“Republicans Cry Foul Over Presidential Multi-Tasking”: No, The Iran Deal Is Not A Manufactured Distraction From ObamaCare
Critics of the nuclear accord struck between Iran, the United States, and five other global superpowers are deeply skeptical about the deal’s terms, fearing it is too weak and relies too much on placing trust in a secretive state.
Some Republicans, meanwhile, think the deal is a farce for another reason.
John Cornyn on Twitter: Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care
10:15 PM – 23 Nov 2013 from Austin, TX, United States
Cornyn isn’t just any random Republican either. He’s the Minority Whip, the second-ranking GOPer in the Senate, so his opinion carries more weight than if someone akin to, say, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) unloaded on the administration with a factually-light claim.
The argument gained some credibility Sunday when Bob Schieffer repeated it in question form on Face the Nation to House Majority Whip Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) McCarthy, for his part, offered only a semi-dismissal: “I know they need some other type of news, but that would be the biggest mistake any administration could do. I would hope that would never be the case.”
As “distraction” murmurs intensified, Cornyn doubled down on the claim. And come Monday, Fox News’ morning hosts were opining on how Secretary of State John Kerry, amid the ObamaCare debacle, magically “pulls a rabbit out of his hat and changes the subject.”
There’s one huge problem with the augment: The deal was reportedly in the works for at least eight months — or well before ObamaCare went live and exposed glaring problems with the health care website.
Administration and Iranian officials met in Oman back in March for the first of at least five secret meetings, according to the Associated Press. The AP learned of the first meeting soon after it happened, the news agency said, but could not confirm the details and so sat on the story until now.
Going back even further, Secretary of State John Kerry, while still in the Senate in 2011, began forging ties with the Omanis that may have laid the groundwork for the nuclear negotiations.
Certainly, President Obama would like to talk about something other than his administration’s poor handling of the ObamaCare rollout. And indeed, the White House is quietly pushing Democratic lawmakers to shift their focus to the economy.
Yet assuming a historic deal was really a calculated gambit to shift the conversation in Washington from domestic to foreign affairs is, given the many months and rounds of negotiations that resulted in the deal, quite a stretch. You could argue that the administration, anticipating the ObamaCare implosion, started preparing an Iranian smokescreen earlier this year, just in case. But to truly believe that you would have to view the news in a complete vacuum, and be a pretty big cynic to boot.
And as far as distractions go, a nuclear deal with a country a plurality of Americans believe is an “enemy” is not exactly the best shiny object to reach for. So far, the reaction to the deal has been mixed, with even some prominent Democrats panning the accord as too friendly to Iran. So though the deal shifted the news cycle, it did not do so in a way uniformly beneficial to the White House.
Plus, the nuclear pact is only the latest piece of news Republicans have claimed is a manufactured ObamaCare distraction. When Democratic senators last week scrapped centuries-old rules governing filibusters, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) accused them of “cook[ing] up some fake fight.”
“I’d probably be looking for an exit, too, if I had supported this law,” he said, “I’d be looking to change the subject, just as Senate Democrats have been doing with their threats of going nuclear and changing the Senate rules on nominations.”
Yes, the Senate changed the conversation from ObamaCare to arcane debate rules last week. But McConnell, as with Cornyn, had no proof it was a deliberate, politically motivated calculation.
The administration has so far refused to respond to the allegations. And that may be a good idea: Were they to respond, someone would probably accuse them of again trying to distract from ObamaCare.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, November 25, 2013
“Darrell Issa’s Credibility Collapses”: Feeding Bogus Stories To Unsuspecting Journalists
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has a favorite trick: his staff puts together a partial transcript of closed-door testimony, they edit it in a misleading way to advance a far-right narrative, and then they look for a news organization who’ll fall for the scam.
This week, the trick involved Henry Chao, HealthCare.gov’s chief project manager at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and an alleged memo involving security risks. CBS News fell victim to Issa’s swindle, and as was first reported right here on Maddow Blog, the story was quickly proven fraudulent.
At an Oversight Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) questioned Chao on this point directly, made clear that the CBS report was wrong, and saw Chao explain that his words had been “rearranged” by the partial transcript Issa released.
But wait, there’s more.
Issa also insisted this week that the White House directed the CMS to disable the so-called “anonymous shopper” function of the Affordable Care Act’s website in order to prevent “sticker shock.” How’d that work out?
