“Way Off Base”: Busting Zombie Obamacare Myths
The Republican effort to defund or delay health care reform at any cost has kept alive many misconceptions and false claims about the Affordable Care Act. This roundup of Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ work on issues related to health reform and the federal government shutdown provides a large dose of reality.
A delay in the individual mandate is neither harmless nor fair: Let’s start with the big one: that a one-year delay in the individual mandate requiring everyone to acquire health insurance as long as it is affordable is harmless and fair because the Obama administration delayed for a year the requirement that large employers provide health insurance or pay a penalty. I discussed some flaws in that argument in an earlier post on this blog.
In CBPP’s shutdown roundup, Edwin Park reiterates why a delay in the individual mandate is neither harmless nor fair. It’s not harmless because it would cause 11 million more Americans to remain uninsured in 2014 and result in higher premiums in the individual market for many others, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It also would disrupt the new health insurance exchanges and likely delay the availability of coverage through the exchanges.
It’s also not fair to equate delay of the individual mandate to a delay in the employer requirement. Park highlights an Urban Institute analysis which showed that the employer delay would have only a small effect on the coverage gains expected under the ACA and which concluded that it would “be dangerously wrong” to assume a similarly small effect from a delay of the individual mandate. Similarly, CBO estimates that delaying the employer requirement would increase the number of uninsured by less than 500,000 – a far cry from the estimated 11 million increase from delaying the individual mandate.
The ACA will not likely cause a significant shift to part-time work: The employer responsibility provision whose implementation was delayed until 2015 requires larger employers (those with at least 50 full-time-equivalent workers) to offer health coverage to their full-time employees (those working 30 or more hours a week) or pay a penalty. Critics claim that we could already see a shift to part-time work in the data before the announced delay. Some have argued that the cutoff for defining full-time work should go from 30 hours a week to 40.
In CBPP’s shutdown roundup, Paul Van de Water shows that data this year provides scant evidence of a significant shift toward part-time work and that there’s every reason to believe that the ultimate effect will be small as a share of total employment. Van de Water shows, however, that raising the threshold from 30 to 40 hours a week would expose a significant number of workers to a reduction in hours.
Medical device manufacturers are unlikely to lose from the ACA despite a tax: A strong lobbying effort is underway to repeal the ACA’s 2.3 percent tax on certain medical devices such as coronary stents, artificial knees and hips, cardiac pacemakers, irradiation equipment and imaging technology. In the CBPP roundup, Paul Van de Water explains why that tax, which helps pay for extending health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, is sound and the arguments against it are not.
First, the tax does not apply to wheelchairs, eyeglasses and other devices that the public generally buys at retail and for individual use. Second, the tax is levied on equipment that manufacturers will likely see a boost in revenue from due to the increase in health coverage afforded by the ACA. As Van de Water points out, a study by Wells Fargo Securities finds that health reform will increase device sales by 1.5 percent in 2014 and by 3.6 percent cumulatively through 2022 – enough to offset the tax.
Finally, this is a highly profitable industry, and the stock prices of the top device manufacturers have generally outperformed market averages since the tax was introduced this year.
The ACA is a major piece of legislation with many interrelated moving parts, and there will be some glitches along the way as it’s implemented. But the criticisms we’re hearing in the current budget fight are way off base.
By: Chad Stone, U. S. News and World Report, October 4, 2013
“A Functioning Government Is A Problem”: Shutdown Isn’t Symptom of Tea Party Ideology, It Is Tea Party Ideology
It’s easy to wonder how a group of people hired to do one job — simply to keep a country running — could be bungling it so terribly. That is, until you remember that a powerful faction of those people were never interested in doing that one job in the first place.
Today’s government shutdown, hitched to an unrealistic laundry list of demands, isn’t a symptom of Tea Party ideology — it is Tea Party ideology. The Tea Party and its allies in Congress have never been interested in using the government to solve problems. Instead, they believe that a functioning government is a problem in itself. And they are willing to risk untold damage to the country in order to get their way.
