“GOP Like The Dog That Chases A Car”: Republican’s Can’t Do Better Than ObamaCare No Matter What They Would Like You To Believe
We are all familiar with the spectacle of a dog frantically chasing a car, which strikes us as stupid because, after all, what on Earth would the dog do with the car if it actually caught it?
That’s basically what we’re witnessing with the Republicans’ monomaniacal war on the Affordable Care Act:
The GOP’s message may well evolve between now and November, but the most tangible early indicator — advertising spending by conservative groups against Democratic candidates — shows how intensely it is focusing on the health-care law.
“It has been the predominant focus of both our grass roots and our advertising efforts,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the primary political operation of a donor network backed by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch.
Of the roughly $30 million the group has spent on ads since August, Phillips said, at least 95 percent has gone toward spots about the health-care law.
Democrats have been tracking that spending to help gauge what their candidates will be facing.
In Senate races, where control of the chamber is on the line, all but $240,000 of the $21.2 million that super PACs are spending on television advertising has gone into attacks centered on the health-care law, said Matt Canter, deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The exceptions were ad buys in three states that criticized Democratic senators for supporting President Obama’s judicial nominees.
There is a lot of polling data about ObamaCare, and you can pick and choose which numbers you want to focus on. I like the fact that 57% of self-proclaimed independents think we should either keep the law as it is or make improvements to it, versus 33% who think it should be scrapped. I don’t like that 29% of voters say that they have been negatively impacted by the law versus 17% who say that they have benefitted.
Overall, you could fairly say that the law is slowly becoming less unpopular. This is a victory in itself, considering how much money the Republicans have spent on trashing the law, and how little money the Democrats have spent defending it. If the law were to become popular, the Republicans’ entire midterm strategy would collapse.
As I’ve noted in recent days, the Republicans are so focused on using ObamaCare as a weapon in the midterms that they don’t want to take on tax or immigration reform because either issue would divide their caucus and take the country’s focus off their war on health coverage.
But, I think the public is going to notice that they are like the dog that chases the car. If you elect them to dismantle ObamaCare, they will have no solutions. They can’t do better than ObamaCare no matter what they would like you to believe. Their proposed reforms would cost more money, insure less people, and take away plans from people who like their plans. Everything they claim not to like about the law, they would make worse.
So, while I am nervous about the differential in firepower and resources being dedicated to arguing about ObamaCare, I think the Republicans are putting all their eggs in one basket full of lies and distortion and that we ought to be able to outflank such a clumsy, plodding, charge.
By: Martin Longman, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly, February 27, 2014
“They’ll Never Rally Behind A Single Plan”: The GOP’s Push To Replace ObamaCare Is Cynical And Doomed
On Friday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is gathering key members of his caucus to work toward coming up with a single, official Republican alternative to the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act (ACA), or ObamaCare. Republican lawmakers have several competing bills to work with, and putting the party’s weight behind one plan or piece of legislation would be great for the country: Finally, America could have a real discussion about the best way to reform America’s health care insurance system.
But an official Republican health care plan would also be great for Democrats — which is reason No. 1 Republicans aren’t going to actually rally behind a single plan.
They will, of course, make a public effort. “GOP leaders have been clear that ahead of the 2014 elections, the conference wants to show what it is for, not simply what it is against,” says Daniel Newhauser at Roll Call. “Similarly, they want to show that they are not in favor of simply returning to the old health care system, which is viewed unfavorably by the electorate.” But any viable plan needs 218 votes from the fractured GOP caucus.
Cantor and his fellow House Republicans have at least three separate House bills to consider — from Reps. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) — and a plan from Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that was unveiled to much fanfare in January. There’s also a bill, from Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.), that would raise ObamaCare’s definition of full-time employment to 40 hours a week, from 30. And a George W. Bush administration economist named Edward Lazear is pushing what he calls BushCare.
As they sort through these plans, what criteria will they use? If they can agree on one proposal, says Roll Call‘s Newhauser, it’s “likely to include poll-tested measures that have broad agreement in the GOP conference, including allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines, allowing insurance portability between jobs, expanding access to health savings accounts, and limiting medical malpractice lawsuits.”
