“Mundane Posturing”: House GOP Kills Eric Cantor’s Ridiculous Health-Care Scheme
It looked like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had come up with a fairly clever scheme. Unfortunately for him, it died yesterday when his fellow House Republicans refused to go along.
The gambit was a little complicated, but in a nutshell, Cantor thought he’d come up with a way to severely undermine the Affordable Care Act — the House would pass a bill to strip federal funds from the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which helps states set up the exchanges that are needed to make the ACA work. The proposal would then divert that money into existing-but- underfunded high-risk pools for the uninsured — a favorite GOP health care policy — that help people with pre-existing conditions buy subsidized coverage.
For Cantor, the plan checked a lot of boxes. If the exchanges are gutted, implementing “Obamacare” would be nearly impossible. At the same time, voters were supposed to see this and say, “See? House Republicans really are interested in providing solutions to problems people face in the real world.” As a matter of public policy, this was an awful idea, but the whole endeavor was billed as an element in the party’s “rebranding” campaign.
So what happened? Cantor’s plan failed miserably because his own allies balked.
On Wednesday, Republican leaders abruptly shelved one of the centerpieces of Mr. Cantor’s “Making Life Work” agenda — a bill to extend insurance coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions — in the face of a conservative revolt. […]
Items that Mr. Cantor had hoped would change the Republican Party’s look, if not its priorities, have been ignored, have been greeted with yawns or have only worsened Republican divisions.
Cantor expected Democratic opposition and he received it — House Dems immediately saw through the scheme and the White House issued a veto threat yesterday morning.
But that wasn’t the majority leader’s real problem. Rather, far-right lawmakers, activists, and organizations saw Cantor’s proposal as an effort to “fix” the Affordable Care Act by investing in high-risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions.
For the left, Cantor’s “Helping Sick Americans Now Act” was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. For the right, it was just a sheep to be slaughtered.
Republican leaders assumed that if they just explained the legislation to their own members — this was about cutting “Obamacare” off at the knees, not actually improving the law — they’d have enough support to pass the bill. But House Republicans wouldn’t listen, seeing this as a misguided effort to spend public funds in support of a provision within the health care law they’ve been told to despise.
The Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation and tea party groups have urged Republican lawmakers to oppose the bill, which was authored by GOP Reps. Joe Pitts of Pennsylvania, Michael Burgess of Texas and Ann Wagner of Missouri. Club for Growth said it would include this vote in its annual rating of members of Congress.
Brent Bozell, a tea party leader, dubbed the bill “CantorCare” in a news release Tuesday.
Republican lawmakers privately fretted that the bill would bolster Obamacare, which the GOP has long tried to dismantle.
Cantor, humiliated, was forced to pull the bill from the floor, realizing it would lose if brought up for a vote. His office insisted that the proposal would be brought back after the leadership had more time to educate its caucus, but there’s no indication of when that might happen.
Remember, Cantor and his allies didn’t really expect this to become law; they only hoped to use this as a political scheme that made House Republicans look better. In practice, it had the opposite of the intended effect, and divided the caucus instead of uniting it.
This was, as NBC’s First Read put it, “mundane posturing,” which should have been easy for the far-right lawmakers, but which ended up backfiring.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 25, 2013
The Unending War On Obamacare: Count On Republicans To Stand In The Way Of Fixing Whatever’s Wrong With It
I’m not a historian, so maybe there’s something I don’t know, but it seems to me that there may never have been a piece of legislation that has inspired such partisan venom as the Affordable Care Act. Sure, Republicans hated Medicare. And yes, their rhetoric at the time, particularly Ronald Reagan’s famous warning that if it passed, “We 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,” was very similar to what they now say about Obamacare. But once it passed, their attempts to undermine it ran more to the occasional raid than the ongoing siege.
I bring this up because Kevin Drum makes an unsettling point today about the future of Obamacare:
No, my biggest concern is what happens after 2014. No big law is ever perfect. But what normally happens is that it gets tweaked over time. Sometimes this is done via agency rules, other times via minor amendments in Congress. It’s routine. But Obamacare has become such a political bomb that it’s not clear that Congress will be willing to fix the minor problems that crop up over time. There’s simply too big a contingent of Republicans who are eager to see Obamacare fail and are actively delighted whenever a problem crops up. This has the potential to be a problem that no other big law has ever had to face.
