“A Man Of No Convictions”: You Can Never Meet The Same Mitt Romney Twice
To a skeptic, the most remarkable aspect of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has been how so flexible a politician can represent so dogmatic a party. Contemporary Republicanism is ideological to its core. Everybody who watched the GOP primary debates between Mitt and the Seven Dwarves (or were there nine? I forget) understands that there’s a black-and-white party line on almost every imaginable topic from tax policy to global warming.
Romney, on the other hand, appears to have no firm convictions at all. How anybody purports to know what the GOP candidate actually thinks about any issue other than the size of his own offshore bank accounts beggars my poor imagination. That most Republicans have temporarily persuaded themselves to trust him reflects mainly their fear and loathing of President Obama.
Equally remarkable, however, is the way the Obama campaign has let Romney get away with it. How can his evasiveness not be an issue? For that matter, how can it not be THE issue? Early on, a strategic decision was apparently made to depict the GOP candidate as the “severely conservative” politician he affected to be during the Republican primaries.
Well, it ain’t working. So many and so various are the GOP candidate’s self-contradictions and reinventions that the proverbial “low information” citizens who appear to constitute much of the swing vote are pretty much free to imagine any Mitt Romney that strikes their fancy.
Maybe it’s unpatriotic to say so, but an awful lot of people who manage their personal affairs competently enough simply refuse to understand the most elementary facts when they’re part of a political argument.
Sometimes you have to tell them a story. It helps if that story connects to something close to home; something they’ve had to think about realistically in their own lives.
Such as, what happens if you lose your health insurance and then get sick? Millions live in fear of this every day.
CBS News’ Scott Pelley recently asked Romney a simple question on 60 Minutes: “Does the government have a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who don’t have it today?”
“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” Romney allowed. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”
“That’s the most expensive way to do it,” Pelley observed. Indeed, government figures show the average emergency room visit costs $922, vs. $199 for a doctor’s office visit.
Nor is it free. People do know that. Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act signed by President Reagan, hospitals must treat sick and injured patients regardless of their ability to pay. A civilized society can do no less; much less one that hopes to head off deadly epidemics.
But the law doesn’t say the hospital can’t perform what’s cynically called a “wallet biopsy” and send you a bill. Indeed, many states allow hospitals to hire collection agencies, garnish wages and seize assets in pursuit of payment. For this reason, many people stay away until they’re at death’s door.
Others abuse the privilege and stick the rest of us with the bill.
Back in 2006, the politician Bill Clinton calls “Moderate Mitt” recognized the problem. Hewrote a Wall Street Journal column objecting to the way deadbeats game the system.
“By law, emergency care cannot be withheld,” he wrote. “Why pay for something you can get free? Of course, while it may be free for them, everyone else ends up paying the bill, either in higher insurance premiums or taxes.”
Writing in Time, Kate Pickert catches Moderate Mitt as recently as 2008, explaining the conservative origins of “Romneycare” in Massachusetts.
“They shouldn’t be allowed just to show up at the hospital and say somebody else should pay for me, so we said no more free riders… We said if you can afford insurance, then either have the insurance or get a health savings account, pay your own way, but no more free ride… I think it’s the conservative approach—to make sure that people who can afford insurance are getting it at their expense, not at the expense of the taxpayers or the government. That, I consider a step towards socialism.”
Ah, but then came “Obamacare,” basically Romneycare with a less expensive per capita price tag. Yesterday’s conservative solution turned into today’s Bolshevism. Severely Conservative Mitt played along.
So what would Romney do if elected?
Who knows? To paraphrase the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: You can never encounter the same Mitt Romney twice. Whatever he says today, he’ll say something different tomorrow.
Here’s the question President Obama should be asking: Would you buy a used health insurance policy from this man?
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 17, 2012
“Completely Ignorant”: Senate Candidate Josh Mandel Offers Most Nonsensical Plan Yet To Cover Pre-Existing Conditions
Republicans who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act—that is, all of them—have a really difficult time explaining how they would preserve popular elements of the legislation, such as the provisions that ban insurers from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, or requirements that young people remain covered for longer on their parents’ policy.
In a lunchtime debate on Monday, Josh Mandel, the Republican trying to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, gave easily the most confusing “plan” we’ve heard so far:
Q: How would you, and with specificity please, how would you maintain those benefits without the requirement of people buying insurance?
