Independent Periodic News and Analysis
Number 400, February 20, 2008
On the Web at http://www.nygaardnotes.org/
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This Week: The Bush Budget, and Single-Payer Activism
1. “Quote” of the Week
2. The 2009 Federal Bush Budget, George W. Version
3. Single-Payer Health Care at the State Level: It’s Happening!
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Greetings,
My apologies for the long interval since the last issue of Nygaard Notes. I’ve been busier than usual, the reasons for which I’ll explain in these pages before long.
Believe it or not, there are important things going on in the world that have nothing to do with the upcoming presidential election. They may not make the front pages during Primary Mania!—but I have a growing stack of remarkable newspaper articles before me even as I type these words. This makes me think that I may have to spend a couple of weeks pointing out the Obscure but Important, the Strange but True, and the Shocking but Not Surprising items that I have run across lately in this bizarre wonderland we call The Media. Stay tuned.
It’s hard for me to believe that this is Issue Number 400 of Nygaard Notes already. The first issue was ‘way back on September 5th 1998. It started out as a little writing experiment for my friends and colleagues. Now it goes to over 1,100 people around the world. I am filled with humility and gratitude when I think of all of you who have supported this project over the years. Thank you! Now, let’s get on with the next 400.
Nygaard
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1.
“Quote” of the Week
The excellent group “OMB Watch,” in the February 5th issue of their newsletter “The Watcher,”ran an article called “The Bush Budget Legacy: Misleading Claims and Misguided Priorities.” (“OMB” is the White House Office of Management and Budget, a powerful but little-understood office that “oversees federal regulation, the budget, information collection and dissemination, proposed legislation, testimony by agencies, and much more.”) Speaking of Bush’s proposed budget for 2009, the article said:
“Bush's assumptions about war spending and Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) reform are unrealistic if not outright spurious. His attempt to balance the budget by 2012 requires massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and other popular domestic investments Congress will certainly not enact. His proposal to terminate or radically cut 151 federal programs is fantastical—wholesale cuts to popular discretionary programs are not only unlikely but are irresponsible in the face of worsening economic conditions.
“Most emblematic of the Bush approach to budgeting is found in his deficit forecast for FY 2008. The projected $410 billion deficit is just shy of the record-setting $413 billion deficit set in 2004 only by virtue of a simply unrealistic economic growth forecast. Assuming [Gross Domestic Product] growth at a full percentage point higher than [the Congressional Budget Office’s] assumption (and a half-point higher than Wall Street’s), the president was able to avoid printing a headline-grabbing, record deficit number.”
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2.
The 2009 Federal Bush Budget, George W. Version
“The federal budget is a moral document, and recent proposed budgets have not been indicative of the nation’s values and priorities.”
The above quotation is from a posting on the website of the group “Faith in Public Life.” I quote it here because I agree with it, and because on February 4th the Bush White House released its proposed 2009 federal budget. For a few months now the Congress will work on its own budget, and the final numbers will be agreed on in the fall. (Maybe.)
Since the media tends to report responses to the budget that they get primarily from members of Congress (one-quarter to one-third of whom are millionaires) and other elites, it is difficult to get a well-rounded moral understanding of this hugely-important document. For that reason I thought it would be good to give some resources for analysis of the budget proposal from the point of view of the non-millionaires among us. I include also some resources for educating ourselves about how the process works, for the benefit of those who want to attempt to influence the allocation of public resources, or to help one of your local political or community groups to attempt to do so.
The Coalition on Human Needs (CHN), in their own words, “is an alliance of national organizations working together to promote public policies which address the needs of low-income and other vulnerable populations.” CHN really is a coalition, listing more than 100 groups in its member list. They have a page on their website called “Federal Budget Tutorials” that I think is excellent. Find it here: http://www.chn.org/issues/budget/budget101.html
The National Priorities Project (NPP) is a non-profit research organization that “analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent.” They, too, have a primer on the federal budget process. It has a little more information than CHN, and their “Budget Briefs” do a good job of explaining—in very concise and clear ways—such commonly-misunderstood things as deficits and surpluses, trust funds, “off-budget” spending, and so forth. Have a look at http://www.nationalpriorities.org/federal_budget_101
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities “was founded in 1981 to analyze federal budget priorities, with particular emphasis on the impact of various budget choices on low-income Americans.” They have a special part of their website that focuses on the federal budget’s impact on states, and their overview “The Dubious Priorities of the President’s FY 2009 Budget” is worth a look: http://www.cbpp.org/pubs/fedbud.htm
In my state there is a group called the “Minnesota Budget Project” that “provides independent research, analysis, and advocacy on budget and tax issues, emphasizing their impact on low- and moderate-income Minnesotans and the organizations that serve them.” The MBP is online at http://www.mncn.org/bp/ There are many other states that have such projects, mostly focusing on the effects of public decisions on low- and moderate-income people. Find the organization in your state by going to the website of the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative at http://www.statefiscal.org
A great source of information on the nuts-and-bolts of the federal budget is the group OMB Watch. They really keep a close eye on the White House Office of Management and Budget. Their reports can be a little technical, but if you are interested in how the White House operates in terms of the budget (and much more), then you should look at the OMB Watch website at
http://www.ombwatch.org/ For the real number-crunching types among you, they also have an affiliated website called Fedspending.org which features a “free, searchable database of approximately $16.8 trillion in Federal government spending.” Yikes! This is a complex thing, but should be heavily utilized by journalists seeking to inform their readers about where their tax money is going, and not going. Check it out at http://www.fedspending.org/
In his January 28 State of the Union address the “President ” promised the Congress that “I'll send you a budget that terminates or substantially reduces 151 wasteful or bloated programs, totaling more than $18 billion.” He kept this promise, unfortunately, and submitted a budget that would cut things like public broadcasting funds, and funds for arts in education, and weatherization assistance, and Amtrak, and... well, you get the idea. If you want to see this whole sad list, you can find it online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/summarytables.html Look for “Table S–5.”
