Brad DeLong makes the case for Barack Obama's approach to the health care reform issue. I pretty much agree.
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DeLong on the Obama Plan
04 Jun 2007 10:26 am
Comments (23)
The very fact that Obama's more timid approach hasn't inocculated him from attacks and criticism, and that his plan has inspired such tepid support, would seem to undercut the case for a plan who's primary justification is political. In effect the argument is: "People should support it because other people might support it, even though no one really supports it enthusiastically."
Counting the right, aka, hand maidens of corporate interests, to not object because something is "market oriented" is hopelessly naive. Sometimes it's better to be on the right side of the road or the left rather than in the middle with all of the traffic.
And I thought you were opposed to healtcare plans in general. What made you change your mind?
Petey, Matt Yglesias isn't actually for or against Obama's health care plan. He's for Obama, because he's convinced (without much evidence, as far as I can tell) that Obama is the most antiwar candidate in the race, and is looking for excuses to support him in other areas. Remember that when Obama had no health care plan whatsoever, the usually wonkish Yglesias came out in favor of candidates not telling voters what their plans are, the position that happened to make Obama look savvy rather than inattentive and disengaged. And when it started to become clear that Edwards would have clearer health care bona fides than Obama, Yglesias started taking up the line that it was bad to take up the fight for health care reform at all because it was a lost cause.
All of this is coming from a pundit-blogger who has, before now, done very, very little writing or research on health care. When you look at Jon Cohn or Ezra Klein, they're both delving into the specifics of plans and they're both talking about the importance of mandates. When you look at Matt Yglesias, you see a blogger who's looking for posts of other pundits who have found arguments for why a plan without a mandate would be acceptable.
Now, it's possible that Yglesias isn't being this disingenuous, and that he's merely lazily writing ill-informed commentary. Neither possibility is wildly comforting, though. I honestly wish he'd stick to analyzing the candidates' foreign policy priorities, which is where his interest has always been, and which are still frustratingly unclear.
Obama's plan to "offer the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program to everybody" is great for me, since I'm self-employed. I guess it's also great for people with lousy jobs "if subsidies to cover the cost for the working poor" are big enough. But who's going to pay for these subsidies? Or the cost of admitting more sick people to the federal program? I think Obama needs more emphasis on cost savings that would at least partly pay for some of this. American voters are generally compassionate if they believe it won't cost them anything.
"Petey, Matt Yglesias isn't actually for or against Obama's health care plan. He's for Obama, because he's convinced (without much evidence, as far as I can tell) that Obama is the most antiwar candidate in the race, and is looking for excuses to support him in other areas."
We're all guilty of reasoning like this at times. It's human.
But I trust that Matthew has a theoretical commitment to intellectual honesty, and thus tries to fight against the lure of such reasoning. So if he really thinks that mandates are a bad idea on the abstract level, he'll lay out his reasoning at some point.
Seen for what it really is, mandated health insurance is a way of creating captive customers for the health insurance industry. This is why it's the method of choice for U.S. pols.
The chances of the U.S. getting workable universal health care from politicians who are being greased by the AMA, AHA, the insurance industry, the pharmaceuticals, etc. are dead flat zero.
I don't recall Matthew coming out in favor of a particular candidate. He says good stuff about Obama and bad stuff about Obama, good stuff about Edwards and bad stuff about Edwards.
I personally am against the idea of individual mandates even though it would cost me less than other ways to pay for broader coverage. I think bossing people around like that makes them hate the government. Whether I'm right or wrong, I'm angry just thinking about it, and lots of other people would be angry too; so poof, there goes your health care plan.
I've always gotten the impression that Yglesias is leaning towards Edwards (much like most of the young, white, male section of the blogosphere).
Perhaps that's just my own pro-Obama bias showing, though.
Either way, I surely wouldn't think that, based on Matt's overall blogging, he'd be going out of his way to be favorable to Obama's health-care proposal.
