In the 2010 midterm elections, elders voted Republican 58 to 39 percent. As Paul Krugman said on his blog Monday:
”Oh, and for all those older Americans who voted GOP last year because those nasty Democrats were going to cut Medicare, I have just one word: suckers!”
No kidding.
Yesterday, chairman of the House Budget Committee, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, presented his budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. It is, basically, a blueprint to destroy Medicare and Medicaid.
Oh, and there is this stunner: a cut in the top income tax rate for individuals and businesses from 35 percent to 25 percent.
But back to Medicaid and Medicare. Here is a short version of Ryan's plan as it affects these two programs:
Medicaid would be eliminated by changing it into a block grant program without federal guidelines that would allow states to spend the lump sum grants as they choose. Oh, yeah, that will work out well for poor people.
Medicare under this plan would be privatized. Beginning in 2021, the current program would be replaced with a federal voucher system under which elders would purchase health coverage on the open market.
Oh, sure - try to find an insurance company when you're old and sick. At 64 and healthy, I couldn't find coverage at any price so I lived on a wing and a prayer until I qualified for Medicare. Had I been hit by a truck or had a serious illness during that time, I now would be among the elder bankruptcy statistics.
And get this about the Ryan Medicare plan, the vouchers are designed NOT to keep up with expected increases in health care costs and, therefore, premiums would quickly grow far beyond the amount of the vouchers leaving elders under-insured or without coverage at all.
(If you want more details and commentary on these plans, just google “paul ryan budget proposal.” There are already a zillion stories.)
Keep in mind that these changes would affect only people 54 and younger. (For a frightening take on this generational divide-and-conquer gambit, check out Matt Yglesias.)
Paul Ryan's draconian proposal has almost no chance of getting anywhere in Congress. It is so extreme that it makes the Simpson/Bowles plan look almost progressive - and that is the real danger: Stating the unthinkable moves the starting point of the debate much further to the right.
If Medicaid and Medicare are substantially destroyed, it will be all those elder Republican voters who sentenced their own children and grandchildren to an old age of poverty, sickness and earlier death.
Krugman, I think, gets it wrong about “suckers.” It seems to me that for those 65 and older Republican voters, it was more a matter of, I've got mine and screw you, my child. Sometimes I'm ashamed to be an old person.
Twenty-two Republicans senators are threatening to vote against raising the debt ceiling later this year unless the president concedes to cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the current budget negotiations.
“Strong leadership is needed now to advance possible solutions to ensure that our entitlement programs can serve both current and future generations. Without action to begin addressing the deficit, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for us to support a further increase in the debt ceiling,” wrote Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) in the letter, obtained by POLITICO. More
A New Hampshire lawmaker resigned Monday amid criticism for suggesting to a constituent that the state ship people with disabilities to Siberia.
Rep. Martin Harty, a 91-year-old first-term Republican in the state’s House of Representatives, drew fire after it became public that he told a constituent that “the world is too populated” with “too many defective people.”
“I wish we had a Siberia so we could ship them all off to freeze to death and die and clean up the population,” Harty continued, according to the constituent’s account. He specified that he was referring to “the mentally ill, the retarded, people with physical disabilities and drug addictions.”
When questioned about the comments last week, Harty was unapologetic and told the Concord Monitor that he was “just kidding.”
But on Monday Harty submitted his letter of resignation to state House Speaker William O’Brien. More
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.
Democrats have been eagerly awaiting a debate on repealing the Affordable Care Act. And they have good reason:
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 nation is divided over the law, but the strength and intensity of the opposition appear diminished. 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.
As for repeal, only about one in four say they want to do away with the law completely. Among Republicans support for repeal has dropped sharply, from 61 percent after the elections to 49 percent now.
Also, 43 percent say they want the law changed so it does more to re-engineer the health care system. Fewer than one in five say it should be left as it is.
The old health care status quo was always politically untouchable, and more people want the law expanded than want it repealed. Read More
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(Washington Post) House Republican leaders said Thursday that they will begin their effort to repeal the new health-care law next week, a return to normal legislative business after the shootings in Arizona suspended activity on Capitol Hill. But no one quite knows what normal will look like, following a wrenching week in which members confronted concerns about their own safety and whether their heated rhetoric played any role in last Saturday's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 18 others. As Giffords recovers in a Tucson hospital, many of her colleagues in Washington said they plan to change the tone in the House, a body that has served as the epicenter of caustic political debate for the past 20 years.
