“A Big Flipping Deal”: Conservatives Need To Acknowledge That They’ve Lost This Battle
President Barack Obama should have skipped his Obamacare victory lap and instead let Vice President Joe Biden talk about the Affordable Care Act officially surpassing 7.1 million enrollees because achieving that milestone is – to paraphrase the colorful expression for which the vice president is well remembered – a big flipping deal.
Let’s be clear on what it’s not: It’s not a definitive number in the sense that there are many questions left to be answered which will help clarify its meaning. As a House GOP leadership aide noted to reporters after White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced that the 7.1 million figure had indeed been surpassed, we still need to know how many of the enrollees were previously uninsured, how many have paid their premiums, how many are getting subsidies and what the age breakdown is of the enrollees.
Some of these questions are not as mysterious as many conservative critics seem to believe: The Los Angeles Times’ Noam N. Levey reported Monday, for example, that roughly one-third of the initial six million enrollees were previously uninsured and that all told 9.5 million people who hadn’t had insurance have gotten it through Obamacare; 80 percent of enrollees having paid seems to be a consensus conservative estimate; and young people reportedly made up around 27 percent of those signing on through the Obamacare exchanges, though that number may well have been higher in the final surge and was reportedly higher among those signing up in the harder-to-track private market.
And in any case, this is only the first Obamacare enrollment window; nearly twice as many people are expected to enroll in 2015 as did this year, and many more the following year. And let’s keep the full scope of the Affordable Care Act in mind as well: Obamacare numbers guru Charles Gaba estimates that altogether somewhere between 14.6 and 22.1 million people have gotten coverage under the law.
So in short, the 7 million news is not a be-all, end-all vindication of the Affordable Care Act. It is, as Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle writes, “the end of the beginning” for the law (h/t BBC’s Anthony Zurcher).
But keeping all that in mind, we also need to acknowledge another thing that it’s not: It’s not the beginning of the end.
Commentary in recent weeks and months looking toward yesterday’s deadline contemplated almost solely the scope of the next presumed Obamacare failure – whether the law would fall short of the reduced-expectations 6 million enrollee figure, let alone the original 7 million benchmark. The fact that in the end the exchanges blew by the lower figure and even exceeded the positive one, even after the bungled initial rollout of the website and more glitches on the final day of the enrollment period, is a testament to not only the fact that the law has some life in it but also the mobilization skills the administration was able to marshal in the closing weeks. (It was, if anything, reminiscent of the 2012 presidential ground game; hey now that the enrollment deadline has passed, do you think the people who masterminded getting millions of people to sign up might be available to help Democrats mobilize their notoriously somnambulant off-year voters? Just wondering.)
Republicans and conservatives, of course, are insisting that there’s nothing to see here except for fraud or failure. But the former just recalls their 2012 “unskewed” infatuation while the latter, as Steve Benen points, has them taking on an increasingly Baghad Bob-style mien. They can insist that the story of Obamacare is one of unremitting, uninterrupted failure, but who are you going to believe – Republicans or your own eyes?
Those on the right who keep trying to poke holes in the law by raising questions need to answer one they’d like to ignore: What happened to Obamacare’s inevitable collapse? Because 7.1 million enrollees is, after all, a big flipping deal.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, April 1, 2014
“Voter Outreach Is Hard, Voter Suppression Is Easy”: GOP Policies Putting New Hurdles Between Voters And Their Democracy
Every few years, Republican officials will say they need to do a better job reaching out to minorities, women, and younger voters. In each instance, GOP leaders will give every indication that they’re serious and sincere about it, because they arguably have no choice – Republicans realize their base is much older and whiter than the Democratic base, which creates a long-term demographic nightmare.
But in practice, GOP officials actually do have a choice. They could, in theory, adopt a more mainstream agenda and prioritize diversity, or they could manipulate voting laws, as they did in advance of the 2012 elections, making it easier for candidates to pick the voters they like, rather than allowing voters to pick they candidates they like.