I've always gotten the impression that Yglesias is leaning towards Edwards
I can dig up the link if necessary, but Yglesias said about two months ago that he was leaning towards Obama for foreign policy reasons, and hasn't wavered too much on that since. He complimented a recent speech Edwards gave on foreign policy, but only while giving equal praise to a recent Obama speech - a speech in which Obama called for a massive and gratuitous increase in the size of the U.S. armed forces. Yglesias has been consistently skeptical of Edwards's policy people, while being strangely credulous towards the supposed benevolence of the people around Obama. He's also tended to overlook positive statements made by the Edwards camp that would typically resonate with his views (promises to remove all troops from Iraq, for instance). Even if Yglesias hasn't decided who to vote for per se, it seems he has a relatively well-formed idea of who he thinks is better on foreign policy issues.
The bottom line remains that Yglesias really doesn't know much at all about health care policy, and hasn't pretended to know much about it before now, when it suddenly became another issue in the Edwards versus Obama debate. To the extent that Yglesias has voiced these new opinions, they've been (1) very uninformed and (2) generally supportive of whatever stance Obama's campaign happens to have taken at the time. The simplest explanation for me is that he's just cheering on his guy, although inept punditry could be another.
Gary Sugar- I used to have similar feelings about mandates when they were first proposed here in Mass. But, in the end, they come down to an individual play-or-pay, since the penalty for not buying in is a tax penalty.
While most would buy insurance if it is made affordable some are free riders, as no one gets turned away from the emergency room and state taxpayers have been subsidizing the "free care pool" at a number of hospitals for decades. Unless we're willing to let the uninsured die in car accidents, free riders are going to be a problem in any scheme without either an individual play-or-pay component or alternatively a tax (which is a mandate by yet another name).
Christmas, could you just mail the guy a John Edwards flyer & let the man be to do his job?
Christmas, could you just mail the guy a John Edwards flyer & let the man be to do his job?
I'm undecided on Edwards precisely because I honestly don't know whether he's better or worse than Obama on foreign policy. That's why I'm miffed with Yglesias: he isn't doing his job. He's got one major area of policy interest that he's developed over the years, and he's puttering around in a bunch of ones he doesn't understand while avoiding the one he knows. He could be doing me - and everyone else - a real service by actually trying to figure out what Obama's foreign policy, or Edwards's foreign policy, would actually look like. But of late he hasn't. Instead he's been arguing for Obama by proxy through bizarre - and bad - arguments: policy specifics are bad, attempts at health care reform are bad. Yglesias should stick to writing about what he knows about - or at least, he should try to do research on his own and educate himself about other issues if he's becoming interested in them all of a sudden, rather than linking to scattered posts that may or may not support his uninformed hunches.
AJ, I'm guessing that people who don't buy health insurance are making that decision because they don't have a lot of money. I still believe the old-fashioned principle about determining tax rates based on ability to pay. This mandates thing sounds like almost the opposite.
After hearing for years that other countries provide universal care for half what we spend to provide far less care, naturally, I want to do it that way. But if what's feasible for the entire world isn't feasible here, then I say pay for it with regular progressive taxes.
Gary Sugar- That'd be my ultimate preference too, for simplicity sake. But the pay-or-play model here in MA and in the Edwards plan is coupled with progressive subsidies, works much like progressive taxes. So you have a backdoor progressive tax, which is why you hear so little about it from Mitt Romney.
The main benefit of which is avoiding the political liability of what would look like a big tax increase to replace the premiums most of us pay now.
I like David Sirota's take on Obamania vs Edwards's issues and principles focused campaign. Right now Obama is the Anti-Hillary. His campaign and the media's response to it is primarily about style, personality and the media and public's conscious and unconscious projections of their desire for something different. It has all the political depth of a consumer marketing survey.