Three weeks ago, Issa alleged that the White House ordered contractors to disable the “anonymous shopper” function that would allow people to compare plans. “The White House was telling them they needed these changes,” he told CBS News. Why? He told Fox News that the administration “buried the information about the high cost of Obamacare” so that consumers wouldn’t get “sticker shock.”
In testimony Wednesday, however, an administration IT expert testified that he ordered the “shopper” function disabled until defects could be repaired and that there had been no political interference.
“So when Chairman Issa stated on national television that the White House ordered you . . . to disable the shopper function in September for political reasons, to avoid consumer sticker shock, that’s not true, is it?” asked Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.).
Issa immediately objected, but it was too late – Issa’s lie (which is to say, his latest in a series of lies) had been exposed. The Republican said Tierney was mischaracterizing his claims, so Tierney read Issa’s discredited arguments out loud. (See the video http://youtu.be/oNSQn2zVdSU.)
I’m sure Issa and his office will continue to feed bogus stories to unsuspecting journalists. I’m less sure why anyone would keep falling for the same nonsense from someone lacking all credibility.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 14, 2013
“What A Terrible Thing To Do To People”: Republican Attacks On Obamacare Are Turning Into An Argument Against Repeal
If health insurance isn’t important, why would receiving a letter telling you that you need to change your plan be a tragedy that can get you on Fox News nearly immediately?
Republicans have seized on the millions of cancellations of current plans happening as a result of the Affordable Care Act remaking the individual insurance market, which currently offers the worst customer satisfaction of any type of health coverage.
By glorifying these “horror” stories, which have often turned out to be overinflated at worst and actual Affordable Care Act (ACA) success stories at best, Republicans are sending a clear message to Americans: We must defend the sanctity of health insurance.
This powerful theme is extremely opportune, as long as cancellation notices are contradicting a promise the president made, Healthcare.gov is flagging and the ACA’s paid enrollment numbers are low. However, it becomes much more complicated as the site starts working and 2014 begins with millions of people enjoying health care coverage and subsidies that the GOP would be voting to take away.
This would effectively doom the “repeal” strategy Republicans have fixated on for years, argues Salon’s Brian Beutler:
Obamacare is driving policy cancellations right now, but it at least creates a coverage guarantee for those affected. Repeal without replace would impose a greater burden without providing any counterweight.
If they pass the Keep Your Health Plan Act this week, House Republicans will see their stylized sympathy for people whose policies have been canceled come into tension with their explicit desire to take Obamacare benefits away from many of the same people, and millions more.
Becoming the party that opposes all cancellations of insurance policies also completely undermines any Republican “plan” that might be an alternative to the ACA. “Such a starting position would make true market-oriented reform impossible,” explains The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein.
John McCain’s health care plan, one part of his platform conservatives love, would have ended health care tax exemptions for employers and employees. This would have likely resulted in millions and millions of Americans ending up in new plans. The Republican Study Committee has offered a “serious” Obamacare alternative that would try to end the system of employer-based health care, disrupting the current health care system far more than the ACA does.
Even as Republicans are vindictively leaping on any cancellation story, other right-wing groups are trying to spread the idea to people in their 20s to optout of the ACA, even though millions of younger Americans can get coverage for free. One Koch-funded group, Generation Opportunity, brought its scary Uncle Sam and some models to tailgate before the University of Miami-Virginia Tech football game to let the students know that opting out of health insurance is, as the kids say, cool.
So health insurance is lame and having it changed in any way whatsoever is the greatest atrocity an American can be expected to suffer.
Republicans have been fine with these kinds of contradictions throughout President Obama’s time in office. The deficit suddenly became a problem on January 21, 2009. Tea Partiers demanded that we get our gubmint hands off their Medicare. The GOP won the House by campaigning against cuts to Medicare that they then included in Paul Ryan’s budget.
But there is evidence that efforts to actually take something away from Americans results in a substantial backlash.
The wave of voting restrictions across the South after the 2010 election was mostly blocked by the federal courts empowered by a Voting Rights Act that had not yet been gutted. But Republicans did successfully restrict early voting in the crucial swing states of Ohio and Florida. Despite this, or as a result of it, African-American turnout hit an all-time high in the 2012 election.
North Carolina passed some of the most radical voting restrictions on students in the nation and local Republicans specifically attempted to block Elizabeth City State University senior Montravias King from running for city council where he was attending college. Their efforts backfired.
