“Running Out Of Fresh Attacks”: Republicans Revive Mitt Romney’s Favorite Medicare Attack
With HealthCare.gov substantially improved and new insurance signups surging, Republicans have been forced to pivot to a new line of attack against the Affordable Care Act. On Tuesday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a series of news releases accusing Democratic candidates of cutting Medicare through their support of the health care reform law.
“As the ObamaCare disaster continues to unfold, Mark Pryor and National Democrats have resorted to deceiving seniors using their old and discredited MediScare playbook,” reads the release targeting Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR).
“What’s new this year is the blatant hypocrisy that Mark Pryor and his liberal allies in Washington are exhibiting,” it continues. “Pryor’s deciding vote for ObamaCare cut $717 billion from Medicare—including nearly $5.4 billion directly from Arkansas ($10,296 per Medicare recipient in Arkansas).”
CNN reports that the NRSC campaign will target Senators Pryor, Mark Begich (D-AK), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Udall (D-CO), Tom Udall (D-NM), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Al Franken (D-MN), along with Senate candidates Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) and Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI).
If this line of attack sounds familiar, it’s because it was a centerpiece of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s case against the Affordable Care Act in the 2012 elections. The Republican ticket repeatedly accused President Obama of having “robbed” and “raided” $716 billion from Medicare to “pay for Obamacare, a risky, unproven, federal takeover of health care.”
Of course, that attack ignored the fact that the overwhelming majority of the $716 billion actually represented reductions in how much Medicare pays hospitals and insurers, as WonkBlog’s Sarah Kliff explained last August. Medicare benefits themselves are not affected.
It also ignored the fact that Ryan’s own budget included the exact same $716 billion in cuts (with the implied promise of deeper cuts in the future to pay for trillions of dollars in new defense spending and tax cuts). He has also kept the savings in subsequent budget proposals. Nearly every Republican in Congress — including Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Pryor’s chief rival in his 2014 re-election bid — has supported Ryan’s budget plans, significantly blunting the accusation’s impact.
Nonetheless, House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) spokesman Brendan Buck told MSNBC that the attack is “a tried and true campaign hit” — ignoring that it totally failed to blunt the Democratic Party’s sweeping victory in 2012.
There’s no denying that Republicans had a good political month targeting the Affordable Care Act’s rocky rollout. But the fact that they are already returning to this easily debunked attack, which was proven to be unpersuasive in the last election, raises the question of whether they are running out of fresh attacks against the law. And with repeal seemingly off the table, one wonders where Republicans will turn if good news about the law continues to trickle out.
By: Henry Decker, Featured Post, The National Memo, December 4, 2013
“Fruits Of Republican Folly”: It Falls To Democrats To Find A Way To Take Advantage Of The Moment
The Republicans badly damaged themselves with their contrived government shutdown and debt crisis, but it remains for the Democrats to drive home their advantage. Will they?
Based on the cost to the Republican brand and the pressure from corporate elites not to harm the economy, the days of shutdowns and games with the debt are probably over for the foreseeable future. If the Tea Party faction tries to repeat these maneuvers, House Speaker John Boehner would likely permit a free vote again, and enough Republicans would vote with Democrats to keep the government open.
The Republicans seem hopelessly split between a Tea Party faction that relishes governing crises and a more mannered corporate faction that kills government softly. But the GOP is still one party when it comes to destroying government as a constructive force in the economy and society.
Since Barack Obama took office, the two Republican factions have complemented each other in a successful “good cop, bad cop” effort to ratchet down public spending. Wall Street creates one sort of crisis; the Tea Party creates another; government takes the hit. Except for the short-lived stimulus of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, this is the first prolonged slump of the postwar era in which government cut rather than expanded public spending.
President Obama’s pivot to deficit reduction in late 2009 was in response to the pressures of the corporate elite, while his several capitulations in the budget cuts since 2010 have been driven by the Tea Party. In effect, the Tea Party and corporate Republicans have executed a pincer movement. Domestic discretionary spending relative to gross domestic product is now below that of the Eisenhower era.
