Conservatives may complain bitterly about “Obamacare,” but they “are winning more than even they may realize in the current health care equation.” That’s the point made by Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, in a recent column.
[F]or all of the frustration and even anger within the conservative movement about where health care is headed, the fact of the matter is that they are winning more than even they may realize in the current health care equation. That’s because the nature of health insurance itself is being redefined and moving gradually but seemingly inexorably in the direction conservatives have long advocated: more consumer “skin in the game” through higher patient deductibles.
Item: In our recent survey of people in the non-group insurance market, we found that the average deductible for an individual policy is now $2,498, and for families it’s $5,149. These are very high thresholds by any standard. Consider, for example, that a family with median income facing such a deductible would be spending almost 10% of their annual income just for their deductible before their insurance kicked in.
Item: The percentage of workers facing high deductibles — $1,000 or more for single coverage – has been growing rapidly. It doubled from 10 percent to 22 percent between 2006 and 2009, and increased from 16 percent to 40 percent in small firms.
Item: Indications are that the share of workers with high deductibles is continuing to grow, a trend I expect our 2010 employer survey to confirm when we release it in September as we have every year for more than a decade now. And a substantial number of these high deductible plans are paired with tax-advantaged savings accounts, which conservatives have long advocated. Facing cost pressures without alternative answers, employers are moving to plans with less comprehensive coverage to reduce their expenses for employee benefits.
Item: Health reform is unlikely to reverse these trends. Large employers will continue to look for ways to address the rising cost of health care. And, for the basic “bronze” insurance plan that people will be required to buy, deductibles could run several thousand dollars for individuals and double that for families. To be sure, other aspects of health reform cut the other way. For example, there will be no cost sharing for preventive services in newly-purchased plans, and insurers will be required to cap consumer out-of-pocket costs at defined levels. And, of course, there are substantial subsidies to reduce premium and out-of-pocket costs for lower-income people. But, for the first time, the government will be defining the threshold that decent insurance must meet, and that minimum coverage will have the kind of high deductibles that conservatives favor.
There’s still another facet to all of this: While many of the effects of health care reform may actually suit a conservative agenda, Republicans will use this self-same health care reform as a “socialistic” bogeyman to help them win the 2010 Congressional elections.
The mainstream press has been gushing on for months about the jobless economic recovery, when in fact, the recession never ended–just ask the people who have been on unemployment for well over a year and still can’t find jobs. The press and the pols say they’re just recalcitrant bums,too lazy to work, and all we’ve got to do is throw out the Mexicans and force our guys to pick up the broom. Maybe we can motivate the slugs by removing unemployment insurance.
Of course, the government, in the manner of the socialist New Deal,could hire all these bums and put them to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure– for example, a nationwide rail system like they have in the French nanny state.God help us if that happened.Socialism would collapse into anarchism and lead to return of the unions.
The right wing Republican solution to all this is states rights.Naturally they don’t call it states rights. It’s the tenth amendment, stupid.Can’t you read? In which case, this latest report from the liberal-minded (that is `socialist’) Center on Budget and Policy Priorities might be of interest. Here is a summary:
At least 46 states struggled to close shortfalls that totaled $121 billion when adopting budgets for the current fiscal year (FY 2011, which began July 1 in most states). These came on top of the large shortfalls that 48 states faced in fiscal years 2009 and 2010.
Federal assistance has reduced the extent of state spending cuts and state tax and fee increases needed to close the shortfalls. But it now appears likely the assistance will end before state budget gaps have abated. If states get no further federal assistance, the steps they will have to take to eliminate deficits will reduce aggregate demand and weaken the economy at a critical moment in its recovery. Such measures likely will take a full percentage point off the Gross Domestic Product. That, in turn, could cost the economy 900,000 jobs next year.
At least 46 states struggled to close shortfalls that totaled $121 billion when adopting budgets for the current fiscal year (FY 2011, which began July 1 in most states). These came on top of the large shortfalls that 48 states faced in fiscal years 2009 and 2010.
Federal assistance has reduced the extent of state spending cuts and state tax and fee increases needed to close the shortfalls. But it now appears likely the assistance will end before state budget gaps have abated. If states get no further federal assistance, the steps they will have to take to eliminate deficits will reduce aggregate demand and weaken the economy at a critical moment in its recovery. Such measures likely will take a full percentage point off the Gross Domestic Product. That, in turn, could cost the economy 900,000 jobs next year.
Undercurrents in Elena Kagan’s improv performance suggest that if the new health care law comes before the courts, she might be partial to one part of it. Of course, knowing what she thinks about most anything is a guessing game. Anyhow, I note this entry from the Kaiser Health News, the invaluable service that aggregates news in the health sphere every day.
Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan suggested at her confirmation hearing Tuesday “that a controversial requirement in the new federal health-care law that most Americans obtain insurance has a legal basis — a question that is likely to come before the courts.” In answering Republican senators, Kagan “signaled” that she supported “enacting a health-care law that for the first time will require most legal residents of the United States to obtain insurance. Some Republicans contend that such a mandate is unconstitutional, and GOP-led states are threatening to file lawsuits challenging the provision,” according to the Post. “Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) asked Kagan whether she supports the argument that the mandate is allowed under the Constitution’s interstate-commerce clause. Kagan declined to address the requirement but made clear that she supports an expansive reading of Congress’s regulatory authority”
No sooner had I read this, than Kaiser recorded a string of planned Republican challenges along with nutty Tea Party stuff: Minority Leader John Boehner and Whip Eric Cantor want to repeal the act. California GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina is against it. Rick Barber, the nut case congressional candidate in Alabama, said the new law was “slavery.” And naturally, Sarah Palin was saying how horrible it all is because it raises costs, especially for children with special needs (proponents, of course, say it will lower costs).
Less than a month after the Senate rejected a proposal for a bipartisan entitlement commission, President Obama has created his own version by executive order. It is not, of course, called an “entitlement commission”–that unsavory term has been banished from the political lexicon, since it clearly frightens the geezers. Instead, it is called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. (Who wouldn’t support that?) The shorthand names are the “deficit commission” and the “debt panel.” This last term is remarkably similar to the much-maligned “death panels”–which seems appropriate, since its primary purpose is to pull the plug on old-age entitlements. Despite protestations to the contrary, the commission exists primarily to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
The commission’s slant is evident from the choice of its two co-chairs: former Wyoming Republican senator Alan Simpson, a long-time foe of entitlements, and Erskine Bowles, the middle- right former Clinton chief of staff. The rest of the 18-member commission will include 6 Republican and 6 Democratic members of Congress, and four more members named by Obama. They are supposed to make a report and recommendations to the president in December, after the fall elections, and Obama is expected to forward the recommendations to Congress.
In the best-case scenario, Congress will do the same thing it has done with all of Obama’s other proposed reforms–i.e. nothing. Because if it acts at all, it will almost certainly decide to pay down the deficit at the expense of the social safety net. While Social Security may be the proverbial “third rail” of politics, the other debt-reducing options–raising taxes on the rich, or making corporations pay their fair share–will be seen as even more deadly in the current political climate.
An aggressive move to cut entitlements is, of course, a long-cherished conservative goal. The Heritage Foundation has been promoting the idea for decades, and was a major cheerleader for creation of a Congressional entitlement commission. Billionaire anti-entitlement activist Pete Peterson has bankrolled a huge lobbying effort for a commission that could ready the cuts, then ram them through Congress on a fast track yes or no vote. When that idea ran into heavy opposition in the Senate, Obama came up with his comparatively toothless version.
The driving force behind the commission—in addition to Peterson’s determined lobbying– is a group of conservative Blue Dog Democrats, some of whom would most likely be just as happy to see Social Security privatized. They will likely join with Republicans to support cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
This same alliance will also be key to a scaled-back health care reform, which looks to bypass altogether the so-called liberals in Congress. Instead, it depends upon senior conservatives in the Republican party, led by retiring New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg. Gregg has said he thinks the health care system needs changing, and he wants to engage in “constructive dialogue” with the president on reform. But any plan Gregg champions will have to be relatively meager and inexpensive. The fiscally conservative Gregg joined with Democrat Kent Conrad to support the Congressional version of a debt commission, and he now seems to making common cause with the perennial Democratic health care compromiser, Max Baucus.
The long and the short of this situation is that the Democratic administration, along with a small group of conservative Democrats in Congress, may make considerable headway toward doing what neither Ronald Reagan nor George W. Bush was able to pull off. They will likely make cuts to Social Security, while at the same time advancing Obama’s government-subsidized “automatic IRA” scheme, which would divert people’s earnings into 401K-style retirement accounts. These, of course, would be invested by Wall Street, helping to rebuild the finance industry. So in the end, we could see a de facto privatization of a portion of Social Security–the ultimate conservative dream, brought to us by the Democrats.
By the same token, the Democratic-led health care reform is likely to bring about some cuts to Medicare and Medicaid–the only single-payer health care this nation has ever known. It will do so while preserving the power and wealth of the health care profiteers who are largely responsible for skyrocketing costs. The corporations, once again, are set to emerge victorious.
