” Republicans didn’t write the menu for what they want on social insurance, the President did last year …”

It doesn’t matter what noise trickles out of the White House. I have no doubt the President will sign any “grand bargain” legislation that makes it to his desk. He wants a deal far more than he cares about any of the details.

The final deal will be based on what Obama can wrestle through Congress, particularly the Senate. And the Senate is where popular pressure must be applied to hold the line on Medicare, Medicaid and SS.

You got that right. The Dems were organizing in MN to take a petition to Amy Klobuchar office to protest any cuts to the big three. They know that she will cut our throats in a minute if we don’t apply pressure. I am proud to say that I did not vote in the Senate election in MN this year.

Durbin has been saying priviatize Medicare for 65-67 year-olds after the exchanges are up and running.

11/27

He said he had “trouble” with proposals to raise the Medicare eligibility age, something Obama seriously considered during negotiations with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in the summer of 2011.

“What I want to hear is the assurance [or] guarantee that people like my brother will have access to affordable healthcare insurance during any interim period of time from retirement until they actually qualify for Medicare,” he said…

11/29

“To think that a person would retire at the age of 64 or 65 and not have Medicare coverage until 67 raises the obvious question: These people in their mid-60s, probably with a health history, will find it difficult to buy health insurance on the open market or afford whatever is available,” Durbin said. “I want to make sure there are no gaps in coverage for those who need it the most: retired Americans who have a health history and can’t find affordable health insurance. So … let us make certain that there are insurance exchanges, good competition, and affordable health care available for those seniors.”

I didn’t watch the interview, but from this quote this doesn’t appear to be a walk-back at all. It still appears to be a first step in privatizing Medicare.

Thanks David. They are enervating are they not? Mostly because from my journalist side, I don’t want to be set up to disarm the necessary resistance to their efforts to degrade our opposition. And as an activist, I don’t want to allow myself to be misled. And as a person, I resent being fooled!

Big surprise!/s Would not be the first time I looked foolish.

Listened to you in the interview last night at virtually speaking. Had no idea politics is so wierd & complex. Thanks for all of your hard work.

The major battle has already been lost when the discussion revolves around what form of austerity to impose, rather than what form of stimulus to implement.

Now we get politicians like Durbin saying that they think losing the battle on Medicare would be a bad idea. Well, yes, that’s kind of a minimally acceptable Democratic position. The real question is whether he’ll say he won’t vote for that or any other cuts to Medicare. Will he rule that out? Or will he say, “The Republicans made me do it” and vote for it anyway?

fyi – Tanden authored CAP’s medicare plan for Seniors dot dot dot . . . partially underwritten by perennial friend of the safety net, one Peter G Peterson.

h/t to commenter / diarist Tom Thumb (see comments)

p.s. I do not trust Durbin – just looks like more of the usual good cop/bad cop DNC choreography

“Durbin admonished “bleeding heart liberals” to be open to program reductions to restore fiscal balance.”

one, two, cha cha cha

“Means testing” has always been code for elimination. You “means test” to discover that the economically and politically powerless are the ones who need the program, then you eliminate it. Raising age elegibilty is another back-handed gift to private insurers as premiums for that group will skyrocket and services will continue to be denied, this fits in perfectly with the Dim-Heritage Foundation ACA. Its all part of the subterfuge that social medicine, and not for profit medicine are the drivers of cost. We all know people that need procedures and services that private insurers deny within 5 years of Medicare eligibility.

Maybe Barry and the Dims should just junk the pretense and feigned concern and convert Medicare to a program that eliminates people once they’re no longer productive to the corporate state.

Gaius_Publius appears to have captured the mood: Obama to John, “Let’s each kill one of our own!”

MoveOn, that huge activist group, is having demonstrations about this today. I am out in the woods but they are protesting near their Reps and Senators offices.

Didn’t they leak out the same thing about the Public Option being included in the healthcare debate?!?

Durbin is one of my senators. He’s been behind some of the WORST ideas. BIG supporter of Simpson Bowles.

You’d think he was a Republican.

Someone please explain to me. In the last 12 years, what changes have been made to Social Security and to Medicare that have caused all of these huge rises in the deficit?

As far as the article and gaps.

I have friends who need health insurance for 3 months. New insurance kicking in. He could get insurance. They were notified that the insurance companies wouldn’t cover her at all. Reason? She had asthma. She’s never been hospitalized for it, or ever had to go to the emergency room. ASTHMA?

Neera Tanden, currently the head of CAP, also went out of her way to reject raising the eligibility age on Up with Chris Hayes Sunday. Tanden worked in the White House, and CAP is very closely aligned with the Administration as well.