MANDEL: Well you have to make cuts in the other part of the government. In order to pay to cover folks with pre-existing conditions, to your question, and for younger folks on their parents’ insurance, if there’s leaders in Washington want to do that without Obamacare on the books—you’ve got to make significant cuts. A lot of Republicans will say, don’t touch defense, don’t touch the military. Listen, if we’re going to have a good-faith conversation about strong health care, about a balanced budget, we need to actually make cuts in defense. I mentioned some of my ideas in respect to Europe. Another place I’d like to cut—I mentioned Pakistan but I’d like to get more specific. A few weeks ago, in Egypt, our embassy was overrun. In Libya our ambassador was killed. Why in the world is Sherrod Brown, and other politicians in Washington, voting to give our tax dollars to countries that harbor terrorists, when we need that money here to pay for healthcare, to protect Medicare, to protect Social Security. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re going to hate us without us paying them to do that. We don’t need to pay them to hate us.
Mandel’s answer, which somehow ends up on the embassy deaths in Libya, betrays a complete ignorance of what “Obamacare” does.
What it does not do is simply pay insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. The ACA has an individual mandate to buy insurance, which broadens the consumer pool for insurance companies, while also banning insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and using community ratings to ensure everyone is offered fair prices for coverage.
If you repeal the individual mandate in Obamacare, which Mandel indisputably wants to do, then how do you keep people from simply waiting until they get sick to buy coverage for which they cannot be denied—something that would send the health insurance industry into a fatal tailspin?
That’s what the moderator was clearly asking, and Mandel squares that circle by… cutting defense spending.
It’s a completely nonsensical response. (Brown wryly noted that “That was about a specific an answer on healthcare as he’s given throughout the whole campaign.”) Interpreted literally, it seems Mandel is actually proposing a new federal program that would directly subsidize insurers for covering those with pre-existing conditions and young people who want to stay on their parents’ plans—funded by cuts in defense and foreign aid to places like Libya and Egypt.
But since nobody anywhere has proposed anything like that before—most notably, Mandel hasn’t—what’s more likely is that he’s trading on the common misperception of Obamacare as a massive taxpayer-funded boondoggle that simply throws public money at various problems. Under that understanding of Obamacare, I suppose you could re-fund the “pre-existing conditions coverage” line in the federal budget with defense cuts—but that line doesn’t exist. It’s not how the law works.
Mandel either doesn’t understand that, or wants to willfully mislead voters about the legislation and what he could do for them if it’s repealed.
It’s a tough question for Republicans to answer—Mitt Romney has simply declared that he would magically cover people with pre-existing conditions without offering any details. (This lead an economist at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute to say last week that “It’s a complete mystery what [Romney]’s talking about. He’s clearly asserting that he’s got a new policy, but he hasn’t said what it is.”)
Given how ridiculous Mandel sounded while attempting to flesh out a plan, perhaps Mitt is onto something here. But the bottom line remains that Republicans like Mandel and Romney have no serious plan for maintaining coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, October 15, 2012
“If Facts Spoke For Themselves”: Takeaways On The VP Debate From Paul Ryan’s Home State
The lively October 11 debate between Vice President Joe Biden and the GOP Vice-Presidential candidate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, has been widely analyzed and fact-checked. But from the Wisconsin perspective, a few statements made by our fellow cheesehead brought to mind some idioms used widely in his home state.
If You Live In a Glass House, Don’t Throw Stones
“Joe and I are from similar towns. He’s from Scranton, Pennsylvania. I’m from Janesville, Wisconsin.” Ryan then cited Scranton’s ten percent unemployment rate, incorrectly suggesting it was indicative of national trends. “You know what it was the day [Obama and Biden] came in? 8.5 percent. That is happening all around America.”
When Ryan first became a U.S. Representative in 1999, unemployment in Janesville was at 3.8 percent. It is now at 9.2 percent. But nationally and in America’s major cities, unemployment is going down, albeit slowly. Unemployment in Ryan’s hometown is still too high, but the rate has dropped from a peak of 15.6 percent a few months after Obama and Biden took office. The peak was largely attributable to the Janesville General Motors plant closing in 2008 under President George W. Bush.
Fool Me Once, Shame on You; Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me
Ryan pledged during the debate that the Romney-Ryan ticket has a plan for “getting the economy growing at 4 percent, creating 12 million jobs over the next four years.”
