President Obama's Weekly Address - March 7 2009

President Barack Obama used his weekly address to detail his plans to fix our ailing economy, noting that reforming healthcare is necessary to ensure our long term fiscal health.

Watch It Here:

LibertyAir Blog

White House Summit On Health Care

Today during the White House summit on health President Obama emphasized how health care is interconnected our economic problems and we can not fix one without fixing the other.

"We are here today to discuss one of the greatest threats not just to the well-being of our families and the prosperity of our businesses, but to the very foundation of our economy -- and that is the exploding cost of health care in America today.

"In the last eight years, premiums have grown four times faster than wages, and an additional nine million Americans have joined the ranks of the uninsured. The cost of health care now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds. By the end of the year, it could cause 1.5 million Americans to lose their homes. And even for folks who are weathering this economic storm, and have health care now, all it takes is one stroke of bad luck -- an accident or illness; a divorce or lost job -- to become one of the nearly 46 million uninsured or the millions who have health care, but can't afford it.

"We did not get here by accident. The problems we face today are a direct consequence of actions we failed to take yesterday.... [T]here are those who say we should defer health care reform once again -- that at a time of economic crisis, we simply cannot afford to fix our health care system as well.

"Well, let's be clear: the same soaring costs that are straining our families' budgets are sinking our businesses and eating up our government's budget too. Too many small businesses can't insure their employees. Major American corporations are struggling to compete with their foreign counterparts. And companies of all sizes are shipping their jobs overseas or shutting their doors for good.

"Medicare costs are consuming our federal budget. Medicaid is overwhelming our state budgets. And at the Fiscal Summit we held here last week, the one thing on which everyone agreed was that the greatest threat to America's fiscal health is not Social Security, though that is a significant challenge; and it is not the investments we've made to rescue our economy; it is the skyrocketing cost of health care.

"That is why we cannot delay this discussion any longer. And that is why today's forum is so important. Because health care reform is no longer just a moral imperative, it is a fiscal imperative. If we want to create jobs and rebuild our economy, then we must address the crushing cost of health care this year, in this Administration. Making investments in reform now, investments that will dramatically lower costs, won't add to our budget deficits in the long-term -- rather, it is one of the best ways to reduce them."

The government will spend $2.5 trillion on health care this year. In less than a decade, it will constitute 20% of GDP. If we're going to improve the economy and take fiscal sustainability seriously, this won't wait. The question isn't whether we can afford to tackle health-care reform; the question is whether we can afford not to.

Watch President Obama speak here:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Rachel Maddow was on "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno the other night, and they discussed how President Obama is taking on the financial crisis, the economy in general, energy policy, and health care. Leno even asks, "Is he [Obama] biting off too much?"

Watch Rachel here:

$634 billion for health care in Obama's budget

In his speech Tuesday night, President Barack Obama said he was serious about fixing the health care crisis in this country. The budget that was released today show's that President Obama is very serious about health care. Very serious:

President Obama is proposing to begin a vast expansion of the U.S. health-care system by creating a $634 billion reserve fund over the next decade, launching an overhaul that most experts project will ultimately cost at least $1 trillion.The "reserve fund" in the budget proposal being released today is Obama's attempt to demonstrate how the country could extend health insurance to millions more Americans and at the same time begin to control escalating medical bills that threaten the solvency of families, businesses and the government.

Obama aims to make a "very substantial down payment" toward universal coverage by trimming tax breaks for the wealthy and squeezing payments to insurers, hospitals, doctors and drug manufacturers, a senior administration official said yesterday.

Embedded in the budget figures are key policy changes that the administration argues would improve the quality of care and bring much-needed efficiency to a health system that costs $2.3 trillion a year.

By first identifying a large pot of money to underwrite health-care reform -- before laying out a proposal on who would be covered or how -- Obama hopes to draw Congress to the bargaining table to tackle the details of a comprehensive plan. The strategy is largely intended to avoid the mistakes of the Clinton administration, which crafted an extensive proposal in secret for many months before delivering the finished product to lawmakers, who quickly rejected it.

