“What’s Really Obstructing Obamacare?”: An Orchestrated GOP Resistance With Only One Very Ugly Precedent
So we’re a month into the Obamacare era. What does your average American know about it? That the website is a mess, and some number of Americans have suddenly lost their coverage after Barack Obama assured them that wouldn’t happen. These things are true, and a person would be quite wrong to deny this is deeply problematic.
But I wonder how many Americans know the other side of the coin. There are already numerous success stories out there. And then there’s the side of the story that has certainly received coverage but not nearly as much as it deserves to, which is the way—did I say way? Ways—the Republican Party is trying to make sure it fails. Todd Purdum wrote a piece for Politico yesterday on the GOP’s “sabotage” of the law. It was a terrific article, but he didn’t say the half of it.
All across the country, Republican governors and insurance commissioners have actively and directly blocked efforts to make the law work. In August, the Obama administration announced that it had awarded contracts to 105 “navigators” to help guide people through their new predicaments and options. There were local health-care providers, community groups, Planned Parenthood outposts, and even business groups. Again—people and groups given the job, under an existing federal law, to help people understand that law.
What has happened, predictably, is that in at least 17 states where Republicans are in charge, a variety of roadblocks have been thrown in front of these folks. In Indiana, they were required to pay fees of $175. In Florida, which under Governor Rick Scott (who knows a thing or two about how to game the health-care system, you may recall) has been probably the most aggressive state of all here, the health department ruled that local public-health offices can’t have navigators on their premises (interesting, because local public health offices tend to be where uninsured people hang out). In West Virginia, Utah, Pennsylvania, and other states, grantees have said no thanks and returned the dough after statewide GOP elected officials started getting in their faces and asking lots of questions about how they operate and what they planned to do. Tennessee issued “emergency rules” requiring their employees to be fingerprinted and undergo background checks.
America, 2013: No background checks to buy assault weapons. But you damn well better not try to enroll someone in health care.
If you Google “Obamacare navigators,” you will be hit smack in the face with the usual agitprop. “Reports” raise “questions” about their qualifications, you see. This is the old trick of finding one bad apple and extrapolating away to beat the band. But in this case the alleged bad apple wasn’t even bad. One enrollment assister in Lawrence, Kansas—one!—had an outstanding warrant. She hadn’t even been aware of the warrant. The group she worked for said, apparently credibly, that the warrant was “no longer active.” (Interestingly under the circumstances, it was about… an unpaid medical bill!) But my favorite story linked—inevitably—the navigator program to ACORN. You will recall that no one ever proved that anybody from ACORN ever did anything wrong, but of course in right-wing land this means nothing.
A second front: Now, with people trying to sign up, some Republican legislators are openly saying that they won’t permit their staffs to answer constituents’ questions about Obamacare. This is really the main job of a member of Congress, especially a House member: People call up all the time with questions about how to slice their way through the federal government’s briar patches, and you have caseworkers on duty—typically a couple in Washington and several more back home in the district regional offices—whose job is exactly that.
Purdum quoted Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp as saying he instructs his staff to refer callers to Kathleen Sebelius. But Huelskamp is not alone. Tennessee’s Diane Black says she doesn’t feel comfortable referring people to navigators. Utah’s Jason Chaffetz is referring people back to the administration, saying: “We know how to forward a phone call.”
Someone I know asked the other day: Has there ever been a law in the history of the country as aggressively resisted by the political opposition as this? Republicans didn’t do this with Social Security. Most of them voted for Social Security. They didn’t do it with Medicare. They, and the Southern racists who were then Democrats, didn’t do it with civil rights. There was a fair amount of on-the-ground opposition to that, but it wasn’t orchestrated at the national level like this was. And when the Voting Rights Act was passed the year after civil rights, Southern states in fact fell in line quickly. Check the black voter-registration figures from Southern states in 1964 versus 1966. It’s pretty amazing.
No, to find obstinacy like this, you have to go back, yes, to the pre-Civil War era. The tariff of 1828, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which led to the civil war in “Bloody Kansas” and ultimately to the Civil War itself. Not a comforting thought. But it’s where we are.
The administration’s cockups are a legitimate story. I’ve never said otherwise. My first column about the website was quite tough on the administration and on Obama personally, when I wrote that I found it shocking that he apparently wasn’t riding herd on staff to make damn sure the thing worked. I said on television, to some host’s surprise, that yes, I did hold him accountable for the mistakes.
