“Health Reform Turns Real”: Even The “Bad News” On Obamacare Start-Up Is Really Good News For The Program’s Future
At this point, the crisis in American governance has taken on a life of its own. Some Republicans are now saying openly that they want concessions in return for reopening the government and avoiding default, not because they have any specific policy goals in mind, but simply because they don’t want to feel “disrespected.” And no endgame is in sight.
But this confrontation did start with a real issue: Republican efforts to stop Obamacare from going into effect. It’s long been clear that the great fear of the Republican Party was not that health reform would fail, but that it would succeed. And developments since Tuesday, when the exchanges on which individuals will buy health insurance opened for business, strongly suggest that their worst fears will indeed be realized: This thing is going to work.
Wait a minute, some readers are saying. Haven’t many stories so far been of computer glitches, of people confronting screens telling them that servers are busy and that they should try again later? Indeed, they have. But everyone knowledgeable about the process always expected some teething problems, and the nature of this week’s problems has actually been hugely encouraging for supporters of the program.
First, let me say a word about the underlying irrelevance of start-up troubles for new government programs.
Political reporting in America, especially but not only on TV, tends to be focused on the play-by-play. Who won today’s news cycle? And, to be fair, this sort of thing may matter during the final days of an election.
But Obamacare isn’t up for a popular referendum, or a revote of any kind. It’s the law, and it’s going into effect. Its future will depend on how it works over the next few years, not the next few weeks.
To illustrate the point, consider Medicare Part D, the drug benefit, which went into effect in 2006. It had what was widely considered a disastrous start, with seniors unclear on their benefits, pharmacies often refusing to honor valid claims, computer problems, and more. In the end, however, the program delivered lasting benefits, and woe unto any politician proposing that it be rolled back.
So the glitches of October won’t matter in the long run. But why are they actually encouraging? Because they appear, for the most part, to be the result of the sheer volume of traffic, which has been much heavier than expected. And this means that one big worry of Obamacare supporters — that not enough people knew about the program, so that many eligible Americans would fail to sign up — is receding fast.
Of course, it’s important that people who want to sign up can actually do so. But the computer problems can and will be fixed. So, by March 31, when enrollment for 2014 closes, we can be reasonably sure that millions of Americans who were previously uninsured will have coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will have become a reality, something people depend on, rather than some fuzzy notion Republicans could demonize. And it will be very hard to take that coverage away.
What we still don’t know, and is crucial for the program’s longer-term success, is who will sign up. Will there be enough young, healthy enrollees to provide a favorable risk pool and keep premiums relatively low? Bear in mind that conservative groups have been spending heavily — and making some seriously creepy ads — in an effort to dissuade young people from signing up for insurance. Nonetheless, insurance companies are betting that young people will, in fact, sign up, as shown by the unexpectedly low premiums they’re offering for next year.
And the insurers are probably right. To see why anti-Obamacare messaging is probably doomed to fail, think about whom we’re talking about here. That is, who are the healthy uninsured individuals the program needs to reach? Well, they’re by and large not affluent, because affluent young people tend to get jobs with health coverage. And they’re disproportionately nonwhite.
In other words, to get a description of the typical person Obamacare needs to enroll, just take the description of a typical Tea Party member or Fox News viewer — older, affluent, white — and put a “not” in front of each characteristic. These are people the right-wing message machine is not set up to talk to, but who can be reached through many of the same channels, from ads on Spanish-language media to celebrity tweets, that turned out Obama voters last year. I have to admit, I find the image of hard-line conservatives defeated by an army of tweeting celebrities highly attractive; but it’s also realistic. Enrollment is probably going to be just fine.
So Obamacare is off to a good start, with even the bad news being really good news for the program’s future. We’re not quite there yet, but more and more, it looks as if health reform is here to stay.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 3, 2013
“The Rise Of The New Confederacy”: By Thought, Word And Deed, They Must Be Making Jefferson Davis Proud
It took on new force with fears of the federal government in Washington interfering with their cherished way of life. It gathered steam with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And it all came into full flower when shore batteries fired on Fort Sumter. It was the spirit of the Old Confederacy, a state-sponsored rebellion hellbent on protecting its “peace and safety” from the party that took possession of the government on March 4, 1861.
The rebels launched a grisly war against the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln warned the Confederacy: “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”
“Peace and safety” are ideals drawn from South Carolina’s Dec. 24, 1860, declaration of secession from the Union. The expression was designed to encompass all that the Deep South states held dear — chiefly, their existence as sovereign states and their ability to decide the propriety of their domestic institutions, including slavery.
This virulent hostility to the Union led the Old Confederacy to conclude — as expressed by South Carolina — that with Lincoln’s elevation to the presidency, “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”
Federal government as the enemy.
Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.
