Broder doesn't get angry very often. After all, the Dean has his reputation as the Wise, Judicious, Evenhanded Old Pro of the Political Wars to maintain. A President can reign for eight years, ignore warnings of an upcoming terrorist attack, lie us into a war costing thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars, imprison people without cause, engage in massive wiretapping, create a system of kangaroo courts, and turn the Federal prosecutorial power on his political enemies in a manner worthy of a banana republic, but the judicious, evenhanded David Broder won't raise his voice.
But when it comes to health care reform, Broder was seethingly angry two weeks ago, and he's pretty upset today, too.
Needless to say, the senile old fart's arguments are bad, the 'facts' he's basing today's column on are from a discredited source, and this alleged walking encyclopedia of American politics in the mid to late 20th century invents a completely bogus history to justify the argument in his earlier column.
One could possibly give the benefit of the doubt if Broder had written just one column or the other. But putting the two together, the only thing that makes sense is that he's just looking for any excuse to oppose health care reform, regardless of his protestations that he supports it.
Today, his problem is that the Dems have failed to pay for universal health care, so it will bankrupt us. Much of his argument, unsurprisingly, is lifted from Fred Hiatt's op-ed from earlier this week, which I already shredded here. But there are some goodies - Broder backs his claims with:
An analysis by the Lewin Group shows that the Energy and Commerce Committee bill...
Yep, the Lewin Group, of which Broder's own paper had this to say:
Generally left unsaid amid all the citations is that the Lewin Group is wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's largest insurers.
More specifically, the Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that was accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association, a physician's group, of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data.
Generally left unsaid, yet again.
And this:
unless something intervenes, Congress is headed toward repeating a familiar pattern. Just as it did under Republican control in the George W. Bush years, when it passed but did not pay for a Medicare prescription drug benefit, it is about to hand out the goodies and leave it to the next generation to pick up the bill.
Through my library, I've got access to the WaPo database going back a couple of decades. So I did a search for pieces written by Broder, published in 2003, that included the word 'prescription.' And I read them. Let's just say that in the unlikely event that I'd been expecting Broder to express concern about whether that bill had been adequately paid for, I'd have been disappointed.
In those articles and op-eds, with titles like "High Cost Of Inaction On Health Care" (June 1, 2003), "GOP May Get a Boost With Seniors" (June 28, 2003), "W's New Deal?" (August 6, 2003), "GOP: Masters Of the Grand Finale," "Time Was GOP's Ally On the Vote," and "Bush Poised To Claim Victory - But Bill's Effects Are Hard to Gauge (November 21, 23, and 25, 2003, respectively), Broder never once raised the slightest question about the effects of the prescription drug benefit on the nation's finances, even while mentioning the debate over the size of the subsidies to be given to the insurance companies to enable them to 'compete' with Medicare.
Finally, while Broder admits that the bill is deficit-neutral over the next decade, he's against it because the Lewin Group says it fails to be deficit-neutral or bend the cost curve after that.
In other words, if you can't solve all its problems for all time up front, no universal health care for you!
Is that the attitude of someone who's actually in favor of health care reform, or someone who's giving lip service to supporting it, while looking for any excuse to sink it?
Which brings us to his October 30 column:, where he angrily denounces the public option's opt-out provision, evidencing his willingness to sink the bill over that alone:
Consider the precedent that would be set if a major piece of social legislation were to be passed with a states' rights provision. Imagine, for example, if Franklin Roosevelt had signed the first Social Security law with the proviso that any states with Republican governors and legislatures could exempt themselves from its coverage.
This might have seemed a minimal concession to conservative opinion. But what would have followed? How long before some states would have demanded an exemption from the wage-and-hour law that established a minimum wage? And what about the clamor in a broad swath of the country when the first civil rights law was passed?
The principle behind almost all liberal legislation is that there are certain values fundamental enough that they should be enforceable at the national level, even if a significant minority of voters or a certain number of states disagree.
That issue was settled in the realm of economic policy during FDR's second term, after enough new Supreme Court justices were seated to uphold the New Deal measures an earlier conservative majority had struck down. In the area of civil rights, Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress put an end to the doctrine of states' rights. Are we now to reopen those issues to make it easier for this generation of Democrats to short-circuit the legislative process?
Except that, well, he's wrong about everything here. And did I mention ignorant?
As DougJ and commenters at Balloon Juice remind us, states could choose whether to participate in Medicaid, the product of " Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress." Arizona didn't participate in Medicaid until 1982.
More recently, state participation in SCHIP isn't mandated, and states have eligibility and benefit requirements that differ greatly. And reaching back to the Roosevelt era, while state participation in the unemployment insurance program is all but mandated, once again, eligibility and generosity/stinginess of benefits varies widely from one state to another. Social Security itself, in order to win the votes needed for passage, initially excluded wide swaths of employment categories in a manner that excluded the vast majority of blacks from eligibility.
'Settled issue,' my left butt-cheek.
And even though Broder thinks the public option isn't all that essential to the overall bill, he thinks the opt-out provision is worth damning the entire bill over on the basis of his bogus history. Again, he's just looking for an excuse to hate on this bill.
Admit it, Broder: you just hate to see the Federal government finally making health care available to all. You haven't been this angry about anything since Clinton got a blowjob.
