“Obamacare Opponents Still Await The Apocalypse”: Opponents Are As Wrong About Obamacare As Reagan Was About Medicare
A while back, progressive activists and politicians pushed for legislation to provide health insurance for a cohort of Americans who could not easily pay for their doctors’ visits and medications. Predictably, that effort was met with fierce resistance from conservatives, who didn’t seem concerned about those less-fortunate citizens who couldn’t afford medical care.
Conservatives denounced the plan as “socialized medicine” or a “communist takeover” of the American health care system. One notable conservative was especially alarmist, declaring that if the proposal passed Congress, “… you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
No, that hysterical tirade didn’t come in response to the Affordable Care Act. Those words were spoken in 1961 by Ronald Reagan, who was crisscrossing the country to campaign against the adoption of Medicare. Yes, Medicare, which Congress passed in 1965 and is widely considered a resounding success.
Fast-forward a few decades. The same alarms were sounded more recently, as progressive activists and politicians pushed for legislation to provide inexpensive health insurance for those who couldn’t afford it. Actually, the denunciations of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, usually called “Obamacare,” may have been even more hysterical.
As the law neared passage, I watched angry crowds gather near the White House — many holding vicious, racially charged signs lambasting the president — to chant about “socialism” and “communism.” Strangely, the most vehement criticisms came from Americans 65 and older, the very cohort that benefits from Medicare.
President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, so it has been the law of the land for five years. Given that, it’s possible to make a reasoned assessment of its strengths and weaknesses.
First off, let’s note that there has been no “socialist takeover” of American medicine. Obamacare uses private health insurance providers; the law merely sets requirements for health insurance plans and issues subsidies to patients who cannot afford to purchase policies.
As you might expect, the number of Americans with health insurance — and, therefore, with access to preventive medical care — has increased in the last five years. Before the law went into effect, there were 48 million uninsured Americans. Now, with 16 million people having signed up for Obamacare, that number has been cut by a third.
Furthermore, health insurance companies are no longer allowed to deny coverage to patients who are already sick or to set a “lifetime cap” on the amount of money a company will pay for medical care. Adult children, who might be in college or working at low-paying jobs without benefits, can stay on their parents’ policies until they are 26.
The Affordable Care Act may also have decreased the rate at which health care costs were escalating. Five years ago, medical care costs were skyrocketing, well beyond the rate of general inflation. Now, those costs are still going up — but at the lowest rate in 50 years. While economists aren’t certain that Obamacare’s cost-containment measures are responsible, many of them give the law credit.
To be sure, the Affordable Care Act has been no panacea. There are still 32 million Americans without health insurance. And, despite the president’s early pledge that people already insured could retain their policies, a tiny but vocal group lost their insurance because Obamacare deemed those policies inadequate. Many in that group ended up paying more for insurance, hardly a happy outcome.
But the worst failings of the Affordable Care Act are beyond its supporters’ control. Because of persistent, irrational Republican opposition, more than 20 states have refused to expand Medicaid — even though the feds would pay the lion’s share of costs. That means that millions of working-class Americans are not getting the health care they need. Furthermore, Obamacare’s unrelenting antagonists have mounted yet another challenge to the law before the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s hard to fathom. The Affordable Care Act has failed to produce the apocalypse (remember “death panels”?) its fiercest critics predicted; instead, it has given millions of people access to decent health care. Its opponents are as wrong about Obamacare as Ronald Reagan was about Medicare.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 28, 2015
“Long On Facade, Short On Bricks And Mortar”: Will The Ted Cruz Presidential Campaign Be All Hat, No Cattle?
A presidential campaign often poses the largest, toughest management challenge of a candidate’s life to date, and fairly or not, is often considered a proxy for whether a politician has what it takes to lead a country.
In order to be the first 2016 candidate to officially launch, Texas senator Ted Cruz skimped on a few hallmarks of a fully prepared, well-run campaign. He used stock footage of American landmarks in a midnight announcement video. He announced in a prefabricated setting before an attendance-required crowd at Liberty University. And his post-announcement tour was actually a media blitz that included Fox News, NBC, CBS, The Laura Ingraham Show and The Glenn Beck Radio Program.
Kentucky senator Rand Paul, by contrast, plans to enter the race April 7 in Louisville and spend the next four days at rallies and other events in the crucial early voting states of New Hampshire, South Carolina, Iowa and Nevada. Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are laying even more extensive groundwork.
Cruz’s choice of an evangelical Christian university for his Monday announcement certainly reinforced his identity as a religious conservative. But it also raised inauspicious questions. Start with the fact that had he not slated his event for that day in that place, the 12,000 students Cruz described as “on fire” would have been listening (albeit perhaps less enthusiastically) to Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe. A leading Democrat and Clinton family ally, he was the speaker originally scheduled for that slot.
