“The Law Of The Land”: The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Stopped Being A “Bill” Several Years Ago
When congressional Republicans condemn the Affordable Care Act, there’s one problematic word in particular they tend to use an awful lot. The Hill did a nice job picking up on the trend.
In floor speeches, TV interviews and town halls, Republicans often refer to President Obama’s signature healthcare law either as “ObamaCare” or a healthcare “bill” — subtly implying that it’s not truly permanent.
“The bill is named after the president. Why wouldn’t the president want to be under the bill?” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) asked in a floor speech earlier this month, making the case that the president should get his healthcare through ObamaCare.
It’s clear that Enzi, who famously admitted that he engaged in health care reform negotiations in bad faith, is confused. The name of the reform law is technically the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” not “Obamacare,” so it’s not “named after the president.”
But that’s not the important thing. Rather, note that Enzi refers to the law as a “bill.” So does Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who said last week that “this bill,” referring to the health care law, is going to hurt people. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said there are “a host of problems [with] this bill.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said “this bill” isn’t working. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) chastised Democrats for supporting “this dog of a bill.”
Keep in mind, all of these quotes come from this month — September 2013 — not from the debate when the law was actually still a bill.
The Hill‘s report added that the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that roughly 40% of Americans don’t know that the Affordable Care Act is, to use John Boehner’s phrase, the law of the land. One possible explanation for such widespread ignorance is the way in which congressional Republicans mislead the public in such a brazen way.
But stepping past the rhetoric, there’s also a substantive significance to this.
If you listened to the House floor debate on Saturday night or watched the Sunday shows, you know the GOP desperately hopes to characterize the current crisis as a “both sides” problem so it won’t receive the bulk of the blame. To hear Republicans tell it, they demand that “Obamacare” be gutted, while Democrats demand that “Obamacare” be implemented. “See?” conservatives say, “both sides are making demands.”
The problem, of course, is that this is almost unimaginably dumb. What Democrats are arguing is that the law is already the law; it’s met constitutional muster according to the U.S. Supreme Court; and it’s up to the president to faithfully execute current laws. If Republicans want to change the law, they can introduce legislation and give it their best shot.
Both sides, in other words, aren’t making comparable “demands” — one side expects existing law to be implemented, the other expects to use extortion to undermine the law they claim to dislike.
It’s very likely why so many Republican U.S. senators, who presumably have some understanding of the differences between a “bill” and a “law,” keep deliberately getting this wrong. If the Affordable Care Act is just a “bill,” then it’s not fully legitimate and Republicans are justified in trying to sabotage it outside the American legislative process.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 30, 2013
“Angry Men Against Democracy”: GOP Government Shutdown Isn’t About Obamacare, It’s About Obama
The House Republicans are like really bad boyfriends in a break-up. The moment is upon us, when the Capitol lantern will be dimmed and dark, with the U.S. government closing down for … who knows how long?
This is what they came here to do, the Class of 2010 House Republicans, which created a new majority overnight. They did not come here to govern or to be part of government. Stone cold crazy, they came to our town of Washington to take it down from within. They came from states like, say, Tennessee. Ever hear of Frog Jump? The tea party has such diversity! They are largely angry white men. They are not legislators or policymakers. They are not respecters of the usual traditions of Congress. They are not much but a band of marauders, an unhappy few.
It doesn’t take many unruly House Republicans to stamp out the spirit of a perfectly nice democracy. Roughly 40 will accomplish what the British did not when they burned down the Capitol in 1814, and what the terrorist hijackers failed to do on 9/11 a dozen years ago.
If I read the tea leaves right, they are going to make a demoralized country even more so. People will start to lose more faith in our national institutions and with the very idea of America: fairness and “playing by the rules,” as Bill Clinton used to say. Our highly skilled and dedicated federal workforce, which has had its pay nearly frozen for years, will feel more disrespected if they are furloughed. The world will be watching in utter disbelief.
And then what happens one minute after midnight Tuesday morning? The light goes out in the dome. The more sensible Senate will not be party to this crime. House Speaker John Boehner will flail about, helpless and humiliated because he can’t control this lawless faction.
Then the babble will start about Obamacare. That’s what they would like us to think this is all about. My fellow Americans, this is not about Obamacare; it’s about President Obama. It’s about taking down his presidency. Attacking Obamacare is just the means to that end. I don’t think Obama sized up their intent and plan to take him down, from the day they arrived in January 2011. Unfortunately, he did not recognize the depth of their hostility when the government debt ceiling hung in the balance in August 2011. He kept trying to be friends with Boehner and the other side.
We have another debt limit deadline hanging over us, which makes this showdown look like a prologue to an even more disastrous event.
