Sunday, December 20, 2009
Good articles.
ARRA keeping millions from poverty.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3035
Republicans' manual for delaying health care reform.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/2/810117/-GOP-Obstruction-Manual-for-HCR
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3035
Republicans' manual for delaying health care reform.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/2/810117/-GOP-Obstruction-Manual-for-HCR
House passed wall street reform on 11 Dec 2009.
It's not as big as the huge backward step when Clinton and the Republicans eliminated Glass Steagall and thus enabled the recent economic disaster, but it is a step forward.
Diane Rehm 14 December 2009
http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/12/14.php#29178
Consumer Reports
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/money/2009/12/cfpa-financial-regulation-house.html
Q&A by the AP
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i9UE4Ip_QNvHp43cXXo1HQzApRngD9CHDR3G0
Huffington Post 11 December 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/11/house-passes-financial-re_n_389267.html
First Posted: 12-11-09 04:30 PM | Updated: 12-11-09 08:32 PM
Diane Rehm 14 December 2009
http://wamu.org/programs/dr/09/12/14.php#29178
Consumer Reports
http://blogs.consumerreports.org/money/2009/12/cfpa-financial-regulation-house.html
Q&A by the AP
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i9UE4Ip_QNvHp43cXXo1HQzApRngD9CHDR3G0
Huffington Post 11 December 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/11/house-passes-financial-re_n_389267.html
First Posted: 12-11-09 04:30 PM | Updated: 12-11-09 08:32 PM
In a close vote, the House of Representatives Friday afternoon passed a financial reform bill intended to re-regulate Wall Street and increase protections for Main Street.
The bill, passed in a 223-202 vote, calls for the creation of a new federal agency dedicated to protecting consumers that would police consumer credit products like mortgages and credit cards. It also establishes new rules for the trading of derivatives and increases the transparency of the credit-rating process -- two previously under-regulated parts of the economy that played a large role in last year's economic collapse.
Not a single Republican voted for the bill. Twenty-seven Democrats broke with the rest of their party to vote against it.
The measure includes language, introduced in committee by Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), that would authorize an expansive audit of the Federal Reserve, a landmark achievement for critics of the central bank's secretive operations.
The bill also requires systemically important banks to pay into a fund that would be used to break them up and sell them off if they go bankrupt. Republicans bitterly and inaccurately referred to it as a "bailout fund," telegraphing a critique that will undoubtedly re-emerge during the 2010 midterm elections.
"Today is an important milestone in reversing the decades-long stranglehold Wall Street and big banks have had over our economy. But it is just the first step," said Service Employees International Union Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger. "Despite the millions Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce spent fighting the demands of the American people and the dozens of visits by big bank CEOs to strong-arm members of Congress, our leaders found the political will and courage to pass the most historic financial reform legislation in nearly 80 years."
The fight to fundamentally reform financial regulations began soon after President Barack Obama took office. Public zeal, though, was tempered on Capitol Hill by bankers and other Wall Street titans, who united to fight against the kind of reform advocated by consumers, union groups, and academics.
The bill disappointed some consumer groups, who pledged to work to make it stronger as it moves to the Senate.
"The bill does very little to address industry structure," the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen said in a statement. "The biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the crisis."
Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, hailed the bill's creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, but worried it goes too far in allowing federal regulators to preempt their state compatriots.
"The bill would provide consumers with significant protections from the industry practices that dismantled our economy and those of countries around the world," he said. "We commend the House for this vote to protect families and small business from unfair, unsafe financial practices. However, we remain concerned that the bill allows the same federal banking regulators whose inaction led to the current crisis to continue to ignore state law. That must be fixed as the legislation moves forward."
Despite the advocacy by financial luminaries like former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the bill does nothing to break up big banks or address the mixing of commercial and investment banking by giant firms like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.
Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, praised the part of the bill dealing with credit rating agencies -- with a caveat, though.
"If you accept the whole business model as a given, the rest of it is strong," she said, referring to the fact that the agencies are paid by bond issuers to rate their products, creating an inherent conflict of interest.
Specifically, the bill subjects the credit rating agencies to increased liability, allowing for aggrieved investors to sue. Also, thanks to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a provision was added mandating that the agencies owe a duty of care to investors, rather than just to the bond issuers that pay them, she said.
The bill takes a stab at regulating derivatives, but key reforms were either ignored or voted down. An amendment by Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) calling for increased transparency in trading, which was backed by a coalition of pro-reform advocates, was voted down 330-98.
Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank offered another amendment regarding derivatives that would have beefed up the powers of federal regulators, who have long lacked critical authority to initiate meaningful regulation. That, too, died.
A third amendment would have banned those derivatives that are, in essence, used by big financial firms to place bets upon bets upon bets, like the kind pioneered by AIG that helped crash the financial system last year. It also was voted down.
"Basically, the financial houses and the big banks are working [these amendments] real hard," Stupak said. "Wall Street's been working hard. We've been tripping over them all week. They've won this round."
Public Citizen offered this explanation:
It's no mystery why this legislation is not stronger. Wall Street spent $5 billion in political investments in the decade before the financial crisis to obtain deregulation and non-enforcement of existing rules.
Despite Wall Street having crashed the economy, nothing has changed on Capitol Hill. Wall Street continues to invest heavily in politics and wield enormous influence. More than 900 former federal employees, including 70 former members of Congress, are working as lobbyists for the financial services sector this year. Wall Street has spent more than $40 million on campaign contributions since November 2008.
"It was the single most important they needed to get right if they wanted to protect the system from future crises, and I don't think they got it right," Roper said.
The bill also addressed investor protection, increasing it in some areas but weakening it in others. Shareholders will now be able to hold non-binding votes on executive compensation -- a big win for investor groups. But the bill also includes a provision that changes current law by exempting about half of all publicly-traded companies from having to get audits of their internal controls. Fraud will be harder to catch, investor groups argue.
The House also voted to kill what many experts, consumer advocates and economists believe to be the best -- and perhaps the only -- way to stem the rising tide of foreclosures: a provision that would have allowed judges to cut the principal for struggling homeowners in bankruptcy.
Belying their expressions of outrage towards banks and sympathy for struggling homeowners, enough Democrats joined Republicans to kill the amendment offered by Democrats John Conyers of Michigan and Jim Marshall of Georgia, by a 241-188 vote.
Bankruptcy courts may reduce several forms of debt for distressed borrowers, but not the mortgage on a primary residence. Judges can, however, alter loan terms on vacation homes and cars, for example.
In March, the House passed a bill that was "substantively identical" to today's amendment, according to a summary of the amendment provided by the chamber's Rules Committee. The Senate, however, voted it down, leading Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime advocate for homeowners, to conclude that banks "frankly own the place."
"The financial industry has so much invested in political influence, in lobbying, in campaign contributions, into having a local network through the local banks and the credit unions," said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.). "It's just very hard to go up against that based upon a strong public policy objective."
Backers of the measure thought it had a reasonable chance of passage, since, after all, it had already passed, and the foreclosure crisis has only gotten worse. About one in seven homeowners with a mortgage are either delinquent or in foreclosure. The passage of time, however, gave banks a chance to work the halls.
"We got a vote for it earlier this year, but it took a huge effort. There was none of that effort this time. I think that leadership has been working other issues in the bill, but not that one. And there's enormous opposition to it," said Miller.
One in four homeowners with a mortgage are "underwater," meaning they owe more on the home than it's worth. The administration's $75 billion foreclosure-prevention effort does virtually nothing to help those homeowners, consumer advocates and economists argue.
Furthermore, since the program's launch in March, less than 32,000 troubled homeowners have received permanent relief through the government's mortgage modification plan. It's supposed to help three to four million homeowners avoid foreclosure.
"You would think that would be a strong argument for doing something about it," Miller said. "And with the continued foreclosure rate and the effect that's having on home values and the effect they're having on each other, being such a downward force on our economy. But there's just a united front of opposition by the financial industry. If some members are playing it by thinking, well, I'll give them this vote but then I'll vote for the CFPA, I guess I can see that calculation."
Marshall pinned some of the blame on Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who had been cool to the idea last spring.
"The leadership here in the House is a big friend to this bill. The White House, well, the Treasury Secretary made some comments earlier this year that I thought were unfortunate. Other than Geithner's comments, I haven't really heard anything else from the White House. Obviously it's not on their priority list, among the many things they don't have much of an opinion about. Though Geithner did say something, and I wish I could recall, he said something earlier this year that was chilling. Not that he said it was a bad idea, but it certainly wasn't an endorsement," said Marshall.
Candidate Obama supported the idea of allowing judges to modify mortgages in bankruptcy en route to the White House. He even expressed public support in February when outlining his plan to stem foreclosures. But it wasn't in his detailed plan released the next month. Since then, the White House has largely been silent.
President Obama cheered the House action Friday. "This legislation brings us another important step closer to necessary, comprehensive financial reform that will create clear rules of the road, consistent and systematic enforcement of those rules, and a stronger, more stable financial system with better protections for consumers and investors," he said in a statement.
But the loopholes in the bill and the reforms that were voted down revealed something else to Roper -- an apparent deep-seated hostility to government regulation.
Time and time again, Roper noticed various reform proposals killed on the specious claim that they would kill jobs. Looking beyond today's vote, there are deep, structural roadblocks to fundamental reform, she said.
"Even as they're trying to cure the regulatory failures that led to the current crisis, they're setting us up for future crises," she said. "It's a philosophy and attitude to regulation that suggests that as soon as the spotlight is off they will be back to attacking regulation as too costly."
