“Complete Nihilists”: The Audacity Of GOP Dopes On Health Care
In three weeks or so, the Supreme Court will rule on health care. Republicans have been discussing what they might do in the event that poor, beleaguered John Roberts manages to withstand that vicious assault of the liberals and to lead a majority that strikes down the individual mandate. This one is a classic, folks. After spending three years lying their eyes out about the bill and tearing this country apart over it, it now turns out that they may well want to keep several of its provisions. And of course they want to keep the easy and fun stuff and get rid of all that bad-bad-bad stuff, but what they don’t understand—or more likely do understand but refuse to acknowledge—is that the good doesn’t work without the “bad.” It’s breathtaking and ignorant—whether breathtakingly ignorant or ignorantly breathtaking I’m not quite sure. Call it the audacity of dopes.
Two weeks ago, John Boehner was insisting that “Obamacare” must be repealed lock, stock, and barrel. Some other Republicans wanted the slightly less radical approach of keeping some aspects of the law. A few days ago, some in the House warmed to this idea. Now, TPM is reporting that Senate Republicans are hopping on the piecemeal train.
The idea is to preserve the language that requires insurers to cover people with preexisting conditions, because everyone likes that; to continue to permit young people up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance, because that’s helpful, especially in a rocky economy; and to press forward with eliminating the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole,” whereby seniors have to pay 100 percent of medication costs within a certain price range.
The last two are fine. But that first one is the gobsmacker. You cannot just make insurance companies cover really sick people. Sick people are expensive people, and insurers’ costs will shoot to the heavens, and those costs of course will be passed along to everyone else. Is there a solution to this problem? Yes. The solution is to get more people in the insurance pool—especially more healthy people, who don’t cost a lot to cover. Then, insurers have more money to use paying for the care of the sick people. But since you can’t just wish for more healthy people to buy insurance, you have to figure out some way to get them to do so. And hence … the individual mandate. It broadens the pool and brings premiums down. It’s how you manage to pay for all those people who need radiation and chemo and dialysis.
There are alternatives to the mandate, which I needn’t go into now because the mandate is what we have. Without the mandate, you have millions of sick people being added to insurance rolls but no healthy ones. What happens? You develop “high-risk pools,” in the argot, and Harold Pollack, a leading health-care expert from the University of Chicago (who advised the Obama campaign) says that high-risk pools don’t work: “Except as a temporary stopgap measure, the track records of high-risk pools is quite poor. Experience in state programs indicates that high subsidies are required to keep premiums affordable for this (by definition) high-cost group. Many states have ended up capping the program, charging high premiums, or both.”
As it happens, the ACA has started temporary high-risk pools, designed to try to help some people before the law fully takes effect. Pollack studied them and wrote up the results in the Journal of General Internal Medicine last year. He found that the program’s funding didn’t come close to matching the need. In other words, lots of money is required to serve these people properly—money that would come from premiums imposed by the individual mandate.
The Republicans’ “answer” to this is their answer to everything like this, tax-free saving accounts. But health-savings accounts, if they work at all, which is a serious question, work only for healthy people who break a leg tossing the Frisbee. Nobody can sock away $25,000 for an operation or $100,000 for end-of-life care; the very idea is crazy. The GOP would also subsidize care for high-risk people. But Pollack notes that these subsidies would have to be billions of dollars a year. Republicans aren’t throwing that kind of money around at anything. Except at ships the Navy doesn’t want and tax cuts really rich people don’t need.
It’s just a shockingly unserious approach to a very serious problem of roughly 4 million uninsured Americans who have cancer, diabetes, emphysema, and the like. Republicans don’t give a happy crap about any of these people. They have no interest whatsoever in trying to solve a public problem. See, this is the Democrats’ burden, and when you come down it, the true difference between the parties these days. Democrats are actually concerned with trying to address a public-policy problem in a responsible way. You can disagree with their way, but they’re at least trying to do something positive in the country—help those 4 million as best they can. This involves difficulty and choices because nothing meaningful in life doesn’t. It also requires the people to stop being selfish apes for five minutes and look at the larger picture.
