Lovin' It As It Is

The folks who are absolutely enchanted with their current health care plans are out in force jamming the phone lines, honking horns and demanding that things remain exactly as they are.

God help any member of Congress who tampers with the wonderfulness of things as they are! I’m sure they believe that such rational arguments as horn honks and sign waving are going to change someone’s mind.

I know it’s small-minded of me, but I’d like to know exactly what it is about the current state of health insurance that they love.

Is it being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions? Is it having insurance arbitrarily cancelled? Oh, I bet it’s the “donut hole” in their drug coverage. You know, the time you have to pay full-pop for your drugs.

If they’re self-employed, or don’t have insurance with their jobs, I guess they don’t want to have tax credits for the health insurance they buy for themselves. Having tax credits ‘forced down their throats’ would be simply dreadful. And of course it would be terrible to be able to keep their kids on their health insurance until the kids were out in the job market and getting their own insurance.

Cross-posted to Blogger.

Francine Shacter

Former Democratic Congressional candidate Francine Shacter is a friend of The Data Port. She regularly sends on to me e-mails or articles that have raised her solidly progressive dudgeon to ever higher levels.

Her latest contribution is Gabrielle Giffords’ interview by the Green Valley News. There’s a link at the bottom of this post.

The “interview” begins with a transcription of her opening remarks, unedited, and printed as one solid block of type. It is very daunting to wade through, and creates the impression of some sort of stream of consciousness data-dump. She comes off as one of those extremely bright college students who, by God, wants you to know everything she knows and everything she’s done.

This sort of thing does not do justice to an extremely bright woman who has worked very hard for her district.

Even when GV News editor, Dan Shearer, or his reporter, Daniel Newhauser, ask specific and fairly focussed questions her answers tend to wander.

Giffords needs to treat these sessions with the press as if she were in “campaign debate” mode. She is being very badly served by her advisors, who have apparently given her free rein to simply wing it. She doesn’t do that well. Before major interviews she needs to take time for extensive preparation in short-form answers.

This assumes that her advisors are fully aware of the questions she is likely to be hit with and can help her to phrase her answers. Maybe Mark Kimble, who is joining the communications staff, will help.

The GV News is not without blame in all this. I assume that Shearer and Newhauser are experienced journalists, but it looks to me that they have fallen into a “newbie trap:” the pocket recorder. I know, because I fell into the same trap when I started to do interviews.

You figure, “Hey, this is like stealing money. I’ll get it all recorded and then edit it for print.” The problem is that you let the recorder do the listening and forget to ask the sort of follow-up question that might really make a great interview. You omit interview prep at your hazard; it’s as important for you as it is for your subject.

Throw away the recorder guys, or keep it as backup, and grab your notebooks.

A purely personal note: Years ago I was the producer of an NBC radio news show on WMAQ in Chicago. I had a chance to meet some real old-timers in the print journalism business, and I noticed that their reporters’ notebooks were a good deal like steno pads. I was not surprised  to find  that many of them had developed, and regularly used, a shorthand system for note taking. They did good work.

Here’s the link to the GV News article.

It is always tough to lose an election. It is even worse to win one and then see the advantages of that win thrown a way by a coalition of Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats. Our local Blue Dog, Congresswoman Giffords, has said she strongly supports a public option, but neither Giffords, nor the rest of us, can say exactly what that public option might be.

In his August 13th column Paul Krugman opened with a quote from then candidate Barack Obama:

“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

The Republicans didn’t get the message, which might have worked out okay, if only the Blue Dogs hadn’t crossed the aisle.

It’s time for the President to get tough. Why not a private conference with each of the Blue Dogs suggesting how difficult it would be for their personal legislative agendas to become law if they didn’t re-think their positions on the Public Option?

Why don’t the Democrats simply cut the Republicans out of the process…as the Republicans have done in the past when they were in control; and the way the Republicans in Arizona’s legislature are doing right now. Screw ‘hands across the aisle’  and ‘can’t we all just get along.’ Let’s just cram healtcare reform down their throats. It’s the right thing to do.