Why Republicans Suddenly Care — Deeply! — About All Those Canceled Health Policies

Memo Pad

Why Republicans Suddenly Care — Deeply! — About All Those Canceled Health Policies

November 15th, 2013 10:32 am

by Joe Conason

Amid the current national uproar over the troubles of the Affordable Care Act, it is almost uplifting to hear the deep concern expressed by politicians, pundits, lobbyists, and corporate leaders over cancelation of existing health insurance policies. They empathize loudly with the millions of potential victims, whose plight infuriates these worthy observers. They fill hours of television and pages of print with expressions of outrage.

Suddenly everyone in Washington is intensely concerned about Americans who are losing their health insurance.

The outpouring of noble sentiment would be laudable — indeed, long overdue — if only there was any reason to believe these protestations are sincere. Sadly, the evidence points in the opposite direction, for a single obvious reason: Millions of people in this country have been losing health insurance for many years, resulting in untold thousands of serious illnesses, bankruptcies, and early deaths – but until insurance cancelations became a political embarrassment for Barack Obama, the usual right-wing reaction was silence. (Except for that awkward and revealing outburst during the Republican debates of 2012, when a live audience howled its approval for the “let him die” plan.)

For anybody who ever honestly cared about people losing their health coverage – for instance, President Obama or his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton – the depressing statistical reality has long been plain. Every day of every year, thousands of people leave the rolls of the private insurance industry in this country, almost never voluntarily.

People often forfeit insurance after losing a job, which happened to millions during the Great Recession. At the recession’s height, when the Tea Party Republicans were fighting to kill Obamacare in the cradle, more than 44,000 people were losing their health coverage every week. In May 2009, the policy journal Health Affairs published a projection that nearly 7 million Americans would lose coverage by the end of 2010.

People also lose insurance because their insurance company doesn’t want to pay the cost of a grave illness (having gorged on costly premiums for years), which has happened to many thousands more. The most recent congressional report on the subject found that three major insurance companies had saved at least $300 million through “rescission” of policies held by 20,000 seriously ill clients, while their profits mounted.

Or people lose insurance because the cost rises and they can no longer afford it, which happens routinely to nearly half the population at some point during every decade. A report released by the Treasury four years ago found that “nearly half of non-elderly Americans” had lived without health coverage at some point between 1997 and 2006, a period of relative prosperity and high employment.

The consequence, as everybody ought to know by now, is that upward of 45 million Americans have gone without health insurance at any given moment since 2007. And the further consequence is that many of those uninsured – men, women, and children — go without needed health care, leading to untold suffering and premature deaths for as many as 45,000 annually, perhaps more.

But such dismal facts have never seemed to trouble the Republicans who are screaming so loudly now about the terrible toll of Obamacare. The perennial GOP attitude was set forth by neoconservative eminence Bill Kristol back in 1993, when the prime objective was to kill the nascent Clinton health plan. “There is no health care crisis,” Kristol famously declared, and for him — then a well-paid flack in the Murdoch empire — that was true enough.

After two decades of medical costs skyrocketing above inflation, threatening fiscal and economic ruin, while millions went without insurance, such smug right-wing complacency remains largely intact. The only “health care crisis” ever feared by Republicans like Kristol is the prospect that reform will help Americans – as Obamacare is already doing, despite their worst efforts.

Let’s hope that the president’s team swiftly solves the inherent problems of providing universal coverage through private insurers. It is certainly possible, if never optimal, as Massachusetts and other states seeking to advance that goal are already proving.

And meanwhile, let’s please have no illusions about this momentary flurry of concern on the right over insurance lost. It would disappear instantly and permanently — if only Obamacare could be repealed.
Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr


Tags: affordable care act, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Congress, health care reform, Health Insurance, Joe Conason, Obamacare, Republicans, Tea Party, William Kristol

Wisconsin Republicans Pass Flurry of Regressive Bills

Wisconsin Republicans Pass Flurry of Regressive Bills

 

By Rebecca Kemble, 

 

 

Nov. 15, 2013 

 

 

On the last day of the fall legislative session, the Republican-dominated Wisconsin State Assembly spent more than 12 hours passing a spate of socially regressive laws that roll back voting rights, public access to land surrounding a proposed mining site, and authorize the state to fundraise for an anti-abortion group by issuing “Choose Life” license plates.

Lawmakers also passed two constitutional amendments: One that makes it more difficult to recall elected officials and another that changes the State Supreme Court’s process around how the chief justice is selected.
Before the Assembly took up the agenda, a group of Democratic Party freshmen moved to suspend the rules and take up a measure that would change the legislative redistricting process. The effort comes in the wake of an extremely contentious, partially illegal redistricting process in 2011 where lawyers for Republicans drew up redistricting maps in secret and required legislators to sign secrecy oaths about the contours of the maps.

That process and the resulting maps have been challenged in court. During the proceedings Republicans and their lawyers refused to produce relevant documents until they were ordered to do so by the court. In that process, it was discovered that hundreds of thousands of files were deleted from the computers in question.

Rep. Stephen Smith (D-Shell Lake) summed up the group’s view on the gerrymandered districts saying that democracy no longer exists “when politicians pick their voters rather than voters picking their representatives.” The bill was tabled on a party line vote.

