“Just Another Shell Game”: John Boehner’s Medicare Proposal Is Sleight Of Hand, Not Cost Control
Denying Medicare to seniors until they reach age 67 will shift costs to seniors, states, and employers without reducing the actual cost of healthcare by one penny. It’s a shell game, and it should not be an option in the fiscal showdown talks.
While it would reduce Medicare expenditures, those costs won’t vanish. Yes, the federal government would save $5.7 billion in 2014, but that would be offset by an additional $11.4 billion spent by states, employers, and seniors, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a cost shift and a cost increase.
The Congressional Budget Office assumes that half of 65- and 66-year-old seniors would continue employer-sponsored coverage at a cost of about $4.5 billion in 2014. That would likely accelerate the long-term decline in corporate benefits for retirees.
States would also pay because low-income uninsured seniors would be eligible for Medicaid. Even if the federal government would pay 100 percent of the cost of the new beneficiaries, states would still be on the hook for an additional $700 million in 2014 alone.
And, of course, seniors lose in the deal. Two thirds of those ages 65 and 66 would each average $2,200 more in out-of-pocket costs ($3.7 billion total) in 2014, even when accounting for subsidies to buy a plan on a health insurance exchange.
There’s another significant but less obvious cost shift through increased premiums in Medicare and in the exchange. Seniors ages 65 and 66 are the healthiest and least expensive Medicare beneficiaries, and they help lower premiums for all enrollees. Moving them to private coverage, where they would be the least healthy and most expensive health plan members, would drive up premiums for everyone else in the exchanges.
Boehner’s proposal seems more sleight of hand than legitimate cost control. It’s about weakening Medicare, not strengthening the program for future generations.
If we really want to think big about Medicare reform, let’s consider lowering the age of eligibility. Letting people as young as 55 buy into Medicare would improve the risk pool for seniors and strengthen Medicare’s bargaining power without raising program costs.
By: Ethan Rome, Executive Director of Health Care for America Now, U. S. News and World Report, December 6, 2012
“It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over”: Pennsylvania GOP To Reconsider Electoral-Vote Scheme
Republican Mike Turzai, Pennsylvania’s House Majority Leader, made quite a name for himself over the summer when he boasted that the state’s voter-ID law, ostensibly about the integrity of the electoral process, “is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
That plan didn’t go well — courts rejected the voter-suppression effort and President Obama won the Keystone State with relative ease. But Turzai isn’t done rolling out election schemes (via my colleague Laura Conaway).
A Pennsylvania lawmaker is proposing making the state the only one to divide its electoral votes based on a presidential candidate’s percentage of public support, a method that would have helped Republican Mitt Romney on Nov. 6.
Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, a Republican from Chester, wants to replace the winner-take-all system, which gave President Barack Obama the state’s 20 electoral votes, with one that divides them to reflect the proportion of votes cast for each candidate. His method would have awarded 12 votes to Obama and eight to Romney had it been in force this year.
It’s understandable that Pennsylvania Republicans would consider efforts like these, and Pileggi’s proposal reportedly has the support of Gov. Tom Corbett (R). The Democratic presidential candidate has won the state six of the six elections, and it’s easier to rig the system then earn public support.
But as I wrote about a year ago, that doesn’t make efforts like these any less ugly. As Ian Millhiser explained, “Pileggi’s plan is nothing more than a proposal to steal electoral votes that are overwhelmingly likely to be awarded to the Democratic candidate under the current system and give them away to the Republican candidate.”
Last year, this identical effort fizzled when congressional Republicans balked fearing the shift might endanger their seats. The fact that Pileggi is back at it, however, suggests the state GOP takes the plan seriously, and is well worth watching.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 5, 2012
“Don’t Tell Rick Scott”: Florida Legislators Introduce Bill To Restore Early Voting Days
Last year, the Republican-led Florida legislature slashed the state’s early voting period in half and cut out voting on the final Sunday before the election — a day when many African American churches turned out parishioners in high numbers. As a result, long lines were the norm for Floridians this year; some even had to wait six hours or more to vote.
After witnessing the negative effects of reducing early voting from 14 days to 8, a number of state lawmakers have introduced legislation to restore those days that had been axed.
State Sens. Arthenia Joyner (D) and Gwen Margolis (D) have pre-filed two bills, SB 80 and SB 82, that would re-institute 14 days of early voting in Florida, beginning on the 15th day before an election and continuing through the Sunday prior to Election Day.
The News Service of Florida has more:
More voting hours also could be available under the bills. Current law requires at least six hours of voting per day, while the bills would require 12 hours per weekday and 12 hours total on the weekend.
In another change proposed by Joyner and Margolis, local supervisors of elections could expand the types of places where early voting is allowed. Currently, supervisors must offer early voting in the supervisor’s offices, and can allow voting in libraries and city halls. The bills would allow supervisors, if they want, to also offer early voting in other government facilities such as a courthouse, as well as colleges, churches, or community centers. The bills would also prevent counties from reducing the number of early voting sites from what they used in 2008.
Though Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, both incoming Senate President Don Gaetz (R) and incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) have “promised that lawmakers will try to figure out what went wrong on Election Day that led to the long lines, and do something about it.”
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, December 5, 2012
“The Conservative Learning Curve”: Thinking Mildly Heretical Thoughts Is One Thing, Actions On The Other Hand…
Over the long run, the most important impact of an election is not on the winning party but on the loser. Winners feel confirmed in staying the course they’re on. Losing parties — or, at least, the ones intent on winning again someday — are moved to figure out what they did wrong and how they must change.
