Dan Amira at NYMag‘s Daily Intel spots Madame Pelosi talking about SCOTUS and the ACA:
Nancy Pelosi’s political predictions seem at times to be based more on wishful thinking than on an objective assessment of reality. “One thing I know for sure is that Democrats will retain their majority in the House of Representatives,” she said in May of 2010, a few months before the Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives. Yesterday, at the Paley Center for Media, she predicted that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Obamacare in a 6-3 vote.
As some of the commentors there point out, Pelosi is a damned smart & effective leader, and not given to throwing around numbers just to hear her own voice. The hour-long “PALEY100: Private Luncheon in Conversation with Nancy Pelosi” video starts slow — no teleprompters! — but it’s a fun listen when you’ve got the time. The healthcare portion starts around the 26.00 mark, and Pelosi’s prediction falls at 33.36… followed by a couple of rude, thoughtless, unserious cracks about the family-planning choices of those individuals most invested in the GOP War Against Women, which made me LOL-for-true.
PeakVT
Nancy Pelosi’s political predictions seem at times to be based more on wishful thinking than on an objective assessment of reality.
OMG! a politician spins! holds back of hand to forehead and faints
Cripes. Pelosi is a party leader, not a pollster or pundit. Of course she’s going to be optimistic about her party’s chances. I wouldn’t expect anything less.
Raven
I know people here don’t care about mornin joe but it is hilarious this morning. He was running his mouth about Romney and his crew talked over him so he went into a major pout and wouldn’t talk. Priceless!
WereBear
@Raven: If they could guarantee that every day, I might tune in :)
c u n d gulag
What she says for public consumption is one thing – what she does behind the scenes is another.
She is a “real smart cookie,’ was a great Speaker, and hopefully will be again.
You want to see her polar opposite?
Take a look at J. Orange Boner sitting in the Speaker’s chair today.
kindness
The GOP makes a big deal out of what an abomination Nancy Pelosi is.
Doesn’t matter. That’s their thing. They would do the same thing to any Democrat. That’s all that matters to them, the D after their name.
May the FSM bless Nancy. She makes me proud.
kay
Karl Rove does the same thing, did the same thing in ’06, but we never hear about “wishful thinking”, instead he’s a hard-headed “boy-wonder” operative.
Of course she says that. She can’t announce she’s going to lose prior to the election.
I’m okay with rank and file Democrats here being so pessimistic on the Supreme Court (and they are: there is no faith in that court here, at all) because rank and file Republicans here are absolutely celebrating that this is a done deal, hoping it boosts Romney’s chances at the beginning of the real campaign (June). I think it’s too early for high-fiving, and they are doing that.
They’re counting on Obamacare going down to provide a boost for Mitt Romney, which seems to me to be a recognition of how weak Romney is as a candidate.
Ron
I don’t get how her saying that is “wishful thinking”. As other people pointed out, party leaders have to say stuff like that. Also, this was in May 2010, which IIRC was before it was really clear what was coming. It’s not like she said this in late October of 2010. As far as how the SCOTUS voted, nobody really knows, but the fact that legal scholars pretty much universally thought the administration’s case was a slam dunk and we’re sweating the outcome says more about the makeup of the current supreme court than anything else.
kay
@Ron:
I think it’s hard to wrap your head around because the implications are so grim and far-reaching. Forget the court, and their credibility, and the presidential election. Putting aside all that, the truth is Democrats are the only game in town in health care, and we’ve been trying to do something about health care for 70 years in this country because we have to.
This is a real, pressing substantive HUGE problem, and “malpractice reform” isn’t going to touch it.
There’s Democrats on health care, or there’s nothing. That’s the hard truth. Democrats have taken every single political hit on reforming health care, w/Clinton and then the 2010 midterms and then Obama’s presidency. One side has taken the entire brunt of the political punishment. They won’t risk it again, and Republicans have nothing, so that leaves…nothing.
There’s denial about this. I read Maureen Dowd recently and she announced that Obama made a political error in taking it on. But she doesn’t get it. Someone has to do something, or, eventually, this problem is going to become real to (even) people like Maureen Dowd. It’s not a choice, attempt to fix or don’t attempt to fix. The system is failing.
WereBear
@kay: So true. I think a hard-hitting ad would be all the bypasses, cancer surgeries, and other serious illness that the Senate has been treated for… on the taxpayer’s dime.