Another way of putting that: Republicans are looking for popular talking points that sound different enough from ObamaCare to win support from the more conservative factions of the GOP caucus. The problem, as The Washington Post notes, is that “there are only so many ways to preserve the patient protections that the ACA offers, which Republicans say they want to keep, while maintaining a private insurance market and assisting those who can’t afford coverage.”
Once Republicans hold up a specific plan, the Congressional Budget Office gets to issue its verdict and the public gets to weigh the proposals not just against ObamaCare but also the GOP’s attacks against ObamaCare.
The CBO analysis for Rep. Young’s bill to raise full-time employment to 40 hours, for example, found that the bill would raise the federal deficit by $74 billion while reducing the number of people getting employer-sponsored health insurance by about a million; about half of those people would go on Medicaid or other public programs, the other half would be uninsured.
It’s not clear the other Republican proposals would be popular in practice, either. Some of them, as the Washington Post editors note, would be better than ObamaCare at holding down health care costs and incentivizing people to buy private health insurance. But they are more disruptive to the status quo — especially post-ObamaCare — and almost all of them would be ripe for articles about sick people losing coverage or watching their health insurance costs skyrocket.
All of the GOP alternative plans, in other words, have their own drawbacks. Some people will lose, and some people will win. They would reduce the role of the federal government in most cases, but increase the power of insurance companies. Many of the policies are really interesting. Here are some examples of the big ideas from the GOP plans:
Cap or end employer tax breaks for providing health insurance: The idea here is that the insurance market is distorted by the tax incentives for employers to offering their workers insurance. It’s a fair point. But capping the tax breaks, as Coburn-Burr-Hatch does, or eliminating them would almost certainly cause employers to drop their plans. Almost 60 percent of Americans get their health insurance through work.
Provide tax breaks for individuals to buy their own insurance: With no employer-offered health plans, individuals and families would buy their own insurance on the open market. The Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan, for example, offers age-adjusted tax credits to people at up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line: Individuals 18 to 34 would get $1,560 a year, while those 50 to 64 would get $3,720 a year (families would get more than double those figures). Lazear’s BushCare would give all Americans with any type of health insurance $7,500 a year in tax breaks, or $15,000 for families; if people opted to buy low-cost, low-coverage insurance, they’d pocket the difference.
Allow insurance to be sold across state lines: This is a perennial GOP proposal to lower health insurance costs. The idea is that if insurers could sell the same policies to any state, regardless of that state’s own insurance regulations, it would increase market competition and drive down prices. A 2005 CBO report estimated those savings to consumers at about 5 percent overall, with the savings skewed toward the young and healthy; the old and sick would pay more. Enacting this option would require scrapping the minimum standards required for all plans under ObamaCare — a selling point for conservatives who argue we use too much health care, anyway.
“The fact that Republicans are coalescing around healthcare reform plans of their own could be very bad news for ObamaCare,” says Sally C. Pipes at Forbes. “Once voters see that the Republican alternative adds up to sensible and affordable health care, ObamaCare’s days will be numbered.”
But the opposite is almost certainly true. And House Republicans know that.
The GOP has gotten a lot of mileage out of its push to repeal ObamaCare — with a big assist, since October, from the Obama administration — but now the law is signing up real people (four million and counting) for real insurance policies. Republicans have to do better than provide plausible-sounding alternatives. They have to come up with a plan that Americans will think is much better than ObamaCare, and worth the disruption of overhauling the health care system again.
Here’s the bottom line: If reforming America’s health care system to provide near-universal affordable coverage were easy, it would have been done 60 years ago — or at any point since. Several Democratic presidents had tried and failed before President Obama. If Republicans had wanted to take their own bite at the apple, they had plenty of chances, too.
This isn’t spitballing. If Republicans want to be relevant voices in the health care debate, they have to come up with something. They should come up with a plan they can try to sell to America.
“One of the unseemly aspects of the last four-plus months is watching some on the right root for ObamaCare to fail,” says Forbes‘ Avik Roy, one of ObamaCare’s wonkiest critics. Among some conservatives, “there has been a kind of intellectual laziness, a belief that there’s no need for critics to come up with better reforms, because Obamacare will ‘collapse under its own weight,’ relieving them of that responsibility.” But it’s clear now that’s not going to happen, he adds. “And that makes the development of a credible, market-oriented health-reform agenda more urgent than ever.”
