LA Philanthropy Watch

Americans for Financial Reform suggests that this fight could be over before Memorial Day.  If consumers are going to get involved, this is the time to do it.  The bill may be debated on the floor of the Senate as early as the week of April 19 or April 26, with a vote in early May.

This afternoon Americans for Financial Reform sponsored a webinar with Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law Professor and Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, set up in October 2008 to review financial markets and the regulatory system.

I’m a fan of Professor Warren, an ardent advocate for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, so I was pleased to listen in on the session.  Her concluding comments:

“This has been a really tough, tough fight – just to make sure that the agency has the independence and the teeth it needs to get the job done.

The lobbyists are out in force.  They have spent millions of dollars – I mean that literally – millions of dollars trying to make all of these issues so complex that Congress is either afraid to push for real accountability or that Congress has cover if it votes against real accountability.”

It is no secret that the Wall Street banks and their lobbyists have spent even more in campaign contributions.  And let’s face it: they have had some successes.”

Among the successes – in the Senate bill – has been giving other regulators a veto over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

“But even so,” she continued, “I have to say, the agency is still alive and kicking.  And we might win this fight, but only if we fight really hard over the next few weeks.  We’re really coming down to it now.  And so I want to close my comments just by making it clear how much we need your help in fighting for strong regulatory reform.”

Professor Warren referred folks visit the Americans for Financial Reform website, ourfinancialsecurity.org, to see how they can lend support, and t0 a new site www.protecttheconsumer.org , “focused specifically on telling the Chamber of Commerce to stop lying about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.”

“We really need your voice and we really need your energy in order to win this fight.”

Last Friday, nearly four dozen health care experts endorsed a strategy, which some have referred to as ‘Plan B,’ to pass health care reform: the House of Representatives should quickly pass the Senate bill.  Then the House and the Senate should pass  a second bill to work out differences between the two chambers on issues related to taxes and premium subsidies – which could be done through the budget reconciliation process, which is not subject to filibuster and thus only requires a 51 votes in the U.S. Senate (or 50 votes + the Vice President’s tie-breaker).

Their letter to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel (Chairman of the Ways & Means Committee), Henry Waxman (Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee), and George Miller (Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee) urged House leaders to take a giant step toward realization of a goal that has eluded Presidents and Congresses for nearly 75 years: making health care accessible to all Americans.

“Both houses of Congress have adopted legislation that would provide health coverage to tens of millions of Americans, begin to control health care costs that seriously threaten our economy, and improve the quality of health care for every American.  These bills are imperfect. Yet they represent a huge step forward in creating a more humane, effective, and sustainable health care system for every American.
We have come further than we have ever come before. Only two steps remain. The House must adopt the Senate bill, and the President must sign it.”

The letter, noting differences between the House and Senate bills, continues:

“The House of Representatives faces a stark choice.  It can enact the Senate bill, and realize the century-old dream of health care reform. . . . Differences between the House and the Senate bill can be negotiated through the reconciliation process.
Alternatively, Congress can abandon the effort at this critical moment, leaving millions more Americans to become uninsured in the coming years as health care becomes ever less affordable.  Abandoning health care reform – the signature political issue of this administration – would send a message that Democrats are incapable of governing … Such a retreat would also abandon the chance to achieve reforms that millions of Americans … desperately need in these difficult times.”

Among the prominent signatories: Jacob Hacker, leading advocate of the public option; Dean Baker, at the Center for Economic and Policy Research; Paul Starr, health care historian at Princeton; and Theda Skocpol, Harvard scholar who has written a great deal on the nonprofit sector.  Three signatories are from Los Angeles: Ronald Anderson at UCLA’s School of Public Health and two professors at UCLA’s School of Public Policy, Mark Kleiman and Arleen Liebowitz.