No shelling of a Union fort, no bloody battlefield clashes, no Good Friday assassination of a hated president — none of that nauseating, horrendous stuff. But the behavior is, nonetheless, malicious and appalling.
The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.
Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.”
Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all.
The ghosts of the Old Confederacy have to be envious.
South Carolina wept and wailed as it withdrew from the Union, citing the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision when it noted that states in the North had elevated to citizenship “persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.”
Not to worry, Old South, the New Confederacy’s spirit is on the move.
In June, the Supreme Court got rid of fundamental legal protections against racial discrimination in voting.
Legislation aimed at suppressing votes is pending across the country, notably in the Deep South.
Hold on to that Confederate money, y’all. Jim Crow just might rise again.
But it’s here in Washington where the New Confederacy’s firebrands are really holding court. Many of them first appeared after the 2010 midterm elections and when the scope of the president’s economic recovery program was taking form. Unlike their predecessors, however, members of this group hail from Dixie and beyond, though I stress there is no evidence that the New shares the racist views of the Old. The view on race is not the common denominator. The view on government is.
These conservative extremists, roughly 60 of them by CNN’s count, represent congressional districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.
They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 4, 2013
“The Party Making No Demands”: Republicans Just Can’t Seem To Recognize Reality
Charles Krauthammer sticks to his party’s script in his new column this morning, complaining about President Obama’s “refusal to compromise or even negotiate.” It got me thinking about how best to explain to conservatives why this makes so little sense.
Maybe it’s time to flip the script to better illustrate the point. After all, when it comes to funding the government and protecting the integrity of the full faith and credit of the United States, we’re describing an inherently cooperative process — the White House needs Congress to pass legislation, the Congress needs a president to sign the legislation. One without the other doesn’t work.
With this mind, imagine a hypothetical.
Let’s say President Obama, feeling good after winning re-election fairly easily, adopted an overly confident posture with lawmakers. He started boasting about the fact that his approval rating is four times higher than Congress’ approval rating; his policy agenda enjoys broader public support than Republicans’ policy agenda; and he decided it’s time they start rewarding him before he considered engaging in basic governance.
“Sure,” Obama said to Republicans in this imaginary scenario, “I’ll sign the spending measures to prevent a government shutdown, but first you have to raise taxes on the wealthy. And end the sequestration policy. And pass comprehensive immigration reform. And approve universal background checks. The American people are with me, so I expect you to compromise and negotiate with me on these matters.”
The president then said to GOP lawmakers, “And sure, I’ll sign a bill to raise the debt limit, paying the bills you already piled up, but I’m not ready to sign a ‘clean’ bill. Instead, I also expect Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill, a public option for the health care system, universal pre-K, and billions in infrastructure investments. If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to tell the public you refuse to compromise and negotiate.”
Much of the political establishment has come to accept a certain frame: the White House is going to have to accept some concessions to make congressional Republicans happy. Obama won’t like it, but voters did elect a House GOP majority.
What I’m suggesting is that this assumption is incomplete. No one seems to question, or even consider in passing, what Republicans will be asked to do to make the White House happy. Boehner & Co. won’t like it, but voters did elect a Democratic president.
Of course, the point of this apparently silly hypothetical is to help Krauthammer and others who share his ideology understand a basic truth: Obama isn’t making any demands. He’s offered no threats. There is no presidential wish list, filled with progressive goodies — unrelated to the budget or the debt ceiling — that Obama expects Congress to pass before the president fulfills his duties.
This notion that Obama “refuses to compromise or even negotiate” isn’t just deliberately misleading; it’s demonstrably silly. If the president was making extravagant demands, threatening to veto every bill lacking liberal treats, Republicans and their pundits would have a point.
But until then, can we at least try to recognize reality as it exists?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
“A Steady Stream Of Untruths”: Everything You’ve Heard About Obamacare Being A Job-Killer Is Wrong
The U.S. government is now “shut down” thanks in large part to yet another attempt to put the brakes on the Affordable Care Act, or ACA. Yet this week, the law’s health care exchanges went on line, promising affordable insurance coverage for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions or jobs that did not previously offer a health plan and to millions of the unemployed. Nevertheless, a steady stream of untruths about the law continues to pop up in newspapers, blogs and Facebook feeds.
One of these tropes is that the ACA is causing employers to cut back on hours for full-time employees so that they will not have to provide coverage (under the ACA, companies with more than 49 employees are required to offer health insurance coverage to those employees working 30 or more hours a week or face penalties). Typically, the evidence for the cutbacks in hours is that someone knows someone else whose hours were cut earlier this year in anticipation of the law taking effect. Many pundits have been even lazier, just stating that employers are cutting back hours without citing concrete examples.
