“Privatization Of Medicare”: Jeb Bush Now Says He Wouldn’t ‘Phase Out’ Medicare. What He Would Do Is Just As Wrong
It had to happen sooner or later: a Republican presidential candidate says something suggesting he’d destroy Medicare, the Democrats jump all over him, and he backtracks, saying that’s not what he meant and in fact he only wants to strengthen it. This time it’s Jeb Bush, who said the other day that though we can keep Medicare around for the people who are currently on it, “we need to figure out a way to phase out this program for others and move to a new system that allows them to have something – because they’re not going to have anything.”
This is an old argument from Republicans, one they also use to justify attacks on Social Security: the program is doomed anyway, so we should go ahead and privatize it. The argument is completely wrong with regard to Social Security, and the truth about Medicare is that the program’s future is looking brighter and brighter — in no small part because of the Affordable Care Act. The argument Bush is making is ten years out of date.
Bush did try to walk back his statement a bit, saying the “phase out” part was taken out of context and he’s only talking about how we “reform our entitlement system.” Here’s his follow-up, which doesn’t change the essence of what he was arguing:
“It’s an actuarially unsound health care system,” said Bush, who said something must be done before the system burdens future generations with $50 billion of debt. “Social Security is an underfunded retirement system; people have put money into it, for sure.
“The people that are receiving these benefits, I don’t think that we should touch that; but your children and grandchildren are not going to get the benefit of this that they believe they’re going to get, or that you think they’re going to get, because the amount of money put in compared to the amount of money the system costs is wrong.”
Bush hasn’t yet released his plan to phase out/reform Medicare, but given these comments it seems likely he’ll embrace something like what Paul Ryan has been advocating for years. It involves changing Medicare from a guaranteed single-payer government insurance plan into a voucher plan, in which the government gives senior citizens a set amount of money with which they can go out and get private health insurance. It saves money by limiting the value of that voucher, so if it’s less than what coverage actually costs, well, tough luck. In that way, it eliminates the central promise of Medicare, which is that every American senior citizen will have health coverage.
We’ll await Jeb’s particulars, but I promise you that most of the GOP candidates will embrace some version of this plan, because that’s what the Republican consensus on Medicare is these days. And it’s always justified with the argument Jeb gives: because of skyrocketing costs the program is doomed, so privatization is the only way to make sure it’s there for your kids. But don’t worry, current seniors, we won’t touch your Medicare! Which is one of the ironies of their argument: the free market is supposed to make everything wonderful, but they fall all over themselves to promise senior citizens that they won’t disturb the big-government, socialist program that seniors love.
Now on to the cost question. As it happens, the Medicare Trustees just released their annual report on the future of the program. And as Kevin Drum noted, things are looking a lot sunnier than they were a few years ago:
Ten years ago, Medicare was a runaway freight train. Spending was projected to increase indefinitely, rising to 13 percent of GDP by 2080. This year, spending is projected to slow down around 2040, and reaches only 6 percent of GDP by 2090. Six percent! That’s half what we thought a mere decade ago. If that isn’t spectacular, I don’t know what is.
Those are projections for what’s going to happen decades from now, so things are doubtless going to change. But the presumption of the Republican argument is that Medicare is eventually going to eat the entire federal budget, and so we have no choice but to fundamentally alter it. And that’s just not true.
The other assumption they make is that the way to alter Medicare is simple: privatize it. But they’re wrong about this, too. Medicare is expensive, but that’s not because it’s an inefficient big-government program. In fact, Medicare is remarkably efficient, more so than private insurance. That’s because it benefits from economies of scale, and because it doesn’t have to spend money on things like marketing, underwriting, and big salaries for executives. The reason Medicare is expensive is that American health care is expensive, and it serves a lot of people. The retirement of the large Baby Boom generation is what’s producing its current funding challenges.
Let’s not forget that at the same time Republicans cry that Medicare is unaffordable and so must be dismantled, they fight any effort to actually lower costs in a rational way. For instance, they’re adamantly opposed to comparative effectiveness research, which involves looking at competing treatments and seeing which ones actually work better. That this isn’t something Medicare already takes into account sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. If there are two medications for a particular ailment that are equally effective, but one costs $100 a year and one costs $100,000 a year, wouldn’t it make sense for Medicare to 1) find that out, and 2) make coverage decisions accordingly? But Republicans have said no — Medicare should just pay for both, no matter what it costs.
