“Extreme, Divisive And Out Of Touch”: Why Seniors Are Turning Against The GOP
There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP. This is apparent in seniors’ party affiliation and vote intention, in their views on the Republican Party and its leaders, and in their surprising positions on jobs, health care, retirement security, investment economics, and the other big issues that will likely define the 2014 midterm elections.
We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens:
—In 2010, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21 point margin (38 percent to 59 percent). Among seniors likely to vote in 2014, the Republican candidate leads by just 5 points (41 percent to 46 percent.)
—When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives at the beginning of 2011, 43 percent of seniors gave the Republican Party a favorable rating. Last month, just 28 percent of seniors rated the GOP favorably. This is not an equal-opportunity rejection of parties or government — over the same period, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating among seniors has increased 3 points, from 37 percent favorable to 40 percent favorable.
—When the Republican congress took office in early 2011, 45 percent of seniors approved of their job performance. That number has dropped to just 22 percent — with 71 percent disapproving.
—Seniors are now much less likely to identify with the Republican Party. On Election Day in 2010, the Republican Party enjoyed a net 10 point party identification advantage among seniors (29 percent identified as Democrats, 39 percent as Republicans). As of last month, Democrats now had a net 6 point advantage in party identification among seniors (39 percent to 33 percent).
—More than half (55 percent) of seniors say the Republican Party is too extreme, half (52 percent) say it is out of touch, and half (52 percent) say the GOP is dividing the country. Just 10 percent of seniors believe that the Republican Party does not put special interests ahead of ordinary voters.
—On almost every issue we tested — including gay rights, aid to the poor, immigration, and gun control — more than half of seniors believe that the Republican Party is too extreme.
What do seniors care about now? Our Democracy Corps July National Survey found that:
—89 percent of seniors want to protect Medicare benefits and premiums.
—87 percent of seniors want to raise pay for working women.
—79 percent of seniors think we need to expand scholarships for working adults.
—77 percent of seniors want to expand access to high-quality and affordable childcare for working parents.
—74 percent of seniors want to cut subsidies to big oil companies, agribusinesses, and multinational corporations in order to invest in education, infrastructure, and technology.
—66 percent of seniors want to expand state health insurance exchanges under Obamacare.
All of these issues will be critical to the national debate as the 2014 election nears. The more seniors hear from Republicans on these and other issues, the more we can expect the GOP’s advantage among this important group to decline. And we can count on one thing in 2014: Seniors will vote.
By: Erica Seifert, The National Memo, August 7, 2013
“Muddied Waters And Smokescreens”: These Six States Want To Allow Health Insurers To Deny Coverage To Sick People
Officials in Texas and five other GOP-led states are refusing to oversee even Obamacare’s most basic — and popular — consumer protections and insurance market reforms. That includes the law’s ban on denying coverage or charging more because of a pre-existing condition and discriminating against women on the basis of gender. The decision could present major hurdles to Americans who buy health insurance through federally-run marketplaces in the Lone Star State, Arizona, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.
A majority of states haven’t set up their own insurance marketplaces, opting to let the federal government set one up for them. But every one of those states (other than the six in question) have at least said they will police the insurers that sell plans on their federally-run marketplaces to make sure that they aren’t giving consumers short shrift. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will instead be responsible for enforcing Obamacare’s insurance industry reforms and reviewing consumer complaints in the states refusing to do so on their own.
That could be confusing for Americans who are buying insurance for the first time through the marketplaces. For example, imagine you’re a relatively poor person with diabetes. Your income isn’t low enough to get you on Medicaid — but your employer doesn’t offer health benefits, and you’ve never qualified for insurance on the individual market because of your medical condition. On October 1st, you can go buy insurance with government subsidies for the first time on an Obamacare marketplace. But the plan you choose charges you a suspiciously high premium relative to your income. You suspect it’s because of your medical problem, which is clearly illegal under the reform law. But who do you complain to?
Usually the answer is your state’s insurance department. But the answer is CMS if you live in one of the six states that won’t enforce the consumer protections. Unfortunately, if you don’t know that, you could spend months oscillating between the state and federal government, trying to figure out if you’re getting hoodwinked by your insurance company. And in the meantime, the bills are piling up.
Those kinds of scenarios are the reason that health policy experts say insurance complaints are best handled by state agencies. Officials with the Texas Department of Insurance argue that they legally can’t enforce the regulations because they’ve ceded authority over the marketplace to the federal government, and Texas doesn’t have corresponding state laws holding insurers to the same standards as Obamacare. But Stacy Pogue of the Center for Public Policy Priorities tells the Texas Tribune that’s likely a smokescreen, since Texas has enforced plenty of other federal laws on a statewide level in the past.
Officials in the Lone Star State certainly haven’t been shy about their opposition to the health law. Gov. Rick Perry (R) dug in his heels against reform in 2012, saying he wouldn’t “be a part of expanding [the] socializing of our medicine.” More recently, Perry denied basic health benefits to 1.5 million of his state’s poorest residents by forgoing Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Evidently, that wasn’t going far enough.
