“A Steady Stream Of Untruths”: Everything You’ve Heard About Obamacare Being A Job-Killer Is Wrong
The U.S. government is now “shut down” thanks in large part to yet another attempt to put the brakes on the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Yet this week, the law’s health care exchanges went on line, promising affordable insurance coverage for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions or jobs that did not previously offer a health plan and to millions of the unemployed. Nevertheless, a steady stream of untruths about the law continues to pop up in newspapers, blogs and Facebook feeds.
One of these tropes is that the ACA is causing employers to cut back on hours for full-time employees so that they will not have to provide coverage (under the ACA, companies with more than 49 employees are required to offer health insurance coverage to those employees working 30 or more hours a week or face penalties). Typically, the evidence for the cutbacks in hours is that someone knows someone else whose hours were cut earlier this year in anticipation of the law taking effect. Many pundits have been even lazier, just stating that employers are cutting back hours without citing concrete examples.
The reality, though, is that there is no widespread trend of employers cutting their workers back to just under 30 hours because of the ACA. In July, my colleagues Dean Baker and Helene Jorgensen analyzed recent data from the Current Population Survey. They found that only 0.64 percent of the workforce was working between 26 and 29 hours a week in the first half of 2013. This number is only slightly higher than it was for the first half of 2012 (0.61 percent).
In other words, there is no evidence of a widespread trend of employers reducing hours to avoid providing coverage. That sentiment was recently echoed by Moody’s Mark Zandi, who said of the supposed trend, “I was expecting to see it. I was looking for it and it’s not there.”
The basic story is that, yes, there are a small number of firms that have cut down on the number of full-time employees recently. And yes, over time, the 30-hour cutoff could have some effect on hours as employers adjust to the law and new businesses open. Of course, some companies may go the opposite route and move part-time workers to full time, as was recently the case at Disney World.
Regardless, the promulgation of the idea that the ACA will transform the U.S. workforce into a part-time workforce and negatively impact employment in the United States is dead wrong.
By: Alan Barber, U. S. News and World Report, October 4, 2013
“Plan Beats No Plan”: In This Clash, Democrats Deserve The Victory
“Plan beats no plan.”
That was Tim Geithner’s political axiom in internal White House debates as the president’s team worked to mend the financial meltdown. Today his slogan does duty nicely as a preview of the public’s judgment on the shocking Republican choice to shut down the government over Obamacare.
Communications strategy in politics generally involves people in power crafting messages for less knowledgeable people (the press) to transmit to even less knowledgeable people (voters). (If you doubt this, have a look at the brilliant man-on-the-street segment Jimmy Kimmel did asking people whether they prefer “Obamacare” or “The Affordable Care Act.”). The idea in these messaging wars is to convey “values” that resonate with the public and trump your opponent’s.
Consider the current showdown in this context. President Obama championed a plan through which government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to help millions of low- and middle-income Americans buy decent private health coverage. As can never be said often enough, Obama’s plan also happens to have been based on a sensible Republican design that Mitt Romney enacted successfully in Massachusetts.
Republicans have no plan — literally, nothing serious whatsoever — to help more than a handful of the roughly 50 million uninsured Americans get such coverage. Yes, the GOP offers little talking points around the edges so that its team has something to say. But all of its “ideas” — from group purchasing for small business to buying coverage across state lines — are pseudo-plans. Nothing the Republican leadership has offered reaches more than 3 million people.
Once you understand this, you understand how deeply disingenuous Republican messaging has been. House Speaker John Boehner delivered a sound bite Monday night: “ We think there ought to be basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare .” That’s why the GOP wouldn’t budge.
Is Boehner kidding? Is that all they have? By “fairness” Boehner means the law’s individual mandate should be delayed for a year, just like the employer mandate has been put off. To save people from “the harms” of Obamacare, in Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) irritating collegiate debate lingo. Democrats are on the side of big business, you see, while the GOP is fighting for the little guy.
Now, to say that this message is an insult to our intelligence isn’t the end of the discussion, because no one ever lost a political fight by insulting the American public’s intelligence.
But that Republicans are staking the shutdown on this thin gruel is revealing. They’re not saying, “we have a better plan to help Americans achieve health security.” They can’t say that, because the president already enacted the Republican plan. Instead, they’re ginning up a phony “fairness” issue and trying to make it sound real.
But the employer mandate is a sideshow in Obamacare. It’s there for one reason: to keep employer money in the game to reduce the cost on public budgets of extending health-care coverage. Ending the employer role in health-care coverage and shifting these costs to public ledgers would be economically rational — better both for citizens and for businesses. Politically, however, the White House judged this to be untenable.
So let’s stipulate that over time the employer mandate should be scrapped. The individual mandate, by contrast — the “unfairness” the GOP now bemoans — is essential. As conservatives taught us via Romneycare, you can’t move toward universal coverage with private health-insurance plans without requiring everyone to be in the insurance pool (and also without subsidizing folks who need help buying coverage). Without a mandate and subsidies, younger, poorer and healthier folks opt out, making rates spiral. This is Insurance 101.
