We recently discussed the stinging criticism of Sen. Chuck Schumer who called Obamacare a colossal political mistake and something that was not a priority for the American people. It was a remarkable admission from the third ranking and one of the most liberal Senate Democrats. Now, perhaps the most liberal departing member has given his own departing shot at the White House and Democratic Leadership. Retiring Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa has gone public with criticism that the Affordable Care Act was badly written and should not have been passed. Like Schumer, he is not questioning the value of health care but said that the current law was not worth doing because of its inherent flaws.
Harkin’s criticism was a bit different from Schumer, who indicated that he would have preferred not to have passed health care in the first term at all. Harkin told The Hill newspaper that ObamaCare that the leadership and White House blew it when they had the majority and should have gone all the way to guarantee funding and a more logical structure to the program: “We had the power to do it in a way that would have simplified healthcare, made it more efficient and made it less costly and we didn’t do it. So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.”
I spoke on Capitol Hill before the passage of the ACA and remarked that the legislation was in the worst condition that I had seen in 30 years in terms of a major piece of legislation. As someone who supports national health care, it was very disappointing, if not alarming, to see the condition of the law. The few sections that I reviewed read like a first draft from a LA’s computer. Democratic staffers told me later that they agreed and that the legislation was not ready. However, with the death of Kennedy (and the replacement by Brown), the Democratic leadership and the White House decided to push through the poorly crafted law on a muscle vote — which led to a number of Democrats being defeated on the marginal vote. The result is that the ACA has been a continual struggle as hundreds of serious drafting errors and flaws have had to be addressed.
Harkin is the retiring chairman of the Senate health panel and helped write the law.
This is pure damage control.
In spite of people claiming how wonderful Obamacare is, it is a noose around the Democrats’ neck, and it is tightening. The last election was a wakeup call.
But they own this debacle, fair and square. The votes are public record, and the internet has a long memory, with plenty of video clips on Dems continuing to push this legislation.
Socialists love big trains to move the masses of proles from their hive-like apartments to their cubicles (High speed rail! Trolley cars! ).
National health care is just another socialist train set, running the lives of the drones better than they ever could.
Obama never even tried to talk to America about the advantages of a single payer plan, and how every other industrialized country in the world has one.
There’s a reason he didn’t do that, and it has to do with the preferences of US voters.
Have you looked at the workings of these other countries’ systems? The countries where single-payer isn’t disastrous operate it as a low-cost alternative to superior private systems. I doubt very much that the American left would ever tolerate a system with such a clear divide b/w the prosperous and the non-prosperous.
The US isn’t Taiwan, or Switzerland, or any other small, homogeneous country. Also, it leads (and subsidizes) the rest of the world in terms of health care quality.
The Democrats were all hot to trot about passing this. Immediately. We can’t wait. No TIME. We must pass a bill. We have to do something….this is something….let’s do it. Don’t bother to read it or have serious discussions and analysis. Paaaaaasss it!!!!!
At the time I was thinking……why is this in such a mad rush? Why such a giant wrenching change to the insurance and health care industry?
So soon after the disastrous ineffective financial bail out bill. Another giant monstrosity that no one read or understood or even wanted to consider the possible ramifications.
One of the main issues that Congress should address is to stop passing these monster bills that do everything all at once and which have so many amendments, unrelated appropriations and sub bills attached that they look like a coon dog covered in ticks.
Pass simple bills. Bills that accomplish ONE purpose at a time. THINK about what you are doing and what you want to accomplish. THINK if you even need to pass this bill at all.
THINK damn it!!!!!
“national health plans cut for-profit insurance companies out of the picture, as sanity would dictate”
What makes you think “non-profits” don’t generate ‘profit,’ or that no one profits in single payer plans?
Oh, yeah, you’re one of those people who seem unaware that every society everywhere runs on greed.
Your plan simply dictates who will be the winners and losers among the greedy. It won’t eliminate profit.
Cue Milton Friedman on greed:
Taiwan is the most recent country to go to a national health plan, and showed us the way it should be done. Send out committees of experts to every country that already has a national health plan (national health plans cut for-profit insurance companies out of the picture, as sanity would dictate). Have the committees examine how the health plans operate. Then have the committees meet and pick the best elements from each country, and put them together in their own plan.
America did the exact opposite with the ACA. Obama went to the insurance companies, and worked out a Rube Goldberg contraption of a plan, full of fatal flaws, and muscled/sneaked it through Congress in such haste that it’s sloppy language will probably lead to its being gutted by SCOTUS. Tragically, Obama never even tried to talk to America about the advantages of a single payer plan, and how every other industrialized country in the world has one.
We have become a country that, driven by the oligarchical desire to please the 1% and by the need to use endless war as a means of getting people not to notice, lags the world in social safety net programs. Obamacare is part of that program.
The first thing we do, let’s socialize all the lawyers.