The Republicans, on the other hand, are complete nihilists. They don’t care about solving any policy problems. They care about two things. They care about politics—advantage, winning, humiliating Obama. And they care about ideology, their drunken and medieval belief that the market can fix everything. But wait; it’s not even really a belief. They’re dumb, but they are not that dumb. They don’t fully believe it. Like Romney accidentally acknowledging to Mark Halperin that huge budget cuts cause recessions. It’s just the garbage they say because it sounds good. No pain! Nothing is complicated! Be selfish!
There is some question as to whether the Republicans will unite behind the three planks I mentioned. Because only the “moderates,” the sell-outs, really want to do it. “Real” Republicans, the Tea Party people, want to kill every aspect of the bill, strike its name from the very records of history. So we’ll see what they do. And of course it all depends on the Supremes tossing the mandate out, which they might not do.
But if this chain of events unfolds, you can bet on Paul Ryan and others going out there to talk about their “reform” of the high-risk pool problem with all the pious sincerity they can muster. And if, God forbid, the Republicans win the presidency in November? Then they’d enact some patchwork thing with about 1/20th of the money actually required, and millions would remain uninsured. But most Americans would never be the wiser because 4 million people just isn’t that many to begin with. That’s how the GOP will hope to get away with it. Here’s hoping little Johnny Roberts is as delicate a flower as conservatives fear he is.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 31, 2012
“Openly And Dangerously Reckless”: Republicans Are Unfit To Govern
One of this biggest economic stories of the past week was this:
The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a “severe recession,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe’s central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.
Just six months ago the OECD considered a 2 percent European contraction the worst-case scenario, but it now sees that as close to happening.
The report forecasts Europe falling further behind other countries, particularly the United States, whose economy is expected to grow 2.4 percent this year and 2.6 percent next.
Let me repeat: Europe’s economy is contracting, while the U.S. economy is growing. Europe’s economy is in imminent danger of contracting at the rate that just six months ago was considered the worst-case scenario, while the U.S. economy is expected to grow even more next year than this year. And just outside the Eurozone, this past week also saw England’s double-dip recession reported as even worsethan had been thought. In other words, as the world continues to attempt to dig itself out of the economic collapse that was caused by the banking meltdown, the United States is slowly recovering. Europe isn’t.
While Europe elected conservative governments at the worst possible moment, and then embraced the cruel stupidity that is economic austerity, the United States took a different path. The United States should have embraced a much more aggressive growth policy, but at least it didn’t slash and burn government spending the way Europe did. Europe’s economies and Europe’s people have been devastated by economic austerity while the tentative Obama stimulus package has stimulated tentative economic growth. Stimulus works, austerity doesn’t. Until the economy is fully back on its feet, more stimulus would be the best economic policy. Austerity would be the worst economic policy. So what do the Republicans want to do?
Mitt Romney would have let the auto industry go bankrupt. Mitt Romney thinks unemployment insurance is a disaster. Mitt Romney wants to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. Mitt Romney wants to cut benefits on just about everyone who needs them in order to finance even more tax cuts for the extremely wealthy— people such as Mitt Romney. In other words, Mitt Romney wants to impose austerity on pretty much everyone other than the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney. In fact, Mitt Romney’s economic program is so unfair, and it so favors the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney, that he doesn’t even want us to know its details. And that gets to the core of why Mitt Romney is unfit to govern.