Well, don’t hold your breath.
The Affordable Care Act was written and enacted by Democrats — with a few exceptions — and that’s one of its main weaknesses: If Republicans had helped shape and pass the law, they probably wouldn’t have spent the last four years attacking and undermining it. They now have at least 10 months left to criticize the law without having to take any serious action to replace it. Don’t expect them to squander the opportunity.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, February 26, 2014
“Like A Drunk In A Bar Fight”: Why Republicans Will Never Stop Lying About Obamacare
Politically speaking, here’s the thing about those melodramatic ads attacking the Affordable Care Act currently running on TV: In terms of actual policy, they’re as futile as the 40-odd votes to repeal the law that House Republicans have already cast.
GOP hardliners are like a drunk in a bar fight threatening to whip somebody twice his size if only his friends would let go of his arms.
It’s all over but the shouting.
Even if Republicans make big gains in the 2014 congressional elections, they can’t possibly win enough votes to overcome a presidential veto. What’s more, chances of capturing the White House in 2016 on a platform of canceling millions of Americans’ health insurance benefits appear so remote as to be downright delusional. Like it or not, the ACA is here to stay.
Indeed, governors and legislatures in previously recalcitrant states including New Hampshire, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Utah and Virginia are considering Medicaid expansion they’d previously shunned. Despite early signup problems with the federal HealthCare.gov exchange, signups for individual private policies have increased to where it now appears the ACA will come close to meeting its projected goal of 7 million enrollees by the March 31 deadline.
Moreover, for all the predictions of actuarial doom heard on Fox News and elsewhere—supposedly caused by an imbalance of old, sick enrollees versus younger, healthier ones—the Washington Post reported last month that “the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that if the market’s age distribution freezes at its current level—an extremely unlikely scenario—‘overall costs in individual market plans would be about 2.4 percent higher than premium revenues.’”
That’s a minor problem, but nothing like a “death spiral.”
In terms of affecting health care policy, then, the TV ads are largely symbolic — scripted melodramas calculated to arouse the partisan passions of the GOP “base” in states where control of the U.S. Senate could be determined this fall. Financed by Americans for Prosperity, the Scrooge McDuck-style front group controlled by the Koch brothers and fellow anti-government tycoons, they’re aimed less at killing the Affordable Care Act than convincing voters that Democrats are their enemies.
Maybe that’s why the ad campaign has proven so singularly unpersuasive to skeptics. In Lousiana, where Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu is up for re-election this fall, AFP has run a commercial featuring a group of actors pretending to be ordinary Louisiana citizens whose health insurance was canceled due to “Obamacare.” But it’s make-believe; a scripted TV drama as fictive as a Viagra advertisment.
In Arkansas, virtually every news program features a pretty, AFP-sponsored actress plaintively begging viewers to remind Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor that health care is about “people,” and that “the law just doesn’t work.” More in sorrow than anger, it seems, because Pryor remains personally popular.
Pryor’s opponent, Koch-financed Rep. Tom Cotton, tells a touching tale about one “Elizabeth, from Pulaski County” whose premiums have allegedly risen 85 percent under the new law “simply because Washington politicians and bureaucrats think they know what’s best for her and her family.”
I found myself wondering what kind of insurance plan the otherwise unidentified Elizabeth used to have, or if she’s like one of those imaginary digitally enhanced hotties that Internet ads assure me are just a mouse-click away.
Supposedly factual AFP ads have proven even less persuasive to skeptical journalists. In Michigan, 49-year-old leukemia patient Julie Boonstra earnestly explained to viewers that her existing health care policy had been canceled due to the Affordable Care Act, implying that she’d also lost her doctor and been broadsided by ruinous costs.
Fact checks by the Washington Post and Detroit News, however, determined that Boonstra hadn’t lost her doctor at all. What’s more, her monthly premiums under the Affordable Care Act cost roughly half what she’d been paying ($571, from $1,100). Her out-of-pocket expenses almost precisely matched those savings — overall, a wash.
