Healthy, Wealthy, Wise

I’ve seen this movie before—the one where everyone who knows anything about the subject says we have to do something—in this case, reform our system of health insurance—but the vested interests and the lunatics manage to keep us from doing it.

 I know I keep yammering about health insurance reform, and I’m sure your eyes are glazing over when I re-introduce the subject yet again. But it is really, really important. And it is particularly important to the gay and lesbian community, for reasons I have also belabored.

One reason the recognition of gay unions is so important is health insurance: currently, if you are gay and don’t work for an enlightened employer, you can’t put your partner (or your partner’s children unless you have somehow established a legal relationship with them—itself not easy) on your health insurance. And that assumes your employer even offers health insurance. The number of employers who do is declining quickly as costs continue to escalate.

Even if you are one of the lucky few who do get adequate insurance through your employer, even if your employer is one of the enlightened ones who allows you to put your partner on your policy, there are significant differences in tax treatment of that benefit, and—surprise!—those differences mean that you will pay more in taxes than a heterosexual coworker who makes the same amount of money that you do and has the same number of dependents and deductions.

Speaking of jobs—as I noted in these pages back in 2006, a rational national health insurance system would mean increased economic development/job creation and would improve American business’s competitiveness with foreign companies. Today, providing employees with health insurance costs businesses more than their net profits; that is why many companies are dropping it. The cost of health insurance is the single largest “drag” on new job creation. For companies that can afford to offer health insurance, negotiating and administering those benefits, and complying with government regulations attendant to them, consumes untold hours of HR time. Smaller companies—the engines of economic growth—are often unable to offer benefits, putting them at a competitive disadvantage for good employees. Job growth benefits everyone—gay and straight.

If all citizens had basic health coverage, we would also experience a decline in the social costs caused by anxiety, anxiety that is caused in significant part by the medical status quo. When a serious illness means you might go bankrupt—when you are worried that you can’t take your child or partner to the emergency room without busting your budget or losing your house—you tend to take those worries out on others. There is a considerable body of research showing that countries with better social safety nets are more tolerant of differences in race, religion and sexual orientation. (Some studies have even suggested that Canada’s lower rate of gun violence can be attributed to their stronger social safety net.)

You just have to turn on your television to see the smoldering fury that too many Americans are feeling. Most of the people screaming and accusing the President of socialism, fascism and the like can’t even articulate what they are angry about or what they want. It is easy to dismiss them as ignorant and fearful, and most of them are. But the fact of their rage is undeniable—and when people get worked up, when they believe they are victims, when they fear for their jobs, and their ability to get healthcare when they need it, they don’t necessarily know why they are angry or look for rational objects for their fury. They take it out on anyone who is different. That—in large measure—was what happened in Germany between the two World Wars. There, the anger was focused on the Jews. There’s no guarantee it won’t focus here on gays.    

To the extent we can patch our tattered social safety net and allay at least some of the free-floating anxiety that leads to disaster, the better chance we have to avoid such outcomes. But getting healthcare reform passed this time won’t be easy. Teddy Roosevelt tried. Harry Truman tried. Nixon tried. LBJ did manage to pass Medicare. Clinton failed to get health reform done.

If Obama is to succeed, he’ll need the help of all of us. Now is the time to write your Congressman, call your Senator, talk down your crazy uncle—whatever you can. We’ll all be the beneficiaries of a more humane, less wasteful system.

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Playing Politics

Last week, the Indiana Court of Appeals struck down the state’s controversial “Voter ID” law.

 For those of you who somehow missed the intensely political arguments about the motives for and effects of that measure—the most restrictive in the nation—let me briefly recap its somewhat checkered history.

