Obama’s Healthcare Speech

Normally I don’t weigh in on issues outside the environment/ energy/climate subject area.  However, with much of the media and population focused on President Obama’s big health care speech Wednesday night, I wanted to add in a thought or two.

I’m for a public option.  I think it makes sense, and I’m not afraid of it spurring a government takeover.  99% of the Republicans in Congress have been absolutely ridiculous when it’s come to health care legislation.  Regardless of what the legislation looks like, there aren’t going to be any Republicans on board save Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins in the Senate.  At the same time, at least a handful of Democrats in the Senate aren’t going to vote for a public option.  Unless President Obama is prepared to use budget reconciliation as a means to pass the legislation, there is no way the public option is getting into the legislation.  And while I’m for it, I do think that you can have real reform without it, even if it isn’t complete reform.

When I look at the public option and compare it to what I think the environmental activists have overblown with our own climate legislation that passed the House this past June, it’s most like the demand for a 100% auction of permits.  There were many environmental activists that kicked and screamed about the climate bill only auctioning 15% of the permits, and how this undermined the entire workability of the legislation.  As I’ve written many times, this is false.  Sure a 100% auction was preferable, but the climate legislation still does a lot of good things.  In fact, I think in some cases environmentalists focused too much on the percentage of permits auctioned when we should’ve tried to hold the line on more important provisions such as the emissions targets and the renewable electricity standards.

I think that the left could actually stand to make the healthcare bill a lot stronger, and the coverage a lot closer to universal, if it focused on improving and strengthening(and in some cases maintaining) other provisions of the bill such as the subsidies to help make healthcare affordable, and the scope of the employer mandate.  I want a public option, but I think the desire is just as much a political necessary as a health care reform necessity.  One intriguing possibility I heard Republican Olympia Snowe say she would support, and other troublemaking Democrats might as well, is a health care bill where the public option is a trigger that only polls if certain objectives of the health care reform legislation are not met.  I think this sword hanging by string over the insurance industry would achieve the desire for more honest rates almost as well.

The liberal Democrats shouldn’t tank health care reform if it doesn’t have a public option.  If Obama decides to go without the public option, sure make a lot of noise to your supporters, but just let it go.  If health care reform dies, the prospects of Obama being able to enact any other major bills(psst..climate legislation?) or reforms that the left favors would disappear.  We’d be a lot more miserable for the next 3 years if we killed health care reform in the name of the public option than if we let it slide and made a lot more progress over the next 7 with a good but not great health care bill.

As for the speech, there have been plenty already, and I think this one is overblown.  I’m not seeing whose mind it’s going to change.  Everyone who is for will stay for.  Everyone who is against will stay against.  The only poll Obama can change is that of the lawmakers in the room with him.  He isn’t going to shift it in his favor by talking.  He’s going to shift it by easing up on the public option since that’s where the line has currently been drawn in the sand.  He knows it too.

Mike Tidwell Links Climate Change and Health Care, Calls on Obama to Step Up

This slipped my mind the other day, but the director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network(CCAN) Mike Tidwell, also terrific author and a friend, had a great column out in the Baltimore Sun on Tuesday.  In it, he shows the linkages between avoiding catastrophic climate change and addressing health care, and makes the case that we shouldn’t put climate change aside to deal with solely health care.  The main target of this demand is President Obama, who has done a lot of work talking up health care in the public and holding town hall meetings, which he hasn’t done thus far on the climate bill.  Tidwell gave me a copy of this op-ed this past Tuesday when we both took part in a lobbying meeting with Senator Cardin’s Staff and the Senator, and I made a mental note to post it on here, but forgot.  I agree wholeheartedly with the conclusion of the column, which is that Obama needs to get louder and more vocal if a meaningful bill is to pass the Senate.  The only part of the column I take issue with is when Mike calls the bill barely better than nothing.  Although I have my fair share of criticisms, I’ve written before that I feel this bill does plenty more good than harm.  I’m reposting the column below.