As well David Ehrenstein's Magic Negro theory is not really that far from the mark in explaining Obamania among many liberals. As Ehrenstein and Sirota basically predicted Obama's campaign style and philosophy reflects only a slight variation of the DLC, New Democrat, New Labor, Clintonian, Blairian Triangulation strategy. A mechanical, predictable, cautious, timid, cynical, corruptible, non-idealogical unprincipled philosophy that is doomed to failure. The end result being the widening of the gap between an extreme wealthly selfish and out of touch elite and everybody else. The Clintons and Tony Blair triangulated between the Conservatives and so-called moderates and ended up calling themselves New Democrats or New Labor. Where as Obama aims for what in many ways is an even less bold triangulation strategy. Attempting to parse the supposed differences between the New Democrats and Mainstream Upper Class Liberals who respond so enthusiastically to Obamania. It is simply cutting the cake a bit too thin. New Coke meets New Democrat. New Democrat 2.0 anyone??? In the end you are left with a politics that is the antithesis of leadership and displays a complete lack of faith in the role of positive government.
Because what Yglesias and Delong should know is no matter how well Obama's Health care plan holds up in a cynical marketing survey of supposed swing voters. What counts is that it would work if it was actually implemented. Not that it is perceived as having just the right mix of bold proposals with out seeming too radical.
The real question is why does the Obama Campaign so distrust the voting public's ability to understand healthcare related issues that challenge preconceived notions of what is politically possible? Why does Obama believe a cynical marketing approach is a substitute for real political leadership? Our founding fathers believed that our nation could be a country of informed rational voters. Why does Obama believe otherwise?
We know Single Payer Socialized Health Insurance programs work. We have Canada as an example to present to the public. We know our current system consisting of private market based health insurance with a feeble incomplete mishmash of public safety net programs does not. Polls overwhelming show public believes the current system does not work well. It is insanely complicated and is way too expensive. Polls indicate a growing desire for a Canadian style program. We dam well know Hillarycare went no where politically because it was incomprehensible. A slightly more bold version of Hillarycare with even more options than we have today is therefore also doomed from the start.
Allowing uninsured individuals to pay to a current public health program is simply an admission that the private market base system dumps its unprofitable and less able to pay would be customers on the public sector. In fact it would only encourage private insurers and employers to do more of the same while still being subsidized by massive corporate tax breaks. All Obama would be doing is adding what will become an overburdened underfunded public health insurance system to the mix that will forever turn the public away from the possibility of a working caring public health insurance system. Is Obama's goal Universal Health Insurance or simply propping up and publicly subsidizing an uncaring greedy private health insurance system?
A basic rule of good design proposal is if the one page synopsis can not be understood by a college educated individual you are on the wrong track. Anything else indicates a lack of focus, purpose and competing goals. Canada's Single Payer system has the virtue of a clear sense of purpose towards understandable goals in the service of the public good.
So why does Obama present what an increasing number of American's know up front to be a mere cynical political campaign marketing strategy in the guise of a viable proven health care proposal?
Does Obama really share Hillary's contempt for the intelligence, character and rationality of the American public? Because if so Obamania will have about the same shelf life as New Coke.
Last If you really what to know what is wrong with politics today? I strongly urge you to watch the Adam Curtis series of BBC documentaries on modern culture and politics. They are readily available for download as bittorrents.
"Instead he's been arguing for Obama by proxy through bizarre - and bad - arguments: policy specifics are bad, attempts at health care reform are bad."
Well said.
It's the bad arguments I object to.
I'd vote Republican or Third Party before I'd vote Obama. He supports the third-world invasion of the U.S. which big business is using to drive down American wages.
The marriage of big business and multiculturalism is the worst thing ever to happen to the American worker.
Big business is using legal and illegal third-world immigration to drive down American wages.
And liberals can side with big business on this issue and use "multiculturalism" to appease their conscience.
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Posted by Old-School Democrat | June 4, 2007 3:43 PM
Please vote Republican. We want nothing to do with you.
Yglesias' politics aside, I found DeLong's piece to be a bit of a bait-and-switch. Which bothers me, because I'm a big fan of his.
DeLong starts off:
It is an iron law of American politics that Democratic party politicians who propose relatively detailed healthcare reform plans – as Barack Obama did last Tuesday – get trashed. If they propose a plan that might actually pass, securing the 60 needed votes to close off debate and proceed to a final vote in the Senate, they will be trashed for having abandoned their base and their own principles. If they propose a plan that corresponds to the world that they wish they could attain, they will be trashed as having no practical sense. In either case, they lose. It is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer: a pointless and painful exercise.
