“24 Health-Care Scandals”: Legislators Who Block Medicaid Expansion Are Stiffing Veterans Out Of Health Care, And Stiffing Workers Out Of Jobs
The scandal over long wait times for veterans in the Department of Veterans Affairs health system has grabbed a lot of headlines and elicited a lot of righteous anger — as it should. America’s veterans deserve so much better.
But as Ezra Klein pointed out in a piece in Vox, there’s another health care scandal that also deserves its share of righteous anger, and it also has a big impact on veterans with health care needs: the self-destructive refusal of lawmakers in 20-plus states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs.
Klein cataloged “24 health-care scandals that critics of the VA should also be furious about” (that is, the 24 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion). Thanks to lawmakers’ knee-jerk opposition to expanding health coverage in those states, there are huge numbers of uninsured veterans who should be eligible for coverage, but aren’t: 41,200 veterans in Florida, 24,900 in Georgia, 48,900 in Texas… and the list goes on.
All in all, about 250,000 uninsured veterans are getting stiffed out of eligibility for health coverage by lawmakers who have blocked Medicaid expansion, according to Pew’s Stateline. As it turns out, those lawmakers are also stiffing their own states out of economy-boosting jobs — health care jobs that are overwhelmingly good-paying jobs. Medicaid expansion would create thousands more of these jobs.
Virginia, where Medicaid expansion still hangs in limbo, is a perfect example. According to a report from Chmura Economics & Analytics, Medicaid expansion would create an average of over 30,000 jobs annually in Virginia, including more than 15,000 jobs in the state’s health care sector. An analysis of data on projected job openings and wage levels underscores that these will be good-paying, economy-boosting jobs.
For a single adult in Virginia, less than half of all projected job openings statewide pay above a living wage ($18.59/hour, according to the 2013 Virginia Job Gap Study). However, three out of five health care job openings and close to nine out of 10 health practitioner and technical job openings do.
For a household with two working adults and two children, while less than two out of five projected job openings in Virginia pay median wages above a living wage ($21.99/hour per worker), half of health care job openings and more than seven out of 10 health practitioner and technical job openings do.
Or look at Maine, where Gov. Paul LePage vetoed a bipartisan Medicaid expansion plan passed by the Maine Legislature earlier this year, and too few Republican legislators were willing to break ranks with the Governor to override his veto. There, Medicaid expansion would create over 4,000 jobs by 2016, including more than 2,000 jobs in Maine’s health care sector. As with Virginia, health care jobs beat statewide wage levels in Maine by wide margins.
For a single adult, less than half of all projected job openings in Maine pay above a living wage ($15.18/hour, according to the 2013 Maine Job Gap Study). But two-thirds of health care job openings and almost nine out of 10 health practitioner and technical job openings do. For a household with two working adults and two children, while barely one-third of projected job openings in Maine pay above a living wage ($18.87/hour per worker), almost three-fifths of health care job openings and more than four out of five health practitioner and technical job openings do.
Health care jobs are also overwhelmingly higher-wage jobs in states like Montana and Idaho. But all these states, along with 20 others, have been missing out on these economy-boosting jobs because their legislatures or governors have rejected Medicaid expansion.
State lawmakers who continue to block Medicaid expansion do so at their own peril — both morally and electorally. Because you can only stiff your own constituents — including low-income, uninsured veterans — out of both access to health care and good-paying, economy-boosting jobs for so long before it catches up with you.
Want to really do something to help veterans get access to the health care they need and create good-paying jobs for your constituents at the same time? Two words: expand Medicaid.
By: LeeAnn Hall, Executive Director, The Alliance For A Just Society; The Huffington Post Blog, August 6, 2014
“All Too Convenient”: Claiming “Obama Is Caesar” Is Sexier Than Saying “Steve King Is Right”
Ross Douthat premised his Sunday New York Times column on the assumption that President Obama’s expected plan to extend deportation protections to millions of undocumented immigrants would be an illegal exercise of executive power. An act of “Caesarism.” This seemed all too convenient, I responded, since the details of the plan don’t even exist and won’t for several weeks.
Douthat has now explained his assumption more fully.
It’s an article of faith among most conservatives that Obama’s existing deferred action program for so-called Dreamers (DACA) is itself illegal. Douthat was silent about DACA in his column, but followed up Monday by noting that he, too, believes DACA 1.0 was a (presumably unlawful) “abuse of power.” Which means his original argument wasn’t fallacious. It was just mistaken. Or probably mistaken, anyhow.
I’ll concede to Douthat that if we assume President Obama’s existing deferred action program is illegal, then expanding it by an order of magnitude would be illegal, too—and worse in the same way that murdering 10 people is worse than murdering just one person. But we shouldn’t assume that.