National Republicans have also been stepping up their efforts to to undermine Obamacare. Reps. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) are refusing to help their own constituents if they have questions about the health law, and the Tea Party-affiliated advocacy group FreedomWorks has been telling young Americans to forgo signing up for health coverage under Obamacare entirely.
By: Sy Mukhergee, Think Progress, August , 2013
“Don’t Poison A Law, Then Claim It’s Sick”: Republicans Doing Everything They Can To Make The Affordable Care Act Fail
One does not usually expect blistering, progressive-minded editorials from USA Today, but this morning’s piece on the Affordable Care Act is a gem. The headline reads, “GOP poisons ObamaCare, then claims it’s sick.”
Regular readers know we’ve been talking quite a bit about Republican efforts to sabotage the federal health care system in the hopes of partisan and ideological gain, and it’s good to see the USA Today editorial board notice. “Having lost in Congress and in court, they’re now using the most cynical of tactics: trying to make the law fail,” the paper explains. “Never mind the public inconvenience and human misery that will result…. There is a distinct line between fighting to turn your ideas into law and trying to wreck a law once it has been passed.”
First, Republicans limited the use of government money to spread the word. Then, when the administration reached out to the NFL and other major sports leagues for help in publicizing the new health care exchanges, the opponents resorted to intimidation.
Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, fired off a letter to the NFL, saying that the league had better not get involved with such a controversial program, as if the league would be taking sides on a debate in Congress, not doing public service announcements for a law soon to affect millions.
In a particularly smarmy warning, McConnell and Cornyn told the NFL to let them know whether the Obama administration retaliated against the league for not cooperating — the clear implication being that if the league did help inform the public about ObamaCare, Senate Republicans had their own methods of retribution. It is an appalling abuse of power, and the NFL meekly yielded.
It’s against this backdrop that Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) falsely argued in his party’s weekly radio address that the law would disrupt people’s cancer care, and GOP governors nationwide block Medicaid expansion for no substantive reason.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but it appears today’s Republican Party knows no other way.
Of course, this isn’t the only thing going on with Obamacare this week.
This story, for example, struck me as almost amusing.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is requesting a new cost estimate for ObamaCare in light of a decision to delay the law’s employer mandate.
Ryan’s staff asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to reevaluate the law’s budget impact after the White House said Tuesday that larger employers will not be required to offer health insurance until 2015.
It’s true that the delay on the employer mandate will likely shrink the deficit reduction of the law by about $4 billion in that first year. In other words, instead of nearly $200 billion in deficit reduction over the first decade of the Affordable Care Act, we’re looking at a figure closer to $196 billion in deficit reduction.
But here’s my follow-up question for Paul Ryan: why do you care? What difference does it make to House Republicans if it’s $200 billion or $196 billion? Does the GOP really intend to run ads saying, “Obamacare is one of the biggest deficit-reduction packages in a generation, but it’s savings are slightly smaller than the CBO estimated last year”?
As for the increasingly common argument among conservatives that the delay in the employer mandate spells implementation trouble for the reform law, Ezra Klein had a good piece explaining that the opposite is true.
Peter Orszag, who helped design Obamacare from his perch as head of the Office of Management and Budget, disagreed with Rubin. “Delaying the employer mandate makes successful implementation more likely, not less likely,” he told me.
Larry Levitt, vice president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, agreed. “There’s nothing about the delay in the employer requirement that suggests Obamacare can’t still be implemented,” he said. “If anything the delay removes some potential administrative complexities from the plates of the implementers, and avoids the problem of some employers reducing the hours of part-time workers to get around the requirement.”
Timothy Jost, a health law expert at Washington and Lee University’s School of Law, was even blunter. “Implementation just got easier rather than harder,” he said…. The Obama administration has decided to accept some bad media coverage now, and some higher costs later, in order to make Obamacare much, much simpler to implement next year.
It seems like a relevant detail that’s been lost amid the chatter of late.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 10, 2013
“He’s Still An Idiot”: Will Rick “Oops” Perry Do It Again?
As soon as Rick Perry uttered his infamous “oops” during the Republican presidential primary, most Americans likely figured the Texas governor’s political career would soon fade to black. Even before he forgot which federal departments he wanted to axe, Perry’s performance had been less than inspiring, and the aftermath only made things worse, culminating with an overtly homophobic ad complaining that “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” I’m guessing once Perry finally suspended his campaign, those outside Texas imagined he’d return to Austin and quietly wait out the rest of his gubernatorial term.
But his latest decisions—including a string of more than two dozen vetoes—seems to only further confirm what most Texas insiders have been saying for months: Perry is paving the way for a second act and a second bid for the White House. And he’s not moving toward the center.
The series of votoes has placed him clearly on the right and in a position to play to a national audience. Republicans dominate the Texas Legislature, and any bill that passes through it by definition has significant Republican support. Among other things, Perry chose to kill a measure meant to stop wage discrimination against women and a bill to require transparency for dark-money groups—both issues Tea Party Republicans at the national level have opposed. (Significantly for state governance, he also vetoed measures to allow the legislature some oversight of the University of Texas Board of Regents, which has been at war with the school’s president, Bill Powers.) Perry also took out his veto pen for smaller line items, like nixing $1.5 million—pocket change in the budget—that would have funded the University of Texas’s Mexican-American Studies Center. In doing so, he could both take a small swipe at the university and also offer a nod to those in his party not so pleased by studies of Mexican history or culture.
