“GOP Crocodile Tears On Obamacare”: Their Entire Strategy Is To Create Noise, Not Solutions
One of the strange things about politics is that it is considered “smart” to make every conceivable argument against your foes, even when your arguments are contradictory or reveal you to be indifferent to people leading desperate lives. But rarely is this “throw the kitchen sink” tactic pursued with such hypocritical gusto as with the GOP’s primal scream over the Obamacare Web site’s rollout.
To listen to Republican laments about Healthcare.gov’s terrible launch, you’d think the GOP was deeply concerned that people who need affordable health insurance are being denied this essential protection thanks to the administration’s incompetence.
But of course nothing could be further from the truth. What conservative officials, pundits and advocates are screaming is closer to the following:
How dare you totally screw up something that we think shouldn’t exist!
How dare you make it hard for poor, uninsured workers to get health coverage we don’t want to subsidize them to purchase!
What did Kathleen Sebelius know and when did she know it, when it comes to the wreck of a train we’ve prayed would be a train wreck all along?
This is what the “logic” of a party of “no” sounds like — where the entire strategy is to create noise, not solutions.
I get that a chunk of the GOP thinks discrediting government’s competence is a political winner (many of these critics are themselves lifers in elected office, but nevermind). But please spare us the fallacious leap to the idea that these Web site snafus reveal that the left’s “technocratic hubris” in “taking over a sixth of the American economy” was bound to fail.
There’s a reason everything about Obamacare is unduly complex, but it has nothing to do with a federal takeover. It’s precisely the opposite. Obamacare is complicated because it seeks to expand coverage largely by relying on private insurers, and also by honoring our tradition of federalism.
The need to check an applicant’s eligibility and income, and to use this information in light of locally offered private health plans to compute associated levels of potential subsidy — all of which requires tying together a bunch of huge databases that weren’t designed to communicate instantly with each other — comes from the need to subsidize the purchase of private coverage in a tailored way.
If we just gave every American a wallet-sized card like they do in single-payer nations — or even an identical universal voucher folks could use to help pay for private health coverage (as diverse voices from Zeke Emanuel and Victor Fuchs to Pete Peterson have championed) — the system, along with its technology backbone, would be far simpler.
This isn’t an excuse; it’s a piece of an explanation.
Meanwhile, when Republicans argue that the Web site’s initial failure means we shouldn’t go forward with extending affordable coverage to the uninsured, it’s like saying that the other high-profile tech failure this month — of the Web-based Common Application used by hundreds of colleges — means we should tell this year’s high school seniors to put off college. I mean, if that nonprofit can’t get the application technology right, what other reasonable choice is there?
The phoniest tears come from conservative analysts who “fear” that the Web site meltdown will trigger an adverse selection problem. The meme of the month is that only the sickest people will be desperate enough to persist in getting coverage, leaving the whole system subject to actuarial implosion.
As my daughter and her friends might say, “Chill, people.” Let’s see how the next few months go. There’s something sad and misguided about talented right-wing wonks devoting immense energy to criticism, yet seeming unable to spare a brain cell for actual public problem-solving. Even a conservative mind is a terrible thing to waste.
The problem, as always, is that once the GOP turns to health-care solutions, they’ll be forced to fess up that Romney-Obamacare was theirs. And it works. That’s something Republican voters are now finding out beyond just Massachusetts.
Like Butch Matthews, 61, a former small-business owner and lifelong Republican from Little Rock. Matthews and his wife, too young for Medicare, had been paying over $1,000 a month in the individual market for a Blue Cross Blue Shield policy with a $10,000 deductible.
“I did not think that Obamacare was going to be a good plan,” he told the (highly functional) Web site ThinkProgress. “I did not think that it was going to help me at all.”
He thought wrong. The policy Matthews just bought from the Arkansas Obamacare marketplace will cost him nothing after income-based subsidies and has a deductible of $750. Doctor visits will cost him $8 instead of nearly $150. He stands to save at least $13,000 a year
“I still am a very strong Republican, but . . . I am so happy this came along,” Matthews said.
If enough Republican voters have happy endings like this, it won’t be long before the GOP’s crocodile tears turn real.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 23, 2013
“Humming Along Today”: Despite Rocky Beginnings, 5 Other Government Programs Suggests Glitches Get Fixed And Forgotten
The Obama administration’s struggle with debugging the HealthCare.gov website is causing critics to ask whether ObamaCare is “Obama’s Iraq war,” and to dismiss Obama’s signature policy achievement a “quagmire.”
Media coverage is becoming increasingly hysterical, meaning some historical perspective is in order. Many large-scale government programs that are now embedded in American society also began with rough rollouts that are now mostly forgotten.