And as it turns out, voter suppression is vastly easier than voter outreach.
Pivotal swing states under Republican control are embracing significant new electoral restrictions on registering and voting that go beyond the voter identification requirements that have caused fierce partisan brawls.
The bills, laws and administrative rules – some of them tried before – shake up fundamental components of state election systems, including the days and times polls are open and the locations where people vote.
The so-called “Republican war on voting” in 2011 and 2012 was unlike anything Americans have seen since the era of Jim Crow, but the results were not what the GOP had hoped for. The policies had some of the intended effects – voting lines in several battleground states were, as designed, ridiculously long – but it didn’t prevent Democrats from making electoral gains.
But this apparently has only encouraged many state Republican policymakers to try harder, as we’ve seen of late in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere.
In the bigger picture, North Carolina poses an especially interesting case.
As we’ve discussed, the voting restrictions imposed by North Carolina Republicans are arguably the most egregious in the nation. Democratic critics have been quick to point out that the new voter-suppression measures, according to the state’s own numbers, disproportionately affect African-American voters.
It’s led opponents of the policy to argue that the policies have nothing to do with addressing voter fraud – a problem that doesn’t actually exist in reality – and everything to do with identifying likely Democratic voters and putting new hurdles between them and their democracy.
A few months ago, as part of a legal challenge to the new restrictions, voting-rights advocates turned up the heat. Zack Roth reported in January:
North Carolina is asking a federal judge to keep secret Republican state lawmakers’ communications as they pushed through the nation’s most restrictive voting law last summer.
“They are doing everything they can to try to keep us from finding out what they did and how they did it and who was involved,” Rev. William Barber II, the president of the state’s NAACP chapter, which is challenging the law, told reporters Thursday. “It’s time for what was done in the dark to come into the light.”
Barber’s NAACP, backed by the Advancement Project, wants access to the lawmakers’ emails and other internal communications in order to bolster the case that the law’s Republican sponsors knowingly discriminated against racial minorities. In response, the state argued late last week that the communications are protected by legislative privilege.
Last week, as Roth and Adam Serwer reported, the voting-rights proponents scored a partial court victory.
North Carolina lawmakers who backed the state’s restrictive voting law are going to have to cough up emails and other documents related to the law’s passage, a federal judge said Thursday evening. […]
North Carolina had sought to block a demand by the civil rights groups that the state turn over documentation that could shed light on what the legislators were thinking when they passed the law. In an order released Thursday evening, Judge Joi Elizabeth Peake ordered the state to turn over some of the documents sought by the civil rights groups. […]
Thursday’s ruling didn’t give the law’s challengers everything they wanted, though. It said that emails that were shared only between legislators and their staffers might still be subject to legislative privilege, as North Carolina claims.
Watch this space.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 31, 2014
“ACA Enrollment Tops 6 Million”: The Imminent Implosion Of The Affordable Care Act Has Been Cancelled
The expectation all along was that health care enrollment through the Affordable Care Act would spike shortly before the March 31 deadline. As of this afternoon, those expectations are very much in line with reality.
More than 6 million people have signed up for health insurance on the new exchanges, a number that signals a tremendous last-minute surge, the White House said Thursday.
President Barack Obama told volunteers and navigators helping sign people up that 1.5 million people visited HealthCare.gov on Wednesday – the highest-traffic day yet. Officials have said they logged more than a million visits each day so far this week.
Remember, this total only refers to consumers who’ve signed up for private coverage through exchange marketplaces. It doesn’t include Americans who’ve gained coverage through Medicaid expansion. For that matter, clearing the 6-million milestone is an important threshold, but there’s still time remaining in the open-enrollment period and it’s not unrealistic to think we’ll see 6.2 million by next week.
“We are seeing near-record numbers of consumers coming to check out their options and enroll in coverage. Yesterday alone, we had 1.5 million visits to HealthCare.gov and took more than 430,000 calls at our 24/7 call center,” said Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
As of March 1 – not quite four weeks ago – 4.2 million Americans had enrolled through exchanges, suggesting we’ve seen nearly two million consumers sign up in less than a month.