CAP has published their recommendations in a publication that carries this acknowledgement at the end:

We would like to acknowledge the critical support of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. This plan was based, in part, on work prepared for the Peterson Foundation’s Solutions Initiative. The Peterson Foundation convened organiza- tions with a variety of perspectives to develop plans addressing our nation’s fiscal challenges. The American Action Forum, Bipartisan Policy Center, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, and The Heritage Foundation each received grants. All organizations had discretion and independence to develop their own goals and propose comprehensive solutions. The Peterson Foundation’s involvement with that project does not represent endorsement of any plan.

And here is what they propose for Medicare:

Our plan includes an array of structural reforms to bend the cost curve over the long term:

Reforming the way prices are determined for health care products and some services. Right now, the government sets these prices for the most part. Instead, Medicare and Medicaid should adopt market-based prices, allowing manufac- turers and suppliers to compete to offer the best prices.

Reforming the way health care is paid for and delivered. Right now, Medicare and Medicaid pay a fee for each service for the most part. This creates incentives for doctors to order more and more profitable tests and procedures. Instead, these programs should pay a fixed amount for a bundle of services or for all of a patient’s care.

Encouraging states to become accountable for controlling health care costs. “Accountable care states” that keep overall health care spending below a global target would be rewarded with bonus payments.

In addition to structural reforms, our plan includes dozens of reforms that would guarantee a “down payment” of savings. These include:

Reducing drug costs. When Medicaid covered drugs for seniors, drug com- panies provided large discounts, but Medicare does not get the same deal. Medicaid rebates should be extended to brand-name drugs purchased by low- income Medicare beneficiaries.

Bringing Medicare payments into line with actual costs. The independent Medicare Payment Advisory Commission—which advises Congress on Medicare policy—has identified numerous ways that health care providers should be more efficient. Targeting inefficiency is much better than resorting to a series of blunt, across-the-board cuts in provider payment rates. Under our plan, for example, hospitals would fare much better with smaller and better targeted cuts.

Increasing premiums for high-income Medicare beneficiaries. High-income beneficiaries pay higher premiums under current law. But the share of benefi- ciaries who pay higher premiums should be expanded and the higher premium amounts should be increased by 15 percent.

This sounds innoccuous, but as always the devil is in the detail, and I’d have to see the details on this.

Here are the authors:

About the authors

Roger Altman is founder and executive chairman of Evercore Partners. He served in the Department of the Treasury as assistant secretary in the Carter administra- tion and as Deputy Secretary in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1995.
In between, he was co-head of investment banking at Lehman Brothers and a member of the firm’s Management Committee and its Board, and vice chairman at the Blackstone Group.

William Daley served as President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff from January 2011 until January 2012. Prior to his chief of staff role, Daley was vice chairman and chairman of the Midwest for JPMorgan Chase, from 2004 until 2011. He was president of SBC Communications from 2001 until 2004. In 2000, he chaired Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign. From 1997 to 2000 Daley served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton.

John Podesta is the founder and Chair of the Center for American Progress and was its President from 2003 to 2011. Prior to founding the Center, Podesta served as White House Chief of Staff to President Clinton. Most recently, Podesta served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition. Podesta has also held numerous posi- tions on Capitol Hill.

Robert E. Rubin served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999. He joined the Clinton administration in 1993, serving in the White House as assis- tant to the president for economic policy and as the first director of the National Economic Council. He joined Goldman, Sachs & Company in 1966 and served as co-chairman from 1990 to 1992. From 1999 to 2009 Rubin served as a mem- ber of the Board of Directors at Citigroup. He currently serves as co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a member of the Harvard Corporation, and counselor to Centerview Partners.

Leslie B. Samuels is a senior partner of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. From 1993 to 1996 he served as assistant secretary for tax policy of the U.S. Treasury Department, and from 1994 to 1996 also served as vice chairman of the Committee of Fiscal Affairs in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mr. Samuels joined Cleary Gottlieb in 1968 and became a partner in 1975.

22 Center for American Progress | Reforming Our Tax System, Reducing Our Deficit

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard. During the Clinton administration, he served in the Department of the Treasury as undersecretary for international affairs, deputy secretary, and secretary of the Treasury. Summers was then president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. From 2009 until 2011 he served in the White House as director of the National Economic Council.

Neera Tanden is the President of the Center for American Progress. Tanden previously served on President Obama’s health reform team. Prior to that, Tanden was the director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden campaign. Tanden served as policy director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and associ- ate director for domestic policy and senior advisor to the first lady in the Clinton administration.

