The Forgotten Accomplishments of The 111th Congress
It’s already been pointed out endlessly that the 111th Congress has been one of the most productive in decades. But here’s another way to look at it: Consider all the things this Congress has accomplished that we aren’t talking about.
Health care reform, the overhaul of Wall Street regulations, the ratification of New START and the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell are, of course, the accomplishments that will define this Congress in the history books. But there are a whole host of other relatively under-the-radar achievements that in and of themselves would normally be considered major achievements, had they not been completely overshadowed by the big ticket items.
Before we all depart for the holidays, let’s pause for a moment of reflection on these also-ran accomplishments, some of which passed with broad bipartisan support. There’s the Lily Ledbetter fair pay act, which reversed a Supreme Court decision limiting the ability of women to sue over salary discrimination. There’s the sweeping credit card reform measure putting a halt to unfair and deceptive industry practices. There’s the landmark legislation that greatly expanded the FDA’s authority to regulate the manufacturing and marketing of tobacco products.
There’s the largely forgotten measure that vastly expanded Federal aid to college kids that ultimately passed as part of health reform. More visibly, there is the food safety bill and the measure granting health benefits to 9/11 responders, both of which passed this month. And two women were confirmed to the Supreme Court, one of them a Latina — a historic accomplishment.
This is only a partial list.
Under normal circumstances, these alone would have constituted significant achievements. “When you look beneath the surface just a little bit there’s an enormous amount that under normal circumstances would have been heralded but got very little attention,” Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein tells me.
The larger story here, though, is that if you add in these accomplishments with the more visible ones, it becomes clear that Congress has expanded government’s reach even more than commonly thought. For all the justifiable criticism of health and Wall Street reform for not going far enough — and for all the talk about the coming battle to repeal them — the bigger story is that the sum total of this Congress’s major and minor achievements have produced an expansion of government’s role in society that will be very hard to undo.
“Taken together, the smaller accomplishments may have an impact on society that rivals the main accomplishments, and they have all bolstered government’s role as a protector of the public interest,” Ornstein says.
And so, one more tip of the hat to the 111th Congress and its leadership.
By Greg Sargent -The Plum Line, Washington Post- December 23, 2010
PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘A government takeover of health care’
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”
“Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.
Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times‘ independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year’s most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)
By selecting “government takeover’ as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.
The phrase is simply not true.
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The label ‘government takeover” has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a ‘takeover.’ ”
An inaccurate claim
“Government takeover” conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:
• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.
• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up “exchanges” where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don’t have it.
• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.
• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.
• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
It’s true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.
Republicans who maintain the Democratic plan is a government takeover say that characterization is justified because the plan increases federal regulation and will require Americans to buy health insurance.
But while those provisions are real, the majority of Americans will continue to get coverage from private insurers. And it will bring new business for the insurance industry: People who don”t currently have coverage will get it, for the most part, from private insurance companies.
Consider some analogies about strict government regulation. The Federal Aviation Administration imposes detailed rules on airlines. State laws require drivers to have car insurance. Regulators tell electric utilities what they can charge. Yet that heavy regulation is not described as a government takeover.
This year, PolitiFact analyzed five claims of a “government takeover of health care.” Three were rated Pants on Fire, two were rated False.
‘Can’t do it in four words’
Other news organizations have also said the claim is false.
Slate said “the proposed health care reform does not take over the system in any sense.’ In a New York Times economics blog, Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, an expert in health care economics, said, “Yes, there would be a substantial government-mandated reorganization of this relatively small corner of the private health insurance market (that serves people who have been buying individual policies). But that hardly constitutes a government takeover of American health care.”
FactCheck.org, an independent fact-checking group run by the University of Pennsylvania, has debunked it several times, calling it one of the “whoppers” about health care and saying the reform plan is neither “government-run” nor a “government takeover.”
We asked incoming House Speaker John Boehner’s office why Republican leaders repeat the phrase when it has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, replied, “We believe that the job-killing ObamaCare law will result in a government takeover of health care. That’s why we have pledged to repeal it, and replace it with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs.”