Today, HCAN – Health Care for America NOW!,  which has been among the most prominent organizations advocating and organizing for health care reform legislation, endorsed Plan B.  HCAN notes the role of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate as a huge obstacle to reform legislation:

“In recent years, the use of the filibuster to block legislation has skyrocketed. While it still only takes 51 votes to pass a bill in the Senate, the minority has ramped up the number of times its blocked legislation with only 41 votes. The Republican party of NO started codifying the use of the filibuster for every piece of legislation proposed by the opposing party under President Clinton. Since then, the use of the filibuster has jumped.”  [Editor's note: click on the thumbnail image for a full-size view of chart].

Last week, SEIU President Andy Stern, writing in the Huffington Post (”A Path Forward: It’s Time to Pass Health Insurance Reform“) also endorsed Plan B, “Let’s not overcomplicate the process, let’s just make it happen. Because we cannot pause or take a step back – we have only one choice: move forward with real reform decisively and right now.”

Will the Democratic Congress go for Plan B?  Or will it dodge responsibility and instead blame the other chamber, or the other party, or someone else for its failure to reform health care?  Will one special election in Massachusetts frighten a majority – which already passed one health care bill in the House and another in the Senate, and is this close to completing the job – into running away from the issue (and from 46 million uninsured Americans) at this stage?  Stay tuned.

(Chart of Cloture voting, U.S. Senate, 1947-2008, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Well, actually the headline of the day:

Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate

From the Village Voice via Talking Points Memo.

(Image of Scott Brown from a screen grab of “Momentum,” a Brown TV ad 0n YouTube.)

From Daily Kos TV.

The exchange:

STEPHANOPOULOS: What is the strategy on health care going forward?

OBAMA: Here’s one thing I know, and I just want to make sure that this is off the table. The senate shouldn’t, certainly shouldn’t try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated. The people in Massachusetts spoke. He’s got to be part of that process.

Without comment:

“I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform. Because I do not think that the country would be well served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the senate rule which means that 59 are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of this process.” — Barney Frank

Statement from Congressman Barney Frank, following Republican Scott Brown’s victory in the race to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, read last night by Rachel Maddow.  Via Talking Points Memo.

(Photo of Barney Frank via Wikimedia Commons.)

Yesterday, I posted on advocates of health care reform who are angry about changes in the legislation as it has moved through the U.S. Senate.  Today, I suggest that these critics should take aim at the real culprit: an undemocratic rule that the Senate should change.

Why did it take 60 votes to pass health care legislation in the United States Senate, when a majority is 51?  How could a single Senator, Joe Lieberman, kill both the public option and the Medicare buy-in, though it’s likely that more than 51 Senators would have supported either one or the other?  Why was Senator Ben Nelson able to dictate an abortion provision to a Democratic majority in the Senate?

Because of the filibuster: a profoundly undemocratic procedure that allows a minority of Senators – 41 out of 100 – to block up or down votes on legislation that the minority opposes.

For several decades the filibuster was used for one reason: to block civil rights legislation.  The late Senator Strom Thurmond (pictured) holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history (according to the Strom Thurmond Institute for Public Affairs); he stood in the Senate chamber and spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the 1957 civil rights bill.

Things have changed since that era.  In the 1950s the filibuster was invoked an average of once a year and in the 1960s no more than 7 filibusters were staged during any two-year Senate term.  But over time, especially with the realignment of our political parties – Democrats representing the center-left and Republicans the right – the number of filibusters continued to rise.  Mark Schmitt suggests, “In terms of culture and custom, the turning point was almost certainly the previous health-reform debate, in 1993 and 1994. That’s when Bob Dole, then the majority leader, made the phrase ‘You need 60 votes to do anything around here’ his mantra, and when — thanks to Bill Kristol’s famous memo — the idea of blocking major legislation for political reasons, rather than trying to get it revised to reflect your own policy preferences, took hold.”

During the 110^th Congress – 2007-08 – the Republican minority forced a record 112 cloture votes to end debate (nearly double the previous high).