Here are five programs that are humming along today, despite their rocky beginnings:
1. Social Security
In the program’s early days, many employers failed to include worker names and their new Social Security numbers in their earnings report, leaving the government without the basic information needed to calculate benefits and cut checks. Syndicated columnist Drew Pearson turned the “John Doe” problem into a crusade, writing about the snafu once a week for two months and stoking panic that the government would be unable to pay out the promised benefits to millions. But new procedures were established to follow up with delinquent employers, and within a year the number of John Does was slashed. Today, the crisis is dismissed as a blip, while Social Security historians view the effort to build a nationwide social insurance system from scratch before the age of computers as “Herculean” and “amazing.”
2. Medicare
Last week, historian and Bloomberg columnist Stephen Mihm chronicled the myriad problems that beset the 1966 Medicare rollout. More than 700,000 eligible seniors initially refused to sign up because they mistakenly believed it meant giving up Social Security. Some Southern cities were left without any participating hospitals because the Medicare law required hospitals to comply with the new Civil Rights Act, yet many in the South remained segregated. It was more commonplace at the time for doctors to bill patients directly, and excessively long waits for Medicare reimbursement checks frustrated seniors. But as Mihm notes, “The government and the private insurers worked out most of the kinks, and by the late 1960s the system was working reasonably well.”
3. Medicare’s Prescription Drug Benefit
It wasn’t all that long ago that another presidential health care initiative ran into an online buzzsaw. In 2005, the Bush administration rolled out its new Medicare Part D program, providing seniors coverage for prescription drugs. But the debut was bedeviled by website problems. The Washington Post noted at the time that the launch was delayed twice over the course of a month. Then on the day it actually launched, “Visitors to the site could not access it for most of the first two hours. When it finally did come up around 5 p.m., it operated awfully slowly.” The glitches continued throughout the open enrollment period, but as Jack Hoadley of the Georgetown Health Policy Institute reminded in a blog post this month, “The program added both phone lines and customer service representatives and implemented other upgrades over the weeks. The website — both its functionality and the accuracy of its information — was the source of ongoing frustration for its users, but it did get better over time. By the end of open enrollment in May 2006, over 16 million successfully enrolled for drug benefits in Part D … And today, Part D enjoys widespread popularity.”
4. The Peace Corps
President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps by executive order shortly after taking office in 1961. Skeptics worried that the program would be overrun with immature draft-dodgers. And that concern was seemingly confirmed when one of the first volunteers mistakenly dropped a postcard before it could be mailed, telling her stateside boyfriend that her host country of Nigeria suffered from widespread “squalor and absolutely primitive living conditions.” A horrified Nigerian student discovered the postcard, made copies, and distributed it widely. It sparked an international incident. Riots ensued, and the volunteer had to be sent home “cloak and dagger” for her safety. Still Kennedy forged ahead, shrugging off the setback by joking to a new batch of volunteers, “Keep in touch, but not by postcard!” And two years later, the Christian Science Monitor reported that foreign governments were “so pleased with [the Peace Corps’] work they have called again and again for more … Although the ‘postcard incident’ in Nigeria seemed to confirm some fears that the program might do more harm than good, that has been far from the case…”
5. The income tax
It was 100 years ago this month when President Woodrow Wilson first enacted the progressive income tax that finances much of our government today. Now, few Americans would claim to be fans of our current tax system — but many of them are fans of what the income tax system helps pay for. In the early days of the rollout, however, plenty of people were sent over the edge because of the forms’ perceived complexity. As tax historian Joseph Thorndike noted, one lawyer made headlines in 1915 by saying of the forms, “It is so complicated that it is utterly impossible to understand its meaning save by consulting a palmist.”A 1915 The New York Times headline characterized the forms as “Income Tax Riddles.”
Now, some may say the tax forms have only gotten worse over the last 100 years. But by and large, the public has accepted the nature of tax forms as a governing necessity, and no politician has gotten very far in the past century campaigning against the progressive income tax. As Thorndike noted in Barron’s, “The income tax has survived because it does two things reasonably well: It raises money, and it satisfies popular notions of economic fairness.”
The lesson? History suggests that glitches get fixed and forgotten, people get acclimated to new programs, and policies rise and fall on their merits. If past is prologue, ObamaCare will be judged on the quality of the coverage, not on the first incarnation of the website.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 23, 2013
“Dick Cheney’s Transcendent Cynicism”: Using The Same Self Serving Game, That’s How He Rolls
Dick Cheney’s cynicism knows no end.
Yet, it still has the power to amaze—especially when Cheney’s political machinations go to extremes.
Consider his current embrace of the Tea Party movement.