In previous partisan budget disputes, at least we’ve had the comfort of imagining that neither party wanted to completely destroy the government. Not so this time.
The Republican Party under Tea Party control is in such denial about reality that it is willing to deal a blow to the nation’s economy just because it can’t believe, and won’t admit, that it lost the last two presidential elections. They’re also hoping that their antics will play to their advantage in future elections, deliberately planning votes they hope will back vulnerable Senate Democrats into tight corners.
Just look at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who somehow has managed to wrest control of the Republican Party after less than a year in the Senate. Cruz explained during his long imaginary filibuster last week that “if we listen to the American people, the vote would be 100 to 0 to defund Obamacare.” Apparently, holding a national election in which the candidate who created Obamacare handily defeated the candidate who wanted to repeal it doesn’t count as “listening to the American people.”
In fact, Cruz told us (and then shamelessly denied that he had told us) that those who criticize his defunding efforts are just like Neville Chamberlain, who wanted the British people to “accept the Nazis” and “appease them.”
Rep. John Culberson of Texas went even further, likening Republicans threatening to shut down the government to the 9/11 heroes on United Airlines Flight 93: “I said, you know like 9/11, ‘Let’s roll!'”
Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, likened the all-out fight to defund Obamacare to helping free Americans from drug addiction, saying, “President Obama can’t wait to get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care.”
This is the alternate reality that is driving the government shutdown.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — far from a liberal group — has warned that a shutdown will hurt business. Wall Street is skittish. Even the majority of Americans who oppose Obamacare don’t want to see it fail. In all, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the plan to shut down the federal government to block the implementation of the ACA. A Quinnipiac poll this week found that 72 percent opposed the shutdown.
Now even Republican members of Congress are coming out to say that the shutdown is nuts and that it’s entirely the fault of a party that’s letting the Tea Party take the reins.
The Republican establishment and big business groups like the Chamber worked to get Tea Party senators and congressman into power and encouraged the rigid anti-government ideology that fueled the movement. They got what they paid for. Unfortunately, the rest of us are now paying too.
By: Michael Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, October 1, 2013
“Our Democracy Is At Stake”: It’s Not Just Obamacare, President Obama Is Defending The Health Of Our Democracy
This time is different. What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule. President Obama must not give in to this hostage taking — not just because Obamacare is at stake, but because the future of how we govern ourselves is at stake.
What we’re seeing here is how three structural changes that have been building in American politics have now, together, reached a tipping point — creating a world in which a small minority in Congress can not only hold up their own party but the whole government. And this is the really scary part: The lawmakers doing this can do so with high confidence that they personally will not be politically punished, and may, in fact, be rewarded. When extremists feel that insulated from playing by the traditional rules of our system, if we do not defend those rules — namely majority rule and the fact that if you don’t like a policy passed by Congress, signed by the president and affirmed by the Supreme Court then you have to go out and win an election to overturn it; you can’t just put a fiscal gun to the country’s head — then our democracy is imperiled.
This danger was neatly captured by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, when he wrote on Tuesday about the 11th-hour debate in Congress to avert the shutdown. Noting a shameful statement by Speaker John Boehner, Milbank wrote: “Democrats howled about ‘extortion’ and ‘hostage taking,’ which Boehner seemed to confirm when he came to the floor and offered: ‘All the Senate has to do is say ‘yes,’ and the government is funded tomorrow.’ It was the legislative equivalent of saying, ‘Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.’ ”
“Give me the money and nobody gets hurt.” How did we get here? First, by taking gerrymandering to a new level. The political analyst Charlie Cook, writing in The National Journal on March 16, noted that the 2010 election gave Republican state legislatures around the country unprecedented power to redraw political boundaries, which they used to create even more “safe, lily-white” Republican strongholds that are, in effect, an “alternative universe” to the country’s diverse reality.
“Between 2000 and 2010, the non-Hispanic white share of the population fell from 69 percent to 64 percent,” wrote Cook. “But after the post-census redistricting and the 2012 elections, the non-Hispanic white share of the average Republican House district jumped from 73 percent to 75 percent, and the average Democratic House district declined from 52 percent white to 51 percent white. In other words, while the country continues to grow more racially diverse, the average Republican district continues to get even whiter.”
