As always, be sure to check out economic news on The Stash, environment and energy coverage on The Vine, the latest on health care at The Treatment, metro policy debate on The Avenue, and Marty Peretz's The Spine. Also be sure to take a look at TNR's new blogs by William Galston, Simon Johnson, Ed Kilgore, Damon Linker, and John McWhorter.
It’s certainly been a big news week for lady parts, as some of my lady colleagues at TNR have pointed out today. But while the conservative fear-mongering about “government rationing” is an obvious political ploy, some vital questions about how much women will have to pay for preventative care in the Democratic health-care bill have yet to be resolved.
Reid’s merged Senate bill left out part of an amendment that Barbara Mikulski had successfully introduced into the Senate HELP legislation, which requires insurance companies to include women’s preventative services as part of all minimum benefit packages, for little or no cost. Mikulski argued that women of child-bearing age end up paying an average of 68 percent more in out-of-pocket costs, partly due to reproductive health needs, and often ended up delaying or forgoing care (like mammograms) because of the expense. The provision—which was in neither the House nor Finance Committee legislation—was slated to be in Reid’s bill this week, but “CBO decided at the last minute there was a problem and it was removed until that is resolved,” Mikulski spokesperson Rachel MacKnight said in an email today.
The problem, according to sources familiar with the issue, was that the Mikulski’s amendment wasn’t specific enough in terms of how it would determine which services would be covered, simply saying that it would be it up to the discretion of HHS to set the guidelines for coverage. As such, the provision was so broad that CBO ended up having to give it a very high—i.e. expensive—score, and Reid ended up leaving the language out of the bill.
Today the European Union finds itself with two new top leaders--Herman Van Rompuy, the EU’s first president, and Catherine Ashton, the new high representative of foreign policy. If the names are unfamiliar, you’re not alone. In fact, the buzz surrounding Van Rompuy, who has been the Belgian prime minister for less than a year, and Ashton, who was most recently the EU’s trade commissioner, is that there is no buzz.
Take this morning’s headlines from around the world: “Leaders lambasted over low-profile EU job nominees,” “Europe’s leaders strike up the bland,” “Von Rampuy—The Reluctant Leader,” “Herman Van Who?” and “Van Rompuy-Ashton appointment: The EU has opted for the quiet life.”
So who are these people?
Like Michelle, we’re happy to see The New York Times giving front-page space to the new recommendations for mammograms and pap smears. And we, too, hope that the revised pap smear guidelines aren’t subjected to the same shameless politicization that quickly engulfed the mammogram ones. But we want to quibble with Michelle's point that “cervical cancer simply doesn't terrify women en masse the way breast cancer does.”
Breast cancer is indeed a much bigger threat to women. This year alone, according to the American Cancer Society, about 10 times as many women will die of breast cancer than of cervical cancer. But there's a generational gap when it comes to dread about these diseases. For women who are in their twenties, like us, cervical cancer is very high on the list of health fears. It’s not difficult to see why: We've come of age in the Gardasil era, with everyone from public health officials to gynecologists to even teachers telling us how urgently we need the vaccine to protect us against HPV, the virus that causes the vast majority of cervical cancer cases. (The FDA recommends vaccinating girls as young as nine.) And we’re constantly reminded of how ubiquitous HPV is: The CDC estimates that 20 million Americans currently have it, while another 6.2 million will be infected each year. Stunningly, more than half of college-aged women get HPV within the first four years of having sex.
It’s safe to say that the increased focus on HPV screening and vaccination has been a good thing, because the rate of cervical cancer deaths has dropped significantly over the last 50 years. But, like the Gardasil push, more screening has also heightened anxiety among young women. You'd be hard-pressed to find a woman our age who--if she hasn't faced the situation herself--doesn't know someone who has dealt with the fear that an abnormal pap smear causes, the subsequent, painful test to determine if there are pre-cancerous cells on the cervix, and the (again painful) surgical procedure to remove any dangerous cells. Add to all of that the sexual stigma that accompanies cervical cancer (it is, after all, a cancer that you get from a highly contagious STD), and it's clear why so many young women are freaked out.
Here’s hoping that, in addition to reducing harmful and invasive procedures that science deem unnecessary, the new pap smear guidelines help women breathe a little easier.
I was pretty shocked by this new poll that found that 52 percent of Republican voters think ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election for Obama. I wanted to get some perspective, though, so I looked for polls that assessed voters' feelings about the 2000 elections. I figured that, even with hanging chads and all, fewer Democratic voters would have considered Bush illegitimate back then than those Republicans who now feel that way about Obama. So I was pretty shocked to find this CBS Poll from January '01, which found that 76 percent of Democrats didn't consider Bush the legitimate winner of the 2000 election. Now, granted, this poll was taken only a few months after the Florida fiasco--which, unlike ACORN, was actually real, not to mention fresh--but still . . . 76 percent!
Is someone from the Pentagon taking a shot at Holbrooke in that WashPost story on Obama's "reset" with Karzai that Jason linked? Note this:
"We've been treating Karzai like [Slobodan] Milosevic," a senior Pentagon official said, referring to the former Bosnian Serb leader whom Holbrooke pressured into accepting a peace treaty in the 1990s. "That's not a model that will work in Afghanistan."
Who played the critical role in dragging Milosevic to a peace agreement? Holbrooke. And his negotiating style amounted to diplomatic brute force, leading Bill Clinton to say that Holbrooke had "the same character as Milosevic."
