“Laying It All Out On Medicare”: No Mistaking Paul Ryan’s Policy
The release of a new Paul Ryan budget plan is always the occasion for a lot of ridicule from liberals, for a whole bunch of reasons, and this year’s will be no different. Ryan’s budgets always manage to combine a remarkable cruelty toward poor people with a sunny optimism that draconian cuts to social services will result in a veritable explosion of economic growth, allowing us to balance the budget without taking anything away from the truly important priorities (like military spending) or, heaven forbid, forcing wealthy people to pay more in taxes.
I’m sure there are other people preparing detailed critiques of the Ryan budget, but I want to focus on one thing this brings up: the question of how we talk about Medicare. As he has before in his budgets, Ryan proposes to repeal the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, like subsidies for middle-class people to buy insurance and the expansion of Medicaid, but he’d keep the tax increases and Medicare cuts that the bill included in order to pay for it all, which helps him achieve his “balanced” budget.
Yes, it’s true that when Ryan was running for vice president, he joined Mitt Romney in condemning those very Medicare savings. But nobody really believed he was doing anything at the time but being a team player. So we can give him credit for taking at least a step toward putting his money where his mouth is on Medicare. Sure, it may be couched in some misleading words (the document refers to “strengthening Medicare” no fewer than ten times), but there’s no mistaking the policy.
Because the rest of his party is, to put it kindly, of two minds when it comes to the program. On one hand, they will tell you, Medicare is unsustainable, a ravenous beast that will devour the entire nation’s financial well-being if we don’t find a way to suppress its appetite. In Washington-speak, this is translated as “doing something about entitlements.” We have to Do Something About Entitlements! If you don’t want to Do Something About Entitlements, you’re just not serious about our nation’s fiscal challenges.
On the other hand, Republicans believe that Medicare is utterly sacrosanct, a jewel whose every facet is so perfect that even the most modest attempt to curtail its costs should be met with howls of anguish and outrage. Or at least that’s what they believe at election time, when they’ll air one ad after another condemning Democrats for cutting the Medicare seniors so desperately need. Democrats all over the country have been subjected to ads saying, “Congressman Fnurbler voted to cut $716 billion from Medicare!” over a picture of an elderly couple sitting at the kitchen table, looking over their bills with an engulfing despair, then meeting each other’s eyes in a tragic look that says, “Thanks to Congressman Fnurbler, all is lost. If only we had been able to pay our gas bill so we could stick our heads in the oven and end it all right now.”
Republicans are so deeply opposed to the idea of cutting Medicare that they can’t even stomach anyone trying to see if Medicare is spending its money wisely. Mention the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a component of the ACA that was designed to restrain Medicare costs if they rose too fast, and steam will come out of their ears. (The IPAB would make recommendations to Congress on ways to save money, and Congress would have to act on them. But since Medicare spending has slowed dramatically in the last couple of years, the requirement has yet to kick in, and President Obama hasn’t bothered to appoint anyone to what is still a theoretical board.) They waged a virtual war on comparative effectiveness research, effectively saying that it was dangerous to even ask which competing treatments work well and which don’t.
In other words, most Republicans believe we must, must, must reduce the cost of Medicare—excuse me, Do Something About Entitlements—but are adamantly opposed to every step that has been taken to reduce the cost of Medicare. I’m sure that lots of them are sympathetic to Ryan’s vision, which is to essentially turn the program into a voucher system, in which the government helps you buy private insurance, and over time costs magically go down (and if you’re thinking that sounds a lot like what people are getting on the Obamacare exchanges, any Republican will tell you that it’s totally different because freedom).
So let’s give Paul Ryan some credit. Sure, his numbers might not add up. But when he puts out a budget, there’s no mystery about where he’s coming from and what he wants to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 1, 2014
“And Four Years Later?”: How Much “Repeal” Must “Replace” Involve?