So I get why that’s a story. But the sabotage is a story, too. A huge one. It’s almost without precedent in American history, and the precedent it does have includes some of the ugliest chapters in this nation’s history. It gets coverage, yes. But not nearly the coverage it deserves. As is so often the case—as with Benghazi, as with Fast and Furious, as with the IRS—the bigger scandal is on the Republican side.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 1, 2013
“In The Name Of Creating Jobs”: Corporations Are Hijacking Government With GOP Help And At Taxpayer Expense
After being swept into statehouses in the red wave of 2010, Republican Govs. Scott Walker, John Kasich and Terry Branstad each presided over the replacement of a state agency responsible for economic development with a less public, more private alternative. Arizona’s Jan Brewer did the same in 2010 after replacing Janet Napolitano, who’d been tapped for Obama’s Cabinet. Walker’s Wisconsin, Kasich’s Ohio, Branstad’s Iowa and Brewer’s Arizona were only the latest to institute a “public-private partnership” approach to development: States including Indiana, Florida, Rhode Island, Michigan and Texas had done the same years earlier. Now North Carolina’s Pat McCrory, who entered the governor’s mansion in January, aims to do the same. A new report from a progressive group warns that means good news for the wealthy and politically connected, but bad news for just about everyone else.
“Privatization augurs against transparency …” Good Jobs First executive director Greg LeRoy told Salon. LeRoy is a co-author of the new report “Creating Scandals Instead of Jobs: The Failures of Privatized State Economic Development,” which his group released Wednesday afternoon. Based on recent years’ scandals and controversies in several states, the authors conclude that “the privatization of economic development agency functions is an inherently corrupting action that states should avoid or repeal.” They argue the record shows that “privatization was not a panacea,” but instead fostered misuse of taxes; excessive bonuses; questionable subsidies; conflicts of interest; specious impact claims; and “resistance to accountability.” Goods Jobs First funders include unions and foundations.
A spokesperson for Gov. Kasich emailed Salon a one-sentence take on the report: “We don’t pay much attention to politically motivated opponents whose mission is to combat job creation.”
Kasich promised as a candidate to substitute a new entity, led by “a successful, experienced business leader,” for the existing Ohio Department of Development. The result, JobsOhio, features prominently in the GJF report. The authors note that its board included some of Kasich’s “major campaign contributors and executives from companies that were recipients of large state development subsidies.” They write that JobsOhio “received a large transfer of state monies about which the legislature was not informed, intermingled public and private monies, refused to name its private donors, and then won legal exemption (advocated by Gov. Kasich) from review of its finances by the state auditor.”
The authors also fault the Arizona Commerce Authority, whose first head reaped a privately paid $60,000 bonus and resigned after one year; and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which they charge has been “racked by scandals and high-level staff instability.” They cite accusations against WEDC including spending millions in federal funds “without legal authority”; failing to “track past-due loans”; and having “hired an executive who owed the state a large amount of back taxes.” LeRoy told reporters on a Wednesday conference call that, of the four newest public-private partnerships, Iowa’s was the only one to so far avoid significant scandal.
The report also slammed some of those four entities’ predecessors, including the Indiana Economic Development Corp. – GJF noted “a state audit found that more than 40 percent of the jobs promised by companies described by IEDC as ‘economic successes’ had never materialized” – and Enterprise Florida Inc.: while “more than $20 million in subsidies has gone to EFI board member companies,” in 2011 the Orlando Sentinel “reported that since 1995 only one-third of 224,000 promised jobs materialized.”
Gov. Scott’s office referred an inquiry to Enterprise Florida Inc., whose strategic communications director emailed that the group’s “efforts have resulted in an increase of competitive jobs projects established, private-sector jobs created and capital investment.” He noted that EFI “has received a clean opinion on its financial statements as conducted by its independent auditors and presented to EFI’s Board of Directors.” The offices of Govs. Walker, Brewer and Pence did not immediately respond to Wednesday evening inquiries.
“If we don’t know how the money’s spent, if we don’t get accurate assessments of the outcomes that we accept from our economic development subsidies or support, then there’s no way for us to evaluate the job they’re doing,” Donald Cohen, who leads the foundation- and labor-backed privatization watchdog In the Public Interest, told reporters on Wednesday’s call. “It’s fundamental to being able to manage our resources.” Cohen added, “When we’re talking about giving away the power and authority to give away public dollars, to make public decisions, then it is all the more important that public control be established in the strongest possible way.”
