“Texas, Where Crazy Gets Elected”: There’s Crazy, And Then There’s Texas Crazy
So what happens in Texas when the Republican gubernatorial candidate invites Ted Nugent to the state to campaign for him not long after the Motor City Motormouth has called the President of the United States a “subhuman mongrel,” not to mention a “Communist” and a “gangster”? Would you believe, as Maxwell Smart used to say, that the candidate increases his lead? Well that’s what has happened. There’s crazy, and then there’s Texas crazy.
In a poll that came out Monday, conducted as the Nugent controversy was brewing, Republican Greg Abbott leads Democrat Wendy Davis by 11 points, which Politico notes is up from six points in a poll last year. Now there are surely other reasons for this little surgette, but it certainly shows that Abbott’s decision to keep company with Nugent did him no harm at all in the state.
You think that’s bad, get a load of this, from the same poll. The candidate leading the Democratic field for the right to seek John Cornyn’s Senate seat is a woman named Kesha Rogers. Two of her top ideas? Impeach Barack Obama and repeal the Affordable Care Act. Yes, you read it right. She’s the leading Democrat. She’s also a La Rouchie, a fact that far from hiding she seems intent to rub in the other candidates’ faces: I can ramble on about crazy worldwide banking conspiracies all I want, she seems to be saying, but as long as I want to impeach Obama and repeal Obamacare, you can’t touch me! There’s crazy, and there’s Texas crazy.
This would all be merely amusing, but there’s another side to Texas crazy. Let’s get serious now for a few paragraphs.
If you read me often enough, you know that one of my themes is that the Democrats, with enough money, creativity, and guts, ought to be able to turn Obamacare into a positive. Millions of people across the country, especially in the states that opted in and accepted the Medicaid money, have insurance now and the peace of mind about themselves and their children that comes with it. Besides which, have you noticed that all the Republican hoo-ha about these alleged horror stories never holds up on examination? Paul Krugman wrote a terrific column on this topic Monday. Literally every high-profile Obamacare-nightmare story retailed by one of these yoyos turns out, once reporters start poking around, not to be at all as advertised. So we have a party that loathes the ACA and its effects and many millions of dollars to go find its victims, and so far it hasn’t really turned up one.
Now—back to Texas. Two recent briefing papers from academics affiliated with the excellent Scholars’ Strategy Network shed considerable light on what Obamacare could be doing for Texas, if only its politicians would permit it.
Texas—hold on to your ten-gallon hat, because this is a shocker—leads the country in the percentage of its people who are uninsured; a gaudy 24.6 percent. Nearly 37 percent of Hispanics are without coverage, as are 22 percent of African Americans, and 23 percent of women. That’s a small army of people who would benefit from the state having accepted the federal Medicaid money and set up an exchange. But Texas’s leaders from Rick Perry on down are having none of it.
In one paper, Jessica Sharac, Peter Shin, and Sara Rosenbaum of George Washington University cite a recent study noting that “if Texas had agreed to expand Medicaid, more than two million uninsured people would likely have gained health insurance.” In another, Ling Zhu and Markie McBrayer of the University of Houston compare how poor people are faring so far in Texas and California, the latter of course being among the states that have accepted the Medicaid expansion. They write: “More than 2.2 million Californians were added to that state’s expanded Medicaid program by the end of January, compared to just over 80,000 Texans who signed up after realizing they were already eligible for the existing state Medicaid program.”
Together, the papers (they’re very short, you should go read them) paint the picture you’d expect. Our two largest states, one working to insure its people and the other doing everything in its power to prevent that. And remember—Texas could be doing this at very minimal cost. Washington is paying full freight on the expansion until 2016, and then a slightly declining share, but still, 90 percent every year after 2019. It’s almost free. And Texas ain’t playin’. Indeed Perry turned down (cue Dr. Evil) nine billion dollars.
So now let’s circle back to the governor’s race. Of course, Abbott opened his campaign last fall pounding Davis on Obamacare, thundering that she’d open the door to this iniquity. Davis has been talking a lot about Ted Nugent, but she’s had rather little to say on the subject of Perry refusing, and Abbott vowing to continue to refuse, $9 billion.
