News at 11. People are still dumb and unimaginative. This would be my reading regardless of who won in Massachusetts.
When I see a quoted voter with this line "his frustrations, including what he considered the too-quick pace of health care legislation," - I have to question either the voter's attention span or the writer composing and paraphrasing those attentions. I don't think the pace was "too quick". The problem is more like "too broad" or "too little" or "meaningless effort to reform" than speed. Speed was pretty well tepid and restrained by Democratic legislators themselves, in addition to populist resistance. The health care debate in effect and in earnest started all the way back in the Democratic primary debates between Obama and Clinton in 2008 prior to the election (since it was fairly obvious that a Democrat was going to win with a weird set of Frankenstein politics representing the best and worst possible combination for each separate Republican candidate to incite both base and broader political support). It was then a centerpiece of the Obama campaign, various initial speeches, the selection of prospective Cabinet members (Daschle), the entire focus of the summer media cycle last year, the entire focus of the fall political cycle as the bills made progress toward passage, and then the bill itself finally passed the Senate over the Christmas season. I'm not familiar with too many ideas that took that long to germinate into bills so "quickly". The bill itself doesn't even take effect for another 6 years. Seriously? Why don't we make laws binding on the next century.
I do readily acknowledge that some bills are very bad because they are passed too quickly (the de-fund ACORN bill or the PATRIOT act are prime examples). But where the fuck were you over the last two years? No wonder there aren't ideas competing against this hodgepodge making its way through the legal hoops. Nobody was actually paying attention.
19 January 2010
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Guilty as charged. I still find it hard to make heads or tails of this thing they call health care reform - at least partly because I agree that it seems so diluted as to be effectively meaningless. So I hadn't read that one's to go into effect for six years. That's hilariously tragic.
Er, not to go into effect, rather.
Neither the House or Senate bills took effect until 2014. This was, in some respects, a key reason that Republican support was easily waved off, because it appears for all the world that the only reason the bill doesn't add to the deficit over the next 10 years is because they gamed the CBO scoring to make it look that way. The taxes and some effects of the bill go into place immediately, but the meat doesn't start up until 2014? Sounds like some fuddled math.
Cowen and McArdle basically have a theory that this is what killed the climate bill too (it's been dead for months), in that they talked sagely about the importance of doing something 20 years from now (or something) but did little that bound up current laws or altered the economics of energy production. Simply put the best effective climate law was to say "Gasoline will be more expensive NOW" or "Coal fired energy will be more expensive NOW" and then offset that with a regressive tax break for the lower and middle class. That's not going to happen. Same thing with health care reform. Simple reform would have said either "your taxes are going up to pay for universal health care" or "most of you will have to pay more of the cost of your own health care". That's not what they did.
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