Are Republicans About To Commit Medicare Suicide?
It’s shaping up to be spring 2011 redux. Just under a year ago, Republicans — euphoric after a midterm election landslide, and overzealous in their interpretation of their mandate — passed a budget that called for phasing out Medicare over the coming years and replacing it with a subsidized private insurance system for newly eligible seniors.
The backlash was ugly. But Republicans seem to have forgotten how poisonous that vote really was, and remains…because they’re poised to do it again. This time they’re signaling they’ll move ahead, with a modified plan — one that, though less radical, would still fundamentally remake and roll back one of the country’s most popular and enduring safety net programs.
“We’re not backing off any of our ideas, any of our solutions,” GOP budget chairman Paul Ryan said last week in an interview with Fox.
Why on earth would Republicans put the whole party back on the line? Particularly after a year of serial brinkmanship and overreach that has dragged their popularity down to record lows?
The answers speak as much to the hubris of this GOP majority as it does to the fact that the party’s in thrall to a movement that demands unyielding commitment to a platform of reducing taxes on high-income earners and rolling back popular, though expensive, federal support programs.
That creates a dilemma: Vote against the platform and face a primary. Vote for it, and face constituent backlash.
House Republicans will now have to choose between reigniting that backlash, or admitting to constituents that they erred the first time around.
To make that choice easier, Ryan’s signaling he’ll swap out his old Medicare plan with a new one — one that he actually co-wrote with a Democratic Senator. That’s what Democrats think he’s going to do, and if they’re right, it will allow him and members of his party to claim they’ve moved significantly in the Democrats’ direction.
Here are all the details of the so-called Ryan-Wyden plan. There are two key differences between this plan and the original Ryan plan. The first is that Ryan-Wyden would preserve a Medicare-like public option as a competitor to private plans in its insurance exchange, and allow seniors to buy into it. The second is that it would leave the rate at which the program’s costs are allowed to grow exactly where it is in current law — forcing seniors to pay less out of pocket than would the original Ryan plan.
So substantively it is, indeed, a step or two left for the GOP. But here’s the key: it ultimately hands Medicare’s benefit guarantee over to a whimsical market, instead of keeping it in government hands, where it’s been for nearly 50 years. It would constitute a massive policy shift to the right. And that’s why Democrats abandoned Ron Wyden en masse the day the plan was unveiled.
House leadership and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee couldn’t be happier. They think the GOP’s walking right back into a political buzz saw, confident the public won’t be impressed by the technical modifications to the plan, or sympathetic to the fact that a single Senate Democrat endorsed it. It’s a lesson Dems learned the hard way during health care reform — all the hair splitting over specifics didn’t stop Republicans from characterizing every permutation of it as “Obamacare.” And the label stuck. Democrats are betting they can pull the same trick in reverse this year. Indeed, as you can tell from the poster below that’s already being distributed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, they liked “Ryan Plan 1” so much, they’re lining round the block for the sequel.
http://50.56.28.37/talkingpointsmemo.com/images/GOP-Horror-Movie-660.jpg
By: Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, February 7, 2012
“Compassionate Conserative”: Gov. Sam Brownback’s Anti-Poor Agenda
The Kansas governor appears to be waging war against low-income families in his state.
The GOP presidential primary has offered some odd debates on who cares about the “very poor” and whether there should be a “safety net” or a “trampoline” to help people get out of poverty. Meanwhile, in Kansas, it seems Governor Sam Brownback is hoping to dig a bigger hole for the poor fall into. Between his tax plans and his approaches to school funding, Brownback’s agenda overtly boosts the wealthy and makes things harder for the poor. While many liberals speculate this to be a secret goal, Brownback is hardly making a secret of his agenda.
