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What The Congressional Research Service Report Really Says About Immigrants And Health Care Reform

By Andrea Nill Sanchez on Aug 27, 2009 at 7:30 pm

77745389_5dc2b84dd6Shortly after the Congressional Research Service released their report on the treatment of noncitizens in the House health care bill, the anti-immigrant hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), was already patting itself on the back. “Case closed. Illegal aliens will be eligible to participate in the health care program offered by the House bill unless Congress acts to amend the bill,” stated Dan Stein, president of FAIR. However, CRS’ analysis was much more nuanced than Stein would like to admit and — if anything — it highlights how the health care bill could actually hurt undocumented immigrants more than it helps them in the absence of any major reform of our immigration laws.

Sec. 242 and 246 of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 explicitly state that only individuals who are lawfully present in US will receive any of the benefits provided in the bill. Stein is right that the CRS points out that the bill does not contain a mechanism to verify immigration status. Yet he downplays a key point of the report: under §142(a)(3), the Health Choices Commissioner is responsible for determining the eligibility of individual affordability credits which implies that he’ll also have to determine the mechanism to verify the eligibility and immigration status of noncitizens.

CRS’ analysis is pretty much in line with what others have been saying. Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Jonathan Blazer of the National Immigration Law Center have both asserted that verification mechanisms for the new subsidy program will be determined during the implementation process (after the bill is passed) which allows the government to choose the “mechanism [which] best matches the underlying process for getting a subsidy.” The report also points out that nothing in the House bill overturns the precedent set by the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act which prohibited undocumented immigrants from being eligible for most public benefits and even severely restricted the eligibility of legal immigrants. It should also be noted that, in the case of Medicaid, stringent verification mechanisms are known to have barred more American citizens than undocumented immigrants at a high cost to taxpayers: for every $100 spent by taxpayers to implement documentation requirements in six states, only 14 cents were saved.

The report also exposes one of the more problematic aspects of the bill’s treatment of noncitizens. The House bill currently mandates that all citizens as well as “resident aliens” must have health insurance. However, “resident alien” is a term defined by tax, not immigration law and it includes undocumented immigrants who meet the “substantial presence test.” That means that all undocumented immigrants who fall into the category of “resident alien” would be required to obtain health insurance and will be fined if they fail to do so. However, that doesn’t in any way imply that the government is going to help them since only individuals who are lawfully present in the United States are eligible for any of the federal assistance provided in the bill. Ultimately — if the nation’s broken immigration system isn’t addressed — the proposed health care bill essentially penalizes undocumented immigrants for not having insurance that they won’t even have access to in the first place.

With that said, the CRS report ultimately sheds more light on the desperate need for immigration reform that addresses the problem of current and future flows of unauthorized immigration as opposed to the deficiencies of the House health care bill related to its treatment of noncitizens. While anti-immigrant activists continue to exploit health care reform to recruit support for their nativist agenda, the smartest way to approach both issues would be to pass immigration reform and turn uninsured undocumented immigrants into legal residents who pay into the system.

Climate Progress

Climate Progress at three years: Why I blog

By Joe Romm on Aug 27, 2009 at 7:16 pm

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

No, I’m not operating under the misimpression that my writing can be compared with George Orwell’s.  I know of no essayists today who come close to matching his skill in writing.  On top of that, bloggers simply lack the time necessary for consistently first-rate efforts.  I’ve written some two million words since launching this blog three years ago this week.  Perfection isn’t an option.

But operating under the dictum, “if you want to be a better writer, read better writers,” I took on vacation Facing Unpleasant Facts, a collection of Orwell’s brilliant narrative essays.  My life has been almost the exact opposite of Orwell’s.  Indeed, if you think you had a rough childhood, trying reading, “Such, such were the joys.”  Compared to Orwell, we’ve all been raised by Mary Poppins.

Orwell does have the soul of a blogger, as we’ll see.  He is solipsistic almost to a fault, but with a brutal honesty that puts even the best modern memoirist to shame.

Read about how his headmaster cured his bedwetting with a beating, a double caning with a riding crop in fact, after he foolishly announced that the first one “didn’t hurt.”  Or read “Shooting an Elephant,” with its gut-punching first line, “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people “” the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

Second, he has “a power of facing unpleasant facts,” which I think is perhaps the primary quality I aspire for here.

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts — see “What if the MSM simply can’t cover humanity’s self-destruction?” and “The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress” and dozens more examples here.

Unlike Orwell, I knew from a very early age, certainly by the age of five or six, that I would be a physicist, like my uncle, and I announced that proudly to all who asked.

