Reconciliation for Health Care? Depends on Who You Ask.

As you can see from this video pulled from Politico's Live site, the feasibility and even the success of budget reconciliation as a means to pass the needed Health Care Reform legislation all depends on precisely who you ask.

Somewhere in the middle of the predictable GOP posturing about how they were left completely out of the process (when they have uniformly opposed it from start to finish), Democratic Senator Ken Conrad's insistence that reconciliation cannot be used to pass a comprehensive bill, or the cautious optimism of the director of the White House Office of Health Reform, Nancy-Ann DeParle, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is the truth of the matter.

For all of the talk about bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, there are fundamental differences between conservatives, moderates, and progressives that go to the heart of how we see the role of government in our daily lives and the extent by which we are comfortable embracing change. However, in a democracy, the majority rules, and those who are in the minority need to understand it. This recent debate has shown us many things, but in particular it has shown that the Senate's arcane rules and procedures impede the progress of legislation. Regardless of how one views the role of reconciliation, the fact of the matter is that it exists and is an option on the table. Much like the laws governing this country, absolutes are few, and individual interpretation is crucial to both establishment of procedure and its enforcement.

Dem Advantage Among Young Voters Returns to Pre-2008 Levels

Written By: Jed Lewison

Posted from Daily Kos

Pew Research has a new report on party identification among young voters (born in 1981 or later), revealing that the Democratic advantage among these voters has returned to pre-2008 levels.

Here's a chart showing the change from 2008's peak to the end of 2009:

As you can see, the Democratic party ID advantage shrunk from a massive 32 points in 2008 to a significant but still smaller 14 point advantage at the end of 2009. Note that most of that shift occurred among leaners, however. Among those solidly committed to a party, the Dem advantage shrunk from 19 points to 12, a much smaller shift.

The more important point is that these numbers don't reflect a longterm collapse in Democratic support; rather, they reflect a drop-off from the 2008 campaign. Examine this chart, created by Pew, illustrating that the numbers from late 2009 represent a return to pre-2008 levels:

Finally, it's clear that the numbers don't reflect a shift among younger voters towards a more conservative brand of political ideology. While young voters have expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in DC as well as the war in Afghanistan, they are still the most liberal age cohort examined by Pew, and unlike party ID, their ideological views have held steady over the past few years:

A separate Pew survey revealed that younger voters don't pay as much attention to politics as older voters. That's no surprise, but it is a reminder to Democrats that in order to win large majorities of younger voters in elections -- particularly mid-terms -- they need to develop strategies to reach those voters similar to the ones used by the Obama campaign in 2008. The risk isn't so much that younger voters will vote heavily for Republicans -- it's simply that they won't vote.

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Easter: The Next Health Care Deadline

From Politico's 25 February 2010 print edition, written by Chris Frates
_________________

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) predicted on Wednesday that Democrats would pass a health care reform bill by the time Congress breaks for the Easter recess, in less than five weeks.

"By the time Easter comes, we will fulfill [the late Senator] Ted Kennedy's dream that health care is a right and not a privilege," Harkin vowed.

The Truth About Reconciliation

Health care's got a history with reconciliation

by David Waldman

Wed Feb 24, 2010 at 07:45:02 AM PST

NPR is running a good roundup aimed at debunking the popular obstructionist myth that the use of the reconciliation process for passing a health care bill would somehow be unprecedented or represent some kind of wild departure from Congressional rules and traditions. But as I've occasionally insisted on reminding people via Twitter:

If you've ever had COBRA coverage, you had it because of reconciliation. It's the "R" in COBRA.

In fact, the whole acronym stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which refers to the bill that the well-known program of extended health benefits was included in when it passed Congress in 1985.

But as the NPR story notes, there's much, much more to the picture:

[V]ia a series of budget reconciliation bills, beginning in 1984, Congress began expanding Medicaid coverage. In 1997, also in a budget reconciliation bill, it created the Children's Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP. Today, says [GWU Prof. Sarah] Rosenbaum, who helped write many of the children's health provisions in those bills, Medicaid and CHIP together cover 1 in every 3 children in the United States.

"So literally we've changed everything about insurance coverage for children and families, and we've changed access to health care all across the United States all as a result of reconciliation," she says.

And...

"Going back even close to 30 years, if you start say in 1982, the reconciliation bill that year added the hospice benefit, which is very important to people at the end of life," says Tricia Neuman, vice president and director of the Medicare Policy Project for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Over the years, budget reconciliation bills added Medicare benefits for HMOs, for preventive care like cancer screenings; added protections for patients in nursing homes; and changed the way Medicare pays doctors and other health professionals.