Currently, the Kansas Legislature is examining Brownback’s plan to redesign education funding. The plan removes extra dollars for students who are more expensive to educate—those who must learn English or come from challenging backgrounds. Instead of providing funding based on the actual costs of education, Kansas would allow counties to raise property taxes and keep the revenue. That’s great for wealthy districts with high property values and seriously damaging for poor districts where the tax base is relatively small. The plan would likely create enormous disparities between school districts, leaving students in poor communities with few good options among traditional schools. Meanwhile, wealthy school districts can likely spend more and more to make their schools top-notch.
While low-income kids would attend schools getting outpaced by wealthy counterparts, their parents would get to pay more in taxes. That’s because the governor is also pushing a tax plan, approved by Reaganite Arthur Laffer, that would actually raise the total tax burden on those who make less than $25,000 a year. For the record, that’s more than 40 percent of filers in the state. As I wrote last week, the plan not only raises taxes on the poor but also cuts government programs that target low-income Kansans, compounding the hit. Meanwhile, the biggest tax cut in the plan would go to the wealthiest residents, those making more than $250,000.
But perhaps most galling is that Brownback will not object to a new decision by the state’s welfare officials that cuts off food-stamp benefits for U.S.-born children of undocumented workers. The decision leaves hundreds of American children without access to the program.
I should also mention that Brownback has long considered himself a “compassionate conservative.” With his level of compassion, who needs safety nets, or as Newt Gingrich would say, “trampolines”?
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, February 8, 2012
“War On Contraception”: GOP Lawmakers Seek To Deny Coverage To Others That They Enjoy
Republican congressional leaders are entering the fray over the Obama administration’s weeks-old decision to require employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception, including for some religious organizations that don’t employ a majority of people of that faith. The decision has been a hot topic on the campaign trail in recent days, but today, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) took the House floor to slam it, calling it an “unambiguous attack on religious freedom in our country” and vowed to repeal the regulation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had a similarly sharp indictmentyesterday. Watch it:
But missed in this debate is the fact Boehner and McConnell’s own health insurance plans covers contraception, something they now want to deny to others.
Since 1998, every insurer participating in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP) — including members of Congress — has had access to comprehensive contraceptive coverage, including emergency contraception, such as the morning after pill. Republican lawmakers now want to prevent access to the coverage they enjoy to employees of religious organizations who may not be of that religion or who disagree with anti-contraception doctrine (89 percent of Catholics say contraception decision should be theirs, not the church’s).
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Think Progress, February 8, 2012
Hypocrisy: Republican Senators Including Snowe And Collins Co-Sponsored Federal Contraception Mandate In 2001
Republicans have gone to war against President Obama’s regulation requiring employers and insurers to provide contraception coverage, portraying the measure as a “government takeover” of health care and pledging to repeal the rule in Congress. The measure, which is part of the Affordable Care Act, says that companies offering coverage must also provide birth control insurance (but exempts houses of worship and nonprofits primarily employing and serving those of the same faith).
The Obama measure closely resembles state laws providing equity in insurance coverage for contraception in six states and actually offers far more conscience protections than previous Congressional efforts to expand women’s access to birth control. For instance, a 2001 bill co-sponsored by Republicans Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME), Susan Collins (ME), Lincoln Chafee (RI), Gordon Smith (OR), John Warner (VA), Arlen Specter (PA) — S. 104 — sought to establish parity for contraceptive prescriptions within the context of coverage already guaranteed by insurance plans, but offered no opt-out clause for religious groups who opposed contraception:
SEC. 714. STANDARDS RELATING TO BENEFITS FOR CONTRACEPTIVES.
`(a) REQUIREMENTS FOR COVERAGE- A group health plan, and a health insurance issuer providing health insurance coverage in connection with a group health plan, may not–
`(1) exclude or restrict benefits for prescription contraceptive drugs or devices approved by the Food and Drug Administration, or generic equivalents approved as substitutable by the Food and Drug Administration, if such plan provides benefits for other outpatient prescription drugs or devices; or
`(2) exclude or restrict benefits for outpatient contraceptive services if such plan provides benefits.