If you’re wondering why it’s taking so long for congressional Republicans to unite behind an Obamacare Replacement plan when there are several of them out there, look no further than the North Carolina U.S. Senate primary, where “Establishment” candidate Thom Tillis has incautiously said not all aspects of Obamacare are bad, yet appears to be afraid to endorse the “replacement” bill originally cosponsored by the senior senator from that state, Richard Burr. WaPo’s Greg Sargent has more:
Tillis has so far refrained from endorsing the Burr plan. And similarly, in interviews, he has claimed that of course he would replace Obamacare with something that would protect people with preexisting conditions and others who need protection, without specifying what that replacement would be. Republicans appear increasingly aware that they can’t be just for repeal, and have to promise replacements that would accomplishment some of what Obamacare accomplishes….
As the case of Tillis shows…Republicans must also simultaneously remain vague enough about those replacements so as to avoid embracing the tradeoffs they would require — since specificity there risks angering the right. Indeed, Tillis’ embrace of even some of Obamacare’s general goals has drawn fire from his primary opponent, Tea Partyer Greg Brannon.
The Coburn-Burr-Hatch proposal is dangerous politically for a primary-challenged Republican because it simultaneously embraces aspects of Obamacare (an insurance purchasing exchange, albeit one selling “deregulated”—which means less generous—products; and subsidies for purchases on those exchanges by certain low-income folk) and aspects of more conventional conservative health care thinking that are wildly disruptive of the status quo at a time when Republicans are making big hay over Obamacare “disruptions” (notably the partial rollback of the federal tax write-off for employer-based plans). Indeed, messing with employer-based coverage has been a conservative policy pet rock for years, even though GOP politicians have been leery of it since John McCain proposed junking it in 2008, and left himself exposed to a “tax increase” charge.
There simply isn’t, and can’t be, an “Obamacare replacement” proposal that lets everyone who likes the status quo keep it, while dealing with pre-existing condition exclusions, expanding coverage, and holding down costs. This is why Republicans prefer to insist they want to repeal Obamacare and are stilling “working” on a replacement, four years after enactment of the Affordable Care Act.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 1, 2014
“Macho Chest-Thumping Myth”: Sorry, Dick Cheney, Torture Doesn’t Work
I’ve written a couple posts now predicting that a Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation practices during the Bush years would show that the CIA’s foray into torture just didn’t work. Also, that the CIA lied about the effectiveness of waterboarding and other controversial techniques. Now we have a test of that prediction — not the Intelligence Committee report itself, which is still under wraps, but a bombshell in the Washington Post that quotes people with firsthand knowledge of the report. Lo and behold:
A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.
The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.
“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”
Importantly, the Senate report apparently also recommends no prosecution for these war crimes. That’s depressing, if not very surprising.
You might be wondering: How was I so prescient? In fact, I deserve no credit: that torture during the Bush era yielded no valuable intelligence was completely obvious from the beginning, despite what Dick Cheney might have you believe. All you had to do was pay attention to people who have studied torture carefully. Darius Rejali, a professor at Reed College, did just that in his masterpiece Torture and Democracy (see here and here). Rejali found that torture is good for two things: intimidation and extracting false confessions. As an intelligence-gathering mechanism, it’s much worse than worthless. You get no good intelligence, while what you do get is decidedly bad, including a corrosion of the legitimacy of security agencies and a weakening of the foundation of liberal democracy itself.
Micah Zenko makes a good point that the major issue when it comes to torture is that it is blatantly illegal, immoral, and unethical. He’s right that the rule of law — not to mention basic decency — ought to land every torturer in federal prison.
But it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that it is also ineffective. The ethos of the Bush-era CIA was “know-nothingism,” as Paul Krugman put it at The New York Times, “the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise.” These national security officials see themselves as the hard-headed tough guys who won’t let the pathetic moral qualms of liberal cowards keep them from doing the dirty work that keeps us safe. (This is a real-life version of Jack Nicholson’s famous “You can’t handle the truth!” scene in A Few Good Men.) Breaking the law, then, is a Badge of Seriousness, of a willingness to do what is necessary no matter the cost.