Douthat bases his conclusion that DACA is illegal on a simplistic reductio argument: If Obama can announce non-enforcement of immigration laws for a subset of unauthorized immigrants and grant them work permits, then “President Rand Paul [could announce] that, because Congress won’t reform sentencing as he desires, he’s issuing permits to domestic cocaine and heroin dealers exempting them from drug laws and ordering the DEA to only arrest non-citizen smugglers and release any American involved in cartel operations.” That would be absurd and obviously lawless—ergo DACA must be lawless, too. This is presented as a companion to a similar argument, originally put forth by Reihan Salam on the National Review‘s website. But Salam has since deleted that piece. In its place, Salam wrote this post, in which he appears, upon more rigorous inspection, to reluctantly concede DACA’s legality. Or at least to play footsie with the idea that DACA is legal.
“The American constitutional order doesn’t rest solely on statutes, or on judicial efforts to restrain the executive branch,” Salam concludes. “It also rests on norms. And the president’s apparent willingness to violate these norms is setting a dangerous precedent.”
You might think DACA is reckless. But that’s a normative judgment, which tells us nothing about its legality.
So let’s flip the assumption. If DACA combines a lawful exercise of prosecutorial discretion with a lawful provision of work permits—and Greg Sargent’s expert sources make a very strong case that it does—then the question for Douthat is, where along the continuum between a million-or-so potential DACA beneficiaries and the (perhaps) five million beneficiaries of an expanded program would it transform into the “lawless” abomination he decried in his column?
The obvious answer to that question is: We can’t say until we see the details. All we know is that Obama is contemplating a program that’s different in degree, not necessarily in kind, from DACA. Which is why my original response to Douthat’s column posited that he had assumed too much. I still contend that he did.
He hasn’t really grappled with that argument, beyond pointing out that it would be absurd to grant drug-use or tax-evasion permits to people. Instead, he focuses on my suggestion that his substantive opposition to deferred action—rather than legal or procedural concerns—is what’s driving his conclusions about its lawlessness.
He’s right that this isn’t much of an argument. But it wasn’t really part of my core argument at all. It was just a sidecar—an inference based on the fact that Douthat made sweeping conclusions about a policy that hasn’t been announced yet, and which might well be legal. If it is legal, then Douthat must retreat to his procedural objection—that, legal or not, protecting up to half the undocumented population from deportation would constitute a dangerous erosion of norms. But if upholding norms is his concern, then he can’t just tiptoe away from the collapsed norms that created the foundation for broad deportation relief. Congress could address the over-reach problem either by passing immigration reform, or by explicitly forbidding programs like DACA. To the dismay of Democrats, Congress won’t do the former. To the dismay of Representative Steve King and other House Republicans, Congress won’t do the latter, either. But that just means Congress is leaving the matter in the president’s hands. Clearly Douthat would prefer it if Congress tied those hands. But a column urging the Senate to pass Steve King’s plan to end DACA wouldn’t have been as tantalizing as one warning that the specter of Caesarism is haunting America.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, August 6, 2014
“Abandon Ship, Abandon Ship!”: Rand Paul Runs From Immigration Talk With Steve King, But Rest Of GOP Is Not So Lucky
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) got into a tense exchange with two DREAMers on Monday, causing Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to physically distance himself from the anti-immigration hardliner. Other Republicans should be thinking about following Paul’s lead.
The confrontation took place at a fundraiser in Okoboji, Iowa, on Monday. Two members of the Dream Action Coalition, Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, approached the lawmakers and introduced themselves as beneficiaries of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Last week, King led the Republican House majority’s push to end the program, which grants temporary deportation relief and work permits for some young immigrants.
After Andiola offered King an opportunity to rip up her DACA card, things quickly got heated. She referenced King’s infamous comment that for every DREAMer who’s a valedictorian, “there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” and the congressman responded by grabbing her wrist.
“Stop a minute,” King said sharply. “You’re very good at English. You know what I’m saying.”
Where was Senator Paul throughout this testy exchange? As soon as Andiola said the words “I’m actually a DREAMer, myself,” Paul put down his hamburger mid-chew, got up, and bolted from the table.
The rest of the Republican Party should be so lucky.
There’s little mystery behind Paul’s decision to abandon ship. The freshman senator will almost certainly run for president in 2016, framing himself as a new kind of Republican who’s not afraid to sell conservatism to skeptical audiences. Improving the GOP’s relationship with Latinos is central to that message, and appearing on camera with King while he grips a DREAMer’s wrist and badgers her about her English skills would be supremely unhelpful.
But whether they like it or not, Republicans are now tied to King’s hardline positions on immigration. That’s what they get for House leadership’s decision to adopt King’s approach to addressing the border crisis after their first attempt flopped in embarrassing fashion.
The result was an immigration bill that would do little to alleviate the crisis at the border, but would dramatically expedite the deportation process and completely gut the current protections for immigrants who were illegally brought to the country as children. Or as King gleefully put it, “The changes brought into this [bill] are ones I’ve developed and advocated for over the past two years…It’s like I ordered it off the menu.”
