“Millions And Millions”: How Many People Has Obamacare Helped?
As the deadline to sign up for an insurance policy that takes effect in 2014 passes on December 23, the next crucial step in the debate about the future of the Affordable Care Act begins.
On January 1, Republicans will make the case that because of the estimated five million cancelation notices that went out last year, more people are uninsured under the president’s signature legislative accomplishment than newly insured.
The White House is preparing to rebut that argument aggressively. Last week, an administration official asserted that only about 10 percent of those who received those notices had not found a replacement plan, as most were offered another option by their current insurer. The remaining 500,000 or so have been offered a special exemption from the individual mandate.
But it will be almost impossible to know right away if the number of net insured went up in January, The Washington Post‘s Sarah Kliff explained on Friday.
“It’s the exact opposite of weather forecasting,” Stan Dorn, a senior expert at the Urban Institute, told Kliff. “There, you can be pretty confident of what will happen tomorrow but no idea about the future. Here it’s the reverse: Over time there will be significant gains, but that will take years, not months.”
All we have now is estimates, as some states are reporting signups and some are announcing actual enrollment numbers. As of Friday, 3.3 million people had signed up for insurance through the Affordable Care Act, with at least 970,000 of them having enrolled in private insurance plans, according to ACAsignups.net.
But these numbers don’t tell the whole story, Campaign for America’s Future’s Dave Johnson points out:
—71 million Americans on private insurance have gained coverage for at least one free preventive health care service such as a mammogram, birth control, or an immunization in 2011 and 2012. In the first 11 months of 2013 alone, an additional 25 million people with traditional Medicare have received at least one preventive service at no out-of-pocket cost.
—Up to 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions—including up to 17 million children —will no longer have to worry about being denied health coverage or charged higher premiums because of their health status.
—Approximately 60 million Americans have gained expanded mental health and substance use disorder benefits and/or federal parity protections.
—41 million uninsured Americans will have new health insurance options through Medicaid or private health plans in the Marketplace. Nearly 6 in 10 of these individuals could pay less than $100 per month for coverage.
—Consumers have saved $5 billion over the past two years due to a new requirement that insurance companies have to spend at least 80 percent of premium dollars on care for patients (at least 85 percent for large group insurers). If they don’t, they must send consumers a rebate. In 2013, 8.5 million enrollees will receive rebates averaging $100 per family.
—Insurance companies must submit premium increases of 10 percent or more for review by experts. In 2012, 6.8 million Americans saved an estimated $1.2 billion on health insurance premiums after their insurers cut back on planned increases as a result of this process.
—Since the health care law was enacted, more than 7 million seniors and people with disabilities have saved an average of $1,200 per person on prescription drugs as the health care law closes Medicare’s “donut hole.”
—Over three million young adults have gained health insurance because they can now stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.
—Individuals no longer have to worry about having their health benefits cut off after they reach a lifetime limit on benefits. Starting in January, 105 million Americans will no longer have to worry about annual limits, either.
—Using funds available through the Affordable Care Act, health centers are expanding access to care by building new sites and renovating existing sites. Health centers served approximately 21 million patients in 2012.
The millions and millions of people who’ve been helped by the law won’t be counted as the press tries to game out if Obamacare will reach the seven million private insurance signups the Congressional Budget Office predicted for its first year. But they’re definitely out there, and they’d be among the millions who would be affected if the GOP is ever successful in repealing the law.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 22, 2013
“Bring On The Pajama Bashing”: Conservatives Can’t Help But Give Vent To Their Ugliest Impulses And Anxieties
Just as we understand the world through stories, our political narratives often revolve around characters, ordinary people who become momentarily famous as supposedly representative of some policy issue or cultural trend. Sometimes they’re fictional, and sometimes they’re people who have chosen to push themselves into a political debate. But often it’s someone who dips a toe into the political waters, then finds the cameras swinging on to them in what surely is a bracing lesson in the contemporary media’s appetites.
