The American public should have a lot of options so as to “pursue happiness,” one of the major purposes to form a government as proclaimed by author Thomas Jefferson in the United States Constitution. I applaud that and more.
The most debated one by name recently, is the Public Option which Democrats craved for their health care legislation on the grounds of human rights, but really it is for vote getting purposes among those of similar ideology and all converts who want what they want when they want it, or as they hypocritize, for “the benefit of the consumer” an idea which frames a major world view divide in US politics.
There is probably a Chinese fortune cookie somewhere saying “Your happiness will come from ObamaCare”.
It is sold as an option for individuals to elect to get health care “insurance” from the government rather than the “greedy” insurance companies (who nonetheless donate a lot of money to Democrats for some reason and incidentally, recently way more than to Republicans).
When contemplating putting the government in the position of competing with private enterprize as a way to “keep them honest” one might consider how that worked out with Fannie Mae, the GSE-Government Sponsored Enterprise in cohoots with private commone stock shareholders. The shareholders lost ALL of their money, tax payers are hundreds of millions in to both GSEs now including Freddie Mac. The government, ie those who pushed a home ownership agenda into the unqualified ranks of borrowers with fanfare, created a false market and when Wall Street figured out how to compete without the implicit, later proved, government guarantee of the GSE debt and obligations, we had a perfect storm. This from the Huffington Post about Barney Frank’s pubic option.
A major recipient of Fannie Mae’s largess, albeit indirectly, was Barney Frank, the combative Democrat from Massachusetts. He was a member, and later the chairman, of the House Financial Services Committee, one of the most powerful on the Hill, charged with oversight of “all components of the nation’s housing and financial services sectors.” The committee also watched over regulators such as HUD, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
Fannie Mae was one of the committee’s top priorities. As such, its members were targeted by the company for special treatment if they were supporters — and punishment if they were not.
Frank was a perpetual protector of Fannie, and those in his orbit were rewarded by the company.
In 1991, for example, Fannie Mae hired Herb Moses, Frank’s partner and a recent graduate of the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Frank praised Moses’ qualifications in a conversation with Gerald R. McMurray, the company’s vice president for housing initiatives who had for decades been staff director of the House Banking Committee’s subcommittee on housing and community development.
In an interview, Frank said that he was an advocate for his partner because his partner was well-qualified.
“Herb had been an economist with the Department of Agriculture and he went and got an M.B.A. from the Tuck School and was interested in a job,” Frank said. “I talked to Jerry McMurray and said: ‘Herb’s a very good economist and has a business degree.’ ”
Almost immediately, Moses was being interviewed by a throng of Fannie Mae executives. A former company executive who first met Moses as he went through the interview process at the company recalled: “Barney wanted him to have a job at Fannie Mae so the word was Johnson wanted him hired. He was just getting out of school and we all sort of bid for him. Ultimately, we chose him to be in our targeted community affairs group, the people who were looking for ways to increase our footprint.”
Moses’ title was assistant director for product initiatives and two of his projects involved relaxing Fannie Mae’s restrictions on home improvement loans and small farm mortgages. He stayed at Fannie Mae for seven years.
In late 2010, Frank was asked whether Fannie’s hiring of Moses had put him in a conflicted position as a legislator voting on matters relating to the company. “I don’t think it influenced me at all,” he said. “I was not totally engaged with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
But the record shows Frank exercising a deep and abiding interest in defending the companies as Congress was crafting the 1992 legislation that would protect taxpayers against losses and ensure the company’s safety and soundness in the future.
During a congressional hearing that year, Robert D. Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office, voiced his concern that taxpayers might be left holding the bag if Fannie tumbled: “Making sure that Fannie and Freddie are entities that are independent, that have some visibility, that have safety and soundness as their prime objective, I think, is a way to ensure that the taxpayer is protected at those times when the klieg lights go off.”
This comment triggered so fierce and unrelenting a cross-examination of Reischauer by Frank that Henry B. Gonzalez, the subcommittee chairman, had to admonish the Massachusetts congressman to let the witness answer.
Frank fumed that concerns about safety and soundness of Fannie and Freddie were overdone. “The focus on safety and soundness to the exclusion of any concern about their mission suggests to me that what we’re going to get is a result where safety and soundness become, not the primary but the exclusive focus at the sacrifice of our ability to do housing,” he said.
In 2010, however, after concerns about the companies’ safety and soundness had been proven justified, Frank said: “I really have no recollection of that ‘92 Act.”
Fannie Mae also made $75,000 in contributions to a Boston nonprofit group, the Committee to End Elder Homelessness, cofounded by Elsie Frank, the congressman’s mother. The company also awarded its “Fannie Mae Maxwell Award of Excellence” at least twice to the group. A newsletter issued by the Committee to End Elder Homelessness thanked Frank for “working behind the scenes to open many doors for us to help achieve our goal.”
Whenever concerns were raised about Fannie growing too large and potentially perilous to taxpayers, Frank would defend the company vociferously. During a House Financial Services hearing in 2003, Frank and the company’s other favored members of Congress maintained that the company and Freddie Mac presented no potential harm to taxpayers. “The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see,” Frank said. “I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially.”
So goes the case against any pubic option.
A legitimate candidate for a public option, unlike Unlimited Insurance Coverage for Everybody or Government Competition and worthy of consideration could be a significant change to the way voter elect politicians.
One interesting way which exists in several election venues such as Ft. Collins, CO. would give each voter a way to rank every candidate on the ballet from best to worst.
Another one, recently promoted by Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC (More Shouting Not By Conservatives), calls for allowing the voters to vote for or against every candidate.