by “spokesmen” or “experts.” To serve as a counterpoint, we need reporters with expertise.

— Walter Pincus, Newspaper Narcissism

Three cheers again for the Fairfield County Weekly, which has had a recent trend toward publishing political stories that are interesting but which I had no idea I was interested in before they published the piece. We all know from political friends in the state and long-running discussions on different policy issues which bills to follow in the legislature, which ambitious politicos are looking to move up, which perennial subjects will produce some news and some competing press releases, and so on.

In any case, check out this article about the introduction of roving traffic cameras — the way that they’re changing law enforcement practices, and the new privacy concerns that they’re raising. It involves genuine reporting from sources in no fewer than five different cities, and sets the table for a debate that very few people are interested in having just yet. News of the day week that’s not designed to be the news of the day.

A followup thought on today’s signing of the Senate Vacancy bill: a lot of the Republican carping has been about how the Democrats in the legislature are undermining executive power merely because it suits them at this moment: the Republican Governor is popular, both of our Senators are old and ambitious, and the legislature doesn’t want to see a Republican stuffed into that office should a Senator find a job as an ambassador someplace. (H/T to tparty at MLN)

That complaint is, of course, completely accurate, but the hysterical tenor of the criticism obscures the fact that that’s how an awful lot of progress has always been achieved. We don’t have a system of government based on moderation or non-partisan bonhomie: we have a system of adversarial interests, between parties, between branches of government, between regional or ideological factions, and so on.

Legislative Democrats could have stuffed a same-party replacement law (like Wyoming’s, which forced a Democratic Governor to appoint a Republican replacement for Craig Thomas in 2007) through, though maybe not with a 2/3 majority. Since the partisan interests of two branches of State government don’t align — but the status quo was unacceptable to the legislature — the outcome was a bill which put the vacancy into the hands of the public.

None of that is remarkable, except in the way that it contrasts with the behavior of the Congressional Democratic majority during the last two years of the Bush presidency. An adequately confrontational Congress might not have done much to build up their own institutional power during those two years, but when it came to privacy issues, habeus, executive branch secrecy and a range of similar issues, a well-functioning adversarial position would have biased the process towards the interests of the public and away from the opposing views of the two competing branches of government.

It occurs to me that by political placing such a high value on bipartisanship, the default position in national political debates has become gridlock, when confrontation could just as easily devolve power — in the form of valuable information and decision-making authority — to the citizenry instead.

A rare bit of non-absurdity from the executive branch today, as Rell signed the Senate Vacancy bill into law. With all 24 Dems united in the Senate, and enough House members (along with one Republican) to make a 2/3 majority, it was going to happen sooner or later. But it’s nice for Rell not to make the lege jump through hoops for no reason on it: consider sending a note of thanks to Rell for signing the bill into law today.

So we got a budget from the State Senate today: highlights include a progressive income tax up to 7.5% for annual incomes over $750,000, a temporary hike in the estate tax, no reduction in the $500 property tax credit, and about a billion dollars in cuts. The Senate Dems have a reasonable presentation assembled here, with pie charts to compare this budget plan to previous “crisis budgets” here. The odds of the pie charts appearing in the news tomorrow morning are pretty slim.

I have more to say about the budget, but the focus in coverage so far has been the number of Democrats that defected on the vote, taking as a foregone conclusion that Rell will issue a veto of the plan.

But a 19-16 vote doesn’t bother me in the least: I mean, I don’t enjoy that Duff and Meyer seem to be re-branding themselves this year as “conservative Democrats,” but the closeness of the vote is a sign that there weren’t any more deals made than necessary to pass the bill through.

A 24-11 budget is not going to be pretty — some of the quotes seem to suggest that the holdouts believe $400,000+ earners need more of a break in our troubled times than those seniors and unemployed residents that are still paying their property tax bills — and the other 80% of the caucus might not be willing to give enough to buy those few renegades back into the fold. In fact, I would hope that legislators from Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport would reject any attempt to stick it to their constituents by making it clear that a proposal that moves too far away from today’s deal would lose their support. (See the excellent effort to whip Congressional progressives into insisting on their own relevance a public option in health reform as a larger-scale version of this same idea.)

If Rell issues a veto — and I’m not totally convinced she will — don’t expect major changes to attract a 24-vote majority. The ticking clock is going to be what persuades either five Senators or one Governor to come aboard, not a more-regressive tax code or sweeteners for wayward Democrats.

Matt Browner-Hamlin is shrill:

The New York Times profile of Senator Max Baucus and his role leading the Finance Committee towards a healthcare reform bill contains an infuriating nugget of strategic hindsight.

He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.

God God, man! It’s like Baucus had never heard of physics before he fell down.

Seriously, the lack of strategic understanding by Democratic elected officials is mind-boggling. That Baucus is only now realizing the strategic value of keeping a single-payer system on the table from Day One, even only as a means to provide political space for something like a political option, is simply stunning. Of course Baucus, and likely the whole country, will pay for his strategic error as the public health insurance option doesn’t survive the Finance Committee’s draft process. After all, while Baucus may be making noises about not being able to keep the Obama-backed public health insurance option on the table because of this error in strategy, he is also conceding it as a means of winning the support of at least one Republican on his committee. Not because he needs the vote to pass legislation out of the Finance Committee, but because he thinks bipartisanship is more important than providing working Americans with universal health care.

Baucus’s statement about the strategic error he made (though in fairness this is a mistake that every Democrat in the Senate save Bernie Sanders has made, as well as most members of the House caucus and Presidnet Obama) is a rare admission by a senior Democrat that there is political value in the party maintaining strong liberal positions. The simple fact is that if the Democrats want to achieve their moderate goals for quasi-liberal, pro-business policy, they can’t have quasi-liberal policies as the left flank. This leaves them coming to the table with only one direction to move: away from their goals and towards the Republican position. This amounts to making concessions before you even start negotiating, by the simple fact that you have no margin for concession short of not getting what you want.

The not-all-that-liberal Baucus is looking at a bill that started from a position of compromise and is rapidly becoming something that even he isn’t very enthusiastic about passing. And if your progressive base is dispirited and your wise moderates are dispirited, well, it makes it a lot less likely that a bill of any merit will pass, and that there are strong incentives (read, money) for your Joe Liebermans and Ben Nelsons to be seen as the one who caused health reform to fail.

But don’t worry, Matt - it sounds like Chairman Baucus has learned his lesson, and I’m sure he’ll fight vigorously for a strong carbon tax cap and trade regime agriculture giveaway package just as soon as health reform is done.