The vote, she said, reveals "that the attitude, the underlying problem, has not changed, and will come back to haunt us in the future."
"It's hard to be all that enthusiastic when you know that nothing has changed," she said.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Excellent videos on financial reform.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfo9sFYULEE&feature=youtube_gdata
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/19/ryan-grim-naomi-klein-dis_n_364022.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_KOEypp3zQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgfmwO8lDHQ&feature=fvsr
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/19/ryan-grim-naomi-klein-dis_n_364022.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_KOEypp3zQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgfmwO8lDHQ&feature=fvsr
Sunday, November 8, 2009
The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
FOR all cable news’s efforts to inflate Election 2009 into a cliffhanger as riveting as Balloon Boy, ratings at MSNBC and CNN were flat Tuesday night. But not at Fox News, where the audience nearly doubled its usual prime-time average. That’s what happens when you have a thrilling story to tell, and what could be more thrilling than a revolution playing out in real time?
As Fox kept insisting, all eyes were glued on Doug Hoffman, the insurgent tea party candidate in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. A “tidal wave” was on its way, said Sean Hannity, and the right would soon “take back the Republican Party.” The race was not “even close,” Bill O’Reilly suggested to the pollster Scott Rasmussen, who didn’t disagree. When returns showed Hoffman trailing, the network’s resident genius, Karl Rove, knowingly reassured viewers that victory was in the bag, even if we’d have to stay up all night waiting for some slacker towns to tally their votes.
Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight, when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that Hoffman’s loss was really a victory. For the Democrats, the excitement was just beginning. New York’s 23rd could be celebrated as a rare bright spot on a night when the party’s gubernatorial candidates lost in Virginia and New Jersey.
The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans. Tuesday’s results may be useless as a predictor of 2010, but they are not without value as cautionary tales. And the most worrisome for Democrats were not in Virginia and New Jersey, but, paradoxically, in the New York contests where they performed relatively well. That includes the idiosyncratic New York City mayor’s race that few viewed as a bellwether of anything. It should be the most troubling of them all for President Obama’s cohort — even though neither Obama nor the national political parties were significant players in it.
But first let’s make a farewell accounting of the farce upstate. The reason why the Democratic victory in New York’s 23rd is a mixed blessing is simple: it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.
This race was a damaging setback for the hard right. Hoffman had the energetic support of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox as well as big bucks from their political auxiliaries. Furthermore, Hoffman was running not only in a district that Rove himself described as “very Republican” but one that fits the demographics of the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. The 23rd is far whiter than America as a whole — 93 percent versus 74 — with tiny sprinklings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. It has few immigrants. It’s rural. Its income and education levels are below the norm. Only if the district were situated in Dixie — or Utah — could it be a more perfect fit for the narrow American demographic where the McCain-Palin ticket had its sole romps last year.
If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in the nation where most Americans live. Some G.O.P. leaders have started to notice. Mitt Romney didn’t endorse Hoffman despite right-wing badgering to do so. On Wednesday, Michael Steele dismissed the right’s mantra that somehow Hoffman’s loss could be called a victory and instead talked up the newly elected Republican governors who won by appealing to independents and moderates. Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are plenty conservative, but both had rejected Palin’s offers to campaign for them. They also avoided the tea party zanies, the fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage and the anti-abortion-rights zealots Hoffman embraced. They positioned themselves as respectful Obama critics, not haters likening him to Hitler.
In the aftermath of this clear-cut demonstration of how Republicans can win, the revolutionaries are still pledging to purge the party’s moderates by rallying behind more Hoffmans in G.O.P. primaries from Florida to California. And they may get some scalps. But Tuesday’s loss revealed that they’re better at luring freak-show gawkers into Fox’s tent than voters into the G.O.P.’s. As if to prove the point, protesters hoisted a sign likening health care reform to Dachau at the raucous tea party rally convened by Michele Bachmann on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.
Michael Bloomberg’s shocking underperformance in New York was an even more dramatic illustration of this animus. Tuesday’s exit polls found that he had a whopping 70 percent approval rating, as befits a mayor who, whatever his quirks and missteps, is widely regarded as a highly competent, nonideological executive who has run the city well. Yet only 72 percent of those who gave him a thumb’s up voted for him. Though the mayor wildly outspent and out-campaigned his bland opponent, Bill Thompson, he received only 50.6 percent of the vote.
This shortfall has been correctly attributed to Bloomberg’s self-serving, highhanded undoing of the term limits law he had once endorsed. The ferocity of the public reaction to this power grab surprised him, pollsters and the press alike. That it became a bigger deal than anyone anticipated — arguably bigger than it merited — is an indicator of how much antipathy there is toward the masters of the universe in the financial capital. Americans don’t hate rich people, but they do despise those who behave as if the rules don’t apply to them. “Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third Term” was the cover line on New York magazine in October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street C.E.O.’s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the rest of us with the bill.
The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It has pushed aside the entreaties of many — including Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board — to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by the government’s bailouts, low-interest loans and guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on “Meet the Press” dodging questions about the banks in general and Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides. “We’re not going to let the system go back to the way it was,” he said.
Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington, publicly questioned Geithner’s fitness for his job, given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations of the derivatives that enabled last year’s collapse. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White House’s consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”
The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.
The tea party Republicans vanquished on Tuesday have no jobs plan. They just want to eliminate all Washington spending — a prescription that didn’t go down too well in New York’s 23rd, where the federal government has the largest payroll. The G.O.P. establishment’s one-size-fits-all panacea is tax cuts — thin gruel for those with little or no taxable income. The administration’s answer is the stimulus, whose iffy results so far, it argues, can’t be judged this early on.
Fair enough. But a year from now the public will register its verdict in any event. Meanwhile, both parties have their own delusions, not the least of which is the Republicans’ conviction that Tuesday was a referendum on what Obama has done so far. If anything, it was a judgment on just how much he has not.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Public option winning?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/10/24/796740/-Public-Option,-Triggers,-Opt-Out,-Oh-My!
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Tea baggers stage a small protest against big government.
President Obama's inauguration was big, about 2 million people. The Washington DC fire department estimated about 60,000 to 70,000 tea baggers on September 12.
Here's a short summary from Talking Points Memo.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/09/small_protest_agst_big_govt.php?ref=fpblg
Here's a short summary from Talking Points Memo.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/09/small_protest_agst_big_govt.php?ref=fpblg
Obama’s Squandered Summer -- Frank Rich
THE day before he gave his latest brilliant speech, Barack Obama repeated a well-worn mantra to a television interviewer: “My job is not to be distracted by the 24-hour news cycle.” The time has come for him to expand that job description. His White House has a duty to push back against the 24-hour news cycle, every 24 hours if necessary, when it threatens to derail his agenda, the nation’s business, or both. This was a silly summer, as wasteful in its way as the summer of 2001, when Washington dithered over the now-forgotten Gary Condit scandal while Al Qaeda plotted. The president deserves his share of the blame.
After a good couple of years of living with the guy, we know the drill that defines his leadership, for better and worse. When trouble lurks, No Drama Obama stays calm as everyone around him goes ballistic. Then he waits — and waits — for that superdramatic moment when he can ride to his own rescue with what the press reliably hypes as The Do-or-Die Speech of His Career. Cable networks slap a countdown clock on the corner of the screen and pump up the suspense. Finally, Mighty Obama steps up to the plate and, lo and behold, confounds all the doubting bloviators yet again by (as they are wont to say) hitting it out of the park.
So it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.
As a mode of campaigning, this tactic was worth a great deal. Obama not only produced eloquent speeches — especially the classic disquisition on race that silenced the Jeremiah Wright pogrom — but also executed a remarkably disciplined tortoise-vs.-hare battle plan that outwitted and ultimately vanquished the hypercaffeinated political strategies of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. As a style of governing, however, this repeated cycle of extended above-the-fray passivity followed by last-minute oratorical heroics has now been stretched to the very limit.
Wednesday night’s address on health care reform was inspired, lucid and, in the literally and figuratively Kennedyesque finale, moving. It was also (mildly) partisan, a trait much deplored by high-minded editorial writers but in real life quite useful when your party is in the majority and you want to rally the troops to get something done. But there was little in the speech that Obama couldn’t have said at the summer’s outset. Its practical effect may prove nil. Short of signing a mass suicide pact, the Democrats were always destined to pass a bill. Will the one to come be substantially better than the one that would have emerged if the same speech had been delivered weeks earlier? Not necessarily — and marginally at most.
In the meantime, a certain damage has been done — to Obama and to the country. The inmates took over the asylum, trivializing and poisoning the national discourse while the president bided his time. The lies that Obama called out so strongly in his speech — from “death panels” to “government takeover” — ran amok. So did all the other incendiary faux controversies, culminating with the ludicrous outcry over the prospect that the president might speak to the nation’s schoolchildren on a higher plane than, say, “The Pet Goat.”
None of this served his cause of health care reform or his political standing. The droop in Obama’s job approval numbers isn’t remotely as large or precipitous as the Beltway’s incessant doomsday drumbeat suggests. But support for his signature program declined, not least because he gave others carte blanche to define it for him. Perhaps the most revealing of all the poll findings came in an end-of-August Washington Post query asking voters what “single word” first came to mind to describe their “feelings” about Obama and his health care proposals. For Obama, the No. 1 feeling was “good.” For the policy package he’d been ostensibly selling all summer, the No. 1 feeling was “none.”