What had been extraordinary has become routine.  Now 60 votes are required for virtually all significant legislation that moves through the Senate.  Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon has suggested, “There’s no question that the Senate has become dysfunctional, and it’s not good for democracy.”

Senator Tom Harkin, who says the filibuster originally served as a way for Senators to delay votes until their colleagues had returned to the chamber (so votes couldn’t be held until all Senators were present), has proposed a change to this rule: essentially, cloture would require 60 votes initially, but the second call for cloture would require only 57 votes, the third vote would require 54, and finally the fourth, 51.  The filibuster would slow things down – but prevent a minority of 41 Senators to bring everything to a dead stop.

Representative Alan Grayson, like many members of the House of Represenatives, is unhappy with the way things get stuck in the Senate.  “Why should launching wars and cutting taxes for the rich require only 50 votes while saving lives requires 60?”  He has setup a website, Stop Senate Stalling, where he has gathered more than 11,500 signatures on a letter to Senator Harry Reid, calling for a rule change in the Senate to require only 55 votes to invoke cloture.

Can we bring a bit more democracy to the United States Senate?  Where does Barbara Boxer stand?  Dianne Feinstein?  Where do progressive Democrats from other states stand on the issue of making the Senate more accountable?

Are you mad about the mangling of health care reform legislation in the Senate?  Don’t blame Senator Joe Lieberman.  Or Senators Ben Nelson or Harry Reid.  Don’t blame President Obama or Rahm Emanuel or the insurance industry.  Blame your Senator – who has voted to approve a Senate rule that allows an obstructionist minority to wield disproportionate power.

(Photo of Senator Strom Thurmond, circa 1961, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Sources:

Robert Schlesinger, “The Staggering Rise and Fall of the Filibuster,” (on his blog at U.S. News and World Report) who cites the research of UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair.

Matt Yglesias, “The Silenced Majority,” The Atlantic, December 24, 2008.  He has also posted on his blog at Think Progress.

Mark Schmitt, at the American Prospect’s TAPPED blog – including “When Did the Senate Get So Bad?” (quoted above) – and at his previous blog the Decembrist, has been writing about filibusters for four or five years.  Note: he has been generally supportive of the filibuster.

David Dayen at Firedoglake.

My DD’s desmoinesdem linked to the Burlington, IA Hawk Eye, which quoted Senator Harkin.

James Fallows recently called for discussion of the filibuster on his blog at the Atlantic (which features a nifty chart on the rise of the filibuster).

Ezra Klein, at his Washington Post blog, had references to the filibuster in nine posts during the last week of November.

Paul Krugman, “A Dangerous Dysfunction,” in his December 20 New York Times column.

Expressions of confusion, disappointment, and anger – from supporters of health care reform – have greeted the advance of the health care reform package in the U.S. Senate, which is poised to pass the bill on Christmas Eve; the same sentiments, from the same cohort, have been expressed regarding the White House’s efforts to enact health care reform.

These critics on the left include a number Organizing for America activists, many of whom have written letters, made phone calls, and attended rallies in support of health care reform.  In recent days, some have experienced doubts, regrets, and disillusionment.  They have had online (and off-line) debates about whether to continue to support the advance of health care legislation, or to kill it outright and start from scratch.  They have linked to dueling blog posts – pro and con – including, recently, a prominent critic of the Senate bill, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.

This is a serious, consequential debate – especially for tens of millions of Americans who lack health insurance or lose coverage when they need it most.  So it is worthwhile to pause for a careful look at what is being said.

Friday’s Huffington Post featured Jane Hamsher’s, “Left/Right Populist Outrage Will Defeat Senate Health Care Bill,” asserting that outrage over health care reform from the left side of the political spectrum is identical to outrage from the right.  Progressive bloggers and tea party activists, according to Ms. Hamsher, “are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill.”

She continues, “What we agree on: both parties are working against the interests of the public, the only difference is in the messaging.” And, “When it comes to true differences in the parties, only the set dressing on the road to capitulation seems to change.”

