“Incentivizing Harmful Behavior”: Sabotaging Obamacare Is A Lucrative Endeavor For Many Republicans
To gain steam for his initiative to tie funding of the government to defunding Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz appeared at events over the summer with the Tea Party Express, a political action committee. “Either continue funding the government without giving one more dime to Obamacare, or shut down the government,” demands Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer.
The Tea Party Express, in turn, has sponsored fundraising drives to help “elect more leaders like Ted Cruz.”
One problem for Cruz-acolytes hoping to make their way into office? The Tea Party Express PAC has spent nearly every dollar of the $2.1 million it has raised this year on campaign consultants and fundraising fees, but not a dime in transfers to candidates or on independent expenditures. In previous years, the PAC has funneled much of its proceeds to Russo Marsh and Rogers, a Republican consulting firm in Sacramento, California.
The frantic crusade to screw up the launch of the Affordable Care Act is a sad tale in American politics. If conservatives are successful, even with a short-term government shutdown Cruz and his House GOP allies might achieve, patients will suffer. If young people fail to sign up for health insurance—the stated goal of one Koch-backed front group now airing television advertisements—more will drown under crushing debt if they find themselves in need of serious medical care. But Washington, DC, has a bizarre way of incentivizing harmful behavior, and the sabotage Obamacare campaign is not without its winners.
A set of campaign consultants and insurance agents stand to profit from confusing Americans on the eve of the healthcare reform enrollment date.
The conservative media frenzy over the defunding debate has invigorated donors to many PACs, not just Tea Party Express. The Senate Conservative Fund PAC recorded its largest-ever fundraising hauls last month, though it spends way more on candidates and on candidate ads than the Tea Party Express. Still, the Jim DeMint–linked PAC expended nearly half its coffers on administrative, research and fundraising payments this year. FreedomWorks, the RNC and the Club for Growth have hopped on the Cruz campaign to raise funds by advocating the repeal of Obamacare. For a non-federal election year, at least these PACs are doing well.
The rigid anti–healthcare reform politics of the Koch brothers is also having a stimulative effect upon a small circle of Republican consultants. Americans for Prosperity, the largest Koch-owned front, pays the traditional 15 percent commission rate on all their television buys—the latest round going to Target Enterprises, a Sherman Oaks, California-based GOP media company. And with a seemingly endless appetite for anti-Obamacare paid media and anti-Obamacare grassroots organizers, Koch makes good on its claim of being a stellar job-creator, at least for jobs in right-wing political advocacy.
The New York Times rightfully notes in an editorial that many other conservative advocacy groups, like the National Liberty Federation, have latched onto the Obamacare fight, viewing the healthcare reform debate as little more than opportunity to raise a few bucks.
The second and less noticed benefactor of some of the more malicious attacks upon healthcare reform are health insurance brokers. Health insurance brokers make a living by selling health insurance and collecting a commission for every person or group they enroll. With healthcare reform set to provide easy access to health insurance options, free of charge, many in the health insurance agent industry view the Obamacare rollout as a death sentence. In recent months, the broker industry has mobilized to erect obstacles for the dozens of community group “navigators,” organizations tapped to spread the word about how to enroll in the exchanges.
In Georgia, under influence from health insurance agent lobbyists, the state passed a law that prohibits navigators from providing advice “concerning the benefits, terms, and features of a particular health benefit plan.” Other states have thrown up licensing laws in an effort to curtail navigators from being able to do, well, anything.
The Center for Public Integrity’s Nicholas Kusnetz has done some of the most interesting investigative reporting on this side of the story, revealing that the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and the National Association of Health Underwriters have orchestrated a multi-pronged attack on Affordable Care Act navigators. The industry, which has secured anti-navigator laws in sixteen states, has poured some $7.5 million into state campaigns since 2010.
While brokers claim they seek only to ensure patients are not scammed by “unlicensed” navigators, in reality, blocking competition seems to be the primary motivation. Last month, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America released a statement endorsing an effort by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) to repeal all of the funding for the navigators programs. Notes from a lobbying association for insurance agents in California warned brokers before a visit to Sacramento: “If we don’t [lobby lawmakers] they will not think it will matter that much when they allow the unlicensed “navigators” to solicit your book of business!!”
Several community groups that had signed up to participate in the navigators program have now backed out, citing political pressure from Republican politicians. The House Oversight Committee, led by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Republican attorneys general have harassed several navigator groups with lengthy questionnaires and other demands.