It’s not, as those on the right would have us believe, that Obama’s ideas are so “liberal” that the American public recoiled. It’s that much of the public didn’t know what his ideas were. Even now I’m not convinced that most Americans know what a “public option” really means or what Obama’s precise position on it is. But I’d bet that many more have a working definition of “death panels.” The 24-hour news cycle abhors a vacuum, and the liars and crazies filled it while Obama waited for his deus ex machina descent onto center stage.
That he let the hard-core base of a leaderless minority party drive the debate only diminished his stature. That’s why his poll numbers on “leadership” declined. The right-wing fringe has become so deranged that it will yank its kids out of school to protest the president and risk yanking more Americans off assembly lines by boycotting General Motors to protest the administration’s Detroit bailout. Even Laura Bush and Newt Gingrich stepped in last week to defend Obama’s classroom homily from the fusillades by some of their own party’s most prominent ideologues. The White House should have landed a punch before they did.
Obama would have looked stronger if he’d stood up more proactively to the screamers along the way, or at least to the ones not packing guns. As the Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith has reminded us, it didn’t harm the New Deal for F.D.R. to tell a national radio audience on election eve 1936 that he welcomed the “hatred” of his enemies. Indeed Obama instantly gained a foot or two in height Wednesday night once that South Carolina clown hollered “You lie!” (One wonders what this congressman calls the Republican governor of his own state, Mark Sanford.) As the political analyst Charlie Cook has pointed out, Obama’s leadership poll numbers have also suffered from his repeated deference to Congress. Waiting for the pettifogging small-state potentates of both parties in the Senate’s Gang of Six is as farcical as waiting for Godot.
Now that he has taken charge, Obama will speed the process and, we must hope, secure reform that may make a real difference for everyone, starting with the 46-million-plus Americans who have no health insurance. But when we gain some perspective on the summer of 2009, the health care debate, like the crazed town-hall sideshows surrounding it, may seem very small in the history of this presidency — maybe even as small as the Condit follies and the breathlessly reported shark attacks of summer 2001 now look in the history of the previous administration.
The reason is that health care reform, while an overdue imperative, still is overshadowed in existential urgency by the legacies of the two devastating cataclysms of the Bush years, 9/11 and 9/15, both of whose anniversaries we now mark. The crucial matters left unresolved in the wake of New York’s two demolished capitalist icons, the World Trade Center and Lehman Brothers, are most likely to determine both this president’s and our country’s fate in the next few years. Both have been left to smolder in the silly summer of ’09.
As we approach the eighth anniversary of the war that 9/11 bequeathed us in Afghanistan, the endgame is still unknown and more troops are on their way. Though the rate of American casualties reached an all-time high last month, the war ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking the issues important to the American public. Most of those who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). But the essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan — and make the heavy sacrifices that would be required — or look for a Plan B was punted by the White House this summer even as the situation drastically deteriorated.
No less unsettling is the first-anniversary snapshot of 9/15: a rebound for Wall Street but not for the 26-million-plus Americans who are unemployed, no longer looking for jobs, or forced to settle for part-time work. Some 40 million Americans are living in poverty. While these economic body counts keep rising, tough regulatory reform for reckless financial institutions, too-big-to-fail and otherwise, seems more remote by the day. Last Sunday, Jenny Anderson of The Times exposed an example of Wall Street’s unashamed recidivism that takes gallows humor to a new high — or would were it in The Onion, not The Times. Some of the same banks that gambled their (and our) way to ruin by concocting exotic mortgage-backed securities now hope to bundle individual Americans’ life insurance policies into a new high-risk financial product built on this sure-fire algorithm: “The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.”
When we look back on these months, we may come to realize that there were in fact “death panels” threatening Americans all along — but they were on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and on Wall Street, not in the fine print of a health care bill on Capitol Hill. Obama’s deliberative brand of wait-and-then-pounce leadership let him squeak — barely — through the summer. The real crises already gathering won’t wait for him to stand back and calculate the precise moment to spring the next Do-or-Die Speech.
But Who Is Watching Regulators?
September 13, 2009
Fair Game
But Who Is Watching Regulators?
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
NOTHING succeeds like failure, as the saying goes. And nowhere is this dismal truth more evident than in our financial regulatory system, one year after the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers.
Even though calamitous lending practices laid waste to the nation’s economy, surprisingly little has changed about how the financial arena operates and is supervised. Sure, a couple of venerable brokerage firms have vanished, but many of the same players remain on the scene, in the same positions of power.
Senior regulators who stood idly by for years as financial firms built their houses of cards have been rewarded with even bigger jobs or are jockeying for increased responsibilities. The Federal Reserve Board, for example, wants to become the financial system’s uber-regulator, even though its officials did nothing as banks made deadly decisions to lend recklessly and leverage themselves to the max.
Awarding increased power to those who failed in their oversight duties flies in the face of all notions of accountability. Imagine hiring Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief of Countrywide Financial, to run a global financial institution, or installing E. Stanley O’Neal, who presided over a disastrous period at Merrill Lynch, at the helm of a major investment firm.
Yet those in the public sector ask us to believe that regulators who snoozed during the credit bubble will be alert to emerging problems on their beats when the next mania begins.
That’s asking a lot, isn’t it?
Here’s a novel thought. Instead of creating more regulations to try to prevent this kind of mess from recurring, why not figure out how to hold regulators accountable when they perform as poorly as they did in recent years?
Edward J. Kane, a professor of finance at Boston College and an authority on the ethical and operational aspects of regulatory failure, has some ideas about how to do this and right our damaged system in the process. He outlined them in a recent paper titled “Unmet Duties in Managing Financial Safety Nets.”
This ugly financial episode we’ve all had to live through makes clear, Mr. Kane says, that taxpayers must protect themselves against two things: the corrupting influence of bureaucratic self-interest among regulators and the political clout wielded by the large institutions they are supposed to police. Finally, he argues, taxpayers must demand that the government publicize the costs of efforts taken to save the financial system from itself.
“That authorities and financiers could so callously violate common-law duties of loyalty, competence, and care they owe taxpayers and financial-institution customers is evidence of a massive incentive breakdown in industry and government,” Mr. Kane writes. “This breakdown cannot be repaired merely by replacing the governing political party or by changing the jurisdictions and mission statements of regulatory agencies.”
It’s tough, however, to assign responsibility to regulators who routinely fend off or stymie anyone attempting to scrutinize how the cops on the beat functioned in the years preceding the financial meltdown. So everyday Americans need to kick and scream if they want some light shed on this critical epoch in our financial history.
To bring accountability to regulatory performance, Mr. Kane suggests that financial supervisors take an oath of office in which they agree to perform four duties. First is the duty of vision, under which they would promise to adapt their surveillance practices to respond to the creative ways financial institutions hide their dubious practices. Regulators must also promise to take prompt corrective action, and to perform their work efficiently. Finally, there is what Mr. Kane calls the duty of “conscientious representation,” whereby regulators swear to put the interests of the community ahead of their own.
This last promise gets to the heart of a continued erosion of trust in our system, Mr. Kane argues. “If real world supervisors were perfectly virtuous, they would make themselves politically and financially accountable for the ways in which they exercise their discretion,” he writes. “Perfectly virtuous supervisors would fearlessly bond themselves to disclose enough information about their decision making to allow the community or interested outsiders to determine whether and how badly they neglect, abuse, or mishandle their responsibilities.”
Instead, our regulators refuse to produce complete documentation and accounts of the actions they took during the crisis. And keeping taxpayers in the dark isn’t exemplary ethical behavior. Rather, it is characteristic of what Mr. Kane calls an elitist regulator, one who uses crises to cover up mistakes and expand his or her jurisdiction.
“According to this standard,” Mr. Kane writes, “Fed efforts to use the crisis as a platform for self-congratulation and for securing enlarged systemic-risk authority sidetracks, rather than promotes, effective reform.”
To ensure that regulators live up to the promises they make, Mr. Kane suggests that inspectors general at each agency be charged with regularly auditing the performance of financial overseers. A crucial component of those reviews would be exploring attempts by regulated entities to influence the officials who oversee them. That’s because in financial crises, Mr. Kane explained, crippled institutions pressure the government to rescue them and force other parties (usually the taxpayers) to share their pain.
“We’ve got a very comfortable equilibrium here where Wall Street praises the authorities and the authorities give Wall Street more or less what it wants and they hope that the public really doesn’t understand the depth of the cynicism involved,” Mr. Kane said in an interview. “You keep reading about how wonderful it is that we didn’t have a Great Depression. Well, if they can sell that point of view, then nothing will change.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Fair Game
But Who Is Watching Regulators?
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
NOTHING succeeds like failure, as the saying goes. And nowhere is this dismal truth more evident than in our financial regulatory system, one year after the bankruptcy filing of Lehman Brothers.
Even though calamitous lending practices laid waste to the nation’s economy, surprisingly little has changed about how the financial arena operates and is supervised. Sure, a couple of venerable brokerage firms have vanished, but many of the same players remain on the scene, in the same positions of power.
Senior regulators who stood idly by for years as financial firms built their houses of cards have been rewarded with even bigger jobs or are jockeying for increased responsibilities. The Federal Reserve Board, for example, wants to become the financial system’s uber-regulator, even though its officials did nothing as banks made deadly decisions to lend recklessly and leverage themselves to the max.
Awarding increased power to those who failed in their oversight duties flies in the face of all notions of accountability. Imagine hiring Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief of Countrywide Financial, to run a global financial institution, or installing E. Stanley O’Neal, who presided over a disastrous period at Merrill Lynch, at the helm of a major investment firm.