The 12 million jobs pledge is one that Romney has been repeating on the campaign trail, with the campaign airing ads in Ryan’s home state promising to create 240,000 jobs in Wisconsin (12 million divided by 50 states). But folks in Wisconsin have reason to doubt these sorts of jobs pledges.
Wisconsin’s current Governor Scott Walker was elected in 2010 with a nearly identical jobs pledge — a promise to create 250,000 jobs by the end of his term in 2014 — and repeated the pledge in May of 2012 during his recall election. But even Walker admits this promise is already broken. Wisconsin’s job growth rates continues to rank among the worst in the nation, behind other states in the region and nationally.
Biden, for his part, did not make a specific promise about jobs numbers, but he did say “we can and we will” get unemployment below 6 percent, a plan that the White House has not backed up with any specifics.
As CMD asked in September, do these folks really think Wisconsinites will fall for it again?
Don’t Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth
In the debate, Rep. Ryan railed against the Obama administration’s stimulus plan and characterized it as a failure. Biden quickly pointed out that Ryan himself had sought stimulus funds for companies in his district.
“I love that, I love that,” Biden responded, laughing. “This is such a bad program and he writes me a letter saying — writes the Department of Energy a letter saying — the reason we need this stimulus, it will create growth and jobs. His words. And now he’s sitting here looking at me.”
Ryan sought $20 million in “green stimulus” for the Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation and hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Energy Center of Wisconsin, both of which were granted by the Department of Energy. Ryan defended the letters in the debate by saying “We advocated for constituents who were applying for grants. It’s what we do.”
In one of the letters, Ryan wrote: “I was pleased that the primary objectives of their project will allow residents and businesess in the partner cities to reduce their energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and stimulate the local economy by creating new jobs.”
Other businesses in Ryan’s district have also benefitted from stimulus spending. Ruud Lighting in Racine, for example, manufactures LED lights and has expanded and added jobs by winning contracts to supply LED lights to municipalities across the United States, many of which are making the purchases using federal stimulus dollars from the Department of Energy.
Don’t Kill a Goose That Lays Golden Eggs
In his closing statements, Ryan repeated the widely discredited claim that Obamacare is a “government takeover of health care,” a right-wing talking point that CMD’s Senior Fellow on Healthcare Wendell Potter has demonstrated was developed by the private health care industry. “Obamacare,” after all, was developed largely to protect and defend the private insurance industry against those who preferred a government-run health care system, such as those found in Canada and much of Europe.
Romney and Ryan have pledged to repeal “Obamacare” without putting forward a plan to replace it. But in 2010, Rep. Ryan sought Obamacare funding for a community health center in his district.
“The proposed new facility, the Belle City Neighborhood Health Center, will serve both the preventative and comprehensive primary healthcare needs of thousands of new patients of all ages who are currently without healthcare,” Ryan wrote.
Community health centers like this one provide a variety of vital health services to low-income communities, and “Obamacare” provides funding to significantly expand those services, including $9.5 billion in operating costs for existing community health centers and $1.5 billion for constructing new facilities.
Wisconsinites will be talking about these facts and others as they gather around the bubbler this weekend.
By: Brendan Fischer, Center for Media and Democracy, October 12, 2012
“A Stark Choice”: Bipartisanship In A Romney Administration
I’ve probably yelled enough about the mendacity of Mitt Romney’s claims last week that he’d “sit down with Democrats” the day after the election and start charting a bipartisan path for the country. But Paul Ryan was up to it again last night, arguing that he couldn’t tell us how he’d pay for an across-the-board tax cut because that would be up to bipartisan negotiations in Congress (as though they could repeal the laws of mathematics!).
Most readers here are probably familiar with the relentless demonization of bipartisanship as “surrender” throughout the Republican primaries, and the specific pledges Romney made to remain faithful to policies guaranteed never to attract a single Democrat (from a repeal-and-reverse approach to health care, to the cut-cap-balance meta-pledge, to the many promises never to accept a tax increase). The most important pledge Romney made, in my opinion, is to sign Paul Ryan’s budget resolution as is if Republicans manage to whip it through Congress using reconciliation procedures, which would mean revolutionary changes in the structure and purpose of the federal government, adopted swiftly on a party-line vote.
But what happens if Romney wins and Republicans fall short of getting control of the Senate? Would this scenario enable him to break his promises and perhaps unleash that secretly moderate Mitt who’s been lying through his teeth the last five years or so?