“Women shouldn’t be held hostage by virtue of where they live,” Snowe told a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing in September of 2001. “It simply is not fair.” “All we’re saying in this legislation is that if health insurance plans provide coverage for prescription drugs that that coverage has to extend to FDA-approved prescription contraceptives. It’s that simple.”
At the time, religious groups also raised concerns about the measure and Snowe promised to add a “conscience clause” that is similar to the exemption included in Maine’s law. Incidentally, that language is very similar to the conscience protections included in Obama’s regulation.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, February 8, 2012
Get Ready For Buyer’s Remorse, Rick Santorum Edition
We’ve had two—or is it three?—helpings of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, more iterations of former Gov. Mitt Romney than you can shake $10,000 at, so should anyone be surprised that we’re getting a second dose of Rick Santorum? The former Pennsylvania senator scored a political hat trick with convincing victories in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota last night. Sure Missouri was a beauty contest and Colorado and Minnesota didn’t actually select delegates, but neither did Iowa and no one said that set of caucuses was meritless.
Now Santorum must accomplish the 2012 political equivalent of defying gravity. For if there has been one rule in this chaotic nomination race, it is that what goes up must come down.
As I wrote in my column this week:
In the wake of Mitt Romney’s convincing victories in Florida on Tuesday and Nevada on Saturday, perhaps the GOP will rally to the former Massachusetts governor and embrace him in a manner which they have resisted thus far.
But through the first month of primary contests, Republican voters haven’t been much about embracing. They’ve been too busy running away from candidates. Romney’s New Hampshire victory, for example, sparked pronouncements that with two wins under his belt (the Iowa caucuses not yet having been retroactively awarded to Rick Santorum), he was marching to the nomination. This prompted a scramble away from Romney, right into the waiting arms of Newt Gingrich.
The former House speaker then easily won South Carolina and gave Republicans another acute case of buyer’s remorse. …
So now maybe GOP voters will settle in with Romney for the long haul. Or maybe they’ll look again at Romney and see a transparently inauthentic conservative of convenience with a propensity for mind-boggling gaffes (“I’m also unemployed,” and “Corporations are people, my friend,” and “Well, the banks aren’t bad people,” and so on.)
And as surely as Mitt Romney rose, bringing new pronouncements of his inevitability, he fell. Conservatives still don’t like him.
But can Santorum avoid a buyer’s remorse come-down? There are a number of factors weighing against him, starting with money and organization. It seems likely that Team Romney will turn its focus on Santorum the way it did on Gingrich after South Carolina (though as of this morning, Gingrich remained in the Mitt-bot’s sights). As Santorum noted Tuesday night, “Tonight we had an opportunity to see what a campaign looks like when one candidate isn’t outspent five- or ten-to-one by negative ads impugning their integrity and distorting their record.” Does anyone think that Santorum will get another clear shot where he isn’t heavily outspent and drilled with negative ads?
As National Journal’s Alex Roarty writes:
Romney won’t have to look hard for way[s] to attack Santorum, whose 16-year career in Washington provides an array of easy targets. The former governor has already criticized his support for congressional earmarks, and Santorum will also be forced to explain his 2004 endorsement of then moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter against a Republican challenger (Specter later switched into the Democratic Party).
More broadly, Romney can argue his business background makes him better suited to turn around the country than a career politician–a tactic that helped him overcome Gingrich.
We might also be reminded that Santorum’s last act in public life before running for president was receiving a historic drubbing from the voters of Pennsylvania, losing his seat by 18 points.
As for Romney, he must feel rather like Michael Corleone in the otherwise forgettable Godfather: Part III, who laments, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” No pivot to the center and the general election for Mitt. He’ll need to turn his focus back to figuring out how to placate his own party, possibly with a hard tack to the right on the social issues which (a) have been Santorum’s bread and butter and (b) are suddenly at the heart of the national political conversation (birth control and gay marriage). This is not the stuff of which winning general election candidates are made.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 8, 2012
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