“Darrell Issa’s Misguided Priorities”: Desperate Even By GOP Standards
The Beltway’s interest in the role of sequestration cuts leading to canceled White House tours reached farcical heights last week, in large part because congressional Republicans are afraid the scrapped tourist opportunities will make them look bad.
But leave it to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to go completely over the top.
For those who can’t watch clips online, Issa released an attack video this morning, presumably paid for with our tax dollars, whining once more about the White House tours. The message of the attack itself is rather odd — Issa apparently believes the cancelation of tours will give the president more leisure time, though that really doesn’t make any sense — and comes across as rather desperate, even by House GOP standards.
But what’s especially amazing about this case is Issa’s bizarre priorities. For reasons I can’t understand, the far-right Republican is fascinated by White House tours, but seems entirely indifferent to the meaningful effects of sequestration in his own congressional district.
A Democratic source this morning alerted me to several recent headlines from the area Issa ostensibly represents:
* A rally was held in San Diego last week to “demonstrate the impact of sequestration on low income seniors.” An administrator at a local facility said, “[B]ack in D.C. what they’re talking about are cuts from White House tours and the president’s golf game but in the meantime real seniors who are hungry are not going to have food.”
* A major employer in San Diego announced a series of layoffs, effecting 185 workers, which became necessary “as a result of the cuts being brought about in the federal budget because of sequestration.”
* The sequester is set to shutter an air-control traffic tower in San Diego, which local officials believe will “jeopardize aerial firefighting in a region prone to wildfire.”
The list goes on. Sequestration is causing serious problems at San Diego’s ports, ship yards, and the local economy in general.
All of this is happening in Darrell Issa’s own hometown, and he’s focusing his attention on White House tours? I can’t remember the last time I saw a congressman so indifferent to the effects of a policy on his own community.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2013
“The Obamacare Referendum”: Paul Ryan Is Using Shorthand Again In Selling Changes To Medicare
Did you know that on November 6, 2012, in conjunction with the national election, the United States also had a referendum on Obamacare that Republicans won? No, I didn’t, either, until Paul Ryan informed me of this, via this Think Progress report:
On Sunday morning, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) stopped by Fox News Sunday to preview his new budget, which will be released in full on Tuesday. As it had the past two years, this year’s version will call for massive cuts to social service programs, including food stamps, job training, Medicaid, and Medicare. Host Chris Wallace challenged Ryan on the viability of his plan, pointing out that he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, and, “that’s not going to happen.”
Still, Ryan insisted that he and then-running mate Mitt Romney won the election on this issue because they “won the senior vote.”
Now I think we all understand that Ryan is using some shorthand here: many Democrats hoped, and Republicans feared, that Ryan’s budget, by proposing to change Medicare from an entitlement to publicly-provided health insurance into a premium-support system, would make his party vulnerable to losses it could not manage in its old-white-folks electoral base. Instead, by a variety of means (including over two years of insanely mendacious “death-panel” demagoguery about the impact of Obamacare on Medicare, and the systematic “grandfathering” of seniors from Ryan’s proposed Medicare changes), the GOP ticket managed to promote a health care message that nicely meshed with its overall pitch to old white folks that those people along with their atheist hippie allies were threatening to take away everything good virtuous retirees had worked so hard to secure for themselves, including Medicare (which they tend to regard as an earned benefit as opposed to Obamacare’s “welfare”).
I suppose it’s understandable that Ryan would view any success in selling big changes in Medicare to old folks would represent a political ten-strike, even if he’s now having to incorporate into his budget the same Medicare savings he implicitly attacked during the campaign as a token of Obamacare’s ultimate goal of sending seniors off to euthanasia camps. But it’s still bizarre that he’s touting an incumbent president’s re-election victory as a repudiation of his most important legislative accomplishment. It’s enough to give Dick Morris hope he can come back from ridicule and disgrace and claim he was right all along in predicting a big Romney-Ryan win.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 11, 2013
“Seniors Take Note”: Republicans Effectively Confessed To Having Mislead Conservative Members Who Now Must Be Mollified
I’m not sure House Republicans realized how large an error they made by kidnapping and then releasing the debt limit earlier this year. By admitting their bluff, they effectively confessed to having misled conservative members, and those members needed to be mollified.
That created a new problem: How could they appease conservatives while lacking the power to satisfy any of their substantive demands? So they offered up grandiose symbolism: A raincheck on the brinksmanship (the current fight over the sequester) and a promise to pass a budget that would wipe out the deficit in 10 years if enacted.
But it’s not clear that they counted their votes, or considered the budget math when they made that promise.
“We are saying a 10-year balance — that’s tougher than the last [Paul] Ryan budget,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), a former Budget Committee member told Politico.
“There could be a significant number of Republicans that say, ‘I’m not going there because it would be too dramatic.’ I have said to my constituents, nobody is talking about changing Social Security and Medicare if you’re 55 years or over.’ I’ve been selling it for three or four years that way. So have many other members. Well, to balance in 10, that 55 years is going to move up to 58, 59, 60. It makes us look like we’re going back on what we were telling people when we were trying to sell this.
We haven’t seen Ryan’s latest budget, so we don’t know what precise ratio of funny math and concessions to reality he’ll use to make the numbers work. And until he’s written it he won’t offer many hints.
But we do know a couple things. First, given Republicans’ famous preference for never increasing taxes or cutting defense spending, we know that it’s probably impossible for them to draft a budget that balances in 10 years without eating into entitlement benefits for people older than 55. Second, per above, we know that GOP leaders promised conservatives a budget that balances over 10 years to win their support for increasing the debt limit. So either Ryan will produce a budget that relies on sleight of hand more than his previous budgets did, or he’ll have to admit that the GOP’s pledge to leave retirement programs untouched for people over 55 was neither sincere nor sustainable.