Antonio Weiss is global head of investment banking for Lazard, an independent financial and asset management firm. Weiss is publisher of The Paris Review and trustee of various nonprofit institutions.

Michael Ettlinger is Vice President for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining the Center, he spent six years at the Economic Policy Institute directing the Economic Analysis and Research Network. Previously he was tax policy director for Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy for 11 years. He has also served on the staff of the New York State Assembly.

Seth Hanlon is Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress, where his work focuses on federal tax issues. Prior to joining the Center, Seth practiced law as an associate with the Washington, D.C. firm of Caplin & Drysdale, where he focused on tax issues facing individuals, corporations, and nonprofit organizations, and previously served on Capitol Hill as an aide to Reps. Harold Ford Jr (D-TN) and Marty Meehan (D-MA).

Michael Linden is Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress. Michael’s work focuses on the federal budget and the medium- and long- term deficits. He has co-authored numerous reports on the causes of and solutions to our fiscal challenges, including “Path to Balance,” which first proposed primary balance as an intermediate goal, and “A First Step,” which included a detailed plan for achieving that goal.

Obama and the Blue Dogs have the long term aim of doing much the same destruction of Medicare that Paul Ryan has suggested, basically a privatization scheme folding it into ObamaCare. Remember Bill Clinton’s pat on Ryan’s back for a budget well done?

These people really want to dismantle government well working programs along with the rest simply to provide more plunder for private capitalists.

Gosh I am going to miss you David. I know Jane and you will keep us informed of what you are doing and where we can read you.

Thank you. That needed to be said. CAP needs to be outed. They have media affiliates too, just like the Republicans do and they need to be identified too. Look for these names in the NYTimes articles about taxes and spending cuts. It’s amazing how many times they show up.
It is about their extracting profits by shifting from fee for service care (and freedom of choice) to managed care where providers profit by reducing access to care and restricting who can be a provider, and government pays them a bonus for doing so.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/07/how-medicare-is-misrepresented/

Yes I do remember the pat on the back from Clinton. I had wondered why that never came up during the election. I don’t trust Bill Clinton and am not looking forward to his wife running for President.

It occurred to me the other day that healthcare is for Democrats what wars are for Republicans. Wellpoint and Aetna and Pharma are the Halliburton, Blackwater, Xe of the Democrats. It is looting the government under the rubric of change or progress.

Same can be said of the FIRE people on that CAP list. JPMorganChase,GoldmanSachs, Blackstone/Peteson connections……Summers?? Sheesh.

Durbin spoke at the Humphrey dinner in Minneapolis in I believe 2011. I wasn’t impressed at all. It was quite clear that he had been in politics too long and wasn’t concerned about the working class. Both him and Klobuchar are cut from the same cloth.

In yesterday’s masaccio diary about o, a commenter signed in as Melissa Ryan. She said

I worked on the Obama campaign and was one of 3 staffers devoted to Netroots outreach. We absolutely reached out to bloggers including FDL, and the campaign very much cared about their input. In addition to 1 to 1 calls we held weekly calls for bloggers and online influencers. Whatever your criticisms of the current Administration he has a blog outreach person on staff at the White House in addition to us. They’re paying attention

masaccio’s answer was

I must have missed the e-mail.

I suspect that the blogs and bloggers she is referring to were the tried and true veal penners. o makes no pretense of listening to FDL or following any suggestions from here.

This is all truly “Looking Glass” conversation, because we need to be figuring out how to LOWER the retirement age for Medicare and Social Security, at least until the Jobs Crisis ends.

Raising both is exactly the WRONG thing to do now.

Exactly.

But how to fund it?

I’d like her to produce the email.

A Medicare buy-in would be self-funding through premiums.

LINK

Several proposals have been made for funding Medicare for All.
HR 676 Section 211

Medicare for All link is a PDF.

She says that she doesn’t work there anymore, so it was probably destroyed when she went out the door. We would not want any such email hanging around.

I read your link and even the author is tepid about the idea.

The CBO found that premiums would be about 5 percent to 7 percent lower than that of private health plans

Meh.

“…healthcare is for Democrats what wars are for Republicans. Wellpoint and Aetna and Pharma are the Halliburton, Blackwater, Xe of the Democrats. It is looting the government under the rubric of change or progress. ”

You got it. RobamneyCare was engineered specifically to create a permanent CLIENTELE group out of the insurance mafia, the hospital corps and the pharmaceutical co.s for the Democratic Party. A cash cow for the Donkey. The Donkey will milk the cow, and the cow will lick the Donkey between the legs.