I'm impressed by the strategy -- and the number.

Entitlement Reform Morphs into Health Care Reform

One thing to come out of the fiscal summit today was the message that the true problem is rising health care costs in both the public and private sectors, not entitlements. That's good news.

Ezra Klein writes about this today:

How Entitlement Reform Became Health Reform, by Ezra Klein, American Prospect: It's testament to how deeply the idea of an entitlement crisis has embedded itself in Washington that news that Obama planned a "fiscal accountability summit" was immediately taken as proof by The Washington Post that he was readying a frontal assault on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

It was an understandable leap for the paper to make. Fiscal responsibility has, in this town, long been an anodyne synonym for entitlement reform. The "responsible" part signaled that you were courageous enough to cut treasured social programs in service of the national debt. The left, which never bought into this ruthlessly austere vision of responsibility, reacted with a defensive fury. It had just spent eight years protecting the entitlement programs from sharp-knifed "reformers." Would it have to do so again?

Today's "White House Fiscal Summit" ... will feature speeches from the president and vice president and "breakout" sessions... Notice what's not in there: Entitlement Reform.

Its absence is the product of a quiet but powerful change in thinking that has taken place in the offices of elite Washington and, now, the halls of the White House. Where a decade ago the looming fiscal threat of entitlement spending led economists and budget wonks to wear out their worry beads, today a more subtle understanding of our fiscal future dominates. In this telling, there's no such program as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. There's Social Security, which ... needs little, if any, help. And then there's health-care reform. "That," says Henry Aaron, a senior economist at the Brookings Institution, "is the big kahuna."

How this happened depends on whom you talk to. Dean Baker ... points to the 2005 Social Security privatization fight. ... That forced left-of-center wonks who'd not thought much about the crisis to confront the numbers...

Aaron locates his light-bulb moment in a paper written by Richard Kogan, Matt Fiedler, Aviva Aron-Dine, and Jim Horney for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He remembers sitting around a table with ... an array of ... economic luminaries while Kogan and Horney presented their findings. "The long-term fiscal outlook is bleak," they wrote, and "rising health care costs are the single largest cause."

Aaron says that the "meeting was sort of a slap-the-forehead moment. I said 'you guys are saying there is no problem other than a health-care financing problem long-term!' Credit goes to them, in my opinion." ...

What everyone agrees on is that the thinking entered government in the person of Peter Orszag. In 2007, Orszag was named director of the Congressional Budget Office. From that perch, he brought Kogan and Horney's thinking to the halls of Congress. Orszag liked to show a particular slide in his public presentations... Government spending and Social Security, it says, will hold relatively constant in coming years. It's Medicare and Medicaid that chew up federal spending.

This graph, however, could be used as evidence for a simple focus on Medicare and Medicaid. The programs are unsustainable. They need to be slashed. The next slide in Orszag's presentation is titled "misdiagnosing the problem." The fiscal threat, it argues, is not more beneficiaries or ... factors internal to Medicare and Medicaid. It's the cost per beneficiary. Orszag has a graph for this, too...

And since Medicaid and Medicare pay for health services on the private market, this can only be fixed through broader health reform. Orszag ... will lead today's "health care" breakout session. Richard Kogan works for him. So it's no surprise that asked for details on today's fiscal summit, one senior administration official told me that "the most likely outcome at this point is that we focus on health care given that it's the key to our fiscal future." Another explained the focus starkly. "Health is mathematically bigger,"... The rumors originally held that eager entitlement cutter Peter G. Peterson would give the day's keynote. Now Robert Greenstein, director of the very think tank that released Kogan and Horney and Cox's paper, will speak.
Fiscal responsibility, in other words, is no longer a stand-in for entitlement reform. In Obama's Washington, it means health reform.