Then we can talk about socializing anything else.
“It is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.”
No, it made things worse, far worse than before.
It was never done to provide health care.
Health care was the McGuffin.
The entire goal was getting socialist control over 1/6th of the economy.
They couldn’t care less if it results in even one vaccination.
It is a fallacy that the Senate and House, at that time, would have passed a universal health care bill. For Harkin to come out now, after being involved in the writing of the bill and say that we should have never passed it, is disingenuous. The ACA is not perfect and I would have preferred a Universal single payer health plan, but we have the Republicans passing legislation in committee and then filibustering it. Some of the filibustered bills were bills that they co-sponsored. It is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. If we want to talk about bad bills that were passed way too quickly and under pressure, let’s talk about the original Patriot Act.
Lloyd, the fall in the rate of growth of HC costs started before the ACA was even written. Here’s the conclusion from a study by David Cutler, who’s a sort of Jonathan Gruber w/ better social skills:
We conclude that a host of structural changes—including less rapid development of imaging technology and new pharmaceuticals, increased patient cost sharing, and greater provider efficiency—were responsible for the major- ity of the slowdown in health care spending growth.
I don’t know anything about you, Alan, but before the ACA a single male in his mid-20s could buy pretty good health insurance for $51 a month. So I’m not sure you have to thank the ACA for anything. (Premiums on that policy I’m talking about are now over $200–and that is thanks to the ACA.)
Now they decide that Obamacare is a problem. Couldn’t they have ‘fessed up before they passed it?
The ACA is a lifesaver to millions of people. When I was between jobs, the ACA allowed me to get health insurance for $60 a month.
That said, it’s an enormous giveaway to the medical and insurance corporations, doing nothing to control costs, and still letting the consumer (and taxpayer) get gouged by these corporations.
Single-payer (like the rest of the civilized world has) is the best solution, but the Republicans have a moral objection to spending government money on the non-wealthy.
Part of the problem is that our two corporate-funded parties are on the take from the corporations, and won’t do anything that would interfere with their profits.
Yet another reason I vote Green Party.
Well as per terms of the ACA, I will just wait until if and when I am sick or injured to sign up.
I am perfectly healthy now, so why would I want to pay for coverage I don’t need?
In the meantime I will pay that 1% penalty.
See, this is one of the gaping holes in the legislation. My logic is every healthy person’s logic here.
In the real world this is exactly what happens. There is a crisis; in this case parasitical health insurance companies ripping off Americans. Then the government responds with something akin to the ACA. If politicians from both sides who have the best interests of America front and center get together the move will still be flawed, because of the size and complexity of the problem. The next move is to analyze the functioning of the first move or the ACA and fix the problems. So, far Republicans have offered up nothing to address the best interests of Americans in the ‘fixing the problem’ approach. What Republicans have done unrelentingly for the past six years is mindlessly whine and rant about anything and everything Obama has done regardless of the level of effectiveness or ineffectiveness.
The first move is to require all Americans to pay into an insurance system. That has been started and should be left alone. The second move is government provided base tier insurance policies that are affordable, pegged to the income tax rates, and obligatory. Most of the more advanced systems in the world operate in this way. Second tier, optional insurance may be purchased from the thinned out parasitical health insurance companies if and so desired. This addresses the need for basic health insurance for all, paid for by all, and the so called freedom of choice of those who want the so called ‘cadillac’ policies. This is how it is done throughout Canada, Great Britain, and other more successful systems. This typically results in administrative costs of less than a quarter of what they are in the US, per capita. The excesses of the health care part of the US system would be more easily identifiable and therefore easier to address if the worst faults of the American Health Care System were eliminated, those being the parasitical involvement of for profit institutions in the universal aspects of the issue.
Instead of working to intelligently fix the problem, offering solutions, and doing what they have been elected to do, Republicans have here again been creating chaos to offer their solution as the fix for this chaos. This terrorist structure has been almost wholly adopted by the Republican party with the goal of gaining power. While they gain power by mindless ranting and raving, America slips along in need of responsible leadership from both parties.
The ACA is a dog’s breakfast, but it has surfaced pros and cons. Any intelligent and responsible politician would be focusing on building the pros and fixing the cons. Tossing the whole thing out would simply put the US back a decade while the oligarchs and their puppets work out yet another law or system that will continue to fleece the citizen, and this time they will have the precedent already set that obligates a citizen to have health insurance but only be able to obtain it through the private sector. To illustrate how this works, in the US a car owner is obligated to carry insurance by law. Yet it is left up to the for profit private sector to provide this insurance. Even with all the so called advantages of competition, Americans pay twenty to thirty percent more for car insurance in the US than they do in other peer countries such as Canada where auto insurance is government regulated and administered. If it is the law of the government to buy something then the private sector should not set the rates and make the profit. There is no competition as a handful of underwriters in Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Great Britain, and such as AIG in the US combine to control and set the rates. All the cheesy adds spouting this or that advantage from this or that company mean only that insurance cost that much more to pay for the irrelevant adds. A prime example of how consumers fund the private sector is the pharmaceutical industry where 20$ of the budget is dedicated to promotion and 16% to research and development. The consumer pays 20% more to be addressed as if he or she was an idiot. Who in their right mind would purchase pharmaceuticals because a cartoon character on TV seemed happier after taking Zimpo, or Zapon, or Crapon? Ask yourself why we are treated like mindless idiots, it might just be because most Americans perform like mindless idiots, and pay more to do so. Some things are better left to government and some things are better left to free market structures.
