“Deciduous Tree Rot”: McConnell Should Be Removed “Root And Branch”
In Kentucky, the federal health care exchange created by the Affordable Care Act is called Kynect. Kynect is very popular, but ObamaCare is very unpopular. So it goes.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to rip up ObamaCare “root and branch” and toss it in the mulch pile, but he doesn’t want to do a thing to Kynect because it has already given more than 400,000 Kentuckians health insurance, many for the first time. Of course, since Kynect and ObamaCare are actually two words for the same thing, it isn’t possible to kill one without killing the other.
The Lexington Herald-Leader explains:
Repeal the federal law, which McConnell calls “Obamacare,” and the state exchange would collapse.
Kynect could not survive without the ACA’s insurance reforms, including no longer allowing insurance companies to cancel policies when people get sick or deny them coverage because of pre-existing conditions, as well as the provision ending lifetime limits on benefit payments. (Kentucky tried to enact such reforms in the 1990s and found out we were too small a market to do it alone.)
Kentucky’s exchange also could not survive without the federal funding and tax credits that are helping 300,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians gain access to regular preventive medicine, including colonoscopies, mammograms and birth control without co-pays.
As a result of a law that McConnell wants to repeal, one in 10 of his constituents no longer have to worry that an illness or injury will drive them into personal bankruptcy or a premature grave.
Repealing the federal law would also end the Medicaid expansion that is enabling Kentucky to expand desperately needed drug treatment and mental health services.
Kynect is the Affordable Care Act is Obamacare — even if Kentuckians are confused about which is which.
The Herald-Leader goes on to wonder how average Kentuckians are supposed to understand the Affordable Care Act if Mitch McConnell doesn’t understand (or pretends not to understand) it himself.
The answer to that is pretty easy. If Kentuckians start with the presumption that nothing that Mitch McConnell says about Kynect or ObamaCare or the Affordable Care Act is true, they will be much less confused. If they like Kynect, then they like ObamaCare and the Affordable Care Act. If they like it, they should vote out Mitch McConnell and prevent him from removing their benefits “root and branch.”
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 28, 2014
“Feigning Outrage”: Outraised By Grimes, McConnell Rethinks Money-As-Speech
Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) has once again outraised Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) in their 2014 Senate race — and all of a sudden, McConnell no longer seems so enthusiastic about the use of money as free speech.
In the first three months of 2014, Grimes raised $2.7 million, edging McConnell’s $2.4 million haul. McConnell still holds a decisive financial advantage in the race; his campaign has almost $10.4 million in cash on hand, more than double Grimes’ total.
That said, McConnell’s campaign has already spent more than $7 million in the 2014 election, only to see a slight decline in his polling numbers. And it seems that the new fundraising totals have made the Republican leader’s campaign defensive.
“The very same ultra-rich liberal elite who bankrolled Barack Obama into the White House are pulling out all the stops for Alison Lundergan Grimes,” spokeswoman Allison Moore told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Kentuckians know darn well her entire campaign is funded by those who seek to destroy Kentucky values and our way of life and the only way they can accomplish that is by getting rid of the man responsible for stopping them, Mitch McConnell.”
Moore’s implication — that Grimes is wrong for taking money from wealthy out-of-state donors — is rather ironic, considering that few politicians raise money from the “ultra-rich elite” better than McConnell does. According to the Wall Street Journal, as of December 31, 80 percent of McConnell’s campaign contributions came from donors outside of Kentucky (good for a total of more than $9.3 million). And the top donors to his campaign committee — which include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs — don’t exactly scream “Kentucky values.”
McConnell has also benefited from outside groups that have jumped directly into the race; $3.4 million has already been spent in support of the Republican, according to GOP ad-tracking firm SMG Delta.
Although McConnell’s campaign is now feigning outrage that Grimes has raised big sums from “Obama’s liberal Hollywood friends” like Jeffrey Katzenberg, the senator is generally one of the nation’s most outspoken defenders of outside money in politics. In 2012, McConnell led the opposition to the DISCLOSE Act, which would have required political groups to disclose campaign contributions of more than $10,000. At the time, the minority leader argued that full disclosure could be used as a “political weapon,” enabling the government to unleash “harassment and intimidation tactics” against those who donate to opposition candidates.