With everything else having been cut, the pressure has shifted to the big social-insurance programs—so-called entitlements—that have thus far been protected. Once again, the corporate right and Tea Party right have called for a grand bargain targeting Social Security and Medicare.
A bargain connotes giving something and getting something. Republicans are disinclined to give anything in exchange for cuts in social insurance, least of all tax increases. Their opening gambit was an improbable offer to shrink Social Security and Medicare in exchange for increases in defense spending.
The Democratic caucuses in both the House and Senate are resolute defenders of Social Security. Polls show that more than 80 percent of Republicans and Democrats alike don’t want Social Security reduced. With Republicans pressing for cuts, defense of Social Security is a clear, bright line that benefits Democrats.
Unless, that is, President Obama chooses to blur it. He has already proposed in his 2014 budget a change in the annual cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security (the chained Consumer Price Index). Although a grand bargain is unlikely, Republicans are pushing a mini-bargain of sequester relief in exchange for cuts in other domestic spending or in Social Security. The chained CPI would yield about $34 billion of deficit reduction per year. This disguised benefit cut would split the Democrats as badly as the government shutdown split the Republicans.
A better mini-bargain would be relief from the depressive impact of the sequester without any offsetting cuts. The Democrats have some leverage here, because the sequester mandates at least $23 billion of defense cuts to take effect in January, requiring cancellation of multiyear weapons contracts dear to key Republican legislators. In exchange for restored military spending, Democrats could demand, and get, $23 billion in social spending. That $46 billion would help stimulate a stagnant economy.
Looking forward to the 2014 midterm, pollsters discern a paradox. Support for the Republican Party is down sharply. In October, Gallup found that 28 percent of those polled approve of the Republicans, down from 38 percent in September and the lowest since Gallup began asking the question in 1992. Yet message testing also shows that large majorities of voters are still inclined to fault “partisan bickering”—blaming both parties—rather than Republican obstruction for the government’s failure to make substantive progress in improving a feeble recovery.
So the shutdown debacle helps the Democrats but only marginally, unless they maximize their moment. Midterm elections are notorious for low turnout. Democrats have a prayer of taking back the House only if they energize their core voters. If President Obama goes into the midterm bragging about how much progress has been made, that won’t resonate with Americans suffering from flat or declining incomes and job insecurity. The Democrats need to stand for restored, broadly shared prosperity, not tinkering, and brand Republicans as the party that would cut your benefits.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, of all people, has set a fine example. In the deal that opened the government, McConnell sneaked in the only earmark: $3 billion for a dam in Kentucky. If we ramped that up to the whole country based on Kentucky’s share of the economy, the outlay would translate to about $200 billion. Call it the Mitch McConnell Memorial Infrastructure Program—a nice down payment on the public investment America needs.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Founder and Co-Editor, The American Prsopect, November 7, 2013
“Raising The Medicare Age”: A Terrible Republican Idea Exposed As Even More Terrible
Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office came out with a report assessing the budgetary impact of something many conservatives have supported, raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. What they found was that the change would save far less money than had previously been assumed: only $19 billion over the next decade. The main reason is that many of the people no longer eligible for Medicare would be eligible for either Medicaid or insurance subsidies through the health exchanges, so the net effect on the federal budget would be small.
But more important than that, this is an opportunity to remind ourselves that when government is doing something worthwhile, doing less of it isn’t a good idea even if it saved a lot of money. And if cutting back only saves a modest amount of money, it’s a really bad idea. You know what else would save a lot of money? Eliminating the United States Navy. But I’m guessing that most conservatives think having a navy is a good thing. Medicare is a spectacular success, one of the greatest things this country has ever done. Letting fewer people get on it is like the Miami Heat saying, “We won the championship last year, so what we need to do now is get rid of LeBron James.”
Don’t forget, Medicare is more efficient and less expensive than private insurance. Let me repeat that: Medicare is more efficient and less expensive than private insurance. It costs less to administer, its costs have risen more slowly than those of private insurance, and its beneficiaries love it. I realize that these facts cause many conservatives to begin blinking rapidly as their brains threaten overload from the cognitive dissonance produced when they realize that there are places where a government program outperforms its private-sector counterparts. But it’s true.
