“Insane Economic Policy”: GOP’s Rejection Of Medicaid Funds Is One More Ideologically Driven Bad Idea
My emotions after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act last week went through various stages: confusion (thanks, CNN), shock and finally sheer joy. It was a complete surprise to have the highest court uphold the entire law, including the individual mandate. Liberals rightly celebrated the ruling as a historic step toward ensuring a better quality of life for all Americans.
But in the jubilation hangover, some more sober analysis has taken its place. One important aspect of the Court’s decision gives no reason to celebrate: the ruling that the federal government can’t withdraw all Medicaid funds from governors who refuse to expand Medicaid rolls in their states, essentially making it possible for them to opt out. The Medicaid expansion is meant to give coverage to about 17 million Americans by 2019, accounting for almost half of the 32 million people the bill promised to insure. Yet as Sarah Kliff reported, if states opt out of expanding Medicaid, it could leave some of the poorest Americans stuck in a no-man’s land in which they don’t qualify for Medicaid but also don’t qualify for subsidies to buy insurance. Beyond literally being a matter of life or death for many uninsured Americans, it’s also an economic issue: the White House calculated that expanding the number of Americans with insurance would increase economic well-being by about $100 billion a year, or about two-thirds of a percent of GDP.
It seems foolhardy for governors to reject what is basically free money to help more people in their own states gain health insurance. Josh Barro wrote just after the ruling that while the White House’s stick was taken away, its carrot—the federal government’s picking up 100 percent of the states’ Medicaid expansion tab for the early years, gradually declining to 90 percent after that—would be enough to incite states to participate. And they stand to see other economic benefits. States that already provide coverage and care to people living at 133 percent of the poverty line would no longer shoulder those costs, saving them millions. Even for those that don’t offer such coverage, the bill stands to save all states money by getting rid of the “hidden tax” they pay in higher insurance premiums that account for the cost of covering the uninsured, also potentially saving millions.
Yet Republican governors are already contemplating rejecting the money. The Hill reported this week that fifteen governors are either flat-out planning to reject the Medicaid expansion money or are leaning in that direction. Firm nos have come from Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Eight more are still undecided yet appear to be following suit: Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Texas and Virginia. Yet Brian Beutler reports today that these very states have some of the country’s highest uninsured rates and would stand to see the biggest benefits. Florida ties with Nevada and New Mexico in second to last place in the country at 21 percent uninsured, and South Carolina and Louisiana come in with 19 and 17 percent rates, respectively.
An indignant refusal of federal money in these states may sound familiar. Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas were among the handful of states to say they would reject federal stimulus money way back in early 2009. The argument was similar back then: as with the Medicaid expansion money, the states were expected to change some policies to protect more of their residents from economic harm. In the case of the stimulus money, they had to expand unemployment benefits to more people. That’s what made GOP governors too cranky to accept the funds. Eventually all fifty accepted federal funds, although some still turned away the money meant to increase those unemployment benefits. Meanwhile, the last holdout, South Carolina, had the nation’s second-highest unemployment rate at the time that it was contemplating rejecting the funds on ideological grounds.
But other federal money was later rejected outright. After President Obama’s 2010 State of the Union, he called for building a high-speed rail network and pledged $8 billion in stimulus money for rail projects in various states. Yet four Republican governors—New Jersey’s Christie, Wisconsin’s Walker, Ohio’s Kasich and Florida’s Scott—refused to take money for the projects. They would have created tens of thousands of jobs in each state—an estimated 16,000 in Ohio, 10,000 in Wisconsin and 10,000 in Florida.
Meanwhile, as research my colleague Mike Konczal and I conducted showed, ultraconservative Republican governors across the country have been enacting policies that hurt their economies, and therefore the entire economy, in other ways. In the midst of a massive jobs crisis, the eleven states that flipped red after the 2010 midterms and Texas accounted for 70 percent of public sector job losses last year, either laying off or pushing these workers out through attrition. The rest of the states lost only an average of .5 percent of their government workforces. Without these massive waves of job losses, our unemployment rate would likely be closer to 7 percent.
