- Hundreds of Billions of Dollars for State Public Plans in Bill

Here's the good news from the Senate bill: of the 31 million uninsured projected to gain coverage under the Senate plan by 2018, the Congressional Budget Office projects that two-thirds of them will gain coverage via some form of public plan. Yes, the limited public option will enroll only a projected 4 million folks, but expansions in Medicaid and SCHIP will enroll 15 million more people than would be expected under current law. 54 million people will be covered by Medicaid, CHIP or the public option by 2018.

Step back from the mechanics and the dollars invested are impressive. $347 billion in additional funds will go directly to Medicaid and CHIP programs.

• By 2014, most nonelderly people with incomes below 133 percent of the federal poverty line would be made eligible for Medicaid. The government would pay for this whole expansion through 2016 and roughly 90% of the costs thereafter.
• Federal support for childrens health insurance plans (CHIP), which cover kids much farther above the poverty line, would expand to an average of 93% of costs under the bill.
• States would pay a total additional $25 billion over the ten-year period.

On top of those directly in public plans, there will be $447 billion in federal funds to subsidize individuals buying into health insurance exchanges and $27 for small employers to subsidize employee health care.  The projection is that the average subsidized enrollee in the exchanges will receive $5500 per enrollee to help pay their health insurance costs.

But here's the better news, under Section 1332 of the bill, states could apply for waivers and convert their state residents' share of health insurance exchange credits and small employer credits into their own more comprehensive state health care program.

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A lot of folks are declaring Obama -- who wasn't on the ballot -- the loser of the night based on two state elections, but the defeat of three anti-tax initiatives that were on the ballot in Washington State and Maine should emphasize that Grover Norquist and the anti-tax movement were big losers of the night -- and this just continues a multi-year roll of defeats.

In both states, voters rejected so-called TABOR ("Taxpayer Bill of Rights") initiatives that would have created rigid tax raising formulas that would have crippled those states' capacity to provide services like education, health care, emergency services, and public safety. Voters in Maine also rejected a proposal to slash the excise tax on new and hybrid cars, which would have undermined local revenue around the state.

Across the country, over thirty state legislatures raised taxes to deal with deficits this year and a number have specifically targeted tax increases on the wealthy - a bugaboo of the rightwing. And at the ballot, the anti-tax right has just lost and lost.

Back in the early 90s, the rightwing managed to pass a TABOR system in Colorado at the ballot box, which led to  terrible results, including large declines in K-12 funding, higher education tuition rates, and hindering the state's ability to address the lack of medical insurance coverage for many children and adults (see a PSN Dispatch on "TABOR's Disastrous Record in Colorado").  Voters partially repudiated TABOR at the ballot in 2005; when the rightwing tried to enact TABOR-like initiatives in states across the country in 2006, progressives highlighted fraud in signature collecting in multiple states and issue was thrown off the ballot in Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma and Missouri. On Election Day, voters in Maine, Nebraska and Oregon finished the job in voting down the remaining TABOR initiatives.  And in 2008, anti-government tax measures were defeated overwhelmingly in Massachusetts, North Dakota and Oregon.

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We'll no doubt hear too much commentary reading too much into a few elections today in a handful of states, so it's worth stepping back to recognize the deep support for progressive policies and ideas that are increasingly dominant across our nation. Obama's election as President is one indicator of that shift, but progressive gains are reflected in the underlying support for progressive policies in poll after poll, whether in demands for greater corporate accountability, health care reform, environmental sustainability or a host of other issues.

If progressives face a challenge, it's not on allegiance to our values such as rewarding work or promoting greater justice, it's a skepticism by many independents of the effectiveness of government in accomplishing the goals shared by most of the public.

However, as the rest of this post (crossposted from PSN) will detail, if we understand the public support for progressive goals, it can inform our political messaging which should embrace a clear progressive agenda, even as we recognize that trust in government needs to be rebuilt after decades of right-wing attacks on its functioning. And we should also act with confidence, knowing that younger voters are even more progressive than their parents and grandparents, so our ability to move policy forward will only grow with each election cycle as these new progressives become a larger and larger share of the electorate.

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While the debate on health reform has dominated headlines, Congress is moving forward with marking up federal financial reform legislation. Currently, proposed federal legislation includes language that safeguards the ability of states to take independent action to protect consumers, but the banking industry, with help from a large block of moderate Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, is seeking amendments that would override state consumer protection laws and eliminate the ability of state and local prosecutors to act on behalf of consumers defrauded by financial institutions.

Progressive States Action is teaming up with Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition of nearly 200 national, state and local consumer, labor, retiree, investor, community and civil rights groups to sponsor a conference call today at noon on why folks need to mobilize to protect state consumer protection laws from federal preemption. On the call will be Elizabeth Warren from the TARP oversight board, Congressman Brad Miller from the Banking Committee, along with others to highlight what's at stake. If interested RSVP at www.progressivestates.org/conferencecallrsvp.