Why aren’t they self-sufficient and thrown on the mercies of the free market? Why aren’t they running yard sales to pay for that next round of chemo?
I know a lot of times Democrats don’t think they need to state the obvious because it’s a no-brainer. But that is who are are dealing with when it comes to Fox viewers.
kay
@WereBear:
My own feeling is it didn’t reach a kind of critical political mass because the truth is, most white college educated people have employer-provided health insurance. That’s just the stark truth. It’s something like 96%. It’s interesting, because the situation in small business is much more dire. A lot of them don’t have health insurance, and don’t offer it, and that’s a change. It went from 60% offer to 30% offer in Ohio, from 2000 to 2012.
Health care is a class issue, and we’re so squeamish about admitting that, because, man, that’s an ugly thing to look squarely at. There is a physical difference, a physical effect, to doing manual work compared to desk work over 20 or 30 years. People who use their bodies at work break down in a way that those of who don’t, don’t. We won’t even admit that! We’ll talk about the fact that more of them smoke, or that they have poor diets, but God forbid we should admit that someone who does physical labor is different at 50 than someone who doesn’t.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@kay:
It’s the same idea of “The poor CHOOSE to be poor, if they worked better, they’d be rich!” It’s predestination crap, the morality of wealth. The white collar folks, the rich in general, etc., they obviously deserve better health care because they are blessed and the lowers, those who don’t have, obviously don’t have because God hates them, thus they should be shunned and cast aside and given scraps because that’s all God has deemed them worthy of.
MariedeGournay
What kind of leader says they’re going to lose prior to an election? This Amira guy doesn’t think things through does he?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
What politician in their right mind would go into an election saying, “Well, we’ve had a good run, but I think wevre in for it this time; we’re bound to lose, and lose big.”? If Pelosi had said that, a lot of voters might have given up and stayed home; the Democrats might well have lost more seats. Telling the press that you just know you’re going to do well isn’t wishful thinking; it can save you some seats here and there on a bad night. Jeez, I wouldn’t have thought ot was that hard to understand…
JoyfulA
@kay: And that class difference in health and health insurance is even starker in Social Security. Lots of desk-bound people favor raising the retirement age for everyone without understanding that manual laborers like warehouse workers and construction people have broken-down bodies that can’t do their jobs at age 60.
dr. bloor
@kay:
This is dead on, and one reason I’m not completely self-immolating about the prospect of ACA being overturned is that even with the law, everyone is going to be back at the table in about three years anyways when those oh-so-nice employer-provided health plans routinely come with 5K and 10K annual deductibles and the employee picks up 25-35% of the premiums. There are still too many Americans who have no clue as to the personal and systemic costs of health care in this country, but they’re about to get an education.
kay
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
But it’s a political problem, in stark terms, because there isn’t a “health care crisis” for a lot of people, and those people vote. Obama spent an enormous amount of time reassuring those people, that 96% of white college educated voters, that they’d “keep their plan”.
A big part of why Democrats lost in 2010 was because Republicans told people who have Medicare that Democrats were taking 500 billion from Medicare. In a way, he was talking not to the uninsured but to the insured.
I made canvassing calls for Ted Strickland in Ohio in 2010. I was calling Democrats. The biggest complaint I heard about the health care law was fear that people were going to LOSE the health care they had, because it’s a limited commodity to them: if someone else gets some, they get less.
Schumer said it, and he was telling the truth. He said they wouldn’t benefit politically from health care reform, because he was just looking at the people who vote and the people who have health insurance. That’s stark, but it’s also TRUE.
daveNYC
@dr. bloor:
Three years? Are you on crack? It’ll be another decade, at least.
dr. bloor
@daveNYC:
Three years max. I started taking credit card payments for the first time last year because my solidly middle class folks couldnt pay their deductibles up front. Those tax-friendly medical savings accounts? No one has two nickels to fund them.
Three years.
kay
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Obama and Democrats had to do two things at the same time. They had to (endlessly, constantly) reassure those who have health insurance (and Medicare) that they wouldn’t lose that, while at the same time reaching those who don’t have health insurance.
The second part is easy, right? People who have NOTHING are pretty easy to sell on SOMETHING. But the first part is really, really difficult, because “change” to people who have something means “risk” they’ll lose. Their political problem (and it’s a big one) is, the people who have health insurance vote, and write editorials, and conduct round tables. They had to sell them, and that’s a much more difficult sale.