Republicans also oppose the most significant effort to reduce Medicare costs in decades, something called the Affordable Care Act, which included all kinds of provisions meant to achieve this goal. Perhaps most critically, the law starts a move away from the fee-for-service model, in which doctors and hospitals make more money the more procedures they do, to a model where they get paid a single rate for treating a patient. Under the fee-for-service model, if your hospital screws up, you get an infection, and you have to get re-admitted, they make more money; the ACA actually punishes them for that, giving them a greater incentive to provide better and less expensive care.
But Republicans not only want to repeal the ACA, which means repealing all those kinds of payment provisions, they have nothing much to say about how, specifically, we might save money in Medicare. Their only answer is that if we privatize it, the magic of the market will produce savings. Of course, if that were true America would have the cheapest health care system in the advanced world, since ours is already more private than in any other similar country. And yet we don’t — ours is far and away the most expensive, and that’s precisely because the market has failed.
So to sum up, this is the Republican argument on Medicare: We absolutely can’t do anything in particular that would bring down the cost of Medicare, but the cost of Medicare is so outrageous that we have no choice but to privatize it.
When Jeb Bush and the other candidates talk about this subject, pay close attention to what they say. They’ll use the word “strengthen” a lot — we want to strengthen Medicare! They’ll tell seniors, who vote in great numbers, that they aren’t going to touch their precious Medicare. And they’ll ignore what we’ve learned in the last few years, talking as though things look just as bad as they did before the Affordable Care Act was passed and health care spending slowed. But the truth is that their solution is no solution at all.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, July 24, 2015
“Incessant Flailing”: GOP Peddles Hard The ‘Hillary Can’t Be Trusted’ Line
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is the runaway pick among voters when asked who among the presidential candidates is the most credible, honest and trustworthy, and even the most compassionate. Her rank on the voter trustworthy meter is far higher than that of Barack Obama and easily tops that of all other GOP presidential contenders. The problem with this is the AP-Ipsos poll that gave Hillary high marks on trustworthiness was taken in March, 2007.
The two big questions are: What happened in the eight years since that poll was taken and today to change voter’s attitudes on the trust issue toward Clinton? The other even bigger one is: Does this pose a real problem for Clinton’s campaign?
The trust issue and Hillary has been the sole fixation of the pollsters and they seem to crank out a new poll monthly hitting that theme. If one believes the barrage of polls, one comes away with the notion that voters, especially Democrats, simply don’t trust Hillary.
Playing up Clinton’s supposed free fall in integrity has been the one constant in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign. The Republican National Committee early on put Hillary dead in its hit sights to do everything possible to render her candidacy stillborn even before it officially became a candidacy. It not so subtly recycled the old trumped up scandals of the past from Whitewater to the Lewinsky scandal. It then cranked out a sneering “poor Hillary” video that touted Hillary’s quip that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. It then intimated that she shook down poor cash strapped universities for her alleged outrageous speaking fees.
There was little doubt that the first chance the GOP got it would seize on a real or manufactured Obama foreign policy flub and make Clinton their hard target. The Benghazi debacle seemed to be just the right flub. In August 2013, the Republican National Committee rammed the attack home with a half-minute clip of her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony earlier that year on the Benghazi attack.
The aim as always was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate. Republicans got what they wanted when their phony accusations against her of cover-up and incompetence got tons of media chatter and focus and raised the first shadow of public doubt. The GOP then tirelessly searched for something else that could ramp up more public doubt about Clinton’s honesty. It didn’t take long to find.
This time it got two for the price of one. Congressional Republicans jubilantly waved a fresh batch of Clinton emails to the media, claiming that it proved that she deliberately mislead Congressional investigators, and the public, on what she knew and how she handled or allegedly mishandled the Benghazi debacle. This ties in with the GOP’s and the media’s incessant flailing of Clinton for supposedly hiding, deleting or misusing her private emails for some sinister and nefarious reason during her stint as Secretary of State. There will be more to come on this rest assured.
Meanwhile, the GOP mockingly ridicules Clinton’s attempt to reimage her campaign and herself as a hands, on in the trenches with the people, caring, feeling candidate as just more of the Clinton con, and an ineffectual one to boot. The supposed proof of that is to finger point her plunging favorability numbers in the polls. Of course, what’s conveniently omitted from the Hillary smear is that every one of her GOP rivals is doing an even lousier job trying to convince voters that they are any more “trustworthy” than Clinton. In the case of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and especially Jeb Bush, their integrity meter score with the public fall somewhere between Watergate Richard Nixon and that of a used car salesman.
There’s more. A USA Poll and an ABC-Washington Post poll found that not only does Clinton have solid numbers in terms of approval with voters, but bags big time general favorability numbers from Democrats. This is even more impressive given the spirited, and populist issues run that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is making at Hillary.
