Reforming Healthcare
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 9:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Belmont University Campus
Gordon E. Inman Center - Frist Lecture Hall
Belmont University is pleased to host the Gordon E. Inman College of Health Sciences & Nursing Speaker Series, Diagnosing Our Future. Launching the series will be a discussion on health care reform with Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen and U.S. Congressman Jim Cooper, two individuals playing key roles in the future of health care in the United States. Providing context and perspective to the presentations of Governor Bredesen and Congressman Cooper will be a diverse panel of industry insiders. This is a free event. but attendees must RSVP. Seating is limited, so please call to inquire about seating availability.
A majority of Congressional Democrats signed a letter today to Speaker Pelosi protesting taxation of health care benefits on "so called high cost insurance plans".
As Congress continues to consider revenue sources for America's Affordable Health Choices Act and other health insurance reform proposals, we strongly encourage you to reject imposing an excise tax on so called high cost insurance plans. Such a tax would impact regions with high health care costs in the short-term, and, in the long-term, inevitably extend to more and more middle-income Americans across the country....
America's Affordable Health Choices Act includes sensible revenue sources to pay for the legislation. However, inclusion of an excise tax on high cost insurance plans, as proposed by the Senate Fiance Committee, could have significant and detrimental implications for millions of middle-class Americans. The short-term impact would be greatest on individuals and families living in high cost regions and for those that have sacrificed pay increase for strong benefits. Over the long term the number of individuals and families subjected to the tax would likely continue to grow. To this end, we urge you to continue to reject proposals to enact an excise tax on high cot insurance plans that could be potentially passed on to to middle class families.
You can read the full text and see the list of original signatories to the letter here (pdf).
In August, on MSNBC, Rep. Cooper clearly stated the reason he thought including a public option would kill health care legislation:
"Well, its really not an ideological question. It's a question of how you pass a bill. And the law is, in the Senate, it takes 60 votes. So how are we going to get to 60 votes? It's going to take some Republicans to do that."
As the above video shows, this wasn't a one-off statement. Jim Cooper repeatedly asserted all through the summer of 2009 that a "bipartisan" health care solution - one that would somehow win Republican votes - was necessary because Democrats did not have a sufficient number of votes to defeat a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
But now they do. And they appear to have the votes to pass the public option as well. Any Republican-only filibuster now will fail. And any successful obstruction would need to require the active participation of Democratic senators to deny an up-or-down vote on either the public option or the final legislation.
Cooper was very quick over the summer to try to use the political realities of the Senate as an excuse for talking down the chances of a public option and quixotically attempting to gain support for his own preferred bill (which did not include one). With Democrats now having the votes they need in the Senate to avoid a filibuster, will Jim Cooper now call for all Democratic senators to allow an up-or-down vote on the public option?
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been at the forefront of the Senate battle to include the controversial government-run plan for consumers, said there are between 54 and 56 votes in the Senate in favor of the provision, with several more votes able to be won.
"Here's how you have to look at it: The overwhelming majority of Democrats in the Senate are for it," Schumer said this morning during an appearance on MSNBC. "I'm talking to some of the moderates, and they're very open to it."
Democrats will not be able to "go it alone" on healthcare legislation and force through a bill with a public option on a party-lines vote, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said Wednesday.
"It's numerically not possible," Cooper, a centrist Blue Dog Democrat who has long focused on healthcare issues, said in an interview on MSNBC. "We don't have enough votes."
If Sen. Schumer is correct, the only way passing a public option is actually "numerically not possible" is if conservative Democrats support a GOP filibuster and refuse president Obama an up-or-down vote on health care reform.
Is a GOP filibuster something Jim Cooper supports? Or will he join Democratic calls for an up-or-down vote?
UPDATE! Well, well, well. Once word got out that there was at least one candidate willing to take on the candidate of Big Health, now I hear that there are more asking around about it and taking a serious look at it. I expected this; the blood is in the water now.
Southern Beale warns Democrats that results on health care are expected:
So, Democrats in Washington, if you can’t deliver the healthcare reform we need and expect under a perfect storm of conditions then you don’t deserve power.
And if you fail us now, you aren’t getting another penny from me, or one more minute of my time. And I’m not the only one.
Recently, Jim Cooper was very upset at being mistaken for Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, the head of the Blue Dog health care task force who has been in the news lately for some suspect real estate dealings and for steadfastly refusing to support the public option along with many of his Blue Dog colleagues.
Yet, back in the spring, on a public affairs show hosted by Rep. Ross, Rep. Cooper praised his fellow Blue Dog colleague on health care in unmistakably glowing terms:
Well, Mike, first I want to congratulate you. Because nobody's fought harder in Congress than you have for better health care for all of our people. These are tough issues. But you are on the key committee in Congress that oversees all of this. You've been selected by your Blue Dog colleagues to be the head of the health committee that's going to help engineer reform.
