“Rick Scott Gets An Earful In Florida”: Talking To Regular People Who Don’t Have A Script To Follow Could End Your Career
There’s a reason so many politicians embrace carefully managed, pre-scripted events: they never know what actual people are going to say. The spontaneity may be refreshing for the rest of us, but for politicians and their aides, it’s frustrating when the public goes “off-message.”
Almost exactly two years ago, this happened to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in Pennsylvania, when aides arranged for the candidate to chat with a group of regular folks about the economy. One voter said, “None of us like to pay more taxes, but sometimes that’s necessary.” Another added, “It’s a necessary evil.” “Right, right,” a third person said as the group nodded.
The Republican presidential hopeful didn’t do too many unscripted events after that.
This week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) ran into similar trouble. The Republican governor, facing a tough re-election fight, is heavily invested in condemning the Affordable Care Act, so he visited a South Florida senior center for a roundtable chat with retirees he assumed would agree with him.
Oops.
The 20 seniors assembled for a roundtable with Scott at the Volen Center were largely content with their Medicare coverage and didn’t have negative stories to recount. And some praised Obamacare – a program that Scott frequently criticizes.
“I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott.
Eisen told the governor he wasn’t sure “if, as you say,” there are Obamacare-inspired cuts to Medicare. But even if there are, that would be OK. “I can’t expect that me as a senior citizen are going to get preferential treatment when other programs are also being cut.”
Ruthlyn Rubin, 66, of Boca Raton, told the governor that people who are too young for Medicare need the health coverage they get from Obamacare. If young people don’t have insurance, she said, everyone else ends up paying for their care when they get sick or injured and end up in the hospital.
Twisting the knife, Rubin added, “People were appalled at Social Security. They were appalled at Medicare when it came out. I think these major changes take some people aback. But I think we have to be careful not to just rely on the fact that we’re seniors and have an entitlement to certain things…. We’re all just sitting here taking it for granted that because we have Medicare we don’t want to lose one part of it. That’s wrong to me. I think we have to spread it around. This is the United States of America. It’s not the United States of senior citizens.”
The underlying point of Scott’s visit was to try to complain about Medicare Advantage reforms and how awful recent “cuts” must be for seniors. But when the governor asked one elderly woman if she’d seen any changes, she said, “Not really.” Another member of the roundtable said he’s “very happy” with the current coverage. A third person said he’s had “no problems.” A fourth said she and her husband are “very pleased.”
When Scott asked if they’ve found doctors opting out of Medicare, most said, “No.”
It was at this point that the governor probably decided he no longer wants to talk to regular people who don’t have a script to follow.
For the record, as Scott probably knows, these so-called “cuts” to Medicare Advantage aren’t really cuts to beneficiaries. At issue are Medicare cost-savings embraced by the Obama administration through the Affordable Care Act. The so-called “cuts” are changes to the way in which the government reimburses insurance companies, which have been overpaid in the Medicare Advantage program.
What’s more, congressional Republicans – not exactly a moderate bunch – have already endorsed and voted for these “cuts.”
It’s likely the governor understands this, but hopes to fool voters. If yesterday was any indication, his efforts aren’t going well.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 30, 2014
“John Boehner Is A Ridiculous Man”: Lacking Political Courage, The Republican Establishment Has A Problem
As soon as I saw what John Boehner had done, I knew that the folks at Red State would lose their minds. While speaking at the Middletown, Ohio, Rotary Club, Speaker Boehner dismissed the possibility of truly repealing ObamaCare and mocked his colleagues in the House who lack the political courage to pass some kind of immigration reform.
On ObamaCare, Boehner said repeal wasn’t even the goal. The goal was to “repeal and replace.” But, as soon as he began to describe what replacing would mean, he made it clear that much of what had been done could not be undone:
“The challenge is that Obamacare is the law of the land. It is there and it has driven all types of changes in our health care delivery system. You can’t recreate an insurance market over night.
“Secondly, you’ve got the big hospital organizations buying up doctor’s groups because hospitals get reimbursed two or three times doctor’s do for the same procedure just because it’s a hospital. Those kinds of changes can’t be redone.
“So the biggest challenge we are going to have is — I do think at some point we’ll get there — is the transition of Obamacare back to a system that empowers patients and doctors to make choices that are good for their own health as opposed to doing what the government is dictating they should do.”
In other words, repeal is out of the question and “replace” means “tinker.”
Over at Red State, Daniel Horowitz is apoplectic:
Which means that he has no intention to repeal it.
It’s funny how we warned those who opposed the effort to defund Obamacare that they would never repeal it at a later date. They denied the charge at the time; now they are embracing it.
Maybe even more troubling to the base is Boehner’s attitude about immigration reform.
