There is a large segment of the blogosphere that has been arguing behind the scenes against showing any receptivity to compromise on health care, even in the analysis we do, because they think we have have the Republicans and the Blue Dogs on the ropes. Why make any concessions at all, if we can get everything we want?
This, of course, means that they aren’t doing honest analysis, but what I’d call ‘advocacy-analysis.’ Essentially, they are going to tell you a proposed compromise is bad because they don’t want you to even consider any possible merits. They want you out there asking for the whole pie. This is the mirror image of the Republican strategy of talking about socialism and death panels, rather than about the nitty-gritty of the legislative process. The GOP wants their base to reject reform wholesale. This element of the progressive blogosphere wants you to reject compromise wholesale. Both strategies have a lot of merit, but I don’t want you to be deceived. Bad analysis is bad analysis. It may be true that the best negotiating stance is to ask for everything and concede nothing until it is absolutely necessary. But if you want to know what is a good or bad compromise, they aren’t going to be very helpful.
You saw this split in the blogosphere during this week, when reactions to a proposed state opt-out compromise came in two forms. There were those that made alarmist and inaccurate analyses, and those that gave you a careful look, weighing the pros and cons.
I’ve begun to wonder whether there might be a different kind of victory in the offing from anything we’ve been anticipating. As Obama noted today in his radio address, former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole and Bill Frist have come out in favor of reform, without making too many conditions about details. Former Republican Secretaries of Health & Human Services Tommy Thompson and Louis Sullivan have done the same. We’ve been operating under the assumption that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have constructed a formidable and unbreachable Fortress of No. We’ve assumed that there are no Republican votes for reform to be had. But maybe this Fortress of No is really built out of sand. Maybe there is a wave coming in that is about to deluge the Republicans’ face of total opposition.
Here are the questions I have for you. Is this a possibility? And, if it is, what concessions would be acceptable to help see that it happens? What are the long-term benefits, not only for health care policy, but for our whole legislative agenda, if Obama cracks the Fortress and breaks down the wall of opposition?
The one thing that I see that I really do not like is the mandate. Forcing people to buy something they do not want is REALLY bad when you are dealing with insurance companies (which I consider nothing better than organized crime). This means that there MUST be a cheap alternative. And I mean REALLY cheap. This is doubly bad if you have some sort of fine system. What a HORRIBLE idea. Congress won’t be held for long by the democrats if they go down this path.
So they can give up anything as long as the have a cheap alternative. Triggers? Sure, as long as they are not a joke. A state opt out? Probably has to be in there if you have a mandate.
Get rid of the mandate and I think you can give up a LOT, even a public option. Just get a foot in the door that will show the public that you are making progress (maybe control of ability to raise rates, and certainly end the ability to reject coverage for pre existing conditions)
nalbar
Well…
You bring up good issues. The mandate certainly has an unpopular coercive element to it. It’s not too terribly different from the mandate on car insurance, but it does cover everybody. The key, when thinking about the mandate, is to think about what it accomplishes.
The most important thing it does it put all the young, healthy people in their twenties and thirties into the overall risk pool. This lowers the risk of covering everybody, including those with pre-existing conditions. So, it actually is the mechanism to drive down costs. This not only makes insurance more affordable, but it means that the government has to spend less on each individual subsidy, making the cost of the bill much lower.
If you take the mandate out, you lose this effect.
You also lose support from the insurance industry. Part of the reason they are willing to make these concessions about recissions and preexisting conditions and so on, is that they are getting a bunch of healthy new customers. This will be true even if we offer a robust public option as an alternative.
So, don’t be too quick to jettison the mandate.
Case a. The federal government takes my money out of my paycheck, before I even cash it, under threat of legal action ranging from charging penalties and interests all the way up to jail time, and gives it to private companies whose business model I find immoral, inefficient or downright criminal and for whose existence I find no convincing need.
It’s called the lion’s share defense budget. And faith-based social services. And agribusiness subsidies.
Case B. I write a check — more accurately an ACH transfer takes place, under threat of legal action ranging from charging penalties and interests all the way up to jail time, to private companies whose business model I find immoral, ineffcient, or downright criminal, and for whose existence I find no convincing need.
It’s called an insurance mandate.
Distinguish.