Yet those in the public sector ask us to believe that regulators who snoozed during the credit bubble will be alert to emerging problems on their beats when the next mania begins.
That’s asking a lot, isn’t it?
Here’s a novel thought. Instead of creating more regulations to try to prevent this kind of mess from recurring, why not figure out how to hold regulators accountable when they perform as poorly as they did in recent years?
Edward J. Kane, a professor of finance at Boston College and an authority on the ethical and operational aspects of regulatory failure, has some ideas about how to do this and right our damaged system in the process. He outlined them in a recent paper titled “Unmet Duties in Managing Financial Safety Nets.”
This ugly financial episode we’ve all had to live through makes clear, Mr. Kane says, that taxpayers must protect themselves against two things: the corrupting influence of bureaucratic self-interest among regulators and the political clout wielded by the large institutions they are supposed to police. Finally, he argues, taxpayers must demand that the government publicize the costs of efforts taken to save the financial system from itself.
“That authorities and financiers could so callously violate common-law duties of loyalty, competence, and care they owe taxpayers and financial-institution customers is evidence of a massive incentive breakdown in industry and government,” Mr. Kane writes. “This breakdown cannot be repaired merely by replacing the governing political party or by changing the jurisdictions and mission statements of regulatory agencies.”
It’s tough, however, to assign responsibility to regulators who routinely fend off or stymie anyone attempting to scrutinize how the cops on the beat functioned in the years preceding the financial meltdown. So everyday Americans need to kick and scream if they want some light shed on this critical epoch in our financial history.
To bring accountability to regulatory performance, Mr. Kane suggests that financial supervisors take an oath of office in which they agree to perform four duties. First is the duty of vision, under which they would promise to adapt their surveillance practices to respond to the creative ways financial institutions hide their dubious practices. Regulators must also promise to take prompt corrective action, and to perform their work efficiently. Finally, there is what Mr. Kane calls the duty of “conscientious representation,” whereby regulators swear to put the interests of the community ahead of their own.
This last promise gets to the heart of a continued erosion of trust in our system, Mr. Kane argues. “If real world supervisors were perfectly virtuous, they would make themselves politically and financially accountable for the ways in which they exercise their discretion,” he writes. “Perfectly virtuous supervisors would fearlessly bond themselves to disclose enough information about their decision making to allow the community or interested outsiders to determine whether and how badly they neglect, abuse, or mishandle their responsibilities.”
Instead, our regulators refuse to produce complete documentation and accounts of the actions they took during the crisis. And keeping taxpayers in the dark isn’t exemplary ethical behavior. Rather, it is characteristic of what Mr. Kane calls an elitist regulator, one who uses crises to cover up mistakes and expand his or her jurisdiction.
“According to this standard,” Mr. Kane writes, “Fed efforts to use the crisis as a platform for self-congratulation and for securing enlarged systemic-risk authority sidetracks, rather than promotes, effective reform.”
To ensure that regulators live up to the promises they make, Mr. Kane suggests that inspectors general at each agency be charged with regularly auditing the performance of financial overseers. A crucial component of those reviews would be exploring attempts by regulated entities to influence the officials who oversee them. That’s because in financial crises, Mr. Kane explained, crippled institutions pressure the government to rescue them and force other parties (usually the taxpayers) to share their pain.
“We’ve got a very comfortable equilibrium here where Wall Street praises the authorities and the authorities give Wall Street more or less what it wants and they hope that the public really doesn’t understand the depth of the cynicism involved,” Mr. Kane said in an interview. “You keep reading about how wonderful it is that we didn’t have a Great Depression. Well, if they can sell that point of view, then nothing will change.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Thursday, August 20, 2009
THE ECONOMY AND HEALTH CARE (what else is new?)
THE ECONOMY
Mixed news on the US economy
1. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf328fb2-8d99-11de-93df-00144feabdc0.html
2. Greetings from RGE Monitor! Below you will find a preview of our views on the short- and medium-term outlook for the U.S. economy.
Rebalancing Growth
A number of economic and financial variables have exhibited signs of improvement recently even if macro indicators are still mixed. The pace of economic deterioration has slowed significantly, and after four quarters of severe contraction in economic activity, RGE Monitor now forecasts that the U.S. will display positive real GDP growth in the second half of 2009. As discussed below, however, that does not mean that the recession in the U.S. is already over, as many analysts have argued. Indeed, all the variables used by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to date recessionary periods will continue to contract or display sub-par growth. However, RGE Monitor now anticipates that policy measures and other factors will boost real GDP growth, albeit in a temporary manner, in the second half of 2009. Yet the shape of the recovery (will it be V, U or W?) and other challenges will influence the U.S. economic outlook going forward. According to RGE Monitor, growth will remain well below potential in 2010, while the shape of the recovery will be closer to a U. Some of the so-called “green shoots” observed in the economy in recent months can be defined as green shoots only if compared with the economic picture painted at the beginning of the year. The contraction in some indicators, such as industrial production, is still comparable to the recessions in the 1970s and 1980s. The July 2009 employment report displayed “only” 247,000 non-farm payroll losses—hardly qualifying as a green shoot in any other post-war recession. (See Easing Job Losses Don’t Change Weak Prospects for U.S. Recovery).
However, given how close the U.S. was to entering a depression, even 250,000 payroll losses seem capable of cheering up investors. H2 2009 Pick-Up in GDP Growth a Temporary Phenomenon In H2 2009, as the economy bottoms out from a record contraction (the worst in the last 60 years), adjustments, such as slower inventory destocking, will occur, while policy measures such as “cash for clunkers” will boost auto production and induce continued spending brought on by the stimulus. According to RGE Monitor, these factors will likely bring U.S. real GDP growth back to positive territory in Q3 2009. However, the NBER is not likely to call the end of the recession until at least late 2009 or early 2010.
In addition to GDP growth, the NBER looks at four variables in making recession calls: real personal income less transfer payments, real manufacturing and wholesale-retail trade sales, industrial production and payroll employment. While all of these indicators might perform better in H2 than in H1 2009, they are likely to remain in contraction or register sub-par growth. With the labor market now a leading indicator for the recovery in private consumption and the wider economy, trends in payrolls will definitely influence the NBER's call. Lower Trend Growth Will Characterize the Recovery The inventory adjustments will largely be over by the middle of 2010 as will the impact of the stimulus. But since the recovery in private demand will be weak, the economy is poised to slip back to anemic growth (well below potential) in 2010, posing the risk of a double-dip recession. Exhausting most policy measures now means that there will be little room for additional fiscal and monetary stimuli in the future. Policy measures entailing long-term fiscal costs can only provide temporary stimulus to growth. Any sustained economic recovery will ultimately have to come from the revival in private demand—i.e. through consumption and investment—both of which will be constrained by structural factors. Preceded by a financial crisis, this is the most severe and prolonged recession since the 1930s. Avoiding the short-term pain of private-sector deleveraging by socializing private losses and re-leveraging the public sector with large deficits and debt accumulation will spur long-term costs and crowd out private spending. The drivers of the previous economic boom—consumers, the housing sector and easy credit—will remain under pressure even after the economy is out of recession. Structural weaknesses will persist. Until the economy finds new sources of growth, it will grow below potential for several years. Potential GDP growth might also take a hit, falling from around 2.8% during 1997-2008 to around 2.25% in the coming years. Productivity growth has held up—on a temporary basis—during the current recession, not due to innovation or productive investment, but due to aggressive cuts in labor and labor hours by firms. In the coming years, productivity growth will remain under pressure as workers age, structural unemployment rises, labor skills deteriorate, and investment and innovation slow.
3. Brighter signs in Europe
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/52947306-8cdd-11de-a540-00144feabdc0.html
4. Long-term (and scary) view of the crisis, comparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession -- long article, but very interesting
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421
ON HEALTH CARE
Have the Republicans pushed the envelope too much?
1. Senator Grassely and townhall meetings
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081004125.html?wpisrc=newsletter
2. The end of bipartisanship?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/health/policy/19repubs.html?_r=1&ref=health
3. The Health Insurance Industry according to a free-market supporter
Health Care War! by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
Dear Subscriber,
What you're witnessing in the U.S. today is not a health care debate. It's a health care WAR.
But it's too soon to take sides: Neither has defined its territory; both are escalating the battle with weapons of mass disgrace. In the meantime, millions of Americans are potentially innocent victims of the collateral damage — both financially and physically. But if you're among those upset at the Obama administration for trying to ram through a health reform bill, wait till you see what most health insurance companies are doing — and have been doing for many years!
They routinely overcharge you on premiums when you're healthy and deny your claims when you're sick.
They welcome your policy when you don't need it and shred it when you do.
Adding financial insult to personal injury, they take the savings you've worked so hard to earn and throw it into high-risk investments you'd never touch with a ten-foot pole.
.....
How Americans Are Routinely Bullied, Cheated, And Abused by Their Health Insurance Companies
The business battles I fought with insurers are inconsequential in comparison to the life-and-death struggles fought by millions of Americans with their insurance companies every day.
All I lost was time and money. In contrast, a young mother with bone cancer who fought against the same company that sued me lost a lot more: her life.
In a trial after her death, the jury read internal memos that revealed a sinister plot: To reduce their costs, not only did the company's executives pursue extreme measures to deny her the treatments that could have saved her life ... they also discussed the cost benefits of hastening her demise. The jurors were so outraged, they awarded her family the largest punitive damage award in the history of health insurers. Think these are just isolated cases? Think again!
Here are just a few of the rampant abuses that continue to this day:
Abuse #1Denial machines ...
