How to Talk About Universal Health Care Insurance: Part 1

A few weeks ago I posted a diary titled How to Talk to Small Business People . So many of the comments were about health care issues that it become apparent that this was a topic in desperate need of further conversation. So instead of "How to Talk To..", today it is "How to Talk About..."

Usually you will see this subject discussed using the short hand of "Universal Health Care" as if that were the issue. That is not the issue. As we will see below the fold, we already have Universal Health Care. What we do not have is Universal Health Care insurance.

So follow along and we'll see what can be done about this situation.

Cross Posted from Florida Kossacks


We need to make one thing perfectly clear right from the start. That is that we do not have a health care crisis in this country. We do have a health care insurance crisis. No one in need of care who presents themselves for treatment is denied treatment. Ok, almost no one. But the general rule is that if you present yourself for health care, you will receive it. From VOANews.com:

Karen Davenport, executive director of health care policy for the Center
for American Progress:
"The ones that are probably of greatest concern would be the people who are
uninsured who delay care and who end up using not just emergency room services,
but more complex, more complicated, more intensive services when they do get
care," she said.

Since they are uninsured, these patients run up bills that they are unable to pay. More from VOANews:

Children's National Medical Center in Washington provides specialty and emergency care to children. Kathleen Chavanu, the hospital's executive director of Quality Improvement and Clinical Support Services, says some people are unable to pay for the care they receive there.

"I think that we provide a high amount of uncompensated care here at Children's National Medical Center, anywhere from $28 and $30 million a year that we report that is provided as uncompensated care," noted Chavanu. "And that's really approximately eight to ten percent of our population."

According to the American Hospital Association, hospitals doled out $27 billion in uncompensated care in 2004.

Like any other business, hospitals pass along the cost of bad debts to their other customers in the form of higher prices. Unlike other businesses, hospitals are not able to control their credit risk. They treat whoever shows up. We all wind up paying for this in the form of higher hospital bills which ultimately turn into higher health care insurance premiums. So what can be done to alleviate this situation?

MALCOLM GLADWELL lays out some of the facts about our current health care system in this article in the New Yorker:

Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and
half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes
to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

<snip>

The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per
year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork
and administration...

Other countries pay around 30% of what we spend on health care related adminstrative overhead. Between the uncompensated service hospitals provide and the excess cost of administration, there is about $300 billion needless spending in our current health care system. That comes to more than $1,000 per year for every man, woman and child in this country.

So we have plenty of room for improvemnt in the administration of our health care delivery system. There is one other myth to bust about health care in this country. We already have a working model for a single payer health care system up and running in the United States. It is called Medicare.

So who are the uninsured? The Census Bureau provides us with this information:

• In 2004, 45.8 million people were without health insurance coverage, up from 45.0 million people in 2003.
• The percentage and number of children (people under 18 years old) without health insurance in 2004 was 11.2 percent and 8.3 million.
• With a 2004 uninsured rate at 18.9 percent, children in poverty were more likely to be uninsured than all children.
• The uninsured rate and number of uninsured in 2004 was:
• 11.3 percent and 22.0 million for non-Hispanic Whites, and
• 19.7 percent and 7.2 million for Blacks.
• The number of uninsured increased in 2004 for Hispanics from 13.2 million in 2003 to 13.7 million; their uninsured rate was 32.7 percent.

These figures show us that an undue burden is placed on people of color, who also tend to be at the lower levels of the socio-economic ladder. Blacks and Hispanics make up 46% of the uninsured population. They account for only 19% of the total population.

How about some characteristics of the uninsured? Again, from the Census Bureau :

• 73% of the uninsured in the workforce worked sometime during the year.
• 63% of the uninsured who worked during the year worked at companies with fewer than 100 employees.
• 62% of the uninsured in the workforce had a high school diploma or less.

It turns out that the uninsured are not only the unemployed. In fact, nearly 3 out of 4 uninsured in the workforce had been employed during the year. Of this group, nearly 2 out of 3 worked for small businesses (less than 100 employees.) And nearly 2 out of 3 uninsured in the workforce had only a high school diploma or less.