Meanwhile, the old, sick, disabled, and poor, who rely on entitlement programs, will bear the weight of the national debt. The low- and middle-income people still reeling from the recession–who need more, not less, government spending–will be left out in the cold, victims of what the Center for Economic and Policy Research calls “the deficit hawks who distract the public and policy makers from the policies necessary to bring the economy back to full employment.”
The people and policies responsible for running up the deficit look like the only ones who won’t be taking a hit. In a report released on Wednesday called “Where Today’s Large Deficits Come From,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities added up the numbers and found: “In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.”
I published this piece yesterday on a site called Reader Supported News. It might provide some food for (wishful) thought as we prepare to listen to Obama’s State of the Union speech.
With the unemployment rate still hovering above 10 percent, the bailed-out financial sector is rewarding itself with bonuses instead of making the kinds of solid investments that might produce jobs. The time clearly is at hand for the Obama administration to push the banks aside, and plunge in to shape the economic recovery on its own terms. That means using federal monies to employ out of work people in rebuilding infrastructure and launching new projects –public employment in the public interest.
The model is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corp. FDR’s idea – hardly a revolutionary one–was to replace relief with work, employing destitute young people in useful, low-skilled labor that would serve the public good. What makes the program seem even more relevant to the present day is its focus on environmental conservation: planting trees, preventing soil erosion, reducing flood and fire risk, and building infrastructure in National Parks. “I call your attention to the fact that this type of work is of definite practical value,” Roosevelt said in announcing the plan in March of 1933, “not only through the prevention of great present financial loss but also a means of creation future national wealth.”
The CCC idea was accompanied by proposals for a Public Works Administration to employ older people in large-scale projects involving a lot of planning and skilled labor. These latter projects would take many months or years, while the Civilian Conservation Corp could be implemented right away. The story of the CCC, writes Jonathan Alter in “The Defining Moment,” an account of FDR’s first 100 days, is “a tale of mobilization so rapid and so competent it almost defies belief for later generations.”
This, despite the fact that the proposal for a Civilian Conservation Corps immediately met with considerable resistance from all sides. The labor unions said Roosevelt’s proposed low wages would turn the nation into a forced labor camp, and amounted to fascism, Hitlerism and Sovietism, all rolled into one. It was attacked from the left by Huey Long, who called it a “sapsucker’s bill,” and from the right by conservative members of Congress who said that the economy would sort itself out in the long run without so much government spending. To one such remark, FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins replied: “People don’t eat in the ‘long run’ Senator They eat every day.”
The Roosevelt administration got the bill creating the CCC through Congress less than a month after his inauguration on March 4, 1933. Members of his own cabinet protested the idea was impossibly ambitious, but the president accepted no excuses–he wanted a quarter of a million young men put to work by summer. He then proceeded to manage the plan himself, delving into bureaucracy that ran the public lands–which then, as now, made a third of the nation–pulling in members of Congress, debating wage levels, making charts, writing up plans. When the mobilization still seemed too slow, he ordered in the army to help. “By April 7,” Alter writes, “only 34 days into the administration, the first corps members were enlisted. By July 1, less than four months after Roosevelt made his outlandish demand, he exceeded the quarter million goal. Nearly 275,000 young men were enrolled in 1,300 camps across the country, supporting their families and undertaking much-needed projects.”
The benefits of the CCC went beyond their impact on the economy or the environment. A friend whose father served in the Corps told me he recalled it, to his dying day, as one of the happiest times of his life. A kid from an immigrant ghetto in upper Manhattan, his idea of wilderness was no doubt limited to Fort Tryon Park–but the CCC sent him to work in Washington state’s glorious Mount Ranier National Park. And instead of the hopelessness that came with unemployment and desperate poverty, he had a place to live, three meals a day, and the pride of sending money home to help his single mother and younger siblings.
In its time, Alter writes, the mobilization of the Civilian Conservation Corps exceeded all prior efforts in the nation’s history–”and it has not been matched since.” Over nine years, more than 3 million men were provided meaningful work. The CCC would inspire numerous other programs–the Job Corps, Peace Corps, Vista, and AmeriCorps. It succeeded in the same spirit of solidarity and national service that would soon help win Second World War.
Roosevelt’s bold experiment in federal job-creation demonstrated that government can work–and more than that. It showed that there are times when leadership must come not from the states or localities or the slow-moving Congress, but directly from the White House. It provides a stark lesson for the Obama government, which remains mired in a swampland of political bickering while it pursues the illusion of bipartisanship, triangulates corporate special interests, and naively supports big banks in some revamped version of trickle-down economics.
