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No Credibility Or Integrity: What McKinsey & Company Has To Hide

An outfit called McKinsey & Company released a report this week making all kinds of discouraging claims about the Affordable Care Act. According to the study, nearly a third of American businesses will stop offering health coverage to their employees as a result of the new reform law. Several news outlets pounced on the release of the report, as did many Republicans.

The White House’s Nancy-Ann DeParle, in a rather understated response, urged caution.

A central goal of the Affordable Care Act is to reduce the cost of providing health insurance and make it easier for employers to offer coverage to their workers. We have implemented the law at every step of the way to minimize disruption and maximize affordability for businesses, workers, and families. And we agree with experts who project that employers will continue to offer high quality benefits to their workers under the new law. This one discordant study should be taken with a grain of salt.

That’s putting it mildly.

McKinsey claims to have done a survey of 1,300 employers. How was it conducted? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said. What were the questions? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said. How were the employers chosen? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said. What were the statistical breakdowns among businesses of different sizes? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said.

Who funded the study? We don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said.

Kate Pickert noticed a small tidbit in the report: McKinsey acknowledged having “educated” those participating in the survey. And what, pray tell, did the company say to respondents that might have affected the results? You guessed it: we don’t know and McKinsey hasn’t said.

Politico added today that it “asked really nicely” to at least see the questionnaire McKinsey used to conduct the employers survey, but the company refused.

Raise your hand if you think the McKinsey & Company report has some credibility problems.

But here’s the angle to keep an eye on. How soon will Republican talking points simply incorporate this highly dubious claim into all arguments about health care policy? That’s usually how this game works — sketchy outfit tells the GOP what it wants to hear; Dems point out how baseless the claim is, and the media presents the information in a he-said-she-said format, leaving the public to think “both sides” have merit.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear a Republican claim on television, “We recently learned that a third of American businesses will stop ensuring their workers.” It won’t be true, but that won’t matter.

By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washongton Monthly-Political Animal, June 9, 2011

June 10, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Businesses, Conservatives, Democrats, GOP, Government, Health Care, Health Care Costs, Health Reform, Ideologues, Ideology, Politics, Public, Republicans, Right Wing, Under Insured, Uninsured | , , , , | Leave a comment

Mitt Romney’s Flawed View Of Freedom

The bales of hay were stacked strategically in the hope that they’d make it into the television screen. The sturdy white barn nearby provided an image worthy of a Christmas card, the symbol of a solid, calm, industrious and confident country. The slogan behind the candidate, “Believe in America,” did not invite debate.

Whatever the punditocracy may have made of Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of his presidential candidacy last week, we could all give the guy credit for trying to reassure us that not everything in politics has changed.

In an age of media flying circuses where you never know who is running for president and who is just trying to boost book sales and speaking fees, Romney did it the old-fashioned way. He really, really wants to be president, and he offered pretty pictures to encourage us to watch him saying so. It was the venerable liturgy of our civil religion.

Unfortunately for Romney, he barely got his moment in the sun because dark clouds rolled in. Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani showed up in New Hampshire on the former Massachusetts governor’s magical day, underscoring why Romney is plagued by the word “putative,” which almost always appears before “front-runner.”

But Romney’s travails are about more than the man himself. They speak to the
condition of a party that won’t let him embrace his actual record and constantly
requires him — and all other Republicans — to say outlandish things.

Romney’s greatest political achievement, the Massachusetts health-care law, was a genuinely masterful piece of politics and policy. The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza recently wrote a superb article about how Romney got the plan passed. The campaign should be
reproducing the article in bulk. Instead, Romney’s lieutenants will pray that Republican primary voters never read the story. Working with those horrid Democrats to pass any sort of forward-looking government program is now forbidden.

When Romney spoke at Doug and Stella Scamman’s Bittersweet Farm, he was guarded in talking about his health plan, saying he “hammered out a solution that took a bad situation and made it better. Not perfect, but it was a state solution to our state’s
problem.” The crowd gave him modest cheers when he got to the part about health
care being a state problem.

But he received what was, by my reckoning, his loudest response when he pledged “a complete repeal of Obamacare.” That’s where the GOP heart is, and Palin and Giuliani both got into most of the Romney announcement stories by bashing him on health care. When you’re forced to tiptoe around your accomplishments, it’s no wonder you get accused of shifting your shape.

Yet it was Romney himself who exposed contemporary conservatism’s core flaw.
“Did you know,” he asked, “that government — federal, state and local — under
President Obama, has grown to consume almost 40 percent of our economy? We’re
only inches away from ceasing to be a free economy.”

Actually, the federal government of which Obama is in charge “consumes” about a quarter of the economy — and this after a severe recession, when government’s share
naturally goes up.

But even granting Romney his addition of spending by all levels of government, the notion that we are “inches away from ceasing to be a free economy” is worse than absurd. It suggests that the only way we measure whether an economy and a country are “free” is by toting up how much government spends.

Are we less “free” because we spend money on public schools and student loans, Medicare and Medicaid, police and firefighters, roads and transit, national defense and environmental protection? Would we be “freer” if government spent zero percent of the economy and just stopped doing things?

Romney, presumably, doesn’t think this, but the logic of what he said points
in exactly that direction. We thus confront in 2012 nothing short of a fundamental argument over what the word “freedom” means. If freedom, as the conservatives seem to insist, comes down primarily to the quantity of government spending, then a country such as Sweden, where government spends quite a lot, would be less “free” than a right-wing dictatorship that had no welfare state and no public schools — but also didn’t allow its people to speak, pray, write or organize as they wish.