After losing throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Republicans finally came to terms with the New Deal and elected Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. Democrats lost three elections in the 1980s and did a lot of rethinking inspired by Bill Clinton, who won the White House in 1992. In Britain, the Labor Party learned a great deal during its exile from power in the Margaret Thatcher years. The same thing happened to the Conservatives during Tony Blair’s long run.
The American conservative movement and the Republican Party it controls were stunned by President Obama’s victory last month. The depth of their astonishment was itself a sign of how much they misunderstood the country they proposed to lead. Yet the shock has pushed many conservatives to think at least mildly heretical thoughts.
In particular, some are realizing that the tea party surge of 2010 was akin to an amphetamine rush — it produced instant gratification but left the conservative brand tarnished by extremism on both social and economic issues. Within two years, the tea party high gave way to a crash.
It’s true that the early signs of conservative evolution are superficial and largely rhetorical. The right wing’s supporters are already threatening primaries against House and Senate Republicans who offer even a hint of apostasy when it comes to raising taxes in any budget deal. Many Republicans still fear challenges from their right far more than defeat in an election by a Democrat.
Nonetheless, rhetorical shifts often presage substantive changes because they are the first and easiest steps along the revisionist path. And on Tuesday, three prominent Republicans took the plunge.
At a dinner in honor of the late Jack Kemp — a big tax-cutter who also had a big heart — Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Marco Rubio both worked hard to back the party away from the damage done by Mitt Romney’s comments on the supposedly dependent 47 percent and the broader hostility shown toward government by a conservatism transfigured by tea-party thinking.
Ryan spoke gracious words about Romney, the man who made him his running mate on the GOP ticket. But the implicit criticism of Romney’s theory was unmistakable. Kemp, Ryan said, “hated the idea that any part of America could be written off.” Republicans, Ryan said, must “carry on and keep fighting for the American Idea — the belief that everyone should have the opportunity to rise, to escape from poverty.” He also said: “Government must act for the common good, while leaving private groups free to do the work that only they can do.”
Rubio dubbed his speech a discourse on “middle-class opportunity” and distanced himself from the GOP’s obsession with giving succor to the very wealthy.
“Every country in the world has rich people,” Rubio said. “But only a few places have achieved a vibrant and stable middle class. And in the history of the world, none has been more vibrant and more stable than the great American middle class.”
Rubio also walked a new and more careful line on government. “Government has a role to play,” he said, “and we must make sure that it does its part.” Then, making sure he stayed inside the conservative tent, Rubio added: “But it’s a supporting role, to help create the conditions that enable prosperity in our private economy.”
For good measure, former president George W. Bush tried to push his party back toward moderation on immigration, using a speech in Texas to urge that the issue be approached with “a benevolent spirit” mindful of “the contribution of immigrants.”
There’s ample reason to remain skeptical about how far conservatives will go in challenging themselves. Substantively, neither Ryan nor Rubio threw much conservative orthodoxy overboard.
And actions matter more than words. It’s not encouraging that a large group of Republican senators blocked ratification of the international treaty on the rights of the disabled. Then there’s the budget. If Republicans can’t accept even a modest increase in tax rates on the best-off Americans, it’s hard to take their proclamations of a new day seriously.
Still, elections are 2-by-4s, and many conservatives seem to realize the need to understand what just hit them.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 5, 2012
“Pretending To Negotiate”: Basic Arithmetic For Republicans Just Doesn’t Add Up
If President Obama honestly wants to negotiate an agreement with Republicans before the year-end fiscal deadline, he must be deeply frustrated. And if he doesn’t really want to negotiate with them, then he should be delighted, for the same reason: Their latest “offer” laid before him by House Speaker John Boehner demonstrates again their refusal to reveal their true intentions — and their inability to do simple arithmetic.
Consider their treatment of Medicare, the popular social insurance program for seniors that Republicans have always despised. They have just emerged from a long national campaign in which they repeatedly and falsely claimed to “protect” Medicare from the president — whom they accused of wanting to slash $716 billion from the program — but now they complain that he won’t cut it enough. The Obama cuts were mythical, but the Boehner budget proposal includes at least $600 billion in Medicare and Medicaid reductions.
Worse still, the Republicans propose to perform this crude surgery on Medicare without the slightest explanation of where they would cut. Washington rumors suggest that they would achieve some of those cuts over the next 10 years by raising the eligibility age by two years to 67 and by increasing premiums for more affluent beneficiaries.
As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out on Tuesday, however, those changes would not begin to achieve the savings required by the Boehner proposal.
The same problem undermines the other aspects of Boehner’s proposal, which includes $600 billion in additional unspecified cuts. Either their arithmetic doesn’t work — or, as Greenstein worries, they mean to inflict severe cuts in health and other services that would harm elderly and poor Americans, but want to conceal those consequences from the public.
Yet there is an even deeper problem with Boehner’s arithmetic. The Republicans are fighting to extend all the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent along with everyone else — but their alternative proposals are utterly inadequate to compensate for the $1.3 trillion in revenues lost by continuing those cuts for the rich. To “offer” $800 billion in new “revenues” obtained by eliminating deductions rather than raising rates simply doesn’t work, as a matter of basic math. It isn’t nearly enough money.
If Republican leaders cannot do the arithmetic, then it is impossible to negotiate with them. If they can do the arithmetic but insist on falsifying the answers, then it is both unwise and impossible to negotiate with them.
Unless and until the Republicans start talking about real numbers that can actually add up, there is nothing to be gained from pretending to negotiate. Nor should the president start negotiating with himself, as he has sometimes done in the past. Instead, he ought to make sure that the opposition understands what will happen when they fail to act responsibly. After January 1, he will bring them an offer they cannot refuse, to restore cuts for the 98 percent — and they will be held accountable for any consequences caused in the meantime by their stalling.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 5, 2012
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