The current word on the political street is that the Obama administration is bent on “going populist” in the wake of recent political defeats. And since his opponents long ago branded him a socialist (if not the anti-Christ), it seems he has little to lose. A good beginning would be to tax the $45 billion in bank bonuses at the utmost possible level, using the return to jump-start a federal government sponsored, government-run program like the CCC to employ men–and this time, women as well. Through a federally funded jobs program, they can be put to work to rebuild the nation’s rotting infrastructure; to spark public enterprise in the new energy industries, from autos to solar and wind powered electric utilities; to lay railways that criss-cross the nation and build the engines, coaches, and freight cars that will travel over them; and to construct and the staff community health centers that might fill in for a failed health care reform effort.
Some version of this plan has been proposed many times during the current financial crisis, and always ignored or shoved aside because of opposition from powerful industries and their supporters, who argue that such dramatic federal action would disrupt the free market or override local initiative. Well, the market, such as it is–never really free, and usually greased to serve corporate interests–has not done the job for the millions of Americans who remain unemployed. It’s time for the president to step in and do his.
I encourage you to check out the rest of Reader Supported News, an up-and-coming progressive news site.
Writing in Kaiser Health News, Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic makes an important point about the process of health care reform. If Obama had not been so intent on winning bipartisan support, Cohn contends, the Democrats could have won the day without making the kinds of backroom concessions–including the so-called cornhusker deal in Nebraska–that have served to alienate even some supporters of reform. Here’s Cohn’s argument:
Remember how we got to this point–and how far President Barack Obama and the Democrats have gone to accommodate Republicans and the conservatives they represent. The plan Obama outlined on the campaign trail, the one Democratic congressional leaders endorsed, called for making sure nearly every American had insurance. But accomplishing that would have cost well over $1 trillion over 10 years and, by some estimates, closer to $2 trillion. That was more than conservatives could stomach. To get the price tag down below $1 trillion, they settled on a plan that covered far fewer people.
The original Obama and congressional plans all called for creating a public insurance option, into which people could enroll voluntarily. But that proposal, too, ran afoul of more conservative sensibilities–and was summarily dropped. (The House ended up including a public plan as part of its bill, but House leaders signaled long ago their readiness to drop it in order to reach a compromise with the Senate.)
These moves didn’t make health care reform more popular. If anything, they had the opposite effect. A plan that spent more money would have required finding more offsetting revenue or savings. But it also would have provided clearer, quicker benefits for middle-class people–many of whom now fear the bill does too little to improve their lives. As for the public plan, poll after poll has shown that it is popular. And the really crazy thing is that the Democrats might have been able to keep both features–with, at most, minimal compromises–if only they’d been willing to go it alone, the way the critics insist they did.
Under Senate procedures, the Democrats had the option of passing health care reform, or at least many of its elements, through what’s called the reconciliation process. In reconciliation, a simple majority of senators can pass a bill, without the threat of a filibuster. Rules limit what can and can’t be considered during the process, so it has definite drawbacks. But if Democratic congressional leaders were determined to pass something on their own–the way, say, Republican congressional leaders were frequently during the Bush years–they could have gotten much and maybe most of what they wanted.
But they didn’t–in no small part because they didn’t want to act in such a blatantly partisan way. Whether that was a matter of principle (i.e, they really believed bipartisanship is important) or a matter of perception (i.e., they thought voters would get mad), it ended up constraining them all year long. Instead of wrapping up negotiations and passing bills before the summer was over, the process dragged into the fall and winter. Over and over again, Democratic leaders (particularly Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus) reached out to Republicans, only to be rebuffed. When that didn’t work, they were left trying to deal with the most conservative members of their own caucus–culminating in the negotiations with Nelson and the promise to cover his state’s Medicaid expansion. If Senate Democrats hadn’t needed Nelson’s vote to break the expected Republican filibuster–if they could have passed health reform with a “mere” 59-vote majority–they could have told Nelson to take a proverbial hike.
Hopes for any pretense of liberal change from the Obama administration collapsed yesterday, and not only because of the election in Massachusetts. While the Massachusetts voters were casting their ballots to install the upstart Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, the White House was hammering out a closed-door deal to cut entitlements. Obama won the support of Democratic leaders for a plan to issue an executive order that would inevitably lead to reductions in Social Security, and especially Medicare and Medicaid.
The plan represents a capitulation to conservatives in both parties, and would leave Democratic liberals accepting unconditional surrender not only on health care, but on the most basic of all New Deal programs. As hopes of even a tepid health care reform wane, the effect of this plan, if accepted by Congress, will be to undermine the only single-payer health care programs this nation has ever known–Medicare for elders, and Medicaid for the poor. As an attack on entitlements, it has the potential to go beyond anything the Reagan and Bush administrations were able to achieve.
Under the agreement, President Obama would issue an executive order to create an 18-member panel that would be granted broad authority to propose changes in the tax code and in the massive federal entitlement programs — including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that threaten to drive the nation’s debt to levels not seen since World War II.
