“No Vote Head-Faking”: How John Boehner Is Playing Washington
There were no fireworks when John Boehner stood before Republican members at their retreat in rural Maryland and unveiled the House GOP’s “principles” for immigration reform. Even as the speaker outlined policies intolerable to hawkish conservatives, such as providing citizenship to undocumented children, there was, amazingly, no ugly dissent inside the Hyatt conference center.
There’s a simple reason why: Most members realized that Boehner was presenting broad ideas to be discussed, not specific proposals to be voted on.
“I thought the principles were vague enough that most people could agree with them,” Rep. Raul Labrador said after the retreat.
That was the idea.
At the beginning of the year, interviews with dozens of lawmakers and aides revealed a strategic dichotomy forming within the House GOP. Many conservatives craved a “bold” voting schedule in 2014 that would draw sharp policy contrasts on a host of issues. Republican leaders, on the other hand, saw such aggression as counterproductive in an election year and preferred to play it safe by pounding the issues of Obamacare, government oversight, the economy, and opportunity for middle-class Americans.
What has emerged is something of a safe middle ground. Boehner said Thursday that Republicans “will not shy away from” advancing major legislation this year. But the pace of that advance will be slow. Indeed, as GOP leadership carefully navigates an election year that appears promising for the party, Boehner is allowing conservative policy solutions to emerge from the conference—but they are meant to elicit positive headlines and score political points, not to expedite votes.
Take immigration. In the abstract, plenty of Republicans support legal status for undocumented immigrants (albeit only after several triggers, such as border security and employment verification, are in place.) Still, they say 2014 isn’t ripe for such an overhaul, citing election-year politics and a belief that President Obama is unwilling to enforce immigration laws. Boehner, knowing the reticence of his members yet understanding the necessity of appearing proactive on immigration, felt he had to act.
So the speaker released a nebulous outline of principles. Republicans rolled their eyes, sensing that significant legislative action was unlikely, but the media went crazy, splashing front-page headlines heralding the House GOP’s embrace of legalization for the undocumented. And one week later, after lawmakers lodged obligatory concerns and reporters wrote glowing reviews, Boehner dutifully acknowledged that immigration reform probably won’t happen this year.
“This is an important issue in our country,” Boehner said on Feb. 6. “It’s been kicked around forever, and it needs to be dealt with.”
The speaker was discussing immigration, but he could have been referencing any number of policies his GOP members want to bring to a vote—tax reform, health care, privacy, and welfare reform among them. Republicans want action, but it’s becoming clear that most of these will share immigration’s fate: Principles will be shared and a discussion will be had, but a vote will not.
Tax reform is the latest example. Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, made a splash last week by introducing a long-awaited overhaul of the tax code. Many conservatives have eagerly anticipated Camp’s proposal for three years, and are now agitating for a vote. “If this is a really powerful document that can rally a bunch of support in the party, then what’s to stop us from having a vote in the House?” Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina said of Camp’s tax plan.
Boehner’s response when asked about Camp’s plan on Wednesday: “Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Leadership sees the details of this proposal, such as eliminating popular deductions, as politically perilous. But they also know how enthusiastic some members are about tax reform. So rather than rankle conservatives by suffocating the plan altogether, or irritate the business community by bringing a risky proposal to the House floor, Boehner’s team is content to have Camp to unveil his plan—allowing for a broad messaging campaign but not a specific vote.
This head-faking has provided GOP leadership with a blueprint for 2014. Now, with immigration and tax reform essentially taken off the table, and fewer than 75 legislative days left before midterm elections, Boehner’s team will have to grapple with but a few more potentially troublesome policy pushes.
Privacy legislation, if it’s a libertarian-backed bill with teeth, is unlikely to reach the floor.
Same goes for welfare reform. A group of conservatives, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, have worked with the Heritage Foundation on a proposal to roll back welfare spending to pre-recession levels and add work requirements to the food-stamp program. But a vote on this plan is unlikely. Tinkering with the social safety net is always hazardous, and, as with other bold proposals, leadership won’t risk an election-year backlash by voting on something that stands no chance of clearing the Senate.
The one major issue that Boehner’s strategy won’t apply to is Obamacare. Conservatives have demanded action—and were promised votes—on an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. Majority Leader Eric Cantor earned applause in Cambridge when he guaranteed an Obamacare replacement plan, and is beginning to meet with colleagues to piece something together. Cantor is widely expected to deliver.
Still, as National Journal reported in January, the House Republican health care plan is likely to be a medley of poll-tested proposals slapped together— not one of the comprehensive alternative plans that conservatives have been boosting.