It’s certainly true that voters do want a president that they can trust to say and do the right thing both on the issues and in their dealing with the public. But they also want a president who is experienced, well-versed, thoughtful, and firm on dealing with the inevitable crises that will confront the country, here and abroad. There’s absolutely no hint in the polls or anywhere else that the general public has shut down on Clinton in this vital area of public policy. But this won’t stop the GOP and those in the media obsessed with depicting Hillary as two-faced from peddling that line.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Associate Editor of New America Media; The Blog, The Huffington Post, July 19,2015
“Every Candidate Should Have A Plan”: Structural Racism Needs To Be A Presidential Campaign Issue
This year, as with every other year, nearly every presidential candidate is white, with the only exceptions being long shots in the mushrooming Republican field. Most candidates are making at least rhetorical efforts to present themselves as allies in the increasingly amplified struggle for black liberation. Hillary Clinton has spoken forcefully of a universal voter registration plan, and her husband told the NAACP this week that the 1994 crime law he signed in his first term as president “made the problem worse,” jailing too many for too long. Rand Paul, an advocate of prison sentencing reform, has embraced Martin Luther King, Jr.’s frame of “two Americas.” Last month, Ben Carson, the only black candidate, published an op-ed after the Charleston church murders, writing, “Not everything is about race in this country. But when it is about race, then it just is.” On July 2, Rick Perry made a speech that is as close to an apology to black voters for ignoring them as a Republican may deliver this entire election season.
Republicans aren’t stopping there. They announced a “Committed to Community” initiative earlier this week, a partnership with black broadcasting giant Radio One to make a direct appeal to African American voters, who turned out at a higher percentage than white voters in 2012. They may very well be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but you’ll forgive me if I have my doubts that they suddenly realize, after generations of the “Southern Strategy,” that black voters matter.
I suspect it isn’t the party’s sudden rediscovery of a conscience that’s behind this. I think it’s this past year. Friday marks one year since NYPD police officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner on a Staten Island sidewalk. The death of the 43-year-old father of six from a supposedly prohibited chokehold was captured on oft-played video, and his pleading— “I can’t breathe!” over and over, until he suffocated—became a mantra that energized a movement. #BlackLivesMatter dates back to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, but Garner’s death last July began a year in which Americans unaware of how fragile and frightening living a black life can be could no longer ignore reality. And it set a template for how we would come to digest all of the violence and injustices done in silent service of structural racism, which continues to survive as the deaths mount.
Sandra Bland took a road trip to Texas last week to take a job, and instead became a hashtag. It happened over the course of a weekend. This is a process we’re terribly familiar with: A black person finds her or himself in an encounter with police that proves injurious, harassing, or, all too often, fatal—and if we’re lucky, someone has a camera on it. It has become formulaic.
A bystander took video of the 28-year-old Chicago native’s Friday arrest for allegedly not signaling before making a lane change. Bland, who reportedly had just landed a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, is heard questioning their rough treatment, which went unreported by the arresting officers. “You just slammed my head into the ground,” she tells an officer. “Do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear!”
Police found Bland dead in her jail cell on Monday morning, allegedly suffocated by a garbage bag. There are a lot of practical reasons to question the law enforcement narrative on this, but a year of seeing what we’ve seen is more than enough to make anyone suspicious not only of what the cops say, but about whether any of them will ever suffer any consequences for it.
We’ve become familiar with this pattern because abuse and death resonates, first across social media and then ricocheting through traditional media with an urgency that can feel discombobulating to those unaccustomed to seeing black lives mattering to people who aren’t living them. Increased media attention means people remember names. Before they would have forgotten them or not even bothered to learn. Justice is sought where shoulders once simply shrugged. Media organizations like the Guardian and the Washington Post count those killed by police, doing the job a government should.
We haven’t gotten the candidate statements on Bland’s case yet, but they’ll come. The remarks will be taciturn and consoling, and will call vaguely for change. But we need to demand more from each and every presidential candidate, and they will need to offer more than rhetoric. The violence has not slowed. The inequity has not lessened. It’s just lain bare with each new death, with every numbing video. We’ll never end racism and racial discrimination. But we can make policies to end the ways racism infects the very structure of American life. Those policies need to be on the platform of every presidential candidate.
If you look at a typical presidential campaign site under a heading like “Issues,” you’ll see that there isn’t a bullet point that lists a candidate’s plans to attack the complicated issue of structural racism with specific steps. This should change. And in this, candidates can take a lesson from President Obama.
