“Rand Paul’s Crazy Word Salad On Obamacare”: A Symbol Of GOP’s Larger Mess
Sen. Rand Paul made national news this weekend when he refused to say precisely whether he wanted to repeal Kentucky’s version of the Affordable Care Act, Kynect, along with the federal act itself. He bobbed and weaved like his boy Mitch McConnell, and most people have left it at that: another scared Republican afraid to tell the voters what he really thinks about a program that’s helped many of them. Reporters are used to that. Nobody except liberals even criticize it anymore, sadly.
But I want to look at Paul’s entire ludicrous soliloquy on Obamacare, Kynect and healthcare generally, because it shows how fundamentally unserious he is about domestic policy. Or if he is serious, he’s seriously delusional. It was every bit the nonsensical word salad we are used to being served by Sarah Palin, but maybe it’s sexism: Paul is never called out on it or mocked the way the former Alaska governor was. He ought to be.
I’ve written before that “Paul is what you get when traditional and corrosive American nepotism meets the 21st century GOP echo chamber: a pampered princeling whose dumb ideas have never been challenged by reality.” Ron Paul’s son has a tendency to look proud of himself whenever he shows a passing familiarity with facts and figures and ideas, even if he’s conflating or distorting them beyond any resemblance to reality. It’s on display in this interview with Kentucky reporters.
The junior senator from Kentucky starts out by acknowledging that Kynect gets a lot of praise, locally and nationally.
I think the real question that we have in Kentucky is people seem to be very much complimenting our exchange because of the functionality of it, but there are still the unknown questions or what’s going to happen with so many new people.
OK. Let’s take a look at “what’s going to happen with so many new people.” Here Paul rolls out some brand-new GOP anti-ACA scare tactics. First: The rapid expansion of Medicaid, he claims, is costing jobs.
I mean it’s basically about a 50 percent increase in Medicaid in one year. That’s a dramatic shot to a system. And my question is what will happen to local hospitals. If you look at [Glasgow, Kentucky, hospital] TJ Samson laid off 50 people and they’re saying they can’t afford the huge burden of Medicaid.
Oops, stop right there. While the hospital’s CEO did in fact link the layoff of 49 staffers to Obamacare in April, days later the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services disputed that account. It said the hospital would take in hundreds of thousands of dollars more in Medicaid funding annually, because it’s now being reimbursed for uninsured patients it used to treat without payment. Asked about the discrepancy, Paul just pointed to earlier reporting about the Samson CEO’s remarks and said: “All I know is what I read in the papers.”
So for President Rand Paul, the buck would presumably stop with the papers.
Then Paul raised the specter of folks getting their private health insurance subsidized under the Affordable Care Act, but with such high deductibles that they ultimately won’t be able to pay.
That’s gonna mean … you’re still just a non-payer, probably. And hospitals are going to have to figure out, we won’t know this for six months to a year, how many people who show up with subsidized insurance will actually be able to pay [their] deductible.
This could conceivably be a problem – actually, it was a big problem before the ACA – but Paul has no evidence the ACA made the problem worse. More likely it has helped some, because even with a high deductible plan, many preventive services are now provided without a co-pay. The point is, there’s no evidence of such a problem yet; Paul is just throwing trash at Obamacare to see what will stick. And there’s more:
How many of the new people on Medicaid, how many of those people may have actually had insurance before? Did they go from being a non-payer to being a government payer? Or did they maybe have insurance, but now they’re on Medicaid because it’s easier than having insurance?
Paul could probably find out the answers to these questions, with staff work and a little consultation with the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, but he would never bother. After hearing all of this bad news, much of it invented, a local reporter asked the senator the obvious question:
With all those unknowns, do you think Kynect should be dismantled?
And here Paul joins McConnell and punts. Or lies, since it’s pretty sure from his answer he thinks Kynect should be dismantled.
You know I’m not sure — there’s going to be … how we unravel or how we change things. I would rather —I always tell people there’s a fork in the road.
Oh, that fork in the road. Paul turns to boilerplate conservative rhetoric:
We could have gone one of two directions. One was towards more competition and more marketplace and one was toward more government control. The people who think that the government can efficiently distribute medicine need to explain why the VA’s been struggling for decade after decade in a much smaller system.
Points for working in the VA, the Obama scandal du jour. Let’s leave that alone, it’s a story in itself. Continue, Sen. Paul:
And they also need to explain, even though I think we all want Medicare to work better, why Medicare is $35 trillion short.