On the constitutional amendment to further restrict Wisconsin’s already tough standards for recalling state elected officials, Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison) pushed back hard. “If you don’t want to be recalled, represent your constituents!” she said. “I can understand why you’re concerned about recalls given your records. It must be horrible to realize that you can only win elections when people don’t vote.”
Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) pointed out that historically, constitutions are amended to enhance and protect people’s rights, not to restrict or remove them.

Rep. Gary Hebl (D-Sun Prairie) called the constitutional amendment to change the way a chief justice is selected for the Wisconsin Supreme Court from seniority to an election every 2 years by the seven justices a potentially unconstitutional abuse of power. “You’re trying to take control of the judiciary,” he said. Both measures have to be passed by both houses of the legislature in two consecutive sessions, and then they are put to a statewide referendum.

Republicans defended what Democrats called voter suppression bills by raising the spectre of “voter fraud,” even though there have only been a handful of documented cases in the state. This is the second time around for a voter id bill after the first one was ruled unconstitutional earlier this year. The bill’s authors hope that tweaks to avoid questions about the id requirement amounting to a poll tax will allow this version to pass constitutional muster.

Proposals to curtail absentee voting hours, to restrict how people in extended care facilities can vote, and to allow more invasive “poll watching” practices all passed on party-line votes.

Rep. Cory Mason (D-Racine) pointed out that the effect of these measures would have a disproportionate impact on poor people and people of color who live in urban areas, calling the collection of bills “Jim Crow for the 21st century.” And Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) asked, “why aren’t Republicans trying to persuade people to vote for them with their policies? Why are they trying to suppress the vote?” The bills were messaged to the state Senate, where their future is uncertain.
The Assembly also passed a bill that allows Gogebic Taconite to close off public access land without paying the approximately $800,000 in penalties for removing it from Managed Forest Law. The bill was modified by the Senate to allow the company to restrict access from 600 feet on either side of the access road that leads to their proposed bulk sampling sites.

Opponents of what is proposed to be the largest open pit taconite iron mine in the world located on the shores of Lake Superior believe that the law is designed to intimidate and discourage independent scientists from conducting independent analyses of the rocks and wetlands in the area. Already geologists have confirmed the presence of an abundance of grunerite, which contains a particularly nasty form of asbestos fiber. GTac lobbyist Bob Seitz has either denied or downplayed the significance of the finding.


GTac lobbyist Bob Seitz, CEO Bill Williams and Engineer Tim Myers. Photo: Rebecca Kemble.     Proponents of the bill insist that the measure has nothing to do with restricting public access, but that it is required for worker safety. To make this point, Rep. Michael Schraa (R-Oshkosh) performed a dramatic reading of a complaint lodged against a group of people who confronted GTac contract workers at a sample drilling site last summer who climbed on equipment, threw tools and yelled at the workers. During this recitation he managed to use the word “terrorist” or “eco-terrorist” at least five times.

Rep. Andy Jorgensen (D-Ft. Atkinson) pointed out that there were no co-sponsors of the bill in the Assembly and wondered who was there to answer questions about it. He suggested that the extra desk on the Assembly floor be given to “the representative from GTac” so they can answer questions directly. Republican leaders have openly admitted that lawyers from the company wrote the massive mining deregulation bill that was the first law to be passed this year.

Others decried the giveaway of power and taxpayer money to GTac that the bill represents. Referring to Sen. Tom Tiffany (R-Hazelhurst) who has championed this and other mining-related bills, Rep. Chris Danou said, “GTac doesn't want to pay penalties to remove land from MFL so they get Taconite Tommy to write them another bill."

While the bill now heads to Governor Walker for signing, GTac’s momentum seems to be stalled by local ordinances involving asbestos, blasting and bulk sampling activities, and their own failure to answer questions that regulators at the Department of Natural Resources asked them three months ago about their bulk sampling plan. The project cannot move forward without permits related to the plan, and the permits can’t be granted until all the DNR’s questions are answered.

After the mining bill was passed at around 10:30 p.m., the already stretched-too-thin veneer of collegiality in the chamber began to break down. Democrats tried to advance a resolution commemorating the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings – a measure that had been passed unanimously in the Senate in September - but Republican leaders tabled the resolution, wanting to get on with the 15 more bills ahead of them on the agenda.

Majority Leader Bill Kramer (R-Waukesha) then announced that they would be taking up the “Choose Life” license plate bill, even though there was a bipartisan agreement to not take it up at that time. Kramer said his decision was spurred by a comment one of the Democratic representatives made on Twitter, and his frustration that Democrats were wasting time with frivolous motions.

Rep. Penny Bernard Schaber (D-Appleton) had worked hard on the compromise that had been abandoned. “It is truly worrisome to me that we have people in this body that act as if they’re in middle school and high school and that they can change the rules whenever they want,” she said to Kramer. “This is childish, stupid, asinine… We have spent a long time on this compromise, and I know that I can’t trust any word that I hear from Republican leadership. That is a problem. “

At issue with the bill is the fact that the brand new “Choose Life Wisconsin,” which would receive $15 for every license plate, has connections with organizations identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. They have also not been able to produce documentation proving they are an independent 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

Reps. Terese Berceau (D-Madison) and Josh Zepnick (D-Milwaukee) called out Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Burlington) and Kramer for abandoning their promises of bipartisanship on the issue.



Assembly Speaker Robin Vos sits stone-faced as he is called out by Democrats for reneging on a negotiated compromise. Photo: Rebecca Kemble.