For conservatives who demanded an aggressive, wide-ranging legislative agenda in 2014, winding up with one vote on a watered-down health care bill might not suffice. “Instead of talking, we could actually act—and we could have a real impact,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, a frequent critic of leadership. “It’s easy to blame Harry Reid and the president for everything, but we’re missing a lot of opportunities. Standing back and waiting is not going to win elections.”
Still, after initially decrying a play-it-safe strategy, other conservatives now sound comfortable with the approach. “When you put a bill out there,” said Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana, “it has a lot of details that can detract from the overall concept.”
By: Tim Alberta, The National Journal, March 2, 2014
“Promises, Promises”: The Elusive Policy That’s Always On The Horizon
In 2009, as Democrats advanced the Affordable Care Act, congressional Republicans promised to produce an alternative plan to prove to the public that the GOP approach was superior. It sounded very nice.
But Republicans, working in secret, missed their own deadline. Then they missed another. Eventually, GOP lawmakers threw together a half-hearted package, which was a bit of a joke. As Matt Yglesias noted at the time, the Republican approach to reform sought to create a system that “works better for people who don’t need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It’s basically a health un-insurance policy.” The CBO found that the plan would leave “about 52 million” Americans without access to basic medical care.
Four-and-a-half years later, we find ourselves in a surprisingly similar situation. For reasons they sometimes struggle to explain, congressional Republicans still hate “Obamacare,” and just as importantly, are still working in secret on an alternative reform plan that will prove their superior policymaking skills. One of these days, they keep saying. Just you watch. It’ll be **awesome.
Except, of course, the elusive policy is always just out of reach. It sits at the horizon, but it never draws closer.
Suddenly, a House vote on a Republican alternative to Obamacare seems less likely.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declined to commit to an alternative measure coming up for a vote this year but said GOP leadership is going to “continue to having conversations with our members” about items like tax reform and replacing President Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislation.
And what about the recent promises from House Republican leaders that they will present an ACA alternative – and vote on it – sometime in 2014? “We’re going to continue to go through a lot of ideas,” Boehner said yesterday, using the most non-committal language possible.
By any fair standard, this is quickly becoming a rather ignominious fiasco.
Jon Chait published a gem this week, highlighting the recent Republican rhetoric.
* On Jan. 30, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA.) vowed, “This year, we will rally around an alternative to ObamaCare and pass it on the floor of the House.”
* On Feb. 21, Cantor said Republicans are working “to finalize our Obamacare replacement plan.”
* On Feb. 24, Cantor’s office said it’s prepared to “begin” working on the party’s alternative.
* On Feb. 27, Boehner said he’s prepared to “have conversations” with Republicans about what might be in an alternative policy.
Notice the pattern? Over the course of four weeks, we’ve gone from a guaranteed vote on an alternative to descending assurances about whether an alternative will ever even exist. Chait explained:
Lots of people treat the Republican Party’s inability to unify around an alternative health-care plan, four years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, as some kind of homework assignment they keep procrastinating on. But the problem isn’t that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lay around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already.
It’s that there’s no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible.
Quite right. Republicans could present an alternative policy that they love, but it’ll quickly be torn to shreds, make the party look foolish, and make clear that the GOP is not to be trusted with health care policy. Indeed, it would very likely scare the American mainstream to be reminded what Republicans would do if the power over the system were in their hands.
On other hand, Republicans could present a half-way credible policy, but it would have to require some regulations and public investments, which necessarily means the party’s base would find it abhorrent.
And so we get … nothing. Years of promises later, the GOP can’t meet its own commitment to the public, not because Republicans are lazy, but because it’s a post-policy party.
They sure are great at complaining, though, aren’t they?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 28, 2014
“They’ll Never Rally Behind A Single Plan”: The GOP’s Push To Replace ObamaCare Is Cynical And Doomed
On Friday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) is gathering key members of his caucus to work toward coming up with a single, official Republican alternative to the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act (ACA), or ObamaCare. Republican lawmakers have several competing bills to work with, and putting the party’s weight behind one plan or piece of legislation would be great for the country: Finally, America could have a real discussion about the best way to reform America’s health care insurance system.
But an official Republican health care plan would also be great for Democrats — which is reason No. 1 Republicans aren’t going to actually rally behind a single plan.