Here’s the cruelest cut of all. Never has a landmark piece of legislation, passed by both houses in the usual manner, been subject to this kind of relentless attack well after its passage. Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader of the tea party band, tells anyone who will listen at 4 a.m. that the American people are on their side. That is erroneous, and besides which, it wouldn’t make the tea party plot right. Obamacare passed before many of them got here, back in 2010.
It wasn’t pretty, but Obamacare passed fair and square. President Obama was re-elected handily. So let’s keep the lantern lit. Don’t let 40 angry men undo the results of American democracy.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 30, 2013
“States Of Health”: Obamacare And GOP Obstructionism
Ours can be an unforgiving country. Paul Sullivan was in his fifties, college-educated, and ran a successful small business in the Houston area. He owned a house and three cars. Then the local economy fell apart. Business dried up. He had savings, but, like more than a million people today in Harris County, Texas, he didn’t have health insurance. “I should have known better,” he says. When an illness put him in the hospital and his doctor found a precancerous lesion that required treatment, the unaffordable medical bills arrived. He had to sell his cars and, eventually, his house. To his shock, he had to move into a homeless shelter, carrying his belongings in a suitcase wherever he went.
This week, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, which provides health-insurance coverage to millions of people like Sullivan, is slated to go into effect. Republican leaders have described the event in apocalyptic terms, as Republican leaders have described proposals to expand health coverage for three-quarters of a century. In 1946, Senator Robert Taft denounced President Harry Truman’s plan for national health insurance as “the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.” Fifteen years later, Ronald Reagan argued that, if Medicare were to be enacted, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” And now comes Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell describing the Affordable Care Act as a “monstrosity,” “a disaster,” and the “single worst piece of legislation passed in the last fifty years.” Lacking the votes to repeal the law, Republican hard-liners want to shut down the federal government unless Democrats agree to halt its implementation.
The law’s actual manifestation, however, is rather anodyne: as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.
How this will unfold, though, depends on where you live. Governors and legislatures in about half the states—from California to New York, Minnesota to Maryland—are working faithfully to implement the law with as few glitches as possible. In the other half—Indiana to Texas, Utah to South Carolina—they are working equally faithfully to obstruct its implementation. Still fundamentally in dispute is whether we as a society have a duty to protect people like Paul Sullivan. Not only do conservatives not think so; they seem to see providing that protection as a threat to America itself.
Obstructionism has taken three forms. The first is a refusal by some states to accept federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs. Under the law, the funds cover a hundred per cent of state costs for three years and no less than ninety per cent thereafter. Every calculation shows substantial savings for state budgets and millions more people covered. Nonetheless, twenty-five states are turning down the assistance. The second is a refusal to operate a state health exchange that would provide individuals with insurance options. In effect, conservatives are choosing to make Washington set up the insurance market, and then complaining about a government takeover. The third form of obstructionism is outright sabotage. Conservative groups are campaigning to persuade young people, in particular, that going without insurance is “better for you”—advice that no responsible parent would ever give to a child. Congress has also tied up funding for the Web site, making delays and snags that much more inevitable.
Some states are going further, passing measures to make it difficult for people to enroll. The health-care-reform act enables local health centers and other organizations to provide “navigators” to help those who have difficulties enrolling, because they are ill, or disabled, or simply overwhelmed by the choices. Medicare has a virtually identical program to help senior citizens sort through their coverage options. No one has had a problem with Medicare navigators. But more than a dozen states have passed measures subjecting health-exchange navigators to strict requirements: licensing exams, heavy licensing fees, insurance bonds. Florida has attempted to ban them from county health departments, where large numbers of uninsured people go for care. Tennessee recently adopted an emergency rule declaring that anyone who could be described as an “enrollment assister” must undergo a criminal background check, fingerprinting, and twelve hours of course work. The hurdles would hamper hospital financial counsellors in the state—and, by some interpretations, ordinary good Samaritans—from simply helping someone get insurance.
This kind of obstructionism has been seen before. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, Virginia shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County rather than accept black children in white schools. When the courts forced the schools to open, the governor followed a number of other Southern states in instituting hurdles such as “pupil placement” reviews, “freedom of choice” plans that provided nothing of the sort, and incessant legal delays. While in some states meaningful progress occurred rapidly, in others it took many years. We face a similar situation with health-care reform. In some states, Paul Sullivan’s fate will become rare. In others, it will remain a reality for an unconscionable number of people. Of some three thousand counties in the nation, a hundred and fourteen account for half of the uninsured. Sixty-two of those counties are in states that have accepted the key elements of Obamacare, including funding to expand Medicaid. Fifty-two are not.
