Paul Krugman

The next thing you know, Paul Krugman will be attacking Paul Krugman – probably from the left! It would go something like, “Krugman is not liberal enough!”

At least it’s not Obama this time.

Anyway, his attack today is not without some justification. There are some old, pasty, white men in the Senate that has taken so much money for so long from big pharma and big medicine that they have forgotten little you and me, the voters. Krugman mentions a couple of these guys in his article today in the opinion section of the NY Times. He mentions two by name, Senators Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad, but there are more than just those two, maybe enough to kill the public health care plan – even enough to kill it using the reconciliation process.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Health Care Showdown – NYTimes.com.

America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.

The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.

He chides the Republicans for doing “all they can do to make the Obama administration a failure”, but he forgets that he himself has done plenty to achieve that same goal as I have railed about here, and here, and here, and more. Krugman is constantly finding fault with the Obama administration and, in effect, is doing just as much or more damage to Obama than the Republicans because his base, all you good readers out there, just gush over Paul Krugman.

This time he’s yelling at some Senators for not being progressive enough, and maybe, just maybe this time he might be on the right track.

What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.

Senator Ben Nelson

Senator Kent Conrad

Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?

Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.

And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”

Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.

It is my opinion that these old, pasty, Democrats have lived in the DC bubble so long that the only contact they have with outside interests are the well paid lobbyists that continually speak congenially with these Senators in the hallways of Congress and over business luncheons. It has gone on for so long that these lobbyists have become their friends and have given them huge, overly-generous campaign contributions.

The lobbyists have been SCREAMING against the public health care plan, so loudly in fact that all the Senators hear now is how wrong the plan is and how unfair it would be to compete with the insurance industry. They aren’t really scared of being “driven out” of the market as the AMA has said recently, but they are terrified of the competition that would cram down their huge profits, their gravy train.

This makes me wonder why “we the people” can’t organize a lobby to counter the corporate greed. It’s a fantasy, I suppose. But it would be nice to have an organization, like say Move On, to have well paid lobbyists roaming the halls of Congress pressing the flesh and pushing the progressive agenda. We could hire some lobbyists who are passionate about the liberal side and could be most effective by getting close to Senators and Congressmen, instead of just sitting back and hurling spit wads at the President.

Maybe we could hire Paul Krugman!?