The accord comes a week before Obama is scheduled to deliver his first State of the Union address to a nation increasingly concerned about his stewardship of the economy and the federal budget. After a year in which he advocated spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a huge economic stimulus package and a far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system, Obama has pledged to redouble his effort to rein in record budget deficits even as he has come under withering Republican attack.
The commission would deliver its recommendations after this fall’s congressional elections, postponing potentially painful decisions about the nation’s fiscal future until after Democrats face the voters. But if the commission approves a deficit-reduction plan, Congress would have to act on it quickly under the agreement, forged late Tuesday in a meeting with Vice President Biden, White House budget director Peter R. Orszag, and Democratic lawmakers led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who has long advocated creation of an independent budget panel, called the agreement an “understanding in concept” that holds the promise of at last addressing the nation’s most wrenching budget problems.
“This goes to the question of the country’s credibility with managing its own finances. This is essential for the nation,” Conrad said.
The commission is likely to form the centerpiece of Democrats’ efforts to reduce projected budget deficits, which have soared into record territory in the aftermath of the worst recession in a generation. Government spending to bail out the troubled financial sector and to stimulate economic activity have combined with sagging tax collections to push last year’s budget deficit to a record $1.4 trillion. The budget gap is projected to be just as large this year and to hover close to $1 trillion a year for much of the next decade.
In other words: The national treasury has been driven into deep deficits by a financial crisis caused by Wall Street greed, compounded by two wars, tax cuts for the rich, and the high prices charged by health care profiteers. And where will we turn to make up for this loss? To the poor and the old, who cling greedily to their “entitlements.”
The claim is made that we need to make these entitlements “solvent” and “sustainable” in their own right, so they don’t “run out of money”–but that’s just political flim-flam. Social Security is in fact perfectly solvent, and the fiscal problems of the Medicare and Medicaid programs stem from the excesses of profit-based health care. If cuts are made to these programs, which have saved millions of Americans out of desperate straits, it will be because there’s simply no political will to do anything else to address the deficit.
All this represents a major victory for the corporate take-over mogul Pete Peterson whose foundation has put up $1 billion to lobby the proposal. His efforts have even involved a financial news service that pushes this rich man’s plan, and that has wormed its way into the Washington Post. William Greider, who has long been covering the Peterson story, writes in The Nation:
The retired mogul has created a digital news agency he dubs “The Fiscal Times” and hired eight seasoned reporters to do the work there. “An impressive group of veteran journalists,” Peterson calls them. I hope they have shaken a lot of money out of this rich geezer. Because I predict doing hack work for him will seriously soil their reputations for objectivity and independence.
With his great wealth, Peterson could have also bought a newspaper to publish his dispatches, but he did better than that. He hooked up with the Washington Post, which has agreed to “jointly produce content focusing on the budget and fiscal issues.” (This media scandal was first uncovered by economist Dean Baker.) The newspaper is thus compromising its own integrity. It’s like buying political propaganda from a Washington lobbyist, then printing it in the news columns as if it was just another news story. Shame on the Post, my old newspaper. I predict a big stink like the one that greeted the Post when its publisher decided to hold pay-for-access “salons” for corporate biggies.
The deal is based on rickety interpretation of the country’s basic laws governing taxation. Normally, any change in taxes must be passed first by the House, with legislation wending its way through the Ways and Means Committee up to the floor. This proposed arrangement short cuts—indeed appears to bypass—this procedure. The appointed commission is to make a recommendation on the budget after the election and that recommendation then goes straight to Congress where it might go through hearings,floor debate and a vote,or as some proponents of the idea would like, just get an up or down vote. To rub salt in the wounds, it was largely crafted not by members of the House, but by vice president and former Delaware senator Joe Biden along two senators–Kent Conrad, the North Dakota Democrat, once considered heir to the Great Plains progressive tradition, and conservative Judd Gregg, from New Hampshire. The man behind the commission plan is Pete Peterson.
We appreciate the concerns of legislators who are looking for a means of reducing the federal deficit and slowing the growth in the debt. However, we have significant concerns about any process – including the Conrad-Gregg Commission – that would disenfranchise American voters and subject Social Security beneficiaries to harmful cuts in benefits. As supporters of Social Security, we are surprised to see the federal deficit and the federal debt cited as the reason a commission needs to be established to make cuts in Social Security. The truth is that neither the $1.4 trillion deficit nor the nearly $12 trillion debt has anything to do with Social Security benefits.