They will, of course, make a public effort. “GOP leaders have been clear that ahead of the 2014 elections, the conference wants to show what it is for, not simply what it is against,” says Daniel Newhauser at Roll Call. “Similarly, they want to show that they are not in favor of simply returning to the old health care system, which is viewed unfavorably by the electorate.” But any viable plan needs 218 votes from the fractured GOP caucus.
Cantor and his fellow House Republicans have at least three separate House bills to consider — from Reps. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), and Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) — and a plan from Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) that was unveiled to much fanfare in January. There’s also a bill, from Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.), that would raise ObamaCare’s definition of full-time employment to 40 hours a week, from 30. And a George W. Bush administration economist named Edward Lazear is pushing what he calls BushCare.
As they sort through these plans, what criteria will they use? If they can agree on one proposal, says Roll Call‘s Newhauser, it’s “likely to include poll-tested measures that have broad agreement in the GOP conference, including allowing the purchase of health insurance across state lines, allowing insurance portability between jobs, expanding access to health savings accounts, and limiting medical malpractice lawsuits.”
Another way of putting that: Republicans are looking for popular talking points that sound different enough from ObamaCare to win support from the more conservative factions of the GOP caucus. The problem, as The Washington Post notes, is that “there are only so many ways to preserve the patient protections that the ACA offers, which Republicans say they want to keep, while maintaining a private insurance market and assisting those who can’t afford coverage.”
Once Republicans hold up a specific plan, the Congressional Budget Office gets to issue its verdict and the public gets to weigh the proposals not just against ObamaCare but also the GOP’s attacks against ObamaCare.
The CBO analysis for Rep. Young’s bill to raise full-time employment to 40 hours, for example, found that the bill would raise the federal deficit by $74 billion while reducing the number of people getting employer-sponsored health insurance by about a million; about half of those people would go on Medicaid or other public programs, the other half would be uninsured.
It’s not clear the other Republican proposals would be popular in practice, either. Some of them, as the Washington Post editors note, would be better than ObamaCare at holding down health care costs and incentivizing people to buy private health insurance. But they are more disruptive to the status quo — especially post-ObamaCare — and almost all of them would be ripe for articles about sick people losing coverage or watching their health insurance costs skyrocket.
All of the GOP alternative plans, in other words, have their own drawbacks. Some people will lose, and some people will win. They would reduce the role of the federal government in most cases, but increase the power of insurance companies. Many of the policies are really interesting. Here are some examples of the big ideas from the GOP plans:
Cap or end employer tax breaks for providing health insurance: The idea here is that the insurance market is distorted by the tax incentives for employers to offering their workers insurance. It’s a fair point. But capping the tax breaks, as Coburn-Burr-Hatch does, or eliminating them would almost certainly cause employers to drop their plans. Almost 60 percent of Americans get their health insurance through work.
Provide tax breaks for individuals to buy their own insurance: With no employer-offered health plans, individuals and families would buy their own insurance on the open market. The Coburn-Burr-Hatch plan, for example, offers age-adjusted tax credits to people at up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line: Individuals 18 to 34 would get $1,560 a year, while those 50 to 64 would get $3,720 a year (families would get more than double those figures). Lazear’s BushCare would give all Americans with any type of health insurance $7,500 a year in tax breaks, or $15,000 for families; if people opted to buy low-cost, low-coverage insurance, they’d pocket the difference.
Allow insurance to be sold across state lines: This is a perennial GOP proposal to lower health insurance costs. The idea is that if insurers could sell the same policies to any state, regardless of that state’s own insurance regulations, it would increase market competition and drive down prices. A 2005 CBO report estimated those savings to consumers at about 5 percent overall, with the savings skewed toward the young and healthy; the old and sick would pay more. Enacting this option would require scrapping the minimum standards required for all plans under ObamaCare — a selling point for conservatives who argue we use too much health care, anyway.
“The fact that Republicans are coalescing around healthcare reform plans of their own could be very bad news for ObamaCare,” says Sally C. Pipes at Forbes. “Once voters see that the Republican alternative adds up to sensible and affordable health care, ObamaCare’s days will be numbered.”
But the opposite is almost certainly true. And House Republicans know that.
The GOP has gotten a lot of mileage out of its push to repeal ObamaCare — with a big assist, since October, from the Obama administration — but now the law is signing up real people (four million and counting) for real insurance policies. Republicans have to do better than provide plausible-sounding alternatives. They have to come up with a plan that Americans will think is much better than ObamaCare, and worth the disruption of overhauling the health care system again.
Here’s the bottom line: If reforming America’s health care system to provide near-universal affordable coverage were easy, it would have been done 60 years ago — or at any point since. Several Democratic presidents had tried and failed before President Obama. If Republicans had wanted to take their own bite at the apple, they had plenty of chances, too.
