“They Haven’t The Foggiest Idea”: The Hostage Takers Disagree Over The Ransom Note
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.) said on Monday that he’s prepared to block a debt-ceiling increase, consequences be damned, unless Democrats give him “a full delay or defund of Obamacare.” Even if Democrats offered him changes to Social Security in exchange for nothing, the New Jersey Republican said, it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him.
Just 24 hours later, Garrett appeared on CNN and said he’s prepared to block a debt-ceiling increase unless we “begin to address our entitlement problems.”
One lawmaker, one issue, two completely different positions.
Similarly, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — remember him? — has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, making his priorities clear.
The president is giving Congress the silent treatment. He’s refusing to talk, even though the federal government is about to hit the debt ceiling. That’s a shame—because this doesn’t have to be another crisis. It could be a breakthrough. We have an opportunity here to pay down the national debt and jump-start the economy, if we start talking, and talking specifics, now. To break the deadlock, both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country’s entitlement programs and tax code.
What does Ryan have to say about the Affordable Care Act? Nothing. In fact, the 1,000-word op-ed doesn’t mention the health care law at all.
Much to the chagrin of right-wing activists, Ryan apparently wants to change the ransom note. He’s comfortable with threatening deliberate harm to the nation unless Democrats meet Republican demands, but the Budget Committee chair wants to replace Tea Partiers’ priority (taking health care benefits away from working families) with his priority (tax reform and entitlement cuts).
Now, I have a hunch I know why Ryan ignores “Obamacare” in his preferred ransom note, and it’s not because he forgot about it. Republicans are reluctant to admit it, but the Affordable Care Act vastly improves the nation’s finances in the coming years, and repealing it would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt. Ryan can’t afford to destroy the health care law — he uses it in his own plan to balance the budget over the next decade.
More important, though, in the bigger picture, Republicans aren’t just flailing, they’re lost.
They shut the government down last week, and they’re prepared to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States next week. They freely admit they’re prepared to impose self-inflicted wounds on Americans, on purpose, unless their demands are met.
And what are those demands? Even now, after months of planning and fiascos of their own making, the party’s own leaders and members haven’t the foggiest idea.
Here’s a radical suggestion: maybe Republicans can reopen the government, agree to skip the sovereign debt crisis, get their act together, and get back to us?
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, October 9, 2013
“GOP Circular Firing Squad”: Right Wing Lashes Out At Paul Ryan Over Obamacare
In one of the most surprising examples of how committed Republicans truly are to attacking the Affordable Care Act, the right wing is lashing out at Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) for being insufficiently committed to killing Obamacare.
The anger stems from an op-ed by Ryan published in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. Ryan used the platform to pitch his plan to end the debt ceiling crisis: Republicans would raise it in exchange for a deal in which they agree to roll back some of the sequester cuts, and Democrats agree to cuts to earned-benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Ryan left the specifics of his plan rather vague, but given the House Budget Committee chairman’s history with “common-sense reforms of the country’s entitlement programs and tax code,” it’s a safe bet that he has another ideological “vision document” in mind. Combine that with Ryan’s long track record of killing bipartisan budget negotiations, and it’s not hard to imagine Democrats recoiling at the prospect of having yet another debate over a Ryan budget.
What is surprising, however, is the negative reaction that Ryan’s op-ed garnered on the right. As Tom Kludt points out at Talking Points Memo, right-wing groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund, Heritage Action, and RedState.com immediately lashed out at Ryan for failing to include the death of Obamacare in his demands in exchange for not intentionally crashing the global economy. Ryan made no mention of the law in his op-ed (perhaps because he knows that its repeal is not realistic, perhaps because he needs the law’s savings to balance his own budget).
And they weren’t alone. Amanda Carpenter, a spokeswoman for Senator Ted Cruz, tweeted ”There is one big word missing from this op-ed. It’s start [sic] with an O and ends with BAMACARE.” Ben Shapiro, an editor-at-large at the right-wing Breitbart.com, lamented that “Paul Ryan dropping Obamacare demands re: shutdown and debt ceiling is suicidal strategy. And sadly typical.” And the list of angry right-wingers goes on.
The backlash was enough to make Ryan reassure Republicans that he is, in fact, committed to taking health insurance away from the tens of millions of Americans who will obtain coverage through the Affordable Care Act.
“Obamacare’s an entitlement just like any other entitlement. So that, as far as we’re concerned, is in this conversation. Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, those are the big drivers of our debt,” Ryan told radio host Bill Bennett on Wednesday. “If you look in the op-ed, I say we have to — ultimately we have to rethink all of our nation’s healthcare laws.”
But he didn’t go as far as to demand that the law’s repeal be linked to the debt ceiling. “I don’t know that within the next two weeks we have a viable strategy for actually repealing Obamacare, every piece of it,” he told Bennett.