Meanwhile, Perry is also burnishing his conservative credentials in other ways. During the regular legislative session, his presence loomed darkly over Medicaid expansion, preventing more moderate Republicans from considering measures that would increase healthcare coverage for low-income residents—one-in-four Texans are uninsured. He brought the legislature back for a special session to task them with passing redistricting maps—hoping to keep a couple Congressional seats in Republicans hands, which could win him some favors in Washington. He added to the agenda a charge to pass an abortion ban for all pregnancies over 20 weeks, which would make Texas among the most restrictive states in the country. Just to keep things interesting he also added a measure to prevent groping from Transportation Security Administration officials at airports—a major focus for Tea Party folks and followers of conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones. All of it puts Perry on the far right, socially and politically.
Economically, Perry’s making his case by going to enemy territory—liberal states on both coasts—and urging companies, in particular gun manufacturers, to relocate to Texas. He ran television ads in California and Illinois noting why businesses would be better off in Texas, and just yesterday prompted a confrontation with Connecticut’s Governor Dannel Malloy when he started urging gun makers in Connecticut to relocate, after lawmakers passed gun control measures in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting. Perry’s interest in business has always been a big part of his political platform, as he often reels off the companies that move to Texas for its super-business-friendly climate. (If only consumers in the state got such a good deal.)
Plenty in Austin are speculating as to whether Perry plans to make another bid for governor or simply wait to run for president. At the very least, a presidential bid would give Perry a chance remake his national image and be remembered for something other than “oops.” While it’s hard to think of another politician screwing up quite that badly and then seeing national success, plenty of folks have come back from disappointing runs and recreated themselves. A run for president, and showing the country he’s not an idiot, would help Perry regardless of whether he’s actually got a shot at winning or simply angling for a presidential appointment. But Perry’s term is up in 2014, and he’s already held the office longer than anyone else. Another bid for governor is risky at best; Attorney General Greg Abbott, who’s made a name for himself suing the Obama Administration, already has $18 million in the bank and a significant staff ready for the 2014 race. Perry, however, currently commands a huge lead over Abbott in polls. Polls aren’t nearly so nice when it comes to his presidential aspirations. Perry garnered a paltry 10 percent measure of support in the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, while Ted Cruz, the state’s newly elected senator and a Tea Party favorite, got a whopping 25 percent. Perry faces choppy waters either way, but there’s no question he’s gearing up for a run for something.
No matter what he chooses, it’s hard to imagine anything will be worse than his last campaign.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, June 18, 2013
“No Shedding Crocodile Tears Here”: Obamacare Critics Should Stop Using Young Men To Fuel Their Arguments
In January, one of Obamacare’s most controversial provisions will come into effect:
Every person in America will be required to either have health insurance or pay a penalty.
Overall, the effect will likely be a net positive: Because of subsidies, the cost of insurance will be kept down for many households, and in many states, a Medicaid expansion will help even more families pay for their health care. But while the outlook is great for millions of workers, things are going to be tougher for at least one group: healthy, financially secure men in their twenties.
So, guess which group Obamacare critics have focused on when they attack the effects of the program? I’ll give you three guesses, but you’ll probably only need one.
On Wednesday, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait pointed out the surprising trend, noting that critics of the Affordable Care Act have almost universally cited the group in their attacks. Likening the move to an old-time patent medicine show (“You, sir – the healthy 25-year-old in front who has never been hospitalized or needed medication in his life! Step right up!”), he suggested that the attacks on Obamacare are, to put it mildly, skewed.
On the surface, targeting the law’s impact on healthy 25-year-old men seems like a masterstroke. After all, it’s hard to argue for the fairness of a system that charges healthy young people to pay for the health care needs of sickly older ones. The trouble is, today’s healthy 25-year-old male could easily become tomorrow’s hit-and-run victim, desperately in need of long-term medical care. And, barring that, today’s healthy 20-something will, with any luck, become a less-healthy 50-something, in need of an affordable method to cover his medications and regular doctor’s visits.
(Or, as happened to me when I was an uninsured man in my mid-20s, today’s healthy young 25-year-old could be tomorrow’s guy paying out-of-pocket for wisdom teeth extraction.)
Obamacare has numerous provisions that will extend coverage and make health insurance cheaper. Among other things, it will help cover the Medicare Part D coverage gap, will end exclusions for pre-existing conditions, and will require health care plans to cover preventative care.
For tens of millions of people, these provisions, and others, will translate into lower medical costs, a previously unimaginable access to health care, and a generally improved quality of life. Given the huge potential benefits, maybe it’s time for Obamacare’s critics to stop shedding crocodile tears for the relatively small portion of the populace that is going to have to take one for the team — and, in the process, get insurance that may well make them safer and healthier.
By: Bruce Watson, Business Insider, Originally Published in DailyFinance, June 10, 2013
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