For nearly three decades, Social Security has taken in more revenue each year than it has paid out in benefits. These excess funds have been invested in special issue U.S. government securities. Thus, Social Security has effectively been loaning its excess funds to the federal government to spend on other programs. Rather than increasing the federal deficit, Social Security’s annual surpluses have actually been covering up the true size of the deficit in the general fund.
Right-wingers have depicted health care reform as a front for various dastardly schemes, which include everything from killing off grannies and unborn babies to ushering in a socialist state. Now, one radical gun rights group sees yet another hidden agenda behind the reform effort: The health care legislation, they say, threatens their right to bear arms.
D.C. Tea Party protest, September 12, 2009
The accusation comes from Gun Owners of America, a 300,000-member group that proudly advertises itself with a quotation from Ron Paul: “The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington.” The GOA has been described as “eight lanes to the right” of the NRA, which it tends to dismiss as a pack of wussy sell-outs; and the group’s longtime leader, Larry Pratt, was booted from Pat Buchanan’s inner circle for having ties to the militia movement and hobnobbing with white nationalists.
Yet, like the Tea Partiers who draw Republican Congressional leaders to their racially tinged protests against “National Socialist Health Care,” the Gun Owners of America could well influence the reform debate in ways that belie their extremist status. GOA has thrown itself wholeheartedly into the battle for the soul of the GOP, pledging to help oust “RINOs” and other insufficiently trigger-happy Republicans in the 2010 primaries. And last week the Washington Post reported that the GOA’s campaign against health care reform could also “cause political indigestion for Democrats from conservative states,” and have some influence on their final votes.
In fact, no version of the reform legislation even mentions firearms. But that hasn’t stopped the Virginia-based group from raising the alarm about what it calls the “anti-gun ObamaCare bill.” In its most recent alerts, the GOA has fixed on the proposal for a nationwide system of electronic health care records, which, it says, “will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database….This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned or any determination of post traumatic stress disorder or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms.”
In other words, better record-keeping and information-sharing might lead some people to be denied gun permits on the basis of serious mental illness. Presumably, this could include people like Cho Seung-Hui, the student who gunned down 32 others before killing himself in the 2007 Viriginia Tech massacre. Less than two years before the shooting, a state court order had directed that Cho be taken into custody for a psychiatric evaluation, declaring the young man mentally ill and “an imminent danger to himself or others.” (He was later ordered into outpatient treatment and released.) But Virginia failed to supply this information to the FBI-monitored National Instant Criminal Background Check System, so Cho was able to purchase two semi-automatic pistols in local gun stores, along with two ten-round magazines of ammo on eBay. After the massacre, even George W. Bush willingly signed a new gun control bill—the first in 13 years. But Gun Owners of America doesn’t think insanity is necessarily incompatible with gun ownership. (The group also has a novel approach to such massacres: Put more guns in schools.)
A GOA alert earlier this fall was titled “ObamaCare Could be Used to Ban Guns in Home Self-Defense.” Their premise, as described by PolitiFact, is that “in a bid to control spiraling health care costs, the administration will target people who have ‘excessively dangerous’ behaviors that officials believe raise the cost of health care.” The legislation’s “special ‘wellness and prevention’ programs” the GOA warns, “would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles — and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that ‘no guns’ is somehow healthier.” (Sibelius earned GOA’s unending wrath when she vetoed concealed-carry gun legislation as governor of Kansas.) “It is even possible that the Obama-prescribed policy could preclude [insurance] reimbursement of any kind in a household which keeps a loaded firearm for self-defense.”
Such dire prognostications are quickly spreading far beyond the GOA’s membership. The Washington Examiner quoted Dave Kopel, research director of the libertarian Independence Institute of Colorado, who said, “The more you socialize costs, the more you empower the argument that the government has the authority to control private behavior.” Kopel continued, “If [the Department of Health and Human Services] can write regulations for lower premiums for healthy habits in general…”Then I don’t see anything in the bill that stops HHS from saying people get higher premiums for unhealthy habits such as owning a gun or a handgun.”
With Republicans sticking to party-line votes against health care reform, the GOA is going after what it sees as vulnerable Democrats. After the Senate cloture vote, GOA attacked Democrats from Conservative states who “were bribed into selling out the American people because Harry Reid ordered them to do so,” and declared: “Can you spell R-E-C-A-L-L? GOA is looking into which states are the best targets for recalls–and you can be sure that we will be pursuing this option aggressively, exposing the Senators who sold their vote.” It provided a model letter for its members to send, which begins: “Just so you know, I will not forget how you voted on Saturday, November 21 when you threw your support in favor of anti-gun socialized health care.”
