:mad:

Sources: House Democrats consider taxing benefits

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090609/ap_on_go_co/us_health_overhaul/print


WASHINGTON – Despite a less-than-rousing reaction from the Obama administration, House Democrats are considering a new tax on employer-provided health benefits to help pay for expanding coverage to the uninsured.

Several officials also said an outline of emerging legislation envisions a requirement for all individuals to purchase affordable coverage, with an unspecified penalty for those who refuse and a waiver for those who cannot cover the cost.

"There's no sense having a mandate unless you have a contribution," Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said Monday. He referred to the suggestion as "play or pay."

Rangel and other senior Democrats arranged to bring members of the party's rank and file up to date at a midday session Tuesday on the effort to draft health care legislation at the top of President Barack Obama's agenda.

No details were available on the possible tax on health benefits, and several officials stressed that no final decisions would be made for several days.

The idea has been gaining currency in recent weeks as Congress intensifies its search for more than $1 trillion to help pay for a health care overhaul.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., first floated the idea several weeks ago, and emerged from a White House meeting last week saying Obama was open to it.

Obama's top aides did not disagree, even though the president attacked the idea lustily last year when campaign rival John McCain proposed it. Instead, White House officials say Obama prefers his own suggestions: cuts in projected Medicare spending and tax increases on the wealthy that thus far have gained little favor among Democrats in Congress.

Several officials said the House legislation will include a government-run insurance option as well as plans offered by private companies. The government option draws near-unanimous opposition from Republicans and provokes concerns among many Democrats as well, although Obama has spoken out in favor of it.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to pre-empt the presentation to rank-and-file Democrats on Tuesday.

Under the House Democratic plan, individuals and small businesses would be able to purchase coverage from a "health exchange" and the government would require all plans to contain a minimum benefit, these officials added. No applicant could be rejected for pre-existing conditions, nor could one be charged a higher premium, they said.

House Democrats also are considering a wide-ranging change for Medicaid that would provide a uniform benefit across all 50 states and increase payments to providers, according to several officials. Medicaid is a joint state-federal program of health coverage for the poor.

The disclosures came as the pace of activity quickened in both the House and Senate on health insurance legislation. Obama scheduled a meeting Tuesday at the White House with several Democrats.

The term "Democrat" has absolutely no independent meaning - none - it is just another word for "Republican"...

I'm thinking of writing an opinion piece, Let's Make It Official (There is No Choice in America): Obama/Palin in 2012!

Just think of the amounts of money that could be saved if they just dropped the charade. No one who thinks independently can view the "two" parties as in any real sense "two parties"...

Dhalgren,
Thanks for the positive response, I get ideas for titles of articles/op-ed pieces a lot, and don't end up pursuing them. If I write I'll send you a private message. Welcome back to PI btw, you, Momperson, Chlamor, a lot of the old PIers are back! :yippee: Now where's Advaita Eyes and/or tlcandie? :hmmmm:

And thanks for the welcome back!

:hi:

with only one party elections became pretty boring affairs. Why vote if the two candidates are the same? The party came up with a solution. Free pastries and beer served after you voted of course.

as when they annexed the Baltic States, they made polling sites the only possible place to acquire a food ration card. Of course, the only option on the ballot was "yes," and their were Red Army soldiers at all the polling places.

As a result, the Soviets boasted that over 99% of the people in the Baltic States had "voted" to be absorbed by the Soviet Union.

Boy, a food ration card, I'd love to get one of those (anyone been to the grocery store lately?)! Never thought I'd be yearning for the U.S. to be like the old Soviet Union... :shot:

but at least they had an ethos!

We were certainly propagandized about them and their system. It was not nearly as bad as we were told (I don't think). One major problem though, I think on paper they had universal health care, but from what I've been told their health care was very bad (of course not that health care is good for a great many Americans)...

They had universal health care, but it was definitely tiered.

The cities were better than the small towns.

Party members got better care (better everything) than non-Party members. There were clinics, stores, housing developments, jobs, and other goodies that were open only to Communist Party members.

World-class athletes, other celebrities, and Politburo members got better everything than anyone, including other Party members.

The disparity between the cities and the countryside in all aspects of life was so stark that the authorities used residence permits as carrots and sticks.

Good students from rural areas could work their way up through the system and earn a place at a major university and from there a city-based job, but if they rocked the boat in any way, their supervisor would start talking about having their Moscow or Leningrad residence permit revoked and transferring them back to their home region.

One student I knew spent a year at the University of Moscow studying Russian literature. During the year, she contracted a bad respiratory infection that refused to go away. The concierge in the dorm took pity on her and gave her tea with honey and other home remedies, but nothing worked, and the school health clinic just told her it was a virus.

At the end of the school year, she was packing to come home, and the concierge asked her what her hometown was like.

"It's located on the Midwestern prairie, and it has 79,000 people," she began.

The concierge gasped."Then you can't go home! You'll never get decent medical care in a town that small!"