Many of us “believe in America” because we believe its history shows that our
sacred liberties are compatible with a rather substantial government that invests in efforts to expand the freedom from want, the freedom from fear, the freedom from unfair treatment and the freedom to improve ourselves. That, as the politicians like to say, is what this campaign is all about.

 

By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 6, 2011

June 10, 2011 Posted by | Affordable Care Act, Conservatives, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, Elections, Freedom, GOP, Government, Health Care Costs, Ideologues, Ideology, Liberty, Media, Medicaid, Medicare, Mitt Romney, Politics, Republicans, Voters | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Democrats Must Fight Back Against Wisconsin GOP Shenanigans Or Risk Losing

A potential bombshell development out in Wisconsin.

As you know, Wisconsin Republicans have hatched a scheme to meddle in Dem primaries in order to delay the recall elecions against GOP state senators in a last ditch maneuver to save their hides.

Now a top labor group heavily involved in the recall wars is responding: It is publicly sounding the alarm about the GOP tactics, and arguing that Democrats must respond in kind or risk failing to take back the state senate.

We Are Wisconsin — which is one of the biggest labor-backed groups involved in the fight — has just issued a public statement stating that it would be in the interests of Democrats to respond to the GOP shenanigans by running their own candidates against Republicans in GOP primaries, just as Republicans are doing to Dems.

In a major development, the group argues that the strategic and on-the-ground implications of the GOP tactics are far more complex and serious a threat to Dem chances than has been publicly explained. They argue that if Republicans do this and Dems don’t, the GOP will be able to dictate the election calendar with a free hand, deciding which general recall elections happen on July 12th and which on August 9th — a huge strategic advantage for Republicans.

Without GOP primaries, the group argues, GOP state senators will automatically advance to the general recall elections, allowing Republican voters in their districts to vote for the fake, GOP-backed “Democratic” candidates in the Dem primaries, making it more likely that the real Dem loses the primary and doesn’t even advance to the recall election. (If there’s also a GOP primary, Republican voters won’t be able to vote in both primaries under Wisconsin law.) And without GOP primaries, all the unlimited outside national conservative money could be channeled into boosting the fake “Democrat” and annhilating the real Dem. The group concludes:

Given the situation Republicans have so despicably concocted to manipulate these recall elections, it is the opinion of We Are Wisconsin that it would be in the interest of Democrats to run candidates in the Republican primaries to ensure the dates of the general election are predictably on August 9th, and that Republicans are forced to win a primary election instead of diverting their unlimited resources to back their “fake” candidates against “legitimate” Democrats. To that end, it would be in the interest of flipping the Wisconsin Senate that interested Democrats contact the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

This opinion is not rendered lightly. This is the most cynical manipulation of the Wisconsin electoral process in our state’s history, and is being done by a Republican party that has demonstrated no respect for the rule of law and our state’s tradition of clean elections and good governance. Unfortunately, however, after evaluating the strategic implications of their despicable tactics, to simply stand idly by would amount to unilateral disarmament and would almost certainly thwart the will of the hundreds of thousands of voters who support recalling Republican Senators in the upcoming elections.

Democrats and liberals have repeatedly described the GOP tactic of meddling in Dem primaries as a dirty trick designed to rig the recalls, and conservatives are now likely to cry hypocrisy. But it’s clear that the situation created by the GOP maneuver is far more complex and potentially dire for Dems than previously understood, and without a Democratic response, Dems would in effect be consigning themselves to defeat by tying their own hands behind their backs while Republicans manipulate the law to their advantage.

The question now is whether Dems will hear this message and respond in kind.

 

By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, June 10, 2011

June 10, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Corporations, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Government, Ideologues, Ideology, Labor, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Voters, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Top Republican National Committee Official Involved In Wisconsin GOP Shenanigans

As you know, Wisconsin Republicans have hatched a scheme to run spoiler candidates in Dem primaries in order to delay the recall elections and give Wisconsin GOP state senators more time to save their hides. This plan has been openly embraced by the state’s Senate Majority Leader.

But it turns out there’s an interesting Washington angle on this story, too: A current top RNC official may have played a key role in developing the plan when he was with the state GOP. And he’s refusing to answer questions from reporters about it.

When the La Crosse Tribune first broke the story earlier this month, the paper reported that one Mark Jefferson, then the executive director of the Wisconsin state GOP, had been recorded discussing the plan with local GOP officials. Jefferson had served in that position for four years, as the right hand man of the Wisconsin state chairman, Reince Priebus. Priebus, of course, is now the head of the Republican National Committee.

Even as the story about the Wisconsin GOP scheme was breaking, it was already known that Jefferson would be moving to the RNC to play the role of midwestern regional director, a significant position.

No one is saying that the RNC itself played an active role in developing the plan. But Jefferson himself has in the past denounced such schemes as highly unethical. Last year, when Republicans accused Dems of running a spoiler candidate in a GOP primary in an Assembly race, Jefferson slammed it as a “nasty, cynical ploy.”

Now that Wisconsin Republicans are the ones accused of this, Jefferson has not responded to repeated requests from reporters that he defend the plan or explain his role in developing it.

This goes beyond just the role of Jefferson. There are currently mounting questions about the scope, nature and real goals of this scheme — we have now learned, for instance, that all six GOP state senators targeted for recall knew about this plan, even though they earlier claimed ignorance. Jefferson could clear up a lot about what’s really going on here. He may not see any reason to do that, of course. But Wisconsin reporters are going to continue demanding that he do.

 

By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, June 9, 2011

June 9, 2011 Posted by | Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Elections, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Ideologues, Ideology, Politics, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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