Perhaps Republicans should think twice about taking orders from a man who has compared immigrants to dogs, livestock and the Visigoths who sacked Rome, among other outbursts.
It’s not as though Latino voters haven’t noticed the GOP’s decision to abandon its plan to become “inclusive and welcoming” in favor of cementing itself as the party of “Deport ‘em all,” as Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) put it after last week’s vote. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, Latinos view the GOP unfavorably by an overwhelming 65 to 29 percent margin (by contrast, they view Democrats favorably, 61 to 33 percent). While Latino voters’ disgust with Republicans may not make much of a tangible difference in the 2014 midterms, which will be decided in solidly red states, you can bet that the GOP will regret running to the right of Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” plan once the 2016 presidential election rolls around.
But really, the GOP should consider itself lucky if King only drives its immigration policy. After all, he has other plans that could be even more politically damaging to the party.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 5, 2014
“An Amusing Sideshow”: The Never-Ending Ben Carson Silliness
The silliness about a Ben Carson presidential bid just got sillier. With much fanfare, he recently gathered a flock of supposedly well-heeled donors, boosters, and political operatives in Palm Beach, Florida, and announced that he’s formed a PAC with the presumptuous name One Nation to prep for his 2016 White House bid. As in past times, when he’s teased the media and some of the more gullible GOP acolytes into actually thinking that his presidential talk is anything more than an amusing sideshow, it makes good copy. And just as in past times, when he pops off about a White House run, no one ever asks the obvious question: Beyond his endlessly milking of his rags-to-successful-neurosurgeon story and a few inane quips about President Obama and Democrats before packs of ultraconservative fawners and groupies, what makes him real political timber, let alone presidential stuff?
Then again, that’s really not the question anyone who buys into the Carson silliness would ask, since he has about as much of a chance of mounting a serious run for the White House as someone has of winning the Big Prize lottery without buying a ticket. Carson has currency for only one reason: He’s black and can be trotted out to make those ridiculous digs about Obama. He can say what GOP ultraconservatives and unreconstructed bigots want to say about Obama, but it just sounds better coming out of Carson’s mouth. The GOP has turned this tactic into a studied art with black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas. But Carson makes far better copy than Thomas, because, unlike Thomas, Carson actually speaks, and when he does, he’ll say something just ludicrous enough to get attention.
In the Obama era the GOP has worked overtime to tout, cultivate, prop up, and showcase a motley collection of black GOP candidates for a scattering of offices. The aim is two-fold: to find that someone who can have just enough luster and media appeal to be a counterbalance to Obama while at the same time allowing the party to thump its chest and claim it’s not racist.
Carson seemingly fits that double bill — actually, triple bill, because he gets even more attention for the GOP. But, more importantly, the notion of Carson as a presidential candidate touches a deep, dark, and throbbing pulse among legions of ultraconservatives who think that Obama and many Democrats are communists, that gays are immoral, and that the healthcare-reform law is “slavery,” as Carson infamously quipped, meaning a tyrannical intrusion by big government into Americans’ lives. Mainstream GOP leaders can’t utter this idiocy. They must always give the appearance that they are above the dirty, muddy, hate-slinging fray, so they leave it to a well-paid stalking horse like Carson to do their dirty work for them.
But let’s assume, for a moment, that Carson is the real presidential deal. Again, the road to the 2016 GOP presidential nomination will be a knock-down, drag-out, bruising, low-intensity war. The names that have already staked out turf for that battle — Rick Perry, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and a cluster of popular GOP governors — are deeply embedded in the GOP political hierarchy. They have money, means, and a dedicated, entrenched following. They have wooed and courted the key state party leaders and potential party delegates who will make or break a candidate in the key party primaries later next year. Their work has been ongoing, and it requires a team of professional, connected, and financially stout party officials to do the hard leg work required.
Then there is the gauntlet of the GOP presidential debates. These are equally vital for a potential candidate to prove that he or she has a firm grasp of the big-ticket policy issues: immigration reform, health care, education, taxation, jobs and the economy, and foreign-policy concerns. Who can forget the moment in the November 2011 GOP debate when Perry put his foot in his mouth when he couldn’t name the three agencies of government that he vowed to eliminate if elected president? His candidacy quickly was yanked off life support. A well-placed sound bite or pithy remark won’t cut it here. There has to be real substance behind the answers that serious presidential candidates must and are expected to give in the heat of a debate, in interviews, and in policy speeches to groups of potential supporters.
Carson’s supposed backers see all of this as a plus. That he is the old self-made, non-politician patriot who simply wants to unite the nation as hard political nostrums won’t fly, in part because of the hard-wired, encrusted, political-insider dominance over the presidential-vetting process, and in bigger part because Carson is nothing more than a curiosity, good for a few more spots on the TV-talk-show circuit. This is just enough to ensure the silliness of Carson will continue.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Associate Editor of New America Media; The Huffington Post Blog, August 5, 2014
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