Could Cruz have gotten his own crowd, one that did not show up under threat of university penalties, and that did not feature people wearing Rand Paul T-shirts? Does Cruz have infrastructure in early primary states? Can he raise sufficient money? In short, will the campaign be real? Or will it be an extension of Cruz’s Senate persona as a champion talker, more interested in making a point than moving the ball?
There have been many candidates who say they are running for president and even are included in primary-season debates. But their campaigns are Potemkin villages — long on facade, short on bricks and mortar.
Cruz would argue that he is all about substance. He bristled during several interviews when it was noted that both he and Obama chose to run for president at the same early point in their Senate careers. Cruz rightly pointed out that he spent more than five years as solicitor general of Texas and won big victories before the Supreme Court. “Unlike Barack Obama, I wasn’t a community organizer,” he said.
Obama was indeed a community organizer — after college for three years, two of them as director of the program. He then went to Harvard Law School, practiced law, taught law, and spent eight years in the Illinois Senate, where he was a leader in improving ethics and transparency, health and tax programs for the poor, and police practices affecting minorities.
As for the U.S. Senate, Cruz repeatedly called Obama an inconsequential backbencher. By contrast, Cruz said, he has personally led fights to uphold conservative principles “on issue after issue after issue,” including stopping Obamacare and stopping “amnesty” for immigrants in the country illegally.
Obama might well have made fewer headlines than Cruz in the U.S. Senate. He did, however, play a key role in the passage of laws and sections of laws on ethics, transparency, green energy, protecting veterans, securing nuclear materials, and prohibiting no-bid contracting in the aftermath of disasters. The fights Cruz led against Obama’s health and immigration policies, meanwhile, produced one government shutdown, one near-shutdown, and sinking GOP approval ratings. The policies he fought are still in effect.
Clearly, leading a fight is not the same as winning a fight. Winning in Congress often means laboring and sometimes compromising in obscurity — all to get your bill or provision or amendment wrapped into a huge piece of legislation with someone else’s name on it.
In his focus on battles as opposed to results, Cruz recalls former Rep. Michele Bachmann. Voters want “a fighter against the political establishment of Washington, D.C., and I have credentials there,” the Minnesota Republican said four years ago on Fox News, as she was gearing up for a 2012 presidential bid. She did express a lot of fighting views. But when she retired from Congress, her legislative record was characterized as thin.
Cruz raised a half-million dollars on his first official day as a candidate, a good start. Among his tests is whether he can sustain that pace and build a full-fledged campaign. To call on a cowboy cliché, Cruz has a lot of ground to make up if he wants to show he is not all hat, no cattle.
By: Jill Lawrence, The National Memo, March 26, 2015
“Iraq And A Hard Place”: Jeb And The Neocon Trap
Are the neoconservatives turning on Jeb Bush? It would be ironic, considering the men his brother turned to for foreign policy advice. It would also be highly problematic—since foreign policy establishment hawks should represent one of Bush’s few natural constituencies on the right. But it’s hard to observe recent developments and not suspect something is afoot.
I’ve often observed that Sen. Rand Paul has to walk a fine line in order to keep all the disparate elements of his coalition together, but it’s increasingly looking like Jeb Bush is having to do the same thing. He has the legacies of his father and brother to contend with. And while these legacies aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, they aren’t necessarily complementary, either. And therein lies the trap for Jeb: Does he alienate the GOP’s main cadre of foreign policy activists and thinkers, or does he saddle up with them and risk being seen as the second coming of his brother?
The foreign policy “realist” community hopes Jeb will be the “smart” son and follow the “prudent” footsteps of his father. Bush 41 oversaw the collapse of the Soviet Union and liberated Kuwait without toppling Saddam, a move that—depending on where you stand—was either an example of prudence or cowardice. But neoconservatives prefer George W. Bush’s more aggressive foreign policy, and want the GOP to nominate a hawk in 2016. Now Jeb Bush’s campaign needs to figure out what kind of President Bush he would be, and he likely won’t be able to assuage the concerns of both camps.
The conundrum, presumably, began when Jeb announced his foreign policy team. Much was made of the fact that many of his advisers had served in previous Bush administrations. This was much ado about nothing. Any Republican who gained senior foreign policy experience in the last quarter of a century would likely have worked for a Bush administration.
More interesting was the amount of daylight between the foreign policy advisers who served his father and his brother—a cleavage that is especially noteworthy in the context of the larger discussion taking place right now, regarding Iran and Israel. There’s a lot of range between the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz and an old-school GOP realist like James Baker, yet both are on the list of Jeb advisers.
