Social Security Reform Splits White House Political, Economic Teams - TheHill.com

Image via WikipediaObama is being pulled in opposite directions by those whose priorities are fiscal and those whose No. 1 concern is electoral.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling and Sperling’s deputy, Jason Furman — leading figures in the president’s economic team — are pressing Obama to cut Social Security benefits if necessary, say sources familiar with their positions.

But Obama’s political team, led by David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Jim Messina, are urging the president to understand that backing benefit cuts could prove disastrous to his 2012 reelection hopes, sources say.
The political team is winning the argument so far, but internal debate rages at the White House as Republicans in Congress insist sweeping efforts to restore government finances must include Social Security reform.

“Gene Sperling and Jason Furman and some of the Treasury people started with the posture that we’re the best people to reform Social Security — that was when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress,” said a Democratic policy expert who has met Obama’s economic policy team over the past two years.

“The same people have continued to make that argument even as they’re now responding to conservatives who are stronger in the Congress,” the source, who strongly opposes benefits cuts, told The Hill.

“There are two camps,” the source added. “One camp wants to be able to throw a bone to Republicans and some [centrist] Democrats.

“The political people would prefer not to be accused of being the party that cuts Social Security in those ways. Some political people would like to see the president out there defending the program and making the case that it has nothing to do with the deficit.”

A second Democratic source, who has pushed to reform Social Security by increasing the flow of revenues to the trust fund and reducing benefits, said, “Geithner’s been the most forward-leaning.”
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Obama May Cut Social Security, Sanders Tells Raw | Raw Story

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By Sahil Kapur

One-year payroll tax holiday key to toppling seniors' safety net, Sanders warns.

Social Security may be on the White House chopping block, a US Senator recently told Raw Story, expressing deep uneasiness about President Barack Obama's noncommittal attitude toward staving off cuts to the cherished program.

"I have to tell you, I have been on the phone to the very, very, very highest levels of the Obama administration, and the responses that I am getting are not assuring," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said in an exclusive interview. "What I’m told is that no definitive decisions have been made on the issue of Social Security – I expect that is probably true."

Progressive activists, fearing that the holy grail of American liberalism could fall prey to a bipartisan deal on Capitol Hill, have launched a campaign to pressure the White House and Congress to oppose cuts. And Sanders has stepped up as their champion in the Senate, confirming their concerns based on knowledge drawn from his relative proximity to the president.

"What I’m hearing does not reassure me – that we have a president who is not prepared to defend the heart and soul of what the Democratic Party has been about since Franklin Delano Roosevelt," said Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist.
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Poll Shows Opposition To Health Law Softening; GOP And Dems Gird For Repeal Vote - Kaiser Health News

The Associated Press: AP-GfK Poll: Raw Feelings Ease Over Health Law
Ahead of a vote on repeal in the GOP-led House this week, strong opposition to the law stands at 30 percent, close to the lowest level registered in AP-GfK surveys dating to September 2009. ... The law expands coverage to more than 30 million uninsured, and would require, for the first time, that most people in the United States carry health insurance. The poll finds that 40 percent of those surveyed said they support the law, while 41 percent oppose it. Just after the November congressional elections, opposition stood at 47 percent and support was 38 percent. ... [the poll] was conducted Jan. 5-10 ... and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points (Alonso-Zaldivar and Agiesta, 1/16).

Politico: Health Care Debate Will Go On, Coburn Says
Acknowledging that Senate Republicans face a difficult, if not impossible, obstacle in the repealing the Democrats' health-care package enacted into law last year, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), a leading conservative, vowed to continue pressing the issue. "The fact is is we're not through with the debate on health care in this country," Coburn said on NBC's "Meet the Press." ..."We welcome, in a certain sense, their attempt to repeal it because it gives us a second chance to make a first impression," [Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.] said on the same show (Bresnahan, 1/16).

The Hill: Senate Dems Indicate Willingness To 'Break Apart,' Fix Health Reform
Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on Sunday said House Republicans remain determined to repeal the healthcare reform law, but one Democratic lawmaker urged her colleagues to instead focus only on reforming flawed provisions. ... Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said on CBS that lawmakers should aim to focus not on throwing out the reform law, but rather on repairing individual provisions. She acknowledged the law "is not perfect," and suggested Republicans and Democrats likely could agree on changing certain provisions. "Let's break it apart," she said during the show (Bennett and Johnson, 1/16).

The Washington Post: GOP Lacks Clear Health-Care Plan
[T]he GOP has a cupboard of health-care ideas, most going back a decade or more. They include tax credits to help Americans afford insurance, limiting awards in medical malpractice lawsuits and unfettering consumers from rules that require them to buy state-regulated insurance policies. ... House Republicans have termed their strategy "repeal and replace." But according to GOP House leaders, senior aides and conservative health policy specialists, Republicans have not distilled their ideas into a coherent plan (Goldstein, 1/15).