In our corporate state, constituents are peddled off to corporate bidders – a paying clientele. The clientele matter and get the legislation they want, if they pay off regular. And the constituents? They are so much grist for the corruption mill. They exist to be processed by their elected representatives on behalf of a client, and to generate fees for the processor.

Why was there no discussion whatever of the merits of a single payer system, a system known to work well around the world, as opposed to the hideously complex market based schemes, all of which were predicated on the forced purchase of an insurance product, notorious for its frequent uselessness to the purchaser, and all of which were centered around keeping the insurance racketeers in place to skim profits from every transaction in the health care market, leeching off hundreds of billions of dollars a year without performing any identifiable service to justify their gargantuan fees? Well, ask it another way. Who would be the paying customer for a draft bill creating a nationwide social insurance system to cover health care expenses? What industry (and with what to gain) would step up to make it worth Congress’ while to pass such a controversial bill? NOBODY that’s who. Nobody was there to out-bribe the deep pocketed health care rackets. Nobody besides their cousins, the banking industry, could even hope to. A handful of citizens showed up to inject a sane point of view and the public interest into the debauched proceedings of the Senate Finance Committee, and they were frog marched out of the building for offending the dignity of the assembled lobbyists, industry moles and grafters. That was the extent of visible opposition to the Insurance Mafia and its associates.

So, perfectly unhindered by the need to justify their “ideas” in a public forum, Congress and Obankster crafted the perfect client relationship with the health racketeers through the provisions of the ACA. The point to be underscored is the relationship: the client isn’t a one time buyer, nor even a repeat buyer of a product. A client is someone who pays for a continuing relationship with a vendor of a service. So it isn’t just that the Insurance Mafia and hospital chains and drug companies bought the legislative product they wanted. No doubt they could imagine even more lucrative arrangements than the guaranteed profits ACA assures them. They are clients for a service. The Democratic Party created “health care reform” so that these immensely rich industries will perpetually have to return to Congress, and to Democrats specifically, for continual maintenance of the product and of the relationship. A Single Payer program of social insurance would drastically curb the price madness of the health care sector, but since government itself would be the source of payment to hospitals and doctors and drug companies, Congress could not oblige these clients with sweeteners and tweaks they wanted without making life more difficult for itself. If they take baksheesh to fatten the profits of their clientele, they have to come up with the extra money that makes up that profit. That would come out of the pool of money to pay for projects in their districts and states – Horrors! Under ACA, on the other hand, they can take baksheesh to sweeten the terms for the insurers and the other members of the client group, and YOU have to come up with the money to pay for their generosity. That is the best of all possible worlds.

Look at the House Banking Committee. Four rows of seats for committee members. So many members that there’s barely room for the witnesses. And what kind of governmental product has this committee been delivering while its ranks swelled up so? Deregulation, neglect, do-as-thou-wilt. It all culminated with the Grand Financial Meltdown of 2008 (and the absurdist anitclimax of Dodd-Frank). So it takes four rows of committee members to tell banksters they’re free to do their worst and never fear the vanishing rule of law? Of course not. So what are those four rows of committee members there for? To collect bribe money from the industry with the most money to throw around. Years and decades of taking baksheesh for the sweet job of mismanaging the US economy into obsolescence and terminal decline. Looking the other way, enabling the looting of the most prosperous nation in history, selling out the voters and the ordinary working schmucks who’re stupid enough to vote for them. Decades of the same corruption as normality, no matter which party has the majority and runs the Committee or the Treasury. That is the model for how RobamneyCare will be administered by Congress no matter which party is on top.

The insurance mob will of course attempt to “better deal” RobamneyCare with Republicans, when Republicans are in power. But ACA is a monster born of the Democratic family. If significant changes are to be made, if it’s second mouth is to be sewn shut or its tentacles pruned, the changes will be made only with the approval of the Democrats. All proposed “adjustments” will need to be passed by the right desks, accompanied by a respectful amount of earnest money. As they say, only Nixon could go to China.

Henceforth with every new Congress, with every new year, the insurers, hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies will have some tweak or sweetener they want from the various Congressional committees with oversight on the implementation of RobamneyCare. Consequently, every year they will hand over manilla envelopes stuffed with cash to the relevant committee members, to ranking Democrats, and the Democratic President. A small token of their esteem in exchange for a considerate hearing of their many grievances and helpful suggestions to “improve” the system and to “enhance its longterm viability.” It won’t be bribery per se – that doesn’t exist in our system!- just campaign donations from citizens deeply concerned for the future of the nation and the welfare of its citizens, whose health they safeguard – or hold hostage.