Speaking of Baker, the Washington Free Beacon, which is widely thought of as a neoconservative outlet, recently noted: “Jeb Bush’s selection of Baker as a foreign policy adviser has sparked concern among conservatives and in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. Baker is infamous for his hostility to Israel, having said during his tenure as secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, ‘F–k the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.’ Baker is also a supporter of President Obama’s Iran negotiations.”
As the Free Beacon expected, Baker—who served as Secretary of State during George H.W. Bush’s administration—did not go easy on Israel when he addressed the liberal J Street conference. And this has led to some think that Jeb Bush might seek to follow his father’s foreign policy—not his brother’s.
In a world where Republicans are trying to out-hawk one another, this might sound absurd. But presidents have been known to govern differently from the way they campaign—remember in 2000 when Bush ran as the anti-“nation building” candidate? “The older Bush circle seems confident that Jeb sided with his father and Brent Scowcroft on the folly of letting the neocons push America into diverting from Osama to Saddam,” wrote Maureen Dowd. (It should be noted that Scowcroft penned a 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Don’t Attack Saddam,” which was eerily prescient in many regards.)
Some are clearly worried that Dowd is right—that Jeb is a chip off the old block. “Whether Jeb disavows James Baker, & how quickly & strongly, could be an oddly important early moment in GOP race,” Bill Kristol tweeted (linking to a Politico story about Baker blasting Bibi). This isn’t an anomaly. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin writes that a source at a Jewish organization told her: “Jim Baker’s bitterly critical comments of Israel and Netanyahu conjured up the worst memories of the H. W. Bush administration’s confrontation with the Jewish state. Any 2016 campaign that takes advice and counsel from him will raise serious questions and concerns from the pro-Israel community.”
The comparatively moderate, intellectually inclined Jeb Bush would seem like a natural candidate for neoconservatives to rally behind. But Baker speaking at J Street while working for the campaign in some capacity is cause for concern. This is dangerous if prominent hawks start to suspect that Jeb might not be as friendly to their cause as the Ted Cruzes of the world. Kristol and Rubin would seem to be sending a message to Bush that he can’t take their support for granted. They need him to prove that he’s a lot more like Dubya than his dad. Given Jeb’s vulnerabilities with so much of the rest of the conservative coalition, they’re in a good position to make demands. And he’s not in a good position to deny them.
Politico is already reporting that Jeb Bush is distancing himself from Baker, noting that he “disagrees” with him on Israel. And writing at National Review Wednesday morning, Jeb made his pro-Israel position clear. Let’s see if that’s enough for the critics. If Jeb really wants to win the nomination, he might have to drop Jim Baker like a bad habit.
By: Matt Lewis, The Daily Beast, March 26, 2015
“Your Dollars At Work — For The Rich”: We’re Not Talking Trickle Here, We’re Talking Cascading To Privatize Everything
Conservative pundits and politicians routinely divide our U.S. economy into two totally distinct spheres. We have the noble private sector over here, they tell us, and the bumbling, bloated public sector over there.
In reality, of course, we have just one economy, with the private and public sectors inextricably entangled. Each year, in fact, hundreds of billions of tax dollars end up flowing directly into the private sector.
The federal government alone, a new Congressional Budget Office report calculates, annually spends $500 billion — that’s half a trillion dollars — to purchase goods and services from private companies. State and local governments spend many billions more on top of that.
We’re not talking trickle here — we’re talking cascade, as our elected leaders rush to privatize services that public employees previously provided.This massive privatization of everything from prisons to public schools hasn’t done much of anything to make the United States a better place to live.
On the other hand, this privatization has paid off quite handsomely for America’s most affluent. They’re collecting ever more generous paychecks, courtesy of the tax dollars the rest of us are paying.
In Washington, D.C., for instance, top officials of the private companies that run many of the city’s charter schools are taking in double or triple what traditional public schools take in, or even more.
The CEO at one company that runs five of these charters, The Washington Post recently reported, pulled in $1.3 million in 2013. That’s nearly five times the pay that went to the top public official responsible for the District of Columbia’s 100-plus traditional public schools.
America’s taxpayer-funded military contractors would, of course, consider that chump change. The CEO at Lockheed Martin, for one, personally pocketed over $25 million in 2013.
So do you like this idea of executives in power suits raking in multiple millions of your tax dollars?
Rhode Island state senator William Conley sure doesn’t. He and four of his colleagues have just introduced legislation that would stop the stuffing of tax dollars into the pockets of wildly overpaid corporate executives.