Today, it appears that McConnell would like to turn the weapon against the “liberal elite” backing Grimes.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, April 16, 2014
“Health Care Nightmares”: There’s An Extraordinary Ugliness Of Spirit Abroad In Today’s GOP America
When it comes to health reform, Republicans suffer from delusions of disaster. They know, just know, that the Affordable Care Act is doomed to utter failure, so failure is what they see, never mind the facts on the ground.
Thus, on Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, dismissed the push for pay equity as an attempt to “change the subject from the nightmare of Obamacare”; on the same day, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study estimating “a net gain of 9.3 million in the number of American adults with health insurance coverage from September 2013 to mid-March 2014.” Some nightmare. And the overall gain, including children and those who signed up during the late-March enrollment surge, must be considerably larger.
But while Obamacare is looking like anything but a nightmare, there are indeed some nightmarish things happening on the health care front. For it turns out that there’s a startling ugliness of spirit abroad in modern America — and health reform has brought that ugliness out into the open.
Let’s start with the good news about reform, which keeps coming in. First, there was the amazing come-from-behind surge in enrollments. Then there were a series of surveys — from Gallup, the Urban Institute, and RAND — all suggesting large gains in coverage. Taken individually, any one of these indicators might be dismissed as an outlier, but taken together they paint an unmistakable picture of major progress.
But wait: What about all the people who lost their policies thanks to Obamacare? The answer is that this looks more than ever like a relatively small issue hyped by right-wing propaganda. RAND finds that fewer than a million people who previously had individual insurance became uninsured — and many of those transitions, one guesses, had nothing to do with Obamacare. It’s worth noting that, so far, not one of the supposed horror stories touted in Koch-backed anti-reform advertisements has stood up to scrutiny, suggesting that real horror stories are rare.
It will be months before we have a full picture, but it’s clear that the number of uninsured Americans has already dropped significantly — not least in Mr. McConnell’s home state. It appears that around 40 percent of Kentucky’s uninsured population has already gained coverage, and we can expect a lot more people to sign up next year.
Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond to these developments. They can’t offer any real alternative to Obamacare, because you can’t achieve the good stuff in the Affordable Care Act, like coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, without also including the stuff they hate, the requirement that everyone buy insurance and the subsidies that make that requirement possible. Their political strategy has been to talk vaguely about replacing reform while waiting for its inevitable collapse. And what if reform doesn’t collapse? They have no idea what to do.
At the state level, however, Republican governors and legislators are still in a position to block the act’s expansion of Medicaid, denying health care to millions of vulnerable Americans. And they have seized that opportunity with gusto: Most Republican-controlled states, totaling half the nation, have rejected Medicaid expansion. And it shows. The number of uninsured Americans is dropping much faster in states accepting Medicaid expansion than in states rejecting it.
What’s amazing about this wave of rejection is that it appears to be motivated by pure spite. The federal government is prepared to pay for Medicaid expansion, so it would cost the states nothing, and would, in fact, provide an inflow of dollars. The health economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the principal architects of health reform — and normally a very mild-mannered guy — recently summed it up: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” Indeed.
And while supposed Obamacare horror stories keep on turning out to be false, it’s already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.
But nobody expects to see a lot of prominent Republicans declaring that rejecting Medicaid expansion is wrong, that caring for Americans in need is more important than scoring political points against the Obama administration. As I said, there’s an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today’s America, which health reform has brought out into the open.
And that revelation, not reform itself — which is going pretty well — is the real Obamacare nightmare.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April, 11, 2014
“Mitch Has Got Some ‘Splainin’ To Do”: McConnell Recycles His Own Ad, Ignores 188,130 Kentuckians Whose Insurance He’d Repeal
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) failed in his goal to make President Obama a one-term president, but he’s still one of the most crafty and ruthless campaigners in politics, as his latest ad proves.
McConnell’s new ad recycles a message the senator knows works because it helped him win in 2008. The new ad is far more affecting. It focuses entirely on Robert Pierce, a worker from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, where exposure to radiation left several employees with cancer. Pierce says throat cancer has weakened his own whispery voice, but he praises the senator for using his voice to help him.
McConnell is boldly trumpeting his help to the plant with the testimony of a man few will want to question. The record is much more complex, according to The Huffington Post‘s Jason Cherkis and Zach Carter.