But if Democrats like Arkansas’s Blanche Lincoln or Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu are swayed by the likes of the GOA, it will mark a new low in the party’s capitulation not only to conservatives, but to extremists of a truly hateful variety. While his views on some subjects may not represent all GOA’s members, Larry Pratt, who has been the group’s executive director for 26 years, has been up to his neck in far-right extremist activity for several decades—an outrider among the pistol-packing white power crowd, and a fellow traveler and inspiration to the militias that sprung up in the 1990s.
Leonard Zeskind, the expert on white nationalist movements, has described Pratt as having “one foot in the political mainstream and the other in the fringe.” Pratt comes out of Fairfax, Virginia, and served two terms in the state legislature in the 1980s, arguing an anti-abortion, anti-tax line. But he made national headlines in 1996, while he was co-chair of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign, after news surfaced on his attendance at a meeting of the racialist far right in Estes Park, Colorado, in 1992. As described by Zeskind, in an article for Rolling Stone:
The three-day strategy session was organized by Pete Peters…who pastors to members of a fringe religious group called [Christian] Identity. Identity doctrine contends that Northern Europeans are racial descendants of the biblical Hebrews; that our government is in the hands of satanic Jews; and that black people were created before Adam and are therefore less than human. Identity believers have begun to stockpile weapons, food and supplies in preparation for Armageddon, which they think will be a race war in the United States.
Among the speakers were Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler and legendary Klansman Louis Beam. And as Zeskind writes, “Although many of the participants had met before, this gathering was different. This meeting marked the birth of the modern militia movement that would tie well-armed radicals to gun advocates in a right-wing national network.” Beam laid out his theory for carrying forward a white revolution against the Zionist Occupied Government by means of a “leaderless resistence” cell strategy. Instead of mass organizations with known chains of command, Beam said, right wing revolutionaries should go underground in secret cells, unknown and unrelated to one another. The cells could number a few or many members, or individuals could act on their own as so-called Phineas Priests. It’s not a stretch to say that this meeting, and the ideas and energy that came from it, may have helped inspire not only the modern Militia Movement, but also crimes ranging from the murders of abortion providers to the Oklahoma City bombing.
And in the midst of it all was Larry Pratt. Lenny Zeskind describes the GOA leader’s appearance at the meeting:
Pratt stood at the podium and peered out from behind his glasses. He confessed to the crowd of gun lovers that he wasn’t a particularly good shot or an enthusiastic hunter. “I bought my first gun in 1968, during the riots in Washington, D.C.” that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he said. At the time all he could buy was a shotgun. “If they’d had that assault rifle, so-called, for sale, and I’d seen that big old magazine there at the time, that’s exactly what I would have bought.”
Pratt, who had studied the evolution of death squads in places like Guatemala and the Philippines and glorified these vigilante groups, joined Beam in providing inspiration for a revived militia movement. He argued the importance of the old-style posse, organized in militias. In his book Blood and Politics, Zeskind quotes from Pratt’s writing: “When the government no longer fears the people, atrocities become possible….Long live the militia! Long live freedom! Long live a government that fears the people.”
Larry Pratt's facebook photo. (He has 3,021 friends.)
Pratt’s history, in general, exemplifies the blurred boundaries between the “mainstream” and the “fringe”—the right and the extremist (and usually racist) far right. In addition to GOA, Pratt set up the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, which attacked gays and demanded a quarantine for anyone with AIDS. “Our judges coddle criminals instead of caring for the victims of crime. They’ve chased God out of our schools, defended abortions…and now they are trying to infect us with strange and horrible diseases.” He was a keen backer of Randall Terry and Operation Rescue, and when the government shutdown OR’s finances, Pratt’s Protect the Family Foundation raised money to help pay off the groups debts and fines. And Pratt is also a founder of the anti-immigrant groups U.S. Border Patrol and English First, and a contributing editor to a periodical of the anti-Semitic United Sovereigns of America.
Pratt has said that he is not a racist or a violent revolutionary, though his record suggests otherwise. And the apparent mainstream influence of a radical group like GOA seems especially sinister at this historical moment. We live at a time when the election of the first black president has sparked an explosion in gun sales, and when attendees at anti-health care reform town halls carry assault weapons and signs saying “It is time to water the tree of liberty” (with the “blood of patriots and tyrants” as the quotation continues). All of which is just fine with the Gun Owners of America. Commenting on the idea of “Americans openly carrying firearms outside presidential appearances,”Pratt told CBS News that ”the most remarkable thing about this is that some find this behavior to be remarkable.” A few days later, Chris Matthews asked GOA spokesperson John Velleco whether people attending a presidential event should ”be allowed to walk in the door armed… Should they be allowed to come into the president’s company and sit in the first row with a loaded gun?” Velleco said that would be fine with him.
In times like this, accommodating the likes of Pratt and the GOA–over health care reform or anything else–is playing with fire.