Most health insurers spend substantial sums in order to develop computer programs and systems that automatically and repeatedly deny and delay claims payments;
hire doctors specialized in poking holes in legitimate claims; and give extra bonuses to employees who can successfully deny the most claims. In sum, health insurers build massive machines designed with the sole purpose of denying and delaying your claims. They know that few policyholders will take legal action. Plus, even though policyholders do win judgments, the companies can earn a lot of extra income on the funds they hold back with delayed claims payments. The longer you or your doctor has to wait for reimbursement, the more income they can make on your money.
And unfortunately, this is not just about a few bad apples in the industry. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), in 2008 alone, policyholders filed 195,669 complaints against insurance companies. That excludes complaints in many states which do not compile comparable data and, needless to say, it also excludes the millions of Americans who do not file a formal complaint.
The two most common types of complaints of all: delays and denials.
"All too often," says New York Attorney General Cuomo, "insurers play a game of deny, delay, and deceive." And, I might add, all too often, people are bankrupted by the expenses or die waiting for the care.
But it gets worse ...
Abuse #2 After-the-fact policy cancellations ...
Just last Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a study demonstrating that, in most states:
Insurance companies can retroactively cancel individual policies if any condition was not disclosed when the policy was obtained. More to the point, insurers can cancel the policies even if the medical condition is unrelated and even if the person was not aware of the condition at the time. (Italics are mine.)
Coverage can also be revoked for all members of a family, even if only one family member failed to disclose a medical condition.
And again, companies institute sophisticated systems and procedures that maximize the savings with these underhanded tactics, including special compensations for employees who can deploy them most effectively.
Two major insurers have admitted to Congressional committees that they automatically investigate the medical records of every policyholder with certain conditions, including leukemia, ovarian cancer, brain cancer, and becoming pregnant with twins.
For example, in one case, after a Texas resident was found to have a lump in her breast, the insurance company investigated her medical history and concluded that she had been diagnosed previously with osteoporosis. Although that condition was unrelated to breast cancer, the company used it as an excuse to cancel her policy.
No, I don't support the notion that underwriting — the process of denying coverage or charging higher premiums due to known risks — is somehow evil. Quite the contrary, if insurers do NOT protect themselves from those risks, they may not be financially capable of fulfilling their promises to all other policyholders. But systematically leveraging contract loopholes to cancel policies after a condition is diagnosed fails to pass the most basic of smell tests.
The most insidious abuse of all: Direct interference with medically recommended procedures ...
"One of our big frustrations with insurance companies," says GOP Congressman Tim Murphy, "is they control the market place, they control what's done," and what doctors decide.
Indeed, in 50 out of 300 U.S. metropolitan areas, a single health insurer controls at least 70 percent of customers. And in many more areas, just two health insurance companies dominate the market.
That puts both you and your doctor at a great disadvantage.
End result: Your doctor's decisions about what's best for your health are frequently overruled by the insurer's decisions about what's best for its bottom line.
Most patients don't realize how widespread this is and how deeply it can impact the quality of care. Most doctors, meanwhile, are so sick and tired of insurance company interference, they've given up complaining.
Which Companies Are the Worst Offenders?
For the most part, government officials are loathe to give you straight answers. But I do. Based on my review of customer complaint data compiled by key states, here's my partial list:
Some Major Health Insurers and HMOs WithThe MOST Frequent Customer Complaints American International GroupAtlantis Health Plans, Inc.Celtic Insurance CompanyCIGNA Healthcare of NY, Inc.Fortis GroupGHI HMO Select, Inc.Mutual of Omaha GroupOxford Health Plans of NYUnitedHealth Group
Not all insurers routinely resort to bad business practices. In fact, some bend over backwards to pay claims promptly and avoid customer complaints ...
Some Major Health Insurers and HMOs WithThe LEAST Frequent Customer Complaints CNA Insurance GroupMass Mutual Life Ins. Co.Northwestern MutualSun Life Assurance Company of CNUniversal American FinancialUNUMProvident Corp. Group
My Recommendations Are Very Straightforward ...
First and foremost, do everything within reason to avoid the worst providers and stick with the best. My lists above are not complete, but I'm confident in my conclusions for each company cited. Second, be sure to keep all your medical records and correspondence with insurers.
Third, if your insurer tries to stiff you for bills you feel should be covered, file a formal complaint. Some states let you file your complaint online. Others require you do it via mail. Either way, do not let insurance companies get away with behavior that you feel is unfair or abusive.
Fourth, if you can't get satisfaction, seriously consider legal action. The good news: Most of the time, plaintiffs with good documentation do win.
Mixed news on the US economy
1. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf328fb2-8d99-11de-93df-00144feabdc0.html
2. Greetings from RGE Monitor! Below you will find a preview of our views on the short- and medium-term outlook for the U.S. economy.
Rebalancing Growth
A number of economic and financial variables have exhibited signs of improvement recently even if macro indicators are still mixed. The pace of economic deterioration has slowed significantly, and after four quarters of severe contraction in economic activity, RGE Monitor now forecasts that the U.S. will display positive real GDP growth in the second half of 2009. As discussed below, however, that does not mean that the recession in the U.S. is already over, as many analysts have argued. Indeed, all the variables used by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to date recessionary periods will continue to contract or display sub-par growth. However, RGE Monitor now anticipates that policy measures and other factors will boost real GDP growth, albeit in a temporary manner, in the second half of 2009. Yet the shape of the recovery (will it be V, U or W?) and other challenges will influence the U.S. economic outlook going forward. According to RGE Monitor, growth will remain well below potential in 2010, while the shape of the recovery will be closer to a U. Some of the so-called “green shoots” observed in the economy in recent months can be defined as green shoots only if compared with the economic picture painted at the beginning of the year. The contraction in some indicators, such as industrial production, is still comparable to the recessions in the 1970s and 1980s. The July 2009 employment report displayed “only” 247,000 non-farm payroll losses—hardly qualifying as a green shoot in any other post-war recession. (See Easing Job Losses Don’t Change Weak Prospects for U.S. Recovery).
However, given how close the U.S. was to entering a depression, even 250,000 payroll losses seem capable of cheering up investors. H2 2009 Pick-Up in GDP Growth a Temporary Phenomenon In H2 2009, as the economy bottoms out from a record contraction (the worst in the last 60 years), adjustments, such as slower inventory destocking, will occur, while policy measures such as “cash for clunkers” will boost auto production and induce continued spending brought on by the stimulus. According to RGE Monitor, these factors will likely bring U.S. real GDP growth back to positive territory in Q3 2009. However, the NBER is not likely to call the end of the recession until at least late 2009 or early 2010.
In addition to GDP growth, the NBER looks at four variables in making recession calls: real personal income less transfer payments, real manufacturing and wholesale-retail trade sales, industrial production and payroll employment. While all of these indicators might perform better in H2 than in H1 2009, they are likely to remain in contraction or register sub-par growth. With the labor market now a leading indicator for the recovery in private consumption and the wider economy, trends in payrolls will definitely influence the NBER's call. Lower Trend Growth Will Characterize the Recovery The inventory adjustments will largely be over by the middle of 2010 as will the impact of the stimulus. But since the recovery in private demand will be weak, the economy is poised to slip back to anemic growth (well below potential) in 2010, posing the risk of a double-dip recession. Exhausting most policy measures now means that there will be little room for additional fiscal and monetary stimuli in the future. Policy measures entailing long-term fiscal costs can only provide temporary stimulus to growth. Any sustained economic recovery will ultimately have to come from the revival in private demand—i.e. through consumption and investment—both of which will be constrained by structural factors. Preceded by a financial crisis, this is the most severe and prolonged recession since the 1930s. Avoiding the short-term pain of private-sector deleveraging by socializing private losses and re-leveraging the public sector with large deficits and debt accumulation will spur long-term costs and crowd out private spending. The drivers of the previous economic boom—consumers, the housing sector and easy credit—will remain under pressure even after the economy is out of recession. Structural weaknesses will persist. Until the economy finds new sources of growth, it will grow below potential for several years. Potential GDP growth might also take a hit, falling from around 2.8% during 1997-2008 to around 2.25% in the coming years. Productivity growth has held up—on a temporary basis—during the current recession, not due to innovation or productive investment, but due to aggressive cuts in labor and labor hours by firms. In the coming years, productivity growth will remain under pressure as workers age, structural unemployment rises, labor skills deteriorate, and investment and innovation slow.
3. Brighter signs in Europe
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/52947306-8cdd-11de-a540-00144feabdc0.html
4. Long-term (and scary) view of the crisis, comparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession -- long article, but very interesting
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421
ON HEALTH CARE
Have the Republicans pushed the envelope too much?
1. Senator Grassely and townhall meetings
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081004125.html?wpisrc=newsletter
2. The end of bipartisanship?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/health/policy/19repubs.html?_r=1&ref=health
3. The Health Insurance Industry according to a free-market supporter
Health Care War! by Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D.
Dear Subscriber,
What you're witnessing in the U.S. today is not a health care debate. It's a health care WAR.
But it's too soon to take sides: Neither has defined its territory; both are escalating the battle with weapons of mass disgrace. In the meantime, millions of Americans are potentially innocent victims of the collateral damage — both financially and physically. But if you're among those upset at the Obama administration for trying to ram through a health reform bill, wait till you see what most health insurance companies are doing — and have been doing for many years!
They routinely overcharge you on premiums when you're healthy and deny your claims when you're sick.
They welcome your policy when you don't need it and shred it when you do.
