by Al Franken
Repealing Obamacare means wiping out all that progress: not just the delivery reform, but the 20 million people who didn’t have insurance and got it thanks to the ACA, and the 153 million people with preexisting conditions who were saved from worrying that they’d be discriminated against, and all the young adults who gained the ability to stay on their parents’ insurance, and every American who got a flu shot or a long-overdue checkup and didn’t get handed a bill at the end.
All these people have a lot riding on whether Republicans really mean it when they say they’re going to replace Obamacare with something that protects them.
After Trump won the presidency, “repeal and replace” was itself replaced with “repeal and delay.” The idea was that the Affordable Care Act would be repealed immediately, but the repeal wouldn’t go into effect until after the 2018 midterm elections, thus buying Republicans some time to think of an idea for how to replace it. The only way this isn’t the dumbest idea in the entire world is if the thing you care most about is the politics—being able to boast to your base that you’ve succeeded in repealing Obamacare, while making sure that you can get reelected in the midterms before the rest of the country figures out how devastating repeal would be.
And even then, they still have to come up with a plan! But if it doesn’t cover people with preexisting conditions, guarantee that people won’t get bankrupt if they get sick, and continue to “bend the cost curve,” then it isn’t a replacement at all. In fact, President Trump has gone on record promising that the Republican replacement will cover every American, give them the same or better benefits, and cost less.
I’m all ears, guys!
The truth is, I don’t really believe that Republicans are ever going to come up with a real replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Because it seems to me that they don’t actually care about making sure that every American has access to quality, affordable health care.
What do they care about? They want insurance companies to be able to sell you junk policies. They want drug manufacturers to be able to gouge people who rely on medications to stay healthy. They want to make it harder for people who’ve suffered from medical malpractice to get their day in court. They want rich people to not have to pay for health care for poor people.
And, most of all, they want to keep using this issue to rally their base, reward their donors, and punish Democrats.
I don’t know what’s going to happen going forward. Heck, I don’t even know what’s going to happen between the time I finish this book and the time you read it. But what I do know is this: Anyone who trusts this Republican Party with the future of our nation’s health care system simply hasn’t been paying attention.
Chapter 34
I Meet George W. Bush
Hey, how about a palate cleanser?
Here’s an interesting story. Or at least a story, at any rate. In the spring of 2015, I was invited to a Major League Baseball dinner at the Hay-Adams Hotel, right across the street from the White House. Dinners in D.C. are an enormous time-suck, so I try to avoid them if I possibly can.
But a number of the team owners, including Jim Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins, were going to be there, so I accepted the invitation to sit at his table. Mitch McConnell and Speaker Boehner came as well, because the owner of the Cincinnati Reds was there. And Dianne Feinstein was seated with the owner of the San Francisco Giants.
It was a nice evening, about fifty people. After cocktails and dinner, the new commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, welcomed everybody. Mitch and John Boehner gave nice remarks about being lifelong Reds fans—Boehner’s from Cincinnati, and Mitch’s hometown, Louisville, Kentucky, is right down the Ohio River from, well, Riverfront Stadium, where the Big Red Machine dominated the National League during most of the 1970s. And then Dianne got up to the podium to talk about the importance of the Giants to San Francisco.
As I listened to Dianne, I noticed a slight change in the sound of the room. I turned around and saw former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, standing at the back, smiling. Dianne acknowledged the president and Laura and wrapped up. Then the new commissioner invited the former Texas Rangers owner (and commander in chief) to make a few remarks.
As Bush walked to the podium, we all gave him a standing ovation. I thought he was a terrible president, but he had been the president, and I wanted to show respect for his office. He seemed really loose and happy, and started with a joke. “Usually, I do this for money.” A good laugh. “I hope Bill and Hillary don’t ruin that for me.” Big laugh. He was referring, of course, to recent headlines about the craploadsUSS of money the Clintons had been raking in for public speaking gigs. Funny and topical. Not bad!
He spoke for five minutes. Another standing ovation. I said good night to the folks at my table and made my exit, heading toward the door farthest from the podium in order to avoid running into the former president, whom I had savaged to great comedic and commercial success.
But as I turned around and headed in that direction, I suddenly saw him standing directly between me and the exit, engaged in a conversation with two people I also didn’t want to talk to. I couldn’t very well skirt past the former president without it seeming like I was snubbing him, so I stopped and stood awkwardly/respectfully a few feet away.
Bush saw me and suddenly made a beeline right toward me.
“Remember where we were the last time we saw each other?!” he asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Iowa.” I had been covering the Iowa straw poll for George magazine in August 1999, and met Bush at a small event in someone’s backyard in Indianola.
“Do you remember what I asked you?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Okay. It was when the cocaine stuff was coming out, and I said I wasn’t interested in that, but since we were in Iowa, I wanted to ask whether you had ever manufactured any crystal meth.”