Obama would open every health care town hall with “you can keep your doctor and keep your plan”. There’s a reason he did that, but it was never admitted or acknowledged, because that’s the third rail of health care. The class issue.
the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady)
@kay:
Some quick back of the napkin math would tell me that for every 21-26 year old that loses their parent’s insurance, there is probably at least one parent, and the likelihood is high two parents, who could be counted to vote Dem in the fall. If there are several million (too lazy to look up the exact nos.) twenty somethings now insured that weren’t, I think Dems can count on a few million motivated voters and potentially new Dem voters, in addition to the kids themselves. I don’t see how taking essential things away from people helps 1% Romney.
Bulworth
As long as Nancy Smash! didn’t criticize the totally non-partisan, non-ideological justices, because doing so will drive all our MSM punditry for the fainting couches, then where will we be?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
So many things in this country are class issues, but as a rule, rich people really want to believe they got where they got all on their own steam. And it’s crap. I’ll give them this: a lot of them got really rich by working hard, or at least by working a lot of hours. (Though a whole shitload of them only got rich because their families were rich and they inherited the business or because their families were rich and they knew the right people to get high-paying work, but some of them have worked hard.) But even the ones who worked hard only got to the point where their hard work would earn them buttloads of money because a whole buttload of people did a lot of even harder work before they ever lifted a finger.
I was talking to somebody not long ago, and I brought up this little puzzle: What would the U.S. look like if there were no roads? How much would Mitt Romney have ever made if he lived in a country with no roads? We don’t even think about roads most of the time, but we need them. We get to work by driving on them. When we need to buy something, we go out shopping, and most often, we drive on roads to get there. The stuff in the stores gets to the stores because somebody drives trucks filled with stuff to the stores. The businesses that make the stuff that goes to the stores need roads to get their supplies and tools and workers to the factory or workshop or sweatshop. It goes on and on and on this way.
But who builds these roads? Who keeps them up? Who builds the bridges that thakes them over creeks or rivers or gorges? Who puts up the stoplights and signs that keep us from hitting each other when we drive? Not Mitt Romney. Not some “self-made” rugged individualist. We do. Society. Specifically, the government, which is society’s agent. And we’re all better off for it.
I lived for a while in Honduras, where there are lots of towns with no roads. Sometimes I’d go out into the country, where what passes for a “road” is a dirt track. It’s rutted when it’s dry, and so swampy it’s uusable when it rains for a few days. And these towns, such as they are, are a few hundred people or fewer most of the time. And they’re all on their own out there. There’s no running water. There are no lights. No stores. People live on what they can grow in their yards, and many of them are born, grow up, live and then die, never having been more than a few miles from home. It isn’t a recipe for making hundreds of millions of dollars at Bain Capital; it’s a recipe for eating home-grown beans and corn and drinking silty water you draw from the creek and sleeping in a bamboo hut your whole life.
So every time I hear about one off these would-be Galts going on about how “nobody ever gave me any help. I earned what I have!” I want to bash their faces in. True, you might have gotten really, really rich in large part because you showed up at work and did what you had to, but you only got to the point that you could get that job because you were born standing on the shoulders of uncountably many people who did all kinds of back-breaking work for you, you thankless asshole.
But I’d love to see Romney or Scott Walker or the Kochs or any of these other turds live a month in Sal Si Puedes, Honduras. Good luck with that, assholes; you know what the name means, by the way? It means, “Get out if you can.” But we’ll come by and save you in a day or two, after you panic and call for help on the cell phone you snuck along with you. Oh, sorry, I forgot. You can’t call way out there. There aren’t any towers. Ooh, yeah. Sorry about that. Well, you can get one of the locals to start a fire and you can send up smoke signals. Dicks.
kay
@the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady):
It’s a great point. I don’t know what’s going to happen, politically. I know Democrats here are doing a sort of slow-build- anger-calculation because they went RIGHT to “the Supreme Court are going to throw another election” so they’re already beyond the political commentary.
But I don’t know what happens. I’m too superstitious to do high-fiving like Republicans are here, so even if the hearing had gone well, I wouldn’t be celebrating. They ARE celebrating, though. They think it’s a huge win for them. I’m not so sure.