At a point when the Republican Party’s favorability ratings have collapsed to the lowest point in the history of Gallup polling, just about everyone who has an interest in the future of the Grand Old Party is fretting about the damage done by a movement so politically tone deaf that it thought the American people would embrace a politics of government shutdown and debt-ceiling brinksmanship in order to advance the impossible dream of “defunding Obamacare.”
But here’s Dick Cheney—taking time out from pitching his new book, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey—to rally to the defense of the movement.
Hailing the Tea Party as a “positive influence” on the Grand Old Party, he announced on NBC’s Today show that “it’s an uprising, in part, and the good thing is it’s taken place within the Republican Party.”
Despite the chaos it has unleashed within and around the party for which the 72-year-old former vice president serves as a grouchy grand old man, Cheney declared: “I don’t see it as a negative. I think it’s much better to have that kind of ferment and turmoil and change in the Republican Party than it would be to have it outside.”
“These are Americans,” he says of the Tea Partisans. “They’re loyal, they’re patriotic and taxpayers, and they’re fed up with what they see happening in Washington. I think it’s a normal, healthy reaction and the fact that the party is having to adjust to it is positive.”
That’s rich coming from Cheney.
No matter what anyone thinks about the Tea Party movement in its current managed and manipulated form, many of its most sincere adherents joined what they thought was a grassroots challenge to the Republican establishment.
And no one says establishment like Dick Cheney: a permanent fixture in and around Republican administrations since Richard Nixon turned the key at the White House. No one has fought harder than this guy has to maintain the crony capitalist project that has made the modern GOP a lobbying agency for Wall Street speculators, bailout-seeking bankers and defense contractors like his own Halliburton.
Cheney’s everything Tea Party activists say they are fighting against.
So what’s the former vice president up to?
The same self-serving gaming of the process in which the man who arranged his own nomination as George W. Bush’s running mate has always engaged.
Asked about Ted Cruz, Cheney declined to criticize the Texas senator who steered the party off the charts when it comes to disapproval among the great mass of voters.
That’s because Cheney doesn’t at this point have any interest in the great mass of American voters. He’s interested in the handful of Wyoming Republican primary voters who will decide the fate of daughter Liz Cheney’s challenge to Republican Senator Mike Enzi.
Enzi is a steady conservative whose only “sin” was to get in the way of Cheney-family ambition. But he is in the way, so Dick Cheney is quite willing to remake himself as the Tea Party’s ardent defender in order to aid Liz Cheney’s campaign.
Indeed, instead of ripping Cruz—as he would have done in his former days as a White House chief of staff, GOP congressional leader, secretary of defense and vice president—Cheney now compares Cruz with daughter Liz.
“I think [Cruz] represents the thinking of an awful lot of people obviously in Texas,” says Dick Cheney. “But my own daughter is running for U.S. Senate in Wyoming partly motivated by the concern that Washington is not working, the system is breaking down and it’s time for new leadership.”
Shameless? Well, yes.
But that’s how Dick Cheney rolls.
The Republican Party is just a vehicle.
The state of Wyoming is just a political playground.
What matters to Cheney is the Cheney brand. And if he has to attach a Tea Party label in order to advance it, why Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney is more than willing to oblige.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 22, 2013
“The Press And The ‘Leadership’ Charade”: Pundits Are Professionally Wed To Faulting President Obama For Republicans Shortcomings
Just days after the government shutdown came to an end, and with public opinion polls continuing to show that the Republican Party paid a grave price for its radical and shortsighted maneuver, Meet The Press host David Gregory wanted to discuss President Obama’s failure to lead.
Pointing to a mocking National Journal piece by Ron Fournier, that was headlined “Obama Wins! Big Whoop. Can He Lead?” Gregory pressed his guests about when Obama would finally “demonstrate he can bring along converts to his side and actually get something meaningful accomplished.” Gregory was convinced the president had to shoulder “a big part of the responsibility” for the shutdown crisis, due to the president’s failed leadership. New York Times columnist David Brooks agreed Obama is at fault, stressing “The question he’s never answered in all these years is, ‘How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?'”
Gregory, Brooks and Fournier were hardly alone in suggesting that Obama’s a failed leader. Why a failure? Because a Democratic president beset by Republicans who just implemented a crazy shutdown strategy hasn’t been able to win them to his side.
In her post-shutdown New York Times column, Maureen Down ridiculed Obama, claiming he “always manages to convey tedium at the idea that he actually has to persuade people to come along with him, given the fact that he feels he’s doing what’s right” (i.e., Obama’s too arrogant to lead.)