Some anti–healthcare reform activists are truly motivated by their convictions. But others stand to gain financially from making sure their fellow Americans have problems signing up for health insurance.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, September 25, 2013
“A Fanatical Group Of Nihilists”: The Upcoming Shutdowns And Defaults Are Symptoms Of A Deeper Republican Malady
Congressional Republicans have gone directly from conservatism to fanaticism without any intervening period of sanity.
First, John Boehner, bowing to Republican extremists, ushers a bill through the House that continues to fund the government after September 30 but doesn’t fund the Affordable Care Act. Anyone with half a brain knows Senate Democrats and the President won’t accept this — which means, if House Republicans stick to their guns, a government shut-down.
A shutdown would be crippling. Soldiers would get IOUs instead of paychecks. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees would be furloughed without pay. National parks would close. Millions of Americans would feel the effects.
And who will get blamed?
House Republicans think the public hates the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) so much they’ll support their tactics. But the fact is, regardless of Americans’ attitudes toward that Act — which, not incidentally, passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by the President, who was re-elected with over 50 percent of the vote, and constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court — Americans hate even more one party using the United States government as a pawn in their power games.
According to a recent CNN poll, 51 percent of Americans say they’d blame the Republicans for a shutdown; 33 percent would blame the President. They blamed Republicans for the last shutdown at the end of 1995 and start of 1996 — contributing to Republican losses of seven out of 11 gubernatorial races in 1996, 53 state legislative seats, 3 House seats, and the presidency.
So what are Senate Republicans doing about this impending train wreck for the country and the GOP?
Senator Ted Cruz is now trying to round up 40 Senate Republicans to vote against — not for, but against — the House bill when it comes to the Senate floor next week. Why? Because Cruz and company don’t want the Senate to enact any funding bill at all. That’s because once any bill is enacted, Senate Democrats can then amend it with only 51 votes — striking out the measure that de-funds Obamacare, and even possibly increasing funds in the continuing resolution to keep the government running.
So if Ted Cruz gets his way and the Senate doesn’t vote out any funding bill at all, what happens? The government runs out of money September 30. That spells shutdown.
The only difference between the Cruz and Boehner scenarios is that under Boehner we get a government shutdown and the public blames the GOP. Under Cruz, we get a shutdown and the public blames the GOP even more, because Republicans wouldn’t even allow a spending bill to come to the Senate floor.
In truth, the fanatics now calling the shots in the Republican Party don’t really care what the public thinks because they’re too busy worrying about even more extremist right-wing challengers in their next primary — courtesy of gerrymandering by Republican state legislators, and big-spending right-wing gonzo groups like the Club for Growth.
The Republican Party is no longer capable of governing the nation. It’s now a fanatical group run out of right-wing states by a cadre of nihilists, Know-nothings, and a handful of billionaires.
But America needs two parties both capable of governing the nation. We cannot do with just one. The upcoming shutdowns and possible defaults are just symptoms of this deeper malady.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, September 21, 2013
“Foraging For Food”: What Harry Reid Learned At The Grocery Store
The speaker is Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic Leader. The place is the Senate floor. The time is last week, after the House Republicans committed the latest outrage, voting to cut the food stamp program, always part of the farm bill – until now. Hear Harry speak on one of life’s simple pleasures:
One of my favorite things that I really like to do in Nevada and here, in Washington, is go grocery shopping. It’s such a diversion for me. I love going grocery shopping to look around, buy the things. Landra and I are without our children and our grandchildren. We live alone. But we still buy food. And I enjoy that so very, very much.
So I know, have a good idea how much $4 will buy or $4.50 to be specific. That’s not money to buy … a pound of hamburger. They have different grades of hamburger. They have the expensive kind, not so expensive and the cheaper kind. Even the cheaper kind you couldn’t buy a pound of that most of the time. A gallon of milk (is) about $4. You couldn’t buy them both the same day. It’s possible to (make) important reforms in both the farm and food stamp programs without balancing the budget on the backs of people who are hungry.
This is one of the most humane speeches I’ve ever come across in the Senate. It may be a first. Seldom does a majority leader, who holds so much power in his hands, seem so humble and down to earth. More often than not, the voices in that clubby chamber drone on longer than necessary, with nobody listening, trying to summon the spirit of Daniel Webster.
The straightforward Reid put his finger on the universal importance of going out to find – or forage – food for yourself and your family. Whether you are man, woman or child, that is an elemental need and the ancient way that we became civilized, by sitting down to break bread, cook meat or gather berries together.