Yes, Medicare’s costs are projected to rise greatly in the coming decades. But that isn’t because the program doesn’t work, it’s because of the high cost of health care in general, and because there are going to be a lot more old people. And not incidentally, there was one piece of legislation that found ways to save hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare’s future expenses. It was called the Affordable Care Act, and you may remember that Republicans didn’t think too highly of it. In fact, they even pretended to be terribly opposed to those very savings, falsely characterizing them as cuts to benefits. But instead they’d like to just make the program available to fewer seniors?
If you don’t let people get on Medicare when they’re 65, it isn’t as though they’ll just step into their suspended animation pods for two years and then pop out when they turn 67. Those people will have to get coverage from private insurers. That means they’ll be paying more out of their own pockets. And look, I realize that many conservatives believe that someone getting health insurance from the government is an inherently bad thing, no matter how well the program works. But it isn’t. When a senior goes on Medicare, it’s something to be celebrated. It isn’t free, but it’s government doing exactly what it ought to do.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 25, 2013
“A Very Sweet Deal”: Prescription Drug Price-Gouging Enabled By Congress
Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on much. But one thing they would agree on if they knew the facts is that because of the cozy relationship big drug companies have with our lawmakers in Washington, Americans pay far more for their medications than people anywhere else on the planet.
As a consequence, our health insurance premiums are much higher than they should be. And our Medicare program is costing both taxpayers and beneficiaries billions of dollars more than necessary.
Americans who are uninsured are at an even greater disadvantage: many of them have no choice but to put their health at risk because they can’t afford the medications their doctors prescribe for them.
Drug makers have so much influence in Washington that they’ve been able to kill numerous proposals over the years that would enable the U.S. government to regulate drug prices like most other countries do. Between 1988 and 2012, the pharmaceutical industry spent more on lobbying than any other special interest, forking over a total of $2.6 billion on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org. That’s far more than even banks and oil and gas companies spent.
That money helped them get a very sweet deal when members of Congress were drafting legislation that would eventually be the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. Drug makers were able to get their friends in Congress to insert language in the Part D legislation that prohibits the federal government from seeking the best prices from pharmaceutical companies.
According to a recent analysis by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), an advocacy group, the 11 largest drug companies reported $711.4 billion in profits over the 10 years ending in 2012, much of it coming from the Medicare program. They reaped $76.3 billion in profits in 2006 alone, 34 percent more than in 2005, the year before the Part D program went into effect.
“Americans pay significantly more than any other country for the exact same drugs,” said HCAN Executive Director Ethan Rome.
How much more do we pay than residents of other countries? Here are a few examples of what we pay on average for six brand name drugs compared to what residents of other countries pay, according to the International Federation of Health Plans:
— Celebrex (for pain) – U.S.: $162; Canada: $53
— Cymbalta (for depression and anxiety) – U.S: $176; France: $47
— Lipitor (for high cholesterol) – U.S.: $124; New Zealand: $6
— Nasonex (for nasal allergies) – U.S: $108; U.K.: $12
— Vytorin (for high cholesterol) – U.S: $123; Argentina: $31
— Nexium (for acid reflux) – U.S.: $123; Spain: $18
The Congressional Budget Office says that if Medicare could get the same bulk purchasing discounts on prescription drugs as state Medicaid programs already get, the federal government would save at least $137 billion over 10 years.
In his proposed budget for 2014, President Obama is asking Congress to require drug companies to sell their medications to Medicare at the best price they offer private insurance companies, which is what they are required to do for Medicaid.
On April 16, several members of Congress, led by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), introduced legislation to require drug companies to provide rebates to the federal government on drugs used by people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. One of the cosponsors was Independent Sen. Angus King, the former governor of Maine. The lawmakers noted that with the exception of Medicare Part D, all large purchasers of prescription drugs negotiate better prices. Their bill, they say, would correct excessive payments to drug companies, while saving taxpayers and the federal government billions of dollars.
