Obama gets medical consultation in healthcare reform pitch

President Obama told doctors this morning that he was confident that Congress would move on healthcare reform this year, though he acknowledged that there were details still to be worked out.

“You look spiffy in your coats,” Obama told the crowd of about 150 in the Rose Garden, most of whom were wearing lab coats. He praised the doctors as being among the medical professionals who know first-hand how important it is to make changes in the healthcare system.

The Senate Finance Committee is expected to pass its version of healthcare reform soon, making it five bills that have worked their way through committees in both houses. The Senate will have to reconcile two bills and the House three.

But among details still to be worked out is what shape a public option might take, whether robust, a government-sponsored health insurance program, some form of cooperatives or just an exchange to make insurance costs more transparent.

The final version of the House bill is expected to have the strongest public option; the version in the Finance Committee is the weakest. Other issues include how to pay for the changes and what consumer protections to demand from the insurance companies.

-- Michael Muskal

Photo: Shawn Thew / EPA

After the jump, check out the latest Twitter updates from Michael Muskal, and your comments.

Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story' challenges many aspects of American life

Although the latest Michael Moore documentary, "Capitalism: A Love Story" has been screening in Los Angeles in a few theaters for a week, the film debuted nationwide Friday.

The consensus of reviewers sampled by RottenTomatoes.com gives the controversial (and funny) doc a respectable 72% "fresh" rating (meaning more favorable reviews than unfavorable ones). L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan's review is equally lukewarm to the movie that uses AIG, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger and even Jesus Christ to help prove Moore's theory that capitalism is hurting America. An excerpt:

Clearly, Moore has not lost his provocateur's gift for stirring the pot, and it is heartening to have a filmmaker take on a subject this all-encompassing and almost taboo. But not even Moore's skill can quell the suspicion that "Capitalism" misses the narrower focus that gave his earlier films some of their punch.

In a sense, "Capitalism" comes by its wide-ranging, scattershot approach naturally. After all, this is a heck of a big subject: Just ask Karl Marx, who spent 18 years researching and writing his multi-volume "Das Kapital." So it's perhaps inevitable because of the ton of territory "Capitalism" covers that this film ends up as the sum of its parts, nothing more.

That said, Moore's scattershot is a lot more interesting than some filmmakers' focus, and many of those individual parts are classic. For one thing, Moore retains the instincts of a shrewd stand-up comedian -- the astonished, baffled looks he often wears are a case in point, as is his decision to include under the rubric of "When did Jesus become a capitalist?" the dubbing of a section of a biblical epic with free-market platitudes.

So now that the film has been released nationally, if you've seen it, feel free to give us your take in the comments below.

-- Tony Pierce

Trailer for "Capitalism: A Love Story" by Overture Films

Schwarzenegger asks what you think of the 'Cow Tails' video

Apparently the governor thinks that when the state's budget crisis has reached a point at which California will have to issue IOUs, debating cow tails should be temporarily terminated.

Meanwhile, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer thinks that some members of the Legislature wouldn't mind if the whole state is forced to shut down, according to L.A. Now:

Lockyer, a Democrat who was previously California’s attorney general and leader of the state Senate, said the state has had “an institutional breakdown.” He sees growing tensions between the Legislature’s majority Democrats and Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger: “I would not be surprised if the Legislature’s response to the governor’s muscle is to say: Fine, shut everything down.”

He aimed some fire at GOP lawmakers, saying he believed there are “a number of Republican legislators that are gleeful about the state shutting down,” if that’s where the fiscal crisis takes California.

Surprisingly wily, Schwarzenegger has been using social media tools like Twitter and YouTube to express his point of view during the budget showdown. On Tuesday, he expressed frustration late into the night. On Wednesday, he had some video produced so he could show that, indeed, in the middle of a crisis, California was debating cow tails.

So is this a legislature that is intentionally dragging its feet to force the state to close down? Does the governor have a point? Or is he overlooking something?

-- Tony Pierce

Can pot save the California budget?

Valuations of illicit activity, whether it’s drug sales, street crime or porn distribution, are notoriously fantasy-ridden. It’s hard to track what are, after all, cash businesses disinclined to file their tax returns on time.

Yet the media always accept such figures as gospel. In the last few months, marijuana’s supposed top rank in California agriculture has appeared in newspapers across the country, including this one, and been cited on CNN and NBC. Often it’s accompanied by other turbo-charged stats, to the effect that the value of the state crop is $14 billion, part of a nationwide marijuana trade worth more than $100 billion a year (including imports).

Is it coincidental that these figures are appearing just when the pot lobby has discovered that the fiscal argument for legalization has acquired real traction among cash-strapped state legislatures? In Sacramento, where a legalization bill has been introduced by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), state officials estimate that taxing weed could bring in more than $1 billion a year.