“On October 9, King was elected to the Elizabeth City city council, winning the most votes of any candidate,” The Nation‘s Ari Berman reported. “He’s now the youngest elected official in the state.”
Students must have figured: If voting weren’t important, why would Republicans be doing everything they can to stop me from doing it?
In only 10 states, 444,000 people have already signed up for Medicaid. The fact that the GOP would deny them and about five million more poor people health insurance isn’t big news for a couple of reasons.
First, they’re poor. Second, these people haven’t had anything taken away from them — yet.
But on January 1, the story changes. Suddenly Republicans will be trying to do exactly what they’re accusing President Obama of: taking away health insurance with nothing to replace it. And thanks to the GOP, now it’s clear what a terrible thing that is to do to a person.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 12, 2013
“What’s The Matter With Motherhood?”: Hey Conservatives, Health Coverage Including Maternity Care Is A Right-To-Life Issue
If you’re a conservative strongly opposed to abortion, shouldn’t you want to give all the help you can to women who want to bring their children into the world? In particular, wouldn’t you hope they’d get the proper medical attention during and after their pregnancy?
This would seem a safe assumption, which is why it ought to be astonishing that conservatives are positively obsessed with trashing the Affordable Care Act’s regulation requiring insurance policies to include maternity coverage.
Never mind that we who are lucky enough to have health insurance end up paying to cover conditions we may never suffer ourselves. We all want to avoid cancer, but we don’t begrudge those who do get it when the premiums we pay into our shared insurance pools help them receive care.
Yet critics of Obamacare apparently think there is something particularly odious when a person who might not have a baby pays premiums to assist someone who does. It’s true that men cannot have babies, although it is worth mentioning that they do play a rather important role in their creation. In any event, it is hardly very radical to argue that society is better off when kids are born healthy to healthy moms.
Yet the conservatives’ ire over this issue knows no bounds.
“And so what if a health policy lacks maternity care?” wrote Deroy Murdoch on National Review’s Web site , the italics on that impatient “so what” being his. “Not all women want to bear more children — or any children at all. . . . And how about lesbians who do not want kids, and are highly unlikely to become pregnant accidentally?” It’s touching, actually, to see such concern for lesbians in a conservative publication. Behold the miracles Obamacare already has called forth.
On “Fox News Sunday” this month, host Chris Wallace was very worked up as he pressed Zeke Emanuel, a former health-care adviser to President Obama, over how unfair it is that a single woman with a 24-year-old son would be forced to pay for such coverage. “She’s not going to have any more children,” Wallace said with great certainty. “She’s not going to need maternity services.”
Writing on the FreedomWorks Web site, Julie Borowski declared, unhappily: “Maternity coverage will be mandatory — even for men. . . . Adding coverage for things that some people do not want will only increase insurance costs for everyone .”
Well, not exactly. But you get the drift. Who knew that supporting motherhood was suddenly controversial?
All of which ought to present members of the right-to-life movement with a challenge. In the name of consistency, they need to break with their conservative allies and insist that maternity coverage be included in all health-care plans. Shouldn’t those who want to prevent abortion be in the forefront of making the case that a woman will be far more likely to choose to have her baby if she knows that both she and her child will get regular medical attention?
For too many politicians on the right, what they say about abortion is at odds with what they say about so many other issues. They speak with great concern and compassion for the unborn, and I respect that. You don’t have to support making abortion illegal to think that there are too many of them in the United States.
To their great credit, some right-to-lifers really do follow the logic of their position and support expanded health coverage, food stamps, the Women, Infants and Children feeding program and other measures that help parents after their kids are born. This reflects a consistent ethic.
But many other conservatives would make abortion illegal and leave it at that. Thus we have the spectacle in Texas of right-wing politicians trying to make it as difficult as possible for a woman to obtain an abortion while proudly blocking the state’s participation in the expansion of Medicaid to cover the near-poor. Does it serve the cause of life to keep more than 1.8 million Texans from getting health insurance?
President Obama apologized last week after all the criticisms of what’s happening in the individual insurance market. But where is the outrage over governors and legislators flatly cutting off so many lower-income Americans from access to Medicaid? The Urban Institute estimates that 6 million to 7 million people will be deprived of coverage in states that are refusing to accept the expansion.