Trying to equate these mandates as a “fairness” issue is to assume the press and the public are idiots. Crafting a message that works only if people are idiots is a grim way to do politics — and deeply cynical. Republicans hardly have a monopoly on cynical political tactics, but to use cynicism in the service of denying basic health security to millions is morally unattractive, to put it mildly. Not something you want to tell the kids about.
“What did you do today, Daddy?” asks the son of one of these House Republicans in my imagination.
‘Hey, Junior, I twisted truth and logic to make sure millions of poor American workers can still go broke if someone in their family gets seriously ill. . . . Junior, why are you looking at me like that?”
John Boehner may look tanned and rested, but the suave speaker has a Dorian Gray problem. Somewhere in the attic, his likeness in a painting is rotting.
There’s a wonderful poster from World War II in which Churchill exhorts British citizens to “Deserve Victory.”
In this clash, Democrats do.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 2, 2013
“Way Off Base”: Busting Zombie Obamacare Myths
The Republican effort to defund or delay health care reform at any cost has kept alive many misconceptions and false claims about the Affordable Care Act. This roundup of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ work on issues related to health reform and the federal government shutdown provides a large dose of reality.
A delay in the individual mandate is neither harmless nor fair: Let’s start with the big one: that a one-year delay in the individual mandate requiring everyone to acquire health insurance as long as it is affordable is harmless and fair because the Obama administration delayed for a year the requirement that large employers provide health insurance or pay a penalty. I discussed some flaws in that argument in an earlier post on this blog.
In CBPP’s shutdown roundup, Edwin Park reiterates why a delay in the individual mandate is neither harmless nor fair. It’s not harmless because it would cause 11 million more Americans to remain uninsured in 2014 and result in higher premiums in the individual market for many others, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It also would disrupt the new health insurance exchanges and likely delay the availability of coverage through the exchanges.
It’s also not fair to equate delay of the individual mandate to a delay in the employer requirement. Park highlights an Urban Institute analysis which showed that the employer delay would have only a small effect on the coverage gains expected under the ACA and which concluded that it would “be dangerously wrong” to assume a similarly small effect from a delay of the individual mandate. Similarly, CBO estimates that delaying the employer requirement would increase the number of uninsured by less than 500,000 – a far cry from the estimated 11 million increase from delaying the individual mandate.
The ACA will not likely cause a significant shift to part-time work: The employer responsibility provision whose implementation was delayed until 2015 requires larger employers (those with at least 50 full-time-equivalent workers) to offer health coverage to their full-time employees (those working 30 or more hours a week) or pay a penalty. Critics claim that we could already see a shift to part-time work in the data before the announced delay. Some have argued that the cutoff for defining full-time work should go from 30 hours a week to 40.
In CBPP’s shutdown roundup, Paul Van de Water shows that data this year provides scant evidence of a significant shift toward part-time work and that there’s every reason to believe that the ultimate effect will be small as a share of total employment. Van de Water shows, however, that raising the threshold from 30 to 40 hours a week would expose a significant number of workers to a reduction in hours.
Medical device manufacturers are unlikely to lose from the ACA despite a tax: A strong lobbying effort is underway to repeal the ACA’s 2.3 percent tax on certain medical devices such as coronary stents, artificial knees and hips, cardiac pacemakers, irradiation equipment and imaging technology. In the CBPP roundup, Paul Van de Water explains why that tax, which helps pay for extending health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, is sound and the arguments against it are not.
First, the tax does not apply to wheelchairs, eyeglasses and other devices that the public generally buys at retail and for individual use. Second, the tax is levied on equipment that manufacturers will likely see a boost in revenue from due to the increase in health coverage afforded by the ACA. As Van de Water points out, a study by Wells Fargo Securities finds that health reform will increase device sales by 1.5 percent in 2014 and by 3.6 percent cumulatively through 2022 – enough to offset the tax.
Finally, this is a highly profitable industry, and the stock prices of the top device manufacturers have generally outperformed market averages since the tax was introduced this year.
The ACA is a major piece of legislation with many interrelated moving parts, and there will be some glitches along the way as it’s implemented. But the criticisms we’re hearing in the current budget fight are way off base.
By: Chad Stone, U. S. News and World Report, October 4, 2013
“Our Democracy Is At Stake”: It’s Not Just Obamacare, President Obama Is Defending The Health Of Our Democracy
This time is different. What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule. President Obama must not give in to this hostage taking — not just because Obamacare is at stake, but because the future of how we govern ourselves is at stake.
What we’re seeing here is how three structural changes that have been building in American politics have now, together, reached a tipping point — creating a world in which a small minority in Congress can not only hold up their own party but the whole government. And this is the really scary part: The lawmakers doing this can do so with high confidence that they personally will not be politically punished, and may, in fact, be rewarded. When extremists feel that insulated from playing by the traditional rules of our system, if we do not defend those rules — namely majority rule and the fact that if you don’t like a policy passed by Congress, signed by the president and affirmed by the Supreme Court then you have to go out and win an election to overturn it; you can’t just put a fiscal gun to the country’s head — then our democracy is imperiled.