This isn’t spitballing. If Republicans want to be relevant voices in the health care debate, they have to come up with something. They should come up with a plan they can try to sell to America.
“One of the unseemly aspects of the last four-plus months is watching some on the right root for ObamaCare to fail,” says Forbes‘ Avik Roy, one of ObamaCare’s wonkiest critics. Among some conservatives, “there has been a kind of intellectual laziness, a belief that there’s no need for critics to come up with better reforms, because Obamacare will ‘collapse under its own weight,’ relieving them of that responsibility.” But it’s clear now that’s not going to happen, he adds. “And that makes the development of a credible, market-oriented health-reform agenda more urgent than ever.”
Well, don’t hold your breath.
The Affordable Care Act was written and enacted by Democrats — with a few exceptions — and that’s one of its main weaknesses: If Republicans had helped shape and pass the law, they probably wouldn’t have spent the last four years attacking and undermining it. They now have at least 10 months left to criticize the law without having to take any serious action to replace it. Don’t expect them to squander the opportunity.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, February 26, 2014
“The Insurance Company Bailout That Republicans Love”: The GOP Has Found A Way To Be Even More Hypocritical Than Before
Remember when Republicans found insurance company bailouts outrageous? Good, because the Republicans don’t.
On Friday, the Obama Administration announced proposed payment rates for Medicare Advantage plans, the private insurance option within Medicare. The federal government pays insurers a fixed fee for each senior they enroll. The program’s goal is to provide seniors with more options and, ideally, foster competition that will lead to better management of care both within the traditional program and for those who get private insruance instead. But, for a long time, experts have said the federal government is actually paying the insurers too much—in other words, more than it costs to provide the same coverage through traditional Medicare.
In the late 1990s, when the program was known as “Medicare+Choice,” the Clinton Administration attempted to rectify this by reducing insurer fees. But experts subsequently found the government was still paying the plans too much, so the Obama Administration and its allies included additional Medicare Advantage cuts in the Affordable Care Act—leaving discretion over the exact rates to the Department of Health and Human Services and its actuaries. On Friday, HHS revealed its calculations for next year’s rates, based in part on projections for how health care spending for the country as a whole is changing.
The payment formula is complicated and even now, with a weekend to digest the announcement, analysts aren’t entirely sure how insurers would react and what that would mean for seniors in the plans. (As Phil Galewitz of Kaiser Health News reports, many independent experts seem to think the effects would be pretty minimal.) But insurers, who say better benefits account for whatever extra funds they get, have warned that cuts of virtually any magnitude will force insurers to offer less generous benefits, charge higher premiums, or withdraw from the program altogether—as some of them did in the late 1990s, following those cuts the Clinton Administration implemented. The insurers are lobbying the administration to use its discretion to reduce the cuts or, ideally, eliminate them altogether. If you live in Washington and have seen those ubiquitous “Seniors are Watching” advertisements on billboards and buses, you have some idea of how strongly the insurers feel about this.
But insurers aren’t the only ones making a fuss. Republicans are too—and they have been for a while. As you may recall, Republicans pounced on the new Medicare Advantage cuts as proof that Obamacare was bad for seniors—in the 2010 midterms and then, again, in the 2012 presidential election. It was pure political gold, since seniors (particularly white seniors) were among those most skeptical of Obama and his health care law in the first place. Of course, House Republicans voted for the very same cuts when Paul Ryan’s budgets had them. But that didn’t stop Republicans from attacking the cuts then—and it’s not stopping them now. “ObamaCare has already caused millions to lose the healthcare plans they liked, and now it is directly harming seniors who rely on the care they have through Medicare Advantage,” Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, said on Friday. “Our nation’s grandparents should not have to wake up tomorrow worried they no longer can access the care they want because of Obamacare.”
With this latest salvo, however, Republicans have actually found a way to be more hypocritical than before. For the last few weeks, Republicans and their allies have been in high dudgeon about Obamacare’s so-called risk corridor program, in which the federal government will subsidize insurers that take heavy losses for the next three years. Republicans and their allies have decried risk corridors as a “taxpayer bailout” of the insurers. But the policy justification for risk corridors is straightforward and, even to some conservatives, incontrovertible: They will ease the transition to a newly regulated insurance market, so that it’s possible to provide universal coverage through a system of private plans. And unlike the additional Medicare Advantage payments, the risk corridor program might actually end up being a net boon to the taxpayers, since the government also shares in unexpected insurer gains. (The Congressional Budget Office has actually predicted as much, though, as with many such projections, there’s a lot of uncertainty there.)