Analysts say health care reform is such a complicated topic that it often cannot be summarized in snappy talking points.
“If you’re going to tell the truth about something as complicated as health care and health care reform, you probably need at least four sentences,” said Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. “You can”t do it in four words.”
Mahar said the GOP simplification distorted the truth about the plan. “Doctors will not be working for the government. Hospitals will not be owned by the government,” she said. “That’s what a government takeover of health care would mean, and that’s not at all what we”re doing.”
How the line was used
If you followed the health care debate or the midterm election – even casually – it’s likely you heard “government takeover” many times.
PolitiFact sought to count how often the phrase was used in 2010 but found an accurate tally was unfeasible because it had been repeated so frequently in so many places. It was used hundreds of times during the debate over the bill and then revived during the fall campaign. A few numbers:
• The phrase appears more than 90 times on Boehner’s website, GOPLeader.gov.
• It was mentioned eight times in the 48-page Republican campaign platform “A Pledge to America” as part of their plan to “repeal and replace the government takeover of health care.”
• The Republican National Committee’s website mentions a government takeover of health care more than 200 times.
Conservative groups and tea party organizations joined the chorus. It was used by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
The phrase proliferated in the media even after Democrats dropped the public option. In 2010 alone, “government takeover” was mentioned 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times in Politico and 79 times on CNN. A review of TV transcripts showed “government takeover” was primarily used as a catchy sound bite, not for discussions of policy details.
In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers. For example, during Boehner’s Jan. 31 appearance on Meet the Press, Boehner said it five times. But not once was he challenged about it.
In rare cases when the point was questioned, the GOP leader would recite various regulations found in the bill and insist that they constituted a takeover. But such followups were rare.
An effective phrase
Politicians and officials in the health care industry have been warning about a “government takeover” for decades.
The phrase became widely used in the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton was trying to pass health care legislation. Then, as today, Democrats tried to debunk the popular Republican refrain.
When Obama proposed his health plan in the spring of 2009, Luntz, a Republican strategist famous for his research on effective phrases, met with focus groups to determine which messages would work best for the Republicans. He did not respond to calls and e-mails from PolitiFact asking him to discuss the phrase.
The 28-page memo he wrote after those sessions, “The Language of Healthcare 2009,” provides a rare glimpse into the art of finding words and phrases that strike a responsive chord with voters.
The memo begins with “The 10 Rules for Stopping the ‘Washington Takeover’ of Healthcare.” Rule No. 4 says people “are deathly afraid that a government takeover will lower their quality of care – so they are extremely receptive to the anti-Washington approach. It’s not an economic issue. It’s a bureaucratic issue.”
The memo is about salesmanship, not substance. It doesn’t address whether the lines are accurate. It just says they are effective and that Republicans should use them. Indeed, facing a Democratic plan that actually relied on the free market to try to bring down costs, Luntz recommended sidestepping that inconvenient fact:
“The arguments against the Democrats’ healthcare plan must center around politicians, bureaucrats and Washington … not the free market, tax incentives or competition.”
Democrats tried to combat the barrage of charges about a government takeover. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly put out statements, but they were drowned out by a disciplined GOP that used the phrase over and over.
Democrats could never agree on their own phrases and were all over the map in their responses, said Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee.
“It was uncoordinated. Everyone had their own idea,” Dean said in an interview with PolitiFact.
“The Democrats are atrocious at messaging,” he said. “They’ve gotten worse since I left, not better. It’s just appalling. First of all, you don”t play defense when you”re doing messaging, you play offense. The Republicans have learned this well.”
Dean grudgingly admires the Republican wordsmith. “Frank Luntz has it right, he just works for the wrong side. You give very simple catch phrases that encapsulate the philosophy of the bill.”
A responsive chord
By March of this year, when Obama signed the bill into law, 53 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg poll said they agreed that “the current proposal to overhaul health care amounts to a government takeover.”