What ties all of these conservative state-level actions together? An adherence to ideology over what’s best for the economy—even their own state economies. The belief that government spending should be shrunk at all costs has steamrolled over policies that shouldn’t be about party affiliation. Taking federal money for much-needed updates to our infrastructure that would also create thousands of jobs is clearly the right choice. Throwing government workers out of their jobs at a time of sky-high unemployment is clearly the wrong choice. And now these conservative states are threatening to keep millions of Americans out of health insurance policies because they worry about higher state spending in the long run. This despite the fact that their residents and their budgets stand to see huge benefits now. The Republican Party’s abhorrence of government is driving bad economic decision-making—and that’s hurting all of us.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, July 5, 2012
“Voting Rights Are Precious”: A Crack In The GOP’s Support For Voter-ID Laws
There’s little question what the political calculus behind voter-ID laws is. Advocates argue that the laws, which require government photo identification to vote, are necessary to prevent voter fraud—despite there being virtually no evidence that such fraud is a problem. In practice, the laws will disproportionately have an impact on poor people and those of color, two Democratic-leaning groups that are less likely to have such IDs. Predictably, Republicans have been pushing for these laws, while Democrats generally oppose them.
That is, until earlier this week, when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder shot down his own party and vetoed a state voter-ID law. He also vetoed laws that would have made it harder to conduct voter-registration drives and to confirm U.S. citizenship for voters. All three—pushed by Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson and sponsored by Republican lawmakers—would likely have dampened turnout, particularly among disadvantaged communities.
During hearings on the measure, protesters stormed the Capitol. “This is a naked assault on that sacred right to vote and to not have unnecessary obstacles placed in their path,” said one Democratic state representative.
The governor’s press release, titled “Snyder signs most of election reform legislation,” shows he wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to make his announcement and in both cases cited “confusion” as the key reason for knocking down the measures.
But in a letter to lawmakers, Snyder expanded his point. “Voting rights are precious,” he wrote, “and we need to work especially hard to make it possible for people to vote.”
As the latest results from Wisconsin’s recall election showed, high turnout does not necessarily help Democrats. Snyder, and others of a more moderate ilk, may recognize that there’s no reason Republican candidates shouldn’t be reaching out to new voting populations. Keeping voter turnout down is hardly a long-term strategy, and as the Prospect‘s Jamelle Bouie recently noted, there’s a lot of room for Republicans to grow in popularity among nonwhites.
Right now, Snyder stands alone. Last week, New Hampshire’s Republican-dominated state legislature overturned a veto from Democratic Governor John Lynch on similar legislation. Several state voter-ID laws are stuck in the courts. But the news from Michigan may help spur others who have wavered on the issue.
The fundamental right to vote should not be a partisan issue, and Snyder’s decision may have a welcome ripple effect on others in the GOP who see the troubling implications of these laws.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 5, 2012
“It’s A Tax! It’s A Penalty!”: It’s A Stupid Argument Over Semantics
The press assumes people are stupid, thereby making them no less stupid.
Since not much campaign news happens over the July 4th holiday, Mitt Romney took the opportunity to change his campaign’s tune on whether the penalty in the Affordable Care Act for those who can afford health insurance but refuse to get it is a “tax.”
To review, the Supreme Court said the government has the authority under its taxing power to penalize those who refuse to get insurance, leading Republicans to cry, “Tax! Tax! Tax!” with all of their usual policy nuance and rhetorical subtlety. The only problem this poses for Romney is that calling it a tax means that Romney imposed a tax with his health-care plan in Massachusetts, which means admitting that Romney sinned against the tax gods. First his spokesman came out and said that no, it’s really just a penalty, but then Romney came out and said, well, if the Supreme Court said it’s a tax then it’s a tax, but it wasn’t a tax when I did it, because the Supreme Court didn’t call it that.
What does all this arguing over semantics tell us? It tells us that the press and public are both complicit in creating the hurricane of stupidity into which all presidential campaigns devolve.
As for the press, they could treat this as the inconsequential semantic quibble it is. The fact is it doesn’t matter whether you call it a “tax,” a “penalty,” a “freedom fee,” or a “Lenin levy.” It’s the same thing. And for the record, according to the Urban Institute, only 2 percent of Americans will be subject to the tax/penalty. And the whole idea is that most of them will be motivated by the tax/penalty to get health insurance, so the whole idea of the tax/penalty is that almost no one will end up paying it.
But the press has treated the question of what Mitt Romney will call the fee as though it matters. Because of some weird nostalgia, I get the dead-tree editions of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, and when I went outside into the 150-degree heat to get my papers this morning (note to self: get time machine, go back and convince George Washington to put the nation’s capital in someplace cold and rainy like Seattle), I found that both front pages had stories about this virtually meaningless issue.