By “mingling private money or having board seats for sale,” LeRoy told reporters, public-private partnerships are “giving undue influence to a tiny share of mostly large companies that can afford to pay and play, potentially to the detriment of the focus of the entity.”
“You want people who are covered by ethics and disclosure and sunshine laws and oversight,” said LeRoy. “We know that government agencies aren’t perfect, but they by far are more accountable.” He also argued that public sector collective bargaining – which came under high-profile attack by Walker and Kasich – was also a check against abuse, because it “helps shield whistle-blowers and protect taxpayers.”
While GJF has proposed various safeguards for public-private economic development groups, it emphasized that its first choice would be for states to simply return their functions to fully public departments. “The economy is soft right now – we need to focus on the basics,” said LeRoy, rather than “tweaking the rules of a captive entity that co-mingles public and private money to get into all of these sort of gray areas.”
By: Josh Eidelson, Salon, October 24, 2013
“Caught Between Arithmetic And Ideology”: Can Republicans Afford To Buck The Tea Party?
Since the Tea Party emerged following President Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, Republican governors have frequently been the faces of some of the most extreme policies in recent political memory. Even before her infamous “finger point” at the president, Arizona’s Jan Brewer was signing and defending her state’s racial-profiling bill, SB 1070. In Ohio, John Kasich championed a law—later repealed by voters—to strip public employees of bargaining rights. In Florida, Rick Scott has pushed a plethora of hard-right policies, from drug screening of welfare recipients and government employees to reductions in early voting. Michigan’s Rick Snyder, who has a moderate streak, went to the extreme last December when he approved “right to work” legislation in a state built largely by union labor.
Yet Brewer, Kasich, Snyder, and Scott are among the nine GOP governors who have staked considerable political capital on Medicaid expansion, a key piece of the Affordable Care Act. They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Brewer made good on a threat to veto every piece of legislation that came before her until lawmakers sent her a bill to expand Medicaid. Snyder rankled his party when he told recalcitrant Republican state senators to “take a vote, not a vacation.” Scott was among the first Republicans to announce his support for expansion. Kasich, struggling to win support from his party’s lawmakers, has vowed to find a way to expand Medicaid even if they won’t.
All this, while in Congress, the Tea Party Republicans have worked tirelessly to shut down the government rather than see the Affordable Care Act continue, marking it as the emblem of Obama’s big-government liberalism.
By championing Medicaid expansion, these governors are defying the Tea Party, which was instrumental in their elections. Such defiance has been exceedingly rare from Republican officeholders on any level since the Tea Party revolution of 2010. That election transformed state legislatures and governors’ mansions—in many cases overnight—into ideological strongholds. Increasingly, the policy priorities of national right-wing groups like ALEC and Americans United for Life began to take precedence over state-specific agendas, and bipartisanship disappeared from state capitols almost as thoroughly as it has Congress. “The broader pathologies of our politics have clearly moved to the state level,” says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author with Thomas Mann of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which made the case that Republican extremism and hyper-partisanship has crippled Congress.
But Kasich, Snyder, and Scott govern states that Obama has won twice. They have all struggled with low approval ratings and polarized the electorate with their far-right policies. They all face tough battles for re-election in 2014. By backing Medicaid, they were guaranteed to inspire Tea Party wrath. By opposing it, they would deny health coverage to huge numbers of low-income residents, shut the door on billions in federal funding, and risk further alienating voters.
“Republican governors are caught in a tug-of-war between arithmetic and ideology,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “For some of them, ideology wins, and for others, who are looking to their self-interest and the interests of their state at least in the short to medium term, they have done a very simple calculation and that is that the Medicaid expansion is a good deal for their states.”
There’s little denying that Medicaid expansion to cover many more adults, is a good deal for every state. For the first three years, the federal government will pick up 100 percent of the cost for new recipients. After that, states will never pay more than 10 percent of the costs of expanded coverage; the rest of the bill goes to Washington. In Ohio alone, more than 500,000 people would gain access to coverage. With more people covered, of course, the costs to states of uncompensated care will drop. In June, a report from the Rand Corporation found that the first 14 states that opted out of expanding Medicaid will have 3.6 million more uninsured residents, lose $8.4 billion a year in federal payments, and pay an additional $1 billion in uncompensated care in 2016.
The arithmetic hasn’t been enough to convince most Republican governors to back Medicaid. Sixteen of the 30 oppose expansion, including the chief executive of another state Obama won twice, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker. Three other GOP governors had yet to venture a position.