It’s hard to overstate just how enormous a symbolic presence Obamacare has come to occupy in Republicans’ minds. They’ve invested so much time in not just criticizing it but telling their constituents that it is the worst thing to ever happen to America—and yes, sometimes they literally say things like that—that they’ve lost all moral perspective. To them, trying to fix a feature of the law so that it works better or helps people more would be a horrifying moral compromise, tantamount to sending fur coats to the guards at Stalin’s labor camps in Siberia. If you say to them, “Look, it’s the law now—why don’t we make sure it works as well as possible?” it just won’t register.
Combine that with the fact that in general, congressional Republicans have stopped caring much about policy at all, and they never cared about health care in the first place. They don’t want to know the details of issues; it just isn’t their priority. In the House, conservatives are spending their time clamoring for an opportunity to cast yet another vote to repeal Obamacare. “The guys who have been up here the last two years, we can go home and say, ‘Listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace ObamaCare,” said Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina. “Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say?” Your tax dollars at work.
You can look at this state of affairs and assume that as new difficulties with the law come to light, it will be possible for the Obama administration to address them with administrative action, through the Department of Health and Human Services. And that may be true to an extent. But other changes could require legislation, and it’s a fair bet that no matter what is involved, Republicans in Congress would reject anything having to do with the law that didn’t involve repealing it. You could tell them that there was a typo in the bill which was causing orphans to be turned into Soylent Green and all it would require to fix was a quick voice-vote, and they’d say no, because Obamacare kills freedom.
And let’s not forget, it’s entirely possible that 45 months from now, there will be a Republican president. If that happens, it’s possible that in order to get confirmed, his or her nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services will have to pledge to Senate Republicans to work every day to dismantle Obamacare. The clock is ticking.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 25, 2013
“Bullet Backdrops”: Arkansas Republican “Most Likely Won’t Try To Kill” Lawmakers Who Support Medicaid Expansion
Arkansas may become the first red state to accept the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which the Supreme Court made optional in its decision last year, if the Department of Health and Human Services accepts its privatized plan.
(Of course, the states turning down Medicaid expansion are generally the ones that need it most.)
The notion of expanding government to improve health care outcomes apparently drove Chris Nogy of the Benton County Republican Committee a little nutty. In a recent newsletter, he encouraged his fellow Republicans to seek “Second Amendment” solutions against those who had voted for the expansion, and expressed dismay that he can’t actually back up these threats:
We need to let those who will come in the future to represent us [know] that we are serious. The 2nd amendment means nothing unless those in power believe you would have no problem simply walking up and shooting them if they got too far out of line and stopped responding as representatives. It seems that we are unable to muster that belief in any of our representatives on a state or federal level, but we have to have something, something costly, something that they will fear that we will use if they step out of line. If we can’t shoot them, we have to at least be firm in our threat to take immediate action against them politically, socially, and civically if they screw up on something this big. Personally, I think a gun is quicker and more merciful, but hey, we can’t.
Nogy’s wife is the group’s secretary and she claims the article was placed in the newsletter without her husband’s approval.
Medicaid expansion will provide health insurance for up to 250,000 Arkansans, ultimately saving dozens if not hundreds of lives, while driving down the costs of the state’s insured — who already subsidize the uninsured through higher rates.
Most of Arkansas’ estimated uninsured 401,100 are working families who simply can’t afford coverage.
Several Arkansas Republicans made it clear that they were appalled by Nogy’s comments.
“I’m embarrassed for the Benton County Republican Committee for including this article in their newsletter,” said State Senator Jon Woods (R). “I would think the Benton County Committee would have better judgment and not allow this to be sent out.”
The Benton County Republican Committee offered a statement:
“The letter was not approved and Mr. Nogy had no authority to submit it through the newsletter. As a committee, we respect the right of our legislators to vote based on their knowledge and feedback from the voters they represent. We will discuss this issue further with our executive committee.”
Nogy later clarified his comments in a letter to KFSM News.
He explained why he is more angry at Republicans than Democrats:
I don’t feel the same way about the Democrats as bullet backstops as I do about the Republicans who joined them. The Democrats were doing what their party told them they had to do because they were elected to do that job.
He concluded by saying that his threats were only meant to attract attention and he “most likely” won’t kill those Republicans who supported the Obamacare provision. He simply thought it was important to put a face behind his threats so lawmakers will take him seriously:
And for the record, I didn’t advocate violence. I mentioned violence to get people’s attention, and it worked. I advocated a serious political and social stand, an assured and significant negative response to any politician who breaks a primary voter/elected official promise contract. We have only one mechanism to maintain the ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’, and that is to elect those who promise to do as we demand they do. If we cannot make these people understand that we will not tolerate this kind of breach of contract, then we lose our ability as the people to control the government. And in this age of death threats from nameless, faceless thugs, we need these folks to know that while we most likely won’t try to kill them or harm their families, they should be much more certain of our response than fearful of the actions of those who will not identify themselves.