Some of the issues and makeupp of the health insurance problem have been laid out. this is the first step. In Part 2, we will talk about some proposed solutions and how to talk about them.

In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. But be gentle.

Democracy: A Very Messy Business

A tyrant is deposed and executed. The long suffering majority, oppressed by the tyrant and his band of cohorts begins a blood letting in retribution. "Dead Ender" supporters of the deposed regime attempt to fight back. The American Secretary of State expresses his strong support for the new government in their struggle against these "Dead Enders". The President of the United States exceeds his constitutional authority because he believes it is in the best interests of the country.

Any of this sound familiar? Is this Iraq we are talking about.....?

Cross Posted from Florida Kossacks

All of these dire predictions coming from the Bush Administration about what will happen if we pull out of Iraq got me to thinking about this. I am a Viet Nam veteran, so I well remember the Domino Theory, which did not come to pass.

So, who were we talking about above the fold? Why, only the country most of us love and many Americans love to hate. So how did France get from a monarchy to the republic that it is today? According to Wiki:

The French Revolution (1789-1799) was a vital period in the history of France and Europe as a whole.... While France would oscillate among republic, empire, and monarchy for 75 years after the First Republic fell to a coup d'état, the Revolution is widely seen as a major turning point in the history of Western democracy — from the age of absolutism and aristocracy, to the age of the citizenry as the dominant political force.

This was not achieved witout a considerable amount of blood letting. But who was this American Secretary of State who supported the Revolutionaries in France? Why none other that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence:

Sensing rising criticism of the excesses of the French Revolution in the letters of William Short (1759-1848), his handpicked chargé des affaires in Paris, Secretary of State Jefferson sharply chastised Short and praised the revolution despite its rising irrationality and violence: "and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? my own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, left free, it would be better than as it now is."

And the American President who exceeded his constitutional authority? Why none other than that self same Thomas Jefferson who executed the Louisiana Purchase even as he was doubtful of his own authority to do so.

I guess my point in all this is that all these dire predictions of the Bush Administration about what will happen if we were to leave Iraq are just not either or propositions. There are many things we could do to prevent these bad consequences that do not involve keeping our troops in Iraq to referee a Civil War. On Meet The Press today, Senator Hagel touched on a plan that has been diaried here.

So our King George wanted to establish a democracy in Iraq. He has. Maybe he should have been careful about what he wished for.

Values Based Foreign Policy

As the 110th Congress is getting ready to come into session, I have been thinking quite a bit about a Values Based Foreign Policy. The Democrats in Congress have been shut out of any meaningful role in US foreign policy for six long years. Now, with the advent of Democrats in control of Congress seems to me a good a time as any to write about how we define our foreign policy parameters.

I will confess first that I have been thinking about this in terms of Values Based Decision Making, but otherwise within the vacumn of my own little noggin. A little research quickly showed me that, once again, I have not come up with anything particularly original. But I still believe a discussion of this topic is particularly timely. So, here we go...

Cross Posted from Florida Kossacks

I had intended to start this diary off with a discussion of the famous "Long Telegram" by George Kennan which was published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947 as The Sources of Soviet conduct by X where the policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union was first and most famously espoused. I was, in fact, all set to blame Kennan for all the sins against "values based foreign policy" committed in the name of "containment". Imagine my surprise then upon re-reading this article and discovering this:

It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time. (Emphasis mine)

And this, the conclusion of the article:

Thus the decision will really fall in large measure on this country itself. The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.

Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

In essence, Kennan was saying that we only had to live up to our values to ultimately prevail. Forty years later, in 1987, Kennan had this to say about "containment":

There are many other sources of instability and trouble. There are local danger spots scattered about in the Third World. There is the dreadful situation in southern Africa. There is the grim phenomenon of a rise in several parts of the world of a fanatical and wildly destructive religious fundamentalism, and there is the terrorism to which that sort of fundamentalism so often resorts. There is the worldwide environmental crisis, the rapid depletion of the world's nonrenewable energy resources, the steady pollution of its atmosphere and its waters -- the general deterioration of its environment as a support system for civilized living.