The problem with Mitt Romney is not only that he doesn’t want us to know the details of his economic agenda, which suggests that it’s even worse than what we do know, and what we do know is bad enough, but Mitt Romney also doesn’t want us to know any details about Mitt Romney. Breaking with the tradition that voters should know as much as is possible about presidential candidates, Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns. What is he hiding? Breaking with the tradition that voters should have at least some idea about a presidential candidate’s positions on major issues, Mitt Romney has flip-flopped so many times on so many issues that even one of his top campaign advisors openly admitted that Romney’s stands can be erased and rewritten without notice. Does he even have any principles or values, or is that he doesn’t want us to know what they are? What is he hiding? Mitt Romney has taken so many stands on so many issues that even he can’t remember where he is supposed to stand on them on any given day. Maybe what Mitt Romney is hiding is that there is no Mitt Romney at all.
For their part, Republican congressional leaders want to repeal the Obama health care law, which would explode the national debt. Republican congressional leaders offer nothing to replace the Obama health care law. House Republicans voted to end Medicare. House Republicans want to decimate health care spending. House Republicans want to take away a million Pell Grants. House Republicans want to punish low income Americans. House Republicans want to punish senior citizens. House Republicans want to punish women. House Republicans want to drive even more Americans from some semblance of food security into poverty. The House Republican budget leader wants to drive even more children into poverty. Whatever they may say they want to do, the agenda of congressional Republicans would be devastating for tens of millions of Americans.
Unfortunately, being wrong— even stupidly wrong— is not in itself proof of unfitness to govern. As the Bush-Cheney team proved, it is in fact now a prerequisite for any Republican aspiring to national office. But the destructive policy agenda of congressional Republicans is not even remotely the worst of it, because in order to impose these policies they have resorted to tactics that are nothing more than political extortion, and government cannot function by extortion. It cannot function when hard fought agreements are blithely broken for the purpose of further extortion. And that’s what the Republicans now are about. They operate like criminal thugs and they cannot be trusted to keep their word. And it’s not merely a game of daring high stakes brinksmanship, for merely playing the game is itself dangerously destructive.
When the Republicans last summer broke bipartisan precedent by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States in order to force the sorts of budget cuts that have shattered the economies of Europe, they agreed to a deal that itself will damage the recovery, but by forcing that deal they also triggered the first ever downgrade in our national credit rating. The Standard & Poor’s downgrade was problematic in itself, but S&P was very carefully explicit in its rationale:
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.
That brinksmanship was wholly the fault of the Republicans. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents, and with both Democratic and Republican Congresses, no one previously had been so petty and unhinged as to play chicken with the debt ceiling. The Republicans last year broke all precedent. Ownership of the consequences is theirs alone. And beyond revealing how dangerous they are even to have attempted political extortion by holding the debt ceiling hostage, the specifics of the Republican approach to the national debt also was specifically mentioned.
Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
Both the Republican policy and the means of imposing the Republican policy were specifically cited. As our own Hunter explained:
Parsing the S&P statement from a partisan standpoint, there are a few things to note. As cited above, the Bush tax cuts appear to be the only non-entitlement-related government policy specifically called out by S&P in their rationale for downgrade, and “Republicans in Congress” were specifically called out for “continu[ing] to resist any measure that would raise revenues.” It seems S&P comes down squarely on the side of believing revenues doneed to be increased, though it pointedly shies away from suggesting any numbers.Couple this with their plain and prominent citation of debt ceiling hostage-taking as a prime reason for the downgrade, and it would be difficult to argue any position other than that S&P is blaming recent GOP actions directly for their downgrade decision
All of which would be bad enough. All of which would by itself reveal how dangerous it is to allow such people any means of asserting any level of control over the making of economic policy. But now House Speaker John Boehner wants to play the whole game over again:
In the meeting—a day after a high-profile speech by Boehner in which he called for spending cuts paired with any future debt-ceiling hikes—the speaker told the president that “I’m not going to allow a debt ceiling increase without doing something serious about the debt,” according to the Ohio Republican’s aides.
Which has even his Republican Senate counterpart unenthused. Of course that same Republican Senate counterpart last year said that his single most important goal was to deny President Obama a second term in office. Despite two wars, international terrorism, a still staggering economy, rising poverty and homelessness, an impending climate crisis and a host of other issues on which one would think a national political leader would want to focus, the single greatest priority of the most powerful Republican in the Senate was to ensure electoral victory. And continued Republican efforts to sabotage the economyproved the man’s words.