Would all those uninsured Latinos and blacks and women be energized to come out and vote for the candidate who dared to make a big issue of this? I admit it’s hard to say. But Davis is a long shot anyway. Nothing against her—Jesus himself could come back and run as a Democrat in that state, and rather than pull that Democratic lever for Him, most Texans would just wonder when the Redeemer went socialist on them (answer: he always was!).
Of course it would be risky. Of course she’d drop in the polls for a while. But she’d still have nearly eight months to explain to people that $9 billion is real money, that all this is happening anyway whether Texas Republicans like it or not, and since it is happening well by cracky she’s not going to leave millions of Texans not getting what their counterparts in other states are getting. As it is, those people have no one really fighting for them. That’s Texas crazy, too.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 26, 2014
“A GOP Sociopathetic Scam”: Why Actual ACA ‘Victims’ Are So Elusive
It’s practically a running joke at this point. The Affordable Care Act’s conservative detractors have spent the last several months in a desperate search for “Obamacare victims” to be used in various partisan attacks, and quite a few regular folks have received quite a bit of attention.
The problem, of course, is that all of these examples, once they’re subjected to even minor scrutiny, have fallen apart – the “horror stories” really aren’t so horrible. Michael Hiltzik speculated last week that there may not be any genuine anecdotes to bolster the right’s claims.
What’s going on here? Paul Krugman offers one possible explanation.
Even supporters of health reform are somewhat surprised by the right’s apparent inability to come up with real cases of hardship. Surely there must be some people somewhere actually being hurt by a reform that affects millions of Americans. Why can’t the right find these people and exploit them?
The most likely answer is that the true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.
That’s as good an explanation as any. What the right needs are sympathetic figures – real, relatable Americans who are struggling, and whose plight was made worse by the Affordable Care Act. The most notable recent example came last week with a Michigan woman, Julie Boonstra, featured in an Americans for Prosperity attack ad and in RNC events, who’s paying less for better insurance without having to change doctors.
In other words, as far as health care policy is concerned, it’s not much of a horror story, though it’s presumably the best the right can come up with.
But taking this one step further, let’s also acknowledge the extent to which the right is using ACA beneficiaries as a cudgel to undermine their own interests.
Brian Beutler did a nice job this morning explaining that the practice of using Americans to harm their own health security is a “sociopathic new scam.”
[W]e’re really just talking about Julie Boonstra here.
If she and AFP get their way, she’ll be just as much a victim of Obamacare repeal as all the people who face health circumstances similar to hers. And the saddest part of that tragic irony is that Boonstra doesn’t even seem to understand what her circumstances are, or why it doesn’t make sense to devote her energies to repealing the law. Boonstra told the Dexter Leader, “People are asking me for the numbers and I don’t know those answers — that’s the heartbreak of all of this. It’s the uncertainty of not having those numbers that I have an issue with, because I always knew what I was paying and now I don’t, and I haven’t gone through the tests or seen my specialist yet.”
But that’s just not so. Anyone who’s studied the law knows it’s not so. Anyone who’s paid unexpected health bills in installments knows it’s not so. And well-heeled Affordable Care Act foes like Americans for Prosperity certainly know it’s not so. And in that sense AFP, and everyone else on the right “supporting” Julie Boonstra, are using her as a weapon in a war against herself.
To a very real degree, it’s tragic to watch the developments unfold in real time. For much of 2013, especially in the months leading up to the open-enrollment period, assorted far-right groups launched an organized campaign to encourage the uninsured to stay that way – on purpose – in order to help conservative organizations advance their ideological agenda. It was a truly offensive display in which wealthy activists on the right urged struggling Americans to deliberately put their wellbeing in jeopardy.