That’s partly because it’s a slow news day, but also because the press knows just how dumb the electorate is. If all voters were at least reasonably informed about things, stuff like this would matter far less. No one who actually knows even the first thing about the Affordable Care Act could possibly have their opinion altered by what we decide to call the penalty for not carrying insurance. No one who thinks it’s a necessary measure will say, “Gee, now that people are calling it a ‘tax,’ that really changes how I think about it.” And if you didn’t like it before, you won’t like it any more or less if we put a different name on it.
But the press operates on the unspoken assumption that meaningful numbers of people actually will react that way. In other words, they assume the public is stupid, and that assumption leads them to make decisions that do nothing to make the public any less stupid. At the same time, if the public knew more about the actual consequences of the election, reporters would certainly pick up on it and alter their coverage accordingly. But since only 55 percent of the public even knows what the result of the most important Supreme Court decision on a policy issue in decades even was, reporters will stick to assuming the public is clueless, and they’ll largely be right.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 5, 2012
“Behind Closed Doors”: In Quiet Rooms, Where All The Romney Money Is Hidden
The incredible new Vanity Fair piece on Romney’s secretive off shore tax accounts and business practices at Bain immediately made me think of one of my favorite video clips of 2012, this one where Romney is talking about how issues related to the concentration of wealth should only be discussed in “quiet rooms”: http://youtu.be/ismksjp10q0
Mitt Romney undeniably likes his secrets, especially when it comes to money, and I have to admit that the revelations in Vanity Fairgave me a different take on the “quiet rooms” quote. I had always assumed it was just Mitt being Mitt, doing his classic Thurston Howell III imitation, another in a long line of Mitticisms (I like being able to fire people, I know a couple of Nascar team owners, did I tell you the funny story about how my dad laid off a bunch of people, etc.) reminding us how cluelessly out of touch Mitt was. It was also the ultimate in big money Republicanism: we don’t talk about these issues in public because we don’t want people to get mad and start a class war. But now it occurs to me what Mitt was really trying to guard in his quiet rooms: all the millions he has secretly stashed away.
What Mitt, with his offshore accounts and his secretive business practices and his endorsement of the Ryan budget which gives even more advantages to Wall Street tycoons like himself, is trying to preserve is the ability to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us. He wants a world where the wealthy have all these advantages and loopholes and secret deals and lower tax rates, precisely because that was his entire business model at Bain Capital. He wants a world where he doesn’t have to pay taxes on his accounts in Bermuda and the Caymans and Luxembourg and Switzerland. He wants a world where he can recruit any sleazebag overseas investor to invest in Bain. As Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon.com puts it: “This pattern of elusiveness is hardly confined to Romney’s finances, but rather defines his public life.”
Mitt’s entire career is defined by the secrets he has, and the fact that he didn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else except for a few other well-connected Wall Street guys. The way Mitt made his money is exactly the kind of thing we should be talking about in this presidential campaign — and not only because it relates directly to Romney’s character, experience, and values. We should be talking about this because we should be debating as a country whether we want a country whose economic system is structured primarily to benefit a small number of wealthy, well-connected insiders operating behind closed doors, manipulating the tax code and financial markets to become more and more wealthy; or whether we want a country where businesses make money the old-fashioned way, by manufacturing and selling quality products, and playing by the same rules everyone else has to play by. By and large, with only occasional exceptions where Bain actually created real new jobs, the way Romney became wealthy was to make other people poorer — manipulating the financial markets and tax code, off-shoring jobs, cutting wages and benefits, laying off people, driving companies into bankruptcy while still getting huge fees from them. He also ripped off the rest of us taxpayers through the outrageous carried interest loophole, through loading up companies with debt and then writing it off, and through taking advantage of the taxpayer-backed Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation’s obligation to pay off pensions when Bain’s companies went bankrupt. I guess it is not surprising that having made most of his money that way, he decided to keep so much of that money invested in secret overseas accounts.
No wonder Mitt Romney wants to keep this discussion confined strictly to “quiet rooms”. I would too if I had stashed so many of the millions I made from off-shoring jobs and all these other revolting business practices into secret off-shore accounts. But it is time for America to have this discussion — and not just in quiet rooms.
By: Mike Lux, The Huffington Post, July 3, 2012
“Daring The Sick And Needy”: Time to Protest Against Republican Governors For Shameful Threats
Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:
Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.
…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,
Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.
If there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.
By: J. P. Green, Democratic Strategist, July 3, 2012
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