Zepnick said, "I'll call out Robin Vos, Bill Kramer and whomever I damn well please! Stand up and do your job!" before he was called out of order and his microphone was turned off.
The bill passed and is available for scheduling in the Senate next year.
------
Featured photo: Flickr user David Berkowitz, creative commons licensed.

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SALON


Thursday, Oct 17, 2013 06:30 PM EDT

Tea Partyers’ grave fear: Why they disdain young people — even their own!

Sociologist Theda Skocpol tells Salon what drives the angry right -- and what comes after the government shutdown

By Josh Eidelson

 

Topics: Tea Party, Theda Skocpol, GOP, Republicans, Congress, DC, Washington, Barack Obama, Obamacare, aca, healthcare, Insurance, Healthcare Reform, Debt, Budget, Democrats, left, right, Elections News, Media News, Business News, News, Politics News

                      

Louie Gohmert (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

The past weeks’ showdown in Washington, D.C., has shocked and perplexed some observers. Theda Skocpol was not among them. Skocpol, a veteran Harvard professor, is the author of books on topics ranging from the politics of the U.S. welfare state (“Protecting Soldiers and Mothers”) to the state of grass-roots political engagement (“Diminished Democracy”), and of the definitive social science tome on the Tea Party (“The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” with Vanessa Williamson).

With the immediate debt ceiling/shutdown showdown coming to a close, Salon called up Skocpol Wednesday to discuss how the media misunderstand the Tea Party, how an unpopular movement can move so many members of Congress, and why the right hates Obama’s moderate healthcare law so much. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Has this month shown us anything we didn’t know about the Tea Party?

I think people in mainstream media and D.C. politics kind of wrote the Tea Party off after 2012. They thought, “Well, this isn’t popular anymore, and the Democrats succeeded in defeating the primary goal of Tea Party forces.” But I think that was always misreading what the Tea Party was about. It’s been there all along to keep Republicans from compromising. I think we’ve seen over the past two weeks that they have the ability to just tie up the federal government and put the country at risk, and they don’t show any signs of backing down. And I don’t think they will, even if they’re defeated in this episode.

Frances Fox Piven argued to me that the Tea Party is something old and something new – it has some demographic continuity with the Birchers or Christian right, but also represents a genuine shift motivated in part by fear that white people are losing their privilege in the U.S. Do you agree?

In many ways I do. We actually did the research, both by pulling together national [data] and by doing observations in groups in three regions. There’s no question that at the grass roots, approximately half of all Republican-identifiers who think of themselves as Tea Partyers are a very conservative-minded old group of white people, some of whom do go all the way back to Goldwater and the Birch Society. They are skeptical of the Republican Party as it has been run in recent years. But they both hate and fear the Democratic Party and Obama. We argued in many ways that anger comes from alarm on the part of these older conservatives that they’re losing their country — that’s what they say. That they’re the true Americans, and they’re losing control of American politics. So that’s the grass-roots component.

Now there is a somewhat new development at the top. There’s no sense in which the grass-roots protests are a fake, or a creation of big money forces. But we have seen the unleashing of billionaire-backed, highly ideological groups that are outside the Republican apparatus, itself symbolized by people like Dick Armey. And much more recently, by Jim DeMint giving up a Senate position to move to Heritage, and turn Heritage into a much more hard-edged political machine. These guys are calling the shots about what happens in Congress. And that’s why we saw the amazing thing [Tuesday] of Heritage Action, under DeMint, indicating that it would score a vote for the leaders’ proposals negatively — within 20 minutes, [Republican leaders] switched. And that’s because they fear now the aroused grass-roots activists, the people who paid attention and vote in Republican primaries. And equally, they fear money coming to challenge them as ideologically impure if they vote the wrong way on key legislation.
So it’s a pincers movement – top-down [and] bottom-up. It really has taken control over the governing part of the Republican Party. It’s probably got less effectiveness in elections.

“Pincers”? How so?

What makes this so powerful is not popularity. People don’t like them; that’s irrelevant. When you’ve got a bloc of legislators in the states and in the Congress, and they can be empowered by very attentive voters who vote in primaries, and then by big money funders who are the ones to challenge other Republicans who don’t go along with the extremists, then you’ve got really a double whammy. The only thing that could counter this would be if more traditional conservative forces started raising money that they used to protect people from challenges on their right. And there are some signs that that’s beginning to happen, but not very many.

Do you expect we’ll see more of that?

We may. But I think this is going on for a while. These folks are coming back at it again in a few months, and they will keep coming at it.

Some Democrats I talk to have this view that this will not happen again in the near future because the voters are going to punish the Republican Party – by taking levers away from the Republican Party and by weakening the leverage of the Tea Party within the GOP.

I think it’s way too soon to conclude that. There’s a huge difference in the electorate that turns out in the midterms. If they do it again next year — which I think they will, at least some of it – it could change the equation in November 2014 a little bit. But let’s get real here.

I mean, you’re going to have to talk about taking the majority away from Republicans in the House of Representatives. You have to talk about getting rid of the filibuster check in the Senate. And I don’t think many liberal commentators are paying any attention to the very important developments that have occurred across so many American states where very extreme Republicans have supermajorities at the moment. So that’s all got to be chipped away at, because as long as a fired-up and morally dogmatic minority, backed by ideological money, can manipulate legislatures, it can choke things up. Their goal is to show that Obama and the Democrats can’t govern, and unfortunately they have some of the levers to do that.