His administration, even as it nears its end, recently offered an example of how a politician can chalk up wins against structural racism. Two weeks ago, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro announced that previously unenforced Fair Housing Act rules would now become requirements. As the Los Angeles Times reported, HUD will now require towns and cities to study patterns of segregation and how they are linked to access to jobs, high-quality schools, and public transportation—then submit specific goals for improving fair access to these resources. This is a policy, not a speech.
It is not an empty appeal to voters. It is not telling them, as Perry did, that the poor, brutalized, and marginalized amongst us are that way because they had faulty political leadership. That is avoidance, perpetrated by people who would have us mistake political courage for actual courage.
Structural racism needs to be a campaign issue. It needs to be something every 2016 candidate is asked about on the trail, in debates, in town halls, and hell, even at the local ice cream shop. Even if they can’t offer firm plans this summer, someone running to be the de facto leader of her or his party should at lease seize the opportunity to shape the Democratic or Republican agenda on this issue.
If ending structural racism is a priority for either party, there is no need to dance around the issue. Because right now, the most a lot of families can hope for their loved ones is that they manage to navigate a country that clearly doesn’t care much for their bodies or their lives. If they can’t, the only kind of justice they’ll see is financial. (On Monday, Garner’s family reached a settlement with New York City for $5.9 million.)
A year after Eric Garner’s death and mere days after Sandra Bland’s, our presidential candidates cannot deny America’s racial realities. If you’re running for president, you can no longer plead ignorance. You’ll have to confront it.
By: Jamil Smith, Senior Editor, The New Republic, July 17, 2015
“Bush ‘Woefully Misinformed’ On Overtime Policy”: The Economy, In Other Words, Is Not Bush’s Strong Suit
With Congress unwilling to pass meaningful economic measures, President Obama’s recently unveiled overtime policy is one of the year’s biggest stories on the domestic economy. Jeb Bush, not surprisingly, doesn’t like it, but he may not fully understand it, either.
To briefly recap, under the status quo, there’s an annual income threshold for mandatory overtime: $23,660. Those making more than that can be classified by employers as “managers” who are exempt from overtime rules. The Obama administration’s Labor Department has spent the last several months working on the new plan, which raises the threshold to $50,440 – more than double the current level.
The policy doesn’t just nibble around the edges; its scope includes roughly 5 million American workers. NBC’s Kristin Donnelly reported the administration’s move constitutes “the most ambitious intervention in the wage economy in at least a decade.”
Campaigning in Iowa this week, Jeb Bush said the policy would result in “less overtime pay” and “less wages earned.” The Guardian did some fact-checking.
Numerous economists attacked Bush’s statement, calling him woefully misinformed. And several studies on the rule contradict Bush’s assertion that the overtime rules would “lessen the number of people working”.
Daniel Hamermesh, a University of Texas labor economist, said: “He’s just 100% wrong,” adding that “there will be more overtime pay and more total earnings” and “there’s a huge amount of evidence employers will use more workers”.
Indeed, a Goldman Sachs study estimated that employers would hire 120,000 more workers in response to Obama’s overtime changes. And a similar study commissioned by the National Retail Federation – a fierce opponent of the proposed overtime rules – estimated that as a result of the new salary threshold, employers in the restaurant and retail industries would hire 117,500 new part-time workers.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey added that Bush “should be embarrassed about how misinformed he was.” Noting that the Republican presidential candidate also said Obama’s policy would also prohibit many bonuses, Eisenbrey added, “All of that is exactly wrong – and pretty much nonsense.”
On a surface level, it’s problematic that Bush would flub the issue so poorly, but it’s even more significant in the context of related confusion about economic policy.
Remember, the Florida Republican remains deeply committed to 4% GDP growth – a target no president has reached in the post-WWII era – despite the fact that the number was basically pulled out of thin air.
Bush picked the growth goal because, as he sees it, four is a “round number.” The fact remains, however, that this is “backed by zero substantive analysis of any kind.”
The former governor still sees himself as some kind of economic expert, thanks to Florida’s growth in the 1990s, but as we’ve discussed before, whether Bush is prepared to admit it or not, Florida’s economic growth during his two terms was the result of a housing bubble. In fact, Paul Krugman accurately described it as “the mother of all housing bubbles – and when the bubble burst (luckily for Jeb! just after he left office) it promptly wiped out 900,000” of the 1.3 million jobs created when Bush was in the governor’s office.