By brazenly doing so, House Republican leaders are tacitly admitting that 1) health care reform is deficit reduction, and 2) their claims of fiscal responsibility are completely empty.
Not only is health care reform the equivalent of deficit reduction, health care reform is the only serious path to deficit reduction. The CBO estimates the savings of the Affordable Care Act to be $1 trillion over the next two decades, and many health care experts believe that's a conservative estimate because the cost-control provisions are inherently experimental.
To exempt heath care reform from a deficit reduction rule is to not have a deficit reduction rule. Full Article
During the 111th Congress, we saw the passage of sweeping reforms in health care and consumer protections, which defend Americans from hidden fees, abusive terms and deceptive practices when obtaining credit cards and mortgages. However, the incoming congress will have a full slate of new issues to consider, which range from deficit reduction to education reform. Here are some issues that we anticipate the 112th Congress to address:
by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Saul Friedman (bio)
I read somewhere that the White House and congressional offices have
been besieged by phone calls and emails from older people complaining at
the news that, for the second consecutive year, there won’t be a cost
of living increase in Social Security benefits.
I don’t take issue with those complaints, for most of us know that
the cost of living has gone up measurably, especially for people who
depend on those Social Security payments. But what caught my attention
and disappointed me was the news that some seniors “erroneously believe
it is the Congress and the White House that are denying them raises.”
It seems to me that people who are on Social Security ought to know
enough about their most important federal program to understand that the
Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) is based on the rate of inflation
measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Consumer Price Index
for workers, called the CPI-W.
Some experts want to substitute the CPI-E (for experimental) which
would be closer to the reality for elders, but that’s another subject.
My point is that most of us ought to know that neither the Congress
nor the White House is responsible for the freeze; indeed, many
congressional Democrats have been pushing for a one time payment of $250
for everyone on Social Security.
If that doesn’t happen in the lame duck Congress because of the
coming changes in power, those deluded seniors who voted for Republicans
because they were angry over the COLA will get what the rest of us
don’t deserve – cuts in Social Security benefits or maybe an attempt at
privatization.
Similarly, if the polling was accurate, millions of older voters
who should have known better were suckered into falling for the ads of
the phony right wing senior group, 60 Plus, the Republicans who all
voted against health reform, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and, of
course, the health insurance lobby, and believing that the reforms will
cut more than $500 billion from your Medicare over the next decade. They
were wrong.
One of the best health care reporters, Trudy Lieberman, of the Columbia Journalism Review, put the so-called Medicare cuts in perspective on November 1:
“The health reform law cuts the growth in Medicare spending
by $533 billion. Some might like to call that a saving [as President
Obama has done] because Medicare might not be spending as much as it
otherwise would, but the term can be confusing.
“But the law also adds $105 billion in new spending for more coverage
for seniors who have very high drug expenses and the elimination of
copayments for preventive services. The net reduction in Medicare
spending is $428 billion over ten years...
“About 40 percent of these cuts come from cuts in payments to hospitals
and other providers, except doctors. That money will be used to
subsidize insurance policies for the uninsured.
“Another 25 percent comes from reductions in the overpayments to
Medicare Advantage plans,” which cost nine percent more than Medicare
spends per beneficiary.
“Phasing out the overpayments,” Lieberman continues, “will also hold
down increases in Part B premiums...While cuts to MA plans may be
unpopular with those who have them, they do strengthen Medicare for
everyone.”
So, why will we haggle over the price of meat or an oil change, but
we will believe the very people who voted against health reform and have
promised to kill the best parts of the bill that passed? How come older
Americans confused over the health care selfishly voted to put Medicare
itself in danger?
Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said the right wing propaganda campaign was working in the mid-term elections.
“The biggest problem Democrats have with the health care
bill,” she said,“ is the dislike of the bill by senior citizens, who
have been scared to death about it.”
Judith Stein, who runs the Center for Medicare Advocacy, said of the ad campaign,
“It’s a way to get seniors to vote against those who supported health reform.”
President Obama shares some of the blame when he helped sell the
reforms by emphasizing that they would “save” more than $500 billion in
Medicare. The so-called savings strengthened Medicare. But because the
reforms were themselves complex, what got lost in translation were at
least two facts: the savings extended the life of the Medicare Hospital
Insurance Trust Fund, and cut only some of the overpayments to private
insurance companies that sell Medicare Advantage coverage. Those
policies are not good for traditional Medicare.