Steve
@kay: A lot of middle-class folks who are perfectly content with their employer-provided health coverage have no idea how much time their employer spends thinking about the possibility of scaling back that coverage (or even eliminating it) in order to cope with the spiraling costs. When you go to your review at the end of the year to get that 2% raise, your boss never boasts, “also, we’re going to keep your health coverage at the same level,” but maybe he should, because it’s hardly a given. A lot of people just assume their coverage is always going to be there for them no matter what.
kay
@Steve:
I once spent 40 minutes trying to talk a McDonald’s manager out of her employer-provided plan, because it’s an absolute shameful rip-off. Eventually I realized that this was going nowhere, because part of how she identified as “a manager” was the fact that she had health insurance. I was insulting her, inadvertently. She had busted ass to get there, started as a line employee, and she now could provide “health insurance” for herself and her kids. It was a point of pride for her.
bin Lurkin'
@JoyfulA:
Put the desk worker of the same age in the same job and they couldn’t do it either, in fact if they don’t know what they’re doing they’ll awesomely funny to watch. It’s not so much that moderate manual labor breaks you down, it’s that it gets progressively harder as you get older.
FWIW, I’m sixtysomething, have done a fair bit of what many would consider manual labor and am in better overall health than a lot of people who are younger than me and haven’t done the manual labor. Part of that is the genetic luck of the draw, part of it is that I figured out tricks for all the jobs I’ve done that reduced the physicality of it to more tolerable levels.
El Cid
It’s also likely that it’s more an attempt to express political will and perhaps a degree of spin influence than an attempt at an empirically informed prediction.
bin Lurkin'
@kay:
Eh, some of us think we’ll end up with something that’s actually worse than nothing in some ways.
The “bronze” plans are going to unusable for many people in all but catastrophic circumstances simply due to copays and deductibles.
People really do want health care rather than health insurance and some of us have dealt enough with insurance companies to be highly dubious of claims they will be brought significantly to heel.
...now I try to be amused
I have good employer-based health insurance, and I always think of the possibility of losing it. Why don’t most employer-insured people, especially in a recession? I dunno. (Don’t try to tell me the recession is over for working people.)
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
(Emphasis mine.) Excellent post. Unfortunately, the Right has sold the message that government is not our agent but our adversary. I suppose the reality is that the Right sees society itself as their adversary. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society.”
satby
@kay:
I see this all the time with my friends in construction and warehouse work: yes, on some strength measures they may be in a bit better shape; but they have killer arthritis and skeletal issues that really impact the quality of their lives. And warehouse jobs routinely expect people to be able to lift (repeatedly) 70 lbs (I have a good friend who just interviewed for one yesterday) which is tough for even younger people (my friend is a 52 y/o female). Her whole life has been spent working these kinds of jobs, and how is she supposed to keep doing that in her late 60s, early 70s??
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
Only High Quality Capital deserves health care. The rest will perish, as they should.
__
See? I’m joking! Ha ha!
gene108
Anything that’s not 100% explicitly stated in the Constitution as being a Right is by default a privilege, such as clean air, health care, not starving, etc.
/end right-wing world view
dcdl
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Thank you for stating what most people don’t and can’t even imagine. I wish this would be talked about more.
@kay:
My dad is a landscaper/construction worker who is in is mid-sixties. His knees are crap. He can barely move around and is in a lot of pain. Has slowed down a lot, but continues to work. He has to work for a few more years to pay off company loans than plans to retire.
He’s trying to get partial knee replacement surgery, but a supplemental insurance to Medicare, HealthNet, keeps rejecting the surgery. They say he needs to be using a walker or crutches for twelve weeks and needs to do more steroid shots, etc. He can’t be doing manual labor with a walker or crutches. Steroid shots don’t work. The doctor says there is nothing that will work except for partial knee or by the time it does get approved full knee replacement.
Suffern ACE
@…now I try to be amused:
At my work, I think the plan is good, but then I am single and don’t have much choice in the matter. I use one of the three plans. Now the only people who take this plan are single people. Anyone of the middle class people who have a partner or children, use their spouse’s plan for coverage. What happens for middle class families where both parents have middle class jobs, the chance of going through an uninsured period is much lower, even during a recession.
Barry
@JoyfulA:
“@kay: And that class difference in health and health insurance is even starker in Social Security. Lots of desk-bound people favor raising the retirement age for everyone without understanding that manual laborers like warehouse workers and construction people have broken-down bodies that can’t do their jobs at age 60.”