Then there’s Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett, a governor emblematic of the dilemma facing unpopular Republicans in swing states. Obama won Pennsylvania by 11 points in 2008 and by 5 points in 2012. But Corbett, who won in the 2010 wave, has stuck to the Tea Party agenda on everything from voter ID to welfare cuts. He was quick to announce that his state would reject federal funds for Medicaid expansion.
Under enormous pressure, however, he changed his mind, and last week announced he would support Medicaid expansion if the federal government agreed to a slew of concessions. Unlike Walker, a strong favorite in 2014 thanks to weak and divided opposition following a failed recall attempt, Corbett is among the most vulnerable incumbents in the country. Corbett is now trying desperately find some political path to moderation—though it’s likely to be too little too late and it stands in contrast to those like Snyder and Kasich, who actually took the lead on the issue.
That a minority of Republican governors has backed Medicaid expansion does not add up to a major shift in the political dynamic. But it could be significant, depending on the outcome of the 2014 elections. If a governor like Scott or Kasich can manage to win re-election even after infuriating his right-wing base on a key issue, it will send a couple of important messages to other Republicans, at least those in purple states: Yes, the Tea Party can be bucked. And no, making policy based on the needs of your state does not amount to certain political death. It might even save you from it.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, September 23, 2013
“First Do No Harm”: It’s Time To Rethink The Oath Of Office For People We Vote To Represent Us
First do no harm. That’s a tenet of medical ethics that future doctors worldwide are taught in medical school.
If only the people we elect to represent us were required to take such an oath when they’re sworn into office.
Because they aren’t, folks in Florida are facing having to pay far more for health insurance over the next two years than necessary. And health insurance executives will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Florida state lawmakers, in their ongoing efforts to block the implementation of Obamacare in the Sunshine State, recently passed a law that will allow health insurance companies to gouge Floridians more than any corporate boss dreamed was possible.
And if that weren’t bad enough, insurers will actually be required by law to mislead their Florida customers about why they’re hiking their premiums.
Republicans, who control the governor’s office as well as both houses of the Florida legislature, were confident the U.S. Supreme Court would declare the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. Not only did they vote to prohibit the state from spending money to implement a law they just knew would be overturned by the high court, they refused to accept money from the federal government that would have enabled the state’s department of insurance to do a better job of regulating health insurers and enforcing new consumer protections in the law.
When the Supreme Court shocked Obamacare opponents last year by upholding the law, Florida lawmakers were in a pickle.
Their response? They passed a bill that prohibits the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation from protecting consumers from unreasonable rate increases for two years.
I learned about what is essentially a “first do as much harm as possible” bill in a letter the nine Democrats in the Florida congressional delegation sent to U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius earlier this month pleading with her to step in to protect Floridians by taking an active role in regulating rate increases in the state.
The lawmakers said intervention by HHS was urgently needed because of a law signed in May by Gov. Rick Scott that specifically prohibits Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty from doing his job of reviewing rate increases and rejecting those he and his staff determine are unjustifiably high.
Until the passage of SB 1842, McCarty had the power to do that. Florida state lawmakers who voted for the bill, including a few Democrats who seemed to think HHS has more authority than it does, took the position that since the federal government was requiring insurance companies to be more consumer friendly, the federal government should assume the responsibility of enforcing the new consumer protections in Obamacare. The problem is that Congress gave the federal government no such additional powers. As a consequence, HHS really can’t take over what is still a state responsibility. And since Florida turned down the federal money that McCarty would have used to do his job, Floridians appear to be out of luck.
Last month, McCarty’s office said insurance premiums for individuals in Florida would be significantly higher than they are now. In their letter to Sebelius, the state’s congressional Democrats wrote that those increases are “not a coincidence, but rather the product of a cynical and intentional effort by Gov. Scott and the Florida legislature to undermine the Affordable Care Act and make health insurance premiums on the Florida Health Insurance Marketplace more expensive by refusing to allow the insurance commissioner to negotiate lower rates with companies or refuse rates that are too high.”
As PolitiFact noted in a recent analysis of the charges made by the Democrats in their letter (which PolitiFact ruled are true), the states that have authority to approve or disapprove rates were “able to extract significant reductions.” PolitiFact cited a Palm Beach Post story which noted that Maryland’s insurance department had used its regulatory powers “to push rates for next year’s premiums down by as much as a third.”