And in a lengthy Boston Globe piece last week addressing Obama’s failure to achieve unity inside the Beltway, Matt Viser wrote that Obama “bears considerable responsibility” for the Beltway’s fractured, dysfunctional status today (it’s “his biggest failure”) because “his leadership style” has “angered countless conservatives, who have coalesced into a fiercely uncompromising opposition.” That’s right, it’s Obama’s fault his critics hate him so much.
Talk about blaming the political victim.
As an example of Obama’s allegedly vexing “leadership style,” Viser pointed to the fact Democrats passed a health care reform bill without the support of a single Republican. That “helped spur the creation of the Tea Party and a “de-fund Obamacare” movement,” according to the Globe. But that’s false. The ferocious anti-Obama Tea Party movement exploded into plain view on Fox News 12 months before the party-line health care vote took place in early 2010. Obama’s “leadership style” had nothing to do with the fevered right-wing eruption that greeted his inauguration.
The GOP just suffered a humiliating shutdown loss that has its own members pointing fingers of blame at each other. So of course pundits have turned their attention to Obama and pretended the shutdown was a loss for him, too. Why? Because the Beltway media rules stipulate if both sides were to blame for the shutdown that means both sides suffered losses. So pundits pretend the crisis highlighted Obama’s glaring lack of leadership.
But did it? Does that premise even make sense? Isn’t there a strong argument to be made that, by staring down the radicals inside the Republican Party who closed the government down in search of political ransom, Obama unequivocally led? And that he led on behalf of the majority of Americans who disapproved of the shutdown, who deeply disapprove of the Republican Party, and who likely did not want Obama to give in to the party’s outlandish demands?
Doesn’t leadership count as standing up for what you believe in and not getting run over, not getting trucked by hard-charging foes?
Yet so many pundits are professionally wed to faulting Democrats for Republicans shortcomings that the agreed-up script is that the GOP’s stunning implosion meant Obama failed to lead by not bringing the two parties together. He wasn’t persuasive enough. And if he had just tried a little harder, asked a little nicer, Republicans would’ve totally come around.
Much of the current leadership commentary is built on the tired trope that Obama “promised” to change the tone and culture of Washington; to break down partisan barriers. And since he hasn’t, that’s botched leadership. Of course what Obama did do, like virtually every presidential candidate before him has done, is vow to try to change the culture in Washington, and to try to get both parties together.
The fact that Republicans plotted as far back as January 2009 to make it their primary goal to thwart Obama’s attempt at bipartisanship, is now used as a weapon against the president under the lazy premise he “promised” to change Republican behavior. By failing to lead, by failing to change Republicans’ deeply extremist behavior, Obama must shoulder the blame, goes the faulty Beltway logic.
“Despite polarization, Obama’s two predecessors managed to find common ground with their obstinate opposing parties,” Fournier recently wrote, in a sentence that almost perfectly encapsulates what’s wrong with the trolling about “leadership.” It’s predicated on a completely outdated premise, which suggests that since previous presidents were able to work, at times, with the opposing party that means Obama should too. And if he can’t, that means he’s not leading. That claim entirely omits all the context about today’s radicalized Republican Party. It entirely omits everything that’s happened in American politics since 2009.
For instance, did Obama’s predecessors face opponents who launched an unprecedented campaign to scuttle a Secretary of Defense nomination? Did they face political foes who shut down the federal government in a comically doomed attempt to defund a three-year-old law, who didn’t blink at denying Americans disaster relief aid, or who obstructed legislation that garnered 90 percent support among voters?
They did not.
When Obama’s immediate predecessor was sworn into office, President Bush was soon greeted by liberal Democrat George Miller (D-CA) who promised to help him secure the votes he needed to pass an education bill. And it was liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who personally guided Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation through Congress.
Memo to media: Thanks to extremist Republicans, that Washington, D.C. world no longer exists, so stop pretending that it does. And stop penalizing Obama for arriving too late to experience it.
Why doesn’t it exist? Because Republican re-wrote the rules and pundits keep scoring Obama against the old one. They keep scolding him for not winning over purposefully un-persuadable Republicans.
“We’re saying there’s a reason Republicans almost certainly can’t be won over,” noted Washington Post writer Greg Sargent, who regularly pushes back against the media’s “leadership” charade. “And that this reason resides not in the failure of presidential persuasion but in basic realities about today’s GOP.”
Just ask Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA). After he defied his party and tried to help get a bipartisan background gun check bill through Congress last winter, he explained its defeat: “In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized. There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”
And with that, Toomey, a Republican senator, gave away the game. He pulled back the curtain and confirmed how the Republican Party actually functions under Obama: It fights him on every conceivable front, withholding the slightest bit of support not necessarily because of ideology, but because most members do not want to see Obama succeed.
Ever.
That represents a stunning lack of leadership. And it’s not coming from the Oval Office.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, October 22, 2013
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