I don’t think so. Even if Romney is so inclined (and I see no particular reason to believe he is), he’d be dealing with a highly mutinous House GOP and the bulk of a Senate GOP Caucus that would insist the new president use his leverage not to cut deals but to break skulls. Depending on the margin of Democratic control of the Senate, and the identity of the Democratic Caucus, there would almost definitely be an effort to buy a vote or two to put them in operational control of Congress, and with items like the repeal of Obamacare and the enactment of the Ryan budget on the table, they’d pay a pretty high price for treason. If that didn’t work, the combination of Republican control of the House, the presidential veto, and GOP filibuster power in the Senate would be used to squelch any Democratic legislation on even the most quotidian matter. With the entire bipartisan commentariat and the business community screaming for action to avert a “fiscal cliff,” Republicans would probably get their way on that set of threshold issues simply by way of superior leverage. And even without congressional support, a new administration could probably paralyze implementation of Obamacare via executive action and inaction.
Perhaps that’s as much as they could accomplish, but beyond that, you’d find a powerful sentiment among Republicans to withhold bipartisan action pending the midterm elections of 2014, when a more favorable electorate (in terms of turnout patterns) and another positive landscape for GOP Senate gains would make the final conquest of Congress a solid betting proposition. And on one big priority of the conservative movement–the final reshaping of the Supreme Court and the reversal of Roe v. Wade–the odds would be very good for a Romney appointment that would survive the Senate on traditional grounds of deference to the president.
More generally, from Romney’s perspective, the certainty of a wholesale uprising by his party’s “base” and its dominant congressional faction in the event of genuine “bipartisanship” would be a much bigger strategic problem than finding ways around a narrow Democratic margin in the Senate. Besides, if Romney does win, it will almost certainly be due to a tilting of the electorate that also makes a Republican Senate more likely than it appears to be today.
In any event, as I’ve said often, Obama and his entire campaign owe it to the country as much as to themselves to demand as many public concessions as possible, in advance, if Mitt and Paul intend to continue right down to Election Day professing their love for bipartisan negotiations. I doubt any real concession will be made, and perhaps it will finally dawn on the media if not the public that there’s really no way around a stark choice between two very different parties and agendas.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 12, 2012
“A Stark Election Choice”: Study Measures Mitt Romney’s Plan To Screw The Poor And Sick
The largest and clearest point of distinction in the presidential race is universal access to health insurance. If President Obama wins reelection, his law to provide access to the uninsured will go forward. If Mitt Romney is elected, it will be gutted, and Medicaid — the bare-bones coverage plan for the most desperately poor and sick — will face enormous additional cuts.
Commonwealth Fund has released a report comparing the stark choice. Estimating conservatively, Romney’s plan — to the extent that the report was able to piece it together — would increase the uninsured population to about 72 million, while Obama’s would cut it to 26 million (his plan does not cover illegal immigrants.) Probably more telling is Romney’s official campaign reaction:
“Under ObamaCare, Americans have seen their insurance premiums increase, small businesses are facing massive tax increases, and seniors will have reduced access to Medicare services,” Ryan Williams, a Romney spokesman, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “The American people did not want this law, our country cannot afford this law, and when Mitt Romney becomes president he will repeal it and replace it with common-sense, patient-centered reforms that strengthen our health care system.”
Note that the statement is almost entirely an attack on Obamacare, with a brief clause at the end vaguely promising something good will take its place. But that something requires resources. Most people lacking insurance are either sick or have a sick family member or they’re poor. If you want to cover them, you need to cough up some money. Obamacare undertook the massive political heavy lift of providing those resources, and that’s what Romney attacks — he included higher taxes on “small businesses” (i.e., people making more than $250,000 a year) and “reduced access to Medicare services” (i.e., cuts in reimbursements to Medicare providers, as a trade-off for providing them with 30 million new paying customers.)
Romney’s budget is premised on denying the government enough resources to fund any kind of universal health insurance program. His promise to cut tax rates by 20 percent would reduce tax revenue well below current levels. But even if you accept Romney’s arithmetically impossible claim that he can cut tax rates by 20 percent and raise the same tax revenue as the tax code does right now (and without raising taxes on the middle class), merely holding revenue at current, Bush-set levels would make any kind of universal coverage impossible.
Both campaigns describe the election as a stark choice, and this is correct. It’s a choice between universal health coverage for legal citizens and preserving the Bush tax cuts.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, October 2, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 