“What A Terrible Thing To Do To People”: Republican Attacks On Obamacare Are Turning Into An Argument Against Repeal
If health insurance isn’t important, why would receiving a letter telling you that you need to change your plan be a tragedy that can get you on Fox News nearly immediately?
Republicans have seized on the millions of cancellations of current plans happening as a result of the Affordable Care Act remaking the individual insurance market, which currently offers the worst customer satisfaction of any type of health coverage.
By glorifying these “horror” stories, which have often turned out to be overinflated at worst and actual Affordable Care Act (ACA) success stories at best, Republicans are sending a clear message to Americans: We must defend the sanctity of health insurance.
This powerful theme is extremely opportune, as long as cancellation notices are contradicting a promise the president made, Healthcare.gov is flagging and the ACA’s paid enrollment numbers are low. However, it becomes much more complicated as the site starts working and 2014 begins with millions of people enjoying health care coverage and subsidies that the GOP would be voting to take away.
This would effectively doom the “repeal” strategy Republicans have fixated on for years, argues Salon’s Brian Beutler:
Obamacare is driving policy cancellations right now, but it at least creates a coverage guarantee for those affected. Repeal without replace would impose a greater burden without providing any counterweight.
If they pass the Keep Your Health Plan Act this week, House Republicans will see their stylized sympathy for people whose policies have been canceled come into tension with their explicit desire to take Obamacare benefits away from many of the same people, and millions more.
Becoming the party that opposes all cancellations of insurance policies also completely undermines any Republican “plan” that might be an alternative to the ACA. “Such a starting position would make true market-oriented reform impossible,” explains The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein.
John McCain’s health care plan, one part of his platform conservatives love, would have ended health care tax exemptions for employers and employees. This would have likely resulted in millions and millions of Americans ending up in new plans. The Republican Study Committee has offered a “serious” Obamacare alternative that would try to end the system of employer-based health care, disrupting the current health care system far more than the ACA does.
Even as Republicans are vindictively leaping on any cancellation story, other right-wing groups are trying to spread the idea to people in their 20s to optout of the ACA, even though millions of younger Americans can get coverage for free. One Koch-funded group, Generation Opportunity, brought its scary Uncle Sam and some models to tailgate before the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game to let the students know that opting out of health insurance is, as the kids say, cool.
So health insurance is lame and having it changed in any way whatsoever is the greatest atrocity an American can be expected to suffer.
Republicans have been fine with these kinds of contradictions throughout President Obama’s time in office. The deficit suddenly became a problem on January 21, 2009. Tea Partiers demanded that we get our gubmint hands off their Medicare. The GOP won the House by campaigning against cuts to Medicare that they then included in Paul Ryan’s budget.
But there is evidence that efforts to actually take something away from Americans results in a substantial backlash.
The wave of voting restrictions across the South after the 2010 election was mostly blocked by the federal courts empowered by a Voting Rights Act that had not yet been gutted. But Republicans did successfully restrict early voting in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida. Despite this, or as a result of it, African-American turnout hit an all-time high in the 2012 election.
North Carolina passed some of the most radical voting restrictions on students in the nation and local Republicans specifically attempted to block Elizabeth City State University senior Montravias King from running for city council where he was attending college. Their efforts backfired.
“On October 9, King was elected to the Elizabeth City city council, winning the most votes of any candidate,” The Nation‘s Ari Berman reported. “He’s now the youngest elected official in the state.”
Students must have figured: If voting weren’t important, why would Republicans be doing everything they can to stop me from doing it?
In only 10 states, 444,000 people have already signed up for Medicaid. The fact that the GOP would deny them and about five million more poor people health insurance isn’t big news for a couple of reasons.
First, they’re poor. Second, these people haven’t had anything taken away from them — yet.
But on January 1, the story changes. Suddenly Republicans will be trying to do exactly what they’re accusing President Obama of: taking away health insurance with nothing to replace it. And thanks to the GOP, now it’s clear what a terrible thing that is to do to a person.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 12, 2013
“And This Too Shall Fail”: The GOP Wants To Solve Its “Woman Problem” By Rebranding Its War On Women
Three women in Virginia have started a consulting firm to help the Republican party appeal to women voters, which seems like it will be a real challenge since the Republican party is terrible on the issues that many women care about.
