“A Right Wing Non-Plan”: Ted Cruz Reveals He’s A Thin-Skinned Wuss, Hypocrite And Policy Lightweight
Sen. Ted Cruz pretends to be a tough guy, but mostly he spends his time trashing Democrats in front of adoring right-wing crowds and conservative journalists. On Wednesday he sat down with CNN’s Chris Cuomo – you didn’t expect him to go to MSNBC, did you? – and showed himself to be incredibly thin-skinned when pressed just a little on how he would replace the Affordable Care Act he wants to repeal. It was an interesting window on Cruz’s temperament as well as his cynical, threadbare “policy” agenda.
Cuomo asked Cruz how he would replace the law he inveighs against, and as usual, Cruz dodged the question and kept on inveighing instead. Cuomo followed up. “You don’t think that you have a responsibility as a U.S. senator to do better than that, in terms of offering a solution for what to do next?” he asked.
And Cruz shot back: “Well, I appreciate your trying to lecture me in the morning.”
Cuomo didn’t leave it there.
“No, no, no, not at all, Senator. I’m worried, same as you, anybody who looks at the situation has worries.”
So Cruz tried to turn the tables. “If you’re worried, did you speak out for the 5 million people who have lost their health insurance?”
Cuomo had an answer: “Absolutely — we’ve been covering it doggedly. The problem is, I don’t have the power to fix it. You do. That’s what a U.S. senator does, is you sponsor law. You know this. It’s not a lecture, it’s a concern; I’m asking, what are you going to do about it?”
Apparently Cruz isn’t used to being grilled. Cuomo got him to share what passes for an answer from conservatives these days: “Let people purchase health insurance across state lines.”
Wow. That’s what Princeton and Harvard Law degrees get you: a warmed-over right wing non-plan that’s been around forever. As Ezra Klein reported back in 2010, the Congressional Budget Office looked at it in 2005 and found it didn’t reduce the number of uninsured and would only save the federal government $12 billion over the next eight years. (By contrast, the CBO says the ACA will reduce the deficit by $41 billion in 2013 alone.)
The CBO also found that allowing people to buy insurance plans across state lines would “make insurance more expensive for the sick and cheaper for the healthy, and lead to more healthy people with insurance and fewer sick people with insurance.” Other than that, it’s a terrific idea.
Of course, insurers like Cruz’s non-plan because it would mean a boon for the states that provide the least regulation and thus encourage the “cheapest” but least protective insurance policies. Rather than insuring states’ rights and competition, which conservatives pretend to like, it would, in effect, create a national insurance-regulation standard, as states then raced to the bottom to compete. Of course, a state’s “rights” usually diminish, for conservatives, whenever that state decides to give its citizens more power and its corporations less.
So in just one morning, Ted Cruz was revealed as a wuss, a hypocrite and a policy lightweight. The last one doesn’t matter on the right, but the first two won’t wear well in a presidential race. Kudos to Cuomo for not accepting Tea Party platitudes as a substitute for governing proposals.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, November 20, 2013
“Can We Please Get A Grip?”: Having The Backbone To Set Minimum Standards For Health Insurance
Democrats are showing once again they have the backbones of banana slugs.
The Affordable Care Act was meant to hold insurers to a higher standards. So it stands to reason that some insurers will have to cancel their lousy sub-standard policies.
But spineless Democrats (including my old boss Bill Clinton) are caving in to the Republican-fueled outrage that the President “misled” Americans into thinking they could keep their old lousy policies — and are now urging the White House to forget the new standards and let people keep what they had before.
And some congressional Republicans are all too eager to join them, and allow insurers to offer whatever crap they were offering before — exposing families to more than $12,700 in out-of-pocket expenses, canceling policies of people who get seriously sick, failing to cover prescription drugs, and so on.
Can we please get a grip? Whenever industry standards are lifted — a higher minimum wage, safer workplaces, non-toxic foods and drugs, safer cars — people no longer have the “freedom” to contract for the sub-standard goods and services.
But that freedom is usually a mirage because big businesses have most of the power and average people don’t have much of a choice. This has been especially the case with health insurance, which is why minimum standards here are essential.