Perhaps Holbrooke's just been stuck with the role of Obama's bad cop in Kabul. But to date is seems possible that Holbrooke's hard-driving style simply wasn't suited for our Karzai problem. There is, after all, a big difference between Afghanistan today and the Balkans in the 1990s. Back then, America was an unchallenged superpower with enormous leverage over Milosevic's small Serbian nation. Today America is stuck in a quagmire and has little to no leverage over Karzai. That presents a completely different challenge. Which may be why the Post also includes this:
And State Department envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, whose aggressive style has infuriated the Afghan leader at times, is devoting more attention to shaping policy in Washington and marshaling international support for reconstruction and development programs.
Sometime last year, I remember watching a video of Barack Obama addressing his campaign staff in Chicago. The talk took place after Obama had won the Democratic primary. It was a pep talk, and the theme was, “Now it’s really serious, we have to win.” One thing Obama said stood out. He said that if John McCain won, none of the important issues facing the country would be solved, and he singled out climate change. I don’t care what McCain promises, Obama told his staff, if he wins, he’s not going to do anything about it.
At the time it struck me as perhaps a bit unfair--McCain had demonstrated what seemed to be genuine understanding of and passion for the issue. But it’s pretty clear now that Obama was right.
Politico has an excellent story about how McCain has abandoned his support for climate change legislation: McCain has emerged as a vocal opponent of the climate bill — a major reversal for the self-proclaimed maverick who once made defying his party on global warming a signature issue of his career.
Now the Arizona Republican is more likely to repeat GOP talking points on cap and trade than to help usher the bill through the thorny politics of the Senate.
McCain refers to the bill as “cap and tax,” calls the climate legislation that passed the House in June “a 1,400-page monstrosity” and dismisses a cap-and-trade proposal included in the White House budget as “a government slush fund.”
Politico suggests that the change in McCain’s staff has played an important role:
Current and former aides suggest that staff changes since the campaign could also have something to do with the change in tone. Several of McCain’s longtime staffers, including top aide Mark Salter, left the office after the campaign. And Floyd DesChamps, a Commerce Committee aide who worked closely on the McCain-Lieberman climate bill, left Capitol Hill after McCain gave up his longtime seat on the committee last January.
The staff that remains, say former aides, lacks the institutional history on the issue and the ability to steer McCain toward productive solutions.
Another factor, not mentioned by Politico, is that McCain is facing a right-wing primary challenger who’s currently running a dead heat.
Of course, if McCain had won the presidency, he’d also be surrounded by conservative aides--that’s just the intellectual infrastructure available to any Republican president. And he’d also have pressure from the right. All in all, it seems pretty clear that the remaining traces of the progressive McCain that emerged from 2000 through 2003 have finally been extinguished.
Wow. Big week for women: How often do both our boobs and our cervices hit the front page of the NYT?
The newly released recommendations regarding cervical-cancer screening really should not provoke anywhere near the angst and anger of the mammography debate. In this case, the science is clearer, and even the more prominent groups upset about the revised breast-cancer screening guidelines are OK with the new Pap smear ones. (Besides, cervical cancer simply doesn't terrify women en masse the way breast cancer does.)
Of course, with the health-care-reform death-match draining all sense and reason from public discource, plenty of piggish political warriors will be unable to resist pitching these recommendations as part of a fiendish government plot to balance the health care books on the reproductive systems of American women. Sarah Palin, unsurprisingly, is out in front on this.
It's like with the abortion sideshow in the reform debate: Never is the uterus so popular as when it can be wielded as a partisan tool.
Related Links:
"Another Word On The Cervix," by Marin Cogan and Seyward Darby
"The Fate of Lady Parts in the Senate Bill," by Suzy Khimm
Mark Halperin, whose Photoshopping privileges should’ve been revoked ages ago, is running with the above doozy today. You see, Senator Landrieu’s first name is Mary, and since she hasn’t decided whether or not to allow the health care debate to proceed, she’s being chased after by a few bungling, desperate men. With only some very major details left aside, it’s almost exactly like the movie. Hilarity! And yet something tells me maybe Halperin forgot what got Mary’s hair to stick up like that?
TNR’s Seyward Darby, who indexed Going Rogue for us earlier this week, is going to be talking Sarah Palin with Brian Lehrer this morning at 11:40. It’s 93.9 on the dial if you live in New York. If you don’t, check it out here.
It's all over the news today that Oprah Winfrey will end her syndicated talk show in 2011, after 25 seasons.
No need for women--or the book publishing industry--to panic. The assumption is that Oprah will move some version of her gab fest to, or at least make frequent appearance on, her soon-to-be-launched, modestly named cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (aka OWN).
But Oprah's impending move is grim news for both CBS, which owns the show's lip-smackingly lucrative syndication rights, and ABC, where the show is largely aired, in many cases in the 4:00 slot that serves as lead-in to the local news.
Hear that pounding? It's the sound of another giant nail being driven into the coffin of broadcast tv.
As Obama ratchets up the rhetoric against a dithering (heh) Iran, an opposition leader offers this advice:
The international spokesman for Iran's main opposition movement called for President Barack Obama to increase his public support for Iranian democrats and significantly intensify financial pressure on Tehran's elite military unit, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Unfortunately, the spokesman thinks the regime is incapable of cutting a deal with the West over its nuclear program, because that program is fundamental to its very survival. Yet he also says that military action will only rally public support around the leadership. I suppose that leaves regime change as the only plausible alternative to seeing Ahmadinejad and Khameinei get the bomb, but that's easier said than done.
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