The fact that far-right conservatives would turn on Paul Ryan — who was a hero of the movement as recently as this spring — illustrates just how committed they are to the impossible dream of convincing Democrats to kill the law as a condition for reopening the government and paying its bills. It also underscores just how futile negotiations with the House would be for President Obama and the Democrats; if another Ryan plan wouldn’t be sufficiently conservative for the right, then there’s really nothing that the president could offer that would satisfy his opponents.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, October 9, 2013
“The Myth Of Obamacare’s Bad Sales Job”: The Complexity Makes It Easy For Republicans To Lie To The Public
When they went forward with their plan to shut down the government in order to undo, defund, or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA), conservatives convinced themselves that their plan was going to work because Americans hate Obamacare. If you look at it in an extremely narrow, context-free way, that’s sort of true. If you just ask people whether they approve of the ACA, you get between 35 percent and 45 percent approval. But the closer you look, the more complicated it gets. Some people disapprove of it because they feel it didn’t go far enough; add them with those who say they approve, and you’ll get a majority. Furthermore, and most critical for what I’d like to discuss, the actual components of the law, like giving people subsidies to buy insurance, outlawing denials for pre-existing conditions, and so on, are extremely popular (the one exception is the individual mandate).
One thing’s for sure, though: You can’t say that the ACA as an abstract entity is overwhelmingly popular. That has led a lot of liberals to blame Barack Obama for doing a bad job selling the law. I must have heard or read this from a hundred liberals over the last couple of years. If only he had sold it better! Then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Sometimes, I’ve actually heard people say that he never really tried to sell it.
This argument is complete bunk. Here’s why.
1. Obama did sell it. When somebody says that Obama should have sold the ACA better, you should ask them what, specifically, they think he should have done. I can offer you a stone-cold guarantee that whatever they suggest is something that the administration and its allies did, in fact, do. Take polls to figure out what appeals would be effective? Check. Distribute talking points to their allies to get everyone repeating the same message? Check. Make one speech after another on health care? Check. Run ads touting reform? Check. They did it all. So why didn’t it work?
2. Health insurance is inherently complicated. See if you can answer these questions about your own health insurance. What’s your co-pay for office visits? What’s your deductible? What about cost-sharing for hospital admissions? Your yearly out-of-pocket maximum? Does your policy have a lifetime limit? My guess is you couldn’t answer some or all of these questions, and that only scratches the surface of the contract you signed when you got insurance. Did you read it? You probably skimmed it but didn’t bother to go through it line by line, just like you did the last time you downloaded a piece of software. Health insurance is incredibly complicated. Even people whose job it is to deal with health policy don’t always understand their own insurance.
That means that any comprehensive reform that tried to address the pathologies of the system was going to have a hard time even explaining to people what was wrong with that system. And those pathologies are so numerous that the administration had to discuss multiple things, while the opposition only had to say that Obamacare sucks. We’ll get to that opposition in a moment, but first:
3. The Affordable Care Act was an extremely complicated bill. I discussed this in my column last week, but the ACA is a gigantic kludge, a cobbled-together jumble of features each meant to solve a practical or political problem. The administration decided that the simple thing—Medicare for all—couldn’t succeed politically. They also decided that it was vital to be able to tell people, “If you like your current insurance, you can keep it.” They also had to keep conservative Democrats on board to get above the 60 votes necessary to defeat a Republican filibuster in the Senate. They also decided to co-opt the various interest groups like insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals that benefit from the current system, which required more complexity. They also decided that every penny of it was going to be paid for, which required new taxes and spending cuts. In and of themselves each of those decisions may have been reasonable, but they added up to a complex bill that was going to be difficult to explain, no matter how good their pollsters were and how effective a speaker the President is.
4. The American public is not particularly well informed or sophisticated when it comes to understanding policy. We don’t have to go into all the details here, but anybody who sets out on a project to explain something both new and complex to a public that doesn’t understand these things very well to begin with and doesn’t much care is going to be fighting an uphill battle.
5. They were facing an extraordinarily well-financed, united opposition that would say or do pretty much anything. All that complexity made it easy to just lie to the public about what the ACA does. When people hear about some new horror the ACA allegedly includes, many are ready to believe it, since it contains so many different things they already don’t understand. So conservatives could tell them that there are death panels, or that Obamacare forces doctors to collect information on your sex life, or that the IRS is going to have your medical records, or that Congress “exempted itself from Obamacare,” or whatever else they were able to dream up.
The opposition also had the benefit of being against something, which is always easier than being for something. We’re naturally more attuned to negative information than positive information, which is why it’s so easy to use fear to create opposition to a new policy, and change is always frightening. “You’re going to love this change!” is an inherently more difficult case to make than “Be afraid!”
