Cynicism and Hope

9:54 Obama on businesses laying off or not able to hire because of health care costs. And this is only going to get worse as costs go up.

9:57 This will be interesting, having a moderator (Obama) who is the chief representative of one side …

9:58 We have included a lot of Republican ideas in the Senate bill.

9:59 “We have tried to take every single cost containment idea that’s out there” and tried to include them in this bill. I’d like to find out which of your cost containment ideas are not in the bill and see whether we can include them. Alexander, you named some ideas you’d like in a bill that are already there.

10:02 McConnell points to poll numbers unfavorable to reform. (Of course, he doesn’t say is that a lot of the opposition is from people who think the bills are not strong enough.)

10:05 Coburn-R: Get rid of fraud. Tort reform.

10:07 Coburn-R says we can incentive healthy eating for users of food stamps and make school lunches healthier because right now food stamps and school lunches are causing diabetes. He forgot to mention massive subsidies for corn-growing.

10:10 Obama: Every good idea we’ve heard about eliminating fraud and abuse in government health care we’ve incorporated. So that’s an area where we agree. But that doesn’t account for rising costs in private marketplace. Sebelius is working on tort reform. There are a lot of preventive measures in the bill already.

10:12 Hoyer-D: Americans hope we’re here talking about them, not about us.

10:15 Hoyer-D, to Coburn-R: We agree with you about cost containment, and a lot of what you suggest is in the bills. You may have a better way of doing it, but we do have wellness as a focus. We agree with your premise on food stamps and school lunches; let’s find a way to get there.

10:17 Hoyer-D: You agree with us on preexisting conditions and caps on coverage, but it’s not in your bill (I think I heard that right). We agree on coordination of care.

10:18 Hoyer-D: Public option! Would open competition. Our caucus didn’t all agree on that.

10:20 Obama: I’d like to hear Republican objections to allowing individuals and small businesses to be able to become part of a large group like government employees have so they’ll have negotiating power–which would drive down costs. (Is he talking about a public option?) Some have agreed in the past on this. Is there something about the way bills have been structured that makes you concerned?

10:22 Republican response doesn’t answer Obama’s question but suggests Republican proposal re allowing association health plans. This would be better than the exchange that’s in the “huge bill.”

10:25 Baucus: “Gaps, in my judgment, are not that great.” We allow buying and selling across state lines in exchange.

OK, I need to break for some work-work.

9:25 Mr. Alexander, how will taxes and mandates cause premiums to go up?

9:29 Mr. Alexander, passing components of health care reform via reconciliation is not the same as abolishing the filibuster. (I guess this is live-arguing on a blog, not live blogging, huh?)

9:31 The administration’s BATNA–best alternative to a negotiated agreement–is probably reconciliation. Alexander is suggesting that this summit will be fruitless unless the administration deep-sixes its BATNA from the get-go.

9:35 Pelosi: “They don’t have time for us to start over.” Amen, Sister.

9:39 Pelosi is talking about potential entrepreneurs being locked down because of their reliance on employer-provided health care for a family member with a pre-existing condition.

9:40 Pelosi: “Who can say ‘ram’?” We started this effort just a few days after the inauguration–with an effort to do it in a bipartisan manner.

9:43 Reid, to Lamar Alexander: “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.” We need to talk about facts here.

9:45 Reid: Of course reconciliation is not the only way out. But reconciliation has been used for many things, especially by Republicans, for Contract with America and tax cuts for rich people.

9:45 Reid: Talking about many Republican amendments in Senate bill. “So let’s look at the facts a little more, ’cause they can be stubborn, y’know?”

9:49 Reid brings out the tired If you have a plan, let’s see it. That’s not going to help. Republicans will say, we gave you a plan!

9:51 Obama talking to Lamar Alexander about process: A lot of the elements you mention are in the Senate bill. So let’s talk about what we do agree on, then what we don’t agree on, and whether we can bridge differences. I don’t know if we can bridge differences, but I hope we can. Before we talk about legislative process, let’s talk about substance. Maybe we’ll surprise ourselves and find out we agree more than we disagree.

“It was enough for him to know that the people were pre-existing.”

–Ed Spivey of Sojourners, in What Would Jesus Prescribe?

Having just returned to freelancing and been smacked in the face by the difficulty of accessing health insurance when you’re self-employed, I’ve been disheartened that the abortion debate threatens to derail health-care reform.

But if we calmly unpack the Stupak amendment, maybe we can all find a way to get along. NPR’s All Things Considered offers some help.

Heidi Unruh suggests two things to pay attention to when discussing public policy: principles that make sense to everyone, even small children, and questions no one can answer.

