“John Boehner’s Hypocritical Griping About The Obamacare Deadline Delay”: Conservatives’ Real Beef, That People Want To Sign Up
The Obama Administration has made another adjustment to the Affordable Care Act and the critics are making another fuss.
The adjustment, first reported (I think) by Amy Lotven for Inside Health Policy, is an extension of the open enrollment period for buying private insurance through the new Obamacare marketplaces. Officially, most people have until March 31 to sign up for a plan. (The exception are people who lose a job or have some other, similar life-altering experience. They can sign up throughout the year.) But on Wednesday, the administration announced that it will be offering some extra time to consumers who don’t finish their applications in time. They’ll be able to use the websites, just like they can now, only they’ll have to check a box attesting to the fact that they started the application process before April 1.
Exactly how many extra days will these folks get? And what’s to prevent somebody from lying—effectively taking advantage of the grace period to get insurance after the official deadline? On a predictably painful and frustrating conference call Wednesday, officials from the Department of Health and Human Services wouldn’t answer these questions directly. Obamacare critics, meanwhile, were quick to express their displeasure.”What the hell is this? A joke?” House Speaker John Boehner said at a press conference. “Another deadline made meaningless. If he hasn’t put enough loopholes in the law already, the administration is now resorting to an honor system to enforce it.”
Boehner appears to be right about the lack of enforcement. Nothing can stop people from gaming this new system. And establishing some kind of fixed date might be a good idea, as Philip Klein points out at the Washington Examiner, although in practice the insurers will basically do that on their own. (If they don’t get applications by the middle of the month, they won’t start coverage on May 1.) But even insurers are shrugging at this and it’s not clear why Boehner or anybody else should react differently.
There’s genuine reason to think that people who waited until the last minute to sign up really might have problems completing the process in time. Traffic to the online marketplaces has been increasing rapidly, with levels now rivaling the surge that took place in late December. On Tuesday, 1.2 million people visited healthcare.gov, according to officials. At some point, the congestion could trigger a built-in queuing system—making it difficult for last-minute applicants to finish enrollment by midnight on March 31. As administration officials pointed out, you don’t stop people from voting because they were standing in line when the polls closed. Or, to borrow a phrase I saw on twitter, you don’t kick somebody out of a restaurant because their dish wasn’t ready before closing time.
As for people gaming the system to buy themselves extra time, sure, it’s going to happen. But it’s unlikely to happen that frequently, certainly not enough to upset the actuarial balance of insurance plans. And it’s not like this is unprecedented. As Igor Volskly explained in an item for ThinkProgress, the Bush Administration did pretty much the same thing with Medicare Part D:
In May of 2006, just days before the end of open enrollment, President Bush took administrative action to waive “penalty fees for very low-income seniors and people with disabilities who sign up late” and allowed “the same impoverished beneficiaries to sign up for Medicare drug coverage until Dec. 31.” …
Like Obamacare, the launch of President George W. Bush’s prescription benefit plan was hampered by technical glitches, setbacks, and mass confusion. As the May 15 deadline for enrollment loomed, a bipartisan group of lawmakers advocacy organizations, and a surprising number of newspaper editorials, urged the administration to extend the enrollment period and protect seniors from the penalties associated with late enrollment.
Of course, the real issue here for conservatives isn’t this one delay. It’s all of the delays, plus all of the exceptions and waivers. And it’s totally reasonable to ask hard questions about these, particularly when it comes to the limits of presidential authority and the precedent it sets for the future. (I’m still waiting to hear from more lawyers on the constitutional issues.) But, for what it’s worth, the Affordable Care Act really did give HHS a huge amount of leeway over how to implement the law—and it did so for a very good reason. Given the inherent complexity of health care, there’s no way Congress could have figured out all of the details. It made sense to delegate that authority—to put in place new systems, but leave the nitty-gritty of regulations and transitions to the administration.
For each one of these extensions or delays, the ultimate question is whether they change the law’s ability to realize its basic goals—which, in this case, means encouraging people to buy new private health plans while maintaining a stable insurance market. Giving people a little extra time to enroll wouldn’t seem to impede this kind of progress. If anything, it would seem to enhance it. And maybe that’s what really bothers some of the law’s fiercer critics.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 26, 2014
“It Might Help To Read It First”: The Hobby Lobby President Is Also Building A $70 Million Bible Museum
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider the challenge of Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City-based craft-store chain, to Obamacare’s contraception mandate—a case that could bolster the doctrine of corporate personhood that the Court laid out in Citizens United and end anti-discrimination laws as we know them. Just a few blocks away, the Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, is looking to enshrine his religious beliefs in Washington, D.C. in a different way: with a $50 million museum devoted to the bible.
The new attraction will house a collection of historic bibles that Green has been assembling since 2010. His holdings range from a hand-illustrated Martin Luther New Testament to a Torah from the Spanish Inquisition; experts have valued them at between $20 and $40 million. The Museum of the Bible, which is slated to open in the spring of 2017, will sit at 3rd and D Streets in Southwest D.C., in an eight-story warehouse that Green plans to complement with a two-story addition. A report from the city’s Historic Preservation Review Board even compared the mock-ups to London’s Tate Modern. The museum’s goal, according to the mission statement in its 501(c)3 tax filings for 2011, the most recent year available, is “To bring to life the living word of God, to tell its compelling story of preservation, and to inspire confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the bible.”