While I follow a link to FDG from time to time, I am hardly familiar enough with Ms. Hamsher’s views to know whether this line of reasoning represents an extraordinary turn or if she often finds herself this deep in Ralph Nader territory.  (Nader – who professes to see no meaningful differences between the Democratic and Republican parties – is unsurprisingly gleeful at the prospect of a defeat for Obama, who – in his view – is proving to be “… an Uncle Tom groveling before the demands of the corporations that are running our country….”)

In any case, while it is easy to despise health insurance companies and to fault Congress for being beholden to them, I believe Ms. Hamsher misses the mark here.  The principled opposition of tea partiers (based on what I’ve heard) hinges on frantic fears of socialism, death panels, an end to cherished freedoms, and a president whose real agenda is akin to Hitler’s.  This is not the conversation they’re having at Daily Kos, nor is it what I’ve heard from friends who object that President Obama has fallen short of his promise to bring genuine reform.  Furthermore, if we turn from grassroots activists to elites, Senator Tom Colbern’s opposition to health care reform has little in common with Governor Howard Dean’s misgivings (which he walked back a bit this past Sunday, at least far enough to take a wait and see stance on what emerges from Conference Committee).

Monday’s Huffington Post features another Jane Hamsher post titled, “Top 10 Reasons to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill.”  (The list is cross-posted at FDL .)  It is a scary list.  It is also, when we take a closer look, more than a bit misleading.  (One example: “7. Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others.”  Yes, but right now insurance companies charge up to 11 times as much for seniors as for young adults.  The reform bill would make things better.)

Ezra Klein looks at the top 10 reasons at his Washington Post blog.   After examining the list point by point, Mr. Klein concludes that, “Hamsher’s list implies that the bill is failing relative to a world in which we don’t kill the bill,” but that the bill actually brings about many meaningful changes.  “In the world where we pass the bill, most everything gets somewhat better, if not good enough. More people have insurance. The insurance industry ditches its worst practices. Fewer families go medically bankrupt. More people catch diseases early, when they can be cured, rather than late, when they become fatal. People who would otherwise have died live. The medical system begins the process of updating itself for the 21st Century, and responding to the cost pressures it’s placing on the rest of the country.

The world in which we kill the bill is a world in which everything just continues to get worse, and politicians are scared away from the issue for decades. A world in which we pass the bill is a world in which things get better, and politicians remember that they can pass big pieces of legislation that take on, or begin taking on, big problems.”

Jonathan Cohn at The New Republic looks just at items #1 and #3 and finds analogous reasons to disagree with Ms. Hamsher.  After looking closely at premiums and out of pocket costs, with and without reform, Mr. Cohn concludes, “This is a hugely progressive program to bolster economic security, the likes of which we haven’t enacted in this country for a long, long time.”

Igor Volsky at the Wonk Room offers discussion and a graphic illustrating a number of real-world changes that would come with passage of the bill.  Here’s a link to the graphic, which shows why health care reform matters.

People’s lives matter.  Insuring 31 million more people matters.  Offering subsidies to fund health insurance for people who wouldn’t have health insurance otherwise matters.  Putting a stop to some of the worst insurance company practices matters – even if the bill doesn’t go far enough.

Insurance companies have an outsized role in the provision of health care.  But try convincing 60 U.S. Senators – here and now in the world we live in – of that.  Political victories come one battle at a time.  And the health care reform bill moving toward a vote on December 24 – no matter how deep the disappointment that we didn’t win more (as yet) in the Senate – would still represent a victory that has eluded progressives for decades.

Progressive change comes in fits and starts.  Categorically rejecting an imperfect bill, which does so much good, and starting from scratch, is not the way – in the world we live in – social change comes about.  Past failures have taken health care reform off the nation’s political agenda for a decade or more, as Senator Jay Rockefeller (a passionate and committed proponent of the public option) noted last week.  And passage of this bill (Senator Rockefeller assures us) will put health care reform on the political agenda year after year – and offer the opportunity to push things further in a progressive direction.