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Okay- it's an ideosyncracy but I am a big defender of President Ulysses Grant, but then the only President in the 19th century to indict Klan leaders and actually work to give African-Americans the chance to vote deserves far more credit than he usually receives. So I'll take some issue with M.J. Rosenberg's political history, at least as far as reducing Grant's Presidency to mere grant-- a standard historical trope that was part of rightwing historical attacks on the Reconstruction era. Politics was hardly pure then, but I'm not sure in the present period where corporate money has such free rein, it's hard to make too broad condemnation.

Garfield was a decent Congressman on racial issues but he readily embraced withdrawing federal troops from the South after 1877 and he was allied with the rightwing economic wing of the Republicans, a "hard money" man who called regulations of railroads "Communism in disguise." This was the era when Rutherford Hayes began the new tradition of using federal troops redeployed from the South to break strikes in the North. Former President Grant acidly remarked at the time that this anti-labor wing of the Republicans were the same people who had resisted using federal troops "to protect the lives of negroes. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens."

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With all the focus on the public option debate, there has been far less on the importance of maintaining a strong mandate for employers to provide health care -- another feature of the House bill that conservatives have vigorously opposed.

And the reason it's important is, at least partly, because Obama did not lie-- despite Congressman Wilson's shout, all the public options as designed will not be available to undocumented immigrants, so for millions of undocumented Americans, employer-provided health care will likely remain the only source of health services outside of emergency rooms.

Similarly, given rightwing pressure, the public option will likely severely restrict funding for abortion services and I've seen few details on whether domestic partners will have the same access to health care under the public option as many do under employer-provided plans.

Like many folks, I've done quite a bit of organizing on behalf of the public option, but given some of the restrictions being put on it, I end up agreeing with Obama that it's only part of the solution. And I hope advocates keep their eye on maintaining strong employer mandates which will likely be crucial to delivering more health care to more people that even the public option.

I love Chipotle. I'm not actually the biggest organic, fresh food advocate but they almost make me a believer. So I was not happy a month or two ago when it came out that they were buying tomotoes from super low-wage pickers.

But under pressure of boycott by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based organization that has led a campaign to improve wages and working conditions for Florida farm workers, Chipotle agreed to pay an additional penny per pound, a wage increase of 64 percent for workers picking tomatoes for Chipotle.

One of the reasons I ignore the constant drumbeat of negative speculation about the future of unions (which has lasted pretty much non-stop for well over a century or more) is that workers keep standing up and organizing and winning, yes suffering setbacks on occasion, but then moving forward as well.

Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office has issued arrest warrants for 11 suspects accused of falsifying hundreds of voter registration cards. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernández Rundle praised ACORN for its work exposing the fraudulent acts by some former employees. ``We've been very aggressive about a lot of these cases,'' she said. ``But we would not have known about these workers unless ACORN brought it to us.

ACORN quality control staff had spotted the fake registration cards and contacted the authorities in June of 2008. "It could not have impacted the voting process whatsoever. Nonetheless, we cannot turn a blind eye to this,'' Rundle added.

Of course-- that's not how the rightwing will frame the story. Expect them to ignore the prosecutor praise of ACORN and the fact that the problems were identified by ACORN months before the November election. Instead-- expect things like this at Freerepublic.com-- Breaking FOX news banner 11 ACORN arrests for voter fraud.

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Glenn Beck and the rightwing is hunting scalps-- and their prime target is Van Jones, the "green jobs" White House advisor who was formerly head of the organization Green for All. They are going after Van Jones, attacking him for professing himself in the past as a "radical", "revolutionary" and studier of Karl Marx. (See this FoxNews "raw data" about Jones or this Glenn Beck rant).

All of which is true. Van has a long history of being a left advocate working in a variety of organizations. Which is why it's even more important that liberals and moderates of good faith stand up to defend him. McCarthyism was not bad because it falsely accused moderates of being radicals. McCarthyism was bad because it made having any form of left views a bar to public service, from policy to being a teacher.

President Obama has explicitly filled his administration with a broad diversity of views, with many of the key positions held by establishment moderates from the corporate world. Van Jones is one viewpoint represented among many voices in the White House, yet the Becks of the world want to make anyone holding left views or having a history of sympathetically reading the "wrong" books forbidden from public service.

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Misrepresentation to protect corporate interests has become just the knee-jerk reflex of the rightwing. They don't seem to think they can win any argument based on promoting alternative proposals as more effective or ideologically more appealing-- they just seem to immediately reach for the distortion.