So far, the health-care-reform law has allowed more than three million people under the age of twenty-six to stay on their parents’ insurance policy. The seventeen million children with preëxisting medical conditions cannot be excluded from insurance eligibility or forced to pay inflated rates. And more than twenty million uninsured will gain protection they didn’t have. It won’t be the thirty-two million hoped for, and it’s becoming clear that the meaning of the plan’s legacy will be fought over not for a few months but for years. Still, state by state, a new norm is coming into being: if you’re a freelancer, or between jobs, or want to start your own business but have a family member with a serious health issue, or if you become injured or ill, you are entitled to basic protection.
Conservatives keep hoping that they can drive the system to collapse. That won’t happen. Enough people, states, and health-care interests are committed to making it work, just as the Massachusetts version has for the past seven years. And people now have a straightforward way to resist the forces of obstruction: sign up for coverage, if they don’t have it, and help others do so as well.
By: Atul Gawande, MD, The New Yorker, Published September 29, 2013
“An Election Do-Over?”: Congress Thinks Elections Don’t Matter if They Don’t Like The Outcome
The problem for many years in Washington was that lawmakers were always looking to the next election, holding votes meant to burnish their own conservative or liberal credentials or set their opponents up for an attack ad based on that vote. That was an unproductive approach, but it seems downright quaint compared to now, when lawmakers are still fighting the last three elections.
Democrats note that their candidate won the 2008 election, and achieved an agenda – including the health care law – as a result of that win and the wins of Democrats in Congress. Republicans counter that voters overwhelmingly expressed their disgust with the law in 2010, electing scores of new Republicans to Congress and giving the GOP control of the House. Democrats say that voters had a definitive opportunity in 2012 to undo Obamacare, when Mitt Romney ran on a platform of doing just that. Not only was Romney defeated, but Democrats picked up seats in both the House and Senate.
Elections have consequences, as Obamacare foe John McCain reminded his colleagues recently. But too many lawmakers seem to think that elections are meaningless if they don’t like the result.
The standoff has resulted in a whole new definition of the word “compromise” on Capitol Hill. It was bad enough when the idea of compromise became equivalent to capitulation. That made it nearly impossible to get an agreement on anything, with lawmakers in both parties declaring to constituents that they will “fight” for them – meaning they wouldn’t accept the concerns or needs of any other district. But now, “compromise” has been expanded to re-open settled matters. This was true when Democrats sought (though with much less ferocity than the GOP has displayed with Obamacare) to vitiate the Bush tax cuts for upper-income people before the law’s expiration date. And Republicans are doing it now with Obamacare.
If lawmakers want to undo settled law and free and fair elections, why stop at legislation? Why don’t the Republicans say, OK, we’ll keep the government running, but only if President Obama and the entire cabinet resign. Then they can offer a “compromise” under which they’ll accept the early departures of merely Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
And maybe Democrats could say, sure, we’ll delay Obamacare, but only if every single tea party-affiliated member of Congress resigns immediately, and pledges never to get involved in politics or public policy again. Then, they could “compromise” by accepting the resignations of only the most vociferous of the GOP’s right wing. If you’re going to undo an election, after all, why not go big?
Sports teams and armies have operated under the idea that you fight the battle with the people and the tools you have at that moment. Washington could do the same.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 27, 2013
“The Revised GOP Ransom Note”: House Republicans Now Willing To Fund Government In Exchange For One Year Obamacare Delay
House Republicans are preparing to introduce a new, last minute Continuing Resolution that would fund the operations of government for a few more months in exchange for an agreement by Senate Democrats and the White House to delay the execution of Obamacare for one year.
This newest bid is being presented as a “compromise” as the initial proposal put forward by the House—one that was rejected by the Senate—hinged the funding of government on the full defunding of the Affordable Care Act.
Compromise?
I suppose it is if you consider that someone holding a gun to your head and demanding ten million dollars to spare your life becomes a “compromiser” when he suddenly drops the price to seven million after you’ve told your assailer that you can’t or won’t pay.
Or maybe you would consider a foreign power threating our country with thermonuclear destruction unless we surrender to them as being willing to compromise if they modify their demand so as to leave us with everything east of the Mississippi if we are prepared to give up all the territory to the west?
For those who would fool themselves into believing that the latest House offer is some effort to find “middle ground”, ask yourself this question—
Why do these people wish to delay enforcement of the Affordable Care Act for one year?
Does anyone imagine that those who have been seeking to deny funding to government absent the delay or destruction of a law that was passed by Congress, signed into being by the President, and approved by the Supreme Court actually want to hold off the implementation of that law so they can improve it?
At no time—since the blitzkrieg of misinformation and outright lies that have been peddled by Obamacare opponents following the Act’s creation–have the House Republicans so much as once suggested that they would like to improve the law. Having voted more than 40 times to repeal or defund the law, have they ever, since passage, voted on proposed amendments to the law that they claim would improve the healthcare reform act?
