“The Rising”: Return Of The Big GOP Medicare Lie
The participant’s in last night’s GOP presidential debate once again took the opportunity to pretend that the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) put a massive dent in Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program.
Michele Bachmann told us that “We know that President Obama stole over $500 billion out of Medicare to switch it over to Obamacare.” Mitt Romney intoned “He cut Medicare by $500 billion. This is a Democratic president the liberal, so to speak, cut Medicare.”
Yeah…except that nobody stole anything and Medicare was not cut by $500 billion.
Here are the facts:
For starters, nobody cut anything from the Medicare budget in the health care reform bill. The actions taken in the legislation are designed to slow the growth of Medicare spending without cutting benefits. Further, not one cent that would have gone to Medicare is somehow being shifted over to a program created by Obamacare (for first time readers, I readily use the term Obamacare because I believe that this name will ultimately stand as an honor to the President who made it happen.)
With respect to the infamous $500 billion, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has made it clear that the bulk of the projected savings will come from two primary sources—ending the subsidies to health insurance companies who offer Medicare Advantage programs and reining in the growth of payments to physicians. The remainder will, hopefully, come from cutting back on the waste and fraud that have long been rampant in the Medicare system.
Let’s begin with the Medicare Advantage program. Established via the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. the program—a Bush/GOP creation—was ostensibly invented to encourage Medicare beneficiaries to gravitate towards privately operated insurance programs pursuant to the theory that the private sector could do a better job of delivering care to our seniors than the government.
I say ‘ostensibly’ because the true purpose was to create a windfall for the private insurance companies who have done so much for so long for so many Republican elected officials.
The way the script played out, the private insurance companies said that they would only be able to paricipate in the program if, and only if, the government gave them a head start by agreeing to subsidize their “start up costs” until the year 2010.
As a result of the deal, Medicare found itself paying, on average, an 11% surcharge on medical services and procedures provided by Medicare Advantage plans. This was enough to guarantee the insurance providers a tidy profit fully comprised of the government subsidies, creating one of the greatest examples of corporate welfare in the history of the nation.
Not surprisingly, the health insurers took advantage of the windfall to attract customers by offering very low premium charges, not to mention free gym memberships, one pair of eyeglasses per year, spa treatments, zero co-pays and assorted other benefits not available to those who opted to take their Medicare directly from the government. And why not? The insurers don’t need to make a penny from those who were insured as each customer guarantees them an 11 percent return on any medical benefit receieved courtesy of the Medicare program. Thus, they are more than happy to offer a free toaster to anyone who agrees to sign up.
What Obamacare did was put an end to the subsidies, thereby reducing future costs to the program by billions while continuing to provide Medicare beneficiaries with the benefits promised.
By any standards, this was a no-brainer in terms of reigning in the growing costs of Medicare and creating a system that is fair to all beneficiaries.
Now, the doctors.
This gets a bit tricky and, to be honest, I don’t really believe that these savings will ever materialize.
At the heart of the discussion is a formula that was designed during the Clinton Administration called the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, or SGR. The approach was created in an attempt to control Medicare spending for physician services with the idea being that the yearly increase in the expense per Medicare beneficiary should be tied to the growth in GDP. Thus, when actual Medicare spending exceeds the annual target in a given year, the SGR requires that physicians, and other system providers, must take a cut in order to bring the spending back in line with the annual spending targets.
The docs, understandably, do not like the idea of taking less in their Medicare payments. As a result, Congress has been delaying the cuts for years, constantly rolling them over into the next year at which time they roll them over again and again. Were Congress to ever stop delaying the SGR cuts, the physicians would find themselves feeling the cumulative pain of the delays with a one time Medicare rate reduction in excess of 20 percent.
These cuts are factored into the Medicare savings projections, along with hoped for savings to come by encouraging physicians to try some different approaches to practicing medicine.
Will this ever happen? Probably not.
So, while a skeptic can argue that these projected savings may never materialize, one cannot argue that this is, somehow, a cut to the Medicare program.
The bottom line is that there is nothing in the ACA that takes anything away from Medicare beneficiaries, now or in the future. Yet, the GOP continues to do its best to scare the hell out of seniors, the most reliable voter block in the nation.
We need to take this very seriously.
If the 2010 elections taught us anything, it is that a frightened voter population will do some crazy things. So, it’s on us to make sure that our grandparents and parents understand that Repubican fear peddlers are selling nothing but lies and that falling for the lies could result in the end of Medicare as we know it if the Republicans are permitted to gain full control of the government.
If you would like more information on this to share with family and friends, just let me know. The effort to mislead our senior citizens worked well in 2010. We simply cannot permit it to work again in 2012.