He nodded, perhaps wondering where I was going with this.
“And you outsmarted me,” I continued.
Now he had it. “I didn’t answer, did I?”
“No. And that was smart. Because if you had, I would have said, ‘Then why won’t you answer the cocaine question?’”
He nodded. I decided to change the subject.
“You know, what I always liked about you is that you like comedy.”
“I do,” he confirmed enthusiastically.
“I remember you said that your favorite movie was Austin Powers.”
“Still is!”
“And also, I remember your taking a risk by going on Letterman via satellite.”
He remembered that. “That was a mistake.”
“Staff error, sir.”
I could tell he appreciated that. I continued, “And you told a very risky joke that I admired you for, because I can’t imagine anyone on your team thought it was a good idea. Do you remember it?”
“No.”
“Well,” I said, “Dave asked you, ‘You say you’re a uniter, not a divider. What does that mean?’ And you said, via satellite, ‘Well, if you had open-heart surgery, I’d sew you back up.’” This had been just a few months after Dave’s open-heart surgery.
“And that got a big laugh, right?”
“No! Oh, no. See, because you were on satellite, you didn’t see it, but Dave turned to the audience and completely sold you out.”
I’m not sure if he understood that I was giving him a compliment for taking the risk, rather than reveling in how badly he had bombed, but in either case, he came back with an upbeat comment. “Well, you were always my favorite comedian on Saturday Night Live.”
I made a face, clearly indicating that I wasn’t buying that for a moment.
“Okay,” he said with a big grin. “I was lyin’.”
“Well,” I responded, “you’re my favorite president.”
He laughed and gave me a big high five. Holy mackerel, I liked him. Now I understood how he got elected twice. Or once, if you’re one of the people who const
antly called in to Air America.
Chapter 35
The 64 Percent Rule
In order to be an effective Democratic senator, you have to be able to hold two inherently contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.
One: Republicans are just awful. They’re beholden to corporate special interests, they’re dishonest and/or crazy, they’re so cynical that they’d willingly thwart badly needed progress for the sake of their own selfish political motivations. And they’ve broken Washington irrevocably. So if we care about making progress in America, we need to fight them at every turn.
Two: Republicans exist. And they care about our country just as much as we do, if not always exactly in the same way we do. We do not have a monopoly on power (how’s that for an understatement?). And the truth is, neither do we have a monopoly on good ideas. So if we care about making progress in America, we need to work with them.
My friend Mike Enzi, a Republican senator from Wyoming, has what he calls the 80 Percent Rule. Republicans and Democrats, Mike says, actually agree on 80 percent of any given piece of legislation. So if we focus on that 80 percent, and ignore the 20 percent where we disagree, we can get a lot done.
I think Mike may be a little too optimistic. Some issues, there’s just no common ground. If some of us believe that you should be allowed to bring military-style assault weapons onto public transportation, and others of us think that’s insane, there’s no 80 percent there.
We just have to argue about it, and then take a vote, and live with the outcome, at least until we win some more elections.
Mike’s 80 Percent Rule, in my estimation, only applies to, charitably, about 80 percent of what we do in the Senate. Hence, Franken’s 64 Percent Rule.
The good news is that there’s a lot you can get done in that 64 percent. Take one of the issues where we have actually made some bipartisan progress during my time in the Senate: education. Everyone agrees that there is nothing more fundamental to our nation’s success than education. One hundred percent of politicians say that, one hundred percent of the time.
Now, there are some basic fault lines between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. Generally speaking, Democrats support teachers’ unions, public school systems, and a strong federal role in education, while Republicans believe in more local control of education, and believe that competition in the form of school vouchers will improve the quality of schools. Also, some conservatives used to secretly support the voucher movement because they wanted to undermine public education in order to “advance God’s Kingdom” by diverting funding from public schools to religious schools. I say “used to” because, with Betsy DeVos now running the Department of Education, they no longer bother keeping it a secret.
Anyway, those fault lines were scrambled in 2002, when George W. Bush signed into law his signature education bill—called, with unintended irony, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
Passed with strong bipartisan support, NCLB sought to improve our nation’s K–12 education system by setting high standards and imposing an extensive testing regime on public elementary and secondary schools, along with draconian measures if the schools failed to achieve federally mandated progress.
By the time I came to the Senate, there was a bipartisan consensus that NCLB was a disaster.
During my 2008 campaign, I’d often say in my stump speech, “I have not met one teacher in Minnesota who likes No Child Left Behind.”
Then, in early October, a teacher took me aside. “I like No Child Left Behind,” he said quietly, “because it disaggregates the data.”
Under NCLB, test data was broken down, and each subgroup of students at a school—black, Hispanic, Asian American and Pacific Islander, American Indian, English Language Learners, students in special education—had to succeed in order for the school to be considered to have made “adequate yearly progress.”