The women behind the firm — two Mitt Romney 2012 campaign alums and a Republican pollster — launched Burning Glass Consulting because they “want to get smarter about how we communicate the Republican message specifically to women,” Katie Packer Gage, a former deputy campaign manager for Romney, explained to the New York Times. “Certainly there are challenges with other demographic groups, but women represent 53 percent of the electorate.”
But better messaging will do little to save the party from its core platform, which the Times frames as an opinion held only by Democratic strategists, but really just seems like common sense. The GOP has for years been buttering its bread with increasingly extreme positions on contraception, abortion, voting rights and other issues that negatively impact and alienate single women voters — the group Burning Glass would most like to reach.
“There were something like 53 million unmarried women eligible to vote in 2012, but on campaigns you don’t hear a specific strategy discussed of ‘How are we going to reach unmarried women?’” said Gage.
The firm seems to think that Democrats have just gotten very good at framing the Republican party as hostile to women, which misses the point that the Republican party is actually very hostile to women.
When you have the chair of the Republican Women’s Policy Committee laughing on Fox News about how women should have to shoulder the financial burden of maternity coverage alone because a man “has never delivered a baby,” you know the problem isn’t about messaging.
When you have a state attorney general wondering aloud why God hasn’t punished the United States for guaranteeing women their constitutional right to abortion care, you know the problem isn’t about messaging.
As Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America noted last week after single women helped defeat Ken Cuccinnelli in Virginia, “The lesson for candidates in 2014 is unmistakable: Dismiss and demean women at your peril.”
By: Katie McDonough, Salon, November 12, 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
“Obamacare Expansion In The Offing?”: Republicans Crying About People Losing Junk Insurance Should Expand The ACA
Every few days, a new poster child for the horror of Obamacare comes along, the person who just loves their insurance plan but has been told it’s being cancelled. Pretty much every time, their story turns out to be full of holes—the plan they’re on is junk insurance, they’d be able to get better and cheaper coverage through the exchanges, and so on (here’s the latest). But without a doubt, this small group of people (and not, say, the millions who are getting free or low-cost coverage for the first time) have become the momentary face of the Affordable Care Act, at least in the mainstream news media’s eyes.
So now the administration is scrambling to deal with this political problem, and here’s the latest twist:
The most popular idea for a fix on the Hill is legislation that would entitle someone who purchases health insurance coverage through the end of this year to keep that coverage. Other legislative responses may include extending the health exchange enrollment deadline or or delaying the penalty for not purchasing coverage.
Obama is also considering a different approach.
According to the administration source, the White House is “looking at an administrative fix for the population of people in the individual market who may have an increase in premiums, but don’t get subsidies.”
Such a fix would address the issue of “sticker shock” that has been popping up across the country, as individuals are losing their coverage and finding only higher-cost alternatives. Under the ACA, there are tax subsidies to help individuals and families with income between 133 percent and 400 percent above the poverty level purchase insurance. Those with incomes higher than 400 percent above poverty get no such assistance. The proposed administrative fix would address this group.
Allowing the junk insurance plans to continue is a terrible idea, no less terrible because it’s being pushed by some Democrats. But giving more subsidies? That’s got some promise. As a big-government liberal, I’m all for the government helping as many people as possible afford coverage. I’m also very skeptical that the administration can just take this move administratively without an act of Congress, but let’s talk about it. Since for the first time in history Republicans are suddenly so very concerned about people not being able to afford health insurance, perhaps they can be pressured into signing on with something that puts their money where their mouths are.
Fat chance, I know. But as long as we’re going to start proposing fixes, how about we let everyone who got a threatening letter from an insurance company buy in to Medicare? If Republicans are going to take the opportunity to demagogue the issue, why not take the opportunity to expand our extremely popular socialized medicine program?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 8, 2013
“Radicalism For The Sake Of Radicalism”: Four Years Later, The Tea Party Has Learned Nothing
The Tea Party is no longer a brand-new movement in American politics. So, more than four years in, what do they appear to have learned? How about: nothing. And they seem to want it that way.