Yet these facts are all soft. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that purveyors of statistics about illicit activity often inflate them -- whether to claim legitimacy for the activity, or (if they are law-enforcement agencies) to frighten voters into supporting funding for more officers, guns, and helicopters.

On the basic issue of whether marijuana should be legalized, there are sound arguments in favor and sound arguments against. Certainly prohibition places a huge burden on all levels of government, amounting to tens of billions of dollars a year squandered on police, court systems, and prisons, not to mention lives ruined over what is largely a victimless crime.

But the toll from addiction to the legal drugs of alcohol and tobacco is also heavy. Legalization advocates argue that regulating rather than criminalizing pot would give us tools to prevent underage use, a precursor to lifelong drug abuse. On the other hand, allowing the master marketers at Philip Morris and Anheuser-Busch to hawk yet another addictive but legal product wouldn’t be a great way to encourage "responsible" use.

The real danger is that voters, overcome by pot-inspired visions of dancing dollar signs, will make their judgment about the legal status of the drug without fully considering these pros and cons. The truth is, no one really knows how much legalization might earn for the public purse, or whether the gains would outweigh the costs. Given how sketchy the real prospect is of a tax windfall from pot, should we inhale?

Read the complete column: Marijuana valuations in California are hallucinations

-- Michael Hiltzik

Photo credit: Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

Soak the rich, or soak the dead?

Everybody’s familiar with Ben Franklin’s old saw about nothing being certain but death and taxes. But how about the “death tax”?

That’s the loaded term employed by opponents of the estate tax, which has been part of the federal tax code for more than 90 years and the subject of furious repeal campaigns for almost that long.

Thanks to lobbyists and legislators looking out for the welfare of the richest Americans, the tax currently hits fewer than 3 out of every 1,000 estates every year and bristles with exemptions and deferments for the rest. Its contribution to the federal treasury is about 1% of all revenue.

Yet it consumes enormous mind share in Washington. Earlier this month, a new tax-cut proposal from Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) won Senate approval with 10 Democrats, bizarrely, voting in favor. The resolution would raise the exemption on taxable estates to $10 million from the current $7 million (after the death of both spouses) . It also would cut the rate charged on the nonexempt portion to 35% from the current 45%. 

Arguments against the estate tax rank as the most special of special pleading. More than 99.7% of all estates already are exempt from the tax -- 997 decedents out of 1,000. Perhaps 3,000 Americans who died in 2007 left estates valued at $7 million to $10 million; Lincoln and Kyl would have given them an exemption.

As for those left to carry the burden, the number of taxpayers who died in 2007 leaving estates worth more than $10 million was 1,700. Their average estate was $31.6 million. Lincoln, Kyl, and their colleagues actually wasted time on the Senate floor to give such people a new tax break. 

So here's the question: Do these richest of the rich deserve yet another tax cut? Or should we leave the heirs of the deceased to enjoy their inheritances in peace?

Read the complete column: Lay 'death tax' debate to rest

-- Michael Hiltzik

Former Orange County judge backs the legalization of pot; do you?

Steve Lopez visited a former Orange County judge who is not just supporting a bill that would legalize marijuana so that the state could tax it, but he is willing to go on the record to say that the war on drugs is a lost.

I'm sitting in Costa Mesa with a silver-haired gent who once ran for Congress as a Republican and used to lock up drug dealers as a federal prosecutor, a man who served as an Orange County judge for 25 years. And what are we talking about? He's begging me to tell you we need to legalize drugs in America.

"Please quote me," says Jim Gray, insisting the war on drugs is hopeless. "What we are doing has failed."

As far as I can tell, Gray is not off his rocker. He's not promoting drug use, he says for clarification. Anything but. If he had his way, half the revenue we would generate from taxing and regulating drugs would be plowed back into drug prevention education, and there'd be rehab on demand.

Lopez writes "If Gray had his way, no one under 21 could buy drugs. But anyone older than that could legally buy marijuana -- which, he says, causes nowhere near the amount of death and disease as alcohol. The state would need to see how that works, he said, before moving on to legalizing the sale of harder drugs. Sure, he says, legalization might lead to more toking at first, but he believes drug use would wane when it's no longer forbidden and the novelty wears off."

So the question is, what do you think? Have we lost the war on drugs? Is it more economical to legalize the weed and tax it? State your case below in the comments and/or vote in the poll here.

-- Tony Pierce

A state police officer stands amid marijuana plants found in a greenhouse at a ranch in Tecate, Mexico, Thursday, March 12, 2009. According to Baja California State Police, over 3800 plants of marijuana were found in the ranch during an operation. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

Who Should Investigate the Financial Meltdown?

Taking a break from my relentless toil the other day, I turned on the TV in search of a suitable intellectual accompaniment for my nutritious mid-morning snack (12 ounces of vitamin water and a Three Musketeers).