Yes, the President might have spelled this out a bit more clearly beforehand, explaining that 95 percent of us aren’t in the private insurance market to begin with and won’t be affected, and that most of the 2 percent who lose their lousy policies and have to take better and more expensive ones will be subsidized.
But right now the President needs all the political support he can muster to hold insurers’ feet to the fire. Democrats should stand firm for a change.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, November 15, 2013
“Obamacare’s Critical Moment”: It’s Time For Nervous Democrats To Have A Gut Check
At times like this, with the Obama administration weathering yet another controversy regarding the stumbling beginnings of the Affordable Care Act, it’s useful to remind ourselves that this too shall pass. I’ve been plenty critical of how Healthcare.gov has been handled (see here, or here, or here), but eventually it will get fixed, at least to the point at which it works well enough. Likewise, the fears now being experienced by people with individual insurance policies will, by and large, turn out to be unfounded. There will be some who have to pay more than they’ve been paying, but in almost all cases they’ll be getting more too.
But there’s no doubt that this is an escalating problem for the administration. The person who got sold a cheap insurance policy on the individual market because the insurer was confident that either a) they probably wouldn’t get sick any time soon, or b) the policy was so stingy (whether the customer knew it or not) that the insurer wouldn’t have to pay anything even if they did, has now become the victim whom all agree must be made whole. We’re all talking endlessly about Obama’s “If you like your current plan, you can keep it” pledge, but the fact is that if you have one of these junk insurance plans, you only like it if you haven’t had to use it. But no matter—the people on these plans (and not, say, people who are finally getting Medicaid, because they’re poor so who cares) are now the only people that matter. Congress is obsessed with them, the news media is obsessed with them, and Something Must Be Done.
The administration is clearly spooked, and so are Democrats. But everyone needs to take a breath and ask themselves whether what they do in the next couple of weeks is something they’ll be able to live with in a year or five years or twenty years.
No one should be under the illusion that the Republican proposals to “fix” the problem of people on the individual market who want to keep their current plan—one of which could be voted on today in the House—are anything other than an effort to cripple the ACA. Not only would they allow insurers to continue selling junk policies, they would also allow the insurers to deny people coverage because of pre-existing conditions. In other words, the Republicans propose to restore the abysmal status quo ante that led to passage of the ACA in the first place. They’d also have the likely effect of jacking up premiums in the exchange marketplace by allowing the insurers to cherry-pick healthy young people for the now still-legal junk policies, leaving older and sicker people to migrate to the exchanges, where premiums will almost surely skyrocket a year from now once the damage becomes clear. As Igor Volsky puts it, “On the eve of implementing hard fought reforms, lawmakers are essentially considering re-segregating the health care market: healthy uninsured individuals without an offer of employer-sponsored coverage, Medicare or Medicaid will be lured away into subprime policies that include few consumer protections (and probably won’t be there for them should they fall ill); sicker people will find themselves in exchanges that resemble high-risk insurance pools, paying ever-more for coverage.” Any Democrat who votes for something like that should be ashamed of themselves.
There’s a Democratic proposal from Mary Landrieu that’s almost as bad. Meanwhile, House Democrats are threatening the White House that they’ll sign on with the Republican plan if the White House doesn’t come up with some other solution that will allow them to cover their asses. But there may be no way to let people who have junk insurance keep it without undermining the law as a whole. As Ezra Klein says, “Solving a political problem now at the case of worsening a policy problem 10 months from now isn’t a good trade.” And that’s putting it way too mildly. They could easily try to solve a political problem now and give themselves a much worse political problem ten months from now by making it impossible for the law to succeed. If that happens, the fact that they signed on to the measure that all but destroyed the law isn’t going to save them with the voters. Obamacare’s fate is every Democrat’s fate, whether they like it or not.
You can say that Obama made his bed by repeating that “If you like your insurance, you can keep it,” and now he has to sleep in it. I’d have two responses to that. First, plans that were in effect when the ACA passed in 2010 fall under a grandfather clause, so strictly speaking, if you liked the plan you had when the law was passed and you still have it, you can keep it, even if it doesn’t meet the new requirements. But since the individual market is volatile (people move in and out of it frequently) and only plans that haven’t been altered since then fall under the grandfather clause, that’s a small number of people.