What ensues is a debate about just what this person is supposed to represent. Is she the embodiment of a problem conservatives refuse to solve? Is he the truest of Americans, held down by liberal meddling? Or is this person, down to his or her very soul, everything we want the public to hate about the other side?
I’ve written before about the standard media practice of offering “exemplars,” or ordinary people used as the vehicle through which to tell the story of a policy issue or an event. The kind of political exemplars pushed by the parties aren’t as common, but each one gets much more attention. Last week saw another episode of these exemplar controversies, and certainly one of the oddest ones yet. Despite some of the weird details, it was familiar in the way it wound up: with conservatives showing the worst of themselves. They haven’t seemed to realize that no matter who starts these arguments, the right almost always loses them. That isn’t because liberals are so brilliant at choosing these exemplars, or because liberals control the media in which the argument plays out. It’s because once things get going, conservatives can’t help but give vent to their ugliest impulses and anxieties, driven on by the mistaken belief that all Americans will see things the way they do.
Last week, the pro-Obama group Organizing for America put up a web ad with a photo of a 20-something man wearing pajamas and drinking hot chocolate in what looked like a Christmas-morning scene, to encourage young people to sign up for health insurance. Immediately, many in the conservative media reacted as though just looking at this young fellow had transported them back to the junior high schoolyard where the class bully had called them sissies. The only way to restore their manhood, apparently, was to go after some random kid in a web ad by saying he’s kinda gay.
The National Review‘s Rich Lowry kicked things off with a column imputing to this fictional character, now named “Pajama Boy,” an entire history and a series of character flaws. “He might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping,” Lowry wrote. But that was one of the more restrained assaults on Pajama Boy’s masculinity. A writer for the popular conservative site Pajamas Media (so named as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the belief that bloggers are just people sitting in their pajamas spouting off, though by now they seem to have changed their stance on pajamas), wrote a piece beginning, “Whatever horrifying condition deprived Pajama Boy of his genitals, I suppose we must be thankful he can’t pass it along to future generations.” He went on to assert cleverly that left-wing academics also “have no genitals” and concluded, “Side with the left long enough, and your genitals fall off. As well they should.” Lowry’s National Review colleague Mark Steyn wrote, “Obamacare pajama models, if not yet mandatorily gay, can only be dressed in tartan onesies and accessorized with hot chocolate so as to communicate to the Republic’s maidenhood what a thankless endeavor heterosexuality is in contemporary America.” Don’t even ask what happened on Twitter.
It should go without saying that if you see a photo of a somewhat nerdy-looking young man and your first impulse is to shout, “Gay! Gay! That guy’s gay!” then maybe you should do some hard thinking about where this powerful sexual anxiety comes from.
So what happens when this is all said and done? Democrats put up a web ad, then conservatives blow a gasket and end up looking shrill and homophobic. This kind of pattern has repeated itself many times. Recall Sandra Fluke, the activist who became briefly famous when she testified before Congress about a controversy over insurance coverage for birth control at the university where she was a law student. Though she said nothing about her personal life, conservatives immediately attacked her for believing that women should have the right to a sex life. Rush Limbaugh, the most powerful conservative media figure in America, called called her a “slut” and a “prostitute,” and said, “if we’re going to pay for your contraceptives and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.” And they wonder why there’s a gender gap.
It isn’t that Democrats aren’t willing to criticize the exemplars Republicans elevate. You remember Joe the Plumber, whom John McCain loved so dearly he brought him up in a debate with Obama, praised him in stump speeches, and even produced an ad with salt-of-the-earth Americans proclaiming “I’m Joe the Plumber” as though he was Spartacus. Liberals certainly chuckled when Joe turned out to not actually be a licensed plumber, and took some satisfaction when he failed to turn his celebrity into a career as a lawmaker, losing his 2012 campaign for an Ohio congressional seat by a razor-thin 49-point margin. Liberals were happy to note that the small business owner who starred in a Mitt Romney ad attacking Barack Obama for “you didn’t build that” actually got nearly a million dollars in government loans and contracts.