In times of trouble, the government should be your friend trying to help you, not an enemy scheming to take away what little you have. That is not “conservative.” That’s firebrand radical. Federal food stamp assistance goes back to the Great Depression, for heaven’s sake, when government lent a helping hand.
Harold Ickes, an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, famously observed the obvious: “People need to eat three times a day.” A blunt statement with sense and compassion between the lines.
I hope everyone knows by now the food stamp troublemakers – the same ones who threaten to shut down the government – are about 40 House Republicans, most of them tea party people who were elected in 2010. They promised to create chaos here in Washington – and then they spit out “D.C.” They ran for office on a platform of practically burning the building down, or least closing the Capitol, the citadel of our democracy.
They have no knowledge of Congress and no interest in its traditions. They respect neither seniority nor authority. They don’t even listen to their own Speaker, John Boehner. Poor country club guy from small-town Ohio, Boehner can’t control these angry white people who showed up with everything but their pitchforks. Sorry, but they are an intolerable faction and this latest act is unconscionable. In fact, let’s call it what it is: un-American.
Paul Krugman, the op-ed columnist for The New York Times, spoke out strongly against “the war on food stamps.” He quoted the GOP golden boy, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, disparaging food and nutrition assistance as “a hammock” instead of a safety net. Ryan is a sharp-tongued instigator of all the madness – in both senses of the word. I have news for Krugman: These people, except for Ryan, are not likely to read The New York Times. They are anti-establishment, anti-intellectual, anti-government, anti-immigrant. If anything, they would take take criticism from The Times as a compliment.
The political party they resemble most is the one Abraham Lincoln despised, the defiant Know-Nothings, back before the Civil War. I think that’s why President Obama can’t wrap his mind around how much damage they plan to do to his presidency and the government and the American people. He’s a man of reason living in unreasonable times. He has the milk of human kindness in his bones; but his political foes have no mercy on the less fortunate among us, not even on children. They would take food out of the mouths of babes.
Reid said it best in his un-common sense statement: Don’t balance the budget on the backs of people who are hungry. Amen.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 24, 2013
“Purposely Stripped Of Context”: When Obamacare Polls Are Accurate Without Being True
As Republicans form a circular firing squad, nervous Democrats continue to believe that this is a depressing time when the future of Obamacare is on the line.
There is some reason for worry: the Koch brothers are spending millions trying to get young people to “opt out” of seeking health insurance at the state level, which could wreck the risk pool essential for the program’s success.
But young people, who as a group support President Obama, aren’t likely to buy Koch lies. And Hollywood progressives are about to unveil a strange-bedfellows alliance with insurance companies that will spend tens of millions of dollars telling Americans the truth — that they are better off with Obamacare being fully implemented.
Meanwhile, the chances of the Affordable Care Act being defunded in Washington are between zero and none, as many Republicans are now acknowledging. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) doesn’t have the votes for his strategy of threatening a government shutdown over Obamacare, and everyone but Cruz knows it. Karl Rove wrote an impassioned plea to Republicans not to use this “ill-conceived tactic.” Some analysts believe a government shutdown, which would almost certainly be blamed on the GOP, could even give Democrats an outside shot at winning back the House in 2014.
So why the jitters on the left? At least part of the explanation lies in polls on Obamacare that have been misunderstood or stripped of context. Over and over, Americans have been told that the public doesn’t support the president’s signature achievement. This is true in only the most literal sense of the word. It turns out that the idea behind the new law — universal coverage — is backed by a strong majority.
To get a sense of how the media are misreporting the story, consider a September 15 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. As David Weigel has noted in Slate, this is one of the most reliable polls around. It found public widespread ignorance about the law, which will be implemented beginning October 1, and a high level of skepticism about Obamacare’s ability to improve people’s lives The poll reported that 30 percent of respondents thought it would have a negative impact on their families and only 12 percent were convinced it would be positive. More than half felt — accurately — that it would have no impact on their families.
But those weren’t the results that made headlines. It was the overall figure — 43 percent support Obamacare and 54 percent oppose it — that received wide coverage, just as similar poll numbers have in the past.
This is a classic example of something being accurate without being true.
As New York Times columnist Charles Blow has noted, a new CNN/ORC Poll shows that while 35 percent of the public (the conservative base) oppose Obamacare because it’s too liberal, 16 percent oppose it because it isn’t liberal enough.
In other words, 59 percent of the American public either supports Obamacare or wants it to go further.
This casts an entirely new light on the health care debate and further isolates the obstructionists. They are now exposed as radicals who believe in extortion rather than elections — a fringe group of what John McCain in another context called “wacko birds.”