Never.
Indeed, they are not even pretending to want to make it better via a delay as not so much as one Republican elected official who has paraded in front of the TV cameras today to pitch defunding or delay has so much as hinted than an extra year would give Congress time to make some ‘fixes’ or ‘changes.’
So, again, why the one year extension?
The better to keep the issue ‘hot’ for Republicans going into the 2014 midterm elections.
After all, nothing is going to change in the next year that would improve the Republicans’ chances of doing away with the law.
Should the GOP hold the House in the 2014 elections and pick up enough seats in the Senate to gain a majority, absolutely nobody believes for a moment that the GOP could gain enough Senate seats so as to grant them the capability of overturning a presidential veto.
And, like it or not, the Democrats will hold the White House through 2016.
And yet, every Republican mug I see on the television screen today tells me that they are doing this for me.
Really?
My premium rates are scheduled to go down rather dramatically upon the opening of the healthcare exchange in my state. So, what exactly are these House Republicans doing for me—and the millions of other Americans who cannot get coverage due to preexisting conditions (like acne) or face using up their lifetime maximums when a serious illness strikes? What exactly are Ted Cruz and his friends doing for those who are denied their paid for coverage after they get sick by insurance companies who don’t want to pay off and can find a spelling error on the insured’s application? What about the millions of Americans who simply have been unable to afford health insurance coverage without the benefit of the government subsidies or those who are married forever to their job—whether they like it or not— because, to leave it, would mean putting their family in jeopardy should someone get sick?
Still, if the GOP continues to feel the need to use healthcare policy to hold up funding of the government, and they are truly doing this for my benefit, I have an additional policy change I’d like Speaker Boehner to add to the new House legislation—things that would truly be for my benefit and the benefit of my family—
I would like the Speaker to make the Continuing Resolution to keep the government’s doors open contingent upon gun control legislation that requires registration of all weapons at the time of purchase. That would be doing something that could truly help me and my family.
And before anyone tries to tell me that this would be unacceptable because—unlike Obamacare where the majority of the country currently opposes the law, the majority of Americans love their guns—I suggest you review the polls revealing that more Americans favor changes in gun registration laws than the number of Americans who oppose the Affordable Care Act.
I could go on with more ransom demands for the Speaker but I’ll settle for just this one. After all, Boehner only plans to fund the government through this December in exchange for destroying the Affordable Care Act so I don’t want to be too greedy as to what I would expect for a three month extension of an operating government.
If the House Republicans are unwilling to link the funding of government to the things that will really be of value to me, then I can only hope that the Senate Democrats and the President hold the line and allow the GOP to get what is coming to them for their behavior.
While I hate to see so many of my fellow Americans suffer the problems and serious inconveniences that are inevitable in a government shut down, I—like so many Americans that the right-wing prefers to pretend do not exist—have had enough of these eighty to one hundred extremists in Congress standing in the way of trying to make life better for so many Americans just so they can be re-elected . These are, after all, elected officials that come from congressional districts where constituents continue to be incapable of grasping that the debt ceiling debate is about paying for debts we’ve already incurred and not some limitation on what government can borrow or spend in the following year.
I also highlight that these people on the right prefer to pretend I do exist because of their continued suggestion that “Americans” do not want the healthcare reform law. Not so much as one supporter of defunding or delaying Obamacare, who has spoken to the cameras today, has said “some Americans” or “most Americans”. They simply say that this law is a train wreck and Americans don’t want it.
Like it or not, I am an American and I do want this alleged train wreck as do enough of my fellow Americans to constitute at least forty percent of the electorate. So, I would very much appreciate it if Rep. Jeb Henserling and the remaining band of the GOP talking heads haunting the airwaves would stop lumping me in with their political distortions.
The President is flat-out right on this one. If the Republicans want to argue over what should—or should not—be included in the next fiscal year’s budget, I’m all for it. Each branch of Congress can pass their version of a budget and the two can get into the conference committee room and beat each other up until they come to a budget agreement they can send over to the White House for signature.
But if these 100 or so Members of Congress want to screw up people’s lives because they have a fundamental problem with our system of government, we should give them no quarter.
And make no mistake, it is precisely these people’s resentment of how our government was created to operate that drives them to these extremist positions—no matter how much they pretend to be ‘strict constitutionalists’.
Just because GOP legislators like to carry a copy of the Constitution in their suit pocket doesn’t mean they’ve ever read it or could care less what it actually says. It just means they have pockets large enough to hold fat oil company checks and a tiny copy of our founding document at the same time.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 29, 2013
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