The Republicans don’t want to solve the nation’s problems, they only want to gain and maintain political power. And in pursuit of that goal they are openly and dangerously reckless. And their new presidential standard-bearer not only wants to impose policies similar to those that continue to devastate Europe, he is a deliberately dishonest cipher, not only about where he stands on issues but even about whether or not he actually has any stands on issues. He doesn’t merely disinform, he openly mocks even the concept of informing.
Differences in policy are one thing, and history tends to reveal who was right and who was wrong. For example, the New Deal worked, while austerity doesn’t. And it’s perfectly fair for Republicans to continue to try to gut the New Deal while promoting more disastrous austerity. That’s politics, and if American voters want to swap the current slow but steadily improving economic recovery for the type of economic implosion and social upheaval now crushing Europe, they have every right to vote for the Republicans. They have every right to vote for whomever they want for whatever reasons or lack of reason they choose. But when Republicans shatter precedent by attempting political extortion that by itself endangers the full faith and credit of the United States, when they threaten to crash the economy if they don’t get their way, when they consider winning more important than responsible governing, when they consciously attempt to undermine the very concept of an informed electorate, that isn’t politics, it’s the deliberate destruction of politics. It makes mere thuggery appear relatively benign in comparison. It reveals the Republicans as not only ideologically and intellectually incompetent, but also as dangerously unstable of temperament.
With the modern Republican Party, the danger isn’t merely that they will succeed in imposing more disastrous policies, the danger is that even allowing them to have any influence at all on the process of making policy can and will be abused, with potentially disastrous consequences. Modern Republicans are not merely lousy at governing, they are unfit to govern.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, May 27, 2012
“Failing The Test Of Courage, Integrity And Loyalty”: Romney Messes Up And Tells The Truth About Austerity
Romney has periodic breakdowns when asked questions about the economy because he sometimes forgets the need to lie. He forgets that he is supposed to treat austerity as the epitome of economic wisdom. When he responds quickly to questions about austerity he slips into default mode and speaks the truth – adopting austerity during the recovery from a Great Recession would (as in Europe) throw the nation back into recession or depression. The latest example is his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.
“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Romney explains that austerity, during the recovery from a Great Recession, would cause catastrophic damage to our nation. The problem, of course, is that the Republican congressional leadership is committed to imposing austerity on the nation and Speaker Boehner has just threatened that Republicans will block the renewal of the debt ceiling in order to extort Democrats to agree to austerity – severe cuts to social programs. Romney knows this could “throw us into recession or depression” and says he would never follow such a policy.
Romney, however, has not opposed Boehner’s threat to use extortion to force austerity on the nation. Romney has the nomination sown up, but I predict that he will stand by and let Boehner try to throw us into a Great Depression rather than upset the Tea Party-wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, Romney will attack Democrats who have the political courage to defend our nation against his Party’s demands for austerity that would throw the nation into recession or depression. What does one call a politician who, solely to advance his personal political ambition, supports his Party’s efforts to coerce austerity even though he knows that the austerity would cause a national economic catastrophe and states that he, “of course,” would never adopt such self-destructive austerity if he were president? Romney is failing the tests of courage, integrity, and loyalty to our nation and people.
Later in the interview, Romney claims that federal budgetary deficits are “immoral.” But he has just explained that using austerity for the purported purpose of ending a deficit would cause a recession or depression. A recession or depression would make the deficit far larger. That means that Romney should be denouncing austerity as “immoral” (as well as suicidal) because it will not simply increase the deficit (which he claims to find “immoral” because of its impact on children) but also dramatically increase unemployment, poverty, child poverty and hunger, and harm their education by causing more teachers to lose their jobs and more school programs to be cut. Fewer children will be able to get college degrees. Austerity is the great enemy of children – it is the epitome of a self-destructive, immoral economic policy.