Months later, we’re at a similarly painful moment in the debate, in which many of the same groups and activists are now exploiting people to create misleading attack ads, all in the hopes of keeping people from having access to affordable health care.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 24, 2014
“The Importance Of Having Health Insurance”: The 2014 Factor No One Is Talking About — Seniors Are Turning On The GOP
Congressional Republicans have passed a budget, raised the debt limit and punted on immigration reform with one goal in mind. They want to make the 2014 midterm elections about Obamacare.
The party seems to be so confident of this strategy that it doesn’t appear to have any “Plan B,” as The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent continually points out.
While going all-in on the Affordable Care Act makes sense inside the right-wing mindset, where the law is one Fox News interview from disappearing to wherever Mitt Romney was supposed to go, seniors — America’s most reliable voters — may end up leading a backlash against a post-government-shutdown Republican Party that is even less popular now than when George W. Bush left office.
Undoubtably, the poll numbers for the president’s health law remain low months after HealthCare.gov’s bungled rollout — even though it has helped lead the country to the lowest uninsured rate in five years.
But since the 2010 election, after which real, live Americans began gaining health insurance coverage due to the Affordable Care Act, has there been even one election that has been swayed by Obamacare?
Having been the godfather of the law didn’t cost Mitt Romney the 2012 GOP primary. Having signed the bill into law didn’t cost President Obama his re-election. It didn’t stop Democrats from picking up seats in the Senate and the House. Since 2012, Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) was re-elected after accepting Medicaid expansion and Terry McAuliffe won Virginia’s governorship with a jobs plan centered upon expanding Medicaid.
In Florida, Democrat Alex Sink narrowly leads Republican David Jolly in a special election to replace Rep. Bill Young (R-FL), who passed away late last year. As Jolly attacks Sink on Obamacare, Sink defends the most popular part of the law — the ban on insurers considering pre-existing conditions — and attacks Jolly on Medicare.
Republicans exploited seniors’ fears of Medicare cuts in 2010 — then voted for the same cuts when they took the House. They also went a step further by proposing a plan to radically remake the single-payer system that provides health coverage to every American 65 or older.
Jolly, a lobbyist, has never officially endorsed or voted for the plan created by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to turn Medicare into a voucher system. However, nearly every sitting Republican member of the House has.
Ryan’s plan and opposition to Obamacare earned him boos when he spoke at the AARP convention as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012. And it was certainly part of the reason he was barely visible in the last few weeks of the campaign.
And since the 2012 election, Republicans’ standing with seniors has only deteriorated.
“In 2010, seniors voted for Republicans by a 21-point margin (38 percent to 59 percent),” Democracy Corps’ Erica Siefert noted in her post “Why Seniors Are Turning Against The GOP,” published months before the government shutdown.
In the latest McClatchy-Marist National Poll, the GOP only had a 4-point margin over Democrats.
The same poll found that 58 percent of adults 45-59 and 54 percent of those 60 and older had an unfavorable view of the president. However, 73 percent of adults 45-59 and 74 percent of those 60 and older also reported an unfavorable view of Republicans in Congress.
Democrats recognize that Obamacare may be a liability and are circulating talking points that call attention to the fact that “65 percent of voters agree with the statement ‘we’ve wasted too much time talking about Obamacare and we have other problems to deal with.’” This aligns with polls that show again and again that most people would rather keep and fix the law than repeal it completely.
But it’s quite possible that the GOP’s stand on Medicare could ultimately be more harmful to their prospects than Obamacare is for Democrats.
Any Republican who sticks with repeal can be charged with wanting to raise prescription drug prices for seniors. Along with eliminating the closing of the Medicare drug “donut hole,” repeal also would erase subsidies that are potentially helping millions of older Americans afford care.
“I just cried, I was so relieved,” said 58-year-old Maureen Grey after using her new plan — purchased with the help of Obamacare subsidies — to visit a doctor.
Adults aged 55-64 make up 31 percent of the new enrollees in the health care marketplaces set up by the law. A new Associated Press report notes that workers nearing retirement have been hardest hit by the Great Recession and are in the most desperate need of what the law offers:
Aging boomers are more likely to be in debt as they enter retirement than were previous generations, with many having purchased more expensive homes with smaller down payments, said economist Olivia Mitchell of University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. One in five has unpaid medical bills and 17 percent are underwater with their home values. Fourteen percent are uninsured.