What with Sarah Palin out and about, it’s time for all Americans to think more seriously about her message, especially when it comes to the socialist menace. Palin began using the S word to refer to Obama back during the campaign, and in June she sadly told Sean Hannity that socialism is “where we are headed” under the new administration.
But the Palin’s warnings may have come too late, since the nation had meandered far down the pink path long before she raised the alarm. Socialism has already wormed its way into the national fabric, hastening its rot. In Maine, home of the simple, taciturn, penny pinching, shrewd yankee of yore, Sam Smith, a veteran blogger with an independent streak, has pulled together a chilling list of socialistic enterprises you may unwittingly be helping to support. If we’re really going to deep six socialism, here’s how Sam thinks we should start:
- Return to the old system of fire fighting in which blazes were handled by private fire brigades hired by private insurance companies. Brooke Harrington described the practice in Economic Sociology: “If you wanted a fire brigade to come to your aid in . . . emergencies, you had to join a kind of club with private membership fees. It worked like this: you ponied up the fees, the club gave you a plaque to put over your front door, and then if fire swept through the neighborhood, the club dispatched help, but they only assisted paying members. So if you didn’t have that plaque over your door, the fire rescue teams would pass you right on by. It would not be uncommon to find that your house burned down while the one next door would be saved.” Sounds a little like our health insurance system.
- End public education. Public schools – which strongly aided the growth of America – are about as socialistic as you can get. Obama, it should be noted, is trying to help reduce this deleterious influence by converting public schools into profit-making charter operations.
- Close down all federal highways or sell them off to the highest bidder so they can turn them into profit-making roads using tolls.
- Abolish Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and all other such welfare programs.
- End all government interference with the banking and financial industries. This would have recently saved us hundred of billions in bailout funds.
- End all veterans programs including closing veterans’ hospitals.
- Sell off all public transportation to unregulated private interests.
- Close all public hospitals, end public subsidies to other hospitals and privatize all ambulance service.
- End all government regulation of food or health products.
- End the practice of government plowing streets after a snow storm. As Boston mayor James Curly put it, “The Lord brought it; let the Lord take it away.”
The Republican Study Committee, which consist of more than 100 conservative members of Congress headed by Georgia’s Tom Price, have set forth a slew of proposals on health care which are sure to be used by members on the stump in 2010. The most important of these proposals concern Medicare, which the Right long has viewed as a foot in the door to socialism. At least two of the RSC committee proposals provide seniors the right to “opt out” of the program entirely. What’s more, old folks could actually get back the money they may have paid into Medicare to date.
Marsha Blackburn’s bill sets up one opt out provision. She is a conservative Republican from Tennessee who runs on low taxe and strengthening the border with fences, and she has has signed on to birther legislation aimed at appeasing the GOP, rightwing which claims Obama isn’t really a US citizen. (The bill Blackburn backs requires every presidential candidate to put up his or her birth certificate for public scrutiny before running.)
Ripping into Medicare is not only another step down the conservative path towards less government, but in this instance, opens the Medicare system to a pillaging by the insurance industry in the form of high-cost Medicare Advantage plans, along with whatever other schemes the industry can dream up. Clearly, the idea is that Medicare recipients could use the money they “get back” from Medicare to buy insurance on the private market. Medicare Part D, the presciption drug program, is already run through private insurance companies, which skim profits off premiums and co-pays, and allows drug companies to charge high prices at government expense. Serious cost efficiency would mean kicking the insurance companies out of Medicare, and having the government negotiate drug prices. Neither is likely to happen under the current health reform–or any time soon.
Exactly what is the Republican Study Committee? Organized by the late Paul Weyrich—himself one of the founders of the New Right– in 1973 as an antidote to the perceived leftish tendencies of the then dominant middle-of-the-road Republican Party, its first chair was Phil Crane, best known as a golden conservative orator who got creamed in his race for presidency against Reagan in 1980. Past members included Tom DeLay and Dan Quayle. In today’s world the RSC is all about balancing budgets, cutting taxes, and diminishing the power of the central government. The Committee’s response to hurricane Katrina was to offer up “Operation Offset,” which proposed cuts of $100 billion to cover the cost of rebuilding New Orleans. According to one independent analysis, this would have meant reducing social welfare programs to the poor—the most vulnerable group in the hurricane—by 40 percent. This cynical strategy was aimed at robbing the poor (permanently) in the name of giving to the poor (temporarily and halfheartedly).
The fact that most of the RSC’s measures couldn’t get past the Bush administration is a measure of just how far to the right the RSC lies. And the fact that they are now taking aim at Medicare shows that the right will never rest until it destroys the only single-payer health care program this country has ever known.