Huh? First of all, Paul doesn’t “want Medicare to work better,” he wants to repeal it. That’s something you don’t hear much about, but he sponsored a bill with Utah Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee to replace Medicare with the Congressional Health Care Plan members of Congress buy in to, essentially privatizing it. The bill would also raise the age of eligibility from 65 to 70. That ought to go over well with the GOP’s rapidly aging white base. That’s why Paul is forced to lie about his own Medicare position.
And the allegation that Medicare is “$35 trillion short”? I could find no documentation for it besides a Heritage Foundation blog post, and a ton of YouTube videos where Rand Paul makes the claim on Fox News. It seems to refer to a 2011 estimate by Medicare trustees that the Part A Trust Fund would face a shortfall by 2026 unless payroll taxes were raised or program costs were trimmed – and the Affordable Care Act has been trimming them. It’s bunk.
Then Paul turns briefly to the question of Kynect:
There’s a lot of questions that are big questions that are beyond the exchange and the Kynect and things like that. It’s whether or not how we’re going to fund these things.
But then he detours again, to take us back to the already debunked example of TJ Samson hospital’s Medicaid-induced “layoffs.”
If they lose 50 good paying jobs in the hospital, is that good? Then we’ve got more people in the wagon, and less people pulling the wagon.
With that profound Kentucky take on Paul Ryan’s “makers vs. takers” narrative, he walks away. And we’re back to Mitt Romney’s deriding the “47 percent.” In Paul’s more colorful telling, the problem is that some of us pull the wagon, while freeloaders and layabouts just lounge in it. For 50 years, Republicans have tried to tell voters the folks “in the wagon” are minorities. But in Kentucky, which is 88 percent white, they’re mainly white. So Rand Paul, the great 2016 hope, is really a prisoner of the elitist 2012 narrative that cost the GOP the White House.
Even though there’s so much to explore in Paul’s Kynect two-step – delusion, ideology, outright lies – the media mostly ignored it. Those who’ve paid attention simply covered the admittedly newsworthy Obamacare evasion. But I think Paul’s entire stand-up act, his performance art — Being a Very Serious Senator, or at least playing one on TV — deserves more attention. It’s only the soft bigotry of the media’s low expectations for Republicans, and maybe a little of society’s sexism, that makes Rand Paul someone to contend with in 2016, when Sarah Palin is widely just a punch line.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, June 2, 2014
“Release Of American POW Sparks Partisan Dispute”: In Practice, The United States Has Negotiated With Terrorists Plenty Of Times
Under normal circumstances, when U.S. officials secure the release of an American prisoner of war, it would seem like a happy occasion for the country, regardless of political considerations. We were reminded over the weekend that these are not normal circumstances.
President Obama announced on Saturday that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the only American soldier held captive in Afghanistan, was finally free after five years as a prisoner of the Taliban, In exchange for his release, U.S. officials agreed to release five Taliban prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to Qatar.
In his White House announcement, the president said, in reference to the Taliban detainees, “The Qatari government has given us assurances that it will put in place measures to protect our national security.”
The complaints from congressional Republicans were immediate.
Amid jubilation Saturday over the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from captivity by the Taliban, senior Republicans on Capitol Hill said they were troubled by the means by which it was accomplished, which was a deal to release five Afghan detainees from the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Top Republicans on the Senate and House armed services committees went so far as to accuse President Obama of having broken the law, which requires the administration to notify Congress before any transfers from Guantanamo are carried out.
Throughout the weekend, prominent GOP lawmakers condemned the move with varying degrees of outrage. Several Republicans described the policy that led to Bergdahl’s release as “shocking,” “disturbing,” and “dangerous.”
Any sense of national joy that might otherwise come with the knowledge that an American POW is on his way home disappeared within minutes of the announcement – Bergdahl’s freedom quickly became the latest partisan fight, and the prospect of congressional hearings are more a matter of “when,” not “if.”
For Republicans, this is an outrage: as Karen Tumulty reported, the administration is required to notify relevant congressional committees 30 days before prisoner transfers, and this clearly did not happen. For Democrats, there were extenuating circumstances that required a legal shortcut: without immediate action, the opportunity to rescue an American POW would probably be lost forever, and Bergdahl’s life would be in severe jeopardy. “We did not have 30 days to wait,” Susan Rice said yesterday.
Who’s right? In this case, probably both.
But Republicans went on to raise a separate concern. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), among others, condemned the White House for having “negotiated with terrorists.” The Michigan Republican added that the move marked a “fundamental shift in U.S. policy.”
That’s a nice soundbite, but it’s also wrong.
In principle, the United States does not negotiate with terrorists, which is a sensible policy intended to discourage terrorism. In practice, the United States has negotiated with terrorists plenty of times.
For example, when terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847 in 1985, the Reagan administration negotiated with the hostage takers, despite the U.S. policy, and despite fears that it might create an incentive for future hijackings.