But there’s a particular venom that characterizes the approach many conservatives take to the liberal exemplars. For example, it’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist driving to Baltimore to poke around the home and business of the family of a 12-year-old boy who advocated for the S-CHIP funding that helped his family afford medical treatment for him and his sister after a serious car accident. But that’s what conservative celebrity Michelle Malkin did in 2007, in an attempt to prove that the boy’s family didn’t deserve the help. It certainly seems as though whenever we meet a new ordinary citizen liberals are touting, the first thought some conservatives have is, “This person must be destroyed.”
There’s also often a disconnect between the attempt to undermine the exemplar and the policy argument conservatives are making. Let’s say Malkin had succeeded in uncovering some dirt on that young boy’s family. What would that have shown—that poor children shouldn’t get health coverage? It was reminiscent of something we learned more about this week, one of the most well-known exemplars in American political history: the “welfare queen” whose bilking of the system Ronald Reagan touted as proof that poor people didn’t deserve help from the government. While liberals believed for many years that Reagan had simply made up the tale (like so many others), Slate has the fascinating backstory of Linda Taylor, who not only defrauded welfare in the 1960s and 70s but may have also committed multiple acts of murder and kidnapping. The problem with Reagan’s use of her story is that he wasn’t arguing that it showed that we needed to do more to crack down on fraud so con artists couldn’t take advantage of the system. Reagan was arguing that this career criminal was actually a typical welfare recipient, and her story showed that benefits should be cut for everyone.
Reagan’s “welfare queen” story had real political potency. These days though, conservatives are more likely to get worked up over some individual liberal (or the photo of someone they presume is a liberal) and eventually find that the public doesn’t share their excitement. Just like they thought Joe the Plumber was going to win them the 2008 election, I guess they think a photo of a guy wearing pajamas is going to get Americans mad at Barack Obama and make them not want to get health insurance. To which liberals should probably respond: Go ahead. Keep telling us about how liberal men aren’t as manly and strong as you are, and how single women are a bunch of sluts, and how racial minorities are ungrateful moochers. How’s that been working out for you lately?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 23, 2013
“White Like Me”: Why The Debate About Santa’s Whiteness Actually Matters For Politics
It might seem that an argument about whether Santa Claus and Jesus are “really” white is nothing more than an opportunity for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to make fun of people on Fox News, and not a matter with actual political consequences. After all, Santa is a fictional character whose current visual representations here in America have their origins in early 20th Century newspaper and magazine illustrations, but he’s portrayed in different ways around the world. But before you dismiss this as just silliness, let me suggest that it does have important political effects.
In case you missed it, a few days back, Fox News host Megyn Kelly responded to an article about black kids wishing they could see a Santa who looks more like them by saying, “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.” She went on, “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change. Jesus was a white man, too. He was a historical figure. That’s a verifiable fact—as is Santa.” After being roundly ridiculed, Kelly claimed she was joking, though it certainly didn’t sound that way. Then her colleague Bill O’Reilly followed up with a little history lesson, acknowledging that Saint Nicholas was born in what’s now Turkey, yet asserting emphatically that he was, in fact, white. Responding to the assertion that Jesus wasn’t white either, O’Reilly said, “If you go to modern-day Turkey … they don’t consider themselves—the Turks—to be non-white. And if you go to the Holy Land, Judea, back then, they don’t consider themselves to be non-white there. That’s just history.”
I’m not going to bother going into detail about what a howler that is on both counts, but what’s interesting is how O’Reilly is under the impression that even 2,000 years ago, people living in what is now Israel would have had an idea of whiteness that included them. For O’Reilly, “white” seems to mean something like “people I now like,” but in America, whiteness has always been a fluid category. For example, at one time in our history, Italian-Americans weren’t considered white, and many people think that over time, Hispanics will end up being brought into the white category as well (if for no other reason than so whites can remain the majority).