It’s easy to forget, but this seemed like a pipe dream last fall. In October, the first month of the open-enrollment period, just 106,185 consumers signed up for insurance through an exchange – causing Republicans to not only celebrate, but to openly mock the system by noting a variety of sports venues that hold more than 106,185 attendees.
It was obviously proof, we were told at the time, that the Affordable Care Act itself was “hurtling toward failure.”
Oops.
The enrollment totals must seem literally unbelievable to Republicans, who managed to convince one another that the ACA is not only catastrophically flawed, but on an inevitable road towards imploding.
Indeed, as Paul Krugman noted earlier today, “[P]eople in the GOP are still working with a completely wrong narrative — namely, that Obamacare is failing, and that these are desperate ploys to save a sinking ship. The reality is quite different: enrollments have clearly surged in the final month…. How will the GOP respond when the numbers come in?”
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I suspect it’ll have something to do with Benghazi.
To reiterate a point from early February, those who say they hate “Obamacare” won’t want to hear this, but the imminent implosion of the Affordable Care Act has been cancelled.
What’s more, this is less of a comeback story than a story of normalcy and effective governance. There was a fair amount of panic in November – remember the pieces that predicted “Obamacare may destroy all of liberalism forever”? – but there were plenty of voices counseling patience. There were problems, but they were surmountable. There were elements that were broken, but they could be fixed.
The recent progress, in other words, isn’t some remarkable fluke the White House achieved through a Hail Mary pass. Rather, what we’re seeing now is progress many of us expected to see all along.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 27, 2014
“Crumbling Walls”: Boehner’s Anti-Unemployment Insurance Excuse Is Falling Apart
Nearly three months after federal unemployment benefits expired for over a million Americans nationwide, House Speaker John Boehner’s excuse for refusing to take up a bill to renew the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program is falling apart.
When Senate Democrats and five Republicans struck a deal that would reauthorize the EUC program for five months and retroactively pay the benefits that expired on December 28, Speaker Boehner immediately dismissed the bill.
Citing a letter from the National Association of State Workforce Agencies (NASWA) – the state agencies that distribute the unemployment checks – Boehner argued that extending unemployment benefits would be too “difficult” and “unworkable,” due to the complications involved in ensuring that beneficiaries were actually looking for work during the proceeding three months.
Abandoning the House’s continuous claims that an extension would hinder job creation and dissuade long-term unemployed Americans from seeking employment, the Speaker argued that “the Senate bill would be costly, difficult to administer, and difficult to determine an individual’s eligibility.”
The bottom line, according to Boehner: ”This could increase the likelihood of fraud and abuse.”
NASWA president Mark Henry, however, is now clarifying that the organization does not endorse a particular position on whether or not the bill should proceed. As Politico reports, Henry says that some in Washington had “conflated” the concerns mentioned in NASWA’s letter.
“The letter that I wrote did not label the legislation ‘unworkable’; that was Speaker Boehner’s word,” Henry said, distancing himself from the Speaker’s stance.
Also, as The New York Times points out, state agencies managed to overcome that same “difficulty” back in 2010, when benefits were renewed after a lapse.
Even others in the GOP are not buying Boehner’s excuse, which seeks to appease House Republicans, who, for the most part, oppose an extension of the EUC program.
According to Politico, Senator Rob Portman, a powerful Republican also from Ohio, shot back at Boehner, saying he understands the “concern” over implementation, “but it’s been done before.”
“We’re eager to hear [the House’s] ideas as to how it could be implemented more effectively,” he added.
Portman was not alone in speaking out against the House’s opposition to the program’s renewal.
“There’s a lot of things that the Speaker doesn’t like that we do over here,” says Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. “What we have out there is a fair proposal.”
Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) also spoke out, describing the deal as a “good compromise that takes care of people who are running out of their checks and does it in a way that is paid for appropriately.”
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, March 26, 2014
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