By: Rick Ungar, Mother Jones, September 13, 2011
Former Sen. Phil “Mental Recession” Phil Gramm Endorses His “Protege” Rick Perry
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) yesterday jumped in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, saying that “it is time to get America working again.” “I will work every day to make Washington, DC, as inconsequential in your lives as I can, and free our families, small businesses and states from a burdensome and costly federal government so they can create, innovate and succeed,” he said. And Perry quickly picked up the endorsementof former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX):
Former senator and current banker Phil Gramm of Texas — well-connected to big donors but controversial for his role in preventing tighter regulation of Wall Street — told The Huffington Post yesterday that he is endorsing his former student and political protege, Texas Gov. Rick Perry...”I’m for Rick and I will do what I can to help,” Gramm said in an interview in Detroit. “He has been an effective governor. He is a determined guy from a small town who knows how to get things done.”
In 2008, Gramm, who was advising Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) presidential campaign (and was floated as McCain’s choice for Treasury Secretary) gained notoriety for saying that the country was “a nation of whiners” that was only in a “mental recession.”
But Gramm’s legacy goes much deeper than that. In 2001, he tucked the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into an unrelated, 11,000 page appropriations bill. That act ensured that the huge market in over-the-counter derivatives stayed unregulated, laying the groundwork for the 2008 financial crisis (and the implosions of AIG and Lehman Brothers). He also believes there should be no minimum wage and has derided the working poor by saying, “we’re the only nation in the world where all our poor people are fat.”
Perry was a student of Gramm’s at Texas A&M, and when Perry became governor “Gramm and his bank pushed a controversial proposal to allow the company to take out insurance polices on teachers and other workers, even though the workers themselves would not benefit.” If Gramm’s support is any indication, Perry’s zeal for financial deregulation will know no bounds.
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, August 14, 2011
Republican Preachers: Believing What You Know Ain’t True
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain makes a stinging observation on the overtly religious. “Faith is when you believe something you know ain’t true.” This is a perfect description of the religious asylum that is now the Republican Party and the tortured gospel they are spreading all over the country. Virtually the entire barnyard of their presidential candidates are preaching a mix of born again religious revivalism and brutal 19th century industrial capitalism, that they “know ain’t even remotely true.”
By and large these are not genetically stupid people. But the political trash talking they feel obligated to serve up to the Tea Party Gods–Rush Limbaugh and the inquisitors at Fox–has degenerated into a competition of who can do the best impression of an absolute lunatic. Rick Perry is preaching virtual secession from the union, while holding prayer vigils for God to solve our problems. By what twisted logic does contempt for the federal government and even secession equate to patriotism? Someone please show me where the founding fathers advocated prayer as the vehicle for solving a national debt crisis?
Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have flip flopped on virtually every position they ever espoused so that their insanity titers can match Michelle Bachmann’s. I’ve met with Jon Huntsman on more than one occasion regarding environmental issues in Utah. He was a reasonable moderate Republican as my state’s governor and appeared on TV ads three years ago exhorting the entire country to act on the climate crisis. He did that because he respected the warnings of our climate scientists. Now he says we can’t deal with global warming in a depressed economy. He knows perfectly well that those same scientists are warning that if we don’t act on it right now, we condemn our children to a brutal, dangerous and likely unlivable world. Newt Gingrich? He appeared on national TV ads with Nancy Pelosi saying that he agreed on the urgency to deal with the climate crisis. Now he looks like a Keystone Cop, tripping over his own feet in full speed reverse.
Sarah Palin? Oh, never mind. Rick Santorum? According to him the world’s scientists are all in on a conspiracy with Al Gore. Really Rick? That conspiracy would have to have started in 1824 when the greenhouse gas phenomenon was first described by the French scientist Joseph Fourier. It would have to have involved scores of scientists in the 1800s like John Tyndall of the Royal Institute of Great Britain, George Marsh, the founder of the Smithsonian Institute, and hundreds of scientists in the 1900s like 1903 Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius. The conspiracy would now have to involve virtually the entire world’s scientific community. That makes sense to you, Rick? Really?
Almost as irritating is the chorus sung over and over by Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and 99% of Republican Congressmen proudly declaring their Huckleberry Finn type faith that an unfettered free market is the only way to create to millions of new jobs. “Stop choking businesses with excessive regulations!” they chant. All businesses, all regulations. Really, Mitch? Never mind that it was precisely the elimination of, inadequacy of, or lack of enforcement of federal regulation that allowed Wall St. to drag the economy to the edge of the apocalypse and the very reason why there are no jobs. Never mind that it was poor regulation and free market cost cutting that brought us the Deep Water Horizon, Kalamazoo River, and now Yellowstone River oil spills. 1,800 oil spills have occurred in this country in the last five years totaling 16 million gallons of oil contaminating our land and water. And Mitt, you want regulators to get off the backs of the oil companies? Really?