Now here’s why this matters for politics. As you surely know, Republicans have a problem with minority voters. In 2012, President Obama won not only 93 percent of the African-American vote and 71 percent of the votes of Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority group, he also won 73 percent of the votes of Asian-Americans, the country’s fastest-growing minority group. That’s partly a result of a general ideological orientation, and partly a result of disagreement over particular policies, particularly the opposition of Republicans to comprehensive immigration reform. But even more important is the fact that Republicans routinely communicate hostility toward minorities. Mitt Romney got a lot of flack for advocating “self-deportation” of undocumented immigrants, i.e. making their lives so miserable that they’ll leave the country. But that was only one comment in the context of a primary contest in which the candidates were trying to outdo each other to see who could express the most antipathy toward immigrants. And if you’re Hispanic or African American you get a constant stream of messages that conservatives don’t like you and your kind of people, and don’t think you’re American.
The alienation of minorities has to be constantly renewed and maintained, and conservatives, both politicians and media figures, do so with vigor and enthusiasm. This kind of policing of the racial and ethnic borders is heard loud and clear in minority communities. The insistence that Santa is white, the constant race-baiting from people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, the ugly comments that inevitably crop up whenever immigration is discussed, the actual policy positions of the Republican party—all of it combines into a clear message from conservatives and Republicans, one that says, “You’re not like us, and we don’t like you.” Come Election Day, people don’t forget.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 17, 2013
“The Obama Political Obituaries Are Way Premature”: Nothing That Happened In 2013 Is Nearly As Humiliating As What Bush Endured
If President Obama saw the columns and news stories I keep reading lately, he’d probably have half a mind to resign and scurry back to Chicago in time to see the Bears lose a playoff game. “Tanking” approval numbers, no accomplishments, rudderlessness, and of course the website fiasco; they all add up, the conventional wisdom seems to say, to a presidency that is already all but finished, unless John Podesta can somehow save it. The Washington Post reported this week that among second-term presidents in the polling era, only Richard Nixon had a lower approval rating at this point than Obama does now.
Nixon? Is it really that bad? (By the way, there’s still a considerable distance between the two—Obama sits at 43 percent in the Post poll, while Nixon was down at 29.) I can read numbers, and I know what’s happened over the past year. Obama has lost support among core Democratic groups such as women and Latinos, and one suspects that the failure—not his failure; the failure, a distinction not enough people are evidently making—to pass immigration reform was disillusioning for these cohorts. And obviously the HealthCare.gov fiasco is the governing reality here. It’s been a messy year.
At the same time, everything that’s happened can be rebounded from. Let’s look, by way of comparison, at where President Bush was at the end of 2005. He’d started out the year, you might recall, saying, “I have political capital, and I intend to use it.” Actually, he said that right after he beat John Kerry. Bush didn’t yet reveal how he meant to use that capital, but soon enough it became clear that he meant Social Security privatization, or partial privatization.
Bush staked a lot on that project. If you were around then, you remember those endless town halls, filled with plants and ringers offering their most plangent testimonials about how they couldn’t wait to get Uncle Sam’s heavy hand out of their purses and invest their own retirement money as they saw fit, as any real Murican would insist. This was how Bush and Karl Rove were going to create the permanent Republican majority, through the new ownership society.
What happened? Congress, even Republicans in Congress, wanted nothing to do with it. It was basically dead by Memorial Day. So that was going to be the signature issue of Bush’s second term—with a House and a Senate, remember, that were also in Republican hands at the time. And it went up in flames.
Nothing that has happened to Obama in 2013 is nearly as humiliating as what Bush endured—and that was before Katrina hit in August 2005. You could make an immigration comparison, but they’re hardly the same, because Bush’s party controlled both houses of Congress. If the Democrats were running the House right now, there’s little question the immigration bill would have passed. I don’t expect the general public to make such distinctions, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make them. Being smacked down by the opposite party, which has shown its contempt for you a hundred times already, isn’t remotely the same thing as being smacked down by your own party. The Bush privatization failure was devastating not only to his standing as president but as head of his own party.