It's no surprise that fellow Blue Dog Cooper would have praised Ross' approach. As NPR reported just a few weeks ago, the Blue Dogs, led by Cooper and Ross, have been raking in contributions this year from big insurance while largely ignoring the serious health care needs of their constituents:
One leader of the Blue Dog effort is Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, the coalition's chief health care negotiator. His 4th Congressional District covers southern Arkansas, a rural area with a high poverty rate. In his district, more than one out of five residents under age 65 lacks health insurance. That's 30 percent higher than the national average... in June, Ross and the Blue Dog Coalition held up the House bill for two weeks. They wanted the measure to promote co-ops instead of a public option, an approach that more liberal lawmakers dismiss as unworkable.
So far this year, the Blue Dogs' political action committee has received $301,500 from health care and health insurance PACs. Ross, the coalition's lead negotiator, has received $100,600 for his campaign committee and a PAC that he operates.
Ross got together with health care industry donors in June, around the same time the Blue Dogs were challenging the House bill. The event brought his campaign at least $20,000 from health care PACs.
NPR asked repeatedly to interview Ross over a two-week period. His office didn't respond.
The Center for Responsive Politics' Capital Eye Blog this summer examined the influence of health-sector contributions to Blue Dogs, noting many have been getting more money from insurance and pharmaceutical interests than their non-Blue Dog Democratic counterparts. The center tracks the influence of money on public policy.
The No. 3 recipient from the health sector since 1989, the center reported, was Tanner, who has collected $949,249, including $252,950 from health insurance interests and $300,970 from pharmaceuticals. U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., ranked second among the Blue Dogs, collecting $1.1 million from health sector contributors, and U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., ranked fifth with $896,414.
Now, leaving aside the idea that a real leader would have come up with one, definitive definition and fought for it, this was still an eyebrow-raising statement -- and so, not wanting to fall short of any ethical standards, I talked to a spokesman in Cooper's office and requested the following:
* To please specify what the 18 definitions are.
* Whether you agree or disagree with the definition(s).
* To state which nine--or more--you publicly pledge to vote for.
And three days later, the response from Rep. Cooper's office:
*crickets*
Indeed, Cooper was dismissing the public option in the spring and bragging that his favorite plan didn't include one and talking up co-ops in the summer. And while he has said he would vote for the Schumer plan, he certainly hasn't fought either for it - or for any one of the seventeen other definitions.
The Blue Dog Democrats have had their feet held to the fire by progressives/liberals regarding the health care issue. And I think that it goes without saying that one of them was going to be targeted. As GoldnI wrote in her post, the bottom line is that Cooper (or any other Blue Dog) can answer simply with a yes or no if they support the public option. And, if folks in his district don’t like what he’s doing, then they need to mobilize.
Cooper likens President Obama's health care strategy to choosing his family's dog (audio):
"President Obama’s choice will matter the most… I don’t know if he will pick out a health reform plan like he picked out his dog Bo."
But if, and again this is always a big hairy IF, a candidate comes along who I think would do a good job and is more in line with my values, what is so wrong about me supporting them? And yes, most people who'd have a shot in hell of winning are weary, if not scared, to challenge an incumbent like Jim Cooper because potential donors will want to see a chance of success before giving, and so its a cyclical catch-22 that can generally only be broken with outside support of people not afraid to challenge the throne.
While Jim Cooper is now calling up cable news networks to argue forcefully that he is in favor of a public option, that wasn't exactly the spin he was putting on things back in April.
At a speech at Vanderbilt on April 7th, as he was still arguing for his preferred legislation, the Healthy Americans Act (original video here), Cooper explained to the audience that he thought a public option was "theoretically possible", but warned against including one because it would politically "ruin your pitch" of sharing Congress' system with the public and would "make you the guinea pigs".
Here's the transcript.
"Another sticking point is whether a public option should be included in the plan. If you read today's New York Times, you'll see a relatively superficial discussion of the issue. And while it's theoretically possible to include a public option on this menu of choices, you can theoretically construct a level playing field so that private insurance companies will still want to compete against what they will perceive as the 800-pound gorilla, while you can do that and you can get through the extra few hundred pages of complexity that that would introduce, it does two things that are critically important politically. Number one, it will probably scare off every republican from the bill, so you'll no longer have bipartisan legislation. And that's not necessarily a deal-killer. But the other one is this: you would ruin your pitch of sharing the federal employees health benefits system with the public. Because we've never had the public option. We can't guarantee to people that it will work with a public option. So we haven't been the guinea pigs anymore, we would make you the guinea pigs."
Now that the politics of health care in his district have clearly shifted, so has Congressman Cooper's rhetoric.
Reforming Healthcare