A determined opponent of the law, apart from her understandable anxiety about changing insurance carriers while fighting cancer, Boonstra turned out to have suffered no real losses. Not to mention that she now has a policy that can’t be rescinded due to a “previously existing condition.”
And so it goes. Los Angeles Times economics columnist Michael Hiltzik has made a minor specialty out of fact checking these successive tales of woe. It’s left him wondering if there are really any “Obamacare” victims at all.
“What a lot of these stories have in common,” he writes “are, first of all, a subject largely unaware of his or her options under the ACA or unwilling to determine them; and, second, shockingly uninformed and incurious news reporters, including some big names in the business, who don’t bother to look into the facts of the cases they’re offering for public consumption.”
Politically, however, printed facts rarely prevail against televised fictions. Anyway, repealing the Affordable Care Act isn’t the point. It’s inflaming the GOP base and defeating Democrats.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 26, 2014
“Texas, Where Crazy Gets Elected”: There’s Crazy, And Then There’s Texas Crazy
So what happens in Texas when the Republican gubernatorial candidate invites Ted Nugent to the state to campaign for him not long after the Motor City Motormouth has called the President of the United States a “subhuman mongrel,” not to mention a “Communist” and a “gangster”? Would you believe, as Maxwell Smart used to say, that the candidate increases his lead? Well that’s what has happened. There’s crazy, and then there’s Texas crazy.
In a poll that came out Monday, conducted as the Nugent controversy was brewing, Republican Greg Abbott leads Democrat Wendy Davis by 11 points, which Politico notes is up from six points in a poll last year. Now there are surely other reasons for this little surgette, but it certainly shows that Abbott’s decision to keep company with Nugent did him no harm at all in the state.
You think that’s bad, get a load of this, from the same poll. The candidate leading the Democratic field for the right to seek John Cornyn’s Senate seat is a woman named Kesha Rogers. Two of her top ideas? Impeach Barack Obama and repeal the Affordable Care Act. Yes, you read it right. She’s the leading Democrat. She’s also a La Rouchie, a fact that far from hiding she seems intent to rub in the other candidates’ faces: I can ramble on about crazy worldwide banking conspiracies all I want, she seems to be saying, but as long as I want to impeach Obama and repeal Obamacare, you can’t touch me! There’s crazy, and there’s Texas crazy.
This would all be merely amusing, but there’s another side to Texas crazy. Let’s get serious now for a few paragraphs.
If you read me often enough, you know that one of my themes is that the Democrats, with enough money, creativity, and guts, ought to be able to turn Obamacare into a positive. Millions of people across the country, especially in the states that opted in and accepted the Medicaid money, have insurance now and the peace of mind about themselves and their children that comes with it. Besides which, have you noticed that all the Republican hoo-ha about these alleged horror stories never holds up on examination? Paul Krugman wrote a terrific column on this topic Monday. Literally every high-profile Obamacare-nightmare story retailed by one of these yoyos turns out, once reporters start poking around, not to be at all as advertised. So we have a party that loathes the ACA and its effects and many millions of dollars to go find its victims, and so far it hasn’t really turned up one.
Now—back to Texas. Two recent briefing papers from academics affiliated with the excellent Scholars’ Strategy Network shed considerable light on what Obamacare could be doing for Texas, if only its politicians would permit it.
Texas—hold on to your ten-gallon hat, because this is a shocker—leads the country in the percentage of its people who are uninsured; a gaudy 24.6 percent. Nearly 37 percent of Hispanics are without coverage, as are 22 percent of African Americans, and 23 percent of women. That’s a small army of people who would benefit from the state having accepted the federal Medicaid money and set up an exchange. But Texas’s leaders from Rick Perry on down are having none of it.
In one paper, Jessica Sharac, Peter Shin, and Sara Rosenbaum of George Washington University cite a recent study noting that “if Texas had agreed to expand Medicaid, more than two million uninsured people would likely have gained health insurance.” In another, Ling Zhu and Markie McBrayer of the University of Houston compare how poor people are faring so far in Texas and California, the latter of course being among the states that have accepted the Medicaid expansion. They write: “More than 2.2 million Californians were added to that state’s expanded Medicaid program by the end of January, compared to just over 80,000 Texans who signed up after realizing they were already eligible for the existing state Medicaid program.”