I knew I didn’t want to be a professional writer since I saw how hopeless it was to make a living that way.  My father was the editor of a small newspaper (circulation 20,000) that he turned into a medium-sized newspaper (70,000) but was paid dirt, even though he managed the equivalent of a large manufacturing enterprise — while simultaneously writing three editorials a day — that in any other industry would pay ten times as much.  My mother pursued freelance writing for many, many years, an even more difficult way to earn a living (see also “This could not possibly be more off topic“).

Why share this?  Orwell, who shares far, far more in his master class of essay writing, argues in “Why I write“:

Read more

Politics

‘Tenther’ Activists Add The Federal Highway System To List Of Programs To Kill

By Ian Millhiser on Aug 27, 2009 at 6:15 pm

highwayIn a recent radio interview, Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) made the seemingly-innocuous statement that the federal highway system, as well as federal laws ensuring safe drugs and safe airplanes, are constitutional. Nevertheless, Shea-Porter is now under attack by “tenther” activists who believe that virtually everything the federal government does is unconstitutional:

Author and historian David Barton, the president of WallBbuilders, [sic] says Shea-Porter’s comments reflect her view that Washington government should run everything. He notes that both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments say anything that is not explicitly covered in the Constitution belongs to the states and to the people.

“All of those issues belong to the states and the people. Healthcare is not a federal issue. It is a state and people issue — the same with transportation. The Constitution does say that the federal government can take care of what are called the post roads — those on which the mail travels — but outside of that, states are responsible for their own highways, their own roads, their own county, local, state roads,” he notes. “And her comment about, ‘Well, the Constitution doesn’t cover drug use and drug abuse’ — yes it does, and that is under the criminal justice issues that belong to the states.”

As ThinkProgress previously reported, conservatives are increasingly enraptured with tentherism, which claims that landmark federal programs such as Medicare, Social Security, the VA health system and the G.I. Bill are violations of the 10th Amendment — and many leading conservative officials are determined to impose the tentherism on the country. Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) is a tenther, as are Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas embraces tenther claims that the federal minimum wage and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters, among other things, are unconstitutional.

Indeed, even federal highways opponent Barton is no small figure in conservative politics; Barton is one of six “experts” tasked with rewriting Texas’ public school textbooks to teach a right-wing alternative history to Texan children. Apparently, Barton and his fellow tenthers also want to rewrite the Constitution.

Health

GrassleyWatch: What Does He Not Understand About ‘Fully Paid For’?

By Igor Volsky on Aug 27, 2009 at 6:07 pm

grassleyisnothealthreform

Yesterday, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee and a member of the so-called bipartisan ‘Gang of Six’ negotiations — joined the growing chorus of Republican lawmakers who are using the adjusted deficit numbers to argue for a smaller health reform package:

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, one of three Senate Republicans negotiating on health care, said the soaring federal budget deficit “puts a stake in the heart” of $1 trillion measures being debated in Congress….“It’s going to have a big impact on whether I’ll even support something,” he said at a town-hall meeting yesterday in Le Mars, Iowa….Still, he said, a forecast by the Congressional Budget Office that deficits between 2010 and 2019 will total $7.1 trillion calls for a more-limited measure than the $900 billion bill the bipartisan group was discussing last month. “We’re going to be looking at smaller numbers,” he said. The deficit projection also dooms $1 trillion measures already moving through the House and approved by the Senate health committee, Grassley said.

Grassley’s suggestion that health care reform would grow the deficit demonstrates that the Senator is either misinformed or deliberately manufacturing reasons to oppose health care reform. The budget framework requires a deficit-neutral health care reform bill, and the Democrats have pledged to fully finance coverage expansion from savings within the system and new sources of revenue.

Secondly, health care is the economy; health care is the deficit. Health care costs are the long-term driving force in federal and state budgets and represent the single most important factor “influencing the Federal Government’s long-term fiscal balance.” The Democrats’ health care reform will help re-orient the system from spending 80% of its dollars treating chronic illnesses into a system prevents the chronic conditions from developing in the first place. It will begin to change the way providers are paid so that we are rewarding quality care and not just quantity care.