Conley’s bill directs Rhode Island to start “giving preference in the awarding of state contracts” to business enterprises whose highest-paid execs receive no more than 25 times the pay of their median — most typical — workers.
Back in the middle of the 20th century, only a handful of top corporate executives ever made more than 25 times the pay of the average worker. Today, by contrast, only a handful of top execs make less than 100 times median pay.
If Conley’s bill becomes law, the ramifications could be huge.
That’s because we may soon know, for the first time ever, the exact ratio between CEO and median worker pay at every major American corporation that trades on Wall Street.
Five years ago, legislation that mandates this disclosure passed Congress and made it into law. Intense corporate lobbying has been stalling its enforcement, but the stall may soon end. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission finally appears ready to issue the regulations needed to enforce full pay ratio disclosure.
CEO-worker pay comparisons for individual companies will likely start hitting the headlines the year after next. With these new stats, taxpayers will be able to see exactly which corporations feeding at the public trough are doing the most to make America more unequal.
With this information, average taxpayers could then do a great deal. They could, for starters, follow Senator Conley’s lead in Rhode Island and urge their lawmakers to reward — with our tax dollars — only those corporations that pay their workers fairly.
By: Sam Pizzigati, Columnist, OtherWords; Associate Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies: The National Memo, March 25, 2015
“Why The House Republican Budget Plan Matters”: Predicated On The Assumption That Low-Income Families Have It Too Easy
“A budget is a moral document,” Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) said two weeks ago. “It talks about where your values are.”
Those comments from a conservative member of the House Budget Committee happen to be entirely accurate. Indeed, Woodall’s description serves as a reminder of why it matters that House Republicans passed their budget blueprint late yesterday.
Normally quarrelsome House Republicans came together Wednesday night and passed a boldly conservative budget that relies on nearly $5 trillion in cuts to eliminate deficits over the next decade, calls for repealing the health care law and envisions transformations of the tax code and Medicare.
There were a variety of competing plans, but the approach endorsed by the House GOP leadership narrowly prevailed – overcoming 26 defections from within their own ranks.
Republican leaders, who’ve had some trouble corralling GOP votes for GOP bills in recent months, breathed a sigh of relief, and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was seen hugging members of his whip team in celebration last night. It was a reminder of just how far expectations have fallen – House Republicans have their largest majority in generations; they struggled mightily to narrowly pass their own budget plan; and this is somehow seen as a great victory for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the rest of the GOP leadership team.
The Senate Republican majority will now try to wrap up work on its budget blueprint – which will include key differences – before members eventually head to a conference committee to hammer out a bicameral agreement.
Note, budgets cannot be filibustered and are not subject to a presidential veto. In fact, much of this process is symbolic – a congressional budget does not lock in spending levels for policymakers; the appropriations process does. The entire budget fight is a less case of understanding what will happen and more a case of appreciating what congressional Republican would like to see happen if all the power were in their hands.
But if the practical effects are limited, why should people care? Because “a budget is a moral document; it talks about where your values are.”
This recent analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities struck a chord.
The budgets adopted on March 19 by the House Budget Committee and the Senate Budget Committee each cut more than $3 trillion over ten years (2016-2025) from programs that serve people of limited means. These deep reductions amount to 69 percent of the cuts to non-defense spending in both the House and Senate plans.
Each budget plan derives more than two-thirds of its non-defense budget cuts from programs for people with low or modest incomes even though these programs constitute less than one-quarter of federal program costs.
Right. If “a budget is a moral document” that reflects lawmakers’ “values,” the House Republican budget approved yesterday tells us, in frightening detail, that GOP morality is predicated on the assumption that low-income families have it too easy – and high-income families have it too tough.
It matters, of course, that Republicans had to rely on ridiculous budget tricks to give the appearance of responsibility. It also matters that they prioritized increased spending on the issue they care about (the military) over fiscal concerns they sometimes pretend to care about (the deficit).
But as the dust settles on yesterday’s floor drama, what remains are GOP “values” on full display. In 2015, Republican members of Congress believe in taking families’ health care benefits away. And scrapping Medicare altogether. And slashing food stamps. And making it harder for young people to go to college. And eliminating environmental safeguards. And freeing Wall Street of pesky oversight and layers of accountability.
In this “moral document,” GOP lawmakers spelled out their priorities for all the world to see. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters yesterday that when he talks to voters about the specific provisions of the Republican budget plan, the public balks – Americans assume he’s exaggerating, because the idea that GOP officials would actually vote for such a radical scheme seems “absurd.”
But the truth is, the Republican budget is real, it is cruel, and as of yesterday, it has passed.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 26, 2015
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