Let’s recall that such policies were instituted by Republicans under
Newt Gingrich in 1995 to wean seniors away from, and undermine,
traditional Medicare in favor of HMOs and PPOs. Fifteen years later,
only 25 percent of seniors have such insurance and under the reforms,
they would not have lost their coverage.
The federal government has spent billions of Medicare dollars to
subsidize that 25 percent. But these short-sighted Medicare
beneficiaries were willing to privatize their Medicare. Some
beneficiaries even declared during town meetings that “government should
stay out of Medicare,” an obvious oxymoron since the government runs
Medicare.
Now they may get their wish for they’ve opened the door to a new
Republican effort to get the government out of Medicare. One coming
proposal would substitute your Medicare benefits for vouchers, which
beneficiaries would use to buy coverage from insurance companies.
To allay fear of change, none of the MA companies, under the law, are
permitted to reduce Medicare benefits. But most were remaining in
business despite the cutbacks in federal subsidies.
In any case, as Stein points out, nothing in the law could reduce
Medicare’s benefits; indeed, they were expanded with the savings able to
pay the full cost (no more co-pays) of yearly physical exams,
preventive services such as mammograms, colonoscopies, prostate tests,
flu shots and vaccinations.
Republicans, who will be in control of the House come January, have
vowed to kill many of the health care reforms perhaps by starving the
reforms of funds. And they want to hold hearings to grill Health and
Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius and the head of the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Donald Berwick.
But some of the reforms, like the free preventive services and
coverage for children and adults with pre-existing conditions, may be
too popular for Republicans to attack. In addition, the Democratic
Senate can, in a turnabout, block the excesses of the right-wing House.
And President Obama can use the power of the veto, if he hangs tough.
Sadly, though, nothing new for seniors - like long term care - will get done in this reactionary, penurious new Congress.
Lieberman concluded in the Columbia Journalism Review:
“Most people, especially those on Medicare, have never
really understood how the program works. That made it easier for each
side to get away with advertising flim-flam.”
I wonder if those older people have learned enough to protect not
only Medicare, but the Republicans’ favorite target – Social Security.
President Obama and Democratic leaders claimed victory in March when the new health care law was enacted. But the bitter partisan and ideological war is far from over, and ongoing battles threaten to undermine it.
Twenty-one states are challenging the law in court on constitutional grounds. Voters in at least three other states are weighing ballot initiatives opposing it. And "repeal" has become the rallying cry of Republicans going into the midterm elections. Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, has made it clear that if his party takes control of the House in November, "repealing this bill has to be our number one priority."
The Republican leadership's new agenda, "A Pledge to America," announced yesterday, also calls for the law to be repealed and replaced with a scaled-down list of provisions. These include medical malpractice reform and expanding health savings accounts.
Where is the law vulnerable and could it be overturned? If so, what would be the consequences for the country and individual Americans? Full Article
GOP and Tea Party candidates are promoting the privatization of Social Security. If they win control of Congress in the next election and succeed in giving the government program to Wall Street, retirees in Hernando County, Florida, as well as all Americans, may be putting their Social Security benefits at risk.
House Republican leaders introduced a bill Thursday to repeal and replace the sweeping healthcare law adopted in late March.
According to Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the measure would repeal the current law and replace it with the alternative the minority party offered to the original healthcare legislation last November. Continue Reading
Diane over at Cab Drollery points us to a recent business section column in the LA Times written by Michael Hiltzgig that describes the ongoing crusade to “privatize” Social Security.
Like a zombie tromping through a Hollywood gorefest, the idea of privatizing Social Security still walks among us.
The last promoter of the idea that people should personally invest their Social Security assets in the stock market was President George W. Bush, in 2001. With the dot-com crash still ringing in people’s memories, the idea died in 2005.
The market hasn’t yet recovered from its most recent crash, but the monster unaccountably is back on its feet. This time it comes dressed up as part of the “Roadmap for America’s Future” recently unfurled by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking GOP member of the House Budget Committee.
The Roadmap is a retort to the charge that the Republican Party contributes no ideas to the national debate on fiscal issues, only “no” votes in Congress. It’s a road map to the dismantling of federal social programs under the guise of making them fiscally sound, while cutting taxes for the rich. (The plan eliminates taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends.)
Why do people rob banks? Because that’s where the money is.