The teacher continued, “That guarantees that schools are finally interested in how their black and Hispanic kids are doing.”
And he was absolutely right.
You see, NCLB was a reauthorization* of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) signed into law by President Johnson. And like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made my dad (and me) a Democrat, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ESEA was a civil rights bill, giving the federal government a bigger role in K–12 education to ensure that states were providing a decent education for all of their students.
So the disaggregation of data became the second thing I liked about No Child Left Behind, the first being the name.
Otherwise, the law was a disaster. If a school failed to make “adequate yearly progress” for four years in a row, it would have to undergo a federally mandated restructuring—in some cases, schools would be forced to fire and replace 50 percent of their teachers and their principal. This made no sense, for example, in rural areas, where there are teacher shortages. A number of rural school superintendents told me about two “failing” schools in their district which just swapped their two principals and half their teachers—showing the sort of problem-solving ingenuity that I dearly hope they passed on to their students.
NCLB had a whole host of wildly stupid rules. For example, students would take their NCLB tests in late April, which meant that the school wouldn’t get the results until well after the school year had ended, at which point it was too late to use the results to actually help the students. Hence, educators referred to the test results as “autopsies.”
Another stupid thing: Schools were judged by what percentage of students met or exceeded “proficiency.” That created a perverse incentive for teachers to focus on kids in the middle—students right below and right above this arbitrary “proficiency” benchmark. Teachers in Minnesota called this a “race to the middle.” They could ignore the kids at the top, because they knew those kids would never fall below proficiency. And they could ignore the kids at the bottom, because there was almost no chance that those students would reach proficiency that school year.
This “proficiency” thing was nuts. A sixth-grade teacher who takes a kid from a third-grade level of reading to a fifth-grade level of reading is a hero, not a failure.
More stupidly, the tests were not allowed to measure students’ ability outside their grade level. A fifth-grader could only take a test designed to show whether or not he could read at a fifth-grade level. If your son couldn’t read at a fifth-grade level, wouldn’t you want to know whether he was reading at a fourth-grade level, as opposed to a second-grade level? Tough. The NCLB test didn’t do that. It only measured for fifth-grade “proficiency,” and gave no answer more detailed than “pass” or “fail.”
That’s why many Minnesota schools started administering a computer adaptive test in addition to the mandated NCLB test.
These tests were far more useful. For one thing, they were on a computer, meaning teachers could get the results for each kid right away, and use them to inform their instruction. For another, they were adaptive, meaning that if a child was answering questions correctly, the questions would get harder, and vice versa. That way, the teachers could see at exactly what grade level each student was testing. Teachers, principals, and superintendents in Minnesota all told me they preferred the computer adaptive test.
But this meant students had to take both tests, and because the stakes were so high, that meant a lot of test prep, or what teachers referred to as “drill and kill.”
It reminded me of the McNamara fallacy, named for Robert McNamara,* Kennedy and Johnson’s data-driven secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. The McNamara fallacy is this: What can be measured will be measured, and what cannot be measured won’t be measured. And only things that are measured are deemed important.
Hence the drilling and killing. Teachers spent all their time trying to get their kids to learn the certain discrete skills they knew would be tested. Not on the test, and therefore not in the lesson plans, were things like critical th
inking, creativity, the ability to work with others, and love of learning. All of which are kind of important. Or at least I’m told. By employers.
By the time I got to the Senate, everyone knew that NCLB needed to be reformed. We held lots of hearings and talked to lots of witnesses. There was a lot of agreement on what wasn’t working, and we all took turns vehemently agreeing about it. In other words, we did a lot of what we in Washington call “admiring the problem.”
So why did it take seven years to get it done?
Well, that whole “two contradictory ideas” thing works both ways. Even as we were finding ourselves in agreement on what we needed to do, Republican leaders were working to prevent us from actually doing it. The entire time Democrats held the majority in the Senate, we couldn’t break through to even bring a K–12 education bill to the floor.
But after Republicans took the majority in the 2014 election, we started to see some things move. Ironic, you might think. But not really. As minority leader, Mitch McConnell’s goal was almost always to stop Obama and Senate Democrats from getting things done, to prevent us from having achievements we could point to. But Obama wouldn’t be on the ballot in 2016, and McConnell was suddenly interested in getting some things done so that his majority could have something to show for itself.
But, hey, after six years, Democrats were willing—hell, eager—to go along with it. We believe in government, after all. And even if it meant Republicans got a lot of the credit, we were happy to be moving forward on long-delayed priorities like a five-year highway bill and, at long last, education reform.
At the outset, Republican HELP Committee chairman Lamar Alexander put together a totally partisan Republican bill, which ranking Democrat Patty Murray and the rest of us refused to take up. After that initial exchange, Lamar and Patty got down to business, working together on a truly bipartisan bill in an exemplary way.