According to Cook, the number of strongly Democratic districts decreased from 144 before redistricting to 136 afterward. The number of strongly Republican districts increased from 175 to 183. “When one party starts out with 47 more very strong districts than the other,” said Cook, “the numbers suggest that the fix is in for any election featuring a fairly neutral environment. Republicans would need to mess up pretty badly to lose their House majority in the near future.” In other words, there is little risk of political punishment for the Tea Party members now holding the country hostage.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s inane Citizens United decision allowed a single donor, Sheldon Adelson, to create his own alternative universe. He was able to contribute so much money to support Newt Gingrich’s candidacy that Gingrich was able to stay in the Republican presidential primary race longer than he would have under sane campaign finance rules. As a result, Gingrich was able to pull the G.O.P.’s leading candidate, Mitt Romney, farther to the right longer, making it harder for him to garner centrist votes. Last month, for the first time ever in Colorado, two state senators who voted for universal background checks on gun purchases lost their seats in a recall election engineered by gun extremists and reportedly financed with some $400,000 from the National Rifle Association. You’re elected, you vote your conscience on a narrow issue, but now determined opponents don’t have to wait for the next election. With enough money, they can get rid of you in weeks.
Finally, the rise of a separate G.O.P. (and a liberal) media universe — from talk-radio hosts, to Web sites to Fox News — has created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme. When politicians only operate inside these bubbles, they lose the habit of persuasion and opt only for coercion. After all, they must be right. Rush Limbaugh told them so.
These “legal” structural changes in money, media and redistricting are not going away. They are superempowering small political movements to act in extreme ways without consequences and thereby stymie majority rule. If democracy means anything, it means that, if you are outvoted, you accept the results and prepare for the next election. Republicans are refusing to do that. It shows contempt for the democratic process.
President Obama is not defending health care. He’s defending the health of our democracy. Every American who cherishes that should stand with him.
By: Thomas L. Friedman, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, October 2, 2013
“The Power Of Personality”: “ObamaCares” And The Tea Party Doesn’t
Does anybody care that millions of Americans can’t afford health care? Does anyone care that before health care reform, insurance companies had the power to screw their customers royally? Does anyone care that Americans spend more per person on health care than people anywhere else in the world but are not nearly as healthy as the citizens of nations which provide comprehensive health care coverage to their residents?
Barack Obama does and the tea party doesn’t.
The most important stat that I saw in the 2012 National Election Day Exit Poll was the power of personality in the presidential race. A majority of the voters who looked for leadership, vision and shared values in 2012 supported Mitt Romney. The only other personal dimension measured by the exit poll was caring. The voters who sought compassion in their president supported Barack Obama by an overwhelming margin. The president’s advantage on empathy was so big that it overwhelmed the support that Mitt Romney had on the other three personality dimensions.
Compassion brings us to the Affordable Care Act or, as I like to call it, ObamaCares.
Many Americans who oppose ObamaCares also dislike the mean spirited nature of the tea party. You can talk about issues until the cows come home, but Americans vote for people, not issues. Voters use the candidates’ positions on issues to make personal judgments about their character. Many Americans may have philosophical reservations about the Affordable Care Act, but more than anything else they resent the tea party’s blind opposition to any proposal that improves the quality of health care available to the public. The tea party has demonstrated its indifference to the suffering of millions of Americans by its failure to offer its own plan to improve the floundering system of health care that undermines the health, wealth and well being of the United States
Politics is full of irony, which is what makes Washington so interesting. Republicans pushed hard on the budget because they wanted to use the threat of a shutdown as leverage against ACA. But on the same day that the wacko birds forced the federal government to close with dismal reviews, enrollment in Obamacare began with such a big demand that it overwhelmed computer systems. My guess is the wingnuts don’t see the irony, but do see a lot of red.