Democrats Cave Again

House Democrats again proving that they will back down at the slightest whine by Republicans have removed a provision from their stimulus bill that would exempt states from the need to get waivers for covering family planning under Medicaid. The family-planning aid has been the subject of repeated Republican attacks over the past few days, and health care advocates were dismayed by the Democrats' decision to give in on its removal.

The Medicaid Family Planning State Option was a common-sense provision which would have expanded basic health care for millions of women, many of whom have lost their jobs in the current economic crisis, was a victim of misleading attacks and partisan politics by cry-baby Republicans.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs addressed the removal of the Medicaid provision, which occurred at Obama's request, during today's press briefing:

The president called Chairman Henry Waxman yesterday and said that, while he believed the policy of increased funding for family planning was the right one, that he didn't believe this bill was the vehicle to make that happen.

The one bright spot is that the House's move doesn't necessarily mean that the family-planning aid is dead. There have been suggestions out of the White House that it could be added to a comprehensive Healthcare bill. Senator Debbie Stabenow has also stated publicly that she would focus on how to attach the family-planning aid to another Senate bill coming down the pike.

Health Care Reform: Good for the Economy.

Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at MIT, explains in the New York Times "Health care reform is good for our economy."

As the country slips into what is possibly the worst downturn since the Depression, nearly all experts agree that Washington should stimulate demand with new spending. And one of the most effective ways to spend would be to give states money to enroll more people in Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Plan. This would free up state money for rebuilding roads and bridges and other public works projects -- spending that could create jobs.

Health care reform can be an engine of job growth in other ways, too. Most proposals
call for investments in health information technology, including the computerization of patient medical records. During the campaign, for example, Mr. Obama proposed spending $50 billion on such technology. The hope is that computerized recordkeeping, and the improved sharing of information among doctors that it would enable, would improve the quality of patient care and perhaps also lower medical costs. More immediately, it would create jobs in the technology sector. After all, somebody would need to develop the computer systems and operate them for thousands of American health care providers.

Expanded insurance coverage would also drive demand for high-paying, rewarding jobs in health services. Most reform proposals emphasize primary care, much of which can be provided by nurse practitioners, registered nurses and physician's assistants. These jobs could provide a landing spot for workers who have lost jobs in other sectors of the economy.

Fundamental health care reform would also stimulate more consumer spending, as previously uninsured families would no longer need to save every extra penny to cover a medical emergency. When the federal government expanded Medicaid in the 1990s, my own research has shown, the newly insured significantly increased their spending on consumer goods.

Universal health insurance coverage would also address economic problems that existed before this downturn began -- and that are likely to linger after growth resumes. In our current system, people who leave or lose their jobs often must go without insurance for months or years, and this discourages people from moving to positions where they could be more productive. Most reform proposals call for the creation of pools of insurance coverage that would guarantee access to high-quality, affordable care for people who are self-employed or out of work, increasing their mobility.

The financial crisis isn't an excuse to not fix a major drain on the economy, and a major hole in this country's social contract.

Sarah Palin is a Blithering Idiot

Yesterday Sarah Palin delivered her first (and probably last) major policy address in Pittsburgh, PA. This speech was about Children with special needs, which we are told will be an area she works on if this country is unlucky enough to have her as a Vice President. In the speech she promised to care for “children with special needs who have been set apart and excluded” and to “fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.”

During the speech Sarah Palin went off on a weird tangent and mocked fruit fly research, during a general tirade against earmarks. This was a speech about autism and disabilities, so why would Palin mock "fruit fly research" as wasteful pork? Didn't anybody in the campaign do any research? Fruit fly research, pardon the pun, has been very fruitful for scientific research. It is one of the foundations of modern biological research.

In her remarks Palin said:

This is a matter of how we prioritize the money that we spend. We've got a three trillion dollar budget, and Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That's more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good -- things like fruit fly research in Paris, France...

