The Speech

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Yin and Yang

Paul Krugman is for the public option.

David Frum is against it.

Their arguments are mirrors of each other. As John Dickerson argues, even though the President has lost a lot of trust with the public on health care reform, the public is still in strong favor of reform. The question now is how and what.

Healthcare week!

Big week for Healthcare. Obama has his big speech tomorrow night in front of Congress, and he looks like he may come out guns blazing after giving a preview of his speech at a AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic on Monday. All the columnists are out in full-force giving assessments and opinions, so let's get started.

Bill Moyers wrote the President an open letter encouraging him to fight.

Joan Walsh has been very encouraged by Obama's Monday speech.

There's another piece in Salon looking at current health care costs and why we Americans get so little for such a high price.

The last post really got me thinking. If you are a conservative Republican, shouldn't you be supporting cost controls for health care? You cannot argue with the fact that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are going to bankrupt this great nation of ours in my lifetime unless changes are made, and yet we aren't seeing any big ideas coming from the Republican side of the aisle in Congress. Aren't Republicans supposed to support competition? I agree that the Democrats have been really bad about getting behind a plan and showing solidarity, but all Republicans have done is spread fear, misinformation, and refusal to participate in any meaningful change. How does that help? Doing this for short-term gains and hurting Obama is really, really dumb. Now, I would argue that simply adding the 45 million people to the current health care system without any other changes is also really, really dumb. I do see some middle ground in there though. I've talked about different ways to have middle ground several times on this blog.

Ezra Klein has a post about how the public option does not mean cost control, and I have to agree with him. He also takes a look at Max Baucus' new health care bill. He also says that the problem with getting health care reform passed doesn't have as much to do with Obama as it does Congress, who actually writes and passes legislation.

David Frum says that regardless of what kind of speech Obama gives, he must face up to the reality that he has helped create.

Al Franken talks down an angry healthcare group who crashed his tent at a Minnesota fairground.

For those who still think our current system is just fine the way it is, see today's front page of USA Today, Bill Moyer's presentation of Critical Condition, the documentary by Roger Weisberg that takes an unflinching look at healthcare in America. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has his new piece that looks at health care.

Link madness

So it's a busy day. I'm a little miffed because the weather forcast for the weekend has completely scuttled my family's plans to go camping on the coast. Oh well. Onto today's topic.

Tim Geitner has laid out his plans for financial regulation. As The Atlantic notes, he does it in an op-ed in the Financial Times in an attempt to get the European banks on board before the G20 summit later this month. The Atlantic also helpfully notes various responses to Geitner's plans. My take: This is very encouraging and somewhat unexpected, as I thought that we had passed the point where reform would happen. Reform hasn't happened yet, but the fact that it is now being pushed on hard is really good. My opinion of Geitner has just gone up. (Maybe something similar will happen with health care, where it looks to late and then stuff happens that is great. Still too early to tell on both.)

Paul Krugman has an excellent story in the NYT magazine this week that examines how economists were so wrong about the economy.

And finally, David Brooks has some pointers for Obama's speech to Congress next week. He cites this Atlantic story about healthcare and this Brookings Institute study.

People don't like more government...

But if you cry out for reforms in the private industry (banking, healthcare, war) then what else is there? As Noam Scheiber notes in response to David Brook's recent NYT column:

All of these things do increase the role of government in the economy. But once you concede that the problems need to be addressed, there isn't much of an alternative. And Obama's approaches are pretty scrupulous about not increasing that role more than necessary, which seems to be the whole conceit. Sure, you could do these things in marginally less centralized ways. But, as Brooks concedes, that probably won't matter PR-wise, since, "Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does." So the idea that there's some less-centralized way of achieving Obama's goals that would be much more popular politically — which Brooks suggests — seems pretty unlikely to me.

Ok, so this video has some problems with it, and the health insurance as fire insurance analogy is a little bit wierd (I do like the part where you have to call around and find a fire station that is in your plan while your house burns). But it does raise a good point about the government being able to run some services ok. Now, a lot of people would argue that the police don't do a good job doing something, or that water treatment is on the verge of collapse, but you do get the idea here. I do think that if those 10 ways to fix health care are done, then you don't need a public option or government-run healthcare, because those 10 ways really will take care of the costs and improve care.

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