Policies and Regulations

Lost in the economic crisis, the lousy horserace numbers for McCain, and the personal attacks of the McCain camp is the ongoing health care crisis in the United States. With our current system, there remain 47 million without care and millions more who are underinsured. Cost issues exist alongside inequalities of care access. And now, with unemployment rising, the issue is becoming more acute.
Paul Krugman: Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (thats what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they havent been able to pull that off.

So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead. But but Not good. Obama’s idea is different. Today, he signed on to the Health Care for America Now principles, which do not endorse specific legislation, but are compatible with single payer and other approaches. From a press release:

Today, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) signed the Health Care for America Now statement declaring that he is on the side of quality, affordable health care for all and opposed to leaving Americans on their own with unregulated health insurance.

There’s still plenty of room to argue about the best way to get there, but with a recession looming and people in danger of losing their jobs, this is not an issue that can be ignored any more. Expect it to be brought up in the town hall debate tomorrow – unlike the phoney stuff being brought up by McCain’s campaign and his increasingly shrill VP candidate, who caters only to the shrinking Republican base, this is an issue that all Americans actually care about.

“Health Care for America Now’s goal this year is to get the next President and a majority of Congress committed to the principles of quality, affordable health care for all and opposed to policies that would tax our benefits at work and leave us on our own with the unregulated, bureaucratic private insurance industry,” said Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager, Health Care for America Now. “With Senator Obama’s signature, we are taking a major step towards getting the next President and Congress to make comprehensive health care reform a priority in 2009.”

John McCain’s plan is anything but acceptable. Since it’s all about saving money and nothing else, he proposes, according to the WSJ: McCain Plans Federal Health Cuts…Medicare, Medicaid Spending Would Be Reduced to Offset Proposed Tax Credit
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. McCain’s senior policy adviser, said Sunday that the campaign has always planned to fund the tax credits, in part, with savings from Medicare and Medicaid. Those government health-care programs serve seniors, poor families and the disabled. Medicare spending for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30 is estimated at $457.5 billion.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/6/124346/441/758/621648
Those of us who analyze health policy and trends for a living have struggled to follow John McCain’s health plan through its many seemingly-improvised changes. First he was taxing health benefits through both payroll and income tax. Then he said he only intended to apply income tax, which meant that his plan would create even larger deficits. Now he says there won’t be deficits, because he’s going to make up the cost of those tax credits by slashing Medicare and Medicaid.

When a candidate suddenly, almost whimsically changes the way he proposes to handle $1.3 trillion – which is the amount of money his plan puts in play over the next ten years – it’s time to get nervous.

We already knew the McCain plan was going to cost most Americans money (in at least three different ways.) Now we know it could jeopardize their medical care when they get older, too. The end result of this off-the-cuff planning could change the way Americans receive, or don’t receive, medical care in this country…at least three kinds of health “tax increases” (more accurately described as increased personal cost) under the McCain plan: a “slow bleed” for people who retain coverage as the tax credit falls behind inflation, a $,7000-plus spike for people who lose their coverage immediately, and an increase in out-of-pocket costs (and denials, etc.) for people who still have insurance. What do we get in return? According to that neutral study, three million uninsured would gain coverage – briefly. After five years the number of uncovered would go up.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/mccains-erratic-health-st_b_132242.html

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Presidential candidate Ron Paul proposes major changes to U.S. foreign policy. We caught up with him in Iowa.

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Kevin Phillips (born November 30, 1940) is an American writer and commentator, largely on politics, economics, and history. Formerly a Republican Party strategist, Phillips has become disaffected with his former party over the last two decades, and is now one of its harshest critics. He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio, and is a political analyst on PBS’ NOW with Bill Moyers.
Phillips was a senior strategist for Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, which was the basis for a book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which predicted a conservative realignment in national politics, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential recent works in political science. His predictions regarding shifting voting patterns in presidential elections proved accurate, though they did not extend “down ballot” to Congress until the Republican revolution of 1994. Phillips also was partly responsible for the design of the Republican “Southern strategy” of the 1970s and 1980s.
The author of fourteen books, he lives in Goshen, Connecticut, in Litchfield County.
Ironically for someone who in later life became a virulent critic of Republicans from the south and west, Phillips in his 1969 book identified the “Heartland” as the future core of Republican votes, and the “Yankee Northeast” as the future Democratic stronghold, foreshadowing the current split between Red States and Blue States. More than 30 years before the 2004 election, Phillips foresaw such previously Democratic states as Texas and West Virginia swinging to the Republicans while Vermont and Maine would become Democratic states.

Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy,and formerly Chairman of the Department of Economics, at Harvard University. His latest book is The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, published in 2005 by Alfred A. Knopf. Mr. Friedman’s best known previous book is Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After, which received the George S. Eccles Prize, awarded annually by Columbia University for excellence in writing about economics.
In addition to Day of Reckoning and The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Mr. Friedman has written extensively on economic policy, and in particular on the role of the financial markets in shaping how monetary and fiscal policies affect overall economic activity. Specific subjects of his work include the effects of government deficits and surpluses on interest rates, exchange rates, and business investment; appropriate guidelines for the conduct of U.S. monetary policy; and appropriate policy actions in response to crises in a country’s banking or financial system. He is the author and/or editor of eleven books aimed primarily at economists and economic policymakers, as well as the author of more than one hundred articles on monetary economics, macroeconomics, and monetary and fiscal policy, published in numerous journals.
He is also a frequent contributor to publications reaching a broader audience, including especially The New York Review of Books.

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In the recent study “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, the authors of the paper, Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard University and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, charge that the United States has willingly set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel. In addition the study accuses the pro-Israeli lobby, particularly AIPAC of manipulating the U.S. media, policing academia and silencing critics of Israel by labeling them as anti-Semitic.

A new article in the New York Review of Books examines the controversial report and the reaction to it. It’s called “The Storm Over the Israel Lobby.” It was written by media critic Michael Massing, who joins Amy Goodman for the interview. Michael is a contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and frequently writes for the New York Review of Books.

You can read the transcript of the interview at: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/1436205

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Joe Biden spoke about Barack Obama’s judgment and readiness to lead the country in a new direction from the failed Bush-McCain foreign policies of the last 8 years in Cincinnati, OH September 24th, 2008.

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Barack Obama, May 16, 2008

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Join MPP-TV as we review five of the 2008 presidential candidates’ positions on marijuana policy.

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2008/09/16/The_Future_of_Health_Care_The_Candidates_Plans

Daniel Kessler and E. Richard Brown, Health Advisors to the John McCain and Barack Obama Presidential campaigns, respectively, discuss why neither candidate supports a single-payer insurance system for the United States.

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Health care is a major issue in the current presidential campaign. Candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have laid out very different visions, and each believes his plan is best for our nation’s citizenry.

Come learn about each plan from the top policy advisors of each candidate, and take the opportunity to ask your own questions and get answers – The Commonwealth Club of California

Daniel Kessler is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. In addition to his Hoover appointment, he is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on economics, public policy, and the health care industry. Among his recent publications are, with Mark McClellan, The Effect of Hospital Ownership on Medical Productivity, forthcoming in the RAND Journal of Economics, and Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare, which appeared in Frontiers in Health Policy Research. He is the holder of a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Dr. E. Richard Brown is a professor at the UCLA School of Public Health and the founder and director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. He received his PhD in sociology of education from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Brown has studied and written extensively about a broad range of issues and policies that affect the access of disadvantaged populations to health care. His recent research focuses on health insurance coverage, the lack of coverage, and the effects of public policies, managed care, and market conditions on access to health services, particularly for disadvantaged populations, ethnic minorities, and immigrants. Dr. Brown and the Center’s studies of health insurance coverage, uninsurance, and eligibility for public programs have been used by California’s governors, legislators, and advocates in crafting health insurance legislation and programs.

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2007/10/03/Wesley_Clark_A_Time_to_Lead

Retired four-star general and former Democratic Presidential candidate Wesley Clark criticizes the course of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of September 11, 2001.

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Wesley Clark discusses “A Time to Lead.”

Wesley Clark sought the presidency during the 2004 elections, seeking to bring a less hawkish perspective to the White House. After the campaign, Clark did not end his crusade for what he sees as a better America, one that supports his vision of a responsible foreign policy. He believes that hard work, leadership and determination will ultimately turn the country around. – The Commonwealth Club

Wesley Clark is a retired four-star general of the United States Army. Clark was valedictorian of his class at West Point, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford where he earned a master’s degree in economics, and later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master’s degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the Army and the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Taken at Makati City, Philippines. The seminar was facilitated by Mr. John Medrana.

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