Half Changed World

One of the joys of our system of employer-provided health insurance is that the odds are pretty good that if you lose your job, you'll also lose your health insurance. 

Well, you can continue your coverage with COBRA, but relatively few workers who have just lost their job can afford to pay 102 percent of their premiums for an extended period of time. The average COBRA payment eats up something like half of the average unemployment insurance benefit.

If you're young and healthy, you might be able to buy an individual plan for less than your COBRA payments, especially if you're willing to accept a high deductible and hope you don't get sick.  If you have children, they might qualify for public insurance, through SCHIP or Medicaid, but unless you were seriously living paycheck to paycheck and have no assets, you probably won't qualify.

The Economic Recovery bills moving through Congress attempt to deal with this problem in a couple of different ways:

• it would provide a federal subsidy for part of the cost of COBRA payments
• it would extend how long you could continue to participate in your former employer's plan if you were within 10 years of qualifying for Medicare, or had worked for your old employer for at least 10 years.
• At least on the House side (it may be in the Senate bill too, but I haven't found it), it would let states cover workers receiving unemployment benefits under Medicaid, without regard to income or assets.

I'm not an expert on health care policy, but this strikes me as a bit of a kludged together package.  For one thing, it leaves out the 60 percent of unemployed workers who don't qualify for unemployment insurance, most of whom probably didn't get employer-provided benefits in the first place, and so can't get COBRA either.  For another, COBRA is a pretty expensive way to cover people — Medicaid is  lot cheaper. 

I'm not really objecting to the proposal — it's better than doing nothing, and I recognize that health care reform isn't likely to happen in the next month.  But this really isn't a substitute for doing health care reform for real.

I'm just back from a quick vacation (a weekend with my family and then an overnight at Great Wolf Lodge*), and facing about a million unread emails, so here's a short book review post.

This week's book is the autobiographical Outwitting History: The Story of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky.  Like Three Cups of Tea, this is the story of a man who found his life's mission pretty much by accident.  In Lansky's case, his mission was the rescuing of Yiddish books that were going to be thrown out, and the founding of the National Yiddish Book Center.

I picked it up because of TC's recommendation and she's right, it's neither preachy nor pedantic.  Lansky's got a good comic storytelling voice, and turns a potentially dry topic (oh look, we found some more books) into a pretty funny one, full of love for both the books and the people who gave them to him.  (And the discovery that Meir Kahane was Arlo Guthrie's Hebrew teacher nearly gave me a heart attack.)

Yiddish is, of course, an all-but-dead language, and the reason there were so many books for Lansky to rescue is that all the people who actually read Yiddish have been busily dying off and their children had no interest in the books.  Some Orthodox Jews still speak Yiddish, but they have little interest in the mostly secular books that Lansky collected.  Mixed in with his funny stories about rescuing books in the rain, being fed by every donor, and giving a talk at a resort in the Catskills, Lansky tries to make a serious case for why people should still care about Yiddish.

That said, I'm not sure he succeeds.  And I say this as someone who took a course in Yiddish in college, much to my parents' bemusement.  (I took it mostly because my favorite professor was teaching it, and I would have taken almost anything he taught.  But it's also a fascinating mongrel of a language, with a Hebrew alphabet, a mostly Germanic vocabulary, but a primarily Slavic grammar.

So, I enjoyed the book (although it could have been a bit shorter without losing much).  But I think I might send you to read an actually Yiddish story instead.

* Fairfax schools were closed Monday and Tuesday. Tying this to the main topic of the post, I was struck by the number of Orthodox women at the waterpark, getting totally soaked in black dresses and hair coverings.  They seemed to be having a good time — more power to them for figuring out a way to enjoy a park while maintaining their version of acceptable dress.

I have to admit, I sort of rolled my eyes when I read the plea in my inbox today from NOW with the claim that "Roe is still under attack."  Obama is expected to repeal the global gag rule although apparently not today.  And at the inauguration, we joked that after Justice Stevens swore Biden in, he was saying "thank god, I can finally retire."

But then I read Cecily's posts today.  First, she reminded me of the problem of the lack of availability of doctors who will perform abortions.  And then she notified me that Virginia is once again considering making it a crime to fail to report a miscarriage to the police.

We've defeated this bullshit before.  Let's do it again.  If you live in Virginia, here's the link for finding out who your state senator is.

Update: For the record, here is Senator Obenshain's response to comments, where he acknowledges that the bill is far too broadly drafted for his intent, which he claims was to eliminate the "it was born dead" defense for infanticide.  However, given the history of a very similar bill four years ago, either Obenshain is lying or he didn't even bother to do cursory research before introducing the bill.

OK, I know you're all probably getting sick of my obsessing over the inauguration, but indulge me for one more post.  I'll get back to being my usual jaded wonky self soon enough, I promise.

I loved these pictures of Obama's first day on the job.  It still hardly seems real that he's actually the president.  So it's amazing to see him in the Oval Office, getting down to business.