Adding financial insult to personal injury, they take the savings you've worked so hard to earn and throw it into high-risk investments you'd never touch with a ten-foot pole.
.....
How Americans Are Routinely Bullied, Cheated, And Abused by Their Health Insurance Companies
The business battles I fought with insurers are inconsequential in comparison to the life-and-death struggles fought by millions of Americans with their insurance companies every day.
All I lost was time and money. In contrast, a young mother with bone cancer who fought against the same company that sued me lost a lot more: her life.
In a trial after her death, the jury read internal memos that revealed a sinister plot: To reduce their costs, not only did the company's executives pursue extreme measures to deny her the treatments that could have saved her life ... they also discussed the cost benefits of hastening her demise. The jurors were so outraged, they awarded her family the largest punitive damage award in the history of health insurers. Think these are just isolated cases? Think again!
Here are just a few of the rampant abuses that continue to this day:
Abuse #1Denial machines ...
Most health insurers spend substantial sums in order to develop computer programs and systems that automatically and repeatedly deny and delay claims payments;
hire doctors specialized in poking holes in legitimate claims; and give extra bonuses to employees who can successfully deny the most claims. In sum, health insurers build massive machines designed with the sole purpose of denying and delaying your claims. They know that few policyholders will take legal action. Plus, even though policyholders do win judgments, the companies can earn a lot of extra income on the funds they hold back with delayed claims payments. The longer you or your doctor has to wait for reimbursement, the more income they can make on your money.
And unfortunately, this is not just about a few bad apples in the industry. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), in 2008 alone, policyholders filed 195,669 complaints against insurance companies. That excludes complaints in many states which do not compile comparable data and, needless to say, it also excludes the millions of Americans who do not file a formal complaint.
The two most common types of complaints of all: delays and denials.
"All too often," says New York Attorney General Cuomo, "insurers play a game of deny, delay, and deceive." And, I might add, all too often, people are bankrupted by the expenses or die waiting for the care.
But it gets worse ...
Abuse #2 After-the-fact policy cancellations ...
Just last Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a study demonstrating that, in most states:
Insurance companies can retroactively cancel individual policies if any condition was not disclosed when the policy was obtained. More to the point, insurers can cancel the policies even if the medical condition is unrelated and even if the person was not aware of the condition at the time. (Italics are mine.)
Coverage can also be revoked for all members of a family, even if only one family member failed to disclose a medical condition.
And again, companies institute sophisticated systems and procedures that maximize the savings with these underhanded tactics, including special compensations for employees who can deploy them most effectively.
Two major insurers have admitted to Congressional committees that they automatically investigate the medical records of every policyholder with certain conditions, including leukemia, ovarian cancer, brain cancer, and becoming pregnant with twins.
For example, in one case, after a Texas resident was found to have a lump in her breast, the insurance company investigated her medical history and concluded that she had been diagnosed previously with osteoporosis. Although that condition was unrelated to breast cancer, the company used it as an excuse to cancel her policy.
No, I don't support the notion that underwriting — the process of denying coverage or charging higher premiums due to known risks — is somehow evil. Quite the contrary, if insurers do NOT protect themselves from those risks, they may not be financially capable of fulfilling their promises to all other policyholders. But systematically leveraging contract loopholes to cancel policies after a condition is diagnosed fails to pass the most basic of smell tests.
The most insidious abuse of all: Direct interference with medically recommended procedures ...
"One of our big frustrations with insurance companies," says GOP Congressman Tim Murphy, "is they control the market place, they control what's done," and what doctors decide.
Indeed, in 50 out of 300 U.S. metropolitan areas, a single health insurer controls at least 70 percent of customers. And in many more areas, just two health insurance companies dominate the market.
That puts both you and your doctor at a great disadvantage.
End result: Your doctor's decisions about what's best for your health are frequently overruled by the insurer's decisions about what's best for its bottom line.
Most patients don't realize how widespread this is and how deeply it can impact the quality of care. Most doctors, meanwhile, are so sick and tired of insurance company interference, they've given up complaining.
Which Companies Are the Worst Offenders?
For the most part, government officials are loathe to give you straight answers. But I do. Based on my review of customer complaint data compiled by key states, here's my partial list:
Some Major Health Insurers and HMOs WithThe MOST Frequent Customer Complaints American International GroupAtlantis Health Plans, Inc.Celtic Insurance CompanyCIGNA Healthcare of NY, Inc.Fortis GroupGHI HMO Select, Inc.Mutual of Omaha GroupOxford Health Plans of NYUnitedHealth Group
Not all insurers routinely resort to bad business practices. In fact, some bend over backwards to pay claims promptly and avoid customer complaints ...
Some Major Health Insurers and HMOs WithThe LEAST Frequent Customer Complaints CNA Insurance GroupMass Mutual Life Ins. Co.Northwestern MutualSun Life Assurance Company of CNUniversal American FinancialUNUMProvident Corp. Group
My Recommendations Are Very Straightforward ...
First and foremost, do everything within reason to avoid the worst providers and stick with the best. My lists above are not complete, but I'm confident in my conclusions for each company cited. Second, be sure to keep all your medical records and correspondence with insurers.
Third, if your insurer tries to stiff you for bills you feel should be covered, file a formal complaint. Some states let you file your complaint online. Others require you do it via mail. Either way, do not let insurance companies get away with behavior that you feel is unfair or abusive.
Fourth, if you can't get satisfaction, seriously consider legal action. The good news: Most of the time, plaintiffs with good documentation do win.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
What Health Reform Will Do For You -- And Why
August 4th, 2009 by Jason Rosenbaum
blog.healthcareforamericanow.org/2009/08/04/what-health-reform-will-do-for-you-and-why/
The below is based on the House version of health care reform, HR 3200 - America's Affordable Health Choices Act, which is the strongest bill being discussed to date. In short, it will provide a guarantee of quality, affordable health care to everyone.
1. If you receive health insurance from your employer (or your spouse's or parent's employer):
The big things will not change - you will keep your current health insurance, keep your current doctor, and keep your current benefits. All the health reform plans being proposed allow people to keep their health insurance if they want to, and that means keeping their current benefits and choice of doctor. So if you get your coverage through work, or if your spouse or parent covers you on their health insurance through work, these big pieces will not change unless you want them to.
Your health insurance will get better and more stable. Health reform gives your employer a strong incentive to retain your health insurance or make it better. They will have to offer you at least standard, comprehensive package of benefits and your employer will not be able to continue shifting additional costs of insurance to you - they will have to pay at least about 70% of the cost of your coverage.
Your health insurance will get cheaper. As the public health insurance option forces insurance companies to compete, prices of private health insurance will fall. Your costs, even if you keep your current health insurance plan, will go down.
If you lose your job, you will always be able to get affordable insurance. If for any reason you lose your job and your employer based coverage, you will be eligible for affordable health insurance that meets your needs, as described below, with the government helping you pick up the tab until you get back to work, and expenses will be capped to make sure you can't go bankrupt due to medical costs. You will always have a guaranteed, affordable backup to rely on if you need it.
2. If you are employed but do not receive health care benefits from your employer:
Your employer will have to offer you good, affordable health insurance. Under the bill proposed by the House, employers will have to offer you health benefits. Those benefits need to meet a standard for coverage, so you can't be offered sub-par insurance that doesn't meet the needs of you and your family. And your employer will have to cover a large percentage of your health care costs (65% for families and 72% for individuals), ensuring insurance is affordable and your employer can't shift more costs to you. Small businesses are exempt from this regulation.
If you work for a small business that is exempt from regulations asking employers to provide health benefits you will always be able to get affordable insurance. You will be eligible for affordable health insurance that meets your needs, as described below.
3. If you buy health insurance on your own, or if you or your family are uninsured:
You will be able to find coverage. You will have access to a new health insurance "exchange," where both public and private health insurance will be offered. You will be able to compare these plans side-by-side and choose what's right for you and your family. None of these plans will be able to reject your application for pre-existing conditions or for your gender. You will have guaranteed access to health insurance.
You will be able to afford coverage. Any health insurance plan in the exchange will be subsidized if you qualify. Subsidies will be available up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or $88,000 per year for a family of four. These subsidies will ensure that you will only pay a certain percentage of your income in health care costs (that percentage varies depending on how much you make). Bottom line: Health insurance through the exchange will be affordable to you.
You will save money. Even if you do not qualify for subsidies or choose the public health insurance option, competition from the public health insurance option will force prices for insurance to fall across the board.
Your coverage will be good coverage, stable and secure. All plans in the exchange will have to conform to federal regulations, making sure that the plan you purchase covers things that you and your family need - things like preventative medicine, regular checkups, and prescription drugs. And, under health reform, your health insurance company will no longer be able to deny you coverage or care for pre-existing conditions. Your insurance company will no longer be able to drop your coverage if you become sick, or charge you more if you're a woman. There will be no more annual or lifetime caps on coverage, so you won't be stuck with tens of thousands in uncovered medical bills. And if you pay your premiums, your insurance company won't be able to reject a renewal of your insurance plan.
Your expenses will be capped. Deductibles, co-pays, premiums, and other expenses will be capped at a percentage of your income (between 1.5% and 11%, depending on how much you make), so you no longer face exorbitant health insurance costs.
4. If you are on Medicare or Medicaid:
Your health programs will not be touched. There will be no eligibility or benefit cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Health reform will be financed partly by finding savings in these programs. These savings will come from eliminating portions of Medicare and Medicaid that are no longer needed once we've passed health care reform for everyone. For example, right now, Medicaid pays hospitals a reimbursement for people who come to the hospital without health insurance, and thus stick that hospital with the bill. Under health reform, most people will have health insurance, making these reimbursements unnecessary.