And finally, there is much in our own life, here in this country, that needs early containment. It could, in fact, be said that the first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves: our own environmental destructiveness, our tendency to live beyond our means and to borrow ourselves into disaster, our apparent inability to reduce a devastating budgetary deficit, our comparable inability to control the immigration into our midst of great masses of people of wholly different cultural and political traditions.

At this juncture, I was going to launch into my own discussion of the pitfalls of the so called "pragmatic approach" to foreign policy versus the "values based" model. I still intend to do so in future diaries. I would be entirely remiss if, at this time, I did not offer my apologies to the late George Kennan, a man who 60 years ago typed these words on his typewriter:

gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership

Our Founding Fathers Gift to Us

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Founding Fathers laid out for us exactly why we have a government. This is why. These 52 words, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America says it all. And that is their greatest gift to us all.

Happy New Year


We the People

This government is being formed by the people of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence states it clearly:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

This government was not some charter granted to us a foreign potentate. This government is a compact by of and for the people who consented to be governed by it.


in Order to form a more perfect Union

We had, of course, already secured our independence form Great Britian through the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War. The original compact beteween the thirteen original states was the Articles of Confederation . After the Revolution, the myriad problems with the Articles quickly made themselves manifest. The result was a call for a Constitutional Convention to create a govenmental compact to form a more perfect union.

establish Justice

After the who (We the People) and the what (to form a more perfect Union), the first why is to establish justice. It is important to note that the founding fathers found the idea of justice so compelling that it would be first i the list of they why's for creating this government. Perhaps it is especially noteworthy in a time when we have just so callously dumped habeus corpus.

insure domestic Tranquility

It was also clearly important to the Founding Fathers that our citizens be able to live in peace, free from domestic strife. We are agreeing here to bind ourselves together under a set of rules so that we may live in "domestic tranquility" or peace.

provide for the common defence

The Founding Fathers also recognized that it was a dangerous world out there. It was seen by bitter expererience that the most effective form of defense was a"common defence" as opposed to 13 seperate secretaries of defense. Maybe with Rumsfeld in there, 50 secretaries of defence slowing things down might not have been a bad idea.

It really is important to point out to my progressive friends that defense of the Constitution of the United States is one of the paramount jobs of government. It is not to carry a big stick, or to throw our weight around. But the sad fact is, there are people out there who reject everything our Constitution stands for and would kill enough of us to thow it onto the trash heap of history if they could. If the ideas represented here are not worth defending then you might as well kill me right now.

promote the general Welfare

I think this is the one that our Conservative friends seem to forget most about. Let's read this again:

promote the general Welfare

Imagine that. The government exists to promote the general welfare? Not the welfare of the multinational corporations or the large campaign contributors? The general welfare? Yeah, that one sort of baffles them. Kinda goes against the grain of their "government is bad" meme, doesn't it.

and last, but certainly not least,

secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

The government was formed to secure the blessings of liberty? How can that be? Government is anti-liberty. Less government is liberty. Well, not according to our Founding Fathers. They recognized that in order to secure the blessings of liberty, there must be a government in existence to ensure that those blessings are not given, sold or otherwise seduced away from us. So, when Newt Gingrich suggests that we ought to give up our First Ammendment Rights for a little security, be sure and point he and his friends towards the ultimate reason we have a government:

to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our
Posterity

John Edwards 2008 ???

John Edwards announced his candidacy for President of the United States in New Orleans today. To paraphrase a line from my favorite movie, Casablanca, "I'm shocked, shocked to hear there is campaigning going on here. And here are your delegates, Senator." Edwards has been practicallyliving in Iowa for the past two years. It has been paying off for him. He has been leading the polls there until being tied by Barack Obamain the most recent poll.

