“Ideology Meets Idiocy”: The GOP’s Obamacare Youth Hoax
It’s rare for a political party to trumpet a position that unintentionally reveals its myopia, incoherence and expediency. Yet such is the trifecta with the Republican campaign to call attention to Obamacare’s young “victims.”
Republicans are obsessed with the supposed injustice being done to some healthy young people who will effectively subsidize their sicker elders when Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect.
The crusaders are nothing if not convinced of the righteousness of their cause. “The whole scheme is enlisting young adults to overpay, so other people can have subsidies,” Dean Clancy, a vice president at FreedomWorks, told my Post colleague Sarah Kliff. “That unfairness reminded us of the military draft.”
Conservatives are therefore urging young Americans to resist. “I’m burning my Obamacare draft card,” runs one theatrical riff from a group called Young Americans for Liberty, “because I’m too busy paying student loans to pay for somebody else’s health insurance.” Republican policy advisors have urged the party to make such child abuse a big part of their anti-Obamacare message.
Sounds like a sexy argument, except for one thing. Republicans seem to have forgotten where most people aged 19 to 34 get health coverage: from their employer. And at virtually every company, young people pay the same premiums as employees who are much older than they are and who get more expensively sick than they do. In other words, the evil cross-subsidy Obamacare’s foes are storming the barricades to roll back already exists, at vastly larger scale, in corporate America.
These youngsters are already in chains! They’ve been put there by the private sector! And, inexplicably, young employees have entered this servitude of their own volition. (To extend the GOP’s draft analogy, it turns out there’s a voluntary army of health care masochists from sea to shining sea.)
How could injustice on this scale escape the GOP’s searing moral scrutiny?
After all, the president is only hoping that about 2.7 million young people will purchase coverage in the new exchanges. But 20 million Americans between the ages of 19 and 34 get coverage from their employer right now, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
If you’re keeping score, that makes employer-based health care’s cross-subsidy about eight times more evil than Obamacare’s.
How does it work? Compare a typical, strapping young employee of 28 to her broken- down 58-year-old colleague. These two employees have very different annual health expenses. Yet under the nefarious plot known as “group health insurance,” they basically pay the same premiums. It turns out every big company in America is essentially a socialized health care republic, in which the young subsidize the old, and the healthy subsidize the sick — all of whom pay the same premiums for the same plans.
Similar dynamics explain why, in the federal health-care plan, spry 42-year-olds like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz subsidize 79-year-old geezers like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch.
Maybe that’s why Cruz always seems so angry.
Of course, most people in civilized nations know and accept that this is how insurance works. But Republicans nowadays aren’t like most people in civilized nations. They think Obamacare is a form of injustice akin to slavery. Which makes employer-provided health care slavery on steroids. Where’s the outrage? If conservatives were consistent and principled, they would devote far more time and effort to liberating 20 million young Americans from the socialism baked into employer-based insurance and look past the Obamacare exchanges as a puny sideshow.
But, alas, conservatives are not consistent and principled, save for their consistent determination to hurt the president politically.
It would be better if all those smart GOP thinkers devoted their talent and energy to the question of how they would expand coverage to the 50 million uninsured — but to raise that question is to enter the policy cul de sac in all its delicious irony.
Because the answer to that question is RomneyObamacare, the only sound way (as Republicans rightly taught us) that a country can move toward universal coverage using private health plans. The GOP could offer a tweaked version with slightly fewer regulations. Or structure it to offer universal catastrophic coverage to save money. But if Republicans were serious, they’d offer the same basic reform architecture.
So Republicans choose not to be serious. And it shows.
In the end, the GOP’s Obamacare youth hoax shows how silly a party can look when a political focus on one corner of a policy leads it to latch on to “insights” that utterly miss the big picture. It’s a reminder, if we needed another, of how close the connection can be between ideology and idiocy.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 21, 2013
“Scaring Normal People”: For Ted Cruz, Crazy Is A Family Business
Be careful what you wish for. The Republican Party sought a crop of new leaders with the vitality and ideological fire both Sen. John McCain and Mitt Romney lacked heading into 2016. Now they’ve got them, most notably Sen. Ted Cruz, who’s leading the charge to either “defund” Obamacare or shut down the government, to the horror of McCain and other so-called “establishment Republicans” (as if there were any such thing.) Even Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul has maybe kinda sorta suggested that shutting down the government to defund Obamacare is a bad idea — even though he signed Sen. Mike Lee’s letter threatening to do so.
