How the Democrats Should Deal With the AnthemBlueCrossCare Issue. Really.
Today, the House of Representatives will take up GOP Rep. Fred Upton’s proposal to ”fix” Obamacare by undermining it, and the vote is being widely cast on a referendum on whether Dems will continue distancing themselves from the law. Meanwhile Senate Dems are also still considering fixes of their own that could undermine it, though that’s subsided.
— The Morning Plum: For Democrats, it’s gut check time, Greg Sargent, Washington Post, this morning
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus is not among my favorite political pundits, but the apt title of her column today–Obama’s political malpractice–sums up not just the current Obamacare-related debacle but my abiding assessment of Obama dating almost to the outset of his presidency. Marcus’s column makes the point that Obama’s attempts, such as they have been, to gain control of this spiraling situation just make the situation worse. But that’s par for his course.
Actual smart and competent congressional Democrats and party leaders–four senators who come quickly to mind are Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Jeff Merkley, and Dick Durbin–need to grab the reins and use Democratic Party funds to establish a massive phone bank, and rent small neighborhood offices, where people who have received cancellation notices of their teensy-coverage plans can get quick easy assistance in learning of their actual options. These Dems need to get the word out, loud and clear, that insurance agents are engaging, en masse, in misleading these people by, most conspicuously but not exclusively, telling them that the particular “replacement” policy they are offering or suggesting is the individual’s cheapest option.
I call it AnthemBlueCrossCare, because nearly every one of these misleading cancellation letters that I’ve read about is from one or another state’s Anthem Blue Cross or Blue Cross company; I keep wondering whether that is the only company that has been offering these teensy-coverage policies, or whether instead this company has just perfected the strategy to a science.
Occasionally, some diligent journalist will actually investigate the situation and will find that the individual or family actually has options that provide better coverage at about the same or less cost. The 46-year-old woman, for example, who chafes at being forced to buy a plan that includes maternity care can get a plan for that costs the same or less than the one being cancelled that does not. But by now, largely thanks to mainstream news media organizations such as the New York Times that have credulously published the Anthem-Blue-Cross-is-canceling-my-policy-and-only-offering-one-at-a-500%-increase-in-premiums-and-I’m-forced-under-pain-of-prison-to-not-look-elsewhere-for-health-insurance anecdote–and thanks (surprise, surprise!) to Obama’s failure to inquire into the actual options of these anecdotal victims–journalists’ refutations of these stories is, as my mother would say, like pushing back the sands.
But surely actual smart congressional Democrats and party leaders recognize that what matters to these people is not being able to keep their current plan but in not having to pay more, or a least not a lot more, to get acceptable coverage. The 46-year-old woman who doesn’t want to pay for maternity coverage or, as she complains, coverage for stage-four-cancer treatment, or for sex-change surgery (surely something that represents most of the additional 500% increase in premiums from Blue Cross that this woman inferred was her only option since Blue Cross didn’t mention any other, because of the commonness of this surgery), might be happy to pay, say, an extra $100 a month for doctor and hospitalization coverage–which apparently her soon-to-be-cancelled policy does not include, since if it does it would have been the best-kept-secret-about-the-best-insurance-for-the-price-in-this-entire-country; hospitalization coverage for $100 a month!–in case, y’know, she needs an appendectomy or surgery for a broken ankle.
Okay, well, Obama apparently recognizes this too. He just can’t trouble himself to assign a few people within the administration to, maybe, look into these anecdotes and report on their accuracy. But the Democratic Party can pick up the slack, and the actual smart and competent congressional Democrats need to start aggressively picking up the slack and making that happen and getting out the word.
I’m sure they recognize by now that the next three years must be devoted to aggressively picking up the slack on a veritable slew of important policy matters and presenting facts and policy proposals clearly, loudly, and often, to the public. Sure it would be nice to have the president do this, but the president won’t do this, probably because he can’t do this. I mean that literally; he lacks not only the desire but also the ability to do it. But it’s critical that it be done.
And that it start en force immediately.
How did we end up with a President who won’t manage? Or who won’t find a way to execute the signature of his Administration?
Preposterous,
David:
How did we end up with a Republican party who refuses to legislate because the President is a black man in a White House???
Moronic and racist . . .
Chris Matthews:
“But what part does (Obama) like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”
‘
Is Chris Matthews moronic and racist?
The problem we have is as noted above but also the result of a party trying to do something populous, you know for the people because well hey, “We’re the Democratic Party” while actually being conservative because well, hey “the nation is a center right nation”.
Now, just like the Repubs who have no where to go because you can’t be right if you jump over the Dems to the left, the Dem’s have boxed themselves in by occupying and promoting policy that is right where the Repubs used to be.
When you are right, how do you fix something on the left that is broken? You ignore it because you can’t see anything to your left.
When did we last have a president to did manage? Clinton?
Bush I was well prepared for it, but didn’t. Reagan was disengaged from day-to-day management from the moment he took office (and perhaps before).
Nixon and Johnson were managers.
FDR, and to some extent, Truman.
But get real. Unless you’re FDR, the presidency is not about day-to-day operations to make government work, especially not since Reagan’s junta.
I agree with you completely, Daniel, but I think the days of the Dems being Repub-light are over. Which is why Hillary Clinton won’t be our next presidential nominee, notwithstanding the mainstream punditry’s failure to recognize this, although in the last week or two there’s finally begun a trickle of wading-carefully-into-these-waters comments stuck here and there in commentary.
Should say ” … stuck here and there into commentary.”
The Dems need the college voter to win, and that means a hip and cool daddy-o who won’t have much of a track record or experience.
Hillary won’t be the nominee because she’s too old and frumpy, and actually was around in the ’90s. That’s, like, ancient history, dude. .
I’ve spent much of the last several years, including this one, in two college towns, both of them flagship-state-university college towns, and can pretty well assure you that current college students do not, as a group, give a damn about whether a political candidate–for president, or congress, or for anything else–is himself/herself hip and cool but instead whether the candidate’s policy views reflect progressive economics concerns and whether the candidate is genuinely passionate about those progressive policies, as illustrated by an extensive record of trying to make those issues prominent and those policies enacted.
And age means nothing, except that almost anyone with the kind of extensive, concrete record I have in mind would not be a kid. Elizabeth Warren is, I believe, 64. Paul Krugman (OK, OK, I know; he’s not a politician, but he illustrates my point) is 60. Neither one will run for president, but it’s a safe bet that if either of them did they’d get the college vote.
I personally on a one to one got three “redneck” voters to register and vote for Obama in MO in 2008. Two days after winning and beginning to pick his cabinet I knew it was all over. And so did the “rednecks” in the Ozarks. Just by his cabinet choices.That’s how “dumb” they are.
I can only think he felt he had to run in 08 was for the performance aspects. Freudian Mother problems?To beat Hillary and the Clinton machine, the Southern white man? IDK but he clearly has no idea of what a president is or does. I am rereading Diane Rubenstein’s This Is Not A President reading continental philosophy through American Presidents:Reagan;Bush I;Clinton;Bush II;and Hillary’s run for the senate. This is the way she taught continental philosophy to WI students who did not have the philosophy background her Yale students had had. Recommended.It is brilliant and very very funny. A google search of Diane Rubenstein + Obama will get you to her CV which is awesome. She is presently a prof of govt and political sci at Cornell.Trust me everything you want to know about Obama can be read through her prolific publications. No youtube as of yet.
Careful, Janet, with talk like that you’ll be accused of racism.
Huh?Explain.
First comment on this story, I said Obama didn’t/couldn’t manage or execute, and was labeled moronic and a racist.