Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Out of the bubble

I’ve spent the last few days in a self-imposed bubble, taking advantage of some days off to work on some poetry, watch some movies (I recommend Syriana, which I watched on DVR today, and Sherlock Holmes, which is a real thrill ride — though Holmes purists might disagree), and play with the dogs.

I also have studiously avoided the news because too much of it is focused on year-end wrap ups that do little more than regurgitate stories that we’ve read before.

I’ll hit the blog with some thoughts tomorrow — my annual musical wrap (what was it I was saying?), some thoughts on health care and more.

Right now, however, I’m going to bed.

Time for Senate reform

This piece by Ezra Klein is spot on — and very eloquently says what I’ve been saying for a half dozen years: Reform the Senate.

Loose lips and hyperbole

I missed this story on Thursday, but it is worth posting today because it shows the dangers the healthcare reform bill poses in its current form.

If, as the Times reports, the impact will be limited, leaving the vast majority of people to deal with an only modestly changed market:

Now that the Senate has caught up with the House by passing a sweeping health care bill, lawmakers are on the verge of extending coverage to the tens of millions of Americans who have no health insurance.

But what about the roughly 160 million workers and their dependents who already have health insurance through an employer? For many people, the result of the long, angry health care debate in Washington may be little more than more of the same.

As President Obama once promised, “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.”

That may be true even if you don’t like your health plan. And no one seems to agree on whether the legislation will do much to reduce workers’ continually rising out-of-pocket costs.

Again, I am not arguing that the bill should be killed — I remain ambivalent, convinced that a better bill could have been crafted had progressive Senators and the president stood up to Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and the moderates and stopped reifying them, but also concerned with the political damage defeating the bill could cause.

What I think needs to happen is that bill supporters need to be honest. Stop painting the bill with such overheated language and just tell the public what it likely will do and how that is good for all. There is too great a danger that the hyperbole will backfire, that the millions who are unaffected by reforms, who find themselves at the mercy of the industry, will turn their back or worse — buy into the BS arguments coming from the GOP.

Long pacts could mean long regrets

Omar Minaya should read this story before lengthening his rumored four-year offer to Jason Bay or two-year to Bengie Molina. Both are good players who may not pay off for that long — Bay is a not particularly athletic outfielder who strikes out a lot and was in the midst of an extended stretch of mediocrity with Pittsburgh before being traded to Boston last year.

(By the way, I predicted the Soriano deal would prove a bad one longterm for Chicago back in 2006 right after it was inked. Do I get points for that?)

Head fake on health care

The health insurance reform plan approved by the Senate the other day can best be likened to a misdirection play in football, where all the action seems to be going in one direction while the real play is heading in another. In this case, we a plan being called “once-in-a-generation reform” — a bit of overstatement, really — when what we have is relatively modest insurance reform that expands coverage by mandating consumers buy plans from an a cartel-like industry that holds all the cards.

The misdirection here is the opportunity the bill gives the White House and the Democrats to claim a victory even if it is rather hollow — no public option (let alone any thought of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach) to create competition to keep costs down, no expansion of Medicare, no changed incentives, no alternatives for businesses stretched to their limits, but millions of new customers for the insurance companies.

So, is it worth passing? That’s a difficult question. There are good things in this bill and there is the possibility that it can be used as a foundation on which to build real reform. The problem is the discourse surrounding the bill. If it were being described by the press and the president as what it is — something short of reform — that would be OK. But it’s not. It is being described as once-in-a-generation reform and that creates the danger that this bill has become a once-in-a-generation chance to fix our broken system. If the House cannot fix it, cannot toughen this bill up, progressives need to walk away from it.