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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has a new article on Huffington Post ripping the private insurance companies and again calling for her new Health Insurance Rate Authority. While I appreciate the sentiment, the Senator’s promises ring hollow to anyone that has followed the health care debate.
I can’t disagree with what Feinstein is saying at the beginning of her piece about how bad private health insurance companies are:
We cannot turn our backs for one minute because, left to their own devices, I truly believe these companies will look for ways to throw paying customers to the sharks for the sake of profit. A situation currently unfolding in California is further proof of this.
I fully believe the for-profit health insurance companies behave terribly and can’t be trusted. However, unlike Feinstein, I did not vote for a law that will now have the government fine people unless they become customers of these terrible companies waiting to throw people to the sharks.
It is toward the end of the piece that its logic really falls apart.
WellPoint will say that these premium rate hikes cannot be avoided. They will tell us that other factors are to blame: hospital charges, prescription drug prices, the rising cost of medical care. They blame the government. They blame the economy. But the fact is that they are making billions of dollars in profits.
If there was any doubt about whether corporate greed has anything to do with WellPoint’s plan to jack up rates on customers, I think the Reuters investigation answers the question definitively.
In order to prevent these kinds of unfair premium rate hikes on Americans, I have introduced a bill that would establish a health insurance rate authority. It would give the Secretary of Health the mandate to see that rates are reasonable.
[…]
I think this proposal strikes the right balance. President Obama took this bill and put it in his version of the health insurance reform reconciliation bill. Unfortunately, it was taken out of the bill due to parliamentary rules, but we haven’t given up.
Feinstein practically accused the for-profit health insurance industry of killing people to make money. When dealing with such evil behavior, you don’t want to find the “right balance” between the needs of the sick people and protecting the business model of the untrustworthy, greedy corporations. This is where you take out the legislative hammer to make sure it can never happen again.
If you think the search for ever greater profits in the health insurance industry is causing terrible problems, the solution is not an agency to maybe cap profits. At the very least, you completely outlaw making a profit off of health insurance. This is what Switzerland did when they adopted health care reform in the ’90s, and in most industrialized countries, it is illegal to sell basic health insurance for profit.
If you think the private health insurance companies can’t be trusted, then you should be fighting to give people the option to sign up for a strong public health insurance alternative. Or, better yet, you take out the big hammer and eliminate private health insurance altogether by adopting Medicare for all (single-payer).
Feinstein’s solution is not only weak, it’s hopeless
The worst thing about Feinstein’s call for a rating authority is not that it is too weak of a solution to deal with the magnitude of the problem, but that it has zero chance of passing. Calling for minor improvements that you can achieve is one thing, but calling for too weak solutions that you know are going nowhere is just pathetic.
The rating authority was taken out of the reconciliation bill because it violated the Byrd rule, so reconciliation is not a viable vehicle to pass it. The providion does not currently seem to have 60 votes in the Senate, and it is unlikely to gain support next year when Republicans pick up more seats. Its passage under regular order especially seems unlikely because they don’t even have the votes to pass the very popular repeal of the health insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption.
If Feinstein really thinks that private insurance companies are untrustworthy, greedy actors waiting to throw people to the sharks, she should be pushing for strong solutions with a viable path to reality. A public option or Medicare buy-in would not violate the Byrd rule, so could pass the Senate with only fifty votes using reconciliation.
I will not hold my breath waiting for Feinstein to demand a reconciliation bill that could be used for a public option. It seems she prefers meaningless grandstanding to advancing real solutions.
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Feinstein is incorrect that the Rate Authority was taken out of the bill for parliamentary reasons.
Long before that, it was taken out to please Ben Nelson. As Jon says, Rate Authority cannot qualify for reconciliation, and it cannot pass under regular order because Ben Nelson will not vote for it, meaning at most 58 votes.
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=NewsRoom.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=c170b8a0-5056-8059-7678-c0e2de028c92&Region_id=&Issue_id=551e9cd8-7e9c-9af9-771b-7176768bc4b6
Great piece, Jon.
DiFi, like many of her colleagues, has based her career on low information voters.
and people are supposed to be surprised?
The choice is pretty clear: Either the for-profiteers go, or America goes down the tubes — sooner rather than later.
It would seem that President Bipartisan and his Justice Department feels the bankers are to big to jail.
Nice! Now that’s what I’m talking about. DiFi represents the ignoble tradition of feigning outrage while, behind closed doors, working to legislate abominations into SOP.
The abolitionists faced similar sell-outs. Back then, the question was: what kind of slavery do we want? DiFi would’ve proposed a kinder, gentler slavery. Only X amount of lashes, your children could only be sold within N miles, the right (but not the power) to reject unwanted sexual advances, etc.
What kind of slavery is acceptable? NONE! Same goes for servitude to greedy health insurers.
Note to DiFi: Selling the citizenry down the river for obscene profits is not good governance. We see through your masquerade.
The unfortunate truth is that the two parties differences are largely superficial .
Both parties are entirely owned by the large corporations whose money put them in office in the first place.
Barring a constitutional amendment to strike down the farce of corporate person hood we have no real hope whatsoever of truly effecting change in DC .
The democrats have to sound like progressives to attract votes but they have no real desire to derail the gravy train whose money they are destined to earn in the private sector upon leaving office !
We now see through the ruse but are still faced with the ” republicans are even worse” line of reasoning advanced on so called progressive sites like think progress and the daily kos !
Until there is an actual “movement” of the left/progressives holding Democrats accountable nothing changes. Boots on the ground, not merely fingers on a keyboard.