As someone who has been desperately trying to get ANY policy when my COBRA runs out, I have no sympathy for people who think they don’t need health insurance. I know this sounds like a wingnut, but when people don’t have insurance, the costs of their inevitable medical care get spread out to the rest of us through premiums. I have to pay 450 a month for COBRA which I have never even used just to protect against catastrophic illness or injury. At least some of that goes to covering the emergency room visits of people who don’t want to be mandated to buy insurance. I’m all for paying more taxes to subsidize the premiums of people who can’t afford insurance, but let’s be honest – anyone who thinks they don’t need health insurance is naïve, selfish and simply W R O N G.
We really need to put the insurance company crooks in jail where they belong and split, according to income (i.e. taxes) the real (non-profit) cost of everyone’s health care.
You make the usual case in favor of the mandate, but are dead wrong on one point: it is, in fact, terribly different from the car insurance mandate. If you hate the liability insurance mandate and its associated fiats enough, you can say, screw it, it just ain’t worth it to drive anymore, so bye-bye car. With the health insurance mandate, what do you give up? Breathing? The proper analogy to this mandate is the income tax, and like that institution, it is possible to hate it even while acknowledging its necessity and benefits.
As to the support of the insurance industry, I’m on the fence as to whether I’m willing to concede anything in order to get their support at all. I’m not sure they really have the power to kill healthcare reform this time around in the face of an all-in pushback against them.
Yeah. It always bugs me when people make the Health Insurance / Auto Insurance analogy, too. When we learned to drive (if we ever learned to drive) they always emphasized that driving is a privilege, not a right and that the privilege can be revoked at any time. No one has an absolute right to drive a car (and therefore need auto insurance,) but everyone does have an absolute right to continue living and should have an absolute right to healthcare, regardless of their ability to pay for it.
To force someone to buy an insurance policy from a corrupt for-profit industry is more like the government forcing people to pay into a mob protection-racket if they want to keep breathing.
i’ve made that point many times, but there are still a lot of similarities.
I would be fine with being forced by the government to, at minimum, buy into the public option (partially paid for with a gov’t subsidy.) And if I wanted to, I could take their subsidy money and buy a private industry health plan as an alternative. A mandate is fine with me, so long as I’m not told by my government that I MUST do business with some for-profit industry.
There are a lot of similarities between oranges and baseballs, too, but that doesn’t provide much worth discussing. Give it up.
the important similarity is the idea that we all have a responsibility to each other.
Actually, my analogy is also wrong. We accept the income tax because for all our governments flaws, it theoretically exists for the general welfare. A mandate that forces tribute to a corporation, especially one that has no right to exist, is a further step worse. There is no community involved.
the lack of a definitive bill with particulars and details is really problematic when weighing what, or where, there’s potential for reasonable compromise[s].
the whole issue of mandates for example. l’ll continue your analogy with car insurance, because l think you’re overlooking something.
yes, minimum liability coverage is required and yes, there’s supposedly a system in place that enforces that…specifically, proof of insurance when registering a vehicle…but it’s far from effective. the end result is that there are still large numbers of uninsured motorists out there.
as a consequence, l’m required to carry uninsured motorist coverage on my policy…which btw, is the largest single item on the bill… 30% of the total premium, and 108% of my personal liability coverage. so l’m penalized for following the law, and the money goes to the insurance co.
great deal, eh?
l can see a similar problem with the individual mandate in HRC, l’ve seen penalty numbers ranging from $750/yr. to $3800/yr. let’s do the math on it for arguments sake. lets assume l’m a healthy 20-something, fresh out of college, burdened with a heavy debt from that, working at an entry level position for a small firm that hasn’t the resources to provide health insurance. if l “opt out” it’ll cost me $750…that’s $62.50/month…where am l going to get a policy for that amount of money? l seriously doubt even a robust public option will be that low…so l opt out and if something happens deal with it via emergency rooms or whatever.
meanwhile, the people who are in the program still have to pay a premium that’s inflated because there’re still millions of people who will not, or cannot purchase it.
end result, the insurance co’s are still the big winners, so it’s no wonder they’re behind it.
I am not quick to jettison the mandate. What I mean is that WITH the mandate, it lessens what you can give up. A mandate FORCES a cheap alternative, which as near as I can tell would have to be a strong public option.
Of course you can have the mandate and no cheap alternative.
But you will NOT have a democratic majority for very long.