Cruz has no such qualms. Headlining former Sen. Jim DeMint and the Heritage Foundation’s “Defund Obamacare” rally last night in Dallas, he fired up the crowd with his Obama attacks. (Of course, I can’t help but note the irony of Heritage sponsoring Cruz’s “Defund Obamacare” tour when Heritage was the source of one of the plan’s key provisions: the individual mandate to carry health insurance.) Even though some Obama defenders showed up and heckled Cruz, the junior Texas senator and his father were the stars of the night.
“We’ve all seen this movie before,” Cruz told the audience. “President Obama and Harry Reid are gonna scream and yell ‘those mean, nasty Republicans are threatening to shut down the government.’” He went on: “One side or the other has to blink. How do we win this fight? Don’t blink!” Only squishes blink.
“Now is the best time we have to defund Obamacare,” Cruz told the crowd of 1,000. “We’re seeing bipartisan agreement that the wheels are coming off.”
The wheels came off the Heritage event, though, when Cruz’s father, minister Rafael Cruz, took the stage to close it out. When it comes to red meat and red-baiting, Ted is a piker compared to his Cuban refugee father, who talks of Castro’s tyranny but never mentions the fact that he supported the Cuban communist leader’s revolution against Batista. Again we heard Cruz Sr. warn that Barack Obama is leading us toward socialism. This time, though, he didn’t merely exaggerate, he outright lied, insisting “Sarah Palin was right” about death panels in Obamacare.
Cruz was oddly specific, as though he’d had a very vivid hallucination: There is a 16-member death panel, he told the rapt crowd, that “will be implemented next year.” Those “16 bureaucrats will decide” not only whether you get life saving treatment, but even knee surgery, Cruz warned the audience, farcically. Instead of a “knee operation,” maybe you’ll just get “a wheelchair” and pain medication instead. Cruz also predicted shortages of aspirin and a hike in staph infections under Obamacare, just like in his native Cuba (although many of Cuba’s medical shortages are due to the U.S. embargo.) Essentially, according to Cruz, the death panel will tell many of us “Go home and die!” And to think Republicans complained about Rep. Alan Grayson’s rhetoric back in the day.
The Cruz and Son roadshow would scare normal voters, but it seems ideal for a GOP primary. Even in Texas, Cruz is the state’s GOP voters’ top pick for a presidential nominee, above Gov. Rick Perry, who is hoping to ride off into the sunset away from the statehouse and toward another primary run. Not so fast, Governor. Cruz had a solid lead even before Perry reversed himself and asked for at least some Medicaid funding for Obamacare, making himself obviously a “squish.”
At what point might Cruz Sr. become a drawback for his son? Can you say “never?” In the important Tea Party primary within the GOP primary, he is leaving Marco Rubio and Rick Perry in the dust, and is neck and neck with Rand Paul nationally. (That’s why Cruz allies are accusing Paul allies of pushing questions about Cruz’s eligibility to be president especially in Iowa, although the two men profess to be friends.) It looks increasingly like Ted Cruz (and his father) dream of him as the 2016 nominee. But so do Democrats.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 21, 2013
“Between The Right And A Hard Place”: Hey Republicans, Why Should My Family Suffer Because You Have A Partisan Axe To Grind?
When it comes to the federal health care system, congressional Republicans have found themselves in an increasingly awkward position. Their far-right base and allied right-wing activist groups continue to push GOP lawmakers to shut down the government — and quite possibly default on U.S. debts — in the hopes of sabotaging the Affordable Care Act.
And yet, many Americans who recognize the benefits of “Obamacare” continue to push in the opposite direction. We saw this two weeks ago in North Carolina, last week in Florida, and yesterday, this amazing clip out of Nevada was released by American Bridge. Watch on YouTube
In this clip, we see a small business owner in Las Vegas who had some straightforward questions for Rep. Joe Heck (R-Nev.): “Why would you oppose the ACA at every turn?” and “Why would you oppose something that’s helping me now?”
When local events erupted during the 2009 August recess, months before the Affordable Care Act became law, the right found it fairly easy to exploit public confusion — throw around some garbage talking points about “death panels” and “socialism,” and wait for scared people to go berserk.
