Finally Left Leverage on Healthcare

dine — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:32:16 +0000

Niagara Falls, Ontario Maybe progressives and liberals are finally willing to exercise some leverage rather than watching painfully as conservatives and moderates strip every bill that arises down to the bone with health care reform being the latest front page casualty? There are signs of a stirring.

SEIU and Andy Stern after having seemed for so long to have been a White House annex office at their headquarters on Dupont Circle finally is snapping back at the evisceration of health legislation. Trumka and the AFL-CIO are unhappy and balking at the compromises. MoveOn which has been indistinguishable from Obama’s Organizing for America is sending out emails targeting Lieberman and praising Senator Bernie Sanders and his threats to NOT vote for the health care bill’s Senate version. There are real discussions everywhere that people gather where folks are trying to find a way to still rationalize supporting so little at this late date in the fight.

My assumption is still that enough no’s will be held to get the votes come hell or high water. That assumption is based on the premise that once passed, evolution would improve the features of the package over time.

Talking to my colleagues in Canada is sobering, since here the evolutionary record is a dilution of health care benefits rather than improvement. Vision coverage for example In Ontario national health care pays for nothing. Not the glasses. Not the eye check even.

I’ve talked earlier about the problems with “opt outs” which are also prevalent in Canada. Each province (think states Americans) can add or subtract some parts of the package especially when it comes to paying for the costs of drugs and other add-ons to the basic health care package.

We need to be careful that we don’t go down from here, like our northern neighbors.

Hunkering Down for Reform

jstuart — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:33:29 +0000

Washington Being around the DC area gave me an opportunity to ply friends and associates for information on what might be happening to some other critical efforts for reform now that health care is at center stage. The votes still don’t seem there for labor law reform and there’s no push to have it jump over health care in the queue of course.

More interestingly were the tidbits I gathered from my friends in the immigration reform movement. There seems to be an emerging consensus that this will be a longer fight than anyone would have wanted and that there needs to be a re-engagement tactically and strategically with the base to rebuild the momentum.

Importantly, there seems to also be two other important recognitions. One is that the anger and disappointment of the base about increased enforcement (like 287g) can’t be ignored or rationalized, especially in the absence of any positive steps towards reform by the Administration. The other is a recognition that to get this job done may require some real leveraging of the elections in 2010 and 2012, and in my view a much clearer quid pro quo about votes following reform, rather than hope.

This all is disappointing but at least seems like a dose of real politick that might mean that immigration reform is real when it comes and that we are finally girding for a fight rather than depending on the White House, which seems a disappointment for sure.

A professor I know well said something to me on the phone recently that put all of this in perspective. He observed that we now seemed to be getting the “Clinton Administration without the economic expansion!” That hurts, but sadly we may have to reckon with that being the truth as great expectations continue to dissolve.

Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Health Care Reform

Finally Left Leverage on Healthcare

Hunkering Down for Reform