Obama hasn’t suffered anything like that. He’s been the victim of a couple of ginned-up “scandals,” the IRS most especially, that had no truth to them but nevertheless took a bite out of his ratings. The Republicans are a constant irritant, willing to sacrifice their own standing as long as they can drag him down with them. But he has not launched a huge, historic initiative on which history has slammed the sarcophagus lid screaming “Failure!”
Health care? Come on. You’re joking. That was a bad first inning. Granted, a really, really bad first inning, but a first inning all the same. There is a lot of ball yet to be played. Even now, we’re only in the top of the second in terms of implementation of this law. And every week brings new reports that the troubles are of the past. The information that’s supposed to be getting to insurance companies is getting to them now, and providers are about to start advertising heavily to potential enrollees. Jeff Zients, the man who fixed the site, is leaving, but he’s being replaced by a Microsoft exec, Kurt DelBene, who presumably knows a thing or two about state-of-the-art operating systems. I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Obamacare is going to have, for most Americans who come face to face with it, a happy ending, and I think sooner rather than later.
That is the big error the Republicans are making. They truly seem to think it’s game-set-match on Obamacare. It isn’t even close. And the media, espying bad Obama poll numbers, go along, because then, instead of the bad poll numbers being just bad poll numbers, they can be woven into a Meta-Narrative Think Piece about how second terms in the modern presidency are graveyards.
Obama isn’t close to any graveyard yet. The Obamacare story is going to keep getting better. And the economy, if you hadn’t noticed, has grown at 3 percent for the last two quarters. That’s not just good considering the circumstances of the meltdown and an opposition party that’s been trying actively to harm the economy. That’s just plain old good.
Predicting a politician’s standing a year out is a mug’s game, so I won’t do that. But I’ll comfortably make the claim that nothing that has happened to Obama in 2013 rules out a rebound. Far be it from me to question The Washington Post’s poll numbers, but Bush was in far worse shape at this point. Obama’s second term will not likely match the list of accomplishments of his first. But even if the second term is nothing more than the successful implementation of Obamacare for 30 million or 40 million Americans, that’s plenty. Public opinion will catch up.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 19, 2013
“An Utterly Irrelevant Man”: NYT Mag Offers Inexplicable 2006 John McCain Cover Profile In 2013
In the last couple of years, every time something John McCain says makes “news,” my immediate reaction—sometimes on Twitter, sometimes just in my head—is, “Remind me again why anybody should give a crap what John McCain thinks about anything?” I’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer to this question. And here comes star reporter Mark Leibovich, author of the well-received This Town, with a 6,634-word cover profile of McCain for next week’s New York Times Magazine. Do we need another one of these? I would have answered “no” before reading, but after, I’m even more sure.
If you’re doing this kind of profile, the first thing you have to do is answer, “Why?” Why do we care what McCain is up to? Did you learn anything important or interesting by following him around for a few days? Leibovich gives a shot to answering this question, and fails completely. He acknowledges all the clichés that have been attached to McCain over the years (maverick!), but then, without acknowledging it, indulges in the cliché that undergirds all the others: that whatever is happening now, John McCain is at the center of it:
McCain has another favorite Teddy Roosevelt phrase, “the crowded hour,” which I have heard him invoke several times over the years. It comes from a poem by the English writer Thomas Mordaunt, and T. R. used it to famously describe his charge on San Juan Hill. In McCain’s philosophy, “the crowded hour” refers to a moment of character testing. “The ‘crowded hour’ is as appropriate for me right now as any in a long time,” McCain told me as we walked through the Capitol. In some respects, this is just a function of public figures’ tendency to overdramatize the current moment and their role in it. But five years after losing to Barack Obama, after enduring the recriminations between his splintered campaign staff and rogue running mate, Sarah Palin, and after returning to the Senate and falling into a prolonged funk, McCain finds himself in the midst of another crowded hour, maybe his last as an elected leader.