Why does Wall Street want to privatize Social Security? You already know the answer. Continue Reading
Thanks to the Republicans’ lurch to the far-out right, they can at last be honest in their intentions if they get another chance at governing in 2010 or 2012. They no longer need hide in sheep’s clothing; they can now be more comfortable as what they are: wolves in wolves’ clothing. And that means they will do what they say if they get the chance.
That is to say, the present Republican leadership and its young new ideologues, have put pretense aside and now openly intend to destroy, during their next watch, the twin pillars of the nation’s public social insurance system – 75-year-old Social Security and 50-year-old Medicare.
If you think I exaggerate, check out their legislation, for H.R. 4529, introduced by the top Republican on the Budget Committee, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and S. 1240, introduced by the most right wing member of the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina.
Some excerpts in a moment, but underlying the proposals, “Roadmap for America’s Future,” is the belief of the now-dominant right-wing of the Republican Party that Americans should be weaned from Medicare and Social Security to reduce the national debt, permit deep reductions in taxes for the wealthy, encourage self-reliance, personal responsibility and less dependence on government and while putting the billions in Social Security taxes to work in American enterprises, the stock markets, to build individual investment accounts instead of a pension.
Republicans, of course, have long advocated self-reliance and individual responsibility - when they opposed child labor laws and opposed Social Security during the Great Depression and Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. But they’ve been disguising their opposition partly because these programs have been so successful and popular with the hundreds of millions of Americans who have been made whole with medical care and pensions. And the Republican Party was closer to the main stream.
Thus, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, he calmed the fears of older Americans when he promised to cut only “waste, fraud and abuse” in government. As a commentator, he had spoken in vigorous, ideological opposition to Social Security and Medicare – as the harbingers of socialism. But as president, Reagan left Medicare alone and in 1983, he appointed a commission that strengthened Social Security to build today’s $3 trillion trust fund for the boomers’ retirement. The Trustees say the trust fund will last until 2037, unless the recession drains it more rapidly.
More background: In 1994-5, when Southern Republicans under House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, his sidekicks Richard Armey and Tom Delay of Texas took over the Congress, their “Contract with America” noted that Reagan had been unable to end many federal programs and the contract proposed a “Personal Responsibility Act,” to end welfare for poor women. But the Contract refrained from frightening the nation for it mentioned not a word about Social Security - which Gingrich called “the third rail” in American politics - nor Medicare.
But Armey let it be known at a press breakfast that the Republicans intended “wean our old people away from dependence on Medicare.” An aide quickly denied Armey meant to kill Medicare. Gingrich told health insurers that the Medicare agency would “wither on the vine.” Eventually it became clear what they meant.
Under the Republican threats to slash Medicare, Bill Clinton agreed to allow private companies to sell Medicare policies, now called Medicare Advantage, which are heavily subsidized and serve a fifth of Medicare beneficiaries.
In 2003, George Bush took Medicare privatization further with the Medicare Part D drug benefit which is wholly private. That bill also put limits on Medicare’s budget growth and instituted a means test for the first time.
Some of that has been reversed in the Democratic Congress, but Medicare is more private than it has ever been, although the proposed health reforms would end most of the $250 billion subsidy for Medicare Advantage.
In 2005, Bush sought to build on his Medicare privatization with an attempt to turn Social Security and its trillions into millions of individual investment accounts. While no one, except Bush, was burned by the third rail, his effort failed partly because even Republicans were afraid of ending Social Security’s $650 billion a year in insurance and pension benefits.
But the opposition, which continues to denigrate and undermine Social Security, has grown bolder and more radical and has not given up.
Sensing new opportunities because of the deficits they helped create and the strain the recession has put on Social Security and Medicare, the Republicans and Democratic deficit hawks have set their sights on both programs as if all “entitlements” contribute to the deficit. Social Security, for example, is self-sustaining and only its administrative costs (one percent) contributes to the deficit.
Nevertheless, the “Roadmap for America’s Future” (a more appealing name than the legalistic “Contract With America,“) would end future Social Security protection for all persons under 55 and substitute a “Personal Social Security Savings Program” - that is, investment accounts like that provided by the government (federal employees now also get Social Security).
Incidentally, the trust fund would no longer be available to loan money to the treasury and thus earn money. Instead the trillions in the trust fund, which belong to you and me, would be “liquidated” and available for Wall Street.
Instead of the guarantees of Medicare, persons who will become eligible in, say ten years, would get an average of $11,000, in vouchers to purchase health insurance on the open market. That would be available through a newly merged Federal Hospital Insurance Trust fund and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Fund. You tell me if that would be enough insurance to last the rest of your life even if, G-D forbid you have a catastrophic illness. Funds would be slashed for the Part D drug program, which would be means tested and voluntary.