It does not appear to me that Huffpo is accepting comments on this article. If anyone sees how to do that, please let me know.
Jon — wise decision to not hold your breath as this looming crash and burn Hindenburg styled HCR Obama and the Sell Outs are telling us is just so very wonderful unfolds.
As we lurch towards Year 2014 when the real Obama HCR deal is slated to finally and fully appear one can only anticipate more moments similar to what DiFi offers here from the cast of ‘Doing HCR For AHIP — The Bait and Switch Show’
The For More Profit HC grifters were given plenty of time to game and sabotage this HCR while Americans with low or no HC choices/pathways are slow marched towards 2014.
That Obama and the Democrats he “leads” will now try to blame his and the Democrats Big AHIP Sell Out on the Republicans for election haymaking is low information voter drag line net fishing of the most craven sort.
Jon– you have done and do much needed take aparts and provide informative observations on this HCR stuff. Keep breathing.:-) Your effort is very worthy. Stay with it.
DiFi- she’s not a real Democrat, she just plays one on TV
I think it is significant that leading Democrats are pretending to argue for reform- but I guess that is the Democrats game right now- appear to be reformers while extorting campaign contributions from the “stakeholders” to preserve (or even expand) their interests. So all we need now to get real reformers elected is for the public to be informed….
I think she’s decided to leave after this term ends, but she’s going to go out with a pathetic whimper that the Big Bad Republicans wouldn’t let her do the right thing.
(IMO she should not have run for re-election last time, since she clearly isn’t interested in doing the job.)
Thanks Jon, regretfully just another act in their pandering to what (hopefully was) is the base.
(I wonder if the word is getting out yet on the true nature of the HCR)
Feinstein is full of shit. The time to address this was BEFORE that miserable HCR bill was passed. You didn’t hear a peep from her then. Typical.
Feinstein is just another corporate Democrat. She is now playing the same game as many others, which is act outraged at the behavior of the health insurance and pharmaceutical cartels which are enabled by the law she voted for. She wants to pander to public sentiment against what the law does by pointing the finger at the corporations benefiting and blaming them for her law.
She’s just another scoundrel and my understanding is she has been a scoundrel for some time.
Yep. She counts on enough people in California being mindlessly partisan and not well informed at all.
I agree in principle but raise this single concern .
I believe that the corporations agenda is actually more important to the puppet masters than the the short term survival of the either party in the next election .
An insurance mandate without meaningful price controls is a disaster for the democrats , mission accomplished ?
The two parties merely toss the ball back and forth to one another . The only constant is the corporate agenda moving froward .
A rigged game .
Difi is, to put in a rather common term, full of shit. The only reason she is in the senate is because two men died one day in San Francisco.
Not only will she not fix the health care crisis she is working on weakening Social Security.
Grandstanding?
Dianne Feinstein???
Surely you jest.
Interesting little tidbit: a group in NJ has started an effort to recall Sen. Melendez. This is curious because the US Constitution technically doesn’t provide for recall of Senators. However, NJ and I believe about 18 other states have provisions in their state constitutions which allow Senators to be recalled. Nobody has ever taken an effort far enough to get a court test on the legality.
California is one of the states which, technically, authorizes recall of Senators. In a perfect world I’d have enough money to underwrite such an effort against DiFi just to scare and piss her off and to get a court ruling.
For those outside CA who don’t fully comprehend how much many of us hate her, let me put it this way: if she was found murdered at nine a.m. there would be about a half-million suspects by 9:05.
The problem with state initiated recall of “federal officers” (i.e., senate and house members) is that once a member is seated for each house for the session, they are there unless expelled by a vote of their peers. And most members of the House and Senate both would tend to not look favorably recalls for the reasons the folks in NJ would be using against Menendez (not Melendez)
The most recent expulsion was James Traficant of OH who was expelled after a fraud conviction in ’02.
I think the expulsion also means he lost his pension benefits which is why most of them resign when it looks like they are going to be convicted so they can keep the bennies
Dakine01 –
You’ve just outlined the basics of the court challenge: which reins supreme, the rules of the House and Senate or the state constitutions (under the clause that reserves to the states those rights not specifically granted to the federal government). There are really two questions: who ultimately gets to decide who represents the people of a state, and does the constitutional provision for seating and expulsion necessarily prohibit other means, esp. since the idea of the initiative, recall, and referendum only gained prominence a hundred years after the original Constitution.
Don’t get me wrong; I suspect a recall would have tough sledding getting past the Supremes. But the idea is interesting, if only for the fact that an active recall campaign that generated enough signatures to be worth a court challenge would be the kind of hard slap in the face to the political establishment that we sorely need in today’s corrupt environment.
The sooner, the better.
Since the House and Senate’s abilities to make their own rules has been fully vested by the Supremes back in the 19th century I’m pretty sure that yes, getting the Supremes to rule otherwise and allow the states to recall would be =very tough sledding indeed.
And good luck on finding a competent lawyer willing to take the case without big bucks up front.
Fingers. Boots.
They don’t give a shit. They do what they damn well please.
Politics: the art of appearing to do one thing while actually doing another through Kabuki, Faux outrage, Rotating Villains, Rotating Pseudo- Heroes, Phoney Bill-Naming, Devious Stagecraft and Re-arrangement of window dressing. All of which results in the hypnotized, anesthetized, smiling masses waltzing happily into the slaughterhouse.
If the Dems wanted to pass Difi’s proposal under reconciliation they could. Biden could overrule the Parliamentarian and the Byrd Rule would not be applied. Not unlike Bartleby, Harry Reid would prefer not to. Which is why I will prefer to sit on my hands in November.