But as Greg Sargent explained well yesterday, ” We’re a long way from the anti-Obamacare town halls of the magical Summer of ’09.” The public is starting to get a better sense of the benefits of the law, how it will help them and their families, and town-hall meetings that used to serve as opportunities to feed red meat to Fox viewers are suddenly becoming opportunities for mainstream Americans to ask Republican lawmakers aloud, “Why should my family suffer because you have a partisan axe to grind?”
Also note just how few answers GOP lawmakers have in response.
For the right, Republicans are eager to boast about voting to repeal the federal health care law several dozen times, but conservatives are unimpressed — the votes were a vanity exercise with no practical value for anyone on either side of the argument.
For the left, Republicans, as we see with Joe Heck in the above video, have tired cliches and shallow talking points about the number of pages in the legislation.
And for everyone in between, as we’ve seen in Nevada, Kentucky, and North Carolina, Republicans offer reassurances that there are some provisions in “Obamacare” that the GOP likes and wants to keep, which makes it that much more difficult to understand why those same Republicans have voted literally dozens of times to eliminate the Affordable Care Act in its entirety — including the parts they now say they support.
All the while, Republicans have said for nearly four years they’re ready to present a credible alternative to the reform law that’ll work even better than that darned Democratic version, but we’re still waiting, and by all appearances, the party still doesn’t have an actual health care policy.
Can’t anybody here play this game?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 20, 2013
“Obama Hates White People”: Loose Lipped Maine Gov Paul LePage’s Penchant For Ignorance And Gross Stupidity
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) announced last month that he would run for re-election in 2014.
LePage squeaked into office in 2010 with some help from the Tea Party — he won just 38 percent of the vote in a three-way race — and has since earned a reputation as a blunt, loose-lipped politician with a penchant for controversy. Think a less diplomatic version of Chris Christie.
Things got so bad that in June, Assistant Senate Republican Leader Roger Katz wrote an op-ed saying he was “embarrassed” by LePage’s “unfortunate tone.”
With LePage gearing up to pursue a second term, here’s a look back at some of his more memorable controversies.
“Obama hates white people”
Move over, Kanye West.
At a fundraiser in August, LePage reportedly told a group of Republican lawmakers and supporters that President Obama “hates white people,” according to an account one attendee gave to the Bangor Daily News.
The chairman of the state GOP, Rick Bennett, told the Daily News he personally had not heard the remark, but said LePage did discuss how “President Obama had an opportunity to unify the country on race, but didn’t do anything.”
“The governor is not a racist,” he added.
“Blow it up”
LePage is no fan of newspapers (more on that below). Just how much does he hate the print news business? Enough to joke about bombing it to smithereens, apparently.
LePage had the chance to test out a fighter jet simulator this summer. While sitting in the cockpit, he was asked, “What would you like to do?”
His response: “I want to find the [Portland] Press Herald building and blow it up.”
A spokesman for the governor later said he was “clearly joking.”
“Vaseline”
LePage came under fire in June for making a vulgar sexual reference about a Democratic state senator, Troy Jackson, while discussing the state’s deadlocked budget negotiations.
“Senator Jackson claims to be for the people, but he’s the first one to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” LePage said in an interview with Maine’s WMTW News.
LePage then walked away, only to return a little later with a semi-apology.
“Damnit,” he said. “That comment is not politically correct, but we’ve got to understand who this man is. This man is a bad person. He doesn’t only have no brains, he has a black heart.”
“Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell”
On the campaign trail in 2010, LePage told voters they should elect him because he would defend them from the federal government’s tyranny. He added, “As your governor, you’re gonna be seeing a lot of me on the front page saying, ‘Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell.'”
“The new Gestapo, the IRS”
There have been a number of criticisms of the Affordable Care Act: It’s unconstitutional; it’s unwieldy; it hinders job growth. LePage, responding to the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law, added a new one, likening the IRS, which will enforce much of that law, to Nazi Germany’s police force.
“We the people have been told there is no choice,” he said during a weekly radio address. “You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo, the IRS.”
After catching flak, LePage clarified one week later that the IRS isn’t actually the Gestapo.
“What I am trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and, frankly, I would never want to see that repeated,” he said. “Maybe the IRS is not quite as bad — yet.”
“Kiss my butt”
Shortly after assuming office in 2011, LePage said he would not attend Martin Luther King Day events hosted by the NAACP, explaining his decision by saying, “I am not going to be held hostage by a special interest group.”