Related from KHN: Republicans' Health Reform Repeal Legislation And Original Overhaul Proposal
The Associated Press: For Heady Tea Party, Now The Hard Part Begins
House Republicans plan on Wednesday to fulfill a tea party priority: voting to repeal the health care law passed by Democrats last year. ... GOP leaders are sticking with a title for their resolution that Democrats say is inaccurate and unseemly in light of the six people killed in Tucson: "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." Republicans acknowledge that the Senate is certain to block a repeal. Some veteran House members say it's unrealistic to think that even a freshman class of 87 Republicans, most of whom have tea party backing, can make a significant impact in their first term (Babington, 1/16).

The New York Times: In The Health Care Fight, A Political Focus On Jobs, With No Simple Answers
In the fight over whether the law will create or destroy jobs, both political parties cite evidence to support their claims. But many economists say the effect on jobs is likely to be modest — neither so negative as Republicans assert nor so positive as Democrats contend. In any event, economists say, the impact on jobs — a hot political issue now — is not a particularly good standard to use in evaluating a complex law that will affect one-sixth of the economy and almost every American (Pear, 1/15).

Springfield News-Leader/FactCheck.org: Check The Facts
When it comes to truth in labeling, House Republicans are getting off to a poor start with their constantly repeated references to the new health care law as "job-killing." We find: Independent, nonpartisan experts project only a "small" or "minimal" impact on jobs, even before taking likely job gains in the health care and insurance industries into account. The House Republican leadership, in a report issued Jan. 6, badly misrepresents what the Congressional Budget Office has said about the law. ... The GOP also cites a study projecting a 1.6 million job loss -- but fails to mention that the study refers to a hypothetical employer mandate that is not part of the new law (1/16).

This is part of Kaiser Health News' Daily Report - a summary of health policy coverage from more than 300 news organizations. The full summary of the day's news can be found here and you can sign up for e-mail subscriptions to the Daily Report here. In addition, our staff of reporters and correspondents file original stories each day, which you can find on our home page.

Who blinks first? Dems can’t agree - TheHill.com

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By Alexander Bolton

Democrats’ final push on healthcare reform has become a game of chicken between the House and Senate.

Lawmakers are at an impasse over who should go first, and a lack of trust between Democrats in both chambers threatens to derail the effort in the final stretch. This is complicating an effort to use special rules to move the legislation with a simple majority vote in the Senate.

Each side is demanding that certain preconditions be met before acting.
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The Bipartisan Trap - And How Democrats Fell Into It - Kaiser Health News

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by Jonathan Cohn

Critics of health care reform have been hammering away at its substance for months. But, since last week's election in Massachusetts, they’ve been focusing their attacks more on the way reform has come together in Congress. As the argument goes, Democrats wrote the bill on their own and in secret, producing proposals full of shady back-room deals that aren’t in the public interest. The symbol of reform’s hidden corruption is the so-called Cornhusker swindle: A promise, extracted by Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, that the federal government would pay the entire cost of expanding Medicaid in his state.

You can’t really defend the deal on the merits. No other state got the special treatment that Nebraska did. But if you stop and think about why Democratic leaders cut that deal, you’ll realize just how wrong-headed the broader critique of the process is. If Democrats hadn’t been so determined to reach out to Republicans--and worked so hard for an agreement that didn’t seem overly partisan--they wouldn’t have made the Nebraska bargain, or many others, in the first place.

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Wile E. Coyote Chases Health Care Reform | ChangingAging.org

by Dr Bill Thomas

My favorite undergraduate political blogger has a nice post up on the dynamic that is currently playing out between the Democrats in Washington and that darned Health Care Reform.

I think he’s got it about right, for now at least.

For the uninitiated, Wile E.Coyote and the Road Runner are classic Warner Brothers cartoon characters (see the clip above) whose antics are the pinnacle of slapstick comedy.

Wile E. Coyote employs endless gadgets and traps to catch the speedy Road Runner. No matter how hard he tries, or diabolical he gets, his plans always backfire, leaving the poor Coyote scorched, crushed, frustrated but determined to try again.

Which, if you think about it, is a little bit like the Democratic party in Washington today!

First, the coyote is armed with an arsenal of weapons (courtesy of ACME). Likewise, the Democrats have the White House, a forty seat majority in the House, and previously a twenty seat majority in the senate.

But just like the lovable lunatic Coyote, the Dems have proven to be their own worst enemy.

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Wile E. Coyote Chases Health Care Reform | ChangingAging.org

Looming retirements could smooth rough votes for House Democrats - TheHill.com

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By Mike Soraghan

There's a silver lining for House Democratic leaders in the growing list of retirements in their caucus -- it could make it easier to round up votes for contentious bills like healthcare.

Four centrist Democratic House members are retiring this year without seeking higher office. More are expected, and analysts see the number of departures as omens of the Democrats' fortunes in the November election.
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