The Medicare "Donut Hole" will be closed. The "donut hole" in Medicare's prescription drug program that leaves seniors with thousands of dollars in drug costs when their coverage runs out partway through the year will be gradually closed under health care reform.
5. Is this all paid for?
Yes. Health reform will be fully paid for, and will not increase the deficit. It will not increase your taxes, either. The House has proposed increasing taxes on those that make more than a quarter of a million dollars per year to pay for health reform. The middle class will not be affected.
—————————
There is a short answer to the question of what health reform will do for you: Better coverage, lower costs, and the security of knowing you're not at the mercy of private insurance anymore. This is what health care reform will do for you.
The cost of doing nothing - the conservative plan for health care - is staggering: The average family will pay $10,000 more in premiums by 2019 if nothing is done. We can not afford the conservative health care plan. We must reform health care now, for you and me and our families.
For a lot of you, this information is not news. However, you must know someone who needs to be educated. Copy and paste this post into an email and send it to someone who needs to know exactly how this bill works. Send around this link. Whatever you need to do, get that information out there. Fear can stop health care reform from happening, we need to fight back with the truth.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The Obama Caucus of Ann Arbor is part of Organizing for America.
obama.caucus@gmail.com ObamaCaucus.blogspot.com
blog.healthcareforamericanow.org/2009/08/04/what-health-reform-will-do-for-you-and-why/
The below is based on the House version of health care reform, HR 3200 - America's Affordable Health Choices Act, which is the strongest bill being discussed to date. In short, it will provide a guarantee of quality, affordable health care to everyone.
1. If you receive health insurance from your employer (or your spouse's or parent's employer):
The big things will not change - you will keep your current health insurance, keep your current doctor, and keep your current benefits. All the health reform plans being proposed allow people to keep their health insurance if they want to, and that means keeping their current benefits and choice of doctor. So if you get your coverage through work, or if your spouse or parent covers you on their health insurance through work, these big pieces will not change unless you want them to.
Your health insurance will get better and more stable. Health reform gives your employer a strong incentive to retain your health insurance or make it better. They will have to offer you at least standard, comprehensive package of benefits and your employer will not be able to continue shifting additional costs of insurance to you - they will have to pay at least about 70% of the cost of your coverage.
Your health insurance will get cheaper. As the public health insurance option forces insurance companies to compete, prices of private health insurance will fall. Your costs, even if you keep your current health insurance plan, will go down.
If you lose your job, you will always be able to get affordable insurance. If for any reason you lose your job and your employer based coverage, you will be eligible for affordable health insurance that meets your needs, as described below, with the government helping you pick up the tab until you get back to work, and expenses will be capped to make sure you can't go bankrupt due to medical costs. You will always have a guaranteed, affordable backup to rely on if you need it.
2. If you are employed but do not receive health care benefits from your employer:
Your employer will have to offer you good, affordable health insurance. Under the bill proposed by the House, employers will have to offer you health benefits. Those benefits need to meet a standard for coverage, so you can't be offered sub-par insurance that doesn't meet the needs of you and your family. And your employer will have to cover a large percentage of your health care costs (65% for families and 72% for individuals), ensuring insurance is affordable and your employer can't shift more costs to you. Small businesses are exempt from this regulation.
If you work for a small business that is exempt from regulations asking employers to provide health benefits you will always be able to get affordable insurance. You will be eligible for affordable health insurance that meets your needs, as described below.
3. If you buy health insurance on your own, or if you or your family are uninsured:
You will be able to find coverage. You will have access to a new health insurance "exchange," where both public and private health insurance will be offered. You will be able to compare these plans side-by-side and choose what's right for you and your family. None of these plans will be able to reject your application for pre-existing conditions or for your gender. You will have guaranteed access to health insurance.
You will be able to afford coverage. Any health insurance plan in the exchange will be subsidized if you qualify. Subsidies will be available up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or $88,000 per year for a family of four. These subsidies will ensure that you will only pay a certain percentage of your income in health care costs (that percentage varies depending on how much you make). Bottom line: Health insurance through the exchange will be affordable to you.
You will save money. Even if you do not qualify for subsidies or choose the public health insurance option, competition from the public health insurance option will force prices for insurance to fall across the board.
Your coverage will be good coverage, stable and secure. All plans in the exchange will have to conform to federal regulations, making sure that the plan you purchase covers things that you and your family need - things like preventative medicine, regular checkups, and prescription drugs. And, under health reform, your health insurance company will no longer be able to deny you coverage or care for pre-existing conditions. Your insurance company will no longer be able to drop your coverage if you become sick, or charge you more if you're a woman. There will be no more annual or lifetime caps on coverage, so you won't be stuck with tens of thousands in uncovered medical bills. And if you pay your premiums, your insurance company won't be able to reject a renewal of your insurance plan.
Your expenses will be capped. Deductibles, co-pays, premiums, and other expenses will be capped at a percentage of your income (between 1.5% and 11%, depending on how much you make), so you no longer face exorbitant health insurance costs.
4. If you are on Medicare or Medicaid:
Your health programs will not be touched. There will be no eligibility or benefit cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Health reform will be financed partly by finding savings in these programs. These savings will come from eliminating portions of Medicare and Medicaid that are no longer needed once we've passed health care reform for everyone. For example, right now, Medicaid pays hospitals a reimbursement for people who come to the hospital without health insurance, and thus stick that hospital with the bill. Under health reform, most people will have health insurance, making these reimbursements unnecessary.
The Medicare "Donut Hole" will be closed. The "donut hole" in Medicare's prescription drug program that leaves seniors with thousands of dollars in drug costs when their coverage runs out partway through the year will be gradually closed under health care reform.
5. Is this all paid for?
Yes. Health reform will be fully paid for, and will not increase the deficit. It will not increase your taxes, either. The House has proposed increasing taxes on those that make more than a quarter of a million dollars per year to pay for health reform. The middle class will not be affected.
—————————
There is a short answer to the question of what health reform will do for you: Better coverage, lower costs, and the security of knowing you're not at the mercy of private insurance anymore. This is what health care reform will do for you.
The cost of doing nothing - the conservative plan for health care - is staggering: The average family will pay $10,000 more in premiums by 2019 if nothing is done. We can not afford the conservative health care plan. We must reform health care now, for you and me and our families.
For a lot of you, this information is not news. However, you must know someone who needs to be educated. Copy and paste this post into an email and send it to someone who needs to know exactly how this bill works. Send around this link. Whatever you need to do, get that information out there. Fear can stop health care reform from happening, we need to fight back with the truth.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
The Obama Caucus of Ann Arbor is part of Organizing for America.
obama.caucus@gmail.com ObamaCaucus.blogspot.com
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Good answers to attacks on health care reform.
Don't let opponents of health care reform get away with their distortions. Here's a great set of replies that correct the record.
DailyKos: Crazy attacks on health care reform begin
DailyKos: Electronicmaji
Politifact.org review of statements on health
DailyKos: Crazy attacks on health care reform begin
DailyKos: Electronicmaji
Politifact.org review of statements on health
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Health Care for the Blue Dogs
By Jacob S. Hacker
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The fate of health-care reform hangs on what President Obama and leading Democrats do in the next few weeks. In particular, it hinges on an effective response to moderate Democrats in the House -- known as "Blue Dogs" -- who are threatening to jump ship.
The main worry expressed by the Blue Dogs is that the Congressional Budget Office has predicted that leading bills on Capitol Hill won't bring down medical inflation. The irony is that the Blue Dogs' argument -- that a new public insurance plan designed to compete with private insurers should be smaller and less powerful, and that Medicare and this new plan should pay more generous rates to rural providers -- would make reform more expensive, not less. The further irony is that the federal premium assistance that the Blue Dogs worry is too costly is the reform that would make health-care affordable for a large share of their constituents.
The Blue Dogs are right to hold Obama and Democratic leaders to their commitment to real cost control. But they are wrong to see this goal as conflicting with a new national public health insurance plan for Americans younger than 65. In fact, such a plan, empowered to work with Medicare, is Congress's single most powerful lever for reforming the way care is paid for and delivered. With appropriate authority, it can encourage private plans to develop innovations in payment and care coordination that could spread through the private sector, as have past public-sector innovations.
Increasing what doctors and hospitals are paid by the new public plan, as the Blue Dogs desire, would only raise premiums and health costs for their constituents. It would also fail to address excessive payments to hospitals and specialists that private insurers say they have lacked the leverage to bring down. Offering public plan rates at close to Medicare levels while giving doctors and hospitals the choice of accepting them -- as the House legislation does -- is a way to test the market. If providers accept the rates, as the CBO projects they will, the Blue Dogs will get what they want: lower costs. If not, the bill in the House contains provisions for adjusting the rates, including nearly $10 billion to raise rates in rural areas if an independent study determines that higher rates are needed.
Many Blue Dogs fret that a new public health insurance plan will become too large, despite the CBO's projection that the overwhelming majority of working people will have employer coverage and that the public plan will enroll less than 5 percent of the population. Their concern should be that a public plan will be too weak. A public health plan will be particularly vital for Americans in the rural areas that many Blue Dogs represent. These areas feature both limited insurance competition and shockingly large numbers of residents without adequate coverage. By providing a backup plan that competes with private insurers, the public plan will broaden coverage and encourage private plans to reduce their premiums. Perhaps that's why support for a public plan is virtually as high in generally conservative rural areas as it is nationwide, with 71 percent of voters expressing enthusiasm.