Never mind that it was inadequate federal oversight and greedy, unfettered capitalism on steroids that allowed Massey Energy to commit manslaughter on 29 coal miners last year. Hey, Eric just what jobs are created by paring down our already bare bones federal food inspection? Will even more outbreaks of e-coli and salmonella in peanut butter, spinach, eggs, cantaloupe, sprouts and hamburger be counted as just collateral blessings from unleashing the free market? We certainly don’t want to pay for inspection of imported sea food from Japan because a little radioactivity in your tuna fish and scallops would probably just make it taste a little more crunchy.
Hey Newt, what jobs will be created by eviscerating the EPA and their enforcement of the Clean Air Act besides morticians and health care providers? Michelle, so you’re comfortable with eliminating money for bridge inspectors from the National Transportation Safety Board because the one that collapsed in your home state in 2007 only killed 13 people, and that’s a small price to pay for that warm, orgasmic tingle only the free market can give?
Lets certainly get regulators off the backs of the pharmaceutical industry because other than the millions of people who have been killed or injured by Phen-Fen, Vioxx, Avandia, Bextra, Cylert, Baycol, Palladone, Trasylol, Tylenol, Darvocet, Heparin and all the drugs now made with ingredients from China without any real standards or controls–i.e. most of them–there’s no reason to think an unregulated free market won’t work out just fine. Really, Sarah? So if defective and tainted drugs weed out the weak among us, that’s just the beauty of the Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman world view?
The entire middle class is struggling with unemployment, under employment, mounting debt, lost pensions, mortgages foreclosed or underwater, and you want to undo even the pathetic protections of the 2010 Consumer Protection Act and put Elizabeth Warren’s head on a platter? Really, Speaker Boehner? That’s the job elixir the middle class so desperately need?
As with most religions the Church of Unfettered Capitalism doesn’t have to make sense in order to thrive. But it does need preachers at the pulpit exhorting us to “believe in things that we know ain’t true” and the Republican Party can’t get enough of them. Huckleberry Finn would be so proud.
By: Brian Moench, CommonDreams.org, July 9, 2011
Tea-pocrisy Is Not Particularly Complicated
Michele Bachmann, at her announcement speech today, offering an extended paean to the Tea Party:
I am here in Waterloo, Iowa to announce today: We can win in 2012, and we will. Our voice has been growing louder and stronger. And it is made up of Americans from all walks of life like a three-legged stool. It’s the peace through strength Republicans, and I’m one of them. It’s fiscal conservatives, and I’m one of them, and it’s social conservatives, and I’m one of them. It’s the Tea Party movement, and I’m one of them.
The liberals, and to be clear I’m NOT one of them, want you to think the Tea Party is the Right Wing of the Republican Party. But it’s not. It’s made up of disaffected Democrats, independents, people who’ve never been political a day in their life, libertarians, Republicans. We’re people who simply want America back on the right track again.
The Los Angeles Times yesterday, revealing some very un-Tea-Party-like behavior from the Bachmann family:
Rep. Michele Bachmann has been propelled into the 2012 presidential contest in part by her insistent calls to reduce federal spending, a pitch in tune with the big-government antipathy gripping many conservatives.
But the Minnesota Republican and her family have benefited personally from government aid, an examination of her record and finances shows. A counseling clinic run by her husband has received nearly $30,000 from the state of Minnesota in the last five years, money that in part came from the federal government. A family farm in Wisconsin, in which the congresswoman is a partner, received nearly $260,000 in federal farm subsidies.
And she has sought to keep federal money flowing to her constituents. After publicly criticizing the Obama administration’s stimulus program, Bachmann requested stimulus funds to support projects in her district.
Bachmann yesterday defended herself by describing the clinic funding and “one time training money” for employees that didn’t financially benefit Bachmann’s husband. But presumably the clinic itself benefitted from having government money train its workers. Otherwise it’s hard to see why Bachmann’s husband’s clinic wanted the funding. And of course, there’s all that stimulus money Bachmann wants for her district.
I don’t really know if these revelations will damage Bachmann’s status as the Tea Party’s leading warrior queen (yes, you have been dethroned, Sarah Palin). That’s because this sort of hypocrisy is widespread among Tea Partyers themselves — let’s call it “Tea-pocrisy.”
As Steve Benen has been documenting — see here and here — there’s no shortage of officials and political activists who embrace the Tea Party even as they benefit directly or indirectly from government generosity themselves. Some House GOP freshmen have even been the direct recipient of farm subsidies. And now the relevations about Tea Party chieftain Bachmann herself.
The point, as always, is that Tea Partyers are frequently for government spending as long as it’s benefitting the right people. Tea-pocrisy is not particularly complicated.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, June 27, 2011
‘Illusions Of Grandeur’: The Richly Earned Humiliation Of Newt Gingrich
If his goal when he officially launched his presidential candidacy last month was to inflict a massive amount of humiliation on himself in as short a time as possible, then Newt Gingrich has succeeded spectacularly.
