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Bratwurst! Massive Healthcare Victory for Dems
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once famously remarked that observing the legislative process was like watching sausage being made. As I made my annual Christmas trek northward this year to the Germanic heartland of the Midwest I couldn’t help but think of Bismarck’s analogy when thinking of the healthcare debate.
We’ve witnessed the entrails and the casings and the other nastiness associated with sausage er lawmaking – public options and Medicare buy-ins and death panels and Liebermans and teabaggers and Stupak Amendments and other assorted unpleasantness. And for some the end product will be too spicy. For others too bland. For others the taste of beer will be too unboiled for taste. And for yet others the various and assorted spices for this year’s bratwurst will prove unsatisfying.
But for me, this health care bill looks like the Sheboygan bratwurst I’ve come to love at the annual Wisconsin State Fair. I have no idea how the guys put that meaty masterpiece together each August but I know that in the end it serves me well. Yes, this health care piece of sausage is a winner. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn point out the substantive benefits of this bill.
Like most pieces of sausage it ain’t perfect. It doesn’t have the public option – not to mention single payer – that would make the Alsatian masterpiece I was hungering for. But it’s a hugely important first step in the long process of providing universal healthcare for the American people.
If Otto von Bismarck could pass the beginnings of universal health care for the German people in 1883 – yes, the 19th century – surely we could accomplish the same a mere 116 years later.
Future Congresses will be fixing the holes in this bill. They will buttress the exchanges, and supplement Medicaid, and expand prescription coverage, and boost non-basic care.
The most important piece of this legislation is the principle. For the first time in American history the US Congress will have established that health care is a right afforded to all Americans. Not a Constitutional right, granted, but a commonly agreed upon right nonetheless – just like Medicare and Social Security.
The whole thing could blow up in Conference Committee, of course. But that seems unlikely at this point. When Nelson joined on the deal was essentially sealed. President Obama’s signature domestic goal will be passed. This Congress will have achieved something that no Congress in 100 years has done. The tea party libertarians on the right and the progressive purity activists on the left will oppose the bill for their own reasons. But make no mistake, this is a HUGE accomplishment for the Democratic Congress and for President Obama. And when the newspapers across the land spell out the various benefits of the bill in the coming days the acrimony will die down (certainly on the left) and Democrats will benefit, Matthew Dowd be damned. The could-have-beens will be forgotten or rolled into next year’s agenda. The malcontents will be just as angry as ever. And the public will recognize why the Republicans fought this so hard – because once the distortions and the acrimony is stripped away this bill provides what the American people have longed for for a very long time. Don’t believe the negative polls on the bill up to now – most of that is based on the overheated rhetoric and not on the substance of the bill. Expect progressives to rally behind the bill, and centrists to be relieved that Congress can focus on other matters. Conservatives will be as angry as always, but the Democrats will now have an accomplishment that no prior Democratic Congress has ever possessed.
Now pass the sauerkraut and mustard!
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18 Responses to “Bratwurst! Massive Healthcare Victory for Dems”
I wonder if this woman would be covered.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOC7a2Tw_8o
It's unfortunately not entirely impossible that Lieberman will do a Lieberman and stab people in the back and then pursue a career as an insurance industry talking head or something. Also, Nelson and Stupak could be slightly dangerous in their respective chambers. The house might make things better when the bill is merged, but the risks are great.
Also, Nelson knows it's a done deal when he votes for cloture, so he is extra paranoid and emotional now.
Lastly, there are many who are ambitious enough to try to pass some of the bill regularly and some of it via reconciliation to get a better bill. I sympathize with that impulse, but again there are risks and some very selfish and odious old men to consider.
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As a historian of the 19th century i won't even pretend to be offended or horrified by the favors promised to Landrieu or Nelson. It's just part of the sausage casing.
i'm neither terribly liberal nor terribly conservative, but i am kind of nervous that the federal gov't assumes the power to mandate insurance of any kind; that's a state power, right?
the author (elrod) is awfully positive about this legislation, and i myself can't say i hate everything about it; bu this just smacks of adding a new bureaucracy to the old one, instead of fixing what we had in the first place.
oh, and lest we blame this totally on the democrats, i think it needs to be said that we owe the obama presidency, and therefore this legislation, to the machinations of a certain karl rove and friends. thanks for turning the republican hive into an ineffectual mob of angry insects, karl! so much for a counterbalance to the democratic machine.
The real question is why would anyone consider a career in medicine or consider investing anything in healthcare.
The Democrats have stgarted down the road of nationalizing health care. Anyone who looks into the future that health care will soon look like education system with the same level of incompetence, waste, and lack of career prospects. I guess the liberal arts majors, after destroying engineering as a good career field are not making health care a bad career choice. Can everyone survive in the finance sectors.
Gee, I wonder how the Europeans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Japanese, the Taiwanese, and all the other civilized countries that have universal health-care manage? Oh, yeah they keep republicans/conservatives as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Amazingly all of the name countries above also mange to have decent education systems, could it be that they don't have racists in them who would rather eat shit than give their minorities a plugged nickel?
I agree the bill isn't perfect, but it is a massive step forward. But I am afraid–the chickens are being counted a little before they're hatched.
What stands out most to me is how little interest Republicans had in finding a solution to the health care problem. They just wanted to play politics. And in spite of that, the final bill is pretty conservative. I presume that–as with the stimulus package–Republicans will go back home and claim credit for things they voted against.