Furthermore, the alliance opposing the law has virtually limitless resources at its disposal. Yesterday The New York Times published a revealing story on the network of conservative funders and activists that have made it their mission to destroy the ACA, including masterminding the current shutdown. Just one Koch brothers-linked organization no one has ever heard of called Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce distributed an incredible $200 million last year alone to various groups fighting the ACA.
Let me close this discussion with a little historical reminder. In March of 1994, when the Clinton health-care reform was being debated, The Wall Street Journal published an article about polls and focus groups it had conducted on the plan. The article was titled “Many Don’t Realize It’s the Clinton Plan They Like,” and it detailed how, while majorities of the public expressed disapproval of Bill Clinton’s health-care plan, when its features were described to them without saying whose plan it was, majorities expressed approval of it. That’s exactly the same thing we find now with the ACA. The problem wasn’t that Barack Obama didn’t try hard enough to sell it.
Fortunately, the success of the law won’t depend on whether you can get a majority of the public to tell pollsters, “I approve of Obamacare.” Once it’s fully implemented, the only thing that will matter will be whether, in all its different component parts, it works.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 7, 2013
“Health Reform Turns Real”: Even The “Bad News” On Obamacare Start-Up Is Really Good News For The Program’s Future
At this point, the crisis in American governance has taken on a life of its own. Some Republicans are now saying openly that they want concessions in return for reopening the government and avoiding default, not because they have any specific policy goals in mind, but simply because they don’t want to feel “disrespected.” And no endgame is in sight.
But this confrontation did start with a real issue: Republican efforts to stop Obamacare from going into effect. It’s long been clear that the great fear of the Republican Party was not that health reform would fail, but that it would succeed. And developments since Tuesday, when the exchanges on which individuals will buy health insurance opened for business, strongly suggest that their worst fears will indeed be realized: This thing is going to work.
Wait a minute, some readers are saying. Haven’t many stories so far been of computer glitches, of people confronting screens telling them that servers are busy and that they should try again later? Indeed, they have. But everyone knowledgeable about the process always expected some teething problems, and the nature of this week’s problems has actually been hugely encouraging for supporters of the program.
First, let me say a word about the underlying irrelevance of start-up troubles for new government programs.
Political reporting in America, especially but not only on TV, tends to be focused on the play-by-play. Who won today’s news cycle? And, to be fair, this sort of thing may matter during the final days of an election.
But Obamacare isn’t up for a popular referendum, or a revote of any kind. It’s the law, and it’s going into effect. Its future will depend on how it works over the next few years, not the next few weeks.
To illustrate the point, consider Medicare Part D, the drug benefit, which went into effect in 2006. It had what was widely considered a disastrous start, with seniors unclear on their benefits, pharmacies often refusing to honor valid claims, computer problems, and more. In the end, however, the program delivered lasting benefits, and woe unto any politician proposing that it be rolled back.
So the glitches of October won’t matter in the long run. But why are they actually encouraging? Because they appear, for the most part, to be the result of the sheer volume of traffic, which has been much heavier than expected. And this means that one big worry of Obamacare supporters — that not enough people knew about the program, so that many eligible Americans would fail to sign up — is receding fast.
Of course, it’s important that people who want to sign up can actually do so. But the computer problems can and will be fixed. So, by March 31, when enrollment for 2014 closes, we can be reasonably sure that millions of Americans who were previously uninsured will have coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will have become a reality, something people depend on, rather than some fuzzy notion Republicans could demonize. And it will be very hard to take that coverage away.
What we still don’t know, and is crucial for the program’s longer-term success, is who will sign up. Will there be enough young, healthy enrollees to provide a favorable risk pool and keep premiums relatively low? Bear in mind that conservative groups have been spending heavily — and making some seriously creepy ads — in an effort to dissuade young people from signing up for insurance. Nonetheless, insurance companies are betting that young people will, in fact, sign up, as shown by the unexpectedly low premiums they’re offering for next year.
And the insurers are probably right. To see why anti-Obamacare messaging is probably doomed to fail, think about whom we’re talking about here. That is, who are the healthy uninsured individuals the program needs to reach? Well, they’re by and large not affluent, because affluent young people tend to get jobs with health coverage. And they’re disproportionately nonwhite.
In other words, to get a description of the typical person Obamacare needs to enroll, just take the description of a typical Tea Party member or Fox News viewer — older, affluent, white — and put a “not” in front of each characteristic. These are people the right-wing message machine is not set up to talk to, but who can be reached through many of the same channels, from ads on Spanish-language media to celebrity tweets, that turned out Obama voters last year. I have to admit, I find the image of hard-line conservatives defeated by an army of tweeting celebrities highly attractive; but it’s also realistic. Enrollment is probably going to be just fine.
So Obamacare is off to a good start, with even the bad news being really good news for the program’s future. We’re not quite there yet, but more and more, it looks as if health reform is here to stay.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 3, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 