As of December, 46 percent of older jobseekers were among the long-term unemployed compared with less than 25 percent before the recession.
And those financial setbacks happened just as their health care needs became more acute. Americans in their mid-50s to mid-60s are more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than other age groups, younger or older, accounting for 3 in 10 of the adult diabetes diagnoses in the United States each year. And every year after age 50, the rate of cancer diagnosis climbs.
For many of these Americans, the Medicare guarantee isn’t some distant, theoretical promise. It’s a necessity.
And with Obamacare bridging the gap until retirement, Republicans may find that their decision to make the 2014 election about health care will be as ill-advised as shutting down the government to defund it.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, February 18, 2014
“Ideology Versus Pragmatism”: Republicans Consider Stripping Health Insurance From Tens Of Thousands Of Arkansans
In Arkansas, approximately 83,000 low-income residents are in danger of losing their health insurance as early as July 1.
In 2013, Arkansas’ Republican-controlled legislature devised an alternative plan to expand Medicaid while still protecting the state’s poorest residents and hospitals. Through the plan, commonly referred to as the “private option,” Arkansas distributes federal funds — provided under the Affordable Care Act — to eligible recipients, who then use the funds to buy private health insurance plans. Proponents note that the plan offers private coverage to residents who would otherwise be unable to obtain it.
As The Washington Post reports, Governor Mike Beebe (R) welcomed the plan, saying it would save taxpayers nearly $90 million this year. The Obama administration later approved the plan, adding two necessary conditions: that cost-sharing and recipients’ benefits remain the same as the traditional Medicaid program, and that the total costs of the private plan do not exceed those of implementing traditional Medicaid expansion.
Over the past year, the private option has become so popular that variations of it are now being adopted in several states, like Pennsylvania and Utah.
“In crafting the ‘private option,’ Arkansas has provided a pathway for other states. They truly are trailblazers,” Deborah Bachrach, a partner with consulting firm Manatt Health, told the Post.
In recent weeks, however, Republicans have threatened to jump ship on the plan, jeopardizing the program that offers protection to tens of thousands of Arkansans.
With the state’s May primaries quickly approaching, Republican lawmakers facing more conservative challengers are feeling the pressure to vote against a renewal of the program’s financing.
“You’ve got a very small minority of people who can derail this,” explains Governor Beebe, who says that the sudden lack of support has to do with “ideology versus pragmatism.”
“If we lose one or two votes, it’s critical,” he added.
Considering that Arkansas requires 75 percent of the members of both houses to pass appropriations measures, “one or two” GOP votes are certainly critical to the program’s future. And in recent weeks, two Republican state senators have voiced their opposition to extending the private plan.
Senator Missy Irvin, who voted for the program last year, announced she would no longer support it, citing a decision made by Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield – Arkansas’ dominant health insurance company – to cut reimbursement rates by 15 percent to specialists who participate in its federally run online insurance exchange plans. Irvin might have had another motive, however; she is currently facing a primary challenge from Tea Party candidate Phil Grace, who pointed to Irvin’s support for the private option as one of the main reasons he chose to run.
The argument against the plan made by Grace and other conservatives like him is rather vague, but it still has the power to sway other GOP votes.
“Right now, Washington is broken and trillions of dollars in debt. We can’t count on D.C. to keep promises for any funding and Arkansas certainly can’t foot the bill. The only way to deal with D.C.’s issues is for states to band together and push back,” Grace says.
Grace’s opposition to the private program – which has been echoed by other conservatives running in 2014 — steers clear of the GOP’s typical “big government” arguments, leaving it seeming rather arbitrary.
State Senator John Cooper, another Tea Party favorite, also says that he will not vote to reauthorize the plan’s funding — which is not a surprise, since he won the state’s special election by running against the program. Cooper argues that it will not save Arkansas money in the long term, despite reports to the contrary.