There is no mention of restraining the costs of premiums or regulating insurance companies’ practices; that would be a restraint on free enterprise. The clever part of the proposal would pit the old against the young who will be on their own and would no longer have to pay for their elders.
But imagine grandma or grandpa, when Medicare is no longer available, having to shop for coverage if they are already ill or disabled or suffering from dementia. Ask your parents what it was like before Medicare. Consider what would be lost if there was no longer any intergenerational responsibility.
But the juiciest part of the Roadmap, the one that will bring joy to the rich and appeal to fiscally conscious Republicans are the numerous tax breaks it proposes. It would end taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, estate and gift taxes and the corporate income tax. (Unfortunately, President Obama has caved in to the deficit fears with his creation of a deficit commission and he even praised Ryan as a person with “ideas.”)
Finally, a page from Dickens and the 19th century workhouses: The bill would end, next January 1, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which the Congress passed over George Bush’s veto. You don’t believe Americans would do this to children? Look for the bills at GovTrack or OpenCongress.
"Don't cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong." So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.
And irony died.
Now, Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What's amazing, however, is that they're getting away with it.
It's not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America's freedom. Nor is it the fact that, as House speaker, Gingrich tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare.
Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare's rising costs, they are seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process would begin with cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that's more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.
Leading House Republicans raised the prospect Monday night that they might refuse to participate in President Obama's proposed health care summit if the White House chooses not to scrap the existing reform bills and start over.
In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) expressed frustration at reports that Obama intends to put the Democratic bills on the table for discussion at the Feb. 25 summit.
"If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected, Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate," Boehner and Cantor wrote.
Obama proposed the half-day summit on national television Sunday, but in their letter, the two GOP leaders offer their suspicion that the president is not serious about opening a bipartisan negotiation on health care. Continue Reading
by Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor of The New Republic
The idea that Republicans haven’t had a chance to present their ideas on health care reform is a bit mind-boggling. Five separate congressional committees had hearings; each chamber had floor debates. That’s hundreds of hours the GOP had to talk about health care, all of it in public view and televised on C-SPAN. And that’s not even including all of the unofficial channels at the Republicans’ disposal. Generally speaking, the party of Rush Limbaugh and Fox Television doesn’t struggle to get across its message.
But if President Obama is determined to give Republicans one more public forum for presenting their health care agenda, as he will do when he meets with GOP leaders on Feb. 25, promised last week, maybe that is just as well. For most of last year, Republicans spent their time attacking Democratic plans for reform, rather than describing their own. But now they’ve put a plan on the table. Showcasing that plan--and comparing it to what the Democrats have proposed--might help clarify a few things.
The Republican health care plan is part of the "Roadmap for America's Future." Its chief architect is Paul Ryan, ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee and a rising star in the party. Republicans boast that the Roadmap is serious plan to get the federal budget under control, which turns out to be a fairly large exaggeration. As Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center has observed, the Roadmap doesn't account for trillions of dollars in lost revenue from its tax cuts. Yes, that's trillions with a "t" at the front and "s" at the back.
The health care portions of the plan, though, really would reduce what the government spends on health care. And they would do so, primarily, by extracting money from Medicare. Instead of continuing to provide coverage directly, the government would issue vouchers that seniors could use to buy private insurance. The value of the vouchers would rise far more slowly than Medicare spending is expected to grow if nothing changes.
On the day of President Obama's State of the Union address, Republican Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin introduced a budget proposal that would, according to the Congressional Budget Office [pdf], create a budget surplus of about five percent by the year 2080. The three main changes that Ryan's Roadmap for America's Future would make are:
• Restructure the federal tax code to eliminate all taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains and estates (which mostly benefits the rich)
• Privatize Medicare and Medicaid
• Privatize Social Security
In other words, the proposal would transfer even more wealth from the working and middle classes to the rich while making it more difficult for everyone to get the health care they need and deserve, not to mention jeopardizing everyone's retirement.
Nowhere in Ryan's Roadmap does the word "defense" appear in relation to the military. There are no spending cuts in it except to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and it increases costs to individuals for those programs and private coverage as it simultaneously cuts benefits.
In theory Congress' return next week from recess could offer a new beginning to the health care reform process, giving everyone a chance to take a deep breath and recalibrate the components of change.
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