Listen for the sounds of silence from Romney in coming months. I predict that he will not act to protect our children or our economy from the suicidal and “immoral” austerity his Republican allies are trying to coerce the Democrats to inflict on our economy and our children.
By: William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives, May 25, 2012
“A Pathetic Scam”: Boehner On Health Care, “Everything Must Go”
For about three years now, congressional Republicans have sworn up and down that they’re hard at work on a health care reform package of their own. It’s going to be awesome, they said, and will meet Obamacare’s goals without all that unpopular stuff.
Sensible people gave up on actually seeing this vaporware quite a while ago, realizing that “repeal and replace” was a rather pathetic scam. But with the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act due fairly soon, and with the possibility of a Republican White House and a Republican Congress on the horizon, there’s renewed interest in what, exactly, GOP policymakers intend to do on the issue.
There was some talk this week that Republicans, fearing a public backlash, would “draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.” (The interconnectivity of the popular and unpopular parts are generally as lost on Republicans as they are on the general public.)
The GOP’s base immediately said this would be outrageous. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) joined them, making it clear that Republicans intend to kill the whole law, including the parts Americans like, want, and have come to expect.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reiterated Thursday that he wants to repeal all of President Obama’s healthcare law if the Supreme Court doesn’t toss out the entire statute.
“We voted to fully repeal the president’s healthcare law as one of our first acts as a new House majority, and our plan remains to repeal the law in its entirety,” Boehner said to reporters. “Anything short of that is unacceptable.”
Let’s not brush past too quickly exactly what this means. The only “acceptable” outcome for Romney is one in which tens of millions of Americans lose their health care coverage, seniors pay higher prescription drug costs, small businesses lose their tax breaks, and the deficit goes up by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
But there’s another point that’s gone largely forgotten: we’ve gone from a policy landscape in which Republicans agreed with 80% of Obamacare to one in which Republicans agree with 0% of Obamacare.
No one seems to remember this, but in September 2009, Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany (R), the Republican who delivered the official GOP response to President Obama’s speech on health care reform, made an interesting declaration, telling MSNBC “about 80%” of the Democratic proposal is acceptable to Republicans.
Soon after, none other than Eric Cantor, now the House Majority Leader, said Republicans and Democrats agree on 80% of the health care reform measures.
Keep in mind, these comments came when the public option was still a key component of the Democratic plan — which suggests by the time the proposal was being voted on, Republicans liked more than 80% of Obamamcare.
This, of course, leads us to a few questions for Boehner and his cohorts. One, how is it congressional Republicans went from 80% to 0%, when the reform package itself did not move to the left? And two, if Republicans intend to get rid of “the entirety” of the law, including parts that enjoy overwhelming public support, why should voters back GOP candidates?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 18, 2012
“No More Tax Cuts For The Wealthy”: As Debt Battle Looms, No Option But To Raise Taxes
President Obama and Republican leaders in Congress made history of sorts last year when they agreed to a 10-year plan to reduce annual deficits with spending cuts and no tax increases. Mr. Obama vows not to let it happen again.
Both he and Speaker John A. Boehner put down their respective markers this week, suggesting a potential replay of their damaging showdown over the debt ceiling last summer. On Tuesday, the speaker reiterated what has become known as the Boehner Rule: House Republicans will not increase the debt ceiling again without spending cuts of a greater amount. Mr. Obama, on Wednesday, told him Congress must pass a “clean” debt-limit increase to cover the nation’s obligations; there will be no more deficit deals, he said, without higher tax revenues from the wealthiest Americans.
While the Republicans largely prevailed last year, this time the Obama administration believes it has the greater leverage. The pain of the reductions is being felt as House Republicans advance the annual spending bills; already they have proposed to raise the spending caps for the military, and they are squabbling over domestic programs.