In other words, in order to transform America’s expensive patchwork health care system into a system that covers everyone and reduces health care spending by successfully preventing and managing chronic conditions, Congress will have to invest a significant amount into reform. If done right, that investment can place the system and the nation on a firm fiscal footing and save millions of middle class families from catastrophic increases in health care costs. As Tim Fernholz points out, “health-care reform will lead to increases in GDP, reaching over 2 percent in 2020 that would lead to proportional increases in tax revenue and lower deficits. But most important, eliminating the “crazy system of cross-subsidies,” as Center for Budget and Policy Priorities economist Jim Horney calls the complex interweaving of publicly and privately subsidized care for the under- and uninsured, would create a much simpler framework for future cost-reduction efforts.”

The Wonk Room has compiled a list of Grassley’s most egregious misrepresentations and will continue monitoring and fact checking Grassley’s statements throughout the reform process. Read the full document HERE.

Yglesias

Grassley Claims Large Deficit Compels Him to Embrace Budget-Busting Status Quo

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 27, 2009 at 5:26 pm

Senator Chuck Grassley continues to cast about for pretexts to spike health reform and please his party leadership so he’s hit upon an unusually nonsensical reason:

Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, one of three Senate Republicans negotiating on health care, said the soaring federal budget deficit “puts a stake in the heart” of $1 trillion measures being debated in Congress.

Obviously, the scope of the budget deficit in 2009 and 2010 has nothing to do with how the health care system ought to look in 2013 when the bills under consideration phase in. If the bills are affordable in 2013, then they’re affordable in 2013 regardless of current deficits. And if they’re not affordable, then small current deficits wouldn’t change that either. But more to the point, as the administration was emphasizing before Grassley’s “death panel” demogoguery helped scare them off the point, health care reform is integral to getting the long-run budget deficit under control:

ek_entitlements_three-1

Whatever you think of the current budget predictions, nothing about sticking with the status quo makes things better.

Media

Will ABC Still Have Stossel Cover Health Care After He Pushed Claim That The Network Said Was ‘Untrue?’

By Matt Corley on Aug 27, 2009 at 5:15 pm

For years now, libertarian journalist John Stossel has used his position at ABC News to attack the idea of a government role in providing health care for all Americans. For instance, in a 20/20 segment earlier this year, Stossel framed his report on congressional health care reform by saying, “some in Congress say they’re moving closer to a plan that will make health care cheaper and better. Sounds great, but when government takes charge it can also mean innovation stops.” Watch it:

Appearing as the keynote speaker at an Americans for Prosperity event yesterday, Stossel called Medicare “a Ponzi scheme” and pushed the thoroughly debunked “death panel” claim:

Stossel, a self-described libertarian, said Obama’s reform proposals would “make things much worse” and actually increase costs and reduce consumer choice.

He also called Medicare a Ponzi scheme gone broke that if left unfixed would lead to limits on care.

“There will be death panels if we do nothing,” Stossel said of Medicare, using the phrase that former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made famous in relation to the health-reform bill, which does not directly affect Medicare.

Stossel’s invocation of “death panels” is surprising considering that his employer, ABC News, ran a “reality check” on the claim and found that it was an “untrue” “myth.” “Two dozen physicians were interviewed by ABC News’ medical unit, and each said these kinds of consultations help families and they are happening already. This provision, they say, would only make them more widespread.”

Given his disregard for his own news agency’s reporting, will ABC continue to give Stossel valuable air time to launch false attacks on health care reform?

Yglesias

Dutch-Style Commuter Bikes

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 27, 2009 at 4:43 pm

Despite the recent increase in popularity of bicycling as a mode of urban transportation, American cycling is still predominantly viewed as a kind of sport. Consequently, the vast majority of bikes you see here are either mountain bikes (for mountains), road bikes (for racing), or hybrid bikes (a blend of the two). In Europe, by contrast, it’s more common to see bikes that are specifically designed for use as urban commuter vehicles. Seth Stevenson explains the basic elements of the urban bike:

1) Upright posture. You sit with your back perpendicular to the ground instead of hunched forward over the handlebars. It’s a far more comfortable and relaxed position. Because your head is up high, it’s easier to see over car roofs in traffic. It’s also easier for the cars to see you.

2) Fenders. These semicircular arcs hover just above the tops of the bike’s tires. They prevent any up-splash when you ride through puddles and also lend the bike a rather dignified appearance.

3) Fully covered chains. Greasy metal links are hidden far out of sight, behind a chain case, meaning you can ride to work in a suit without schmutzing your trouser cuffs.

Jamis Commuter 3.0

Jamis Commuter 3.0

He then goes on to discuss several different brands of actual Dutch bicycles. But they’re all very expensive. I paid much less money than that for a “Dutch-style” American bike, the Jamis Commuter 3.0. I’ve never actually owned any other bike, but I like it quite a lot and it definitely delivers on the main virtues of European-style cycling—less speed, more comfort and convenience—something to use to get around town faster than you could on foot, but not actually race with.

