“Stunning New Report Undermines Central GOP Obamacare Claim”: The Arguments Made By Republicans Simply Lack A Firm Factual Basis
A crucial GOP line of attack against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is that millions of people will supposedly lose coverage thanks to shifting requirements on the health insurance exchanges — a flagrant violation of President Obama’s infamous “if you like your plan, you can keep it” proclamation. The truth has always been more complicated, of course. Republicans are constantly blurring the line between people who lose a plan and people who lose coverage. That is, many people might lose a particular insurance plan but immediately be presented with other options.
Now, a new report from the minority staff of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has destroyed the foundation of that particular GOP claim. It projects that only 10,000 people will lose coverage because of the ACA and be unable to regain it — or in other words, 0.2 percent of the oft-cited 5 million cancellations statistic.
The report starts with an assumption that 4.7 million will receive cancellation notices about their 2013 plan. (Notably it doesn’t endorse that figure, just takes it on for the sake of argument.) But of those, who will get a new plan?
- According to the report, half of the 4.7 million will have the option to renew their 2013 plans, thanks to an administrative fix this year.
- Of the remaining 2.35 million individuals, 1.4 million should be eligible for tax credits through the marketplaces or Medicaid, according to the report.
- Of the remaining 950,000 individuals, fewer than 10,000 people in 18 counties will lack access to an affordable catastrophic plan.
“This new report shows that people will get the health insurance coverage they need, contrary to the dire predictions of Republicans,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the ranking committee member. “Millions of American families are already benefiting from the law.”
The report is somewhat speculative, of course, since there is no central repository of data on the individual health insurance market. But the methods are clear, and the onus is now on Republicans to explain why it isn’t true.
As we’ve noted, Republicans have had an awful hard time finding people who completely lost coverage because of the ACA. (Think of the man who starred in Americans for Prosperity ads last week and whose story still hasn’t been fully explained.) Perhaps it’s because there just aren’t that many of them.
Of course, there’s no doubt that for those 10,000 people, the health-care law left them worse off than before. And by no means is the rocky political ride over for Democrats — back-end problems still present a serious threat to implementation. But as is sadly too often the case, the arguments made by Republicans simply lack a firm factual basis — and deserve much more scrutiny that they’ve received in many sectors of the mainstream press.
By: George Zornick, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 31, 2013
“Time To Get A Life”: Republicans React To Benghazi News
The article The Times published on Benghazi this weekend infuriated many Republicans, who ran screaming to television studios.
Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, who has made a special crusade out of the attack on the American diplomatic and intelligence compound in Benghazi, was asked on “Meet the Press” to justify Republican claims that Al Qaeda agents planned and executed the operation. (The article found no evidence that Al Qaeda was involved.)
Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC put her finger on the political question when she asked Mr. Issa why Republicans “use the term Al Qaeda.” After all, she said, “you and other members of Congress are sophisticated in this and know that when you say Al Qaeda, people think central Al Qaeda. They don’t think militias that may be inspired by Bin Laden and his other followers.”
“There is a group there involved that is linked to Al Qaeda,” Mr. Issa said. “What we never said — and I didn’t have the security to look behind the door, that’s for other members of Congress — of what the intelligence were on the exact correspondence with Al Qaeda, that sort of information — those sorts of methods I’ve never claimed.”
I’m still trying to parse that sentence.
On Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan insisted the story was wrong in finding that “Al Qaeda was not involved in this.”
“There was some level of pre-planning; we know that,” he said. “There was aspiration to conduct an attack by Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Libya; we know that. The individuals on the ground talked about a planned tactical movement on the compound — this is the compound before they went to the annex.”
For anyone wondering why it’s so important to Republicans that Al Qaeda orchestrated the attack — or how the Obama administration described the attack in its immediate aftermath — the answer is simple. The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take Al Qaeda seriously. They also want to throw mud at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who they fear will run for president in 2016.
Which brings us to one particularly hilarious theme in the response to the Times investigation. According to Mr. Rogers, the article was intended to “clear the deck” for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said today that The Times was “already laying the groundwork” for a Clinton campaign. Other Republicans referred to Mrs. Clinton as our “candidate of choice.”
Since I will have more to say about which candidate we will endorse in 2016 than any other editor at the Times, let me be clear: We have not chosen Mrs. Clinton. We have not chosen anyone. I can also state definitively that there was no editorial/newsroom conspiracy of any kind, because I knew nothing about the Benghazi article until I read it in the paper on Sunday.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, Editorial Page Editor, The New York Times, December 30, 2013
“A Warning For Republicans In 2014”: Francis Proves Fighting Yesterday’s Culture War Is Folly
What a difference a year makes. And what a difference a pope makes. At Christmas services this year, the priest at our local church told the families gathered for the children’s pageant that Jesus loves and is represented in everyone, including gays and lesbians. Our local church isn’t Jesuit, nor particularly liberal, but before Pope Francis stepped up with a new message of inclusivity, none of us had ever expected to hear anything like that at church, let alone at Christmas Eve mass. The congregation cheered.