More evidence to bolster that point comes from a CNBC poll that shows the public opposed to cutting off funding for Obamacare by 44 to 38 percent. If it meant a government shutdown, nearly 60 percent oppose defunding. Surely if a majority opposed the idea of Obamacare, a similar majority would oppose the funding of it.
Liberals are justifiably upset about the way public opinion has been misreported on this issue, and most of the blame rests with reporters who don’t probe the internals of polls deeply enough.
But progressives have a role to play in changing the way the polling looks.
Longtime supporters of a single-payer system (I am among them) need to stop telling pollsters that they don’t like Obamacare, even if its provisions seem inadequate to them. Otherwise they will continue to be lumped in with Tea Party types and depicted as standing against a landmark achievement that liberals have been seeking since universal coverage first appeared in Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party (Bull Moose) Platform of 1912.
By: Jonathan Alter, The National Memo, September 23, 2013
“Free To Be Hungry”: Conservatives Believe That Freedom Is Just Another Word For “Not Enough To Eat”
The word “freedom” looms large in modern conservative rhetoric. Lobbying groups are given names like FreedomWorks; health reform is denounced not just for its cost but as an assault on, yes, freedom. Oh, and remember when we were supposed to refer to pommes frites as “freedom fries”?
The right’s definition of freedom, however, isn’t one that, say, F.D.R. would recognize. In particular, the third of his famous Four Freedoms — freedom from want — seems to have been turned on its head. Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat.
Hence the war on food stamps, which House Republicans have just voted to cut sharply even while voting to increase farm subsidies.
In a way, you can see why the food stamp program — or, to use its proper name, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) — has become a target. Conservatives are deeply committed to the view that the size of government has exploded under President Obama but face the awkward fact that public employment is down sharply, while overall spending has been falling fast as a share of G.D.P. SNAP, however, really has grown a lot, with enrollment rising from 26 million Americans in 2007 to almost 48 million now.
Conservatives look at this and see what, to their great disappointment, they can’t find elsewhere in the data: runaway, explosive growth in a government program. The rest of us, however, see a safety-net program doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: help more people in a time of widespread economic distress.
The recent growth of SNAP has indeed been unusual, but then so have the times, in the worst possible way. The Great Recession of 2007-9 was the worst slump since the Great Depression, and the recovery that followed has been very weak. Multiple careful economic studies have shown that the economic downturn explains the great bulk of the increase in food stamp use. And while the economic news has been generally bad, one piece of good news is that food stamps have at least mitigated the hardship, keeping millions of Americans out of poverty.
Nor is that the program’s only benefit. The evidence is now overwhelming that spending cuts in a depressed economy deepen the slump, yet government spending has been falling anyway. SNAP, however, is one program that has been expanding, and as such it has indirectly helped save hundreds of thousands of jobs.
But, say the usual suspects, the recession ended in 2009. Why hasn’t recovery brought the SNAP rolls down? The answer is, while the recession did indeed officially end in 2009, what we’ve had since then is a recovery of, by and for a small number of people at the top of the income distribution, with none of the gains trickling down to the less fortunate. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the top 1 percent rose 31 percent from 2009 to 2012, but the real income of the bottom 40 percent actually fell 6 percent. Why should food stamp usage have gone down?
Still, is SNAP in general a good idea? Or is it, as Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, puts it, an example of turning the safety net into “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
One answer is, some hammock: last year, average food stamp benefits were $4.45 a day. Also, about those “able-bodied people”: almost two-thirds of SNAP beneficiaries are children, the elderly or the disabled, and most of the rest are adults with children.
Beyond that, however, you might think that ensuring adequate nutrition for children, which is a large part of what SNAP does, actually makes it less, not more likely that those children will be poor and need public assistance when they grow up. And that’s what the evidence shows. The economists Hilary Hoynes and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach have studied the impact of the food stamp program in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was gradually rolled out across the country. They found that children who received early assistance grew up, on average, to be healthier and more productive adults than those who didn’t — and they were also, it turns out, less likely to turn to the safety net for help.
SNAP, in short, is public policy at its best. It not only helps those in need; it helps them help themselves. And it has done yeoman work in the economic crisis, mitigating suffering and protecting jobs at a time when all too many policy makers seem determined to do the opposite. So it tells you something that conservatives have singled out this of all programs for special ire.
Even some conservative pundits worry that the war on food stamps, especially combined with the vote to increase farm subsidies, is bad for the G.O.P., because it makes Republicans look like meanspirited class warriors. Indeed it does. And that’s because they are.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 22, 2013
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