As you can imagine, the drug companies don’t like what President Obama and the lawmakers are proposing. You can expect them to mount a multi-million dollar PR and lobbying campaign over the coming months to protect both their sweet deal with Medicare and their Wall Street-pleasing profits.
By: Wendell Potter, Guest Contributor, Politix, April 23, 2013
“Grounded In Even Less Reality”: Paul Ryan’s Make-Believe Budget
If Rep. Paul Ryan wants people to take his budget manifestos seriously, he should be honest about his ambition: not so much to make the federal government fiscally sustainable as to make it smaller.
You will recall that the Ryan Budget was a big Republican selling point in last year’s election. Most famously, Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program. He offered the usual GOP recipe of tax cuts — to be offset by closing certain loopholes, which he would not specify — along with drastic reductions in non-defense “discretionary” spending.
If the plan Ryan offered had been enacted, the federal budget would not come into balance until 2040. For some reason, Republicans forgot to mention this detail in their stump speeches and campaign ads.
Voters were supposed to believe that Ryan was an apostle of fiscal rectitude. But his real aim wasn’t to balance the budget. It was to starve the federal government of revenue. Big government, in his worldview, is inherently bad — never mind that we live in an awfully big country.
Ryan and Mitt Romney offered their vision, President Obama offered his, and Americans made their choice. Rather emphatically.
Now Ryan, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, is coming back with an ostensibly new and improved version of the framework that voters rejected in November. Judging by the preview he offered Sunday, the new plan is even less grounded in reality than was the old one.
Voters might not have focused on the fact that Ryan’s original plan wouldn’t have produced a balanced budget until today’s high school students reached middle age, but the true deficit hawks in the House Republican caucus certainly noticed. They demanded a budget that reached balance much sooner. Hence Ryan’s revised plan, which claims to accomplish this feat of equilibrium within a decade.
It will, in fact, do nothing of the sort, because it appears to depend on at least one ridiculous assumption and two glaring contradictions. That’s for starters; I’m confident we’ll see more absurdities when the full proposal is released soon.
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan said his plan assumes that the far-reaching reforms known as Obamacare will be repealed. Host Chris Wallace reacted with open disbelief: “That’s not going to happen.”
Indeed, to take Ryan seriously is to believe that legislation repealing the landmark Affordable Care Act would be approved by the Senate, with its Democratic majority, and signed by Obama. What are the odds? That’s a clown question, bro.
As he did in the campaign, Ryan attacked Obama’s health reforms for cutting about $700 billion from Medicare over a decade, not by slashing benefits but by reducing payments to providers. Ryan neglected to mention that his own budget — the one he convinced the party to run on in 2012 — would cut Medicare by the same amount. Actually, by a little more.
This was hypocrisy raised to high art. How could anyone who claimed to be so very worried about the crushing federal debt blithely renounce $700 billion in savings? Ryan suggested Sunday that once Obamacare is repealed, this money can be plowed back into Medicare. Which, as you recall, will never happen.
While Ryan’s new budget assumes that Obamacare goes away, it also assumes that the tax increase on high earners approved in the “fiscal cliff” deal remains in place. “That’s current law,” he said, as if Obamacare were not.
Ryan’s sudden respect for a tax increase that had to be — metaphorically — crammed down Republicans’ throats is easily explained. He needs the $600 billion in revenue it produces to make his new fantasyland budget appear to reach balance.
Ryan is likely to reprise — and even augment — the hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts he proposed last year for social programs. He indicated that he still believes Medicare should be voucherized, although he objects to the word and insists that what he advocates is “premium support.” And he asserted that Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, is “reckless” — even as tea party-approved Republican governors such as Rick Scott of Florida announce their states’ participation.
From the evidence, Ryan cares less about deficits or tax rates than about finding some way to dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. He has every right to hold that view. But it’s hard to take him seriously as long as he refuses to come clean about his intentions.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 11, 2013
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