The priest also pressed his core Christmas theme that the greatest joy we will experience is the joy we feel when serving others. Serving the poor is another significant shift in focus that Francis has brought to reinvigorate the church. Surely, there is no message more central to Jesus’ teaching and the Christian tradition than serving others and loving humanity, and, yet, prior to Francis’ ascent, it was a message eclipsed by a Catholic Church bent on fighting culture wars and chastising those who stray from its teachings. All too often, serving the poor had taken a backseat to the Church’s war on abortion and gay marriage.
Francis called an end to those culture wars, urging bishops to spend more time healing their flock and less time fighting political battles. He started a revolution by answering a reporter’s question about gay priests with the question, “who am I to judge?” and then later, elaborating, urged bishops to drop their “obsession” with gays, abortion and contraception and to create a welcoming church that is a “home for all.” Recently, Pope Francis removed a conservative American cardinal from a key Vatican committee after the cardinal said, “One gets the impression … that [the Pope] thinks we’re talking too much about abortion [and gay marriage.] But we can never talk enough about that.”
Instead of focusing on political fights, Francis is urging a renewed focus on serving the poor, pushing his cardinals to abandon their “psychology of princes” and get out of the lavish Vatican. He, himself, has rejected the posh apartment, cars and wardrobe of previous popes to live, travel and dress simply and humbly. He celebrated his recent birthday with homeless men, and has drawn attention for kissing and embracing a severely disfigured man and washing the feet of girls in a juvenile jail. Surely, there is no Catholic leader this Christmas who is closer in his own practices to the teachings and life of Jesus. In retrospect, his selection of his papal name seems perfectly apt: Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century patron saint of the poor.
Where the previous Catholic Church hierarchy had denied communion to elected officials who voted to give poor women the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies, the current pope exhorts that communion is open to all and not to be treated as “a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”
What a difference a year makes. Actually, it’s been a mere nine months.
There are some lessons here for Washington. And for the Republican party in particular.
The first lesson is how quickly things can change. Republicans starting 2014 giddy about the coming elections for Congress may not want to count their chickens before they’ve hatched. Much of their giddiness rides on the poorly handled roll-out of Obamacare and resulting negative public opinion about both health care reform and the president. But the federal website – healthcare.gov – is rapidly improving. Although only about 30,000 people were able to enroll in the launch month of October, the same number was able to enroll in the first two days of December, alone, with nearly 1 million people enrolling in December overall.
Americans are starting to find out for themselves what affordable, high-quality health care looks like without pre-existing conditions, lifetime limits and caps on coverage, now that insurance companies no longer call the shots. And they like it. Over this year, word will spread around America about people too young for Medicare – but too old and sick to find a new job or to buy individual insurance – who finally have insurance, or kids with cancer who finally get care, or women who don’t lose their insurance simply because they become pregnant or get breast cancer. And, as that word spreads, minds will change. Republicans who gloat today over projected victories in November based on their presumption of public distaste for Obamacare are vulnerable to a quickly changing future.
The second lesson to take to heart is that culture wars may not be as popular as those waging them think. No doubt many American bishops leading the war against gay marriage and contraception believed the majority of their flock, as well as their fellow Catholic leadership, was behind them. Today, they are shocked to hear words of chastisement from the Vatican and surprised at how Francis’ message of inclusivity and economic justice is garnering sky high public approval ratings – from 88 percent of American Catholics and three-quarters of non-Catholic Americans, in a CNN poll shortly before Christmas – and landing him on the cover of Time and other magazines as person of the year.
Just like their political allies among conservative American bishops, Republican obsessed with social issues are somewhat out of touch with the general public, yet they remain unaware of this critical fact. And this is their Achilles heel. They were surprised on election night this year to find their extremism rejected at the polls in Virginia, Alabama and elsewhere, and they continued to believe they lost because they had not pushed their extremist agenda harder – out of touch with the polling that showed American voters rejected extremism and favored leaders willing to work across the aisle to forge compromise and get results.
Republican leaders obsessed with so-called family values while simultaneously breaking up undocumented families, slashing food stamps and cutting off unemployment insurance will be as disappointed in November as conservative American bishops were this fall when they discovered they were out on a limb in their culture wars without sufficient backing among either their flock or their colleagues in Rome.
By: Carrie Wofford, U. S. News and World Report, December 30, 2013
“More Bark Than Bite”: Tomorrow’s Obamacare Controversy, Today
If past is precedent, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee will soon release a draft memo they requested and received from the Health and Human Services Department just before most Washingtonians decamped for the Christmas holiday.
At first glance, the memo, obtained by National Journal, looks very bad for the Obama administration. In the Sept. 24 document, a top information security officer for the agency overseeing the Obamacare insurance exchanges warns that the marketplace “does not reasonably meet … security requirements” and that “there is also no confidence that Personal Identifiable Information (PII) will be protected.” Teresa Fryer, the chief information security officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, continues: The federal marketplace will likely “not be ready to securely support the Affordable Care Act … by October 1, 2013.”