The Soviet Union wasn't really Marxist except in a few aspects. It was state capitalism overlaid with Russian authoritarianism and at times, personality cults.

One thing a professor that I had told me in college is that to retain power (assuage the masses) they (the Soviets/Communist Party) would often appoint rural people to major positions of power/authority.

For a bird's-eye view on what a resounding failure communism was (and how it got that way), the book is a must-read.

I don't think any of us are big advocates of communism, but I find your post to be a bit of red herring (I thought we were talking about some upsides of communism, or at least saying that communism was not the hell on Earth that Americans were told). Such books have been written about capitalism as well:

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
http://www.amazon.com/Late-Victorian-Holocausts-Famines-Making/dp/1859843824/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244813762&sr=8-1


Mike Davis' new book is a work of singular importance, offering a valuable new perspective on a disaster of horrifying magnitude. In the late 1870s and the late 1890s somewhere between 30 to 60 million people died in famine in India, China and Brazil. This does not count the many more who died from the Philippines to Angola, from Morocco to Indonesia. To the extent that people remember these famines it has been assumed that they were the result of an unfavorable climate. To the extent that larger social factors were involved, they were a classic Malthusian crisis, too many people on too little land, and they represented the failure of the Third World to adapt the industrial revolution.

Davis shows very clearly that the third world was ravaged by the El Nino phenomenon. But that is the only the beginning. They were also ravaged by the new regimes of imperialism and the world market. Had the responsible authorities distributed what food existed, most of the victims would have survived. Davis is well aware of Nobel laureate A. Sen's argument that they key problem with famine is not scarcity but maldistribution. He also point out that whether under the American occupation of the Philippines or the ravages of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the real problem was the lack of democracy and lack of influence of the very poor.

Davis starts off with a fascinating and horrific description of the famines, filled with damning facts. For example Lord Lytton and his bureaucrats in 1876 India were obssessed with the idea that relief would just encourage Indian shirking. Readers will not soon forget that the calorie/work regimen that Lytton did impose was worse than that of Buchenwald. Nor will they forget the judgment of the Famine inquiries in the 1880s whom, Davis notes, concluded that with millions of famine dead the main flaw was that too much money was spent on relief. Davis goes into how the famines sparked millenarian movements and political resistance from the Boxer rebellion to the extermination of the Catholic movement at Canudos discussed, inaccurately, in Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World. He also brings a discussion of how scientists found the El Nino phenomenon, and gives a thorough technical account of how it works. He then discusses how the famines solidified European hegemony over the Third World leading to their stagnation and decline.

Based on such scholars as Bairroch, Parthsarathi, Gura and Pomeranz, Davis brings forth many facts that shore up his argument. 1) In 1800 India's share of the world manufactured product was four times that of Britain, and China's share was even higher. By 1900 India was fully under British control and the ration was 8-1 in England's favor. 2) In 1789 the living standards of China and Western Europe were roughly comparable and it appeared that China was making even better progress with its ecological problems. Naturally, a century later Europeans and Americans were much better off. 3) Despite all the many claims made on behalf of British rule in India, Indian per capita income stayed the same from 1759 to 1947. And contrary to the Malthusian argument, its population didn't grow very much. 4) Indian and Chinese rulers actually had before 1800 a good record of mitigating famines, and one British statistician suggested that whereas for the previous two millennia there was one major famine a century, under British rule there was one every four years.

How had things gone so wrong such that the El Nino famines could have such a devastating effect? Here Davis provides a useful and valuable account. Whereas previously anti-imperialists had crudely claimed that Britain had got where it was by draining the wealth of the Third World, Davis' account is much more nuanced. The problem was not so much the absolute share. Instead, by having a captive markets in Asia, Britain in the late 19th century was able to maintain its balance of payments and its complex system of free trade as surpluses in Asia balanced its increasing trade deficits with Germany and the United States. Davis shows not only how India had to bear the military costs of empire, but also how British irrigation schemes were often poorly funded, inappropriate for local conditions and had pernicious ecological effects. China, by contrast did face a severe ecological crisis which, as Davis points out, it could not escape as the Europeans did by colonizing the Western hemisphere. Moreover the West forced China to keep up the opium trade and forced it into inequitable trading arrangements. This encouraged the Chinese government to concentrate on protecting the ports and its sovereignty while underfunding the collapsing irrigation system. Ecological and political crisis fed off each other, leading to revolution and continued ecological crisis to the present day.

The result is a work which provides a valuable alternative to David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. There are some minor flaws (for instance, Czar Alexander III, unlike his father and son, was not assassinated). But it also helps introduce to a larger audience the valuable work of Indian historians that has been too long confined to specialists. It also provides a valuable complement to such works as Sheldon Watts' Epidemics and History and Prasannan Parthasarathi's The Making of a Colonial Economy. In the end this is a very different, but very appropriate sequel to the Ecology of Fear.