At work, everyone was trading their inauguration stories.  It sounded like the people who just wandered down to the Mall and found spots near the Washington Monument generally had a better experience than many of the people who had tickets, who spent a lot of time on lines to get through security (and some of whom didn't make it in at all).

I really enjoyed reading about the experiences of these kids from Chicago who were selected for a trip to DC at Share My Inauguration.*  They clearly appreciated the historic moment, but also had a definite kids' perspective on the whole experience.

As I said yesterday, I had a better time at the inauguration for not being responsible for keeping D safe and happy.  I think he probably showed good judgment in turning down my invitation to come with me.  But I'm also a little sad that I don't think he appreciates quite how momentous a day it was.  He's learned about segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr. in school, but it's a pretty abstract concept to him.  And there's something lovely about that innocence too.  But I wonder if 8 years from now, he's going to be pissed that I didn't schlepp him down to the Mall so he could claim bragging rights.

One of the things that was interesting about the inauguration is that everyone there was consciously aware that it was a Historical Moment.  I wonder if the people who attended the March on Washington knew right away that it would be Important.  I'm pretty sure that most of the people who attended Woodstock (the other comparison I heard a lot) didn't know that it was an Event until after the fact.

* Full disclosure: I was asked to plug this site as part of MomCentral blog tour, but I'm happy to do so.  They seem to be great kids, and I'm glad that they got the opportunity to be here.

It really was a day to remember.

I'm assuming that anyone reading this has already read news coverage, so I'm only going to post about my personal experience:

The transportation logistics were convoluted, but not terrible given the huge number of people they were transporting.  The 16S bus we had been promised didn't exist, but that didn't really matter.  Bypassing L'Enfant Plaza and getting dumped at Judiciary Square instead probably cost us an hour of walking around, but gained us the experience of getting to walk through the 3rd street tunnel.  On the way home, we didn't even try to get on the metro near the Mall, but walked across the 14th street bridge to the Pentagon.  We passed a woman who suggested that it would be grand to have no cars and pedestrians walking down the middle of Independence Ave all the time.

The lines for the ticketed areas were a total mess.  The silver line literally looped back onto itself at one point.  We lucked into being right nearby when they opened up a new gate, but I'm not at all surprised that some ticket holders never got in.  There was no one managing the lines or providing information that I could find.

The Mall was a madhouse
(we were jam packed so tightly that I literally couldn't move my arms
for most of the time, and I could only see small pieces of the Jumbotron, let alone
the actual events) but it was still a glorious day.  Everyone was just
so happy and excited and buzzing.  I've never been in that tightly packed a crowd other than for short periods on the subway, but it was ok.

I really wasn't that cold, except on the way home.  I guess we were packed in so tightly we kept each other warm, like penguins.

That said, I'm glad that D turned down my offer to come.  He would have been tired and uncomfortable and unable to see, and I would have had him on my shoulders for hours, and we both would have been cranky.  It was a day for going with the flow, and I'm particularly bad at going with the flow when I feel responsible for other people's happiness.

The crowd was more integrated than any event I've attended that I can think of.  The woman in front of me (white) was 6 months pregnant and part of a group that was 4 adults and 16 children. She's a lot braver than I am.  The woman next to her (black) said she was only there because her 91 year old mother wanted to be there.

I'm not generally a fan of Rick
Warren, but it was moving to hear so many people around me saying the
Lord's Prayer under their breath around me.
 

The crowd was a lot more rowdy than you could tell from the TV
broadcasts — there was lots of cheering for Ted Kennedy and Jimmy
Carter as well as Bill Clinton and all of the Obamas, and there were
pretty loud boos for Bush, Lieberman, and Clarence Thomas.  (Some for
McCain, but not as many as for the other three.)   And there was lots
of singing of hey nah, good bye.  Chants of Yes We Can and Obama while the dignitaries were arriving.

I don't think the people around us
knew that Aretha was going to sing, so there were whooops when she was
announced. 

I couldn't really hear most of the speeches — the audio wasn't very
loud, and there was also an echo effect from the multiple jumbotrons —
so I watched the whole thing over again once we finally made it home.

Here's a photo I took during Obama's speech — by holding my camera over my head and snapping in the general direction of the screen.  The view from my eye level was much worse.

Forgot to mention: Everyone in my section was amused by a squirrel who was clearly freaked out that there were so many people under ITS TREE.  At one point it got up the nerve to jump from one tree to another, and there was an audible cheer in our area. 

At last year's office holiday party, I won in the gift swap a keychain that counted down the number of days until Bush left office.  At the time, the number was horrifyingly large, but we're down to less than a day now.  (The keychain died sometime last summer, frozen somewhere in the 150s.)

I lucked into a pair of tickets for the swearing in ceremony, so T and I will go.  I gave D the opportunity to come with me, but the idea of standing in the cold for 5 hours didn't appeal to him, so we got a sitter.  We're not leaving the house until 7 am, so I don't expect to be able to see much, but I got a kick out of just wandering around the mall on Sunday, even though we were in the group shut out when they closed the checkpoints.