The reality, though, is that there is no widespread trend of employers cutting their workers back to just under 30 hours because of the ACA. In July, my colleagues Dean Baker and Helene Jorgensen analyzed recent data from the Current Population Survey. They found that only 0.64 percent of the workforce was working between 26 and 29 hours a week in the first half of 2013. This number is only slightly higher than it was for the first half of 2012 (0.61 percent).
In other words, there is no evidence of a widespread trend of employers reducing hours to avoid providing coverage. That sentiment was recently echoed by Moody’s Mark Zandi, who said of the supposed trend, “I was expecting to see it. I was looking for it and it’s not there.”
The basic story is that, yes, there are a small number of firms that have cut down on the number of full-time employees recently. And yes, over time, the 30-hour cutoff could have some effect on hours as employers adjust to the law and new businesses open. Of course, some companies may go the opposite route and move part-time workers to full time, as was recently the case at Disney World.
Regardless, the promulgation of the idea that the ACA will transform the U.S. workforce into a part-time workforce and negatively impact employment in the United States is dead wrong.
By: Alan Barber, U. S. News and World Report, October 4, 2013
“Pride Goeth Before The Shutdown”: The “Special Role” Of Boehner And The Screaming Tykes
It’s remarkable how much the current crop of House Republican radicals seems bent on repeating the mistakes of their Gingrichian forebears. First, of course, they shut down the government. The ostensible reason was implacable opposition to Obamacare in the name of “ the American people” (even if the American people actually support neither rolling back the Affordable Care Act nor shutting down the government), but as the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman detailed Saturday, that message has gotten muddled in a GOP talking points funhouse mirror where conservatives are suddenly defenders of government and seekers of compromise.
But the most plausible reason enunciated to this point – now openly verbalized by at least two Republican House members – also happens to be the most offensive: pride.
Florida GOP Rep. Dennis Ross told Weisman that the shutdown is imperiling the “significant gains” conservatives have made on cutting spending because – wait for it – “there’s no connection now between the shutdown and the funding of Obamacare.” So what’s going on then? “I think now it’s a lot about pride,” said Ross, a tea party conservative who has elsewhere acknowledged that the GOP has already “lost the [continuing resolution] battle.”
Indiana Rep. Marlin Stutzman, another denizen of the conservative fringe, told the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker that “we’re not going to be disrespected. … We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
Side note to Congressman Stutzman: While it’s often said “respect must be earned,” that’s actually not the case in Washington. Inside the beltway titles and offices get their due respect – disrespect must be earned. And there’s no surer way to do that than shutting down the government and refusing to reopen it on the grounds that “we have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
In any case, Stutzman later issued a statement trying to walk back his comment, saying that he had “carelessly misrepresented the ongoing budget debate.” But if he was careless it was only in the sense of committing the classic Washington gaffe: telling the truth. As the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote on Thursday:
Stutzman is right. The fight over the shutdown has become unmoored from any particular policy demands the GOP believes it can secure. It’s become an issue of pride and politics. At this point, Republicans simply need something so they can tell themselves, and their base, that they didn’t lose. They don’t know what that something is, exactly. But it needs to be something.
Decoupled from Obamacare, the shutdown has become about soothing the flustered tea party wing of the GOP. These pols have adopted a kindergarten-esque view of legislating: they deserve some sort of reward just because they tried really hard and because they really, really want it. The government’s been shut down? It’s all good because, in the memorable words of Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann, “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time, because we see we are starting to win this dialogue on a national level.” (Given the initial polling of the shutdown, she seems to have a unique definition of winning.)
As I noted yesterday, the Times reported that Boehner and his team know that they’ve got an untenable position but are determined to drag the showdown on long enough wrap the debt ceiling fight into it. They want to minimize the number of tantrums the caucus’s conservative fringe throws over its inability to win on either of its quixotic quests.
This view of shutting down the federal government as some sort of tea party therapy strategy brings us back to the ghosts of 1995. One of the turning points of the first government shutdown came when the New York Daily News (a corporate cousin, as both it and U.S. News & World Report are owned by Mort Zuckerman) published a famous front page portraying then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich as a cry-baby. Gingrich had complained to reporters about feeling slighted after he had been made to sit at the back of Air Force One and exit through the rear door when he flew back with President Clinton from the funeral of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “This is petty,” Gingrich said. “I’m going to say up front it’s petty, but I think it’s human.” The public got the basic pettiness of bringing the work of governance to halt over personal pride.
John Boehner, with his endearing crying jags and carefully timed minor profanities isn’t so stupid as to articulate the reasons for shutting the government down in terms of personal or movement pride. But if the Daily News recycles its famous front page some time in the next few days it won’t be a caricature of one giant crybaby but instead one of a hapless Boehner surrounded by dozens of screaming tykes. How long will it be before more members of the tea party fringe, empowered by their unshakable belief in their own special role of spokesperson for “the American people,” follow the lead of Stutzman and Ross?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 6, 2013
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