People do not see, with their own eyes, the risk pooling that a mandate brings. All they ‘see’ is that they will HAVE to buy what most do not need.
A mandate restricts your ability to negotiate, particularly with people who only want to destroy you. They will attempt to get you to keep the mandate with no cost reductions, and still allow insurance companies to refuse care because of pre conditions.
nalbar
ok- lets look at this. first, dole and frist. chiavo???? enough with them. sullivan and thompson- what did they do for the citizenry except to bobblehead their way to oblivion.
now- lets look at mcconnell and bonehead. look at their publicx ly stated position and honestly state that they aren’t blatant liars. their fortress of no is not built on stone becxause it is all that they have. who is gonna break? olympia? puleezee. who else?
nada, nyet, nothing.
the most important result of their performane is that the true color of the gop is transparent. just look at the latest- kyl blocks additional unemployment benefits!
the serious question that i have is:
how the hell can any sane person vote for the goopers?
.
lies the answer. Guidelines of the goopers for health care “debate”.
With Obama a return to sanity.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Tim Dickinson’s article in Rolling Stone is an eye opener since it shows (in the Luntz Memo) how Luntz operates, and there’s a fundamental difference between Luntz’s advocacy and what Lakoff and Westen do.
There is a false frame present in the health care issue that I’ve dubbed the Solomon fallacy. We see it in issues such as global warming, in which disinformation is given an equal weight with climate science, under the beguiling justification of fairness and considering all ‘relevant information’ in making a reasoned decision. It’s also present in the Discovery Insitute’s “wedge strategy” or the “teach the controversy” tactic. On that issue, Intelligent Design is pushed as a “competing theory” while biological sciences are attacked as a form of religion.
Luntz isn’t advocating more effective communication, as Lakoff and Westen do, he’s merely the using the results from polling and focus groups to tell him what people hate the most — and then advising people to say that, regardless of whether it’s true.
In the Orwellian world of Luntz-speak, efforts to reform the health care system to end rescission, the practice in which the insurance company denies coverage or stalls, are equated with the very thing they outlaw. Many rescission scenarios involve terminating the policy, too, and the person filing a claim then discovers that they’re effectively blacklisted since they’re illness is now a preexisting condition and insurance (if available) is now prohibitively expensive.
Did he say whether he would support a bill that had a public option. Obviously, he’s a Republican, and they want the best deal for the insurance companies as their first preference. But, what was his bottom line?
He is officially against a public option but doesn’t think having one will kill the Health Insurance industry. He was fearful for the insurance industry losing all that money. Bill Maher reminded him that the government isn’t supposed to work for Aetna, rather for the people.
He tried to push the line that there will be rationing by the Feds under a public plan and that doctors, nurses, hospitals would be under-paid for services. Neither argument holds up very well.
I was left with the impression that he would privately be fine with a public option but wasn’t willing to publicly state that position.
Bill Maher had an agenda in the interview though and most of it was wasted on his crazy idea that vaccines are evil and that no one should get them. So Bill Frist was left spending most of his time defending vaccines.
the problem is not whether turnabout is fair play, the problem is whether turnabout works. Bush of course rammed things through banking on a disciplined and Club for Growth purged GOP caucus, a pliant cheerleader press, and enthusiastic support of the economic and military/security powers. The idea that a democratic president, a black one at that, can reproduce such a power play given a fractious and weak caucus, a GOP dominated press, and the active opposition of the powers that be, seems mighty dubious to me.
BooMan,
I was accused at my regular site of ‘injecting race’ into my strong opposition for the ‘ opt-out’ possibility. I call that BS, because RACE has been there, since the beginning of us trying to get some form of national healthcare. Just why do people think Truman failed in 1948 to get it?
BECAUSE OF THE SEGREGATED SOUTH.
I link this ‘opt-out’ piecemeal to the same arguments made about social security. Having been told by no less than Bill Maher that ‘ Roosevelt didn’t get everything he wanted on social security and that it was ‘phased in’ over decades.’