On C-SPAN I found the perfect thing: The House Financial Services Committee was grilling Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about the AIG rescue.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas., took the floor at an early stage to complain about "socialized medicine," as though he had wandered into the wrong committee room. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, obsessed about the "small group of Wall Street types who are making decisions," especially Goldman Sachs & Co., which she described in terms James Bond normally uses to describe SPECTRE.

Their colleagues, meanwhile, emitted what the writer David Foster Wallace might have described as "recombinant strings of dead cliches" about undeserved bonus payments, U.S. taxpayer money paying off foreign banks, and the proliferation and mushrooming size of that new American art form, the bailout.

They showed, in sum, that they have no understanding of the roots or remedies for the financial crisis, and — more to the point — no great desire to understand. They left me convinced that if we are to have a productive investigation of the financial meltdown, it must be taken away from posturing lawmakers.

With the public still clamoring for an answer to the question "How did this happen?" I have accordingly decided to name my own investigative board.

Who would be on yours?

Read the complete column here.

--Michael Hiltzik

Photo: Geithner testifies at a House Financial Services Committee hearing.  Credit: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg News.

Longtime housekeepers and nannies form friendships with employers

"I feel very indebted to Lucy," Sherry Steinberg of Santa Monica wrote of her bond with her housekeeper of more than 40 years. "I feel appreciative of other friends, but I don't feel indebted to my friends."

Steinberg's story was hardly unique; The Times' Home section received letters from many readers who shared her experience of forging strong bonds with housekeepers and nannies. 

Have you had a similarly close relationship with a domestic employee, or are you a housekeeper or nanny who considers your employee a friend?  Share your story here.

Art: Dave Calver, For The Times

Is it time to soak the rich?

The notion that the poor always will be with us has been ingrained in our culture ever since the sermons of Moses were set down by the anonymous author of Deuteronomy.

The financial crisis of the present day raises a rather different issue, however: What should we do about the rich?

That the point is even open for discussion suggests that a sea change is taking place on the American political scene. For decades, the wealthy have been held up as people to be admired, victors in the Darwinian economic struggle by virtue of their personal ingenuity and hard work.

Americans consistently voted for fiscal policies that undermined middle- and working-class interests partially because they saw themselves as rich-people-in-waiting: Given time, toil and the magic of compound interest, anyone could retire a millionaire.

That mindset has all but been eradicated by the damage sustained by the average worker’s nest egg, combined with the spectacle of bankers and financial engineers maintaining their lifestyles with multimillion-dollar bonuses while the submerged 99% struggle for oxygen. (The price of admission to the top 1% income-earning club last year was roughly $400,000.) That may account for the near-total absence of public outcry over President Obama’s proposal to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans -- except of course from the wealthiest Americans.

One factor fueling the public fury over the AIG bonuses, so inescapably in the news this week, is the recognition that so many huge fortunes landed in the hands of the undeserving rich. Some were people who added little value to the economy but merely moved money around in novel, excessively clever and ultimately destructive ways; others were corporate executives who got ridiculously overpaid whether they succeeded or failed at their jobs.

A few years ago it was common to think of the rich as a special breed; we may soon come around to George Orwell’s view that the only difference between rich and poor is income — "The average millionaire," as he put it, "is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit."

But that only begs the question: Are the rich soaked enough by our income tax system, or should they be soaked more?

Read the full column here.

--Michael Hiltzik

Photo: Protesters demonstrate outside an AIG office in Washington, D.C.  Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Rich investors buying and selling mortgages -- you got a problem with that?

The latest development in the mortgage market fomenting outrage in the streets and condemnation across the media spectrum is the spectacle of rich investors -- Wall Street traders, hedge fund operators, even former executives of the detested Countrywide Financial Corp. -- buying up delinquent home loans, reworking terms for borrowers, and selling them off to new investors at a handsome profit.

Here's what I think about these bottom-feeders:

God bless them.

If there's one fact about the mortgage meltdown on which almost everybody agrees, it's that fixing the problem will require a multifaceted approach and involve multiple participants -- banks, borrowers, the government and private capital.

Over the last year or two, the last group has stepped up to the plate. Investors with billions of dollars have come into the mortgage market to take thousands of troubled loans off the banks' hands. They do so on terms that give them a real incentive to get delinquent borrowers current again. The key: They acquire the loans at prices that give them great flexibility to find payment terms the borrowers can afford.

Why should this activity be the least bit controversial?

In part it's because some of the investors were involved in selling arguably troubling mortgages in the first place. Plus, the idea of someone profiting from a financial crisis doesn't sit well with many people at first blush; you have to think for a moment to understand the potential gains to the economy, and who wants to do that?

But shouldn't the critics comprehend that the interests of these investors are closely aligned with those of the rest of us? After all, their goal and ours is to keep borrowers in their houses with as little pain as possible.