So the AFL-CIO and some allies came out with a proposal for a tiny tax on stock transactions -- about one-tenth of one percent of each transaction -- an amount that individual investors making long-term investments would barely notice. The goal is to raise revenue off the large-scale traders like Goldman Sachs and discourage high-frequency traders using computers to game the stock market. "High-frequency trading is estimated to earn about $20 billion in profits for the nation's biggest investment firms, who guard the their practices zealously."

And of course the rightwing immediately just labels the proposal as the "AFL-CIO's Tax on Your 401(k)"

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Steven Brill has a long essay in the New Yorker about the long process required to fire teachers in New York City. Now, any discussion of due process, whether in firings or criminal justice, inevitably can stack the deck by focusing on the guilty while ignoring those protected from arbitrary abuse by the process. Which Brill does of course.

But what I find most telling about Brill's account is that, like most stories about union rules and contracts, there is not really any serious discussion about WHY union members vote for such contracts. Is Brill arguing that the majority of teachers like having bad teachers among their numbers? Is he arguing that the majority of teachers approving the contracts care about children less than administrators? Actually, Brill says almost nothing about the motivation of teachers in the union in his whole piece.

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So at least some of the TARP money the government put into the banks last fall appears to be making a profit:

The US government...is sitting on a paper profit of almost $11bn on its 34 per cent shareholding in Citigroup, its only direct stake in a large financial institution...The government said it had earned an annualised return of 23 per cent from its $10bn investment in Goldman Sachs under Tarp. In June, Goldman returned the $10bn and later paid another $1.1bn to buy back warrants attached to Tarp aid. Morgan Stanley, American Express and other banks have done the same, leaving taxpayers with substantial profits.

Back in September, I was in the minority on the left in thinking the TARP bailout plan, with all it's flaws, was better than the status quo and so far evidence is that not only did the plan help stabilize the financial system, it won't cost taxpayers anywhere near the amount feared by critics-- and many of the TARP investments will end up netting profits to the governemnt that can be used for other needs.

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Mark Schmitt worries over at the American Prospect that the U.S. labor movement is so weakened that we are in danger of constructing an effete liberal coalition of "minority, professional, and younger voters" lacking white working class voters. I'll leave it to others to parse the polling data on voting patterns and instead challenge his argument on the weakening centrality of the labor movement to the Democratic coalition. Let's start with his major piece of evidence:

Labor's lack of clout to pass EFCA in even the most overwhelmingly Democratic -- and progressive -- Congress in decades is an indication that we already have a successful progressive movement in which labor plays only a modest role.

So what does this say about the centrality of labor in the last seventy-four years in which no other major pro-labor law reform was passed, despite many years when Democrats had even greater numbers, as during the Great Society? In fact, we had quite large numbers of Democrats in the past vote for the viciously anti-labor 1947 Taft-Hartley law (creating "right to work" rules and massively limiting union organizing and strikes) and the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act (restricting union picketing and negotiating rights). In fact, when EFCA comes to a vote, it will no doubt have a higher percentage of Democrats taking a pro-labor position than any other labor legislation since the Wagner Act.

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When folks talk about their fear of "socialized medicine", I'm always wondering what they prize in our present system? The instability of coverage, fear of being locked out by a preexisting condition, the craziness of reimbursement rules? Some will say a fear of Soviet-style lines for care, but we have them-- which I was reminded of last night as I went to the emergency room with my wife.

We went to the emergency room because she had intense pains, fever and other symptoms that her doctor said on the phone had a chance of being fatal if not treated immediately. So we ran to the local hospital-- luckily only two blocks from our home, one of the best in New York City (Columbia Presbyterian). With our lovely private health insurance --also one of the better ones (Oxford) -- the results were: a long wait to even see the triage nurse, and then being told my wife would have to wait EIGHT HOURS to see someone. The triage nurse didn't disagree with her doctor's diagnosis of the possibility of the fatal condition, but that was the timeline for everyone who wasn't basically bleeding to death on the spot.

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Yeah, we know the rightwing now officially believes that government should do nothing to restrain health care costs, since as we know rightwing politicians have been opposed to any cuts in funding of Medicaid or Medicare for years.  But at the risk of adding fuel to the fire, how about some birth panels to think about reducing the insane overuse of surgery for births in the United States?

C-sections during birth are the most common surgical procedures each year, with roughly half of them at deemed to be unneeded and potentially dangerous to other and child.  

So to encourage more natural childbirths, beginning this month, the state of Washington will pay hospitals the same amount for an uncomplicated C-section as for a complicated vaginal birth under its Medicaid reimbursement rules.  With half of all births in Washington paid for by Medicaid, this will likely have a significant impact in reducing unneeded C-sections in the state, saving money and potentially lives.

The Alarming Rise in C-Sections:  As the Washington State Department of Social & Health Services described in adopting new reimbursement rules to encourage more natural births, the problem of unneeded C-sections had been rising dangerously in recent years:

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