It plays right into the Republican narrative about HealthCare.gov: The administration knew the website would not be ready by the launch date but went ahead with it anyway. And the site may still not be adequately protecting consumers’ information.
But, in context, the draft memo becomes much less exciting.
On the Friday before Christmas, Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, released a partial transcript from an interview conducted by the panel’s staff with Fryer. That partial transcript, shared with ABC and CBS, suggested that Fryer warned the administration that there were two findings of serious vulnerabilities in the system.
However, when Democrats on the Oversight Committee released parts of the transcript omitted from Issa’s version, Fryer’s comments looked far less explosive, and ABC updated its story to reflect the change. It turns out that by Sept. 27, a few days after Fryer raised her concerns about the security at launch, extensive new security measures were added.
As she told the committee’s investigators, “The added protections that we have put into place in accordance with the risk decision memo … are best practices above and beyond what is usually recommended.” She went on to describe her confidence in the three-level security system and to note that there have been “no successful breaches [or] security incidents.”
Which brings us back to the draft memo we obtained. We should note that it was just a draft, and was never sent or reviewed by more senior officers in the chain of command, and was written three days before the mitigation strategies went into effect. She later told Oversight Committee investigators that her earlier recommendation against giving the go-ahead to launch the site—the “authority to operate,” as it’s called—did not take into account the mitigation strategies laid out in the Sept. 27 Authority to Operate memo.
The investigators asked Tony Trenkle, then-CMS’ top information executive, this: “So as long as the mitigation strategy described in the [ATO] memo was carried out, you considered that it was, it would be sufficient to mitigate the risks described in the memo?” He responded, “Yes.”
She added that she was “satisfied” with the current security testing, and that she did not object when another CMS information security officer decided to move ahead with the launch. Again, she stated: “All systems are susceptible to attacks. There have been no successful attempts.”
As the Los Angeles Times‘ Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Michael Hiltzik noted, “Issa has absolutely no evidence” to support his broader claims that the system’s deep vulnerabilities put all kinds of consumers’ government data at risk, and that CMS moved ahead anyway to avoid embarrassing the White House.
Of course, sleight of hand with opaque bureaucratic documents is nothing new for Issa, but the potential to dissuade Americans from obtaining health insurance through the federal exchanges because of trumped up security fears has pushed relations between the committee chair and the administration to a new low. It’s one thing to say without evidence that the administration is corrupt, but it’s another to tell Americans that their Social Security number is at risk when there’s nothing to suggest that’s true.
But perhaps we can head off another round of this farce by putting out Fryer’s memo before Issa does—in its full context.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, The National Journal, December 24, 2013
“Please Proceed, Republicans”: With No Regard For Facts, Do They Have The Capacity For Shame?
Well, lookee here:
Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
Let’s go back to that infamous appearance that Susan Rice made on Meet the Press the Sunday following the Benghazi attacks:
DAVID GREGORY: The images as you well know are jarring to Americans watching all of this play out this week, and we’ll share the map of all of this turmoil with our viewers to show the scale of it across not just the Arab world, but the entire Islamic world and flashpoints as well. In Egypt, of course, the protests outside the U.S. embassy there that Egyptian officials were slow to put down. This weekend in Pakistan, protests as well there. More anti-American rage. Also protests against the drone strikes. In Yemen, you also had arrests and some deaths outside of our U.S. embassy there. How much longer can Americans expect to see these troubling images and these protests go forward?
MS. RICE: Well, David, we can’t predict with any certainty. But let’s remember what has transpired over the last several days. This is a response to a hateful and offensive video that was widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Obviously, our view is that there is absolutely no excuse for violence and that– what has happened is condemnable, but this is a– a spontaneous reaction to a video, and it’s not dissimilar but, perhaps, on a slightly larger scale than what we have seen in the past with The Satanic Verses with the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Now, the United States has made very clear and the president has been very plain that our top priority is the protection of American personnel in our facilities and bringing to justice those who…
GREGORY: All right.
MS. RICE: …attacked our facility in Benghazi.
I seem to recall that Ms. Rice received some criticism for those remarks. Yet, the New York Times reports:
Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…
…There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.
So, to recap, the attacks in Benghazi were not carried out by al-Qaeda, were not meticulously planned, and the motivation to participate in them was largely “a spontaneous reaction to a video.”
It appears that Ms. Rice’s comments weren’t all that far off the mark.
The lack of an al-Qaeda role is particularly damaging to the Republicans because their main conspiracy theory all along has been that the administration blamed the whole thing on the Innocence of Muslims movie to deflect from the fact that they had not eradicated the terrorist organization by eliminating their leader, Usama bin-Laden. Supposedly, the real problem in Benghazi wasn’t insufficient security but the actual identity of the attackers.
But it wasn’t the administration that politicized the tragedy. It was Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, behind in the polls and smelling blood, that tried everything they could think of to gain an advantage.
I wonder if they have the capacity for shame.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 28, 2013
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