To what extent do you think that the tactics Republicans have taken up show something about our political institutions’ ability to work in the face of what some would call more parliamentary tactics?

Well, I don’t think this is parliamentary. I think this is truly extremist. The filibuster rules, of course, are rules, and they can change. And the ability of one or two senators to hold up everything may be something that even the minority will want to change, because you know, Sen. Ted Cruz is really a cruise missile. He has unsettled Senate Republicans plenty.

American institutions do not in any way require that the same party or the same faction controls the presidency and both houses of Congress. And so that creates openings for obstructionists to really grind everything to a halt. We’ve seen Republicans, as they fear that they can’t make it in majority elections, turn to creating new uses for old institutional mechanisms and rules. That’s what’s going on right now.

A decade ago, you observed a long-term decline in American civic participation and the groups that used to foster it. What does the Tea Party mean for that?

At the grass roots, it’s a return to some traditional methods. The grass-roots Tea Party actually formed, at their height, about 900 local groups — genuinely new groups. I wrote in “Diminished Democracy” that the right has been more effective at either sustaining or re-creating federated action, which is the key to American politics — to be able to organize across many districts, many states, and still be part of something national. The Tea Party is a different kind of manifestation of that.

They’ve actually destroyed the organizational integrity of the Republican Party right now. That’s why the situation is so scary for the United States. The Washington press corps wants to write again and again that both sides should compromise. The fact of the matter is that Obama doesn’t have anybody to compromise with. He can’t make a deal, because the Tea Party forces have discombobulated the Republican leadership. John Boehner can’t make a deal with anybody. He can’t deliver even on what he wants for breakfast.

“Destroyed the organizational integrity of the Republican Party.” How so?

Republican Party committees can’t necessarily keep themselves at all levels from being taken over or end-runned by Tea Party forces. The leadership in the Senate, [and] especially in the House, can’t control their various actions, can’t use a combination of carrots and sticks to put things together. It means even that in elections, Republicans can’t control the message they’re sending out. You can declare that you’re going to have outreach to women and minorities, and the next day Rush Limbaugh can say god-knows-what. People can show up at the U.S. Capitol with a Confederate flag in front of the White House. Things are kind of out of control.

The Confederate flag – is there some larger significance in that popping up when and where it did?

There’s a strain in the Tea Party, especially at the grass roots, that’s xenophobic and racist, and certainly the Confederate flag also symbolizes regional resistance to federal power – there’s lots of themes here that resemble nullification, and even the pre-Civil War crisis.

But I don’t really think it’s helpful to announce that the entire Tea Party base is racist.  I don’t think it’s that simple. For one thing, they’re just as riled up about immigration as they are about blacks. There’s certainly a worry about a change in the social composition of America. But we found in our research that they also resent young people — including in their own families.

They think young people are not measuring up. That the grandsons and daughters and nieces and nephews expect to get free college loans, and don’t get a job, and hold ideas that are not very American in their view — like Obama. Obama symbolizes all of this.

How does that play out in the politics around the Affordable Care Act, and these accusations of raiding Medicare?

One of the big mysteries that we’ve tried to deal with in our research is why the Affordable Care Act, which after all is fairly moderate — it’s an extremely important piece of legislation, but it’s moderate in its means — why would that become a flashpoint?

Well, despite all of the particular policy features that came from conservative origins, it is a powerfully redistributive law. The people left out of the insurance system have been lower income and more moderate income workers.  They’re a younger population, browner and blacker. And then you come along with a president who symbolizes everything that conservatives and Tea Partyers hate. And he proposes to raise taxes on wealthier people, Medicare beneficiaries and business to pay for insurance for those people who’ve been left out. So Obamacare really symbolizes the idea that this new America is going to take something from “our America.”

And for the ideological forces, Freedomworks, Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Action — you just have to go back to Bill Kristol’s memo in 1993 on Clinton healthcare. They’re worried about filling in one of the big holes in the American welfare state, and creating a positive relationship between the government and working-age people that will make it hard for Republicans to win elections or proceed with their preference: to roll back Social Security and Medicare, let alone another big piece of the American welfare state.

Another thing you’ll hear from Democrats is that every past program like this has been controversial at the time, and then becomes popular to the point Republicans won’t even admit they want to get rid of it. Is there reason to expect the same here?

Yes. It’s going to be a tough battle because of the new levers the Supreme Court gave to the states to reduce the Medicaid expansion. There is a question in my mind as to whether a regional group around Texas will stay out permanently. But over the last month, while we’ve been having an Armageddon-like battle supposedly over Obamacare in Washington, several more Republican-led states have accepted the Medicaid expansion, or are on the verge of doing it. In the final analysis, this is about money for healthcare, and states and localities as well can’t be denying care to people who get sick in this country.

Business interests and hospitals and doctors are grudgingly accepting this vast expansion of resources in their sector, and the disconnect in public opinion is so extreme. If you ask them about the particular provisions in the law, almost all of them are very popular, including with majorities of Republicans. So once this thing is actually carried through — and it’s obviously not going to be easy, and it’s not clear that the Obama administration is entirely up to it — this law is here to stay. It’s not going anywhere. By 2016, it will not be reversible. And by about five years after that, people will be wondering what all the fuss was about.