If Republicans vote against the private option – a vote that come could as early as next week – the implications for the state’s poor residents are burdensome and great. Before the private option existed, Arkansas had one of the most restrictive Medicaid programs in the nation, which made it especially difficult for struggling individuals and families to obtain coverage.
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, February 11, 2014
“Health, Work, Lies”: Losing Your Job And Choosing To Work Less Aren’t The Same Thing
On Wednesday, Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, said the obvious: losing your job and choosing to work less aren’t the same thing. If you lose your job, you suffer immense personal and financial hardship. If, on the other hand, you choose to work less and spend more time with your family, “we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.”
And now you know everything you need to know about the latest falsehood in the ever-mendacious campaign against health reform.
Let’s back up. On Tuesday, the budget office released a report on the fiscal and economic outlook that included two appendices devoted to effects of the Affordable Care Act.
The first appendix attracted almost no attention from the news media, yet it was actually a bombshell. Much public discussion of health reform is still colored by Obamacare’s terrible start, and presumes that the program remains a disaster. Some of us have pointed out that things have been going much better lately — but now it’s more or less official. The budget office predicts that first-year sign-ups in the health exchanges will fall only modestly short of expectations, and that nearly as many uninsured Americans will gain insurance as it predicted last spring.
This good news got drowned out, however, by false claims about the meaning of the second health care appendix, on labor supply.
It has always been clear that health reform will induce some Americans to work less. Some people will, for example, retire earlier because they no longer need to keep working to keep their health insurance. Others will reduce their hours to spend more time with their children because insurance is no longer contingent on holding a full-time job. More subtly, the incentive to work will be somewhat reduced by health insurance subsidies that fall as your income rises.
The budget office has now increased its estimate of the size of these effects. It believes that health reform will reduce the number of hours worked in the economy by between 1.5 percent and 2 percent, which it unhelpfully noted “represents a decline in the number of full-time-equivalent workers of about 2.0 million.”
Why was this unhelpful? Because politicians and, I’m sorry to say, all too many news organizations immediately seized on the 2 million number and utterly misrepresented its meaning. For example, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, quickly posted this on his Twitter account: “Under Obamacare, millions of hardworking Americans will lose their jobs and those who keep them will see their hours and wages reduced.”
Not a word of this claim was true. The budget office report didn’t say that people will lose their jobs. It declared explicitly that the predicted fall in hours worked will come “almost entirely because workers will choose to supply less labor” (emphasis added). And as we’ve already seen, Mr. Elmendorf did his best the next day to explain that voluntary reductions in work hours are nothing like involuntary job loss. Oh, and because labor supply will be reduced, wages will go up, not down.
We should add that the budget office believes that health reform will actually reduce unemployment over the next few years.
Just to be clear, the predicted long-run fall in working hours isn’t entirely a good thing. Workers who choose to spend more time with their families will gain, but they’ll also impose some burden on the rest of society, for example, by paying less in payroll and income taxes. So there is some cost to Obamacare over and above the insurance subsidies. Any attempt to do the math, however, suggests that we’re talking about fairly minor costs, not the “devastating effects” Mr. Cantor asserted in his next post on Twitter.
So was Mr. Cantor being dishonest? Or was he just ignorant of the policy basics and unwilling to actually read the report before trumpeting his misrepresentation of what it said? It doesn’t matter — because even if it was ignorance, it was willful ignorance. Remember, the campaign against health reform has, at every stage, grabbed hold of any and every argument it could find against insuring the uninsured, with truth and logic never entering into the matter.
Think about it. We had the nonexistent death panels. We had false claims that the Affordable Care Act will cause the deficit to balloon. We had supposed horror stories about ordinary Americans facing huge rate increases, stories that collapsed under scrutiny. And now we have a fairly innocuous technical estimate misrepresented as a tale of massive economic damage.
Meanwhile, the reality is that American health reform — flawed and incomplete though it is — is making steady progress. No, millions of Americans won’t lose their jobs, but tens of millions will gain the security of knowing that they can get and afford the health care they need.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 6, 2014
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