If health coverage — yes, including maternity care — isn’t a right-to-life issue, I don’t know what is.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 10, 2013
“The Obamacare Bait And Switch”: America’s Beloved Health Insurance Industry Demonstrates Why We Needed Reform All Along
So here’s my advice: If you’re somebody who’s smoking hot about the Big Lie of the Affordable Care Act — you know, how President Obama told everybody that if they liked their current health insurance policy they could keep it — do yourself a favor. Avoid the county fair midway.
Because if you go, you’re apt to encounter a quick-handed scoundrel running a shell game, and that boy will take your money. Doubtless Obama should have said almost everybody could keep their current plan, or that 95 percent could, but he apparently found that too, um, subtle for the campaign trail.
So now old Mitt “47-percent” Romney gets to call him a liar.
But while your attention’s fixed on the president’s “mendacity,” and “paternalism,” to quote one characteristically overwrought scribe, America’s beloved health insurance industry is demonstrating exactly why we needed reform all along. Certain companies are taking advantage of the political confusion to sell people in the “individual market” far more expensive plans than they need and blame “Obamacare.”
As usual, the nation’s esteemed political media have gone along for the ride. CBS News, rapidly morphing into Fox News Lite, presented the heartbreaking tale of one Diane Barrette, a 56 year-old Floridian who got a letter from her insurance company cancelling her $54 a month policy and offering a replacement for $591 a month—a lot of money to her.
CBS correspondent Jan Crawford, deemed smart enough to cover the U.S. Supreme Court, took Barrette’s story at face value. The idea that health insurance worth having could be purchased at a monthly cost of less than a steak dinner apparently failed to arouse her reporter’s curiosity.
Poor Barrette choked up telling CBS her story, leading to several appearances on Fox News itself.
Had CBS done elementary due diligence, they’d have learned why Ms. Barrette’s plan was so cheap. Reporters who did learned that among other shortcomings, it didn’t cover hospitalization. In reality, she had no health insurance at all. A serious accident or illness might have bankrupted her—precisely the kind of ripoff the Affordable Care Act makes illegal.
Also, Barrette was taking the insurance company’s word about the cost of a replacement policy. Writing for BillMoyers.com, Joshua Holland ran her numbers through Kaiser Permanente’s subsidy calculator. With assistance from Obamacare, she can have a real policy covering preventive care and hospitalization for an out-of-pocket cost of $97 monthly, or a more generous “Silver” level plan for $209.
Now she calls it “a blessing in disguise.”
In short, CBS News couldn’t have gotten the story more backward had they tried. For its part, NBC News featured Los Angeles real estate agent Deborah Cavallaro, whose similar experience led her to conclude that “there’s nothing affordable about the Affordable Care Act.”
However, LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik found that Cavallaro had simply failed to consult Covered California, the state’s health plan exchange. When he did so, he quickly found that “better plans than she has now are available for her to purchase today, some of them for less money.”
No doubt some among the three to five percent of Americans whose individual health care policies have been cancelled are experiencing genuine sticker shock. However, nobody should take his insurance company’s word at face value without double-checking—a task admittedly made harder by Healthcare.gov’s website meltdown.
See, when you read a story about a couple like Dean and Mary Lou Griffin of Chadd’s Ford, PA, who told the Associated Press they’d expected to be able to keep the policy they bought three years ago, what reporters aren’t asking is where they’d gotten that idea.
From President Obama? Possibly.
More likely, however, from an insurance broker. See, all providers have known about new coverage standards ever since the Affordable Care Act passed in March 2010. Since then some have clearly been “churning” the market, offering low-risk, healthy customers bargain policies they knew perfectly well would no longer pass muster come January 1, 2014.
So now come the inevitable cancellation letters, and guess what? If they were lucky—and health-wise the Griffins have been fortunate—here comes the bad news. “We’re buying insurance that we will never use and can’t possibly ever benefit from,” Dean Griffin complains. “We’re basically passing on a benefit to other people who are not otherwise able to buy basic insurance.”
Two thoughts: One, don’t get cocky, you never know.
Two, boo-hoo-hoo. You can afford it.
Meanwhile, Dylan Scott at Talking Points Memo has documented companies sending “misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into…more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces.” Authorities in four states have disciplined Humana affiliates for exactly that.
It’s a classic bait and switch: luring customers with unsustainably low rates, and then blaming the White House for their chicanery.
That’s basically why we needed Obamacare to begin with.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, November 6, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 