See, for me, the problem is that it was ‘ phased in’ on the backs of BLACK FOLK who were denied for over a GENERATION the right to put money into Social Security, which is why we have today, whole swaths of Black Seniors who have low checks from Social Security, especially Black women, who have ALWAYS worked outside of the home, but their S.S. checks don’t indicate them…it’s because the ‘ piecemeal’ compromise was born on the backs of BLACK FOLK.
look at all the states that you reasonably believe would Opt-Out. Outside of Utah and Wyoming, the rest of them have a sizeable BLACK POPULATION, that, without a doubt, is disproportionately UN-insured UNDER-insured and lacks access to decent healthcare. The majority of the Black population in this country lives in those states that would more than likely OPT-OUT. And, this is a big issue for me.
I’m not one that supports Obama’s ‘ rainbow’ approach to things; his unwillingness to speak about anything BLACK specifically bothers me, but I had made my peace with the rainbow approach, because if it was something, like healthcare, that if fixing it WOULD help Black people, because we are in the most need, I’ll take it. But, to have the rainbow approach and it STILL not get down to helping Black folks?
I don’t think so.
and the THOUGHT..
THE THOUGHT..
that DEMOCRATS would put forth STATES RIGHTS?
I don’t think so.
Black folk, with regards to healthcare, have bad numbers EVERYWHERE. to ‘ wait’ for piecemeal to ‘ work itself through’, means more dead Black folks….
not willing to go there.
I respect for position and your rationale.
Part of the problem with assessing an opt-out provision is that the merits really depend on details we don’t have.
A good opt-out provision would not be pursued by anyone. A good opt-out provision would basically be a sop to a few centrists who want to argue that they didn’t vote for a ‘government takeover’ of health care. But it would be crafted in such a way that no state would consider opting out.
A bad opt-out provision would make it a sane option, resulting in a real state-level battle over the issue all over the country.
Only a few states (California, Texas, New York, Florida) have enough population to do very well on their own in the exchanges. Most states will want to join in regional exchanges to increase their bargaining power. Crafted correctly, a state that opted out of a public option wouldn’t be able to join in a regional exchange with states that offer one. There are many other ways to disincentivize states from opting-out.
I don’t really see this as a state’s rights issue in the classic sense. The idea isn’t to deny health care to black folks. The idea is just to win over more votes for a stronger public option.
You make some interesting points that people should keep in mind as they think about different alternatives, but I think you should remain open-minded and wait to see the details before you make a hard decision on the merits.
You really think opt-out states would be able to provide healthcare to everybody but black people? Opting out doesn’t mean secession from all federal laws. Whatever they did to deprive their citizens of the healthcare people have the next state over would deprive everybody in the state. That’s why it seems almost like fantasy to think their pols could get away with just saying no. OTOH, if the opt-out let them take the fed bucks and try something more like single payer, it might provide a laboratory for better ideas than the federal one.
Here’s the state issue I see. Very much of the Baucus bill depends on state insurance commissioners regulating the industry, based on model regulations drafted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The effectiveness of insurance commissioners varies greatly from state to state. It is not clear which states will have to see legislative authority to put the regulations in place; some insurance commissioners have greater authority than others. And the states with the weakest regulators just so happen be be among those with larger minority populations. So even without opt-out, the prohibitions on denial for pre-existing condtion, rescissions, and annual and lifetime maximum may never be implemented in those states.
Now for opt-out. Adding the opt-out provision to any software for implementing the exchanges will dramatically complicate the programming and delay implementation of the exchanges in all states.
And then the effect of the absence of a public plan is this. The federal government will be paying subsidies for certain people’s insurance in all states. There will be inequities because of state inequities in Medicaid, which one basis of the subsidies in the Baucus bill. The states will not have a public plan to keep premiums down. Premiums will rise both for those in the public plan and those in private plans. Those rising costs might cause rejection of the total healthcare reform package instead of forcing state legislators or governor or whoever to opt in and make it right.
I can see up to 15 states opting out to avoid a federal plan and only 1 or 2 seeking to have their own single payer plan.
It clearly is another case of Democrats bargaining with themselves. It is interesting that all these non-elected Republicans favor reform (without a public option) but the elected Republicans have repeatedly stated and voted that none of the existing bills is acceptable to them.
The opt-out idea is not serious, it has not been introduced by amendment, and if put into the Senate floor bill, I would like to know exactly which members of the Democratic caucus will support Republicans in a filibuster. Otherwise, the whole attempt to weaken the bill to get them to vote for it results in a seriously weakened bill. If opt-out is accepted, the folks who want to kill the bill will figure out some other “compromise” that they have to have in order to vote for it.