“Here’s the attitude. Ohhhh. Don’t make me do this. Ohhhh. This is too hard,” Boehner whined before a luncheon crowd at Brown’s Run County Club in Madison Township.
“We get elected to make choices. We get elected to solve problems and it’s remarkable to me how many of my colleagues just don’t want to … They’ll take the path of least resistance.”
Boehner said he’s been working for 16 or 17 months trying to push Congress to deal with immigration reform.
“I’ve had every brick and bat and arrow shot at me over this issue just because I wanted to deal with it. I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” he said.
Of course, a majority in the House wants to pass immigration reform, so Boehner could do it tomorrow if he was willing to put up with the grumbling in his own party. If he thinks it would cost him his leadership position, then he’s lacking political courage, too.
Here’s Horowitz’s response:
Yes, Mr. Boehner. We actually want to solve the immigration problem.
We want to deal with the problem of criminals being let out of jail.
We want to deal with the problem of Obama suspending deportations.
We want to deal with birthright citizenship and other magnets that allow foreigners to violate our sovereignty and take advantage of the welfare state.
We want to make immigration work for the American people, not for your donors.
Sadly, you have no interest in joining us in combating the President’s malfeasance. You are the one who is too scared to make hard decisions. It’s a lot easier to go along with the political class and cowardly hide behind the misleading canard of “reform” just for the purpose of pushing the same failed amnesty that has engendered endless cycles of illegal immigration and that is already spawning a new wave. It’s akin to saying conservatives are cowards for not dealing with “healthcare reform” because they don’t support Obamacare.
In the aftermath of the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee did a study to figure out why they lost and what they needed to do differently to win in the future. They basically concluded that they lost because they sounded too much like Red State. They couldn’t ignore the need for immigration reform anymore. They couldn’t continue to oppose gay equality. The New York Times’ Tom Edsall described the problem this way:
There is at least one crucial problem that the authors, all members of the establishment wing of the party, address only peripherally and with kid gloves: the extreme conservatism of the party’s primary and caucus voters — the people who actually pick nominees. For over three decades, these voters have episodically shown an inclination to go off the deep end and nominate general election losers in House and Senate races — or, in the case of very conservative states and districts, general election winners who push the party in the House and Senate to become an instrument of obstruction.
Ironically, it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who conceived of the Party of No strategy that the GOP has followed with almost psychotic glee. President Obama’s reelection did not alter that strategy one iota. Somehow, the folks at Red State took the strategy seriously, as if it were about principle instead of a failed attempt to destroy Obama’s presidency.
So, now the Republican Establishment has a problem. They cannot govern according to their own lights. They literally cannot lead their own caucuses. When they whine about the results, they invite nothing more than simple ridicule.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly, Ten Miles Square, April 25, 2014
“Obamascare Tactics In Red State Races”: Passing Laws That Prevent Any Future Governor From Accepting Medicaid Money
If I asked you to name two states where the incumbent Republican governors might lose reelection this fall, you would likely, I expect, say Florida and Pennsylvania. I doubt very much you’d offer up Georgia and Kansas.
But lo and behold—the contests in both of those states are right now a little closer than you’d expect. In Kansas, Sam Brownback is the governor. You remember Brownback—he was a senator for a spell, best remembered (by me anyway) for his prominent role in that hideous Republican appropriation of poor Terry Schiavo in their zealotry to “promote life.” In Georgia, the bossman is Nathan Deal, also a former Congressman, whose term is best remembered for the way he announced a departure date for his gubernatorial run. (He realized that the House would be voting on Obamacare shortly thereafter, and delayed his departure so he could vote against it.)
It ought to be easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy for right-wing Republicans to get reelected in those states, but recent polls have shown them dangling along the margin-of-error cliff. Deal leads Jason Carter (yep, Jimmy’s grandson) by just 3.4 percent in the realclearpolitics average, and Brownback actually trailed Democrat Paul Davis 42-40 in one February poll. Brownback’s approval rating is also deeply underwater. So it’s conceivable—that’s as far as we should prudently go—that both could lose.
Now, here’s the rub. Both, naturally, oppose the expansion of Obamacare into their states. They say no force on earth or in heaven will make them take that Medicaid money. It’s estimated that 600,000 Georgians and 78,000 Kansans would benefit. But they’re having none of it. And that’s their right. But what they’re doing now, in cahoots with friendly legislators, is a step beyond: In both states, they’re passing laws that would prevent any future governor from accepting the Medicaid money.
It works like this. Under the Affordable Care Act, the process by which states decide to accept the money is entirely up to them. Some states determined that legislative action should be required. You may have read about the Republicans in the Florida legislature rebuffing GOP Governor Rick Scott for the five minutes he was toying with taking the money. New Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe wants the money badly, and his Democratic State Senate is with him, but they’re hamstrung by the GOP-controlled House of Delegates, which is against.