But much more importantly, we shouldn’t make a terrible policy choice just because it’s the one that we think would line up most precisely with a rhetorical pledge Barack Obama made three years ago. Yes, he should have said, “If you like your plan you can keep it, so long as it’s a plan that gives real coverage and doesn’t leave you vulnerable to bankruptcy if you get sick or have an accident.” But he didn’t. And today, we should make the policy choice that does the most good for the most people.
It would be nice if you could make an enormous policy change without leaving a single American worse off. But that was never possible. There are millions who are going to benefit from the ACA—people who had no insurance who will now be able to get it for free or for a modest cost, people with pre-existing conditions who couldn’t get coverage but now can, and yes, people who thought they were covered but weren’t and now will be, even if they have to pay a little more. Screwing huge numbers of them over for the sake of a small number of people who have been sold a bill of goods by their insurance company and want to keep their junk plans would be unconscionable.
As Josh Marshall says, it’s time for nervous Democrats to have a gut check. Republicans are positively slobbering at the opportunity they think they have to destroy the ACA. After all that’s happened—after a generation of waiting for health reform, after all the effort it took to pass it, after the Supreme Court case and the election and everything else—are there Democrats who want to find themselves telling their grandchildren, “Well, I helped the Republicans subvert the ACA and deprive millions of Americans of health security, because I was afraid somebody might run an ad against me in my next election”?
My confidence that your average member of Congress in either party fully understands the policy implications of what they might be voting for hovers somewhere near zero. But they need to get up to speed, and then find their moral centers. This is among the most critical moments in the already long and tortured history of this law. They’d better not screw it up.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 14, 2013
“Here We Go Again”: Democrats Need To Stop Freaking Out About Obamacare And Take Charge
The dawn of the 24-7 news cycle about 15 or so years ago brought with it a few new ways for the media to talk about and cover politics. With all that air time to fill, politics, and certain big news events like your major murders, became part soap opera. Soap operas, to keep the ratings steady, need running themes. What used to be called “Democrats in disarray,” known today in our hurried-up age as #demsindisarray, proved to be a compelling and durable one.
It developed, in part, because that dawn of cable happened to be the era of Clinton “scandals,” real and (mostly) imagined. Remember Craig Livingstone? If you don’t, Google him. If you do, you’re chuckling already, I know, because for about four days there on cable TV in 1996, Livingstone was supposed to be the ruination of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Democrats in disarray!
Yes, Republicans have been in disarray, too, from time to time—the low points of the Iraq War, Katrina, and just last month during the government shutdown. But for a variety of reasons, the 24-7 news cycle era has found Dems in disarray to be a far more potent story line than Republicans in disarray. It’s alliterative, for starters. And it has been, I readily concede, legitimately true at times. Plus, Fox, for many years, drove the agenda that the other cable nets swallowed hook, line, and sinker. MSNBC has been a liberal pushback channel only for five years or so, or less than half the life span of the 24-7 cycle. (Remember when Tucker Carlson was an MSNBC host?) And Republicans have tended to have tougher game faces, march more in lockstep, and not concede those crucial rhetorical inches that Democrats so often feel compelled to grant.
Of course, we are at one of these moments now. Bill Clinton conceded those rhetorical inches to the right on Obamacare, which Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) seized on immediately. At least two blue-state senators, Dianne Feinstein (CA) and Jeff Merkley (OR), have jumped on the “fix Obamacare” bandwagon. A week ago, Majority Leader Harry Reid was not going to allow any changes to the Affordable Care Act reach the floor of his Senate. Now he’s probably going to have to.
Undeniably, a lot of the damage is self-inflicted, and I’ve said that already more than once. It’s a pretty good time for President Obama to crack the whip. Why he evidently didn’t earlier is still mystifying. Or maybe it’s not. He just isn’t a kick-ass-and-take-names kind of guy. But the success of his presidency may be on the line here in the next few weeks, so it’s not the worst idea for him to become one.