The economy, in other words, is not Bush’s strong suit.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 17, 2015
“Jeb Is Headed For Little Bighorn”: If You Know Neither Yourself Nor Your Enemy, You Will Always Endanger Yourself
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu provided the following wisdom:
So, it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
When it comes to Jeb Bush’s understanding of Donald Trump, let’s just say that he really doesn’t have a clue.
Now, those close to his campaign say, Bush, who has taken on the mantle of frontrunner, is bracing for the possibility of a presidential debate pile-on — with Trump leading the charge.
Gaming out how Trump — a bombastic figure who refuses to abide by the usual rules of political decorum — will present himself has become a growing subject of speculation in Bush’s world.
During one recent phone call with a political ally, Bush pointedly asked about the surging real estate mogul. What, the friend recalled the former governor wondering out loud, was behind Trump’s antics, and what was he trying to accomplish?
I don’t think Jeb is alone in being perplexed about Donald Trump’s motives for running for president, but if he doesn’t know what’s driving Trump he’s going to have a hell of a time dodging his hand grenades.
“Trump presents a challenge for Bush because he’s a hand grenade,” said Nelson Warfield, a longtime Republican strategist who has prepared a number of candidates for debates. “His people understand that and will be prepared for anything that comes their way.”
As the Aug. 6 debate grows closer, some Republicans are relishing the prospect of Trump tearing the bark off the former governor — or, at the very least, trying to trip him up. “Trump has one target and one target only,” said an adviser to a rival GOP candidate. “He’s going to bring a lawn mower for Bush.”
Maybe Trump really is best understood as a hand grenade, in which case the damage he does will be somewhat equally dispersed but will also (by random chance) injure some more than others. On the other hand, maybe Trump is better understood as a heat-seeking missile who is locked in on Jeb, and really only on Jeb. If that’s the case, he should be a little more predictable and easier to parry.
In this Politico piece, we can see that advisers to rival GOP candidates are hoping that Trump is in this latter category, and it could be that they are correct.
Now, I know that politicians will say anything and we’re fools to take many of their utterances at face value. But if Jeb believes any part of the following, he doesn’t know his party and may not even know himself:
If Trump is a danger for Bush, some close to the former governor say, he also presents opportunity. The debate will give Bush a national platform to take on Trump in strong terms, presenting himself as a mature, substantive leader who rises above toxic discourse. Bush may have hinted at that approach during a campaign stop in Iowa on Tuesday. “Whether it’s Donald Trump or Barack Obama, their rhetoric of divisiveness is wrong,” the former governor said. “A Republican will never win by striking fear in people’s hearts.”
Jeb should take a look around and even listen to himself as one Republican after another tells the public that we’re all going to die because the president has reached an agreement with Iran on their nuclear program. We’re all going to die if even one prisoner at Gitmo is brought here to stand trial or serve time. We’re all going to die if we don’t invade Iraq and take away their WMD. We’re all going to die if we don’t reinvade Iraq and now Syria to deal with ISIS. We’re all going to die if we give one inch to the commies in Korea or Vietnam or Angola or Cuba or Nicaragua.
And if we’re not going to die, then our culture and our religion are going to die. Our freedom is going to die. Our guns will be confiscated. Our children will be indoctrinated.
Striking fear into the hearts of Americans is pretty much all Fox News does, all day long, every day. There are almost two dozen Republican candidates for the presidency, and every single one of them is out there saying that our whole way of life is going to be destroyed.
Go ahead and try to find me the positive, Reaganesque messaging from these folks. I know Jeb aspires to be that guy, but he’s just not. And he’s going to get his ass kicked in the primaries if he doesn’t begin to understand why the crap Trump is pulling has launched him into a lead in the polls among Republicans.
Dubya once cracked this nut with a “compassionate conservative” gambit that was about as fraudulent as daddy’s thousand points of light. But the current mood of the Republican base is the farthest thing there is away from “compassionate.”
Does Jeb understand what made his father successful (exploiting amnestied black rapists) and his brother successful (buy duct tape, plastic sheeting, and bottled water!)?
Does he know himself and his political clan well enough to understand what needs to be done to capture the hearts of the Republican right?
Because, if he doesn’t, he will always endanger himself when he goes into these debates. And it isn’t only Trump that he needs to worry about.
He’s going to be on a stage with nine other Republicans, none of whom are under the misimpression that the base seeks “a mature, substantive leader who rises above toxic discourse” or whom believe that “the rhetoric of divisiveness is wrong.”
If Sun Tzu was right, Jeb could be headed for Little Bighorn.
By: Martin Longman, Web Editor, The Washington Monthly; Ten Miles Square, July 16, 2015
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