Reply #302: All very irrelevant. [View All]

[SanchoPanza]

The DLC will argue that the party should move to the right whether it wins, loses, or maintains its present majority. It's committed to an electoral ideology and no amount of contravening evidence will convince it otherwise. They have an underlying set of assumptions about how American politics works (everything is national, etc) that are fundamentally bogus, which shouldn't come as a surprise seeing the DLC strategists like Bob Shrum have been losing elections for more than a decade. But you can have some assurance in the fact that the DLCs influence within the party has declined rapidly since about 2005.

Of course centrist and conservative Democrats will try to represent their particular constituencies. That's what politics is. The problem is that, for a variety of reasons (many of which pertain to the Progressive caucus as well, but no one really wants to hear that), they aren't negotiating within the party in good faith.

I'll give you an example related to HCR. Progressives want Single Payer. The easiest way to get Single Payer from an institutional standpoint is to go through all the Medicare statutes and remove the age requirement. Problem is that a lot of these centrist and conservative Democrats come from districts and states that are getting screwed over by the current Medicare reimbursement rates, as those rates are tied to a geographic practice cost index that give more money to more urbanized areas. In other words, their doctors and hospitals are being paid less through Medicare than in districts and states represented by Progressives, and they're not particularly amiable to the idea of making that issue worse. Progressives, on the other hand, want to reduce costs for everyone, and the best way to do that is through the reimbursement rate framework.

Is this debated anywhere in pubic? Of course it isn't. Kent Conrad and John Rockefeller may be discussing it behind closed doors but, publicly, Progressives shout that opponents to framework (which also applies to a public option, as that would be tied to Medicare rates) are only objecting because they are in bed with insurance companies. Opponents shout that Progressives are a bunch of hippies that hate doctors. Nothing gets accomplished because neither side is exposed to the reasonable criticism of their own ideas.

As for the insurance reforms, disagree all you want. If you want to have a discussion about that disagreement, you'll have to say why.