And just how is John McCain in this ‘crowded hour,’ shaping critical events? How is his character being tested? Well let’s see. In the next paragraph, Leibovich tells us that McCain thinks Barack Obama is a foreign policy disaster. An opinion shared by most Republicans (Obama hasn’t even started any new wars, for pete’s sake!), but holding that opinion doesn’t constitute doing anything. Next, Leibovich tells us, “McCain also finds himself in the thick of the latest ‘fight for the soul of the G.O.P.’ against the Tea Party right.” “In the thick” of it, is he? And what does that mean? Will McCain have some large influence over that fight for the party’s soul? Of course not. Every once in a while he’ll give a surly comment, like when he referred to Tea Partiers as “wacko birds,” but he won’t be organizing any faction, or leading anybody, or doing anything at all that will determine the outcome of that fight. Nevertheless, Leibovich assures us, McCain does go on TV a lot. You might argue that makes him relevant (“I think the biggest fear John has is not being relevant,” says his little buddy Lindsey Graham), but spending a lot of time chatting with Wolf Blitzer is not the same thing as having an impact on developing events.
So let’s ask: What are the standards we could use to judge whether a senator is an important figure, at least more important than most of his or her 99 colleagues? After all, nobody’s writing Times Magazine cover profiles of Mike Johanns or John Hoeven. How is it that they’re less important than John McCain? An important senator might be influencing critical legislation. No dice there: McCain never much cared about lawmaking (in his three decades in Congress, he authored exactly one important law, which was later eviscerated by the Supreme Court). He might later become a presidential candidate, which is why we pay attention to people like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, even if they’re ridiculous. No dice there either; McCain won’t be running for the White House again. He might lead some important constituency, or exercise great influence over his colleagues. Nothing there either; McCain represents basically no one, and he has never been popular with other senators. He might be championing an issue that will grow in import in the near future. Nothing there either. He might have some truly profound ideas that will shape policy in years to come. Can you name an important idea John McCain is advocating for?
So all that’s left is that John McCain is important because he gets invited on Meet the Press a lot. If you’re looking for something beyond that, you won’t find it in this article.
Leibovich is a good reporter, which is why this piece is so puzzling. Not just in that he makes some of the same blunders so many other reporters profiling McCain have made, like credulously quoting McCain saying he never talks about his experience in Vietnam—not only completely false (he talks about it all the time*), but a transparent way of making sure that the reporter includes in his story both a tribute to McCain’s modesty and a lengthy description of his POW ordeal. But more critically, what boggles the mind is that Leibovich (not to mention his editors) thought there was something to be learned with yet another 6,600-word profile of John McCain that reads exactly like every other profile of McCain you’ve ever read, from the Vietnam tribute to the description of his full schedule to the admiring quotes from Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman to the awe at his mavericky maverickness. I’ll save you the trouble: there isn’t.
* I just want to add that it isn’t just Leibovich who says this, just like so many other reporters who have written about McCain. In another portion of the article, Liebovich discusses a luncheon Harry Reid organized to honor the anniversary of McCain’s captivity:
“John told a lot of little poignant stories,” Susan Collins of Maine told me. “When John was tied up in such a painful position, he talked about the one guard who would loosen the bonds. He told the story of being out in the yard on Easter, and how one of the guards drew a little cross in the sand, just to acknowledge the holiday, and then rubbed it out so no one would get in trouble.” Collins has spent more than a hundred hours on airplane trips with McCain, she says, and has never heard him tell these stories.
Really? Then Collins ought to pay more attention to the news, because I’ve seen McCain tell that story a dozen times. His 2008 campaign even made an ad telling the story. For the record, as I’ve said many times, McCain has every right to talk about Vietnam as much as he wants and get whatever political mileage he can out of it. But when he and other people claim he’s terribly reticent about ever bringing it up, they just aren’t telling the truth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American prospect, December 18, 2013
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