Will the opt-out provision segregate the application of the benefits and discriminate against minorities? Not likely. But it will encourage states with large minority populations to deny benefits to all of their citizens in order to keep the status quo. And taken nationwide, that will differentially affect minorities.
OPT-OUT to me means STATUS QUO.
The STATUS QUO of whole swaths of uninsured Black folks and them having no access to regular, decent healthcare. Cause the folks that we are talking about – can’t afford a private plan, or they’d already have one. So, if there’s no PUBLIC OPTION for them, what are they going to do?
Die Quickly.
No, the fortress of opposition is real and will not waver, in my opinion, with the possible exception of 1-3 GOP senate votes.
Nate discussed this months ago. Specifically, the GOP rightly recognizes that opposing is best from a game-theory point of view. They will not get credit for going along with any health care plan, and will not benefit from its popularity. On the other hand, they will not get undue blame for its failure, in light of the Democrats’ numerical advantage. Even if they do get blamed, their image won’t really change much, while the Democrats’ image will suffer..
Moreover, they are a much more disciplined bunch.
They seem weak to me.
they are well on the way to a situation where their failure to vote for Democratic legislation will be widely interpreted as partisan sniping.
That is the question. I certainly hope that Obama is being wickedly shrewd in heaping praise on the Finance committee, Frist & Co., the drug companies, etc. – blowing them smoke for their lip service and preventing their active opposition – only to jam a real bill through in the 15th round.
But the dopes he’s roping could also be us. The Baucus bill is just another corporate bailout – this time to companies that are already making billions in profit. I have reached the point that I hate Baucus and Conrad (and Rahm Emanuel) as much as Bush and Cheney and that’s a whole lotta hate. Every time I hear Obama praise the SFC I vomit onto my keyboard. All I’m saying is there better be a brilliant plan behind all of this.
What Obama has been doing, while the poutosphere weeps, is chipping away at the structure of Republican power. The unified Puke voting block is not the result of better grasp of game theory, it comes from an interlocking bunch of organizations that reinforce the message and ideologically isolate the caucus while acting to primary weak adherents and nurture a farm team. The cracks in the chamber of commerce last week, the wooing of GE, the patronage power of stimulus 1, the dogged insistence that the Obama agenda is the bipartisan common sense agenda and so on are all aimed single mindedly on wresting control of the Agenda from Puke hands and breaking their united front.
In fact, the strategy tirelessly advocated by e.g. openleft is the strategy for continued “conservative” dominance as the Democrats define themselves as an oppositional minority and accept the republican brand and republican selection of key issues. It’s remarkable to see that Atwaters “acid, amnesty, abortion” has been so successful that the “left” considers breaking with this agenda to be betrayal and attempts to focus on economics and to claim the moral center to be caving.
You have me with the first paragraph, not so much with the second.
nalbar
Bad analysis of what: the politics or the policy? Those are two different things. Politics is pragmatic about extracting the best you can out of a crummy system and inadequate resources. Policy should be about figuring out the best possible setup regardless of the realities of the crummy system. Some analysis focuses mainly on policy, some on politics. That doesn’t make either one “bad”.
Compromise is what happens when the game shifts from policy to politics. From the viewpoint of policy, it is always bad. Something is always lost in order to placate those who never wanted that particular policy at all. In that sense, compromise is always a zero-sum game. Analysis at some point ends up being about how much was given away, and how necessary it was in order to save the whole policy idea.
In constrast to compromise, negotiation does leave open the possibility of a win-win. It does that by looking beyond the walls of a particular policy and finding the larger wants and needs that drive advocacy or opposition to the policy. If some are valid, there is room to satisfy some of those basic needs without necessarily ending up with absolute winners and losers.
In the case of the opt-out idea, many on the left agree with many on the right in their suspicion of big, intrusive government. The difference is in how they weigh the cost and the benefits. A good opt-out provision, seems to me, could be a win-win by giving states the means to try other approaches to healthcare beyond the seriously flawed federal policy we’re looking at today. Pretty much everyone on the left is hoping the current best bills will open the way for something better in the future. If some states or regions try something else, it will do more than anything else to keep that hope alive and not let an inadequate system become an untouchable sacred cow.
As Boo says, it’s all about the details. To me, we’d do ourselves the most good by seriously looking at how the opt-out could improve our long-term system, instead of dismissing the whole idea out of hand.