Here is what science blog BiochemicalSoul.com had to say:

The fruit fly (Drosophila) has probably been the single most important organism for the study of genetics for over a century now. Almost everything we know about genetics, development, cell biology, neuroscience, and every other field of biology has strong roots in previous and current work on Drosophila. The fruit fly is one of a small handful of “standard model organisms” used by thousands of scientists across the world to learn how our bodies, organs, genes, and proteins work. Most of what we know about how a single fertilized cell becomes the amazingly complex beings we are comes from studies initially done in Drosophila. Vast amounts of our understanding of the brain (and brain disorders, diseases, and defects) also come from initial studies in fruit flies.

In fact, recent research from my own graduate alma mater, the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, on fruit fly brains has had an impact on the understanding of autism and has boosted autism research:

“[S]cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly. The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead
to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human
neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.”

To decry research in [condescending and amazed tone] “the fruit fly” is a testament to the true idiocy of this woman and to the failure of our public education system.
In fact, her own father, Chuck Heath, was a biology teacher – obviously a complete failure of a biology teacher.

Keith Olbermann covered this on his show Friday night in his first segment, and the he interviewed Richard Wolfe of Newsweek. Richard had the best line when he said "This is the most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment that we have seen from Governor Palin so far, and there's been a lot of competition for that prize."

Watch here:


Why has the Republican Party made the decision to not respect science? It is too pervasive throughout the party, to have not been a conscious decision by the party. It's one more example of the intellectual laziness that pervades the GOP. Why do modern Republicans respect stupidity and ignorance?

Palin’s dismissal of all earmarks in her remarks were also dishonest. A simple search of the Office of Management and Budget website shows that there are at least 19 autism-related projects in the 2009 budget:

- $250K to Parents as Teachers National Center, St. Louis, MO, to develop research-based materials and training for home visiting professionals for families of children with autism
- $200K for Southern Penobscot Regional Program for Children with Exceptionalities, Bangor, ME, for services for families with autistic children
- $100K to Marywood University, Scranton, PA, for campus-based autism education programs

Not every earmark is a waste of money, not every earmark is pork. And history shows that when it comes to priorities, there is little history that backs up Palin's grand statements in her speech.

John McCain and Sarah Palin run around all over the country giving speeches where they try to scare Americans about the dangers of expanding SCHIP and Medicaid for poor and sick children, yet this "evil socialism" would be avoided if the government is able to fund medical research or other special needs initiatives, to reduce disease and cure genetic disorders.

Palin’s rhetoric in the speech also does not square with her record, McCain’s individual market-centric health care plan, and penchant for gutting all forms of government programs.

John McCain's Plan For Paying For Healthcare

It turns out John McCain's plans for paying for his health care plan with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid. This was confirmed by a top aide. Independent analysts from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank, estimate McCain's plan could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs. John McCain “has said little about the proposed cuts, but they are needed to keep his health-care plan ‘budget neutral,’ as he has promised.

Obama Add: McCain's Health Tax

The Obama campaign has another television Ad going after John McCain's health tax.


LibertyAir Blog

Looking Ahead To The VP Debate

At tonight's debate debate will be the only vice-presidential match-up before the election. Tonight's debate will be moderated by PBS anchor Gwen Ifill at Washington University in St. Louis.

Tonight Sarah Palin will present her conservative record and ideology to the American public in support of her running mate, John McCain. For the majority of America that do not follow politics or the news every day, this will be an introduction. For all the news Palin is still a relatively unknown figure to the American public.

Despite all the gaffs, miscues, and embarressing interviews that Sarah Palin has suffered over the past two weeks, John McCain recently said, "She's [Palin's] exactly who I need." And President Bush praised McCain's selection of Sarah Palin, calling her "a proven reformer who is a wise steward of taxpayer dollars and champion for accountability in government."

In September, Palin announced the responsibilities that John McCain will entrust to her: "Government reform, energy independence. And helping families and children, those with special needs."