More recently, and more to the point, military leaders appointed by the Bush/Cheney administration, at David Petraeus’ behest, endorsed negotiations with the Taliban years ago in the hopes of improving national security conditions in Afghanistan*.
The politics surrounding negotiations to free Bergdahl have been ugly for a long while, so this weekend’s rhetoric hardly came as a surprise. What’s more, many of the questions that have been raised about the move deserve answers.
But let’s not pretend that talking to the Taliban represents some kind of shocking twist.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, June 2, 2014
“What Does Shinseki’s Resignation Change?”: Disappointing Republican Leaders With Big Plans For This Scandal
One of the more common developments inside the Beltway in recent years is seeing congressional Republicans call for various members of President Obama’s cabinet to resign. It’s become so routine, it’s almost as if GOP lawmakers consider it part of their daily routine: wake up, have breakfast, get dressed, and call for the Secretary of Whatever to step down immediately.
But as the tide turned quickly against Eric Shinseki at the Department of Veterans Affairs, House Republican leaders bit their tongues this week, refusing to call for his ouster. It became pretty odd – many of Obama’s close Democratic allies demanded the secretary’s resignation, even as John Boehner and Eric Cantor did not.
Was this because GOP leaders wanted to give the White House a break? Um, no. Was it the result of Republicans’ deep respect and admiration for Shinseki, a true patriot? That’s a nice thought, but that’s not what happened, either.
Instead, consider the response to Shinseki’s resignation.
House Speaker John Boehner said Friday that the resignation of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki “really changes nothing” to fix systemic problems at the department, calling on President Barack Obama to take further action to address system-wide mismanagement.
“One personnel change cannot be used as an excuse to paper over” problems at the VA, he told reporters after President Barack Obama accepted Shinseki’s resignation Friday morning.
As recently as yesterday, the Ohio Republican told reporters, “The question I ask myself: Is him resigning going to get us to the bottom of the problem? Is it going to help us find out what’s really going on? The answer I keep getting is no.”
It’s important to understand Boehner’s likely motivations here.
What Republicans leaders want is to blame President Obama for the controversy. Substantively, that’s not an easy sell – as Mariah Blake makes clear today, much of what plagues the VA started under the Bush/Cheney administration – but there’s an election coming up, and none of the issues GOP officials hoped to run on are going the way Republicans hoped.
What does this have to do with Shinseki’s ouster? Probably everything.
Inside the Beltway, there was an overwhelming demand that Obama “do something” and not let this story linger any longer. Boehner, however, likely wanted the opposite: White House inaction, more delays, and a controversy that lingers indefinitely.
Many on the right may have cheered today’s announcement, but in no way does this advance a partisan goal. The VA system hasn’t been working, so the president is replacing the head of the VA system with someone who’ll hopefully do a better job. This doesn’t help Boehner at all, which is why he was so quick to say the news “really changes nothing” – the Speaker is probably concerned attention will now shift now that the embattled Shinseki is leaving the stage.
And even putting partisan motivations aside, substantively, Boehner arguably has a credible point. The VA mess will be no better this evening than it was this morning. A cabinet secretary is gone, but the problem that forced him out remains.
If the political world decides to move on, it will disappoint Republican leaders with big plans for this scandal, but it will also do a disservice to veterans who continue to wait for a solution.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2014
“Repurposing Of A Failed Website”: The Republicans’ Subtle Retreat From ‘Obamacare’
House Republicans held a press conference on Capitol Hill this week, at which the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman tweeted a fascinating image – of the podium.
If you look closely, you’ll notice the sign on the podium not only refers people to a website run by the House Republican Conference, but also to a specific part of the site – gop.gov/yourstory – followed by a tagline that reads in all caps, “Our veterans deserve better.”
At first blush, that wouldn’t seem especially noteworthy, except up until very recently the gop.gov/yourstory website served a very different purpose: it was set up to collect scary stories from people who didn’t like the Affordable Care Act. Republicans launched a months-long campaign to collect anecdotal evidence from “Obamacare victims” and this website was intended to be the go-to destination for those adversely affected by the health care reform law.
But the political winds have changed direction. The crusade to find “Obamacare victims” has run its course – the evidence never materialized – and House Republicans are ready to give up on the campaign and start collecting other horror stories the party can try to exploit for partisan gain.
The repurposing of a failed website is, however, just a piece of a larger puzzle. As Juliet Eilperin and Robert Costa reported this morning, Republicans suddenly find themselves in “retreat” on health care.
Republican candidates have begun to retreat in recent weeks from their all-out assault on the Affordable Care Act in favor of a more piecemeal approach, suggesting they would preserve some aspects of the law while jettisoning others.