Lots of idiots, rather, or swine. Try getting even an office job after age 40, let alone 50, or 60.
kay
@bin Lurkin’:
There’s two parts to the subsidy. There’s a subsidy on the premium, for those under 400% of poverty, then there’s a subsidy on the out of pocket costs,
In addition, because preventive care has no out of pocket cost, (that’s what we were fighting about on contraception: what is preventive care, and that’s why it’s worth going to the mat over) they will be able to get preventive care without co-pays or meeting the deductible.
To do an analysis on out of out of pocket cost/practical worth you’d have to look at percentage of premium they’ll be paying, subtract subsidy for premium, then subtract subsidy for out of pocket, then fold in the whole set of services that are covered under “preventive”, because those are exclusive of any co-pay or deductible.
The best specific summary of the PPACA I’ve ever seen is actually in the administration brief that went to the SCOTUS. They had to really pare down the words, while accurately presenting the scope and truth of the thing. They worked on it, and it shows. It’s not sexy, and there’s no opinionating, but it’s worth a read.
Gretchen
@JoyfulA:
Thank you for saying this. This is something that makes me nuts. These 80-year-old Senators think “I’m still working. Why can’t these lazy cusses do the same?” They have no understanding of what it’s like to be a roofer, or a landscaper, or a nurse, or my job where I stand for 9 hours each overnight shift. There are a lot of things you can do just as well at 80 as at 30. My job isn’t one of them, and there are more jobs like mine than those of the senators.
kay
@bin Lurkin’:
This is the list of covered preventive services that would be exclusive of a co pay or deductible. What’s really behind the GOP opposition to this list isn’t contraception, it’s opposition to the whole idea of a list of covered services, because it’s a mandate on insurance companies.
One of the main differences between Republicans and Democrats on health care is Democrats really believe that if they cover prevention we’ll spend less down the road. Conservatives do not believe that. I don’t know how or why they do not believe it, because we already know it’s true, with our vast experience with Medicare, but it simply isn’t in the conservative “belief system”. They don’t DO prevention.
Gretchen
@the Conster (f/k/a Cat Lady):
And both parents and kids have friends who will hear about the problem. This is a real, tangible benefit that people care about and will fight to preserve now that they have it. I hope.
Gretchen
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
I’d be happy to contribute to a fund to send these guys to live off-the-grid in the Honduras for a month. How do we make it happen?
gogol's wife
@kay:
That crack by Dowd made me furious! What did she think was going to happen if he hadn’t taken it on? She has the luxury of sitting in her fur-lined New York Times office and sneering at somebody who’s trying to stop a train wreck. Why, oh why, do I still read her?
Kay
@gogol’s wife:
It’s probably true, politically, though, right? Obama could have done absolutely nothing on health care. He could have said “we have an unprecedented financial system implosion, and we’re going to focus on that”. The carnival would have moved on. That’s the safer political move. But it doesn’t do a thing about the problem.
I have just really grown to hate that fake-sophisticate, all-knowing, smart-ass analysis. It’s SO goddamned easy to churn out and there are SO many paid pundits who rely on it.
I will say this. They will bend over backward not to talk about health care. They will talk about ANYTHING other than health care.
Ruckus
@kay:
This.
And in your earlier post you stated that health care is failing. I disagree. Past tense. It has failed. That it has been failing for 70 years and we haven’t been able to come close to even patching it up(ACA does some of that-Yea!!) is to me a reflection on us as a nation. What the hell are we afraid of as a country that we can’t take care of ourselves?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Gretchen:
Yeah, but I don’t think that would be good to do. Honduras has enough woes without having to deal with those assholes.
Ruckus
@satby:
Sixty two here. Have worked over 50 years with my hands and back. Ailments? Yea I’ve got them. Health insurance? Ain’t got that. Every day when I wake up(hey that still happens so I got that going for me) I wonder what will hurt the most today. And I have to put in another 5-6 years to get full SS so I can retire. Medicare sounds great, 2 years to go for that. Some days I wonder WHAT THE FUCK, how am I going to make that, if this is what 62/63 feels like. And I was of those small business owners. For 21 of those 50 years I owned my own businesses. For the first 15 I had health insurance. But there is no way I could afford it for the last 6. No.Way.No.How.