John McCain has been falsely presenting Sarah Palin as a break from the disastrous policies and extreme ideology of the Bush administration. However Sarah Palin's true record in Alaska is less reformer and more opportunist, and John McCain's actual agenda actually represents more of the same failed conservativism that has given America two ongoing wars, a staggering deficit, obscene profits to Big Oil, croneyism gone amok, and a stark decline in the fortunes of the middle class.

FISCAL EXCESS AND CORRUPTION:
Sarah Palin claims that she is a "hard-core fiscal conservative" who said, "Thanks, but no thanks to the Bridge to Nowhere." She claimed this right from the beginning in her introduction speech in Dayton Ohio. We now know this is a lie, one she has been willing to repeat time after time. Appearing on The View, John McCain claimed Sarah Palin didn't request any earmarks as governor of Alaska. In fact, when Palin was mayor of Wasilla she was able to obtain $27 million in earmarks through the use of lobbyists, and yet still "racked up nearly $20 million in long-term debt" for the town of Wasilla. This amounts to $3,000 in debt per resident of this small town.

Calling Sarah Palin a reformer is laughable; she has demonstrated long and committed support for the Bridge to Nowhere. And Palin has requested earmarks of the very type that John McCain routinely mocks. "In her time inoffice, which is still lesss than two years, the state of Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation," according to the AP.

John McCain and Sarah Palin also misrepresent their economic plans. Senior economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin claims tax cuts for the wealthy "are not anywhere" in McCain's agenda. However, the Tax Policy Center writes that "McCain's tax cuts would primarily benefit those with very high incomes, almost all of whom would receive large tax cuts." They also claim they will balance the budget by the end of their first term and that no "real cuts would even be required." McCain and Palin spend so much on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that they could eliminate ten cabinet agencies and still not balance the budget.

ENERGY 'LA-LA LAND':
According to John McCain, Sarah Palin "knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." Yet Sarah Palin shows no real knowledge of alternative energy sources, and dismisses renewable energy as "far from imminent." She instead supports a conservative favorite of "drill, drill, drill." This energy platform is based on oil being plentiful, and a move towards "clean, green natural gas." Despite only proven reserves that equal just 3% of the world's reserves, Sarah Palin says that we as a nation can "drill our way" out of our energy problem. She also claims that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would produce oil in "five years," and "should help reduce price volatility." Those who don't agree, she says, "are living in La-La Land."

In reality, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has found that opening drilling in protected areas "would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices."

Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson of ABC News that her state "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy," and told Katie Couric of CBS that "we're supplying 16, 17 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." Neither of these claims were true. In fact, Alaska produces 3.5 percent of domestic energy and only 13 percent of U.S. oil.

It has becom apparent that Sarah Palin's definition of energy does not include anything that is not oil or natural gas -- and her ideas on an energy policy seems to ignores the role of energy efficiency. Just like George W. Bush did with Dick Cheney, John McCain seems intent on putting someone in charge of energy policy who disagrees that global warming is caused by man-made emissions, even as "worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide from fuel burning and cement production increased by 3.5 percent per year from 2000 to 2007, nearly four times the growth rate in the 1990s."

ENDANGERING HEALTH CARE:
John McCain and Sarah Palin's program of "quality and affordable health care for every American" calls for the elimination of "the current tax exclusion of the value of health insurance from employees' taxable compensation." A recent survey of benefits officers at large U.S. companies found that 74 percent of firms believe that a repeal of the exclusion "would have a strong negative impact on their workforce." Among those who would lose their health care are 56 million Americans with pre-existing chronic health conditions.

In particular, John McCain's health care policy will make it next to impossible for special needs children to get sufficient health care. The entire employer health insurance system could unravel, ending this as an option for Americans who prefer it. In place of employer-based health care, McCain-Palin would provide a "refundable credit amounting to $5,000 for all families and $2,500 for individuals purchasing health insurance." This credit comes up grossly short for all but the most insufficient plans -- and ignores the steady rise in health coverage costs. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “the total cost for family coverage now averages $12,680 a year, up 5 percent from 2007,” and $4,704 for single coverage.