“Obamacare Witch Hunt”: Republican Halloween Witch Trials About Obamacare Avoid The Facts
Watch out for the hobgoblins! The knives are out. The hearings are on. The charges are flying. Obamacare is on the hot seat … again!
The sad result is that as we get these unconfirmed anecdotes, these stories about problems with insurance companies, these people who face hardship supposedly because of Obamacare, few Republicans think back to pre-2010. Then the costs of health care were skyrocketing – from $1,000 per person in 1980 to about $3,000 in 1990 to $4,000 in 2000 to nearly $8,000 before the Affordable Care Act was passed. The next highest nation for cost: Norway at $5,352.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, 49.9 million Americans were without health insurance in 2009, up 13 million from 2000. Houston, we have a problem.
And remember the stories of pre-existing conditions? Getting kicked off your health insurance or unable to get coverage? How about caps on your care? Or huge deductibles, especially for women? Horror story after horror story.
The facts are clear: 17 million Americans had pre-existing conditions; 34 percent lacked coverage for mental health; 62 percent lacked maternity coverage.
How soon we forget the problems that the ACA was written to solve. Right now, only 5 percent of Americans are covered by individual plans – if you had your plan prior to 2010, you are grandfathered in and can keep it. If the insurance companies want to kick you off they have to alter your plan, but they can no longer kick you off because of a pre-existing condition or because you cost them too much.
Most of these individual plans are renewed yearly and, according to current figures, 48 percent of those with individual plans would get a tax credit under the Affordable Care Act. The average “rebate” would be $5,500, not exactly chump change. Nearly half of those who believe they are suffering sticker shock from their insurance companies would get better coverage for less money.
So, before more and more people are dragged up before Republican-led congressional committees and berated, maybe it is time to get the facts. Maybe it is also time to work to fix what problems may exist and to offer solutions and not engage in more Salem-like witch trials just before Halloween.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, October 30, 2013
“Deja vu On Obamacare”: In The Crossfire Tonight, Americans Begin Signing Up For FDR’s New “Social Security” Program
Voiceover: It’s December 1, 1936 — in the Crossfire tonight — Americans begin signing up for FDR’s new “Social Security” program — but can the post office handle the volume? And is it essential protection for seniors — or the slippery slope to socialism? In the Crossfire — Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, who supports the program — and congressman Daniel Reed, Republican of New York, who opposes it.
Good evening, I’m Upton Sinclair, on the left.
And I’m Freddy Hayek, on the right.
Sinclair: After 18 months of planning, President Roosevelt’s breakthrough Social Security program to ease poverty among senior citizens recently began its rollout, with application forms sent to post offices across the country — and with employers forced to register as well. Freddy, I think it’s a milestone for a civilized nation. After all, two dozen countries already have systems of social insurance on the books. And the whole idea was invented by a conservative, Otto von Bismarck, back in the ’80s as a shrewd way to assure social peace. Can’t you concede that morality, not to mention the survival instincts of the ruling class, requires a decent society to offer something like Bismarckcare to protect against destitution in old age?
Hayek: Spoken like a communist out to weigh the economy down, Up. Don’t you lefties see that your taxing and spending will put us on the road to serfdom?
Sinclair: Catchy phrase, Fred — might want to hold onto that for a book at some point. Let’s bring in our guests. Congressman Reed, here’s what you said about Social Security during the House debate over the legislation: “The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test.” One of your Senate colleagues said the new program would “end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with the average European. But isn’t this rhetoric a bit over the top?
Reed: Not at all, Upton. This is simply the reality. As another Republican in our caucus says, “Never in the history of the world has a measure been . . . so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.”
Hayek: Secretary Perkins, you don’t look convinced.
Perkins: It’s always the same sob story from the party of wealth. The sky is falling, the lights of freedom are being extinguished, blah blah blah blah blah.
Reed: Plus, the darn thing doesn’t cover enough people.
Perkins and Upton: What?
Reed: It’s only slated to reach a couple hundred thousand Americans in 1940. And with very modest benefits.
Perkins: So your beef with a program you want to kill is that it doesn’t do enough for enough people in need?
Reed: Well, that, plus it’s very complicated and hard to sign up for. Have you seen the lines at the post office? People have no idea what to do. The wait can take hours.
Sinclair: You can’t blast a program for existing and also for being inadequate.
Perkins: Sure you can, Upton, if you’re a Republican. But my real problem with the GOP is different. More than 50 percent of our seniors live in poverty. You see them in the street every day. Charities are overwhelmed. These poor souls have nowhere to turn. They can’t afford food or medicine. And Republicans say there’s nothing the government of a great nation can do.
Hayek: Congressman, what say you?
Reed: Isn’t this socialism, Frances?
Perkins: Absolutely not.
Reed: Come, Secretary Perkins. Isn’t this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?
Perkins: It’s a load of common sense and decency, is what it is.
Reed: It will discourage people from saving for their own retirement. And it creates incentives for employers to drop any pension coverage they offer now. They’ll assume everyone can just be dumped into the government system.
Perkins: No, congressman, it’ll save companies money by letting them tailor any pensions they offer to work atop the national minimum that Social Security provides. Some basic level of government-funded retirement security is good for business.
Reed: Then why does every thinking businessman in America oppose it?
Perkins: Don’t throw oxymorons at me, Dan. Mark my words: Social Security will end up bigger than anyone today can imagine, even as America grows much, much richer — proving that social insurance and capitalism are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive.
Hayek: Such poetry, Frances — such misguided but lovely-sounding poetry!
Upton: After the break — some Democrats are urging FDR to go big on basic health coverage for every American, too — but the president says we can come back and address that question in a few years. Who’s right? Answers just ahead — when Crossfire returns . . .