Maybe Republicans think that’s insufficient reason to pay the Obamacare insurers money—fine. But then how can they simultaneously insist government keep paying higher fees to Medicare insurers, given the case for them is a lot more dubious?
Congressional Democrats haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory over this issue. New York Senator Charles Schumer was among the Democrats who signed a bipartisan letter to HHS, urging the administration not to harm beneficiaries with payment reductions, though the senators stopped short of calling for outright reversal of the cuts. But the current Republican position makes no sense whatsoever, unless the GOP’s real priorities are (a) opposing anything the Obama Administration supports (b) sucking money away from the traditional, government-run Medicare program (c) stopping programs and spending that benefits the non-elderly uninsured. Readers can decide for themselves which of those explanations make the most sense—or whether, perhaps, it’s all of the above.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, Fenbruary 24, 2014
“Inequality, Dignity And Freedom”: People Least Inclined To Respect Efforts Of Ordinary Workers Are Winners Of The Wealth Lottery
Now that the Congressional Budget Office has explicitly denied saying that Obamacare destroys jobs, some (though by no means all) Republicans have stopped lying about that issue and turned to a different argument. O.K., they concede, any reduction in working hours because of health reform will be a voluntary choice by the workers themselves — but it’s still a bad thing because, as Representative Paul Ryan puts it, they’ll lose “the dignity of work.”
So let’s talk about what that means in 21st-century America.
It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?
In fact, the people who seem least inclined to respect the efforts of ordinary workers are the winners of the wealth lottery. Over the past few months, we’ve been harangued by a procession of angry billionaires, furious that they’re not receiving the deference, the acknowledgment of their superiority, that they believe is their due. For example, last week the investor Sam Zell went on CNN Money to defend the 1 percent against “envy,” and he asserted that “the 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.” Dignity for all!
And there’s another group that doesn’t respect workers: Republican politicians. In 2012, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, infamously marked Labor Day with a Twitter post celebrating … people who start their own businesses. Perhaps Mr. Cantor was chastened by the backlash to that post; at a recent G.O.P. retreat, he reportedly urged his colleagues to show some respect for Americans who don’t own businesses, who work for someone else. The clear implication was that they haven’t shown that kind of respect in the past.
On the whole, working Americans are better at appreciating their own worth than either the wealthy or conservative politicians are at showing them even minimal respect. Still, tens of millions of Americans know from experience that hard work isn’t enough to provide financial security or a decent education for their children, and many either couldn’t get health insurance or were desperately afraid of losing jobs that came with insurance until the Affordable Care Act kicked in last month. In the face of that kind of everyday struggle, talk about the dignity of work rings hollow.
So what would give working Americans more dignity in their lives, despite huge income disparities? How about assuring them that the essentials — health care, opportunity for their children, a minimal income — will be there even if their boss fires them or their jobs are shipped overseas?
Think about it: Has anything done as much to enhance the dignity of American seniors, to rescue them from the penury and dependence that were once so common among the elderly, as Social Security and Medicare? Inside the Beltway, fiscal scolds have turned “entitlements” into a bad word, but it’s precisely the fact that Americans are entitled to collect Social Security and be covered by Medicare, no questions asked, that makes these programs so empowering and liberating.
Conversely, the drive by conservatives to dismantle much of the social safety net, to replace it with minimal programs and private charity, is, in effect, an effort to strip away the dignity of lower-income workers.
And it’s something else: an assault on their freedom.
Modern American conservatives talk a lot about freedom, and deride liberals for advocating a “nanny state.” But when it comes to Americans down on their luck, conservatives become insultingly paternalistic, as comfortable congressmen lecture struggling families on the dignity of work. And they also become advocates of highly intrusive government. For example, House Republicans tried to introduce a provision into the farm bill that would have allowed states to mandate drug testing for food stamp recipients. (A commenter on my blog suggested mandatory drug tests for employees of too-big-to-fail financial institutions, which receive large implicit subsidies. Now that would really cause a panic.)
The truth is that if you really care about the dignity and freedom of American workers, you should favor more, not fewer, entitlements, a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.
And you should, in particular, support and celebrate health reform. Never mind all those claims that Obamacare is slavery; the reality is that the Affordable Care Act will empower millions of Americans, giving them exactly the kind of dignity and freedom politicians only pretend to love.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 13, 2014
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