You said the right is more effective at building the kind of organizations that wield political leverage. What do you think explains that?

Partly, the right in this country, over the last half-century, has recognized that fighting across many localities and states is worth it. And they’ve developed mechanisms for doing that, and that turned out to have a big payoff in Congress. There’s also a whole series of reasons why older conservative voters, backed by ideologues, have this combination of apocalyptic moral certitude with organization that really gets results. Especially in obstructing things in American politics.

I don’t happen to think that the left and the center-left could imitate this. For one thing, they don’t have the presence across as many states and districts. But it’s also not clear it’s a model worth imitating. I think the real problem that you’ve got right now on the left is how to defeat this stuff, how to contain it, how to beat it — given the permeability of American political institutions to this kind of thing. And I don’t think it’s clear what’s going to happen.

More Josh Eidelson

Right-wing nuts nab new way to sabotage Obamacare

SALON

Thursday, Oct 17, 2013 07:44 AM EDT

Right-wing nuts nab new way to sabotage Obamacare

Remember how the shutdown deal only gave the GOP "small" concessions? One low-profile component could prove costly

By David Dayen

 

    

Topics: Obamacare, income verification, Government shutdown, Debt limit, Republican Party, GOP, The Right, Conservatives, Editor's Picks, Health Care, IRS, Business News, Politics News

                      

Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon)

The final deal to avert a breach of the debt limit and end the government shutdown included what has been described as a “small concession” to Republicans: tightening the income verification measures for customers on the Obamacare insurance exchanges to qualify for subsidies. But considering the hurdles associated with this step – and the enormous IT problems we’ve already seen with the exchanges – the concession may not be small at all.

As one prominent health care expert tells Salon, the impact could contribute to an attempted sabotage of the law by those who want to see it repealed. Rather than letting the health care law survive “unscathed,” the income verification piece could trigger a new round of headaches for Obamacare, and this time, Republicans – and the country – will be paying attention.

Conservatives have been grumbling for months that Obamacare invites fraud, by using an “honor system” to verify the income levels that determine subsidy amounts on the exchanges. Just last month, House Republicans passed the No Subsidies Without Verification Act 235-191, with all of their members voting in favor. The bill prohibits any subsidies from being distributed until the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) certifies that a system of income verification is operational.

HHS did say back in July that they would rely on “self-attestation” to determine the initial subsidy level, with sample audits to verify information. But later, HHS announced the sample size would equal 100% of the population, and that they would test self-reporting against sources like past tax filings and Social Security data. While they haven’t officially changed the regulation, income verification tests are included in the exchange’s data hubs. So you can say that the Republican measure just forces compliance with spelling out the regulations for a full verification regime.

However, there’s another part to this, the simplest and easiest way to ensure that everyone receives the proper subsidy level. It’s called the Internal Revenue Service. Every American sends in a tax return annually showing their exact income level, subject to routine verification by a large government agency. Under Obamacare, the IRS can claw back excess subsidies after the fact, something frequent conservative critic Avik Roy acknowledged in July. He added that “the IRS’ record of impartiality is, shall we say, contested,” and that people in poverty who don’t file tax returns “would probably not be subject” to clawbacks (weasel word alert!). Roy is relying on the discredited IRS scandal here to suggest that the agency wouldn’t do their job when Obamacare recipients (read: Democrats) are involved. But he also takes a very curious stance for a conservative: that the IRS, far from being a group of jack-booted thugs who will stop at nothing to take your money at the barrel of a gun, is simply too lazy to do its job!

“You have to wonder, why isn’t clawback enough,” Paul Starr, Princeton professor and author of Remedy and Reaction, about the legislative fight over Obamacare, told Salon. “This seems to me another form of sabotage.”

Starr’s perspective is borne by the early experience of the exchanges. The federal exchange, which is the Obamacare portal for customers in 34 states, has performed very badly in the opening weeks. Even supporters of the law like the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein has called the rollout a disaster. Not only have potential customers been unable to register for the program after 20 or 30 attempts, those few who have been successful aren’t having their data transferred to insurance companies properly.
“Things are worse behind the curtain than in front of it,” according to health care writer Bob Laszlewski, describing how the system is enrolling and unenrolling customers seemingly at random. If HHS can’t approve subsidies until the Inspector General decides income verification is operational, that would definitely delay subsidies – nothing is operational about the federal exchanges right now. (Subsequent reports about the deal suggest that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and not the Inspector General, would do the certification. But it’s not clear what would have to be tweaked in the process.)

And you have to question whether income verification would ever be operational, and if that’s contributing to the major delays on the exchange website. Accurate, real-time income verification has been a cherished goal for members of the financial services industry for many years; they use this data to determine eligibility for loans of all types. Needless to say, big banks and financial services firms have massive resources relative to the federal government. And they haven’t been able to nail electronic income verification yet; they mostly ask people to mail or fax in forms proving income, rather than submit them through the Web (which leads to losing forms and multiple queries for data and all the rest).

Most of the information you can scrape from payroll or Social Security data would be 6-18 months out of date, especially for the types of part-time workers, freelancers, “unbanked” individuals and self-employed persons who comprise the primary group signing up for Obamacare. Demanding real-time income verification would require technology that doesn’t even exist for the financial sector, and to get it right would add significantly to the already burdensome delays in acquiring insurance coverage on the exchanges. It would also expand costs for IT development exponentially, achieving the neat trick of making Obamacare more costly and more ineffective at the same time.