This is too bad, as the US needs to have a debate on its healthcare system. It spends twice as much as western Europe for little clear benefit: Americans are no more healthy or long-lived than western Europeans. If the US could get the same value for its healthcare dollars as western Europe, it would have an extra $800bn a year to spend: enough to pay room, board and private college tuition for every American 18-21 year old, and still have enough left over for Marshall Plan-scale economic development programmes for Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt and the Maghreb.
So is Obama's plan going to free up that $800 billion annual windfall? No, it's not - all it will do is reduce the number of uninsured, and who knows that it won't cost more than we're paying now.
So if the prospect of that windfall is why the U.S. needs to have a vigorous health care debate, but Obama's plan isn't going to try to reform the system in a way that has a prospect of freeing up that money, then why does DeLong favor Obama's plan? Anyone have any ideas? Because I sure don't.
Gary Sugar,
I do not consider myself conservative Democrat. My hero's were FDR and Truman. FDR's New Deal and the great expansion of the American Middle Class and the labor movement took place in an era of Restricted moderate levels of immigration that followed the 1924 Immigration Act which was supported by a wide majority of American at the time.
Right now we are dealing with the combined fallout of the ill conceived 1965 Immigration Act that encouraged chain migration, the
1986 Simpson-Mazzoli fiasco which granted amnesty to Illegal Aliens with no improvement in workplace enforcement or the creation of a secure national identification system, the 1990 creation of the heinous H1-B and later L1 visa and last NAFTA and FREE TRADE fundamentalism.
Old-School Democrat is right about one thing. If the Democrats nominate an Open Borders Free Trade Democrat in 2008 we stand to be absolutely crushed . If Nancy Pelosi pushes this turd called Comprehensive Immigration Reform Democrats will most likely loose the House as well. I can only tell you about the Midwest. Out here in flyover land Democrats will join Republican and vote out any Democratic voter who supports "CIR". Freshman Democrats like Brad Elsworth D-IN are going on record that they want nothing to do with "CIR". If Pelosi takes too strong a stand in support of "CIR" many Independents and some Democrats will simply vote for the Republican to ensure she is no longer speaker since Boehner is rapidly shifting to the Tancredo wing of the party. As long as Cheap Labor Free Trade DLCer Democrat like Rahm Emmanuel is the real power in the House, lots of Democrats and Independent will simply see their 2006 mandate spat upon.
It does not matter that the country hates George Bush. Bushco will not be on the ballot in 2008. It is almost certain that the Republican base will force the adoption of a Secure Borders, Restricted Immigration, Attrition Through Enforcement of Employment laws for Illegal Aliens.
Against that, Hillary and Obama do not stand a chance. Their nomination will result in certain defeat. Edwards could still win if he takes a strong populist Secure Borders and Restricted Immigration stance.
Obama's plan sucks. It's a collection of other people's ideas, minus a few of them so he can call it "more moderate."
But his decision-making process in terms of what he jettisons can't be justified from either a political or a policy standpoint. For instance, he gets rid of the mandate, something policymakers widely agree needs to be there, something that not one but TWO Republican governors have come out for. The mandate is not just good policy, it's very moderate policy...and he threw it out.
There's a lot more devil in his details, if you know health care policy. But the mandate is the most obvious example of the overall stupid choices made in this plan.
For chrissake, Republicans have mandates. Getting rid of the mandate doesn't make you a moderate, it makes you STUPID. It's jettisoning good policy for no political gain. I can't imagine anything more gratuitously dumb. If you're going to jettison good policy, you should at least get political advantage for it. He doesn't. That's dumb.
Obasama...
Obi Obi Won.
(sama sama)
Comments closed June 18, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
"Brad DeLong makes the case for Barack Obama's approach to the health care reform issue."
I think he'd have had to have gotten comparative if he actually wanted to the case for Barack Obama's approach to the health care reform issue...
Obama's plan is better than a sharp stick in the eye, for example, but that's not quite the proper criteria.
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And I thought you were opposed to healtcare plans in general. What made you change your mind?
Posted by Petey | June 4, 2007 10:47 AM