7 April 2009

On the agenda today: easy 3-4 mile run, stretching, voting and getting caught up at work.

Update: 4.2 miles in 37:36 (sunny, cold), voted: Van Aucken, Shadid (treasurer), Build the Block: Yes.

Health Care: E. J. Dionne points out that this isn’t the early 1990s when the Clinton administration failed in its plan to get national health care. This isn’t a criticism of President Clinton but they admit that they made mistakes and didn’t anticipate the built in resistance to this type of change. (as an aside, Hillary Clinton is very frank about this in her book Living History).

Things are different now and there has been some behind the scenes progress since then:

Getting there won’t be pretty. But for the first time since the passage of Medicare in the 1960s, the forces favoring action on health-care reform are stronger than the forces of cynicism and obstruction.

Feel free to be skeptical. Since Bill and Hillary Clinton’s reform efforts foundered in 1994, predicting the death of any comparable venture has been the safest bet in Washington.

But this conclusion misses almost everything that has been happening. It’s not just that the public (including business) is frustrated with the status quo. And it has little to do with the details that policy wonks are necessarily hashing over.

What matters is that members of Congress have quietly been preparing the ground for reform since the Democrats took over two years ago. And the competing interest groups seem more inclined to get what they can out of reform than to stop the enterprise altogether. [...]

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the House’s resident health-care mavens, has been working closely with two other committee chairs, Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.).

One largely unheralded change is that health-care reformers have made peace with each other. In the past, groups advocating competing proposals were more interested in establishing their dominance than in passing a bill.

“People who advocated health coverage for all Americans wanted it their way, and the second choice was nothing,” Waxman told me. This time, he said, reformers want to get to universal coverage by whatever route is open.

Indeed, the reformers are broadly focused on the same set of ideas, a mixture of subsidies for those who can’t afford insurance, reform of insurance markets so sick people can’t be denied coverage, and serious efforts at cost containment and efficiency.

I recommend reading the whole article; it perked me up a bit.

Personal Comment

Many conservatives are very upset that President Obama admitted that we (as a country) have been arrogant and belligerent at times. Why is that so bad?

I’m drawn to the conclusion that many conservatives are socially immature; they can dish out criticism by the truckload but can’t accept any themselves.

Fortunately, most Americans are ok with this sort of approach:

PRINCETON, NJ — President Barack Obama — currently on his first multi-stop trip abroad since he took office — is enjoying a 61% job approval rating at home for handling foreign affairs, up seven points since February. His job approval rating for handling the economy — 56% — is down by the slight margin of three points, but is higher than his rating for handling the federal budget deficit.

Note: there is an excellent summary of the trip (with tons of short videos) here.

Here is Rachel Maddow’s coverage:

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