The line up of Democratic primaries in 2008 is very much in John Edwards favor. He is well positioned to win Iowa and Nevada. He need not worry so much about New Hampshire, but must do well in South Carolina. Winning 3 out of the 4 first contests in 2008 would make Edwards the clear favorite for the 2008 nomination. That kind of success potential should give Edwards a real leg up in the money primary as well.

The Edwards message is one that he has been honing for the past 3 years. His "two Americas" message has been reinforced by his One America PAC. He has already put a video up on >YouTubeand live blogged at DailyKostoday. He is doing a Live on Line Town Hall Meeting tonight, from, you guessed it, Des Moines,Iowa. If this is not a nod to Time Magazine's Person of the Year, you, I don't think we'll ever see one.

I was leaning towards former Virginia Governor Mark Warner until he took himself out of the running before the 2006 mid term elections. Since then, I have been sitting back trying to see if someone will really grab my attention. In 2003, I was intensely curious about Howard Dean. But when it became clear that Bob Graham was going to run, there was no question in my mind who I was going to support.

There are still a few more days in 2006 left. The question now is, do I become a 2006 supporter of (fill in the blank), or do I stay on the sidelines watching the game unfold? It had been my intention to wait a while to see what developed. But I have submitted a question to the Edwards Town Hall meeting tonight. I asked the same question of John Kerry in March of 2003. There is no way that Edwards can fail to give a better answer than Kerry gave, but I am going to reserve judgement until I get an answer to my question:

Senator, the Republicans win because they win a solid South. How do you
plan to win in the South?

Stay tuned.

How to Talk to Small Business People

Today we are back on track. The last two weeks have been spent on How to Talk to the Main Stream Media. While I personally thought they would be very useful, they did not get overwhelming responses. That's OK though, it was good exercise for me to run through my own personal do's and don'ts when dealing with the media.

How to Talk to Small Business People has a more "traditional" goal. Once again we will be trying to convince people who should be agreeing with us that we have the better ideas, and that our candidates are the better ones because they espouse these ideas and values. We need to do this in such a way as that our subjects will not be immediately turned off to our arguments before we even get started.

Speaking of getting started....

Cross Posted at Florida Kossacks


Small businesses create more jobs and are the sources of more innovations than any other segment of our society. They have a very strong sense of self reliance and personal accountability. Community is highly valued by Small Business People. The operate their businesses and employ people in our communities. They raise their families and worship together with us in our communities. They give back to their communities by serving in Kiwanis, Optimists, and all other manner of civic organizations, both international and local in scope.

Small Business People also vote overwhelmingly Republican. They are mistaken in their understanding of what the Republican Party stands for (by its deeds, not by its words). Most Small Business People are moderate by nature - they want their products and services to be sought out by the widest range of potential customers possible. Time and again, that has been shown to be in the "broad middle".

Define the Overarching Strategy

What is the best strategy to use when deciding How to Talk to Small Business People? It is not much different than in talking to any other segment of society you wish to persuade. The first thing to do is to identify which among your values is most applicable to this subject. Emphasize those values that are shared by the subjects, in this case Small Business People. Any facilitator of conflict resolution worth his or her own salt will first seek to identify areas of common agreement. We should view this exercise no differently.

Small Business People value personal accountability. They know full well that given an even chance, they and they alone, are responsible for their own success or failure. Small business people value community. They raise their families, worship and run their businesses in their communities. They are the backbone of the Kiwanis, the Optimists and other civic organizations. They run for City Council, belong to the Chamber of Commerce and support their churches and local charities.Small Business People value independence and freedom from over burdensome governmental regulations. Their trade group is the National Federation of Independent Businesses. The issues that are important to them include competition, government and regulatory reform and tax relief. The NFIB website proudly proclaims:

Advocacy is a top priority for NFIB.

Their list of legislative accomplishments includes tax relief and "tort reform" amongst others.