The senator didn’t “spring into action” on Paducah until 1999, 14 years after the first workers became sick, when a Washington Post article uncovered that radioactive exposure was still occurring at the plant. But once the story was in the limelight, McConnell pushed for a practical solution: “He worked to pass what amounted to a new entitlement that allowed plant workers over age 50 access to free body scans and free health care.” Recently McConnell’s absence from the debate about the plant’s potential closing has led a union leader to say the senator has “given up on Paducah.”
An ad touting the ability to get people government-run health care is an unlikely way to open the campaign of a man who has vowed to repeal Obamacare “root and branch.”
Thanks to the president’s health reforms, 188,130 residents of McConnell’s state now have health coverage; of those, 100,359 have completely subsidized health insurance through Medicaid or SCHIP.
McConnell needs to explain what will happen to the more than 100,000 people who would lose coverage if his goal of repealing Obamacare is accomplished, says The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent.
“McConnell’s new ad tells us he should be re-elected because his efforts to bring health coverage to people who lack it shows his willingness to ‘knock down walls’ for Kentucky’s ‘working families,’ helping ‘save people’s lives,’” Sargent writes. “So what about all the working people who would lose coverage if McConnell got his way?”
Unfortunately for McConnell, 2014 isn’t 2008.
Six years ago the senator could brag about providing some deserving workers with government health care without having to go into his actual policies on health care. In 2014, Obamacare is no longer theoretical; millions of Americans have gained coverage through Obamacare exchanges or by remaining on their parents’ coverage until age 26, thanks to the law.
If McConnell is arguing he did the right thing by helping those in need, he must also explain what would happen to these people if he gets his way and they lose their coverage.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, January 22, 2014
“Are The Obamacare Clouds Breaking?”: Love It Or Hate It, Obamacare Is Here To Stay
This morning, I was listening to NPR—because yeah, I’m an effete pointy-headed liberal and that’s how I roll—and I heard a story about people in California who got insurance cancellation notices, but then wound up getting better coverage and couldn’t be happier about it. And the other day there was this story in The Washington Post about droves of poor people in rural Kentucky getting insurance for the first time in their lives—free, through Medicaid—because of the Affordable Care Act. In other words, after spending weeks telling the tales of people losing their health coverage (who in truth could get other health coverage), the media are finally putting at least some attention on the people who are benefiting from the ACA.
And encouraging news seems to be breaking out all over. Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas ask, “Is Obamacare Turning the Corner?”, noting that Healthcare.gov seems to be working pretty well, at least on the front end. States with well-functioning web sites like New York and California are meeting or exceeding their enrollment targets. Steve Benen concurs on the corner-turning interpretation. Kevin Drum argues that “Getting Obamacare to the end zone wasn’t easy, and Obama almost fumbled the ball at the one-yard line, but he’s finally won. There’s nothing left for conservatives to do. Love it or hate it, Obamacare is here to stay.”
That isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of problems left to be sorted out. Nor is it to say that the media are done with Obamacare “horror” stories. For instance, last night, NBC News aired this story about employers moving to more modest plans to avoid the “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans, complete with disgruntled employees. The piece didn’t bother to explore why an employer might choose a plan for 2014 based on a tax that doesn’t take effect until 2018, other than including a quote from a health-industry consultant claiming that employers “are going to have to get ready for it now,” which makes no sense at all. Think there might be a story there about companies making a decision to scale back benefits and save money but just blaming it on Obamacare? Maybe?
Anyhow, it does appear that we’re starting to edge toward a more balanced media discussion of the successes and failures of this law. I’ll stick to the prediction I’ve made for some time, that the law will be fine. When that December 1 deadline for fixing the website comes, reporters will find that it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. In the medium term, the law will do a lot of good for a lot of people, but it won’t transform America into a health care paradise, nor will it drag us into a nightmare of communist oppression. It will have problems, most of which will get sorted out. And the political impact? That will probably be something of a wash as well. Republicans will still be able to go to their conservative constituents and say, “I fought against Obamacare!” as proof of their right-wing bona fides. Democrats will still be able to go to their constituents and say they made it so nobody would get rejected for insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Eventually, Republicans will find something else to shout about.
And who knows, maybe these kinds of problems getting fixed will create a new narrative of success around the ACA: Despite terrible obstacles and mistakes, the administration found its way and delivered for the American people, redeeming liberalism in the process! Weirder things have happened.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 26, 2013
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