The museum plans to accomplish this largely through historic reenactments, or what its chief operating officer Cary Summers calls “immersive environments.” For example, the Green Collection’s travelling exhibition—so far, it’s been shown in Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Israel, Cuba, and the Vatican—displays a note written by Martin Luther the night before his excommunication in “a theater featuring a debate between Fathers Erasmus and Luther and Dr. Johann Eck … which culminates in Luther nailing his 95 Theses to his church door.” Tourists will also find set pieces of the Dead Sea, where the famous scrolls were found, and London’s Westminster Abbey, where the King James Bible was written.
Summers assured me that “we’re not trying to convince anybody of anything. We’re simply presenting the facts.” Summers added that consistency across thousands of international bibles “gives a great deal of comfort that the bible is true, and it’s accurate.”
When I asked Summers if the exhibits would contain any evidence that the bible was divinely written, he asked, “What if I was to ask you, did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?” I said the jury was out on the bard. “That’s true,” he said. “So somewhere along the way, people have to draw a line and say, ‘Everything I read, even though I can’t prove Aristotle was Aristotle or Sappho was Sappho’—people have a tendency to believe that they are.”
Along with snapshots from biblical historiography, the Museum of the Bible will recreate scenes from famous biblical stories, such as creation. But Summers said it won’t touch on their more controversial implications. Summers has also served as a consultant at the Creation Museum, where an exhibit shows Adam and Eve sharing the Garden with the dinosaurs. Green’s museum, by contrast, will reiterate the tale of earth’s first seven days without mentioning evolution. “How people interpret it is up to them—we’re not going there,” said Summers. “If others want to create a museum that takes the other approach, that’s up to them.” Of course, others have, at the National Museum of Natural History a few blocks away.
Summers said the museum won’t mention homosexuality, abortion, or any other “political commentary.” (He also declined to comment on the Supreme Court case.) But he hinted that the museum will weigh in more freely on controversies past. He mentioned anthropological exhibitions on the spread of the bible: How it “enters into countries and very uncivilized tribes and cultural settings that are very cruel. The bible entered into it and their lives were changed. … We’re presenting the impact through the facts.”
These anthropological components, along with exhibits on archeological records that corroborate biblical stories, are in early planning stages. In the meantime, the Green Collection continues touring—it’s en route to the Vatican this week—while the architects work on its eventual home. Religion News Service has reported that Green paid $50 million for the former refrigeration warehouse, which is currently occupied by the Washington Design Center. Tax filings value its artifacts at $23,038,000.
As Green’s landmark lawsuit comes before the Court, his collection continues to make the rounds, embedded in history as he sees it. Workers who depend on a paycheck and health care from his company, or another with a religious owner, may soon be highly acquainted with his point of view. Visiting his museum, on the other hand, is voluntary.
By: Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New Republic, March 25, 2014
“David Vitter, God Bless The Koch Brothers”: The Most Patriotic Americans In The History Of The Earth
It stands to reason that Republican politicians are going to celebrate Charles and David Koch. After all, the billionaires’ generosity is critically important in conservative politics right now and may ultimately be the deciding factor in which party has power in Congress.
But Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) is willing to take his appreciation for the Koch brothers to a pretty extraordinary level, as evidenced by a town-hall event in Shreveport this week. American Bridge posted the above video (http://youtu.be/-7mStFMk6og), and for those who can’t watch clips online, the conservative senator told constituents:
“I think the Koch brothers are two of the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth. […]
“God bless the Koch brothers. They’re fighting for our freedoms.”
Sure, Republicans are bound to be grateful to the billionaires for saturating the airwaves with anti-Democratic attack ads, but Vitter’s effusive praise seemed a little over the top.
Burgess Everett saw an even longer version of the clip and reported that Vitter, as part of the same discussion, said he’s “not defending big money in politics.”
No, of course not. He’s just grateful that the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth are fighting for our freedoms.
It’s worth noting that Louisiana will host two major elections in the next two years: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) is running for re-election this year, and she’s already facing attack ads from the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, and Vitter is running for governor next year, and likely hopes the Kochs’ operation will support his candidacy.
But there’s an even larger context to this: what is it, exactly, the most patriotic Americans in the history of the Earth hope to receive in exchange for their political investments?
The New York Times reports today on the bigger picture.
As [Americans for Prosperity] emerges as a dominant force in the 2014 midterm elections, spending up to 10 times as much as any major outside Democratic group so far, officials of the organization say their effort is not confined to hammering away at President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. They are also trying to present the law as a case study in government ineptitude to change the way voters think about the role of government for years to come.
“We have a broader cautionary tale,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “The president’s out there touting billions of dollars on climate change. We want Americans to think about what they promised with the last social welfare boondoggle and look at what the actual result is.”