It's amazing to me that people who preferred nothing at all will attack this bill because it doesn't cover everything. This seems like the very definition of hypocrisy.
Complaints that elected officials have sold out are naive, disingenuous, or–again–hypocritical.
And it's obvious that since people will continue to need health care, health care will continue to be a viable career choice.
I will also be relieved once Congress moves on to other matters.
DQ,
Actually, in countries like France, Japan, and Canada, medicine is a bad career to go into. Healthcare workers are poorly paid in France and few of the elite go into Medicine. That is why every big hospital in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have international offices that deal with the elites from those countries.
Most of those countgries push people into health care occupations early and then underpay them. That is why the U.S. is full of nurses from places like Canada.
And last, France, Candata, or Australia does not have a population of 12% blacks and 15% Hispanic. Like all progressives, your first assumption is that all Americans will act like Scandanavians when all of our culture shows that they will not.
Unless you are will to make the demographics of the U.S. the same as the demographics of France or Sweden, any socialist top down program is doomed to fail.
Just like schools work fine in the suburbs where there are plenty of two parent families and white children but fail in the inner cities, health care is the U.S. is bound to fail.
Just image yourself a human resources manager in Newark New Jersey and ask yourself why anyone would want to work in Newark when they get paid the same as every other medial worker in the U.S.
Obviously you haven't visited any hospitals lately, when I do, I notice a lot of nurses from India, Pakistan and India which is the result of our “Cheap Labor Conservatism”, but not from Germany, England, Canada or any other industrialized country. I also see a lot of doctors from India, Pakistan and other third world countries, again a result of our “Cheap Labor Conservatism” policy.
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
The elites of third world countries, not that of the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or Taiwan.
As the jobs keep getting outsource to third world rat-holes, your white suburbs are going to end up looking like your Detroits and Newarks. it's not the people, it's the fact that there are no stable steady, decent paying jobs available.
DQ,
Actually the Phillipines is the biggest producers of nurses for the U.S. but when I consulted in Hawaii, I was amazed that at the number of nurses from Canada. Of course, when you visit a hospital it is easy to tell where the Patels, Kims, or Santos, it is easy to guess where they are from. The smiths from Canada get lost. Many of the Canadians worked as agency nurses.
I also worked in physicist from Canada who could not get a job in Canda because if you graduate when the government is not hiring, you have to move to the U.S.
If you think cheap labor is important now, what do you think will happen when the government cuts reimbursements by 20%. The last whites thinking about medical school or health profressions will probably give up on the idea instead of working for low wages while facing massive new government requirements.
Also, you did not say why anyonw will ever want to work in the inner city hospitals while facing the coming system.
I can't believe the complaints about this bill.
Of course, this is sausage. It is much too conservative for some, much too liberal for others, but definitely it is too much of a compromise for everyone. These bills always are.
Of course, the Senators played games to get what they wanted in it. And they wrote portions of the law to favor their state or favorite industry. That is their job.
This bill is neither the end of civilization as we know it nor is going to salvage it
It is the normal result of representative democracy in our day and time.
I guess the shock is because what used to be done behind closed doors and obfuscated, is done now as a daylight robbery. With the holdups by Landrieu and Nelson, what's to stop all the other congresspeople working out a deal for their constituents? And, “it won't tax anyone under $250,000 a thin dime”. Where is my Pinocchio meter. Will it work with lies this big? Plus, we taxpayers won't even get a Bratwurst dinner before they “focus” on the next big reform.
You hit the nail on the head, Don. Here in America, we have a pretty good ethnic mix among doctors (and the entire medical industry overall). In England, very few Doctors are native English – as most are medical graduates from third world nations. And the reason there are no “decent paying jobs” available has a lot to do with corporatism of healthcare. Not so long ago, before the Humanas and the other medical conglomerates took over everything, medical care was much cheaper. Welcome to the Wal-Mart age in medicine!
They had to do it behind closed doors. If they offered in publc the exclusion of Nebraska and other sweet deals for Vermont and Lousiana; they didn't want the video to be used against them in 2010 and 2012. That's the same reason for the timing and the implementation AFTER 2012.
Obvious, unethical, crap.
“Massive Victory”?
Gee, that's not what far-lefty talkers, such as on Air America, have been saying.
“If you think cheap labor is important now, what do you think will happen when the government cuts reimbursements by 20%.”
It's going to get worse, of course. I have long feared not only cost-cutting and qualifications of future care-givers but the prospect (which has been on my mind for years) also of such people who will be often resentful of their situation (always facing pay cuts and such) and taking it out on patients like me. Gulp.
And if someday a few cowards or venal people decide to be more than that, and actually want the feds to assume ownership as well as control of everything, then you'll face “You can't fire or sue me. I'm Civil Service and I have sovereign immunity!”
Importing immigrants, if that's your concern, has always been on my mind. It's not limited to health care but if you're an equal-opporunity-cynic you know it applies to everything left that can't be sent offshore.
Gee, I wonder how someone like you can make a statement like that, but then realize that you can hide in a dark bedroom somewhere spouting rubish. If you would use your computer and the internet to do some research, you wouldn't make such dumb statements about how well other countries are doing with socialized medicine. At least try to skim through the CATO institute paper regarding health care comparisons in other countries. You might learn that the grass is NOT greener on the other side.