There are a lot of ways to try to understand the number $18 billion. One of them is to remember that the budgets for just two aspects of our military—so-called Missile Defense and nuclear weapons—add up to about $18 billion. That is, the “savings” supposedly gained in the Bush budget by slashing 151 programs could be achieved by giving up the lunacy of “missile defense” and ceasing to develop more nuclear weapons.
When I point out that just two programs cost as much as 151 other programs, I fear that it may make it seem as though the 151 must be small and insignificant. That’s not the case. To address that issue, I plan to talk in the next Nygaard Notes about just 10 of those 151—the ones having to do with housing—to give a hint of the impact that these programs can have in the lives of actual people. I’ll translate, where necessary, from the dry bureaucratic language used to describe these programs.
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3.
Single-Payer Health Care at the State Level: It’s Happening!
We’re in the middle of a presidential campaign, and survey after survey shows that health care is the second-most important domestic issue on the minds of the U.S. public (after “the economy”).
How, then, can it be that the idea of a single-payer system of health care almost never appears in the daily news in this country? A Lexis/Nexis search of the nation’s major newspapers for the past month turned up exactly one article with the phrase “single-payer health care” in the lead paragraphs. And that one article was in the Wall Street Journal, and was only there to say that the idea is not “politically feasible.” (In case you didn’t notice, that is an “opinion,” the appearance of which in a “news” article is typical.) As far as I know, there hasn’t been even one serious article on single-payer health care on the front pages of any newspaper for months, if ever.
Is single-payer “politically feasible,” or is it not? A very interesting poll was just released (on Valentine’s Day) by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harris polling organization. The poll, called “Americans’ Views on Socialized Medicine,” asked United Statesians, “So far as you understand the phrase, do you think that if we had socialized medicine in this country that the health care system would be better or worse than what we have now?” Forty-five percent said “socialized medicine” would be better, and thirty-nine percent said “worse.” And these answers were given despite the fact that, as the pollsters point out, “Historically, the phrase socialized medicine has been used to attack health reform proposals in the U.S.”
Seventy-nine percent of respondents in the Harvard poll understand the words ‘Socialized Medicine’ to mean “a system where ...the government makes sure everyone has health insurance,” and seventy-three percent thinks the phrase refers to a system where “The government pays most of the cost of health care.” It would be reasonable to interpret these findings as saying that a plurality of United Statesians would prefer a single-payer health care system to the current system.
Well, despite the fact that people don’t understand the difference between “socialized medicine” and a single-payer system (which is NOT socialized medicine), people do understand that the current system is broken beyond repair and we need something different. And, despite the impression one may get from the lack of mention in the news media, many people are doing something to bring about real change.
I’ve already written about the single-payer legislation that has been introduced in the U.S. Congress, H.R. 676 (see “Single-Payer Health Care: The Invisible Movement” in Nygaard Notes #367). To learn about and find out how to promote this bill, check out the Physicians for a National Health Plan at http://www.pnhp.org/ But perhaps even more exciting are the various initiatives on the state level.
Keep in mind that the Canadian system of national health care (also NOT socialized medicine) did not start as a national system, but began at the provincial level, in Saskatchewan. It proved so popular there that it wasn’t long before the entire nation had to follow Saskatchewan’s example. Now, several decades later, a movement is growing in the United States to try to plant a single-payer seed at the state level, which just may be more “politically feasible” than it is at the federal level.
In my own state we now have a bill—just introduced this week—called the Minnesota Health Act. According to long-time health care activist and researcher Kip Sullivan, the MHA is “a very good single-payer bill, probably the best in the country.” It didn’t come out of nowhere, of course. A grassroots movement has long been working to build support for such a bill. You can learn a lot about that movement, and you can learn a lot about the bill itself and how to support it, at the website of Citizens for The Minnesota Health Plan: http://mnhealthplan.org/
I know that many readers of Nygaard Notes do not live in Minnesota. Fortunately, there are organizations in many states that are working to bring about real reform in health care. From California to Maine, from Florida to Washington State, there are probably one or more organizations in YOUR state, and one place to start looking to find out if there is one is the website of the Universal Health Care Action Network at http://www.uhcan.org/ Click on “See What’s Happening in States Across the Country.” Another place to look is the website of the group “Everybody In, Nobody Out” at http://www.everybodyinnobodyout.org/ – Almost at the bottom of the page you’ll see “Guide to State Groups,” with links to more than 20 states. And, finally, there is yet another list of state organizations at the website of American Health Care Reform.org It’s at http://americanhealthcarereform.org/html/states.html
I hope you will find a group that is doing good work in your area and support it.
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Jeff Nygaard
National Writers Union
Twin Cities Local #13 UAW
Nygaard Notes
http://www.nygaardnotes.org
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