Define the Terminology

Small Business People tend to self identify as Republicans because they believe the Republican Party is the party of business. They are only partially correct. The Republican Party is the party of big business. The Gopers give a lot of lip service to small business but that's about all they really give them. All the major legislative efforts of the Republicans have been centered on benefiting big business. Very little is actually done with small business people as the major focus.

Tax rollbacks on the very wealthy are a good example. The Republicans claimed that rolling back the tax cuts for the very wealthy would negatively impact small business people, and therefore hurt job creation, the economy, mother hood and apple pie. The truth of the matter is that most small business people are able to arrange their financial affairs in such a way as to not show very high taxable incomes. Where they are running into real problems is with the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) . This is a tax scheme that was devised to keep the super rich from avoiding paying taxes at all. It has not been modified to keep up with the times, however. So now it is going to ensnare people it was never meant to cover. We can go a long way to getting small business people on our side by making AMT reform a priority.

Fair competition is another area that small business people are getting lied to by the Republicans. I am going to use Wal Mart as an example only here. Small business people don't like the idea of welfare or government subsidies. Because of their sense of community, most of them want to provide and many do, health and other benefits for their employees. What they don't realize is that companies that hire primarily part time employees and pay them no benefits and low wages are getting subsidized by the government. These part time employees get free health care from the government when they get sick. Many of them are on food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Even though they are working, many work 2 or more jobs, their incomes are still low enough to qualify for government assistance.

When you explain to a small business person that the big company he is competing with is getting these subsidies from the government, they tend to get very unhappy. Usually when they think about welfare, they only think about the Welfare Queens ripping off the government. They don't stop to think that their competition is benefiting from the welfare system by having the government pick up the spread between a living wage and what they are actually paying their employees. When you explain that to a small business person, the idea of a living wage begins to look a whole lot more reasonable to them.

The other argument that Republican use against raising the minimum wage or a living wage is that it will cost jobs and put small business people out of business. Many states have a higher minimum wage than the Federal Minimum Wage. In Florida, we passed a State Constitutional Amendment raising the minimum wage and indexing it for inflation. Florida is still leading the nation in job creation. Scratch that argument.

Small business people understand economics. After they get that the government is subsidizing below living wage paying employers, they are susceptible to another argument. That is that if you can't afford to pay a living wage ( not get the government to subsidize you), economically you should not be in that business. A truly free market would force you out of business without the government subsidies. Small Business People really get that argument.


Mangle the Memes

You are not going to get through to Small business People unless you can get past the memes that they have bee indoctrinated on since birth. Use examples to show them that the Republican Party is not the party of rugged individualists, but is instead the party of corporate welfare.

Small Business People tend to be on the patriotic side. Be ready to show them that Dems are competent to keep us safe from terrorists and will otherwise protect our national security. After all, most people now get that Dumbya did not make us safer by invading Iraq.

Don't let them get away with calling us "tax and spend" Dems. Remind them that it was a Dem President who balanced the budget and left office with a surplus. Also, it is the Dems in Congress who are bringing back pay - go budgeting. That's something small business people really understand.

We have more in common with the Small business community than most people think. We have a lot more in common with them than the Republicans really do. The Gopers have just done a better job of convincing the small business community that they share their values. In fact, we share more values in practice than the Gopers do.

If you can remember to speak to small business people in terms of our shared values, you have a very good chance to get them away from the Dark Side. You will at least have made them think about it.

And that's a start.

Iraq: What We Should Really Do

I have stayed away from diarying about Iraq. Lots of very bright people have been writing about it. I have been focused on the 2006 elections, nationally and here in Florida. I just didn't want to do it.

The elections are over now. WE WON!!! Unfortunately, we didn't win everything we wanted. I dearly wanted Jim Davis to win in FL-Gov. It was not to be. But, we did win a giant referendum on Iraq. Now the President is acting like he is leading a different country than the one that just soundly rejected his vision for Iraq.

So, here I am. I have no excuses for not writing this. Some of you are not going to like what I have to say. Others might. In any event, here is my two cents worth...


