“A Test Of Ideology”: How Far Will Republicans Go To Deny Healthcare
Texas has a higher proportion of its population living without health insurance than any other state. But like many other states with lots of poor people, it has the misfortune of being governed by Republicans. That explains why yesterday, Governor Rick Perry announced that the state will refuse to accept the federal money offered for expanding Medicaid eligibility to everyone who makes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Perry says that this expansion of Medicaid, which is almost entirely paid for by the federal government, will nevertheless bankrupt the state and put the oppressive boot on the necks of Texans. So he’s happy to keep 25 percent of his population uninsured.
In case you’re wondering, Texas currently sets eligibility for Medicaid at 26 percent of the federal poverty level, which means that if you earn more than $6,000 a year for a family of four, you’re not eligible. That’s not a typo. Six thousand dollars a year for a family of four is what the state of Texas considers too rich to get on Medicaid. Look down the list of eligibility levels, and you find that only Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, and Louisiana set their eligibility lower. It is just so weird how those poor Southern states are the stingiest with health-care benefits, isn’t it?
It’s possible that eventually, Texas and the other states will come around to the expansion of Medicaid. Sarah Kliff explains how this happened with Medicaid’s enactment in the 1960s and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in the 1990s; conservatives initially resisted, but the money and the opportunity to insure their population eventually became irresistible. One of the key factors then and now is the presence of organized, influential interest groups—particularly the hospitals that have to deliver uncompensated care to the uninsured, costing them billions—that can exert their influence on the government’s decisions.
But the Republicans who resisted and then gave in were different from the Republicans of today, and this will be a test of just how far they’ll go to make a statement about their hatred of the federal government in general and their hatred of Barack Obama in particular. Today’s Republicans are the ones who would turn down a deal offering ten dollars of spending cuts for one dollar of tax increases. But that was a hypothetical question, and this question is very real. There are actual human beings whose lives are at stake. I’d love to hear someone ask Rick Perry this question: Which do you think is worse, someone living without health insurance, or someone getting health insurance through a government program? I’m not sure what he’d say, but his actions say quite clearly that he’d prefer that the person have no health insurance. Of course, we’re not talking about him personally, or his kids, or anybody he knows having to go without insurance. We’re talking about poor people. So screw them.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 10, 2012
“Under The Big Spotlight”: Mitt Romney’s Primary Season Demons Return
It’s still safe to say that, compared to the other Republicans who sought their party’s presidential nomination, Mitt Romney was the GOP’s best option. But there were warning signs during the primary season that he’d be far from an ideal challenger to President Obama, and the potential impact of his deficiencies is becoming clearer.
First, there’s the matter of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney once ran. Because the economy figured to dominate the campaign, Romney set out to run on his business experience this time around, not his gubernatorial record. Early this year, Newt Gingrich had some success turning this emphasis around on Romney, stirring up resentment among blue collar Republican voters in South Carolina over Bain’s history of profiting while shutting down businesses and laying off workers.
Gingrich never really had a chance, but there was reason to suspect his formula would be useful for Democrats in the general election. And sure enough, after a few months of heavy Bain-focused attack advertising by an Obama-friendly super PAC, Romney’s image and standing in battleground states seems to have eroded. Whether the damage will be lasting is another question, but clearly playing the Bain card has at least the potential to steer swing voters away from the GOP candidate this November.
Then there’s healthcare, the issue that Rick Santorum once warned made Romney “the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.” The problem for Romney is obvious: He championed a healthcare reform law in Massachusetts that helped position him for the 2008 White House race, then watched it become poison in the Republican Party when Obama adopted it as the blueprint from his national law.
So when the Supreme Court upheld the ACA two weeks ago, Romney’s instinct was not to join his fellow Republicans in denouncing the individual mandate as a tax. To do so would be to admit that his Massachusetts mandate had also been a tax. But this didn’t sit well with Republicans, forcing Romney to change his tune and invent a justification for claiming his mandate was somehow different than Obama’s.
Will the circumstances of Romney’s early July flip-flop end up mattering in November? Probably not. But the episode underscored how uncomfortable healthcare can be for Romney if he’s pressed on it – as he probably will be by Obama when they debate this fall. John Kerry’s experience running against George W. Bush comes to mind here. For all of the criticisms Kerry leveled against Bush over his conduct of the Iraq war, Bush was always able to point out that Kerry himself had voted for the war. In the same way, any time Romney rails against the ACA, Obama will be able to reply, “Gee, Mitt, where do you think I got the idea?”
And there’s also Romney’s top-1-percent image, which was accentuated during the primary season by a series of “wealth gaffes” by the candidate and revelations about his personal finances – particularly his use of Swiss bank accounts and offshore accounts. Again, this wasn’t enough to sink him against his comical primary season opposition, but it raised the possibility that Romney would be a poor match for a post–Wall Street meltdown general election – a man whose upbringing, professional history, personal lifestyle and general bearing all mark him as a member of the super-affluent elite. Obama and his fellow Democrats argue that the GOP treats the top one percent as a protected class, so in nominating Romney they are playing to type.