Certainly that appears to be the case with the Tea Party as an electoral force. Oh, Tea Partyers will remind you – they’ve won some. Ted Cruz in Texas, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin – all True Conservatives in good standing (at least last I looked; these things can change rapidly), all solid winners in their election bids. It’s hardly the case that nominating a Tea Party candidate is guaranteed to turn a win into a loss.
But three election cycles in, it’s pretty clear that nominating a candidate favored by Tea Partyers over what they consider “establishment” candidates is a formula for risking Republican disaster. And that it’s not going to change any time soon.
So it was for Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle in 2010. So it was with Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock in 2012. And so it’s likely to be with the 2014 crop.
The thing is, four years is plenty of time to develop solid, seasoned candidates. Indeed, once upon a time Marco Rubio was one of those solid, seasoned candidates. Rubio was a successful Florida Republican who had risen rapidly to become speaker of the Florida House; he then adopted the emerging Tea Party and went on to easily win an open U.S. Senate seat. But Rubio’s Tea Party credentials were tarnished because he actually tried to legislate on immigration; while it’s much too early to declare his career in trouble and it wouldn’t be surprising if he still ran a solid race for the Republican presidential nomination, it’s also very easy to imagine him having to fend off a Tea Party primary of his own if he runs for reelection instead of the White House in 2016.
So what do Republicans have for 2014? Matt Bevin, taking on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, is a first-time candidate; should he win, Republicans would probably lose that seat. In Georgia, Paul Braun in particular is thought by many to be a particularly weak candidate, capable of losing that open seat to Democrat Michelle Nunn if he emerges as the nominee. In Louisiana, Republicans had settled on a solid candidate to challenge Mary Landrieu, but Tea Partyer Rob Maness has jumped in with plenty of serious organizational support.
Granted, this early in the cycle, none of these candidates has (to my knowledge, at least) managed to embarrass himself by orating on rape. Nor have any of them yet revealed themselves as certified non-witches. Indeed, it’s so early that I don’t even know if they have a history of having said crazy things – although I suspect that Mississippi Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a former talk radio host, has furnished enough for a fat opposition research file.
Still, it appears to be no more distinguished of a crop than the 2010 and 2012 versions, and I strongly suspect they will begin to generate equally baroque sound bites as soon as the public portion of the campaign season begins. After all, we just had birther Dean Young, who provided plenty of entertainment if you enjoy politicians saying crazy things, come close to knocking off mainstream conservative Bradley Byrne in the Alabama 1 special election.
There’s nothing about being conservative, even extremely conservative, that would necessarily generate bad candidates. But it’s a mistake to interpret Tea Partyism as simply about being more conservative than mainstream Republicans. Instead, in practice, it’s basically turned out to be a cross between radicalism for the sake of radicalism, along with an extreme suspicion of elites. Which in turn has made it rather easy for hucksters and scam artists to convince Tea Party voters and activists that solid conservatives are really squishes and RINOs. There are no issue positions one can cling to that will prevent those charges; accusations of being insufficiently “conservative” in this atmosphere, to these voters, are impossible to refute.
Indeed, as we’ve seen with Ted Cruz, the very reaction to crazy things that Tea Party politicians say really is the best proof that they are actually True Conservatives.
Which doesn’t mean that Democrats are about to win a Senate seat in Mississippi (although they would be smart to at least get a plausible candidate on the ballot, just in case). But it does mean that we can expect more of the same from Tea Party candidates – perhaps even worse, since by this cycle, perhaps, raving against rape will be too old hat to get condemned by Rachel Maddow, and therefore not sufficient to establish one’s True Conservative credentials.
And therefore, expect Republicans to continue to give away elections they could have won – and to prove incapable of governing in many cases when they do win. The dysfunctional Republican Party isn’t getting better any time soon.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Nation, November 9, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 