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 30, 2013
“The Eugenics Forum”: If This Is What 2016 Is Going To Look Like, The GOP Is In Big Trouble
“In your lifetime, much of your potential — or lack thereof — can be known simply by swabbing the inside of your cheek,” Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said at Liberty University on Monday, during a rally for the Virginia GOP’s nominee for governor, Ken Cuccinelli. “Are we prepared to select out the imperfect among us?”
The senator was making an argument against abortion rights by conjuring eugenics, a pseudo-science of genetic improvement that resulted in sterilization laws across America in the 20th century. And he was possibly plagiarizing from Wikipedia to do it.
If Cuccinelli were leading in polls — even his own poll — appealing to the far right with abstruse arguments that have almost no appeal to swing voters probably wouldn’t be a very good idea with only eight days until the election.
But Paul — a Tea Party favorite — was in Virginia to shore up Cuccinelli’s support among libertarians currently trending to the Libertarian Party nominee Robert Sarvis, who refuses to identify as anti-abortion.
Until the government shutdown and polls that show him losing by as much as 17 percent, Cuccinelli had veered away from social issues, attempting to avoid pointing out that he opposes same-sex sex even as a majority of America accepts same-sex marriage. But at this point the Republican nominee is just trying to hold on to his base, hoping the electorate resembles 2010 much more than 2012.
Meanwhile, Bill Clinton is crisscrossing the state with his old friend, Democratic nominee for governor Terry McAuliffe. And as he did when he barnstormed for President Obama in the final days before the last presidential election, Clinton was aiming right down the center.
“If we become ideological, then we’re blind to evidence,” the former president said on Sunday. “We can only hear people who already agree with us. We think we know everything right now, and we have nothing to learn from anybody.”
McAuliffe is definitely running a far more liberal campaign than his fellow Democrats, Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Tim Kaine (D-VA), who have recently won statewide elections in Virginia.
“Like the president, McAuliffe has endorsed gay marriage; universal background checks for gun purchases; an assault-weapons ban; a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally; a mandate on employers offering health insurance to include free contraception coverage; and limits on carbon emissions from new coal-fired power plants,” The National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein reports, in a story examining how McAuliffe is winning as a “liberal Democrat” in purple Virginia. “He would also reverse the tight restrictions on abortion clinics championed by state Republicans led by Cuccinelli and outgoing Gov. Bob McDonnell.”
The combination of these ideas moving into the mainstream along with the contrast to Cuccinelli’s fundamentalism has given the Democrat a chance to still position himself as a centrist.
While his tone can be harsh, Cuccinelli’s policies are generally in the mainstream of the GOP’s base, represented by 2016 frontrunners Paul, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former senator Rick Santorum.
Even Governors Scott Walker (R-WI) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) have defunded Planned Parenthood in their states. Still, Christie’s willingness to literally embrace President Obama has positioned him as a “moderate” in the party. If he or former governor Jeb Bush were to win their party’s nomination in 2016, presenting the GOP with its third “moderate” candidate in a row, it’s not hard to imagine the Tea Party wing of the party losing patience and finding its own nominee that would draw voters away from the Republican nominee, as Sarvis seems to be siphoning from Cuccinelli. (Perhaps that third-party nominee could even be Senator Paul, who begins his first run for president by inheriting a grassroots network built up during his father’s two presidential campaigns.)
The next president of the United States will likely have to win in Virginia. And that person is not likely to be the person discussing eugenics a week before the election.
By: Jason Sattler, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 28, 2013
“House Republicans Exhausted By Failure”: They Would Prefer To Start Working Even Less
Following up on a segment from last night’s show, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives, just nine months into the current Congress, can’t think of anything to do. The Republican leadership hasn’t scheduled many work days for the remainder of 2013, and they’re now considering a plan to scale back even further.
For the first time in months, House Republicans are facing no immediate cataclysmic deadlines, and GOP leaders are struggling to come up with an agenda to fill the 19 legislative days that are left in 2013.
Need evidence? The House votes Monday evening and will finish its work week Wednesday. After that, the House is out of session until Nov. 12. Internally, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and senior Republicans aren’t discussing coming back early from the scheduled recess, but instead, they are wondering if they’ll cancel some of the remaining days in session.
This Politico item was published yesterday, so there are really only 18 legislative days remaining until New Year’s Eve – it’s great work if you can get it – a total which may be poised to shrink.
The 112th Congress was the least productive since the clerk’s office started keeping track seven decades ago, and this current 113th Congress is on track to do even less. Presumably, the Republican majority could at least try to take up meaningful bills in the hopes of passing something, but at this point, they’re not even inclined to bother. Rather, they’re thinking about showing up to work even less.
What about the House Republican policy agenda? It apparently doesn’t exist. What about the desire to have some legislative accomplishments? It’s been overwhelmed by political lethargy. This crop of lawmakers is giving new meaning to the phrase “do-nothing Congress,” and instead of scurrying to prove themselves capable of governing, they’re content to just accept the label and go home.
As pathetic as this may be, the larger point isn’t just to point and laugh at the House’s ineptitude. Rather, one of the key takeaways of this is that House Republicans keep saying they’d love to tackle immigration reform – if only they had more time.
The problem, of course, is not with a lack of time, but rather what they choose to do with it.
I’m reminded of an item from two weeks ago, when Byron York quoted a Senate Republican staffer commenting on the House GOP. “They are a majority party that wants to be a minority party,” the aide said.
The evidence to bolster that thesis is increasingly apparent. There is such a thing as a governing party. It just so happens that the House Republican conference isn’t one of them. For those in doubt, look no further than the fact that these lawmakers have accomplished practically nothing this year, and are apparently so exhausted by their failures that they’d prefer to start working even less.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 29, 2013
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