It’s not surprising, then, that Democrats have spent the last week playing up the pictures that emerged from Romney’s holiday retreat at his opulent lakefront home in New Hampshire, especially those featuring the candidate on his jet ski. And with the offshore accounts back in the news thanks to reports from Vanity Fair and the Associated Press, it was inevitable that Democrats would now make them a centerpiece of their anti-Romney talking points.
Romney’s goal is to be a generic opposition party candidate – to avoid controversy and policy details and to function as the protest vehicle for economically frustrated swing voters who are eager to vote Obama out. It’s not a bad game plan, given the state of the economy, and Romney certainly comes much closer to being generic than Santorum, Gingrich or any of the others who vied with him for the GOP nomination. But he has vulnerabilities that could ultimately keep a critical chunk of swing voters from checking his name off, and those vulnerabilities are beginning to come into focus.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, July 9, 2012
“Off And Out With Mitt Romney”: A Willing Participant In The Destruction Of The Middle Class
In a better America, Mitt Romney would be running for president on the strength of his major achievement as governor of Massachusetts: a health reform that was identical in all important respects to the health reform enacted by President Obama. By the way, the Massachusetts reform is working pretty well and has overwhelming popular support.
In reality, however, Mr. Romney is doing no such thing, bitterly denouncing the Supreme Court for upholding the constitutionality of his own health care plan. His case for becoming president relies, instead, on his claim that, having been a successful businessman, he knows how to create jobs.
This, in turn, means that however much the Romney campaign may wish otherwise, the nature of that business career is fair game. How did Mr. Romney make all that money? Was it in ways suggesting that what was good for Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made him rich, would also be good for America?
And the answer is no.
The truth is that even if Mr. Romney had been a classic captain of industry, a present-day Andrew Carnegie, his career wouldn’t have prepared him to manage the economy. A country is not a company (despite globalization, America still sells 86 percent of what it makes to itself), and the tools of macroeconomic policy — interest rates, tax rates, spending programs — have no counterparts on a corporate organization chart. Did I mention that Herbert Hoover actually was a great businessman in the classic mold?
In any case, however, Mr. Romney wasn’t that kind of businessman. Bain didn’t build businesses; it bought and sold them. Sometimes its takeovers led to new hiring; often they led to layoffs, wage cuts and lost benefits. On some occasions, Bain made a profit even as its takeover target was driven out of business. None of this sounds like the kind of record that should reassure American workers looking for an economic savior.
And then there’s the business about outsourcing.
Two weeks ago, The Washington Post reported that Bain had invested in companies whose specialty was helping other companies move jobs overseas. The Romney campaign went ballistic, demanding — unsuccessfully — that The Post retract the report on the basis of an unconvincing “fact sheet” consisting largely of executive testimonials.
What was more interesting was the campaign’s insistence that The Post had misled readers by failing to distinguish between “offshoring” — moving jobs abroad — and “outsourcing,” which simply means having an external contractor perform services that could have been performed in-house.
Now, if the Romney campaign really believed in its own alleged free-market principles, it would have defended the right of corporations to do whatever maximizes their profits, even if that means shipping jobs overseas. Instead, however, the campaign effectively conceded that offshoring is bad but insisted that outsourcing is O.K. as long as the contractor is another American firm.
That is, however, a very dubious assertion.
Consider one of Mr. Romney’s most famous remarks: “Corporations are people, my friend.” When the audience jeered, he elaborated: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets.” This is undoubtedly true, once you take into account the pockets of, say, partners at Bain Capital (who, I hasten to add, are, indeed, people). But one of the main points of outsourcing is to ensure that as little as possible of what corporations earn goes into the pockets of the people who actually work for those corporations.
Why, for example, do many large companies now outsource cleaning and security to outside contractors? Surely the answer is, in large part, that outside contractors can hire cheap labor that isn’t represented by the union and can’t participate in the company health and retirement plans. And, sure enough, recent academic research finds that outsourced janitors and guards receive substantially lower wages and worse benefits than their in-house counterparts.
Just to be clear, outsourcing is only one source of the huge disconnect between a tiny elite and ordinary American workers, a disconnect that has been growing for more than 30 years. And Bain, in turn, was only one player in the growth of outsourcing. So Mitt Romney didn’t personally, single-handedly, destroy the middle-class society we used to have. He was, however, an enthusiastic and very well remunerated participant in the process of destruction; if Bain got involved with your company, one way or another, the odds were pretty good that even if your job survived you ended up with lower pay and diminished benefits.
In short, what was good for Bain Capital definitely wasn’t good for America. And, as I said at the beginning, the Obama campaign has every right to point that out.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 5, 2012
“Daring The Sick And Needy”: Time to Protest Against Republican Governors For Shameful Threats
Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:
Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.
…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,
Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.
If there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.
By: J. P. Green, Democratic Strategist, July 3, 2012
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