There's so much there, in fact, that NPR ended up posting it in sidebar chart form, too:

A History Of Reconciliation

For 30 years, major changes to health care laws have passed via the budget reconciliation process. Here are a few examples:

1982 — TEFRA: The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act first opened Medicare to HMOs

1986 — COBRA: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act allowed people who were laid off to keep their health coverage, and stopped hospitals from dumping ER patients unable to pay for their care

1987 — OBRA '87: Added nursing home protection rules to Medicare and Medicaid, created no-fault vaccine injury compensation program

1989 — OBRA '89: Overhauled doctor payment system for Medicare, created new federal agency on research and quality of care

1990 — OBRA '90: Added cancer screenings to Medicare, required providers to notify patients about advance directives and living wills, expanded Medicaid to all kids living below poverty level, required drug companies to provide discounts to Medicaid

1993 — OBRA '93: created federal vaccine funding for all children

1996 — Welfare Reform: Separated Medicaid from welfare

1997 — BBA: The Balanced Budget Act created the state-federal childrens' health program called CHIP

2005 — DRA: The Deficit Reduction Act reduced Medicaid spending, allowed parents of disabled children to buy into Medicaid

Yes, despite the claim made by the random Republican caller to C-SPAN claimed during Darcy Burner's appearance on Washington Journal this morning that reconciliation had never been used to pass any legislation of any kind (!!!), the procedure has in fact been used dozens of times, on several occasions for exactly what opponents of health care reform insist has never, ever, ever been done.

No wonder Republicans want to eliminate public broadcasting.

Same It It Ever Was

Posted from today's Politico.

The White House opened its last-ditch push for health reform Monday by releasing a $950 billion plan that signaled a new phase of hands-on presidential involvement.

But by day’s end, President Barack Obama was staring down all the same old problems.

Republicans called it a retread of the same bills Americans have panned, even though it included some GOP ideas. “Déjà vu all over again,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.).

Democrats and labor unions didn’t rush to embrace the plan, either, though by Monday night, Democrats were sounding more receptive to it, despite the lack of a public health insurance option. Congressional Democratic aides also complained of being left in the dark by the White House, asking for a preview of the bill Friday, only to be denied by White House aides, according to multiple sources.

And Obama’s plan did nothing to answer the central question facing Democrats: how to get a bill through the Senate — now one vote shy of a filibuster-proof majority — in one of the most toxic environments for incumbents in recent memory. Even with the first presidential plan on the table, there was no guarantee Democrats could pull off health reform this year.

After a year of keeping his distance from the legislative process, Obama plunged in ahead of Thursday’s bipartisan health care summit with a sweeping plan that laid to rest any question about whether he would scale down his ambitions. Following the Massachusetts defeat, Obama floated the idea of a smaller bill, but even skeptics of the comprehensive approach argued the bill was too interrelated to break apart.

By stepping forward now, Obama hoped to set the agenda for the summit — making his own bill the starting point for any discussions and trying to force Republicans to come to the table with a single plan.

“We view this as the opening bid for the health meeting,” said White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer. “We took our best shot at bridging the differences. We think this makes some strong steps to improving the final product.”

The renewed presidential involvement was a relief for many congressional Democrats, who had agitated for a more direct approach from Obama. Democrats said that by presenting his first concrete blueprint in the yearlong debate, the president may be able to rebrand health care reform after months of messy legislative negotiations that contributed to a sharp drop in the bill’s popularity. Even though the president’s numbers have dipped, the public views him more favorably than it views Congress.

“Let’s just say it was welcomed,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said when asked whether Obama’s involvement was overdue.

But Republicans weren’t impressed with the offer, issuing uniformly negative statements. They called it more of the same drafted-behind-closed-doors policy that Americans dislike and continued to push for Democrats to start with a blank slate — a demand Obama has emphatically rejected.

“Americans want the administration to scrap its massive government scheme in favor of an incremental approach to health care reform,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “Unfortunately, the White House still seems unwilling to do the one thing Americans want most. It’s still clinging to a massive bill that Americans have overwhelmingly rejected, again and again, for months.