Initially, Georgia and Kansas were states where it was just the governor’s call. Which was fine as long as the Republicans looked like sure things. But the polls tightened up, and people started getting a little antsy. Hey, what if a Democratic governor got elected and said, ‘Okay, Barack, write me that check?’
And so Brownback signed his state’s law last Friday. His office just announced it this week. Why the delay? Shouldn’t one such as Sam Brownback be proud of signing this socialism-blocking law? Well, it turns out that it was originally a law about something else, requiring the state to provide quick payment to certain in-state Medicaid care providers. This provision was tacked on late. A Wichita Democrat, Jim Ward, said: “That bill is what I think is endemic with this legislative process under this governor and this speaker and Senate president. There was no hearing. There were no opportunities for people who have a stake in Medicaid expansion to come in and talk about it.”
In Georgia, it’s easier. The legislation was passed about a month ago. If Deal doesn’t veto it, it becomes law. And since he supports it—indeed, since his staff helped write this law that willingly hands gubernatorial power over to the legislature—it will. And into the bargain, the Georgia legislature also passed—on the next-to-last day of the session—a bill that blocks state employees from helping Georgians sign up for care under the ACA.
So stop and think about this. Kansas and Georgia have just taken what was a gubernatorial decision out of the hands of not only current but future governors. You can argue plausibly that the people’s representatives should have a say in such a decision, on principle. But principle wasn’t at work here. Political expediency was. Legislators in the two states know that Republicans are likely to have control as far as the eye can see. And they’ll never say yes. And they’re doing all this in the name of what? In the name of denying 678,000 people a chance at health-insurance coverage.
It gets worse. The ACA makes cuts to certain current Medicaid programs on the assumption that states would take this new Medicaid money. It cut funding for hospitals that serve the poor, cuts intended to be mitigated by the fact that a large number of poor would now be insured once the states they live in accepted the new money. But in states that did not, those people are suffering even more. Several rural hospitals in Georgia have closed. They could be saved if the state took the Medicaid money.
Carter vows he’s going to make this skeezy law, and the Medicaid question generally, an issue. The Georgia law has sparked large protests and arrests and might end up being the most important issue in the campaign. In Kansas, Davis supports Medicaid expansion—and according to a recent poll so do 55 percent of Kansans, against just 39 percent who oppose taking the money. So maybe there’s not as much the matter with Kansas as we thought. With the people, anyway. The governor and the legislators are another matter.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 23, 2014
“Stuck In The First Stage Of Grief”: GOP Reflexively Making Themselves Feel Better About A Reality That’s Causing Them Pain
At a press conference last week, President Obama announced a figure that was hard to even imagine a month ago: 8 million consumers signed up for private insurance through exchange marketplaces during the Affordable Care Act’s open-enrollment period. Obama also took a moment to chide Republicans for having been wrong about practically every aspect of the debate.
“I recognize that their party is going through the stages of grief,” he said, “and we’re not at acceptance yet.”
That sounds about right, though I’m not sure the GOP is “going through the stages of grief” so much as it’s stuck on the first one. If the process is believed to have five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – we have quite a ways to go before “acceptance” is even on the horizon.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.) said Monday he believes the uninsured rate in his state has increased since implementation of the 2010 health care reform law.
“It’s hard to get accurate numbers on anything,” Huelskamp told his constituents at a town hall in Salina, Kan., according to video posted by Eagle Community Television. “But the numbers we see today is that – as I understand them – we believe there are more people uninsured today in Kansas than there were before the president’s health care plan went into effect. And I thought the goal was to bring more people into insurance.”
There are a wide variety of counts when it comes to determining just how many uninsured Americans have been able to get coverage, but all of the reports have something important in common: they all show the rate of the uninsured going down, not up. We can discuss exactly how many, whether that’s in line with expectations, whether that’s enough to sustain the larger system, and why progress is happening faster in blue states than red states.
But to argue that the number of uninsured people is climbing is comparable to arguing that the federal budget deficit is getting larger; the planet is experiencing global cooling; and Obama has pushed use of executive orders to new heights.
Oh wait, conservative Republicans often believe all of those bogus claims, too.
Obviously, the problem isn’t limited to Huelskamp. On Friday, Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) said he doesn’t believe the Obama administration’s enrollment totals, calling the figures “all smoke and mirrors.” On Thursday, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suggested consumers receiving ACA subsidies to defray the costs of coverage may be engaged in “fraud.”
Much of the Republican establishment quickly embraced the “cooking the books” conspiracy theory, which was soon after followed by the Census Bureau conspiracy theory.
The right doesn’t bother with evidence to bolster any of this – evidence is irrelevant. Denial isn’t about rationality; it’s about reflexively making one feel better about a reality that’s causing them pain.
