“Weight Loss, No Exercise”: Four Years Later, The Second Half Of The Republican “Repeal And Replace” Plan
At his press conference late last week, President Obama chided congressional Republicans for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act several dozen times without offering a credible alternative. “They used to say they had a replacement,” he told reporters. “That never actually arrived, right? I mean, I’ve been hearing about this whole replacement thing for two years — now I just don’t hear about it, because basically they don’t have an agenda to provide health insurance to people at affordable rates.”
Au contraire, Republicans responded.
The 173-member strong Republican Study Committee is on track to roll out legislation this fall that would replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act with a comprehensive alternative, Chairman Steve Scalise told CQ Roll Call on Thursday.
Though it wouldn’t be the first Obamacare repeal-and-replace proposal floated by individual GOP lawmakers in either chamber of Congress, the RSC bill is one that could at least gain traction on the House floor, given the conservative group’s size and influence.
Oh good, it only took four years for House Republicans to come up with a health care plan they like.
So, what’s in it? No one outside the Republican Study Committee actually knows, and even the RSC isn’t altogether sure since the plan isn’t finished. But Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the RSC, insists some of the popular provisions in “Obamacare” will remain intact, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
“We address that to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be discriminated against,” he told Roll Call. But, he promised the bill would not “put in place mandates that increase the costs of health care and push people out of the insurance that they like,” Scalise said.
In related news, the Republican Study Committee has a weight-loss plan in which everyone eats all the deserts they want and never exercises.
Look, it’s extremely difficult to craft a health care system that protects people with pre-existing conditions while eliminating mandates, scrapping industry regulations, and keeping costs down. Indeed, it’s why Republicans came up with mandates in the first place — the mandates were seen as the lynchpin that made their larger reform efforts work.
Indeed, it’s partly why Democrats used to push so hard to see the GOP alternative. Dems assumed, correctly, that once Republicans got past their talking points and chest-thumping, they’d see that actually solving the problem required provisions that some folks wouldn’t like.
But let’s not pre-judge, right? Maybe the right-wing members of the Republican Study Committee have figured out a creative way to help those who can’t afford coverage and protect those with pre-existing conditions and reduce health care costs and cut the costs for prescription medication and cover preventive care and cut the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars — just like the Affordable Care Act does. What’s more, maybe they’ll do all of this without raising taxes and/or including elements in the plan that are unpopular.
I seriously doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible.
What seems more likely to me, though, is that the Republican Study Committee will eventually finish and unveil their “Obamacare” alternative and invite side-by-side comparisons between the two approaches — which will in turn make the Affordable Care Act look even better.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
“How The Movie Ends”: Three Stories That Prove The GOP Is Screwed For Years To Come
We are in the doggiest of the dog days of summer. Congress is currently in the sleep spindles stage of a five-week nap that the public doesn’t think it deserves. Meanwhile, the political media—because TV and the Internet and even the printing presses never stop—must continue to bark and pant. So anything you hear or read—including here—must be approached with appropriate skepticism. But three stories published online over the past 24 hours show what kind of media narrative we can expect in September, once our elected officials finally wake up and swipe the drool from their slack jaws.
1. The Hill reports Friday morning that “House conservatives say grassroots support is building for their effort to risk a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare.” Those House conservatives, specifically, are Indiana’s Marlin Stutzman and Texas’ Michael Burgess, who say there’s been overwhelming support at town hall meetings for doing anything, even shutting down our very necessary government, to defund Obamacare (a law that, it bears reminding, is a law—lawfully passed by Congress, signed by a lawfully elected president, and being lawfully enacted as we speak).
Burgess told The Hill that the decision to exempt lawmakers and staff from Obamacare is “driving people into a froth,” adding, “I’m hearing a lot of anger that is right beneath the surface, ready to erupt.” Well, of course he’s hearing that! These town meetings are not exactly how people with moderate opinions prefer to spend their evenings. But Burgess and Stutzman—unlike GOP representatives Tom Cole and Steve Womack, who are quoted as being opposed to a shutdown, no matter what they hear from constituents—are going to assume that a few dozen town hall attendees represent the thousands of voters who elected them.
Takeaway: House conservatives will likely return from vacation not only well rested, but emboldened to threaten a shutdown.
2. The New York Times reported Thursday that a “Puzzle Awaits the Capital: How to Solve 3 Fiscal Rifts,” the lead sentence of which declares that only one thing is “clear” about the endgame of this showdown: “President Obama thinks Republicans cannot risk another debt crisis or government shutdown, and Republican leaders agree.” The Times even goes so far as to call it a “consensus,” concluding that “the odds of an economy-damaging stalemate are relatively low, despite rising jitters in the capital.”