Leaders of the effort say it has great appeal to the businessmen and businesswomen who finance the operation and who believe that excess regulation and taxation are harming their enterprises and threatening the future of the country. The Kochs, with billions in holdings in energy, transportation and manufacturing, have a significant interest in seeing that future government regulation is limited.
Indeed, Wonkblog reported just yesterday that a Koch Industries subsidiary is the biggest lease owner in Canada’s tar sands, covering an area of 1.1 million acres. The piece added, “Separately, industry sources familiar with oil sands leases said Koch’s lease holdings could be closer to 2 million acres.”
This helps bring into sharper focus why the Democratic fight with the Koch brothers has become so important. The dispute isn’t about some misleading AFP attack ads about health care reform; this is about a broader agenda.
As Greg Sargent explained this morning, “The real purpose of the Dem strategy is to create a framework for a broader argument about the true goals and priorities of the actual GOP policy agenda. It’s about tapping into a sense that the economy is rigged against ordinary Americans, and in favor of the one percent, and dramatizing that the GOP’s economic agenda would preserve that status quo, blocking any government policies designed to address stagnant mobility and soaring inequality. Or that, as Jonathan Chait puts it, the GOP has ‘built a policy agenda around plutocracy,’ and its primary ‘organizing purpose is to safeguard the economic interests of the very rich.’”
And it’s against this backdrop that David Vitter proclaims, “God bless the Koch brothers. They’re fighting for our freedoms.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2014
“Not So Fast!”: “The Sky Is Falling,” Says Anonymous Chicken
I’m sure many of you saw a certain headline from The Hill today: “O-Care premiums to skyrocket.” At first I thought the source was The Drudge Report.
If you actually read the accompanying article by Elise Viebeck, the rather alarming assertion is mostly a collection of blind quotes from “health industry officials.” Yes, one former Cigna executive went on the record to say his “gut” tells him premiums could go up, which is of course very convincing. Otherwise the closest Viebeck gets to attribution is an “insurance official who hails from a populous swing state.”
In an updated version of the article, Viebeck does quote by name two experts–who deny the whole premise of her story.
And the “premiums to skyrocket” claim directly contradicts a variety of on-the-record assessments by health insurance executives–e.g., Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, Wellpoint president Joe Swedish, and Cigna CEO David Cordani–that the Obamacare premium structure is working out relatively well. And the most reliable independent study, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, concluded that the much-feared “death spiral” of premiums that Viebeck seems to be predicting as a reality for much of the country is very unlikely to occur.
Particularly in its revised form, Viebeck’s piece has a number of “to be sure” qualifiers that undermine the headline. But it’s the headline that will get big coverage today–to be sure–maybe on Drudge Report itself. And it’s pretty clear which political constituency is driving the “story.”
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 20, 2014
“The Education Of Scott Brown”: A Slowly Dawning Lesson, Running Against An Abstraction Is Easy
Less than two years after losing his re-election bid in his home state, former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) is apparently trying again, this time running in New Hampshire – where’s he still learning quite a bit.
It’s not altogether clear why Brown is running in the Granite State, but his strategy has nevertheless taken shape: the Republican intends to hit the campaign trail complaining about the Affordable Care Act. It worked in one state in 2010, Brown figures, so maybe it’ll work in a different state in 2014.
With this in mind, Brown visited with state Rep. Herb Richardson (R-N.H.) and his wife over the weekend at the lawmaker’s home, where the Senate candidate called the ACA a “monstrosity.” Sam Stein flagged an account of the meeting from the local newspaper (pdf):
Richardson was injured on the job and was forced to live on his workers’ comp payments for an extended period of time, which ultimately cost the couple their house on Williams Street. The couple had to pay $1,100 a month if they wanted to maintain their health insurance coverage under the federal COBRA law.
Richardson said he only received some $2,000 a month in workers’ comp. payments, however, leaving little for them to live on. “Thank God for Obamacare!” his wife exclaimed.
Now, thanks to the subsidy for which they qualify, the Richardsons only pay $136 a month for health insurance that covers them both.
The state lawmaker added that the health care law, which Brown claims to abhor, has been a “financial lifesaver” for his family.
According to the local reporter, the former senator listened to the Richardsons’ perspective and then changed the subject.
Running against an abstraction is easy; running against a law that’s currently benefiting millions of families nationwide is a little trickier. That may slowly be dawning on Brown right about now.
Speaking of New Hampshire, Stein also had this report out of the Granite State the other day.
The former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party will save $1,000 a month in premiums for his family’s health care package after signing up for a new policy through the Obamacare exchange.
But Fergus Cullen said the savings aren’t enough to turn him into a supporter of the new health care law.
Apparently, Cullen’s catastrophic-coverage plan was phased out under ACA guidelines, which forced the former state GOP chair to transition to a new plan – with no annual or lifetime caps, and which can’t be taken away if Cullen gets stick – that will save the Republican and his family $12,000 a year in premiums.
For his part, Cullen, concerned about out-of-pocket costs, says he still prefers his old plan and wrote about his experience in the Union Leader, acknowledging the trade-offs.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 