After an epically botched campaign roll-out — which included accusations of ideological treason from influential conservatives and a nationally televised exchange with an Iowa voter who called him “an embarrassment to our party” and urged him to quit the race “before you make a bigger fool of yourself” — Gingrich was left struggling to explain how he and his wife racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at Tiffany’s jewelers. Then he randomly took off on a vacation (a lavish Greek cruise, it turned out), and now he’s returned to find that virtually his entire staff has quit.
Does this latest development change the presidential race in any significant way? Not really. Since even before his month from hell, Gingrich had no realistic chance of winning the GOP nomination, and not since the 1990s has he been a significant force on the right. Most conservative activists and opinion-shapers long ago tuned him out.
But much of the political media world never quite figured this out, instead treating Gingrich for the last decade as an enduring relevant national leader. The instinct was understandable: The celebrity (and notoriety) he attained during his mid-’90s stint as House Speaker never fully faded, and he could always be counted on for a lively, provocative quote or two.
This is the promise of Gingrich’s amazing crash-and-burn as a White House candidate (I know, he says he’s staying in despite the staff defections): that it might compel the political media to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
The reality is that Gingrich’s serious career in elected politics lasted for 20 years and ended in 1998.
He spent the first 16 of those years clawing his way through his party’s House ranks, finally reaching the top spot just as the ideal circumstances — complete Democratic control of Washington for the first time since the Carter administration, a profoundly unpopular president, and a ton of low-hanging fruit in the South — presented themselves for a Republican takeover of the House. The midterm election of 1994 made Gingrich Speaker of the House.
The tactics he employed during that rise could be devious. Early on, he formed the Conservative Opportunity Society with about a dozen fellow far-right GOP members. They pushed their party’s leadership toward a more confrontational posture and engaged in harsh and highly personal attacks on their Democratic colleagues.
In one episode in 1984, Gingrich used an after-hours “special orders” speech on the House floor to read off the names of ten Democrats who had written a letter to Daniel Ortega, whose Sandinistas had seized control of the country in 1979, urging him to hold democratic elections and to allow expatriates to return to vote. The ten, Gingrich said, had “undercut and crippled” U.S. foreign policy; he suggested they be prosecuted under the Logan Act of 1798, which gives the president the right to conduct foreign policy. Upon learning of this, Speaker Tip O’Neill confronted Gingrich on the floor, calling his attack “the lowest thing I’ve seen in my 32 years in Congress.”
In 1989, Gingrich edged out Edward Madigan, the candidate preferred by Robert Michel, the pragmatic House GOP leader, to become minority whip, then the No. 2 position on the Republican side. Four years later, in the run-up to the 1994 election, Michel announced that he’d retire. Officially, it was his decision, but Gingrich was breathing down his neck. The GOP conference was increasingly filled with confrontational conservatives who preferred Gingrich’s style.
His four-year run as Speaker proved disastrous, for Gingrich personally and for his party. His own obnoxious style — when a South Carolina woman drowned her children in a horrifying late 1994 incident, Gingrich called it a sign of society’s breakdown and proof that people needed to vote Republican — alienated all but the most hardcore Republicans. And his eagerness to force a government shutdown over a GOP plan to slash Medicare spending gave President Clinton and Democrats a winning issue in 1996, when nearly 20 Republican incumbents lost their seats and the GOP barely held the House. Shortly after that, Gingrich held off an attempted coup from a band of frustrated but incompetent House Republicans. Then he made things worse for his party by leading an impeachment drive against Clinton in 1998 (even, as we later learned, while engaging in an extramarital affair himself), which backfired and led to shocking Democratic gains in that year’s midterms.
It was then that Gingrich took his massive unpopularity and walked off the political stage, knowing that his party was ready to throw him off if he didn’t make the first move. From that moment on, the party’s elites — elected officials, activists, interest group leaders, and opinion-shaping commentators — have had little use for him. But the media has been a different story. A few years after his demise as Speaker, Gingrich reemerged and was quickly welcomed back into every green room in America. Convinced he’d been rehabilitated, he began making noise about seeking the presidency, first in the run-up to the 2008 race and then again this time. His taste for ugly, personalized attacks hadn’t faded, either, something he’s shown over and over during the Obama presidency.
But the idea that he was a real player in politics was an illusion, something that’s become clear during the month-long Gingrich candidacy. Most of the important figures in the Republican Party never had any interest in seeing him run for president. There have been few endorsements, donors have shunned him, and conservative activists and commentators have amplified every one of his embarrassments.
Even with his staff quitting on him, Gingrich insists he’ll stay in the race. We’ll see how long that lasts. One way or the other, he’ll soon be taking the same walk of shame off the political stage that he took 13 years ago. This time, let’s hope it’s for good.
By: Steve Kornacki, News Editor, Salon, June 10, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 