As Simpson’s quote suggests, that’ll make it harder for Republicans to pass a budget at all; and if they do, it’ll come at a potentially enormous cost with their voting base.
By: Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo, TPM Editor’s Blog, February 15, 2013
“Just Another Shell Game”: John Boehner’s Medicare Proposal Is Sleight Of Hand, Not Cost Control
Denying Medicare to seniors until they reach age 67 will shift costs to seniors, states, and employers without reducing the actual cost of healthcare by one penny. It’s a shell game, and it should not be an option in the fiscal showdown talks.
While it would reduce Medicare expenditures, those costs won’t vanish. Yes, the federal government would save $5.7 billion in 2014, but that would be offset by an additional $11.4 billion spent by states, employers, and seniors, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s a cost shift and a cost increase.
The Congressional Budget Office assumes that half of 65- and 66-year-old seniors would continue employer-sponsored coverage at a cost of about $4.5 billion in 2014. That would likely accelerate the long-term decline in corporate benefits for retirees.
States would also pay because low-income uninsured seniors would be eligible for Medicaid. Even if the federal government would pay 100 percent of the cost of the new beneficiaries, states would still be on the hook for an additional $700 million in 2014 alone.
And, of course, seniors lose in the deal. Two thirds of those ages 65 and 66 would each average $2,200 more in out-of-pocket costs ($3.7 billion total) in 2014, even when accounting for subsidies to buy a plan on a health insurance exchange.
There’s another significant but less obvious cost shift through increased premiums in Medicare and in the exchange. Seniors ages 65 and 66 are the healthiest and least expensive Medicare beneficiaries, and they help lower premiums for all enrollees. Moving them to private coverage, where they would be the least healthy and most expensive health plan members, would drive up premiums for everyone else in the exchanges.
Boehner’s proposal seems more sleight of hand than legitimate cost control. It’s about weakening Medicare, not strengthening the program for future generations.
If we really want to think big about Medicare reform, let’s consider lowering the age of eligibility. Letting people as young as 55 buy into Medicare would improve the risk pool for seniors and strengthen Medicare’s bargaining power without raising program costs.
By: Ethan Rome, Executive Director of Health Care for America Now, U. S. News and World Report, December 6, 2012
“Life, Death And Deficits”: There Is No Good Case For Denying Older Americans Access To Medicare And Social Security
America’s political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas — beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity. But there are others.
And right now the most dangerous zombie is probably the claim that rising life expectancy justifies a rise in both the Social Security retirement age and the age of eligibility for Medicare. Even some Democrats — including, according to reports, the president — have seemed susceptible to this argument. But it’s a cruel, foolish idea — cruel in the case of Social Security, foolish in the case of Medicare — and we shouldn’t let it eat our brains.
First of all, you need to understand that while life expectancy at birth has gone up a lot, that’s not relevant to this issue; what matters is life expectancy for those at or near retirement age. When, to take one example, Alan Simpson — the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission — declared that Social Security was “never intended as a retirement program” because life expectancy when it was founded was only 63, he was displaying his ignorance. Even in 1940, Americans who made it to age 65 generally had many years left.
Now, life expectancy at age 65 has risen, too. But the rise has been very uneven since the 1970s, with only the relatively affluent and well-educated seeing large gains. Bear in mind, too, that the full retirement age has already gone up to 66 and is scheduled to rise to 67 under current law.
This means that any further rise in the retirement age would be a harsh blow to Americans in the bottom half of the income distribution, who aren’t living much longer, and who, in many cases, have jobs requiring physical effort that’s difficult even for healthy seniors. And these are precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.
So any rise in the Social Security retirement age would, as I said, be cruel, hurting the most vulnerable Americans. And this cruelty would be gratuitous: While the United States does have a long-run budget problem, Social Security is not a major factor in that problem.
Medicare, on the other hand, is a big budget problem. But raising the eligibility age, which means forcing seniors to seek private insurance, is no way to deal with that problem.
It’s true that thanks to Obamacare, seniors should actually be able to get insurance even without Medicare. (Although, what happens if a number of states block the expansion of Medicaid that’s a crucial piece of the program?) But let’s be clear: Government insurance via Medicare is better and more cost-effective than private insurance.
You might ask why, in that case, health reform didn’t just extend Medicare to everyone, as opposed to setting up a system that continues to rely on private insurers. The answer, of course, is political realism. Given the power of the insurance industry, the Obama administration had to keep that industry in the loop. But the fact that Medicare for all may have been politically out of reach is no reason to push millions of Americans out of a good system into a worse one.
What would happen if we raised the Medicare eligibility age? The federal government would save only a small amount of money, because younger seniors are relatively healthy and hence low-cost. Meanwhile, however, those seniors would face sharply higher out-of-pocket costs. How could this trade-off be considered good policy?
The bottom line is that raising the age of eligibility for either Social Security benefits or Medicare would be destructive, making Americans’ lives worse without contributing in any significant way to deficit reduction. Democrats, in particular, who even consider either alternative need to ask themselves what on earth they think they’re doing.
But what, ask the deficit scolds, do people like me propose doing about rising spending? The answer is to do what every other advanced country does, and make a serious effort to rein in health care costs. Give Medicare the ability to bargain over drug prices. Let the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created as part of Obamacare to help Medicare control costs, do its job instead of crying “death panels.” (And isn’t it odd that the same people who demagogue attempts to help Medicare save money are eager to throw millions of people out of the program altogether?) We know that we have a health care system with skewed incentives and bloated costs, so why don’t we try to fix it?
What we know for sure is that there is no good case for denying older Americans access to the programs they count on. This should be a red line in any budget negotiations, and we can only hope that Mr. Obama doesn’t betray his supporters by crossing it.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 15, 2012
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