As noted before, there’s an already existing method of income verification, through the IRS, that stands ready to handle any potential misreporting through clawbacks. In fact, the IRS will have to verify income anyway; people simply don’t have perfect information about their future income, especially part-timers and freelancers and the self-employed. This is how many means-tested programs like Medicare and Medicaid work, and despite the cries of conservatives, fraud in those programs mostly come from health care providers bilking the government rather than individual subscribers.
Instead of using a time-tested process that works (and would work better if Republicans weren’t so dedicated to defunding the IRS), the GOP wants to add this kludgey extra step to an already strained online exchange. The clear goal here is to make it harder to enroll or collapse the insurance exchanges entirely, along with creating the impression that Obamacare customers are automatically freeloaders and cheats, which aligns with conservative demonization of other government programs.

So far, the woes of the insurance exchanges have played in the background of the news, far behind the government shutdown and possible debt limit breach. By embarking on a white-whale quest to defund Obamacare, Tea Party Republicans have ignored the huge PR value of the exchange disaster. Indeed, many people logically assume that the problems with the exchanges are due to the shutdown (they aren’t). The Administration has basically gotten a lifeline on the bad rollout, thanks to the GOP focusing attention elsewhere. That could change with this deal, and the added hurdle of income verification.

Obviously, verifying the income of applicants to determine their proper level of subsidy is critical to Obamacare running smoothly. But there are plenty of ways to do this, particularly through the agency best equipped to verify income. Asking the federal government to perform an impossible technical feat through a shaky online portal is a recipe for further disaster. Senate Democrats made this concession to Republicans in their fiscal deal; House conservatives are well-positioned to exploit it.

David Dayen is a contributing writer for Salon. Follow him on Twitter at @ddayen. More David Dayen.

SALON

Thursday, Oct 17, 2013 07:45 AM EDT

GOP’s huge Tea Party mess has only just begun

John Boehner thought the last few weeks were rough? The coming months could present him with even more headaches

By Brian Beutler

 

    

Topics: John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, Budget, Government shutdown, Default, Debt limit, Editor's Picks, The Right, GOP, Republican Party, Conservatives, Politics News

(Credit: Ted Cruz, John Boehner)

Last night, Republicans stood aside as Congress increased the debt limit and reopened the government. In return, they got nothing. Or more accurately, they got something that already existed, and gave Democrats something they’d been blocking for months.
The deal Harry Reid struck with Mitch McConnell includes a formal negotiation over the federal government, which GOP senators and various House Republicans have objected to since the spring. In exchange, Republicans got a redundant measure to assure Obamacare’s existing income verification mechanisms are actually verifying beneficiary incomes (for a less bullish take on this measure, see David Dayen’s take here).

It’s a fig leaf, minus the properties that allow it to conceal anyone’s nether regions. A fig leaf with the chlorophyll sapped out of it. Republicans can spin it among themselves as a Democratic concession, but they can’t rightly look back at the ruin of the past month, and the content of the deal, and expect that they can extort unreciprocated concessions from Democrats next time around.

The questions on everyone’s mind are, Will they try anyhow? And what will the coming months look like if they don’t?

I think the answer to the first question is “probably not,” mostly for the reasons I noted above. Republicans didn’t just sacrifice an incredible amount of public cachet in this fight. Their leaders also revealed, for the second time this year, that they’re not willing to actually allow the country to default just to preserve party unity or pressure the president to cave. Unless they’re stricken with a nihilistic sense of bitterness and the feeling that they have nothing left to lose, there’s little reason to think they’re going to approach coming deadlines the same way they approached these past two.

Before you object on the grounds that the past month’s events won’t make conservative House hardliners any less bloodthirsty: I agree. They can’t fight their nature, or their incentives, and they don’t even seem to want to.

My suspicion, though, is that the right will have about the same amount of sway in the months ahead as an erratic general who led his soldiers into a massacre, then reassimilated unnoticed far down the chain of command. He’s still there, he’s still cranky, but other officers can now point to the slaughter and everyone will ignore his guidance.

If that’s right, then you can paint optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for the winter months. The optimistic one, obviously, is that parties’ official budget delegates ink some mutually agreeable deal and take the debt limit off the table once again.
The budget negotiators will have until Dec. 13 to write a fiscal blueprint, which appropriators would use to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, and the House and Senate tax-writing committees would use to implement any recommended changes to the tax code or entitlement programs or both.

If they come to an agreement, then you won’t have to read any more stories about crisis governance until about January 2015 at the earliest. The challenge, as always, is that even median Republicans still categorically oppose increasing taxes even modestly. The establishment and the radicals have been at war with each other for weeks now, but they never battled over this single uniting principle.

Here’s McConnell, whose deal quashed the radical rebellion, yesterday afternoon:

“Crucially, I’m also confident that we’ll be able to announce that we’re protecting the government spending reductions that both parties agreed to under the Budget Control Act, and that the President signed into law. That’s been a top priority for me and my Republican colleagues throughout this debate. And it’s been worth the effort. Some have suggested that we break that promise as part of this agreement. They’ve said Washington needs to spend more, that we need to raise taxes — that we can just tax our way to prosperity and balance.”