Exit polls showed the economy was the top issue for voters in the November election, but analysts said the drumbeat about the “government takeover” during the campaign helped cement the advantage for the Republicans.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat whose provision for Medicare end-of-life care was distorted into the charge of “death panels” (last year’s Lie of the Year), said the Republicans’ success with the phrase was a matter of repetition.
“There was a uniformity of Republican messaging that was disconnected from facts,” Blumenauer said. “The sheer discipline . . . was breathtaking.”
By: Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact-December 16th, 2010
Individual Mandate: Cutting Off Your Policies to Spite Your Opponents
To step outside the latest Supreme Court case, it’s worth remarking on the long-term damage conservatives are doing their cause by focusing their fire on the individual mandate.
The political case for their strategy is clear: The individual mandate, like most taxes, is unpopular. In fact, it’s one of the only unpopular elements of the whole bill. But it’s also one of very few ways to have a health-care system where everyone has coverage but private insurers dominate. In the long run, it may be the only way. That’s why Republicans originally thought up the idea, and why it’s mainly been associated with a Republican health-care bill. Mitt Romney, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, Judd Gregg and Mike Crapo are just a few of the prominent Republicans who’ve cosponsored legislation with individual mandates.
More internationally, you may have heard of the conservative affection for Singapore’s health-care system. Here’s how the journal of the American Enterprise Institute describes Singapore’s structure in a gushing article: “In Singapore’s system, the primary role of government is to require people to save in order to meet medical expenses they don’t expect.” Another term for the government forcing you to put money into a vehicle that helps protect you from a health-care crisis is, well, an individual mandate.
Switzerland and the Netherlands also use individual mandates to sustain universal health-care systems that are less centralized than single-payer arrangements. It’s a pretty common device. But if Republicans get it ruled unconstitutional in America, they’d be wise to ask themselves what other options they have: After all, the constitutionality of Medicare is not in question, and that’s really the other model we could eventually trend toward. As Matt Miller put it in a column a few months back:
Conservatives, either from confusion, or for the sheer fun of taking a political bite out of Democrats, are fighting the one measure that’s essential if private insurance is to retain its central role in American health care … [But] be careful what you wish for. By fighting the mandate needed to make private insurance solutions work, and doing nothing to ease the health cost burden on everyday Americans, you’ll hasten the day when the public throws up its hands and says, “Just give us single-payer and price controls.” Don’t think the anti-government wave this fall won’t reverse itself on health care if the most private sector-oriented health care system on earth keeps delivering the world’s costliest, most inefficient care.
By Ezra Klein | December 13, 2010
Charles Krauthammer Is the Fraud
Charles Krauthammer says that Obama has conned Republicans into agreeing to a second stimulus even bigger than the first. Democrats are too stupid to see this (and Republicans are even more stupid, presumably, since they are the victims).
Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 – and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years – which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?
He’s right about the Democrats’ stupidity, but this is not Krauthammer at his most lucid.
Yes, Democrats are fools to tear their hair out over this deal, which gives them most of what they wanted: the middle-class tax rates, unemployment benefit extension, payroll-tax cut, and so on. They compound the idiocy by advertising higher taxes on the rich as their core objective. Forget relieving poverty, widening access to health care, improving opportunities for the disadvantaged. What matters more than any of that is sticking it to “millionaires and billionaires” (two-earner households making more than $250,000). You bet, the Democrats are acting like fools.But this stimulus is not bigger than the first, not even close. Two-thirds of its “cost” is keeping tax rates where they currently are. There is no new stimulus in failing to put taxes up–in forgoing a drastic fiscal tightening that nobody wanted and nobody expected. Unlike Krauthammer, I think further short-term stimulus makes sense, so I welcome the $300 billion (over two years) or so of extra stimulus in the deal. Oppose this if you like, but please don’t call it a bigger stimulus than the first.