It’s critically important, therefore, to break forever this macho chest-thumping myth. Anyone who advocates torture shouldn’t be met only with moral condemnation, but also contemptuous jeers for being such a naive dupe. The members of the CIA torture cabal aren’t tough. They aren’t keeping us safe. They are a pack of incompetents who don’t know what they’re doing.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, April 1, 2014
“Stunning Hypocrisy”: Hobby Lobby 401(k) Discovered To Be Investor In Numerous Abortion And Contraception Products While Claiming Religious Objection
In what just may be the most stunning example of hypocrisy in my lifetime, Mother Jones has uncovered numerous investments on the part of Hobby Lobby’s retirement fund in a wide variety of companies producing abortion and contraception related products.
Hobby Lobby is currently seeking relief from certain contraception benefit requirements of Obamacare in a United States Supreme Court case that promises to be a landmark decision on the rights of corporations and the extension of personal religious protections to corporate entities. In the case of the Hobby Lobby corporation, the company is closely held by the Green family who purport to have strong religious objections to certain types of contraceptive devices and are suing to protect those religious rights.
Remarkably, the contraceptive devices and products that so offend the religious beliefs of this family are manufactured by the very companies in which Hobby Lobby holds a substantial stake via their employee 401(k) plan.
As I suspect many readers will find this as hard to believe and digest as I, the data can be confirmed by reviewing the company’s 2012 Annual Report of Employee Benefit Plan as filed with the Department of Labor.
This according to Mother Jones’ Molly Redden:
“Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012 (see above)—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).”
In a brief submitted to the Court in support of Hobby Lobby’s position in the case, the company specifically names contraceptive products such as Plan B, Ella, and IUDs as violating their religious beliefs because they work by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman’s uterus. According to the Green family, interfering with an already fertilized egg is tantamount to abortion—an act unacceptable to the family and one they refuse to participate in no matter what the Affordable Care Act may require .
However, it turns out that the owners of Hobby Lobby do not appear to have any problem with profiting from the companies that manufacture the very products that so grievously offend their religious principles.
The following is a summation of the companies manufacturing these products that are held by the Hobby Lobby employee retirement plan, as set forth by Ms. Redden’s remarkable reporting:
“These companies include Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, which makes Plan B and ParaGard, a copper IUD, and Actavis, which makes a generic version of Plan B and distributes Ella. Other holdings in the mutual funds selected by Hobby Lobby include Pfizer, the maker of Cytotec and Prostin E2, which are used to induce abortions; Bayer, which manufactures the hormonal IUDs Skyla and Mirena; AstraZeneca, which has an Indian subsidiary that manufactures Prostodin, Cerviprime, and Partocin, three drugs commonly used in abortions; and Forest Laboratories, which makes Cervidil, a drug used to induce abortions. Several funds in the Hobby Lobby retirement plan also invested in Aetna and Humana, two health insurance companies that cover surgical abortions, abortion drugs, and emergency contraception in many of the health care policies they sell.”
When added up, the nine funds holding the stated investments involve three-quarters of Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) assets.
You may be thinking that it must have been beyond Hobby Lobby’s reasonable abilities to know what companies were being invested in by the mutual funds purchased for the Hobby Lobby 401(k) plans—but I am afraid you would be wrong.
Not only does Hobby Lobby have an obligation to know what their sponsored 401(k) is investing in for the benefit of their employees, it turns out that there are ample opportunities for the retirement fund to invest in mutual funds that are specifically screened to avoid any religiously offensive products.
“To avoid supporting companies that manufacture abortion drugs—or products such as alcohol or pornography—religious investors can turn to a cottage industry of mutual funds that screen out stocks that religious people might consider morally objectionable. The Timothy Plan and the Ave Maria Fund, for example, screen for companies that manufacture abortion drugs, support Planned Parenthood, or engage in embryonic stem cell research.”
Apparently, Hobby Lobby was either not aware that these options existed (kind of hard to believe for a company willing to take a case to the Supreme Court over their religious beliefs) or simply didn’t care.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, April 1, 2014
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