Read the complete column: Investors profiting from -- and fixing -- the financial crisis

-- Michael Hiltzik

Photo: Former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo testifies at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on severance packages for executives involved in the subprime mortgage crisis last March.  Credit: Jay Mallin / Bloomberg News

'Buying black': Illinois couple's economic experiment

A Chicago-area couple are taking unusual measures to repair what they term "the crisis in the black community." 

Oak Park residents John and Maggie Anderson are working to make sure they spend their money in a way that benefits African American business owners, sometimes traveling miles out of their way to buy from black-owned businesses.  The Chicago Tribune's Ted Gregory explains:

They call it the "ebony experiment."

"More than anything, this is a learning thing," said Maggie Anderson, who grew up in the crime-ridden Liberty City neighborhood of Miami and holds a law degree and an MBA from the University of Chicago. "We know it's controversial, and we knew that coming in."

But the Andersons said they also knew that a thriving black economy was fundamental to restoring impoverished African American communities. They talked for years about how to address the problem.

What they came up with is provocative. One anonymous letter mailed to their home accused the Andersons of "unabashed, virulent racism. Because of you," the writer stated, "we will totally avoid black suppliers. Because of you, we will dodge every which way to avoid hiring black employees."

Apart from that letter, most comments have been encouraging, the Andersons said, adding that most people see the endeavor as beneficial to all.

Do you think the ebony experiment is a good idea?  Why or why not?  Share your thoughts here.

-- Lindsay Barnett

Photo: Store owner Karriem Beyah talks with Maggie Anderson as she shops at Farmers Best Market in Chicago. Credit: Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune

Is the health insurance industry serious about reform?

They jury is out, to say the least.

In December, the health insurance industry's trade group, AHIP (for America's Health Insurance Plans), said it had decided for the first time to support the principle of universal healthcare -- insuring everyone in America, regardless of health condition.

I was skeptical. And what I found by reading AHIP's 16-page policy brochure was that its position hadn't changed at all. Its version of "reform" comprises the same wish list that the industry has been pushing for decades.

Briefly, the industry wants the government to assume the cost of treating the sickest, and therefore most expensive, Americans. It wants the government to clamp down hard on doctors' and hospitals' fees. And it wants permission to offer stripped-down, low-benefit policies freed from pesky state regulations limiting their premiums.

Figuring out the industry's stance on healthcare reform is of paramount importance this year. President Obama's healthcare forum last Thursday demonstrated that the administration and Congress are girding for a big push to remake a tattered employer-based system that has left more than 45 million people without coverage.

But what role will private insurers play? What role do you think they should play?

Read the full column: Insurers' commitment to healthcare reform is only skin-deep

-- Michael Hiltzik

photo credit: Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times

Shortchanging the state universities -- or ourselves?

The new state budget continues a years-long trend in resources allocated to the University of California and California State University: less than they need, by an ever-widening margin.

Sure, things are tough statewide. We’ve been living beyond our means.

But the problem with applying these bromides to the educational system is that the state universities are the closest thing to an investment in the state’s future that we can budget for.

Nevertheless, every year we fall further behind in producing the college graduates industry needs. Come 2025, the demand for college-educated workers in California will rise to 41% of the state’s workforce, according to a projection by the Public Policy Institute of California -- up from about 34% today and 28% in 1990.

Will they be homegrown? Not if current trends continue.

“Clearly we will not meet these needs,” says Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who sits ex officio on both the Cal State Board of Trustees and the UC Board of Regents. “We are not producing nurses and technicians and engineers in the numbers we have to. We are making a very serious economic mistake when we don’t support higher education.”

CSU has been forced to close its doors to 10,000 students who would be otherwise be eligible, says CSU Chancellor Charles Reed. That will cut the student body to about 450,000, he says, reducing the corps of graduates to 85,000 a year from 90,000.

“The state is at a crossroads,” Reed says. “What kind of California do we want? A state with one of the best workforces in the world, with many innovative and creative people? One that’s economically competitive on a worldwide basis?”

Should Cal State and UC get special attention in the state budget?

-- Michael Hiltzik

Read the full column: Cutting school? When will the state learn?

Photo: UCLA's Royce Hall. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Bailout talks continue

"We are going to get a package passed...We will rise to the occasion, where Republicans and Democrats will come together and pass a substantial rescue plan," President Bush said today about the proposed $700 million bailout. 

Do you support or oppose the package?  Does it go far enough, or too far?  Weigh in here.

Update:  Earlier today Peter Viles, author of the L.A. Land blog, hosted a live chat with readers about the proposed bailout.  A transcript is available. 

Photos:  Left, protesters gather on Wall Street -- Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times.
Right, President Bush during a statement outside the Oval Office this morning -- Alex Wong/Getty Images.