In any event, the key question is this: does Krauthammer oppose the deal? Having declared Obama guilty of a massive swindle, and recalling that he is opposed to all of Obama’s sinister purposes, Krauthammer is obliged by his own logic to say what a bad thing the agreement must be. So what exactly did he want to happen? Presumably, raise everybody’s taxes next month, with an especially steep rise for $250,000+ households. Has he previously advocated this policy? Maybe he has, and I missed it; if so, I apologize. But if he agrees it makes sense for now to keep taxes where they are, which has been the Republicans’ defensible position, what is so bad about what just happened? Krauthammer is left opposing it because Obama was in favour. It is not every day that Krauthammer is backed into an absurd and dishonest position by his own logic.
What about the long-term deficit? This deal, if temporary, has little effect on that either way, and could easily be deficit-reducing if it avoids a second dip (as Krauthammer seems to concede it might). Obviously, the long-term deficit remains a huge concern. Tackling that requires prolonged Bowles-Simpson-type efforts that were not on the agenda for this deal. They should have been, but they weren’t. Was that a reason for rejecting the deal and letting taxes rise next month? I think not. Again, if that is the outcome Krauthammer wanted, then all right. But if that is not his position, then he is the fraud.
Read David Brooks instead.
BY: Clive Crook, Senior Editor of The Atlantic-December 11, 2010
Voters Are About to be Disillusioned With the GOP
The Puppet Master and his Minions
But going forward, now that they control the House and aspire to gain control of the Senate and the executive branch in the next election, Republicans will be forced to work for an actual agenda. And as Paul Waldman nicely explains in The American Prospect, this can produce a great pivot in the political climate of the country, very fast:
As a long history of public-opinion research has made clear — and as events continue to remind us — Americans are “symbolic conservatives” but “operational liberals.” In other words, they like the idea of limited government, but they also like just about everything government does. Good things happen to the party that can successfully pander to both impulses, which is why we saw so many ads from Republicans…condemning Democrats for passing a big-government health-care plan because it would … curtail the growth of Medicare.Perhaps they’re just being cautious as they get used to their new majority, but in the last week, Republicans have steadfastly refused to say what their professed desire to limit government would actually entail. Press them hard on what they want to cut, and they’ll answer “earmarks,” which would be fine were it not for the fact that a) earmarks do not appropriate new money; they merely direct money that has already been appropriated, and b) the value of all earmarks amounts to less than 1 percent of the federal budget….
If there’s one thing Republicans have been clear about, it’s their desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Even here, though, they don’t want to get too specific. As you’ve no doubt heard many times, a bare majority of the public opposes “health-care reform” (or “Obamacare”), while substantial majorities favor almost all the major provisions of the law. Once again, Republicans can win the vague, general argument but not the specific one. Faced with the impossibility of repealing the entire act (which Obama would veto), Republicans have said they’ll try to dismantle it piece by piece. Try that, however, and they’re suddenly attacking not “health-care reform” but those particular things people like.
That isn’t to say Republicans will inevitably be punished for attempting to repeal the ACA. Pushing repeal will only be dangerous for them if Democrats make it so. Republicans will suffer if they’re attacked aggressively for wanting to reopen the Medicare prescription-drug “doughnut hole,” for wanting to kick young people off their parents’ insurance, or for wanting to give the insurance companies the ability to deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions. Those are all provisions of the ACA that have already gone into effect. The Democrats are hardly guaranteed to win the battle of ACA, but they have a shot if they make the right arguments.
Waldman goes on to note that House Republicans will have to write a budget resolution, and moreover, are virtually promising a budget showdown with the president, probably forcing a shutdown of the federal government. There’s no particular reason to assume that tactic will fare any better than it did when Newt Gingrich tried it back in the ’90s. But that scenario, too, will force Republicans–and attentive voters generally–to make some sheep-and-goat distinctions between government programs and services that are essential and those that are not. It’s when those two judgments begin to diverge, as they undoubtedly will, that the GOP will begin to pay a high price for consciously promising an austerity budget that somehow won’t upset their own voters. Campaigning on a Big Lie–Big Government is a terrible threat to your liberties and your pocketbook, but Big Government doesn’t involve anything that you care about, dear voter–can cause a real boomerang when the lies have to be turned into an agenda.
BY: Ed Kilgore, The New Republic, November 11, 2010
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