 The measure was originally championed by Secretary of State Todd Rokita, and passed by Republican majorities in the Statehouse. Democrats sued, supported by a number of organizations, including the AARP, Rock the Vote and the NAACP.  They argued that the law violated the federal constitution by effectively disenfranchising many poor and elderly voters who, not so incidentally, tend to vote disproportionately Democratic. They also pointed out that Indiana had been unable to identify any instances of in-person voter fraud. (Where fraud had been confirmed, it was within the absentee ballot process, but the Voter ID law doesn’t apply to absentee voting.)  

 The Democrats lost in a split opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court, although the Court left the door open for a future challenge. The Supreme Court based its opinion largely on the absence of concrete evidence that the law had prevented people from casting ballots. The Democrats had been unable to identify real people who had been adversely affected by the law.

 The recent Indiana Court of Appeals case was brought by the League of Women Voters, and was based on a different theory and a different constitution. This time, the argument was that Indiana’s Constitution requires all voters to be treated uniformly, and that the Voter ID law treats absentee voters and in-person voters differently. The Court unanimously agreed.  

 If the legislature wants to keep the law, in other words, they’ll have to apply it to all voters, not just those who show up in person.

 This seems eminently reasonable, but Governor Daniels was quick to accuse all three judges who issued the opinion of “playing politics.” This rhetoric is unfortunate on a number of levels. It betrays unfamiliarity with the arguments involved, and—worse—paints judges as no more than partisans in robes. Such attacks, as the Indiana Bar Association pointed out, undermine the legitimacy of the judicial system.

Daniel’s intemperate reaction also appears to confirm suspicions that the Voter ID law was itself a partisan effort. As Doug Masson of Masson’s Blog observed in the wake of Daniel’s outburst, “The facts fit together better if you discard the premise that voter fraud was the purpose of the Voter ID law, and replace it with the premise that one political party, temporarily ascendant, saw fit to pass a law that would shave a percentage point or two off the other side’s votes. The Republicans made a calculation that the voters who would vote in person and not have identification would skew Democratic. That calculus changes if you apply the ID requirements to those who vote absentee. Therefore, the absentee voters weren’t subject to the same level of scrutiny.”

In other words, the judges weren’t the ones playing politics.

If You Are Wondering….

why America can’t seem to make sane public policy, Steve Benen has a clue.

Kate Sheppard reported today on some recent Barton comments about climate change and wind power.

“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.”

 

Something to think about, indeed.

Barton is, of course, the same lawmaker who recently suggested that humans will “adapt” to climate change because we can “get shade.”

And as Matthew DeLong reminds us, Barton was, up until a couple of years ago, the lawmaker House Republicans made the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Our Morphing Media

I have been writing (and worrying) a lot about the transition of the media, and the effect of the current landscape on public discourse and policy.

As I told a friend, it’s one thing to disagree about something that we both see. We can both look at a photo, or a piece of art, or a draft of a pending bill, and disagree about its meaning, or–in the case of proposed legislation–whether it is a good idea. But the current fragmented media environment and the disproportionate attention garnered by “pundits” of varying philosophies and degrees of sanity has created a situation where we are far too often not looking at the same reality. It reminds me of the time (b.c.–before cellphones) when a friend and I agreed to meet for lunch at “the tearoom.” Back then, both Ayres and Blocks had tearooms, and I went to Ayres while she went to Blocks. This made conversation difficult, in much the same way that our current media environment does.

Clay Shirkey recently wrote an essay that is one of the more thoughtful analyses of the morphing of media.  In it, he echoes the observation of Paul Starr that “journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it is about assembling a public to read and react to those stories.”

In other words, there is a difference between an audience and a public. As Shirkey says, journalism is about more than dissemination of news; its about the creation of shared awareness. It’s about occupying the same reality, or eating at the same tearoom.  It’s about enabling meaningful communication.

As the information environment continues to fragment into smaller and more widely dispersed niches, what will the consequences be for public communication and discourse?

What’s It All About?

For those who doubt the need for reforming America’s health insurance industry, this one-page summary from the Kaiser Foundation pretty well speaks for itself.