(Image from the Wonk Room.)

Update – December 23, 2009:

At just after 1:00 a.m. ET the U.S. Senate voted 60-40 to overcome a Republican filibuster of the health care reform package put together by Majority Leader Harry Reid, Igor Volsky reports at the Wonk Room of the Center for American Progress.

“This bill ‘acknowledges finally that health care is a fundamental right,’ Reid said before the vote. It’s ‘a human right, not just a privilege for the most fortunate.’ Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) insisted that ‘this is not the end of health care reform. It’s the beginning. But we must make this beginning in order to fulfill that dream and really make health care a right, not a privilege.’”

A fundamental right: that’s what this debate is about.  No one should have to rely on charity to get health care, or to forgo basic health care when in need – if we affirm health care as a right.

Government – federal, state, and local – has a role to play in providing health care.  Peter Manzo alluded to this central role in a discussion of California’s state-run Healthy Families Program, which received a multimillion dollar philanthropic contribution; 200,000 children were a risk of losing coverage as a result of the state budget crisis, until a private foundation stepped in.  Yet the state’s fiscal deficit continues to grow.  “This situation dramatically makes a point we’ve known about philanthropy all along – there is no way private philanthropy can pick up the slack when government, which was designed to be our common commitment, retreats.”

Peter Manzo’s essay, “Pounds of Cure,” appears in UCLA’s Center for Civil Society report, “Resilience & Vulnerabililty: the State of the Nonprofit Sector in Los Angeles 2009 Report.”

(Image of Hippocrates from Wikimedia Commons.)

Keith Olbermann disagrees with Jay Rockefeller.  I have excerpted comments from each of them below – with a link to the Olbermann video.

Keith Olbermann (who offers praise for Senator Rockefeller at the 45-second mark):
“The American insurance cartel is the death panel. And this Senate bill does nothing to destroy it. Nor even to satiate it. It merely decrees that our underprivileged, our sick, our elderly, our middle class can be fed into it as human sacrifices to the great maw of corporate voraciousness at a profit per victim at ten cents on the dollar, instead of the current twenty.” (From 1:39 through 2:04 of an 11-minute 58-second special comment.)

Senator Jay Rockefeller (responding to criticism by Governor Howard Dean, not Keith Olbermann):
“… I’m going to vote yes.
I’m a grown up. You’re a grown up. And we’ve been around this business for a long time. And you never get everything that you want. You don’t sulk about it. You try to keep improving the bill. And you do it next year, or the year afterwards. Up ’til now health care’s been every 15 or 20 years. From now on it’s going to be every single year. I love that.” (This concludes the 2-minute 18-second excerpt.)

Video from TPMtv.

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, David Lazarus reported on the health care reform proposal under consideration in the United States Senate.  The column features the qualified support of Howard Kahn, CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan, for the “compromise plan unveiled in the Senate last week,”  and his advocacy for many community-based regional public plans in lieu of a public option.  The model for these regional plans?  L.A. Care Health Plan: the largest public health care plan in the country.

Although Mr. Lazarus describes L.A. Care as “a Los Angeles nonprofit organization,” it is not a 501(c)(3).  It is actually a public agency, established by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors after enabling legislation passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor Pete Wilson in 1994.  L.A. Care serves over 800,000 county residents through a variety of programs, including: Medi-Cal, Healthy Families, L.A. Care’s Healthy Kids, and L.A. Care Health Care Medicare Advantage  HMO.

This huge enterprise, which competes with a for-profit Medi-Cal provider in LA County, is an intriguing model.

Since the column ran, of course, the “compromise plan” has been rejected and – at this stage – it is not clear that any provision for a community-based public model is in the works.

There are links at L.A. Care’s website on Sunday’s column and on health care reform.

(I appreciate the information provided by Marissa Jimenez, in Communications and Marketing at L.A. Care Health Plan, in response to my questions.)