The only downside of evolving towards government regulated and administered basic health insurance is that several hundred thousand unnecessary jobs will be lost. So, we have a different sort of socialism in the US in this industry. Citizens pay for people that are essentially redundant and the corporate top end salaries, as well as returns on shareholders’ investments. Some socialism is better than other socialism.
Harkin’s criticism is too little, too late.
That does us, well, no good at all now.
Those guys were all triumphant smiles when this monstrosity passed.
They knew at the time it was garbage, yet passed it anyway
“So I look back and say we should have either done it the correct way or not done anything at all.”
Gee, thanks for the input, Tom.
First of all, you CAN’T hold the Weiner jokes (see that was one right there), because almost any reference to his name lends itself immediately to a shallow, dirty joke.
Second, as I see the juggernaut of a legislative catastrophe chugging down upon the country like the 2011 tsunami, I am wondering how the hell can we extricate ourselves from it.
The full brunt of its illogical and economically defective mandates has not fully been felt by the common man, nor businesses, nor eventually the taxpayer who will have to fund the inevitable financial deficits that are incipient in the legislation.
The only way it could be solvent, is if we all thought like good little worker bees, instead of individuals looking out for our own better interests.
The legislation depends more on a naive, and defective, theory of mass psychology, more than it does upon cold hard self-sustaining calculations.
It is what happens when you get liberal arts majors trying to do engineering.
So the question remains, how can we as a nation get out of this morass — so many people will buy into the legislated plan trusting that the people who put it together actually know what they are doing, and it will result in a partial birth abortion. It can’t work because there isn’t enough money, and it can’t be stopped because it is law with so many mechanisms trying to force it to work on hope alone.
I really don’t know the answer. Maybe some kind of conversion in-situ of the plans sold, and something to staunch the continuing sign-ups that will cause its collapse that much faste.
I don’t know.
“Health care spending grows at lowest-ever rate.”
Well, that’s because:
“One in three Americans has put off seeking medical treatment in 2014 due to high costs, according to Gallup — the highest percentage since Gallup began asking the question in 2001.
Thirty-three percent of Americans have delayed medical treatment for themselves or their families because of the costs they’d have to pay, according to the survey. Obamacare, of course, had promised that it would help make health care more affordable for everyone, but the number of people who can’t afford a trip to the doctor has actually risen three points since 2013, before most Obamacare provisions took effect.
The hardest-hit: the middle-class.”
Winning!
What it should have been:
National tax on every person and every business. Pays for basic level of service. And by basic I mean catastrophic coverage for things like accidents, cancer, heart failure. Instead we are paying for free birth control and doctor’s visits. That’s not insurance, that’s comprehensive coverage.
Once the basics are covered, people can go to the private market for coverage of the remaining medical needs. Some of the most expensive parts are removed, so the cost has gone done. And portability isn’t an issue because its now individual plans instead of group plans tied to an employer.
Harkin is absolutely correct. They had the opportunity but too many special interests had to be appeased and huge corporate profits had t be protected. As a result, you get ACA. But I put much blame on the fence straddlers, the Lieberman types, and especially Lieberman who was instrumental in defeating a much simplified Medicare buy-in option:
“On part of it – the so-called Medicare buy-in – the opposition to it has been growing as the week has gone on,” Lieberman said. “Though I don’t know exactly what’s in it, from what I hear I certainly would have a hard time voting for it because it has some of the same infirmities that the public option did.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30553.html
And he said he was particularly troubled by the overly enthusiastic reaction to the proposal by some liberals, including Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, who champions a fully government-run health care system.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/15/lieberman-liberal-enthusi_n_392887.html
Hold the Weiner jokes…
So good old Joe doesn’t know what’sin it but won’t vote for it because liberals like it…. That was what led to ACA’s complicated structure. Thanks, Joe, and the GOP for their complete obstruction to something that would have benefited millions with less complication.
But, Professor, you may want to occasionally point out some benefits of ACA. Here’s one:
Health care spending grows at lowest-ever rate
Health care spending in the U.S. grew last year at the lowest rate ever recorded, due in part to the Affordable Care Act,….USA Today.
That picture is Schumer. It’s Harkin.
Sent from my iPad
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