Takeaway: Republican leaders think they can prevent these emboldened, well-rested House conservatives from shutting down the government. Let’s hope the House leadership has learned how to count votes since June.
3. Neither The Hill nor The New York Times, though, come out and say what this really means. Enter Politico. According to Mike Allen and Jim VandeHai’s latest interpretation of our nation’s political theater, we are on the “Eve of Destruction.” “It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be,” they report. “Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it.”
The “blown opportunities and self-inflicted wounds” include House opposition to broad immigration reform, alienating Latinos; narrowing voting laws and saying dumb things about the Trayvon Martin case, alienating blacks; and continuing to believe that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry, alienating gays.
Takeaway (via Politico, natch): “This probably doesn’t matter for 2014, because off-year elections are notoriously low-turnout affairs where older whites show up in disproportionate numbers. But elite Republican strategists and donors tell us they are increasingly worried the past nine months make 2016 look very bleak—unless elected GOP officials in Washington change course, and fast.”
So. Come September, you can expect hourly reports on threats to shut down the government, the likelihood of said shutdown, and finally the imminence of said shutdown, with websites featuring running counters of the days, hours, and minutes until the first deadline, and then the second deadline, and then the third deadline. Riveting stuff! As Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told the Times, “Even those of us quite close to it have a hard time saying how the movie ends.”
That statement is offensive to anyone who has ever made a movie. Also, we know how it ends: with a Democrat in the White House in 2017.
By: Brian Kearney, The New Republic, August 17, 2013
“What Does ‘Some Woman’ Know?”: Commissioner Ray Kelly, “No Question” More People Will Die Without Stop And Frisk
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly enthusiastically defended the New York Police Department’s use of the controversial “stop and frisk” program during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning. Kelly went so far as to claim that more New Yorkers would die without the procedure in place.
Stop and frisk is a commonly used practice wherein NYC police officers question tens of thousands of pedestrians and may frisk them for weapons and contraband. The program disproportionately targets young black and Latino men, leading many to claim that it constitutes racial profiling — a view that was affirmed by federal judge Shira Scheindlin, who ruled the practice to be unconstitutional last week.
Host David Gregory asked Kelly if more Americans would die if the judge’s ruling — which Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (I) administration has already appealed — were to stand and the program be dismantled. Kelly replied, “No question about it, violent crime will go up,” before launching into a more extensive defense of stop and frisk premised on higher crime rates among minorities:
We need some balance here. The stark reality is that violence is happening disproportionately in minority communities. And that unfortunately is in big cities throughout America. We have record low numbers of murders in New York City, record low numbers of shootings, we’re doing something right to save lives. […]
This is something that’s integral to policing. This happens throughout America at any police jurisdiction. You have to do it. Officers have to have the right of inquiry, if they see some suspicious behavior. So I can assure you, this is not just a New York City issue. It’s an issue throughout America. And this case has to be appealed in my judgment because it will be taken as a template and have significant impact in policing throughout America.
In her ruling against stop and frisk, Scheindlin wrote, “[T]he policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling.”
More than 5 million New York residents have been stopped and frisked under the program since Bloomberg took office in 2002. Over 86 percent of those who have been stopped are either black or Latino. But the mass random stops haven’t been particularly efficient — a staggering 4.4 million of New Yorkers who were targeted under the program, which cost taxpayer $22 million in civil rights lawsuits last year, were innocent.
There have also been incidents where a stop and frisk ends with deadly consequences. In March, overzealous NYPD officers shot and killed 16-year-old black male Kimani Gray after stopping him for “suspiciously” adjusting his belt. The NYPD claims that Gray had drawn a weapon on the officers — but eyewitness testimony disputes that account, and an autopsy revealed that several shots were fired from behind Gray.
That hasn’t stopped the Bloomberg administration from singing the practice’s praises. Bloomberg recently dismissed Scheindlin as “some woman” who knows “absolutely zero” about policing. “Your safety and the safety of your kids is now in the hands of some woman who does not have the expertise to do it,” he said during a radio interview Friday.
By: Sy Mukherjee, Think Progress, August 18, 2013
“Moving Past The Awkwardness With Respect”: Learning To Talk About Harriet Tubman, Slavery And Racism
Slavery and race are awkward and uncomfortable subjects for many Americans. As a result, we often find awkward and uncomfortable ways to talk about them. That was my conclusion earlier this week when, as a means of debuting his new channel All Def Digital, hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons posted a video parody titled, “Harriet Tubman’s Sex Tape.” In the video, the iconic “conductor” of the Underground Railroad is shown secretly recording sexual relations with her “Massa” in an attempt to blackmail him into allowing her to start her now famous freedom train. Almost as soon as it was released the three-minute video prompted a wave of condemnation and a Change.org petition. It wasn’t long before the NAACP asked Simmons to take it down. He offered an apology—”For all those I offended, I am sincerely sorry”—and removed the clip from his website.