The early returns on the shutdown should worry Republicans. A CBS News survey conducted since the federal government closed for business early Tuesday morning indicates that a large majority (72 percent) of Americans oppose the shutdown over Obamacare. The tea party doesn’t seem to care about its electoral fortunes any more than it does about the well being of the working families who make this country great. The party’s indifference to people and politics will cost it dearly next year in the midterm elections.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, October 3, 2013
“Obamacare Swallowed Conservatism Whole”: What Happens To Conservatism When The Obamacare War Is Over?
When we look back decades from now, one of the keys to understanding this period in our political history will be the story of how a set of market-based health insurance reforms that started as a proposal from the Heritage Foundation and then were successfully implemented by a Republican governor who later became the GOP presidential nominee, ended up being viewed by virtually all conservatives as not just an abomination but the very essence of statist oppression. Liberals have often expressed wonder or exasperation about the way conservatives changed their opinions about this particular brand of reform. But now that it’s driving a government shutdown (and soon a potential default on the debt), we have to acknowledge that it’s more than just a policy conservatives hate. The Affordable Care Act is far, far bigger than that. It has become the most important definer of conservatism in America circa 2013. It isn’t that conservatives don’t still want to cut taxes for the wealthy, or slash the social safety net, or liberate corporations from pesky regulations on worker safety and the environment, or make it impossible for women to get abortions, because they still want all those things. But Obamacare has swallowed conservatism whole.
Since the health-care exchanges opened yesterday, some have suggested that the increased attention brought to the fact of their opening by the shutdown has done the administration a favor, informing more people that open enrollment has begun than the Department of Health and Human Services could possibly have managed on its own. That’s probably true. This controversy has also served to remind conservatives that there is nothing more important than fighting Obamacare. Every Republican politician has to prove that their hatred of the law is as great as that of the angriest Tea Partier. Every conservative everywhere is being told that this is what it means to be a conservative, this is so important to their beliefs and the future prospects of their party and their ideological movement that it is worth laying waste to the government and even the economy itself. If you’re a conservative and you aren’t willing to risk everything on even the smallest chance to toss your spear into this foul beast’s heart, then you’re not really a conservative at all.
Let’s fast-forward a couple of years from now, after this crisis ends without the ACA being defunded or delayed. The law is all rolled out, and while it’s far from perfect, things are going pretty well. We don’t have universal coverage, but the vast majority of Americans now have insurance, including millions who didn’t have it before. It’s not dirt cheap, but the trends that are evident today—a slowdown in the overall health-care spending growth rate, mirrored by a slowdown in premium increases—are continuing. More states have put aside their ideological objections and accepted the expansion of Medicaid to cover all their poor citizens, even if there are a few straggler states left. What with “pre-existing conditions” and “job lock” things of the past, even the most doctrinaire Tea Partier admits that there’s no more question about whether Obamacare can be repealed. Its tendrils have reached too many people who now benefit from it and would react angrily if you tried to take it away.
Ted Cruz admitted to Sean Hannity back in July that “If we don’t [defund Obamacare] now, in all likelihood, Obamacare will never, ever be repealed. Why is that? Because on January 1, the exchanges kick in, the subsidies kick in,” and they’ll be unable to take away something people are benefiting from. And he’s surely not the only Republican who gets this, which is part of the explanation for the ferocity with which they’re fighting now. But in our future scenario, the fight over the law will be basically over. There might be some debates about adjusting parts of the law, as Democrats will want to do, but that won’t concern Republicans too much. Once there’s no possibility left that it can be killed, they’ll likely lose interest.
I think that’s the most plausible picture of what things will be like in, say, 2015. The question is, if eventually they have no choice but to accept that the argument over the ACA is settled, what on earth will Republicans do with themselves? Because over the last four years, opposition to Obamacare has taken on such an extraordinary power within the movement that all other issues have paled before it.
Sure, they could revert to the old standbys—Cut taxes! Cut regulations! Strong defense! But those are just positions you can take. Obamacare was a war to be fought. And nothing galvanizes, energizes, and defines us like our wars. That’s particularly true of the zealots who are driving the Republican party and form such a key part of its base. And if they aren’t fighting Obamacare, who will they be?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 2, 2013
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