Then she links to this video, produced by the American Values Network and Sojourners:

Are you waiting to see the doctor? Tell us about it in the comments.

My friend E. Peevie’s eleven-year-old son

has so many pre-existing conditions, long-term medications, and high-risk medical concerns that the only way he’ll get health care coverage is if he marries a cardiologist or ends up working for a large company that’s required to provide health insurance to all of its employees.

Read about him and hospitals here.

Though Representative Joe Wilson (R., S.C.) apologized for shouting “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to Congress last night, he continued to insist that the president was lying about benefits being unavailable to undocumented immigrants.

In an interview broadcast on MSNBC, Wilson pointed to two amendments calling for verification of citizenship that were turned down in House committees. The conclusion: if you’re not going to check for citizenship, you’re going to wind up covering some people who are here illegally. Why would you vote down citizenship checks if you’re not planning to insure “illegals”?

For the moment I’ll put aside the question of whether it’s biblical to care for people who don’t have the proper paperwork.

There are some big problems with this push for citizenship checks for everything from voter registration to school enrollment.

1) A 2006 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that 13 million Americans do not have access to documents proving their citizenship. The League of Women Voters of the state of Georgia points out that some of these people were born at home and their birth was never registered with the state.

2) The Brennan Center also learned that only 66% of voting-age women have access to citizenship documents with their current legal name. That means 32 million women who are U.S. citizens don’t have the documents to prove it. (I would need to gather my birth certificate, my marriage license, and presumably some sort of additional documentation showing that I changed my first name—from the never-used Margaret to the always-used Meg—as well as my last after I married.)

3) Naturalization papers don’t all look the same, an election official in Colorado told me when I was researching the topic a few years ago. It’s very difficult for a nonexpert to verify their authenticity.

4) It’s a dangerous practice to put someone’s health care—or right to vote or go to school—into the hands of people who could subjectively refuse to accept that authentic documents are real. We know that there are those who will always contest the citizenship of certain people no matter how many times they’ve seen a birth certificate.

If we can’t verify someone’s right to be in the U.S., some undocumented immigrants might receive benefits to which they’re not entitled. So what are we to do? Should all those citizens who can’t prove their status (or whose proof some won’t accept) just do without coverage? Should we kill health-care reform altogether since we can’t administer the system with 100% certainty that no one will receive something they’re not allowed to have?

Or should we just take the risk that a few extra people want so much to be well that they’d risk deportation to be cured?

I was talking with someone about media bias and health care. I asked, “What do you know about Canadian health care?”

“Well, I haven’t researched it,” he said, “but I’ve heard it’s really bad.”

“Who has told you it’s bad? Are they people who have researched it themselves?”

“I don’t know what kind of research people do, but you hear it from commentators in the media and people like that.”

“Do you know what Canadians think about it?”

“Well they wouldn’t really know.”

“Huh?”

“They only know their own system. They haven’t experienced ours, so they don’t have anything to compare their system to.”

I’m not sure who can be experts on Canadian health care if Canadians themselves are out of the running, but for what it’s worth, here’s what a few Canadians think:

While I continue to work full-time at the job-with-benefits that I’m about to leave, I’m trying to fast-track a transition to other insurance for my family. It’s been exhausting and has left me extra grouchy about the health-care debate.

So you can imagine my irritation when I came across this gem:

The Family Research Council needed to use elderly people in this ad because denial of coverage is already a common experience for people too young for Medicare. To scare people about government denial of coverage they had to use people who already have the most reliable coverage, which just so happens to be provided by the government.

Oppose government health care because it will spell the end of government health care!

Huh?

Oh, was I feeling grouchy!

But then I read about the Mennonite Church USA’s Corinthian Plan. A couple of years ago, delegates at a church convention decided to formally support health-care reform. But they realized that if they’re going to say health care is a justice issue, they need to practice what they preach, and about 100 Mennonite pastors in this country have no health insurance.

So they came up with a plan. If 80% or more of U.S. Mennonite congregations will chuck $10 per attender into a pot, all Mennonite pastors and church workers will be able to have health coverage for their families regardless of the size or wealth of their congregations. The plan is more complicated, but that’s it in a nutshell.

This concrete expression of Mennonite mutual aid takes its name from 2 Corinthians 8:13-15:

I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, “The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

This story of mutual aid calmed my soul.

It’s important to note that the Mennonite Church USA’s support for health-care reform continues. They know that a just civil society will also reflect the Corinthian principle.

This sentence concludes Rick Perlstein’s interesting take on the vehemence of opposition to health care reform:

Good thing our leaders weren’t so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill—because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.

See In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition, from the August 16 Washington Post.

Hat tip to Rick Nowlin.