Together, the papers (they’re very short, you should go read them) paint the picture you’d expect. Our two largest states, one working to insure its people and the other doing everything in its power to prevent that. And remember—Texas could be doing this at very minimal cost. Washington is paying full freight on the expansion until 2016, and then a slightly declining share, but still, 90 percent every year after 2019. It’s almost free. And Texas ain’t playin’. Indeed Perry turned down (cue Dr. Evil) nine billion dollars.
So now let’s circle back to the governor’s race. Of course, Abbott opened his campaign last fall pounding Davis on Obamacare, thundering that she’d open the door to this iniquity. Davis has been talking a lot about Ted Nugent, but she’s had rather little to say on the subject of Perry refusing, and Abbott vowing to continue to refuse, $9 billion.
Would all those uninsured Latinos and blacks and women be energized to come out and vote for the candidate who dared to make a big issue of this? I admit it’s hard to say. But Davis is a long shot anyway. Nothing against her—Jesus himself could come back and run as a Democrat in that state, and rather than pull that Democratic lever for Him, most Texans would just wonder when the Redeemer went socialist on them (answer: he always was!).
Of course it would be risky. Of course she’d drop in the polls for a while. But she’d still have nearly eight months to explain to people that $9 billion is real money, that all this is happening anyway whether Texas Republicans like it or not, and since it is happening well by cracky she’s not going to leave millions of Texans not getting what their counterparts in other states are getting. As it is, those people have no one really fighting for them. That’s Texas crazy, too.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 26, 2014
“Willful Republican Obfuscation”: The GOP Takes Another ObamaCare Study Way Out Of Context
It’s no secret that Republicans are pinning their midterm election hopes on ObamaCare.
So it should be no surprise that the GOP has tried to cast virtually all news about the health care law as proof that ObamaCare will kill jobs and send insurance costs soaring. The only problem with that strategy is that the underlying arguments are often disingenuous.
In the latest case, a new report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services estimates that ObamaCare could raise insurance premiums for nearly two-thirds of small businesses, affecting some 11 million employees. Before ObamaCare, those small businesses were paying below-average rates — often by having younger, healthier workers whom insurers could charge less to cover — but new rules designed to level the insurance marketplace will cause those rates to rise, according to the report.
Naturally, right-wing blogs and Republican lawmakers seized on the report to bash ObamaCare. The report revealed another “broken promise” from the Obama administration, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement, calling it “another punch in the gut for Americans already struggling in the president’s economy.”
The reality of the report’s conclusions, though, are a bit more nuanced.
While the report did find that insurance premiums would probably go up, it did not determine that insurance costs overall would spike. That’s because the report focused only on the impact of ObamaCare’s new rules, and not, crucially, on the impact of its new benefits.
ObamaCare contains a wealth of subsidies, tax breaks, and the like — many of them geared specifically toward small businesses — that are intended to drive down individuals’ insurance costs. When you factor in all the positives, “Obamacare may well be the best thing Washington has done for American small business in decades,” The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki wrote last year.
The CMS report acknowledged that fact, hedging that there was “a rather large degree of uncertainty associated with this estimate” and that the true impact “will be based on far more factors than the three that are focused on in this report so understanding the effects of just these provisions will always be challenging.” And the report specifically mentioned one nongovernmental analysis of the entire law which found that it would have a “minimal” impact on small business premiums.
Moreover, the report estimated that costs would drop for the remaining one-third of small businesses. Why? They’re currently paying above-average rates, so the market-leveling rules will actually benefit them.
The GOP hand-wringing comes on the heels of its failed attempt to claim a separate federal report confirmed that ObamaCare will be a job killer. That nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report actually found that the law would lead to a reduction of labor, not jobs, as incentives made it easier for people to work less or retire early. The GOP’s claim was so bogus, in fact, that the CBO released a follow-up statement thoroughly debunking it as an egregious distortion of the truth.
Republicans understandably want to make the health care law look bad to boost their election prospects. But skewing the findings on ObamaCare only hurts their credibility and reveals the party’s willful obfuscation on the issue.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, February 25, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 