Simmons’s satirical approach represents one extreme. (“I’m a very liberal person with thick skin,” he explained.) On the other is the trend of introducing children to slavery with traumatic role-playing exercises. For example, in 2008, a middle school social studies teacher in suburban New York, who is white, bound the hands and feet of two black girls and instructed them to crawl underneath a desk to simulate the conditions of a crowded slave ship. In 2011, an elementary school student in Ohio described himself as having been “humiliated” after he was forced to play the role of a slave at a mock slave auction and his white classmates were urged to degrade him during the exercise. That same year in Virginia, the Washington Post reported that a fourth grade teacher also held a mock slave auction in her class and that the white children took turns buying the black and mixed-race children.
It’s not just in school classrooms that this reality show approach to slavery is taking place. At Connor Prairie Interactive History Park in Indiana, the public is asked to pay $20 to “Come face-to-face with slave hunters, see fear and hope in the eyes of a fellow runaway and… experience life as a fugitive slave during your journey through one of the most compelling periods in Indiana’s history. “ 60% of the visitors to the park are school children. According to a 2009 article from the Organization of American Historians’ Magazine of American History by historian Carl Weinberg, white visitors to the park often say they are getting quite a lot out of the experience of the reenactment, but it is not uncommon for African American visitors to feel uncomfortable about fully immersing themselves in the experience. Is this really a surprise to anyone?
Just for a moment, imagine if the holocaust was taught by either of these methods—a satire of Anne Frank, for example, trading sexual favors, or a fourth grade class of children being separated into jews and gentiles with the latter leading the former off to their death. It is hard to visualize either of those things happening. Slavery is the most profound mistake this country has ever made—”the great and foul stain upon the North America Union,” as John Quincy Adams said. We need to learn how to move past the awkwardness and talk with each other about it respectfully before we can laugh about it or relive the experience.
By: Noliwe M. Rooks, Time Magazine, August 17, 2013
“Stop Lying!”: GOP Congressman Daniel Webster Called Out By Constituents Over His Multiple Votes To Repeal Obamacare
Things got heated for Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL) during a town hall question-and-answer session in Winter Haven, Florida on Thursday. His constituents called him out over his multiple votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and his misleading claims that the law’s consumer protections are being dismantled by the Obama administration.
Webster was responding to several constituents’ questions about the consequences that repealing Obamacare — which House Republicans, including Webster, have voted to do on 40 separate occasions — would have for the people in his district. Attendees asked Webster if he had any plans to replace consumer protections included in Obamacare, such as guaranteed insurance coverage for Americans with pre-existing medical conditions and free preventative health screenings for seniors:
QUESTIONER: What happens to us when Obamacare is repealed? What happens to people with pre-existing conditions that can’t get health care? What happens to those of us who finally have access to health insurance for the first time in nine or ten years? What happens to us? And you want to make this local, I’ll make this local. I’m a constituent, right now I can’t get health care. I’m waiting for this [insurance marketplace] to open and I’d like to know why we keep repealing [Obamacare]?
The congressman defended his repeal votes by saying the law would drive up Americans’ health care costs by requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. He then claimed that President Barack Obama himself thinks his signature law is unworkable. As evidence, Webster implied that the law’s protections — such as its cap on consumers’ annual out-of-pocket medical costs — were being dismantled by the Obama administration. That prompted an outcry from the audience, as people booed and countered Webster’s claims.
An event official interrupted at that point, asking the audience to be respectful and give Webster a chance to speak. One audience member replied by saying, “Well, tell him to stop lying!”
Watch it, courtesy of advocacy group Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and its local Florida partner Organize Now.
The Obama administration did, in fact, delay the health law’s cap on Americans’ out-of-pocket costs through their co-payments and deductibles. But as the audience correctly pointed out, it is a temporary one-year delay that only applies to certain employer-based insurance plans. The cap still applies for health policies sold through Obamacare’s statewide marketplaces beginning in October.
Webster isn’t the first GOP congressman to get flak from his constituents over his opposition to the health law. Last week, constituents confronted Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) over his many votes to repeal Obamacare and asked why he wanted to take away protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. One grieving mother in the audience had told reporters before the town hall that her own son had died of colon cancer after being denied coverage for having a pre-existing condition.
Obamacare critics who have incessantly demonized the reform law and pushed for its repeal have been brushing up against a growing number of people that support its consumer protections. A recent poll from the Heritage Foundation’s advocacy arm that was ostensibly meant to show Obamacare’s unpopularity by over-surveying Republicans inadvertently showed that it is actually popular. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) admitted that a “handful of things” in the law are “probably OK” in an interview on Wednesday.
By: Sy Mukherjee, Think Progress, August 16, 2013
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