“It’s not reasonable or right for there to be another discussion of a spending-only package” for reducing deficits, said Jacob J. Lew, the White House chief of staff and former budget director. “When you look at how we got into the hole we’re in, it’s very clear that tax cuts for the wealthy were part of contributing to the deficits we’re now trying to close.”
Mr. Obama’s position leaves open the question of whether election-year politics will play to his advantage among voters who do not like deficits or the measures needed to reduce them. Neither party expects the fight to be resolved until after the election, the results of which will determine who actually has the upper hand in a lame-duck Congress. The debt limit must be raised by early 2013, Treasury has said.
The two budget deals last year — the deficit-reduction compromise in August and a smaller agreement before that — called for cutting $1.7 trillion from so-called discretionary spending, which covers the bulk of federal programs whose budgets Congress controls annually, including air-traffic control, the military, education, research and much more.
Those deals left unscathed the entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which, given the growing aging population, are driving projections of unsustainable deficits.
And those deals, because of Republicans’ resistance, did not raise taxes, unlike the deficit measures of the 1980s and 1990s.
“Tax hikes destroy jobs,” Mr. Boehner said in his speech on Tuesday.
But veterans of past budget wars say that discretionary spending for domestic programs, which make up just 15 percent of the federal budget, cannot continue to bear the brunt without significant implications for government services. “They’ve gone way past fat and are cutting into muscle,” said Bruce R. Bartlett, who was a Treasury official in the Reagan administration.
Nor, these people say, would the public support the deeper reductions that would have to be made in programs like Medicare if taxes are not part of the mix.
“That’s basically why I, and a very large number of other people, conclude that you do need some additional revenues,” said Rudolph G. Penner, a Republican who headed the Congressional Budget Office in the 1980s and was co-chairman in 2010 of a blue-ribbon panel that proposed a debt-reduction plan.
“I’ve been kind of surprised at these recent agreements, where almost all of the reduction comes from discretionary programs over 10 years,” he said. “What you’re talking about is a very large number of years of austerity — through various Congresses, elections and possible natural disasters and terrorist attacks and on and on, which is just not plausible to me.”
Barry Anderson, a former deputy director of the White House and Congressional budget offices, said, “Eventually you’re going to have to increase taxes across the board” — not just for the wealthy — “by at least a third.”
Former Senator Pete V. Domenici, who was the chairman or senior Republican leader on the Senate Budget Committee from 1981 to 2007, said in an interview, “Adequate projections of revenues and expenditures have to be put on the table. Everything has to be on the table.”
Senator Domenici, with Alice Rivlin, a former budget director for Congress and the Clinton administration, was chairman of a panel in 2010 of former lawmakers, administration officials, academics and executives, that produced a blueprint for debt reduction. It came just before a roughly similar plan from a majority on Mr. Obama’s fiscal commission, which was led by Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine B. Bowles, a businessman and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.
All three recent debt proposals — Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin and that of Mr. Penner’s group, sponsored by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration — recommended trillions of dollars in savings, both from higher taxes and reduced entitlement spending. Yet it is those two sources that the White House and Congress have avoided, given Republicans’ opposition to tax increases and Democrats’ to cutting Medicare unless taxes are raised.
Tax increases were part of nearly every significant deficit-reduction measure of the 1980s and 1990s, including the 1982, 1984 and 1987 packages signed by Ronald Reagan, the 1990 accord under George H.W. Bush and Mr. Clinton’s 1993 measure. The exception was a deal in 1997, though by that agreement Congressional Republicans ratified Mr. Clinton’s 1993 tax increases that they had vowed to repeal.
Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Mr. Lew, participated in most of those deals, as an aide to House Democratic leaders and then as Mr. Clinton’s budget director.
“The history of dealing with big problems like this is, almost in every case, it’s been a balanced package” of taxes and cuts in both discretionary and entitlement spending, Mr. Lew said. “So it’s not like it is some radical Democratic position.”
By: Jackie Calmes, The New York Times, May 18, 2012