For the Democratic Party, RobamneyCare is a non-stop gravy train that will pay out yearly for a generation. For their new clientele, the insurers and hospitals and drug companies, it’s a bit of a nuisance perhaps, but it’s also an airtight jail to lock in captive customers provided at US Government expense, together with a mighty fat conduit jacked straight into the US Treasury. A little baksheesh every year for a very lucrative private-public partnership is well worth the occasional annoyance of grandstanding politicians (who will always come to heel eventually). For Democratic constituents and “the citizenry”, it is lifetime of mandated debt slavery, imposed by a publicly enforced tax paid to a private party for the privilege (no longer a right) of merely being alive.

I’m tepid about the buy-in too. I support Medicare for All. However, as an interim solution for older people not eligible for Medicare, I do support it as a better alternative than private insurance.

Oh, so we got a text in the dark of night about how really, he loves us, and he promises he’ll be leaving wifey any day now. Also, see us next Friday at the Motel 6, 5:15 PM sharp?
Talk to you next then!

Hi Tom,

I owe my possession of that document to you. Thanks.

And, thanks for the link to that article by Uwe Reinhardt. I now get your point about fee-for-service vs managed care.

That’s great.

The sad thing is that their policies reflect their sincere belief in the deficit and in ‘free market’ principles and somehow trying to marry that technological, profit-seeking focused approach to provision of human services, medical care and income security. If they could just leave these programs alone they would lumber along just fine. But the powers that be have convinced themselves that their negative projections are ‘real’. It has become a terrible self-destructive fusion of ideology, cronyism, technocratic expert-textpertness and power politics.

Their ideological extremism is probably better correlated to their relative proximity to certain affluent and politically connected zip codes than to any other factor!

Means tesying has always been opposed because this long-standing chestnut of the pubs was aimed at making social insurance obligations into welfare programs and be stigmatized accordingly .This is brutal class warfare .and everyone knows the ancient war strategy dictum is to enervate and eradicate the enemy.

My insomnia results in the viewing this Morning Joe deal and this guy ,his yes girl ,and his regulars are the most dangerous and vicious group of sociopaths on msm .What makes this ilk so dangerous is they pretend to be voices of moderation and reason while advocating slashes in medicare ,upping the medicare age ,and always ignoring that coal miners ,foundry workers ,construction labor and parts of the service sector are dead on their feet before hitting sixty .I would imagine career longevity is a given for over-priviliged ,chickenhawk media pansies who regal in their repugnancy his is the type who will spew rhetoric about helping the poor at Christmas and then endorse cutting food stamps .

DingDingDingDingDing – we have a winner!

Fantastic synopsis.

rotfl

I caught part of it too, but had to shut it off when Dim girl asked Whor-zag,”but if Obama gets a hike to 37% then doesn’t he HAVE to give the Rethugs something BIG”?

I was screaming at the screen, “NO!, No he doesn’t! He can get 39.5% by going over the cliff and giving NOTHING!

Thank you for pointing out Durbin’s weaseling ways.

Oh, I do not trust any of them any more.

We so need a party which gives a damn about the lower economic quintiles. Will that happen in my lifetime? Probably not, and the generations following will be systematically screwed until there is a revolt.

(Yes, it’s been a bad day, following a bad week….)

OMG, I was so bamboozled by Bill Clinton. Now, Hillary as Secty of State seems to be showing by her actions that I was bamboozled by her as well.

Could any politicians rise to prominence in this nation without sucking up to the Powers That Be?

Notice that the MCM (Maintream Corporate Media) has kind of pivoted from worrying about what would happen to the economy if middle class people don’t have $2000 for discretionary spending (as if it is discretionary) and never worrying about what happens when the unemployed don’t have $20,000, or whatever their regular income was, to spend on both discretionary and utterly necessary items? Somehow, to these folks, the failure of the unemployed to be able to spend is not a drag on the economy.

What are they thinking?

They’re also trying to scare the public into believing that if 1/1/13 means increases in taxes for everyone that then Obama looses all leverage and the Repubs can run roughshod over him based of being screaming idiots about raising the debt ceiling.

Obama unfortunately really, really, really wants to mess around with SocSec and Medicare. He sees it as out Ronnie-ing St. Ronnie. It will be his legacy.

May any such actions live in infamy.

Part of that legacy will be destroying the Democratic Party, which is a feature perhaps, not a bug.

Don’t Democratic pols get that?