That said, GOP officials aren’t just embracing denial, they’re swimming in it in the most self-indulgent fashion possible. Republicans almost seem to be enjoying their distaste for health care reality, seemingly eager to one up their far-right colleagues.
Let’s also not brush past the “heads I win, tails you lose” problem – “Obamacare” critics believe the numbers are correct and reliable when they point to facts Republicans want to hear. Enrollment totals are low? This is proof that conservatives were right all along and that the ACA is a failure. Enrollment totals soared in March? This is proof that the White House is perpetrating a fraud – because conservatives were right all along and that the ACA is a failure.
It’s become effectively impossible under conditions like these for the two sides to even have a conversation about health policy. Paul Krugman’s take over the weekend rings true:
Not a day goes by without some prominent Republican politician or pundit insisting that the enrollment numbers are phony, that more people are losing insurance than gaining it, etc.. I know that’s what the base believes, because it’s what they hear from Rush and Fox. But you would think that important people would have someone around who has a clue, who knows that enrollment data and multiple surveys are all telling the same story of unexpected success. OK, maybe not – if famous senators don’t have anyone to clue them in about BLS data, they might really still be living in the bubble. But that’s really their choice.
And the point is that with enrollment more or less closed for 2014, there’s not much point in spinning. OK, maybe if you can keep up the pretense all the way to November, you can slightly sway base voters for the midterms. But even that’s doubtful – by the fall, we’re going to have a very clear picture of how things went; and the shape of that picture has already been determined.
I guess that what gets me is the – to use the technical term – wussiness of it all. Isn’t there any space on the right for people who sell themselves as tough-minded, who condemn Obamacare on principle but warn their followers that it’s not on the verge of collapse? Is the whole party so insecure, so unable to handle the truth, that it automatically shoots anyone bearing bad news?
I’m going to assume those are rhetorical questions, because the answer seems pretty obvious.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 21, 2014
“The GOP Grand Swindle”: “We’re Not Going To Do Anything To Address Health Care”
It’s been nearly three months since House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) declared, “This year, we will rally around an alternative to ObamaCare and pass it on the floor of the House.” Last week House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the plan is being delayed “at least a month.” A month from when? He didn’t say.
ThinkProgress reports that Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) is telling his constituents that his party doesn’t intend “to do anything” on this issue for the rest of the year.
CONSTITUENT: You’ve voted to repeal it approximately 50 times. Had zero votes on a replacement. So my question is, why do you think it is so good to deny seniors on Part D to make them pay more, about $4,000 more for medicine, and people with pre-existing conditions get denied insurance, have 26-year-olds have a harder time getting insurance because they can’t get on their parents’? Why do you think those are good ideas?
ROSS: I don’t. And let me tell you, I think one of the most unfortunate things my party did the last three years was not offer an alternative to health care. I’ve always felt that way. I think it’s absurd when I tell people that this isn’t what you should do, but I don’t have an alternative for you…. I wish we had an alternative. For the next six months, we’re going to go into an election knowing that we’re not going to do anything to address health care. Because we’ve gone so far in the last few years saying “no” that we don’t have an alternative to say “yes” to.
It’s not too common to hear House Republicans referring to their own party’s posture on health care as “absurd,” which make Ross’ comments fairly striking on their own.
There’s also the news that Ross is apparently under the impression that his party won’t bother with an ACA alternative at all in 2014, despite literally years of Republican promises to the contrary.
But perhaps most interesting of all was the two-word answer in response to the question from Ross’ constituent: “I don’t.”
The question made a lot of sense: here’s a Republican congressman who voted several dozen times to repeal – either in whole or in part – the Affordable Care Act, including all kinds of popular provisions, benefits, and consumer protections. Why is Ross against them?
He’s not, he says.
It’s part of an increasingly common pitch from congressional Republicans: they share the goals of “Obamacare,” they say, but disagree with how the reform law achieves those goals.
Rhetorically, that’s not a bad idea. Substantively, as Brian Beutler explained, it’s nonsense.
Republicans have replaced an unabashed “full repeal!” mantra with a deluge of weasel words meant to conceal the fact that “repeal” is still the beginning and end of their health-care reform agenda. It’s still the goal – they’re just a little ashamed of it now. And that places an onus on Dems (and reporters and anyone else who believes politicians should own the consequences of their policies) to be extremely explicit about the benefits Obamacare is conferring, and what an unvarnished rendering of GOP health policy would really look like.
This is clearly true of Ross, who went on to tell his constituents how much he likes all kinds of ACA provisions, making it sound as if he were somehow sympathetic to the law he voted to repeal several dozen times.
But real health care policy doesn’t work this way. A policymaker can’t (1) vote to gut the federal health care system; (2) endorse the goals of the federal health care system; (3) talk up the need for a credible alternative; (4) and offer no credible alternative, all at the same time.
It is, as Beutler added, “a grand swindle.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 17, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 