The contentious battle over expansion has shown that Republicans are eager to take the federal funds without getting any Obama on them. Lawmakers are so afraid to be caught pandering to the president or “takers” that they’ve officially declared that Medicaid expansion is not an entitlement.
Mr. Nogy should be happy to know that another feature of Obamacare is mental health parity.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, April 22, 2013
“Debunking GOP Hype”: Very Few Businesses Plan To Drop Health Coverage Because Of Obamacare
Companies that have threatened to drop coverage of their employees as a result of Obamacare are vocal, but according to a new study they are also few and far between. Only a total one percent of businesses said they are not going to continue coverage in the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans survey. Another 2 percent said that they are “somewhat unlikely” to continue providing health care to their employees. Meanwhile, 69 percent will definitely cover employees, and 25 percent “very likely” will.
The results are encouraging primarily because they show businesses have growing confidence in Obamacare — last year, the survey showed that far fewer companies were certain to continue their health care plans. It also means business leaders are beginning to recognize the benefits providing employees with health coverage:
That hefty percentage of respondents who said coverage definitely will be offered in 2014 contrasts with a similar survey the IFEBP did last year, when only 46% of respondents said coverage would definitely be offered. That greater certainty expressed by employers about offering coverage next year may the result of several factors, said Julie Stich, research director for the Brookfield, Wis.-based IFEBP. One factor may be a greater consideration by employers on how offering a health care plan can significantly aid in the recruitment and retention of employees, Ms. Stich said.
Offering health care does, indeed, aid recruitment and retention. And if three percent of companies chose not to do so while the rest do, they will likely suffer the consequences. Lacking health coverage also drives away some of the best employees, especially when, under Obamacare, those employees will then be forced to take on the cost burden of healh care coverage themselves.
By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, April 11, 2013
“Hell Bent On Destroying The Health Care System”: Mitch McConnell Has A Secret Plan For Obamacare
Republicans promised voters in 2012 that with public support, they would repeal the Affordable Care Act. Voters responded by electing Democrats, seemingly ending the debate.
Indeed, as recently as two months ago, there wasn’t much left to fight about. President Obama had won re-election; the health care law’s implementation would continue apace; many Republican governors started accepting the law’s provisions; House Speaker John Boehner called the Affordable Care Act “the law of the land”; and Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said, “The arc of partisan fever is beginning to recede, and pragmatism is beginning to come to the fore.”
That was late January. Now, congressional Republicans seem to vote uncontrollably on “Obamacare” repeal and National Journal reports that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “secret Republican plan” to destroy the law.
By Election Day, Senate Republicans were ready to, as McConnell put it, “take this monstrosity down.”
“We were prepared to do that had we had the votes to do it after the election. Well, the election didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to,” McConnell told National Journal in an interview. “The monstrosity has … begun to be implemented and we’re not giving up the fight.”
Sure, those darned voters got in the way of McConnell’s dreams, but the Republican senator apparently only sees that as a minor inconvenience that simply delays his plans.
The “secret Republican plan” really isn’t much of a secret. Hell, it’s not really much of a plan, either. McConnell’s idea is apparently to have Republicans win a bunch of elections and then destroy the law through the reconciliation process so Democrats can’t filibuster the GOP’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
That’s roughly the same plan Republicans came up with last year, right before the electorate re-elected President Obama and expanded the Democratic majority in the Senate.
But as is the case with so many issues — taxes, deficit reduction, Planned Parenthood, Paul Ryan’s budget, etc. — GOP officials are determined to pretend 2012 didn’t happen and the will of the voters is irrelevant.
What’s less clear is whether McConnell has actually thought through the consequences, or whether he’s so deep into his post-policy vision that he simply no longer cares.
How will he pay for Obamacare repeal, which would cost over $100 billion in the coming decade? What will he do for the millions of Americans who would lose the ability to see a doctor if Obamacare were destroyed? How will he reconcile eliminating Obamacare and Republican plans to rely on Obamacare to balance the federal budget?
McConnell doesn’t seem to have answers for any of this. In fact, I’m not altogether sure why, exactly, McConnell hates the Affordable Care Act as much as he thinks he does, or whether this posturing is intended to placate the far-right wing of his party in advance of his 2014 campaign.
But the bottom line remains effectively the same: whereas Republicans were prepared two months ago to move on to other fights, GOP leaders are now back to their preoccupation with, in Paul Ryan’s words, “destroying the health care system for the American people.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 28, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 