As Florida CHAIN, a state advocacy group, pointed out when Scott signed SB 1842, the law not only blocks McCarty’s office from protecting consumers, a provision in the law actually requires insurers to send deceptive and misleading notices about rate increases to consumers — and to blame Obamacare for them.
“The only ’public education’ of any sort authorized by the Legislature related to the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is a requirement … that insurers send extremely biased and incomplete notices this fall about the ACA and its effect on policyholders’ rates,” Florida CHAIN said in a statement.
“The sole purpose of the requirement is to create ‘sticker shock’ that can be blamed on the ACA. There will be no mention of the many uncertainties or any other relevant factors, such as past rate increases or how actual rates will be reduced for many by the availability of premium tax credits (to low and middle income earners.)”
So not only will many Floridians be harmed by SB 1842, they will, by law, be misled about who caused the harm.
Maybe it’s time to rethink the oath of office for people we vote to represent us.
By: Wendell Potter, The Center for Public Integrity, August 19, 2013
“Suppressing The Vote”: For The GOP, “Integrity Of The Ballot” Is A Deceptive Myth
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court’s hyper-conservative faction has neutered the Voting Rights Act, Republican officials around the country have re-energized their campaign to block citizens of color from voting.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott surprised no one last week when he announced that he would resume a controversial and clearly partisan purge of the voting rolls, supposedly to clear them of non-citizens. Nor is there any shock in the decisions by officials in Texas, Alabama and Mississippi to proceed with harsh new voter ID laws.
While Republicans contend the new laws and purges are necessary to protect the integrity of the ballot, that stale defense no longer merits extensive debate. It’s obvious that GOP activists have but one purpose in changing laws that affect voting and registration: putting up obstacles that might suppress the franchise among voters who usually support Democrats.
Actually, a few have admitted as much. Last year, Republican Mike Turzai, House majority leader in the Pennsylvania legislature, bragged about the passage of a strict new voter ID law, claiming it would “allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Though Romney lost Pennsylvania on his way to overall defeat, the state’s GOP chairman still said earlier this year that voter ID “probably helped a bit” in cutting President Obama’s margin of victory from 2008.
A similar admission came from Republican campaign consultant Scott Tranter when he spoke at a post-election analysis hosted last December by the Pew Center on the States. He dismissed the idea of bipartisan cooperation to eliminate the long lines and other dismal conditions that had plagued voting in many areas.
“… At the end of the day, a lot of us are campaign professionals and we want to do everything we can to help our sides. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines, whatever it may be,” Tranter said.
Not that you needed those admissions to know that the GOP-led campaign to “protect the integrity of the ballot” is phony, the 21st-century version of the poll tax. Remember when Alan Wilson, South Carolina’s Republican attorney general, claimed last year that hundreds of dead people had voted in his state?
Ah, never happened. As you might expect, zombies have little interest in electoral politics. State authorities investigated and found no — zip, zero, zilch — zombie voters there.
Wilson made his claims in defense of a strict new voter ID law, one of the GOP’s more popular methods for suppressing the franchise. Supposedly, the requirement for showing state-sponsored identification, such as a driver’s license, would prohibit not only the dead but also other unworthies who claim to be legitimate voters. There is just one problem with that theory: Voter impersonation is virtually non-existent.
But voter ID laws do serve the purpose for which they are actually intended. They pose an obstacle for thousands of elderly and poor Americans who lack driver’s licenses, most of whom tend to support Democrats.
Florida, where Scott is proceeding with his purge, is a particularly interesting case. According to Florida Democratic strategist Steve Schale, the state has gained 1.5 million registered voters since 2006. Of those, 61 percent are blacks or Latinos, both strong constituencies for the Democratic Party. It’s no wonder, then, that Florida Republicans have worked so hard to block the franchise among those voters.
You may have noticed, though, that voter suppression hasn’t helped the GOP win presidential elections in the last two cycles. Indeed, their tactics may have given Obama the winning edge in Florida in 2012: Black voters were so angered by obvious attempts to discourage them from voting that they turned out in huge numbers, enduring long lines.
Given that reality, some conservatives believe the GOP should give up its emphasis on blocking the ballot. As The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat has written: “the GOP is … sending a message to African-Americans that their suspicions about conservatism are basically correct, and that rather than actually doing outreach to blacks, the right would rather not have them vote at all.”
Indeed, there is no reason for black voters to believe anything else.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, August 11, 2013
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