First thing, I ought to tell you a little about me. I am old enough to have spent 4 years in the Marine Corps and 13 months in South East Asia. (Viet Nam mostly, but also some other places in that general neck of the woods.) Up until the last few years, I thought this country had actually learned some lessons from Viet Nam. Until ole George W got into his mach0 act.

I long ago came to my own terms with Viet Nam. It was a mistake to have gone there in the first place. We didn't fight the war in a way that would give us a chance to "win". But the men and women who served there did so honorably and felt they were serving the best interests of their country at the time. It was not until several years later that I saw how wrong it was for us to have gotten involved there. But our involvement there did figure into the larger scheme of events and in its own way contributed to the eventual freedom of Eastern Europe. All part of history.

I was not in favor of this war from the beginning. I did not believe that Iraq was an imminent threat to the national security of the United States, and couldn't fathom why Dumbya did. But neither am I a pacifist. There are people out there who want to harm us. I have no problem whatsoever doing it to them before they can do it to us. I would just prefer we focus on the real bad guys out there. There are certainly enough of them. We didn't need to invent any new ones.

On that score, I was in complete agreement with Senator Bob Graham. During the debate for the Authorization of Use of Military Force in Iraq (AUMF), Senator Graham introduced a substitute amendment. The Graham amendment left the Iraq request intact. It added other trouble makers such as Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Syria etc. Graham, who was Chair of the Senate Intelligence committee at the time, urged his colleagues to approve his amendment because there were other bad actors out there who had in fact already killed Americans and wanted to kill some more.

Well, the Graham amendment was defeated. The Bush administration did not want the focus on Iraq to be diluted. Senator Graham's speech the next day on the resolution that ultimately passed should be required reading for every critic of the war.

tonight I am going to vote no on this resolution. The reason is this
resolution is too timid. It is too limiting. It is too weak. This resolution
fails to recognize the new reality of the era of terrorism. And that reality is
that war abroad will, without assertive security actions, increase the prospects
of terrorist attacks here at home. In fact, war on Iraq alone leaves
Americans more vulnerable to the No. 1 threat facing us today, those
international terrorist organizations that have the capability to inflict upon
us a repeat of the tragedy of September 11.

Graham closed his speech with this:

Of all the issues we care about, and those issues over which we have
some capability to determine the outcome, in my judgment, the No. 1
priority should be the war on terrorism and its threat to the people of
the United States in our homeland. Our top targets should be those
groups that have the greatest potential to repeat what happened on
September 11, killing thousands of Americans. Passing this timid resolution, I fear, will only increase the chances of Americans
again being killed. That is not a burden of probability I am prepared
to accept. Therefore, I will vote no.
I close with the words spoken in one of the darkest periods of the
history of the Western World. In 1941, Winston Churchill said:

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and
easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can
measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.
The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that
once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of
policy, but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable
events.

Now to the nub of it. What should we be doing now? There are all these dire predictions of the region falling into chaos if we withdraw precipitously. Sounds a lot like the old "domino theory" to me. We all now that didn't come to pass. , But maybe we just got lucky that time. Maybe this is a different set of circumstances.

Here is my proposal. I don't want to lose a single more American life refereeing the civil war going on in Iraq right now. Neither do I want to risk that the bad actors adjacent to Iraq will use our absence to their advantage. My proposal is that we immediately inform the Iraqis that they are responsible for their own internal security. We will pull our forces back to the Iraqi borders or into Kuwait and / or Turkey. We will provide external security to Iraq for a limited time period.

This should deter Iraq's neighbors from making mischief in the area. At the same time we should be talking to all of Iraq's neighbors to get them to buy into a solution for Iraq's external security that will allow us to remove all our combat forces from Iraqi soil. This should begin immediately.

So there you have it. It has some elements of the Murtha plan. It has some elements of the ISG report. And it has ideas borrowed from elsewhere. If I were in a position to advise the President, that's what I would be telling him we ought to do. I am not, so I am suggesting this alternative to you.