If the budget committee deadlocks, this will be the reason. Outside the narrow constraints of budgeting, there are plenty of things Democrats want other than tax increases. But it’s hard to imagine them surfacing in an official budget conference as a replacement for new revenues.

Thus, there’s a high likelihood that these negotiations will end the same way as all the others that preceded them did: no agreement. An agreement is only compatible with the GOP’s anti-tax absolutism if Democrats drop their demand for tax parity and agree to pay down sequestration with other spending cuts. Possible, but unlikely. And gridlock would create a new challenge for Boehner and test whether the hardliners learned anything at all from this whole experience.

The deal extends funding for the government through Jan. 15. Republicans are now very, very invested in not triggering another government shutdown. Much more invested than they were last month, when party leaders got forced into shutting down the government against their better collective judgment.

Democrats won’t shut down the government. They’re not going to make demands unrelated to the issue at hand, like Republicans just did, and refuse to fund the government unless they get their ransom. But they will fight harder than ever to ease sequestration, and their leverage will come both from the deadline and the House GOP’s inability to govern itself. This is where the dynamic between Boehner and his hardliners will become relevant again. The only way for him to beat back Democratic demands without shutting down the government will be to pass appropriations in some form that neither exceed sequestration nor include the kinds of extraneous riders that will invite easy veto threats from Obama.

This will be an immense challenge. Hardliners aren’t particularly interested in funding the government without demanding ransoms, and even if they were, it might not be possible at the funding levels the party supports. Earlier this year they had to yank the one domestic appropriations bill they’d hoped to pass on the floor, because it was too austere for Democrats and moderate Republicans, and not radical enough for the hardliners.

They’re not going to get a lot of help from Democrats if they try to appropriate at 2014 sequestration levels. And if they can’t appropriate on their own, without once again dragging Obamacare into the equation, they’ll have a problem.

Perhaps that just means the government will be funded with continuing resolutions in perpetuity. Agency budgets will remain stuck in the past, and subject to more damaging sequestration cuts. It does seem like McConnell would prefer this outcome over a real budget with higher spending. But if Senate Democrats can appropriate at higher levels, perhaps with assistance from chastened moderate Republicans, Boehner will get jammed again. Would he really shut down the government again rather than put a bipartisan omnibus spending bill on the floor?

Once that deadline passes, the debt limit will have to be increased again. The statutory deadline is Feb. 7, but extraordinary measures could delay that by several weeks. How it gets increased depends a lot on everything that comes before it. If the parties agree on a budget, it will probably be increased as part of it. If they don’t, it’ll have to be increased independently. And at that point Republicans will get to decide whether they want to try their hand at extortion one more time.

Brian Beutler is Salon's political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and  follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler.

Even When the GOP Loses, It Wins

Even When the GOP Loses, It Wins

  

Think the Senate deal is a resounding defeat for Republicans? Think again.

 

The Editors

October 16, 2013   |    This article appeared in the November 4, 2013 edition of The Nation.

 

Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, walks away from the microphone during a news conference after a House GOP meeting on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

  
Just hours before a default on our national debt and sixteen days into a wrenching federal government shutdown, it now appears that the barest measure of sanity has prevailed in Washington. The Senate has reached a deal to reopen the government at current funding levels through January 15 and to pass a debt ceiling hike though February 7. The measure is expected to clear the House tonight with scant but necessary Republican support.

Because the deal only includes minor concessions, the Beltway consensus is that it represents a resounding defeat for Republicans, who “surrendered” their original demands to defund or delay Obamacare. In the skirmish of opinion polls, that may be true, for now. But in the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

Surrender? Any more “victories” like this and Democrats will end up paying tribute into the GOP’s coffers.

This debate started in 2011 when the president accepted that he couldn’t get support for jobs programs and instead called for “balanced” deficit reduction that included tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and spending cuts. In response, Republicans threatened to default on America’s debts, forcing through the Budget Control Act, which cut nearly $1 trillion in spending over ten years with no tax increases and exacted another trillion in cuts either by agreement of a “supercommittee” or, failing that, automatic across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion over ten years. Now the Republicans’ “surrender” locks in that sequester while pushing for further reductions to basic safety net programs—all while tax increases remain off the table and the threat of default is still pointed at the country’s head. Tea Party zealots may have lost their bid to torpedo healthcare reform, but the right continues to set the terms of the debate.
This is particularly perverse because austerity only adds to the country’s troubles. More than 20 million people still need full-time work. Incomes are still stagnant. The top 1 percent continue to capture what little growth there is. The International Monetary Fund says even that will slow, projecting a rate of 1.6 percent growth in the coming months. We are closer to a renewed recession than a healthy recovery. Meanwhile, deficits are falling more rapidly than at any time since the demobilization after World War II. More spending cuts will only cost jobs and slow growth.

We should be debating the real challenges ahead. How do we get the economy moving and create jobs? How do we empower workers to gain a fair share of profits? Can we forge a global effort to shut down off-shore tax dodges and end the obscenity of multinational companies pocketing millions in profits and paying nothing in taxes? Will we squander the opportunity to rebuild our decrepit roads, airports and sewers when interest rates are low and labor in abundant supply?

The GOP may be bearing the brunt of the public’s rage, but anger is also directed at Washington and government generally. Nearly eight in ten say the country is seriously off-track. The Tea Party may be plummeting in public esteem, but it is taking government down with it. There is simply no way to rebuild widely shared prosperity without a government with a clear strategy in the global economy. There is no way to make needed public investments and temper the extreme inequality that threatens our democracy without progressive tax reform. The terms of the Republican “surrender” take us in the wrong direction.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated. A previous version appears in the November 4, 2013 print issue.