This danger was neatly captured by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, when he wrote on Tuesday about the 11th-hour debate in Congress to avert the shutdown. Noting a shameful statement by Speaker John Boehner, Milbank wrote: “Democrats howled about ‘extortion’ and ‘hostage taking,’ which Boehner seemed to confirm when he came to the floor and offered: ‘All the Senate has to do is say ‘yes,’ and the government is funded tomorrow.’ It was the legislative equivalent of saying, ‘Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.’ ”
“Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.” How did we get here? First, by taking gerrymandering to a new level. The political analyst Charlie Cook, writing in The National Journal on March 16, noted that the 2010 election gave Republican state legislatures around the country unprecedented power to redraw political boundaries, which they used to create even more “safe, lily-white” Republican strongholds that are, in effect, an “alternative universe” to the country’s diverse reality.
“Between 2000 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white share of the population fell from 69 percent to 64 percent,” wrote Cook. “But after the post-census redistricting and the 2012 elections, the non-Hispanic white share of the average Republican House district jumped from 73 percent to 75 percent, and the average Democratic House district declined from 52 percent white to 51 percent white. In other words, while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.”
According to Cook, the number of strongly Democratic districts decreased from 144 before redistricting to 136 afterward. The number of strongly Republican districts increased from 175 to 183. “When one party starts out with 47 more very strong districts than the other,” said Cook, “the numbers suggest that the fix is in for any election featuring a fairly neutral environment. Republicans would need to mess up pretty badly to lose their House majority in the near future.” In other words, there is little risk of political punishment for the Tea Party members now holding the country hostage.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s inane Citizens United decision allowed a single donor, Sheldon Adelson, to create his own alternative universe. He was able to contribute so much money to support Newt Gingrich’s candidacy that Gingrich was able to stay in the Republican presidential primary race longer than he would have under sane campaign finance rules. As a result, Gingrich was able to pull the G.O.P.’s leading candidate, Mitt Romney, farther to the right longer, making it harder for him to garner centrist votes. Last month, for the first time ever in Colorado, two state senators who voted for universal background checks on gun purchases lost their seats in a recall election engineered by gun extremists and reportedly financed with some $400,000 from the National Rifle Association. You’re elected, you vote your conscience on a narrow issue, but now determined opponents don’t have to wait for the next election. With enough money, they can get rid of you in weeks.
Finally, the rise of a separate G.O.P. (and a liberal) media universe — from talk-radio hosts, to Web sites to Fox News — has created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme. When politicians only operate inside these bubbles, they lose the habit of persuasion and opt only for coercion. After all, they must be right. Rush Limbaugh told them so.
These “legal” structural changes in money, media and redistricting are not going away. They are superempowering small political movements to act in extreme ways without consequences and thereby stymie majority rule. If democracy means anything, it means that, if you are outvoted, you accept the results and prepare for the next election. Republicans are refusing to do that. It shows contempt for the democratic process.
President Obama is not defending health care. He’s defending the health of our democracy. Every American who cherishes that should stand with him.
By: Thomas L. Friedman, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, October 2, 2013
“The Power Of Personality”: “ObamaCares” And The Tea Party Doesn’t
Does anybody care that millions of Americans can’t afford health care? Does anyone care that before health care reform, insurance companies had the power to screw their customers royally? Does anyone care that Americans spend more per person on health care than people anywhere else in the world but are not nearly as healthy as the citizens of nations which provide comprehensive health care coverage to their residents?
Barack Obama does and the tea party doesn’t.
The most important stat that I saw in the 2012 National Election Day Exit Poll was the power of personality in the presidential race. A majority of the voters who looked for leadership, vision and shared values in 2012 supported Mitt Romney. The only other personal dimension measured by the exit poll was caring. The voters who sought compassion in their president supported Barack Obama by an overwhelming margin. The president’s advantage on empathy was so big that it overwhelmed the support that Mitt Romney had on the other three personality dimensions.
Compassion brings us to the Affordable Care Act or, as I like to call it, ObamaCares.
Many Americans who oppose ObamaCares also dislike the mean spirited nature of the tea party. You can talk about issues until the cows come home, but Americans vote for people, not issues. Voters use the candidates’ positions on issues to make personal judgments about their character. Many Americans may have philosophical reservations about the Affordable Care Act, but more than anything else they resent the tea party’s blind opposition to any proposal that improves the quality of health care available to the public. The tea party has demonstrated its indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans by its failure to offer its own plan to improve the floundering system of health care that undermines the health, wealth and well being of the United States
Politics is full of irony, which is what makes Washington so interesting. Republicans pushed hard on the budget because they wanted to use the threat of a shutdown as leverage against ACA. But on the same day that the wacko birds forced the federal government to close with dismal reviews, enrollment in Obamacare began with such a big demand that it overwhelmed computer systems. My guess is the wingnuts don’t see the irony, but do see a lot of red.
The early returns on the shutdown should worry Republicans. A CBS News survey conducted since the federal government closed for business early Tuesday morning indicates that a large majority (72 percent) of Americans oppose the shutdown over Obamacare. The tea party doesn’t seem to care about its electoral fortunes any more than it does about the well being of the working families who make this country great. The party’s indifference to people and politics will cost it dearly next year in the midterm elections.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 3, 2013
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