At the same time, there’s no need for panic. Even with the continued existence and success of Fox, reality is still reality, and in the end, reality usually trumps cable and hyperventilating reports about who won the morning in Politico. And reality says the enrollment period doesn’t end until next spring, and it’s really not possible to tell how things are going until enrollment has ended and we see both the number of people who’ve enrolled and what percentage healthy vs. sick, because insurers made their guesstimates and pegged their rates to those guesstimates. Reality also says a legislative fix to address the problems faced by those buying insurance on the private market might not be so bad. A bill that allows—doesn’t order, but allows—insurers to keep offering existing policies for one more year while also restricting that offer only to existing customers wouldn’t necessarily blow a big hole in the precepts of the act. I’m not sure why Republicans would agree to it, but the first part of my equation comes from Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI)’s bill, so who knows.
Democrats—especially Obama, but all Democrats—have to take charge of the situation right now. In danger of losing the country’s trust, they must say in essence: “All right, we did screw up Round 1. We’re going to admit it, and we’re going to apologize, and we’re going to fix it, and we’re not going to bullshit you. But we’re also not going to panic. We’re going to make this thing work.”
If they do all those things, they will still come out looking a hell of a lot better than the radical obstructionists. Obama’s approval rating may be down to 40 percent, but that’s four times the Republican Congress’s rating. He can step in and take more control of the agenda here, and he and the Democrats can be seen as the ones sincerely trying to fix these problems, while the Republicans will inevitably be seen as wanting only to kill yet another law and throw yet another wrench into the engine. They will be led once again by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the man who has enticed his party to go down several rat holes already these past couple of years. He is now sitting up on his throne warning that hackers are about to steal applicants’ Social Security numbers, a charge that rings with all the veracity of his earlier accusation that the administration knowingly targeted conservative nonprofit groups.
The current situation is serious. But I remember a lot of other times when it was supposedly curtains for Obama, too, because inside the Beltway, the more disciplined Republicans, who after all are in the luxurious position of just sitting back and firing away, have an easier time winning news cycles. But out beyond the Beltway, the party that shut down the government for three weeks and killed immigration reform and wants to decimate food stamps and can’t even pass its own spending bills doesn’t look very appealing to most people. The fate of Obamacare can be changed. The DNA of the GOP cannot.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 14, 2013
“What Will Republicans Do?”: Here Comes The Real Government Takeover Of Health Care
For the last few weeks, Republicans have been full of schadenfreude over President Obama’s broken “If you like your plan, you can keep it” promise.
Now, this issue is about to blow up in Republicans’ faces.
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who faces a tough re-election fight in a red state next year, has introduced a bill to address the president’s broken promise through greater government control over the individual health insurance market. Her bill would obligate insurers to continue offering all the plans they offer today unless they entirely exit the health insurance business in a state.
What will Republicans do with this proposal? Do they really want a federal law that says health insurers can’t enter or exit specific lines of business?
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has introduced a bill in the House that would allow insurers to continue offering plans that would have been prohibited under the Affordable Care Act, but his bill is vulnerable to the criticism that it will still lead to a raft of plan cancellations as insurers choose to discontinue plans because the ACA has changed the financial incentives they face.
If Congress really wants to make sure people can take their plans, it will need to use the heavy-handed Landrieu approach; the light-touch Upton approach won’t work. Erick Erickson (of all people!) understands this; he wrote a piece this morning called “It’s a trap“:
The House, with the help of a good number of Democrats, will pass the Upton plan and send it to the Senate. Harry Reid will substitute the Landrieu plan and send it back to the House. The House will be forced to either vote for the Landrieu plan or be characterized as siding with insurance companies against people.
In one fell swoop, the Democrats will have the GOP on record saving Mary Landrieu’s re-election in Louisiana by casting her as the one who saved Americans’ health care plans, and also getting on record as really being in favor of fixing Obamacare with the use of mandates.
Pretty much. And it’s the comeuppance conservatives are getting for (1) having no health care agenda of their own and (2) endorsing the bizarre idea that health reform should not lead to health plan changes. With no health policy guidestar other than they’re against what the president is for, Republicans are liable to walk into traps like demanding more health insurance regulation than the president wants.
By: Josh Barro, Business Insider, November 13, 2013
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