The changing tactics signal that the health-care law – while still unpopular with voters overall – may no longer be the lone rallying cry for Republicans seeking to defeat Democrats in this year’s midterm elections…. On the campaign trail, some Republicans and their outside allies have started talking about the health-care law in more nuanced terms than they have in the past.
Imagine that. Running on a platform of taking health care benefits from millions of people isn’t the winning strategy far-right lawmakers thought it’d be.
“The sentiment toward the Affordable Care Act is still strongly negative, but people are saying, ‘Don’t throw the baby out” with the bathwater, Glen Bolger, a partner with the GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, told the Washington Post.
Remember when Republicans assumed they could simply ride a “Repeal Obamacare!” wave to electoral fortunes? That plan has been thrown out the window.
And what about the House GOP’s vaunted alternative, years in the making?
[S]enior House Republicans have decided to postpone a floor vote on their own health-reform proposal – making it less likely that a GOP alternative will be on offer before the November elections, according to lawmakers familiar with the deliberations. The delay will give them more time to work on the bill and weigh the consequences of putting a detailed policy before the voters in the fall, lawmakers said.
I suspect this isn’t more widely considered a humiliating fiasco for Republicans because most political observers simply assumed they’d fail to present their own plan, but this new “postponement” only makes the GOP’s debacle look worse.
Remember, it was exactly four months ago today that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA.) publicly vowed, “This year, we will rally around an alternative to Obamacare and pass it on the floor of the House.”
That was Jan. 30. On May 30, Cantor’s new message is apparently, “Check back after the elections.”
Americans have only been waiting five years for the Republican alternative to the Affordable Care Act. What’s another seven months?
We know, of course, why GOP officials are struggling. As we talked about in February, 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.
As a Republican Hill staffer recently told Sahil Kapur, every attempt to come up with a serious proposal leads to a plan that “looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act.” And so we get … nothing.
Nothing, that is, except the Democratic law, which is working quite well, Republican assurances to the contrary and repeated attempts at sabotage notwithstanding.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 30, 2014
“Feeling A Bit Of Anxiety”: Cantor’s Cause For Concern In The Commonwealth
The idea that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) would worry at all about his re-election seems hard to believe. The conservative Republican has fared quite well in all of his campaigns; he’s already quite powerful by Capitol Hill standards; and in the not-too-distant future, Cantor might even be well positioned to be Speaker of the House.
And yet, the Majority Leader appears to be feeling quite a bit of anxiety about his future.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is boasting in a new campaign mailer of shutting down a plan to give “amnesty” to “illegal aliens,” a strongly worded statement from a Republican leader who’s spoken favorably about acting on immigration.
The flier sent by his re-election campaign comes as Cantor is under pressure ahead of his June 10 GOP primary in Virginia – and as the narrow window for action on immigration legislation in the House is closing fast. Cantor’s flier underscores how vexing the issue is for the GOP.
In the larger context, it’s not helpful for Republicans when the Majority Leader brags about killing a bill that gives “amnesty” to “illegal aliens,” while his party tries to maintain a half-hearted pretense that blames President Obama for the demise of immigration reform.
But at this point, Cantor doesn’t appear to care too much about the larger context or message coherence. He’s worried about losing – the rest can be worked out later.
In fact, the degree of Cantor’s anxiety is pretty remarkable. The Majority Leader is up against David Brat, a conservative economist at Randolph-Macon College, who’s eagerly telling primary voters that Cantor isn’t right-wing enough. What was once seen as token opposition, however, has clearly gotten the incumbent’s attention.
Cantor was concerned enough last month to launch a television attack ad, which was followed by Cantor’s anti-immigrant mailing, which culminated in yet another television attack ad that the congressman’s campaign unveiled yesterday.
These are not the actions of a confident incumbent.
As best as I can tell, there are no publicly available polls out of this Virginia district (though it’s safe to say Cantor has invested in some surveys of his own). With that in mind, it’s hard to say with any confidence whether the Majority Leader is overreacting to a pesky annoyance or a credible challenger.
But Jenna Portnoy and Robert Costa reported recently that it’s probably the former, not the latter.
Most Republicans continue to believe Cantor is safe; he won a primary challenge two years ago with nearly 80 percent of the vote. But the prospect of a competitive and bruising challenge to the second-ranking Republican in Congress is embarrassing to Cantor – and is rattling GOP leaders at a time when the party is trying to unify its divided ranks.
We’ll know soon enough just how serious the threat is – the primary is in 13 days – but as the election draws closer, let’s not forget that Cantor was booed and heckled by Republican activists in his own district just two weeks ago.
No wonder he seems so nervous.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 28, 2014
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