Yet the Blue Dogs have mostly ignored the huge benefits of a new public plan for their districts. They have also largely ignored the disproportionate benefits promised by new federal subsidies for low- and medium-income workers. Right now, large swaths of farmers, ranchers and self-employed workers can barely afford a policy in the individual market or are uninsured. They will benefit greatly from the premium assistance in the House legislation promised for workers whose earnings are up to 400 percent of the poverty line, from additional subsidies for small businesses to cover their workers, and from a new national purchasing pool, or "exchange," giving those employers access to low-cost group health insurance that's now out of reach.
And given that Blue Dogs are worried about the federal cost of reform, they should applaud the House bill's requirement that all but the smallest of employers make a meaningful contribution to the cost of coverage. This will not just raise much-needed revenue. By ensuring that most employers contribute to the cost of insurance, it will also reduce the incentive for employers to drop coverage and let their workers go into the pool, increasing the size of the exchange and the public plan.
Blue Dogs have the future of health-care reform in their hands. If they hold firm to their principles of fiscal responsibility and effective relief for workers and employers in their districts, what's good for Blue Dogs will also be good for America.
The writer is a political science professor at Yale University and author of "The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Security and the Decline of the American Dream."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072701906_pf.htmlMonday, July 27, 2009
Health Reform: The Fateful Moment
The New York Review of Books
By Theodore R. Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander
Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis
by Senator Tom Daschle, with Scott S. Greenberger and Jeanne M. Lambrew
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 226 pp., $23.95
Barack Obama has long emphasized the importance of reforming American medical care, both as a candidate in the 2008 election and as president. During the month of June, however, he dramatically increased his efforts to secure major reform legislation by the end of the year.
The President is using his oratorical skills to rally support for reform. In a series of speeches and town hall meetings, Obama made his case for expanding insurance coverage and controlling medical spending. Speaking before the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in Chicago on June 15, for example, he painted a familiar, distressing portrait of a health care system that costs too much, leaves too many Americans without adequate insurance, and too often provides substandard care. The President warned of the dire consequences if these problems were not promptly addressed:
Make no mistake: the cost of our health care is a threat to our economy. It's an escalating burden on our families and businesses. It's a ticking time-bomb for the federal budget. And it is unsustainable for the United States of America.
Yet as the President expands his involvement in the health care debate, health reformers have concluded that time is not on their side. Delay and the President's popularity might well ebb. Congress could become more cautious as the 2010 elections approach. The longer the health care debate drags on, the more time opponents have to mobilize against and foster public anxiety about reform. And with federal budget deficits soaring, the political opportunities to finance expanded health insurance coverage may fade.
....
The full article: Health Reform: The Fateful Moment
Thursday, July 23, 2009
President Obama's news conference on health care reform.
Go to the video.
Read the full transcript.
Here's an excerpt:
Read the full transcript.
Here's an excerpt:
If you have health insurance, the reform we're proposing will provide you with more security and more stability. It will keep government out of health care decisions, giving you the option to keep your insurance if you're happy with it. It will prevent insurance companies from dropping your coverage if you get too sick. It will give you the security of knowing that if you lose your job, if you move, or if you change your job, you'll still be able to have coverage. It will limit the amount your insurance company can force you to pay for your medical costs out of your own pocket. And it will cover preventive care like check-ups and mammograms that save lives and money.
Now, if you don't have health insurance, or you're a small business looking to cover your employees, you'll be able to choose a quality, affordable health plan through a health insurance exchange -- a marketplace that promotes choice and competition. Finally, no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a preexisting medical condition. I've also pledged that health insurance reform will not add to our deficit over the next decade. And I mean it. In the past eight years, we saw the enactment of two tax cuts, primarily for the wealthiest Americans, and a Medicare prescription program -- none of which were paid for. And that's partly why I inherited a $1.3 trillion deficit.
....
Taxing Health Insurance Premiums and Subsidizing Health Care Providers
Dean Baker
Truthout, July 20, 2009
As a card-carrying economist, I don’t like the unlimited tax deduction for health insurance premiums. It is regressive and just plain bad policy.
Low- and moderate-income people are both less likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and benefit much less from the tax deduction if they do. Most of these families will have no income tax liability. So, if they get a $12,000 employer provided plan, their tax savings will only be on the 15.4 percent payroll tax liability, which would come to $1,850 in this case.
Truthout, July 20, 2009
As a card-carrying economist, I don’t like the unlimited tax deduction for health insurance premiums. It is regressive and just plain bad policy.
Low- and moderate-income people are both less likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and benefit much less from the tax deduction if they do. Most of these families will have no income tax liability. So, if they get a $12,000 employer provided plan, their tax savings will only be on the 15.4 percent payroll tax liability, which would come to $1,850 in this case.
By contrast, if a family earns $250,000, it is in the 33 percent tax bracket. If this family gets a $25,000 policy from an employer, the government is effectively paying almost half the tab, or $12,100. In this case, the government ends up paying almost seven times as much to subsidize the health care of a high-income family as it does for a moderate-income family. That policy is hard to justify.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Michigan bills target insurers' denial of proper claims
MASON – The state House will hold three hearings this week on legislation to punish insurance companies that wrongfully deny legitimate claims by their policyholders.
The state could fine insurance companies $1 million for denying legitimate claims by policyholders, under legislation House Democrats say will put an end to insurers cheating their customers.
The state could fine insurance companies $1 million for denying legitimate claims by policyholders, under legislation House Democrats say will put an end to insurers cheating their customers.
The package of 12 bills also would allow courts to levy heavy fines and charge insurance executives with felonies for encouraging the delay or denial of insurance claims.
Too many consumers are denied claims for injuries or property damages to boost insurance company profits, House Democrats said at one of five press conferences planned across the state.
Rest of article at: http://freep.com/article/20090713/NEWS06/90713046/Michigan-legislation-targets-insurers--denial-of-proper-claims
BREAKING: House Bill Looks Good (So Far)
By Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic
The three House committees writing health care legislation have just released the full text of their bill. And my immediate, admittedly tentative reaction is strongly positive. Once fully implemented, this reform plan will accomplish most of the goals on my mental checklist:
- Generous subisidies, available to people making up to 400 percent of the poverty line
- Expansion of Medicaid to cover people making less than 133 percent of the poverty line
- Guarantees of solid benefits for everybody, with limits on out-of-pocket spending
- Strong regulation of insurers, including requirements that insurers provide insurance to people with pre-existing conditions without higher rates
- An individual mandate, so that everybody (or what passes for everybody in these discussions) gets into the system and assumes some financial responsibility
- A public plan, one that appears to be strong, although I'll reserve judgment on that until I hear from the experts
- Choice of public and private plan, at first just for individuals and small businesses, but later for larger businesses and--possibly--eventually for everybody
- Efforts at payment reform, if not necessarily as strong as they could be
- Investment in primary care and prevention, which is not sexy but potentially important for general health .
Another article briefly explains major parts of bill, with links to an official press release, with links to summary sheets about each component: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/the_house_releases_its_health-.html
Monday, July 13, 2009
Alex in Ann Arbor, Michigan
I just graduated from the University of Michigan and will go on to teach special education in Phoenix, Arizona through Teach for America. I spent most of my life without insurance because my divorced parents were both self-employed and could not afford health care. When we were sick or hurt, we would call family friends who were doctors to ask for advice and avoid actually going in to the doctor's because of the high costs. When I did finally get health care a few years ago, I came down with appendicitis and had to be hospitalized. I went to the University of Michigan hospital because it was the only one I knew of. When I left the hospital after an overnight stay, I was later sent a bill for $18,000 with the claim that my insurance would not cover any of the costs. My mother's income is below poverty level and I have paid my way through school on my own. To have this $18,000 bill looming over my head was a disaster. The bill has since been reduced, but it is still more money than I can manage to pay on my own.
Alex
Ann Arbor, Michigan
http://stories.barackobama.com/healthcare/stories/12902
Alex
Ann Arbor, Michigan
http://stories.barackobama.com/healthcare/stories/12902
The cost of no public option
There's a lot of arguing about the cost of the public option. The plan put forward by the HELP committee, is expected to cost $600 billion. The numbers (plucked from extremely well researched thin air) by the GOP insist the final number will be well above a trillion.
But what does it cost us to not have a public option?
Some of the costs of not having a public option are simple to calculate, but immeasurable in value. Infant mortality rates in the United States are 6.37 deaths/1,000 live births. A sampling of other industrialized nations with public health care finds the United Kingdom at 5.01 deaths / 1,000 live births. Canada at 4.63. France at 3.41. If the United States infant mortality matched that of the United Kingdom, just under 6,000 fewer infants would have died in the United States last year. If we could match France around 13,000 fewer infants would have died.
Let's move to the other end of the spectrum. As of 2009, life expectancy in the United States is 78.11 years. Which sounds pretty good, until you realize it puts us one slot above Albania. For the United Kingdom, this number is 79.01 years. For France it's 80.98. For Canada, 81.23. for the United States, that means about 270,000,000 years lost compared just to the slightly better numbers of the UK. 936,000,000 years lost compared to Canada. Want to stick a monetary value on it? Say that just a fourth of these Americans in their golden years are pulling down 20 hours a week and getting minimum wage to wave you into the local big box or bag your groceries. That's $442 billion worth of time lost compared to the UK. About $1.5 trillion lost if those workers had lived as long as Canadians.
...
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/7/750936/-The-cost-of-no-public-option
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