Don’t put climate on back burner

By Mike Tidwell

July 7, 2009

President Barack Obama may have made history last November, but he seems deaf to history’s loudest call right now. The president clearly believes that health care reform, above all else, will define his early presidency. But even if Mr. Obama scores total success on health care, few future Americans will care or remember as long as the Earth’s ailing atmosphere goes untreated.

Climate change, it turns out, is the ultimate public health issue. And yet the House of Representatives passed a mere band-aid of a bill last month on global warming. Why so weak? Because Mr. Obama, with his 63 percent approval rating, was surprisingly AWOL for most the climate debate, essentially telling House leaders to hurry up and pass something – anything – so we can get on to the real issue of health care.

But cheap prescription drugs won’t do much good if our cities have filthy drinking water in coming years due to global warming. A “public option” on heath insurance? I’m all for it – but it will mean little if killer heat waves and mega-droughts parch the nation while Florida becomes a chain of malarial islands

If this sounds melodramatic, keep in mind that a joint report from 13 federal agencies – released by the White House last month – stated that, due to global warming, hurricanes are already getting bigger and droughts are lasting longer in America. And sea levels will continue to rise, up to four feet this century, according to the massive scientific report.

If there’s one thing health experts agree on, it’s this: Clean water is a core determinant of good health. Just visit Calcutta or much of Africa to see what a bacteria-laced gulp does to a 5-year-old child. It’s alarming, then, to know that New York City alone has 14 wastewater treatment plants located exactly at sea level now. And Philadelphia’s main source of drinking water is already dangerously vulnerable to saltwater intrusion from rising seas.

Where will the clean water come from along much of the East Coast after just one or two more feet of ocean rise? Will we ring ourselves and our sanitation infrastructure in levees, living at the mercy of earthen walls? That didn’t work out well for the health of New Orleans.

No one’s arguing that health care reform should take a back seat to climate action. It’s just that if we do one without the other – if we make short-term health care affordable but long-term health systems impossible – we’ve failed.

The truth is, we can do both. Drastically cutting our use of fossil fuels, especially coal, will simultaneously reduce a whole host of conventional pollution dangers, ranging from asthma to elevated mercury in our fish. These avoided health costs, combined with the growing affordability of fuel-efficient cars and powerful wind farms in the Midwest, mean even strong action on global warming will cost just a few cents per day for average Americans.

This is why Mr. Obama must take charge right now and totally redirect the climate debate in the Senate. The Waxman-Markey bill, narrowly approved by the House, is barely better than nothing at all. It sets weak reduction targets for greenhouse gases and gives free pollution permits to many of America’s dirtiest corporations. It strips the Environmental Protection Agency of the power to regulate carbon from coal plants and creates a mind-numbing trading system of carbon derivatives.

The Senate must now make a U-turn, heading back to the president’s own original climate framework unveiled last February. All polluters must pay for greenhouse gas emissions, the president said then. No exceptions. And 80 percent of the money should be rebated directly to middle- and lower-income Americans. That leaves a healthy $15 billion per year for investments in clean energy and green jobs. The Obama approach was simple, fair and – with populist appeal – built to last.

But the president didn’t fight for the plan, yielding to House Democrats who caved in to the pollution lobby. How do we get back on track? First, look at health care reform again. It, not climate policy, dominates the front pages for one simple reason: It’s what Mr. Obama talks about loudest. He’s involved. With a similarly strong voice on global warming in the Senate, Mr. Obama can redirect national attention toward a more complete, long-term picture of health.

James Hansen, America’s top climate scientist, says we have less than 10 years to reverse the rise in greenhouse gases worldwide. Less than 10 years to save the planet’s health and our own. Mr. Obama must now be our Lincoln – our Churchill. The ineffectual U.S. House bill passed last month shows Congress simply cannot do it without a push from the president.

As U.S. climate policy is ironed out in coming months, American voters should beseech the White House at every legislative step: Where was Mr. Obama on key committee votes? The floor debate? How much did he do? How hard did he work?

We must ask these questions now, holding our president accountable, knowing that future Americans – their health at stake – will ask the same questions for centuries to come.

Mike Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in Takoma Park and author of “Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast.” His e-mail is mtidwell@chesapeakeclimate.org.