Everybody is trying to get Congress to do its work, including an interfaith group determined to sing to Congressman Paul Ryan so that “his heart is broken…[and] he will act courageously,” according to Greg Kaufmann.

The Editors

October 16, 2013   |    This article appeared in the November 4, 2013 edition of The Nation.

On the Sabotage of Democracy

Published on Monday, October 7, 2013 by Moyers & Company

On the Sabotage of Democracy

by Bill Moyers

 

BILL MOYERS: And now to the people who refuse to let democracy work. The people who hate government so much they’ve shut it down. Unable to abide by the results of democracy when they don’t win, they turned on it.



Republicans have now lost three successive elections to control the Senate and they’ve lost the last two presidential elections. Nonetheless, they fought tooth and nail to kill President Obama’s health care initiative. They lost that fight, but with the corporate wing of Democrats, they managed to bend it toward private interests.

So we should be clear on this, Obamacare, as it’s known, is deeply flawed. Big subsidies to the health insurance industry. A bonanza for lobbyists. No public option. And as The New York Times reported this week, “Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law.” Largely because states controlled by Republicans refuse to expand Medicaid.

As far as our bought and paid for legislative process goes, Obama’s initiative made it through the sausage factory. Yet even after both the House and Senate approved it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it, the Republicans keep insisting on calling the law a “bill,” thumbing their noses and refusing to accept that it is enacted legislation.

Now they’re fighting to prevent it from being implemented. Here was their order of the day on Thursday from the popular right wing blog RedState.com:

“Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare. Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it. This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare, we leave the whole thing shut down.”

Once upon a time when I was a young man working on Capitol Hill, it was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with it. But you didn’t bring down the government just because it wasn’t perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been at least raggedly served, on to the next fight.

That was a long time ago. Long before the Tea Party minority, armed with huge sums of secret money from rich donors, sucked the last bit of soul from the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln. They became delusional. Then rabid. Like this:

SENATOR STEVE KING: If Obamacare is ever implemented and enforced, we will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional takings of God-given American liberty.

BILL MOYERS: That’s false, of course. Just like those right-wing talking points that keep grinding through the propaganda mills of Fox News:

AINSLEY EARHARDT on Fox and Friends: Thanks to Obamacare, doctors will be forced to ask patients about their sex life, even if it has nothing to do with the medical treatment that they are seeking at the time.

BILL MOYERS: Not true.

MICHELLE MALKIN on Fox and Friends: That healthcare plan puts a discount on the lives of elderly people and would result in the redistribution of health away from the elderly and the infirm to other special favored interests and patients.

BILL MOYERS: Again, not true. Nor is this, from the multi-millionaire fabulist Rush Limbaugh:

RUSH LIMBAUGH from the Rush Limbaugh Show: What we now have is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. Obamacare is just a massive tax increase, that all it is.

BILL MOYERS: That’s just a tiny sample of the lies and misinformation perpetrated by the right with the song and dance compliance of its richly paid mouthpieces. Sarah Palin set the bar for truth at about ankle height with those fictitious “death panels” that she still insists will decide our rendezvous with the Grim Reaper.

SARAH PALIN on Cashin' In: Of course there are death panels in there, but the important thing to remember is that’s just one aspect of this atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of Obama’s and that is Obamacare.

BILL MOYERS: Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees. They demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline. They demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled, and the big, bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities.
When the president refused to buckle to their extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the Union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn the place down, sink the ship of state, and sow economic chaos to get their way. This says it all, they even shuttered the Statue of Liberty.

Watching all this from London, the noted commentator Martin Wolf, of the capitalist friendly Financial Times, says “America flirts with self-destruction.”
This man is the biggest flirt of all, Newt Gingrich. It was Newt Gingrich who twenty years ago spearheaded the right-wing’s virulent crusade against the norms of democratic government. As Speaker of the House he twice brought about shutdowns of the federal government once, believe it or not, because he felt snubbed after riding on Air Force One with President Clinton and had to leave by the backdoor.

It was also Newt Gingrich, speaker Gingrich, who was caught lying to congressional investigators looking into charges of his ethical wrongdoing. His colleagues voted overwhelmingly, 395 to 28, to reprimand him. Pressure from his own party then prompted him to resign.

Yet even after his flame out, even after his recent bizarre race for the presidency bankrolled with money from admiring oligarchs, even after new allegations about his secret fundraising for right-wing candidates, Gingrich remains the darling of a fawning amnesic media.

NEWT GINGRICH on Crossfire: I’m Newt Gingrich on the right.

BILL MOYERS: On CNN.com the other day he issued a call to arms to his fellow bomb-throwers, “…don’t cave on shutdown.”

At least let’s name this for what it is, sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means. And let’s be clear about where such reckless ambition leads. As surely as night must follow day, the alternative to democracy is worse.

© 2013 Public Affairs Television, Inc

Journalist Bill Moyers is the host of the new show Moyers & Company, a weekly series of smart talk and new ideas aimed at helping viewers make sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of America’s strongest thinkers.. His previous shows on PBS included NOW with Bill Moyers and Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television. He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk awards and is the author of three best-selling books.