Politics

New Files Prove Pentagon Is Profiling Reporters

By Amanda Terkel on Aug 27, 2009 at 4:36 pm

This week, Stars and Stripes revealed that the Pentagon had hired a controversial contractor to screen journalists seeking to embed with U.S. forces. The Rendon Group determines whether reporters’ coverage “was ‘positive,’ ‘negative’ or ‘neutral’ compared to mission objectives.” The Pentagon’s decision was especially shocking in light of Rendon’s sordid past: The group personally set up the Iraqi National Congress and helped install Ahmad Chalabi as leader, whose main goal — “pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein” — Rendon helped facilitate.

Military officials immediately went about furiously refuting the reports. “We have not denied access to anyone because of what may or may not come out of their biography,” said public affairs officer Air Force Capt. Elizabeth Mathias. “It’s so we know with whom we’re working.” Other officials for the Pentagon and Rendon went even further:

“They are not doing that [rating reporters], that’s not been a practice for some time — actually since the creation of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan” in October 2008, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters Monday. “I can tell you that the way in which the Department of Defense evaluates an article is its accuracy. It’s a good article if it’s accurate. It’s a bad article if it’s inaccurate. That’s the only measurement that we use here at the Defense Department.” [...]

The Rendon Group declared in a statement that “the information and analysis we generate is developed … not by ranking of reporters.”

But new files prove otherwise. Stars and Stripes obtained profiles produced by Rendon. They clearly calculate the percentage of “positive” stories written by a reporter and offer ideas not about how to get the reporter to produce more accurate stories, but how to get more “favorable coverage” for the military. Fox News also obtained a slide from a Rendon PowerPoint presentation, where headlines from major newspapers are rated with “a plus sign, a negative sign or a capital ‘N,’ presumably for neutral.” Images from the profiles and PowerPoint:

rendonslides

Stars and Stripes also notes that one of the profiles looked at a reporter’s work as recently as May, indicating that the ranking did not stop in October 2008, as Whitman claimed.

What remains unclear is how extensively this ranking affects whether the military allows certain reporters to embed with troops. At least one reporter, Heath Druzin with Stars and Stripes, was barred for refusing to highlight more good news from the military. Fox News also obtained a Rendon memo that “showed that past coverage is at least taken into account during the process.”

Yglesias

Unlikely Committee Scenarios

By Matthew Yglesias on Aug 27, 2009 at 3:58 pm

Sleepy Hollow Farm, Vermont (cc photo by snapstermax)

Sleepy Hollow Farm, Vermont (cc photo by snapstermax)

So far this year, Chris Dodd has been basically double-fisting as head of both HELP and Banking, but with Ted Kennedy now dead he needs to choose between them which sets off various musical chairs scenarios. My understanding is that he’ll almost certainly take the helm at HELP, since he wants to distance himself from some of his work on bank regulation and score a legacy-building win on health care. But if not:

If Dodd doesn’t leave Banking, then HELP would go to Iowa’s Tom Harkin, who would have to give up his post as Chairman of the Agriculture Committee to take it. The next most senior members of the Ag Committee are Leahy, Conrad and Baucus, all of whom chair more important committees. So Ag would probably go to Blanche Lincoln. If Harkin stays put — and he is an Iowan, so chairing Ag is worth something to him — then HELP would go to Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski.

Not only will Dodd probably leave Banking, if he did choose to stay Harkin would almost certainly not give up Agriculture. And even if Harkin did give up Agriculture, Leahy probably wouldn’t give up Judiciary. But in the unlikely event that all this did happen and Pat Leahy became chair of the Agriculture Committee, the results would be potentially hilarious. After all, we’re used to agriculture policy being completely dominated by the interests of the big midwestern corn producers. But what if we instead redirected all that money into massive subsidies for maple syrup and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? The public health consequences could be dire. At the same time, I believe Vermont is a major center of artisanal cheese production and the results of more subsidies for that could be delicious.

Part of the larger moral of the story here is that one of the perverse aspects of the committee system is that it encourages progressive politicians to maximize their power on the issues where they take the least-progressive stands. I agree with Tom Harkin about almost everything except agricultural policy. And Chris Dodd has a much better record on all the issues that aren’t financial institution regulation than on the issue he has the most power over. If you just reassigned everyone at random, you’d probably improve outcomes.

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