The White House kept Obama’s plan under wraps until Monday, and knowing this, party leaders in the House agreed last week not to weigh in immediately on the plan once it was unveiled, preferring instead to hear from their rank and file and field whatever concerns members had, leadership aides said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a statement Monday morning to say the plan “contains positive elements from the House- and Senate-passed bills.” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said, “It could be the basis for a compromise. We’re not there yet. ... We’ll see what the Republicans have to offer.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said he was pleased to see that the bill mirrors much in the Senate version of reform. “It’s close. I mean, this is a democracy — you have 535 members of Congress, plus a president, and we hope to put these provisions together. I’m pleased,” Baucus said. “We will get health care reform passed this year.”

But for all the talk of the details in Obama’s bill, it’s politics, not policy, that has been the biggest sticking point for Democrats of late.

Since losing the Massachusetts Senate election, Democrats have struggled with finding a legislative path to move forward in the House and Senate.

In the Senate, they are moving toward using reconciliation, a parliamentary maneuver that allows legislation to be passed with a simple majority. But Democrats remain skittish about using that tool, as Republicans have cast it as a shortcut, even though they, too, have used it to pass legislation.

The White House went further Monday than it has before in signaling support for reconciliation. Pfeiffer said the president believes the bill should receive an up-or-down vote.

“This is designed to provide us maximum flexibility if the opposition decides to take the extraordinary step of filibustering health reform,” Pfeiffer said.

A senior Democratic Senate aide said any decision on how to proceed will wait until after the summit.

The White House plan adopts the broad framework of the House and Senate bills, which require individuals to purchase insurance, provide subsidies for lower-income Americans to buy coverage and prohibit insurers from refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions.

The plan appears designed to allay liberals in the House while not going too far in a way that would alienate Senate moderates. For example, it delays an unpopular tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans until 2018 for all Americans, which will please liberal Democrats, but omits the public option, which aims to keep moderates on board.

Obama has long said he would sign a bill without a public option, and his own legislation confirms that.

“It would have been nice if it was in there, but I think there are practical reasons for that, and I hope we can continue to work our way through those,” said Whitehouse, who signed a letter last week urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to include the public option in the bill.

Asked if he was disappointed the bill doesn’t include a public option, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said, “We’re going to fight to put it in.”

At the same time, the president makes a run at Republicans by boosting measures to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare — a fixture in GOP talking points.

The proposal eliminates some of the most maligned elements of the Senate bill and enhances popular provisions, such as fully closing the “doughnut hole” for Medicare prescription drug beneficiaries. Obama’s proposal also includes a legal requirement for all Americans to own insurance but lowers the penalty on individuals who don’t, to just $325 in the first year.

After months of losing the messaging war on health care, the White House put a new frame on the subsidies for lower-income Americans to purchase health insurance, describing them as the “largest middle-class tax cut for health care in history.” At the same time, the plan would raise the Medicare payroll tax on couples earning more than $250,000 a year.

The bill also gives the federal government sweeping new powers to curb exorbitant rate hikes by the nation’s health insurance companies.

“It is a very constructive step forward, and we are now prepared to see what the Republicans will bring to the table Thursday,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.).

Chris Frates, John Bresnahan and Meredith Shiner contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33322.html#ixzz0gNuCZu7X

Candidate Endorsements, 2010 Election Cycle

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Friday YouTube

In anticipation of our Speaker Series, enclosed here is video from the 2008 gala. The speaker is one of our esteemed alumni, Maryland state Senator Jamie Raskin.

Intern/Fellow Announcement

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21^st Century Democrats, the country’s top progressive PAC, invites you to join us for the Spring and beyond. Our Internship and Fellowship programs give you real world political experience while making a difference for progressive candidates from around the country.

We are seeking high-achieving students and recent graduates with a commitment to progressive Democratic values to serve in our Washington, DC office. We offer both full-time and part-time programs and a flexible work schedule.

Interns and Fellows will work on the planning and deployment of political, development and communications programs to elect progressive Democratic candidates. These programs include a seminar series with members of our vast network of elected officials, activist trainings, donor outreach and candidate promotion initiatives. Web design and new media skills are a plus.

21^st Century Democrats has played an important role in the progressive movement by training the activists and promoting the candidates who later become leaders in politics and government. A critical component of grooming the next generation of progressive leaders is our Internship and Fellowship program. Although these are unpaid positions, you will be richly rewarded by the experience you gain.

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Coming Attractions

Candidate Endorsements

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Readers can also use this site as a means to keep up with the latest scheduled Speaker Series and Field Training Events. These events will also be listed by means of a Google calendar which all can access, which can also be found by means of a link included on the right hand side of this site.