When asked about the NAACP’s criticism of him for turning down those invites, LePage told a reporter, “Tell them to kiss my butt.”
“Some women may have little beards”
In 2011, the Maine Board of Environmental Protection recommended banning bisphenol A, or BPA, in all reusable food and beverage containers sold in the state. Studies have linked BPA to health problems in young children and fetuses, prompting the European Union and several U.S. states to regulate the chemical’s use.
LePage, unconvinced that the science behind those studies was sound, disagreed with the environmental agency’s recommendation.
“The only thing that I’ve heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen,” he said. “So the worst case is some women may have little beards.”
“Newspapers”
LePage is terrified of Maine’s newspapers.
While visiting a grade school, LePage told the students, “My greatest fear in the state of Maine: Newspapers. I’m not a fan of newspapers.”
TV and radio news were all right, LePage added, because they don’t “spin” the news.
“Brainwash the masses”
Months into his first term, LePage ordered that a mural depicting labor triumphs and notable figures like Rosie the Riveter be removed from the state’s Department of Labor building, saying the mural was too one-sided.
A spokesperson for LePage said he had made the decision after receiving an anonymous fax likening it to “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.”
“The Department of Labor is a state agency that works very closely with both employees and employers, and we need to have a decor that represents neutrality,” the spokesperson added.
The U.S. Labor Department, which helped pay for the mural with a $60,000 grant, filed a federal lawsuit demanding that it be returned. A judge threw out that lawsuit, but LePage placed the mural back on display in the Maine State Museum earlier this year.
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, August 20, 2013; Editor’s note: This story was first published on July 3, 2013, and updated on August 20.
“Petulant Little Children”: Why The Republican Obamacare “No Strategy At All” Strategy Fell Apart
After President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, conservative writer David Frum, who had been a speechwriter for George W. Bush, chided his compatriots for the strategy they had employed in opposing it. Had they worked with Obama on a compromise, he argued, the result could have been a more conservative version of the law; by simply opposing it in its entirety, they wound up with nothing once the law passed. For raising this criticism, Frum was declared a traitor and banished from the conservative movement; these days his (still conservative) ideas get a better hearing on the left than the right.
And what has been the Republican strategy on health-care reform since the ACA’s passage? Well, first they tried to kill it through the courts. That didn’t work, though they won for Republican governors the right to refuse the Medicaid dollars that would enable them to offer insurance to their states’ poor (congrats on that), though many of them are coming around to accept the money. In the one house of Congress they control, they’ve held dozens of symbolic repeal votes, so many that it’s become a national joke. They’re now threatening to shut down the government (very bad) or default on America’s debts (even worse) unless Obama agrees to shut the law down, a plan even many within their own party realize is insane. So they’ve ended up looking like petulant children who don’t know when they’ve lost, not to mention viciously cruel ideologues who would literally rather see people go without health insurance than allow them to get it through a system tainted in any way by contact with a law with Barack Obama’s signature on it.
So once again, they’re not getting what they want substantively, and they’re losing politically as well. Even Newt Gingrich—Newt Gingrich!—is criticizing them for not bothering to come up with the “replace” part of “repeal and replace.” Why didn’t they? It’s partly because, as I’ve argued before, the whole topic of health-care reform is something they just don’t care about. But Ed Kilgore adds an important insight: their stance of opposition to every single component of what is a pretty conservative reform plan not only left them defending the status quo, but has pushed them step by step so far to the right that they’ve now reached a point where they’ve almost rejected the very idea of insurance. They’re attacking Obamacare on the grounds that healthy people will have to buy insurance, but might not use it as much as sick people, even going so far as to encourage young people to stay uninsured. But that’s how insurance works! Is it a “bad deal” for many healthy young people? Absolutely, just like car insurance is a bad deal for people who never get into an accident, and homeowner’s insurance is a bad deal for people whose houses never burn down. You don’t have to be a health-care wonk to hear them saying these things and say, “Geez, these people are nuts.”
The real problem is that, as usually happens in a complex political world, the Republican “strategy” to oppose Obamacare was no strategy at all. It was a bunch of ad-hoc decisions, based on a mixture of reason, ill-informed judgment and emotion, made by people not necessarily working together, over an extended period of time. And now it’s falling apart.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 20, 2013
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