On the politics. If the GOP is about to fold, weakening the bill is exactly the wrong tack to take. Make them vote or oppose a bill that actually does some good as policy.
On the other hand, my reading of the problem is that Democrats in the Senate cannot rise to party unity on a needed bill. That bodes ill for a succession of other parts of Obama’s agenda. And makes digging out of the economic hole that Bush left us in that much more difficult.
Democrats controlled by corporations is the problem and it’s a far-reaching problem that has already terribly watered down Obama’s work to date and threatens to water down and/or completely derail the rest of his platform.
Sadly, the presidency and congress was not enough. We need Scalia or Thomas to retire and we need the SCOTUS to rescind “corporate citizenship” so we can purge the senate of these crooks.
Kennedy is actually the most likely member of the conservative SCOTUS majority to retire.
In the House, it is quite possible that the worst of the Democrats controlled by corporations have been sidelined by public pressure on the rest.
In the Senate those corporately-controlled Democrats are trying to pin the watering down on attempts to involve Republicans because “the votes are not there”. Well now we know that at least 51 votes are there for a strong public option. That means that the bar is now the 60 votes for cloture. So which of the 60 members of the Democratic caucus will publicly fess up that they will join Republicans in filibustering? If they are voting the will of their constituents, one would think they would be advertising the fact.
So the “we don’t have the votes” and “we are still trying to get a bipartisan bill” are covering for corporate-controlled Democratic Senators.
I have emailed Senators Durbin and Burris on this. Bottom line, no mandate without a public option available to ALL. Opt-out is OK without mandate. No tax on so-called Cadillac plans. Discouraging good insurance is the last thing we want. #3, no cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates. These three are my line in the sand and I will no longer vote for any Democrat that crosses them or President Obama if he signs a bill without them.
I feel guilty accepting state opt-out, knowing it is condemning those who live in the South, but damn it!, get a brain and a spine and quit voting for Republicans because they are racists. As a friend of mine in Mississippi told his brother, when said brother offered him a No-Bama bumper sticker, “You’ve got to lose that ignorant redneck mentality.” Of course, his brother didn’t talk to him for a month.
This afternoon’s mail included a magazine-sized four page color brochure from my Congressman, Peter Roskam (R-IL, really R). “Government takeover of Health Care” is plastered all over it. The only positive plan mentioned is one line of small print about ending abusive law suits.
So is President Obama going to give up the right to petition a Court of Law for redress of damages in order to maybe get this wingnut’s vote?
I’ve been with your analysis, Booman (and it has given me heart), but I don’t see any GOPers voting for any health care bill at all. It is a weird trap they are building, but they seem eager to walk into it.
If they vote for it, the Club for Growth will primary them, and we’ll still gun for them in the general. This will be a purely partisan vote at every point. Which is okay if we come up with a plan that most people like.
I expect thirty Democratic votes against, split evenly between the left and the Blue Dogs. This happened with ACES, and for similar reasons. You had the spectacle of Kucinich and DeFazio voting no with Minnick and Dye.
I don’t think any GOP votes are needed but I expect the margin in the House to be twelve votes or less.
If no concessions are necessary, then no concessions are acceptable.
My argument is that there is absolutely no benefit to getting Republican support on this or any other legislative initiative. It only gives the GOP the opportunity to take credit for the work done by Democrats while reducing the effectiveness of that work.
My hope is that we will someday live in a country where the right wing is like the mainstream European right wing, i.e., somewhat to the left of current “moderate” Democrats, and anything like the present-day American right is permanently marginalized and delegitimized. If the Bush era should have taught us anything, it is that no coexistence is possible with the right wing. If we do not eliminate them, they will eliminate us — and their idea of elimination ultimately involves a lot more bloodshed than ours.
Screw them. Let them barricade themselves into the Fortress of No while we build a country that has no place for them.
Cheer leading and preaching to the choir are fungible activities in the progsphere. The entry costs are low enough and any idiot can snark on the outrage of the day. With Democrats in ascendancy, they’re gonna have to bring more than huzzahs and poutrage.
Good political analysis of policy initiatives is in short supply. Mostly “I want my pony now”(IWMPN) advocacy or village CW. You did good on health care.
The veal pen has confused being the party vanguard with being the base. You can guess how that’s gonna end. Jane’s tell-all.