Great discussion of This Land is Your Land — and the fact that Pete included the "private property" verse — over at Crooked Timber.

T pointed out to me tonight this Onion article from January 2001:

"During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to
the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring
citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed
conflict in the next four years….

"On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation
by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession,
which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in
consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the
recession even further."

It's time for some change.

I spent much of the day immersed in the details of the recovery legislation that's being introduced in the House.  And all I can say is, wow, we're really in a whole new world.

I know, there's still a long way to go between this preliminary bill being introduced and something being signed into law.  (I watched my schoolhouse rock, you know.)  But, for someone who has spent much of my life fighting for incredibly modest incremental improvements, it's just mindboggling to read a bill that in one stroke would do so much.

Just to give one example: you might remember that last fall, I was excited that the Senate tax bill would lower the threshold at which families begin to qualify for the child tax credit to $8,500.  Well, this bill would lower the threshold all the way to $0.  If a family with a child earns $1, they would get a $0.15 tax credit.

This is just totally outside of my zone of experience.  The only time in my life when Democrats have controlled both the Presidency and both houses of Congress was 1993-1994.  And Clinton was so convinced that he needed to bring the budget deficit under control that he famously complained that they had become "Eisenhower Republicans." 

So, wow.

I was thrilled to read earlier this week that Tom Geoghegan is running for Congress, for the seat that Rahm Emmanuel is vacating.  It's a special election, which usually means really low turnout, and there's about 10 people running for it, so goodness knows whether he's got a shot, but I'm excited enough about him that I squeezed out a contribution for him.  Thomas Frank called him an "unrepentant New Dealer" and that's probably fair enough.  He's a lifelong labor lawyer, a supporter of single payer health insurance.

But the main reason that I'm supporting him is that he wrote a book that changed my life.  It's called Which Side Are You On?  Trying To Be For Labor When It's Flat on Its Back.  It begins:

The book is sad, funny, and poetic.  And it convinced me that tilting at windmills is a perfectly reasonable way to spend your life.  The next thing I knew, I was taking  David Montgomery's classes and a few years later I was in public policy grad school. 

My copy of the book is still on my shelf, and I just picked it up.  I had forgotten that Geoghegan had signed it for me.  It's dated November 1994, a few weeks after the election that brought us Newt Gingrich and the Contract with (or on) America, and I must have been pretty discouraged when I talked to him, because what he wrote is "For some good it may do — Read Coles!  Then just put it all aside, and do it all with as much style as you can."

Anyway, I'm not the only person who Geoghegan has impressed.  Here's Kathy G writing about canvassing for him, and Katha Pollitt and David Sirota and James Fallows and Rick Perlstein (author of Nixonland) even Mickey Kaus

Oh, and if you're having trouble spelling his name, you can also find his website at www.tom09.com

On vacation with my in-laws, I did manage to read a few books for fun. One of them was Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book.  It's fiction, but based on the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a rare illuminated Jewish manuscript, which was protected from the Nazis by a Muslim cleric and also survived the bombings of Sarajevo during the wars of the 1990s.

The title of the book is both a play on the traditional notion that Jews are "the people of the Book" (e.g. the Torah) and a description of the contents, as it follows the stories of the different people who were involved with the creation, use, and protection of the manuscript over the centuries.  Brooks uses the story to highlight stories of multi-cultural friendship in a part of the world known for its ethnic feuds. The story unfolds backwards, with each story tied to a piece of physical evidence found in the Haggadah, and at times reminded me of a highbrow version of a James Michener concept.  But Brooks writes very well, and I enjoyed the story as it unfolded.

By coincidence or serendipity, my in-laws gave me a reproduction of the real Sarajevo Haggadah for the holidays — purchased long before I showed up with the novel.  I certainly appreciated the gift more for knowing the story that went with it.

In writing this review, I remembered that I blogged about another Brooks book, March, a few years back.  I think I liked that one a bit more.

It still takes my breath away to think that in just over a week, this man is going to be sworn is as President of the United States.  I'm sure he'll piss me off sometimes, but I really can't think of anyone else I'd rather have as President right now, even if there are people whose list of policies look closer to mine.

I think I've decided against taking the boys downtown, although it kills me a little to be so close and not to be there.  But we wouldn't be able to see a thing, and it's going to be cold, and they just don't have that much patience.  I took them to see him at the town meeting in Alexandria during the primaries, so they can tell their kids someday that they saw him.  (I'm told that my great-great grandmother Betsy Segal saw Mr. Lincoln when he came to New York to give his speech at Cooper Union and she was a little girl.)  One of my friends is having a kid-friendly party, so I think we'll go there, and watch on TV and wave flags, and read stories from Our White House.

I'm not going to any of the inaugural balls, but there are a couple of parties that I'm considering.  My boss is having a get together on the evening of the 20th, if I can figure out how to get to her house in Maryland from Virginia.

What are you doing?