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Yglesias

GOP Members of Congress Reluctant to Repeal the Affordable Care Act

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 28, 2010 at 5:31 pm

File-Steve_King,_official_Congressional_photo_portrait

There’s been a largely theoretical debate raging amongst pundits over whether or not it’s realistic to think conservatives will be able to repeal the Affordable Care Act at any point. Dave Weigel brings us the empirical data:

About one month later, neither Bachmann’s bill nor companion bills in the House and Senate have won majority support from their peers. Only 52 House Republicans have co-sponsored Bachmann’s repeal bill, H.R. 4903, and only 62 House Republicans have co-sponsored Rep. Steve King’s (Iowa) repeal bill, H.R. 4972. Most of the same people have co-sponsored both. Only 20 Republican senators have co-sponsored Sen. Jim DeMint’s (S.C.) repeal bill, S. 3152. That worries some Republicans who want to run hard on repeal in November.

“What I run into,” King told me recently, “is that you ask Republicans to support 100 percent full repeal, but there are a number of them that aren’t committed to full repeal. They have an equivocation that they would leave a piece there, a piece there, a piece there. If Republicans cannot unanimously come together and support 100 percent repeal of Obamacare and then start to rebuild, then we will not win this victory, because we’ll be divided by the Democrats and fighting on Obama’s turf.”

And there’s the rub.

Republicans oppose tax increases and Republicans oppose deficit spending when the President is a Democrat. Consequently, none of them could support the Affordable Care Act since it necessarily involved either tax increases or else deficit spending. At some point in the future, however, there will be a Republican President and that person will propose a deficit-increasing tax cut, with the cuts designed so as to overwhelmingly benefit the rich. That may involve repealing some of the revenue sections of the ACA and will certainly involved undoing the ACA’s modestly beneficial impact on the budget. But it won’t be repealed.

Politics

Florida councilman mocks Muslim commission nominee, tells him to publicly ‘say a prayer to your God.’

By Amanda Terkel on Apr 28, 2010 at 5:25 pm

Don Redman Last week, ThinkProgress reported on a Jacksonville, FL council member’s controversial questioning of city Human Rights Commission nominee Parvez Ahmed. Council member Clay Yarborough (R) grilled Ahmed on same-sex marriage, God, Islam, and public prayer, even though the topics had nothing to do with the position he was being considered for. Yesterday, ending three weeks of debate, the council voted 13-6 to approve Ahmed. However, even on this last day, a member of the council mocked Ahmed for being Muslim:

As discussion on the nomination began, [Councilman Don] Redman called Ahmed, who is Muslim, to the podium and asked him to “say a prayer to your God.”

The comment elicited an audible, negative reaction from the audience and Ahmed refused to comply, saying it had no relevance to his nomination to the commission. At the same time, Chief Deputy General Counsel Cindy Laquidara rushed to the podium to reign in Redman, asking to speak with him privately before he continued.

Instead, Redman changed his approach, asking Ahmed if he was offended by Redman’s opening prayer, in which he referenced Jesus. Ahmed again questioned the relevance of the question, but he said Christian prayers did not bother him. “People do have the right to pray according to their faith and according to their beliefs,” he said.

Redman wasn’t convinced. He insisted that Ahmed, despite his answer, would be offended by prayers to Jesus and that is why he shouldn’t serve on Human Rights Commission.

Redman joined Yarborough and voted against Ahmed.

Yglesias

How Much Waste Is There In the Defense Budget?

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 28, 2010 at 4:44 pm

160px-paulryan

Ezra Klein offers an interesting tidbit from a deficit reduction event today:

I’m at the Peterson Foundation’s Fiscal Summit today, and one of the big themes is “everything on the table.” As part of that, Rep. Paul Ryan got asked about defense spending. “There are a lot of savings you can get in defense,” he said. “There’s a lot of waste over there, for sure.”

It’s always good to see people acknowledge that defense spending needs to be part of the spending conversation. And it’s also true that there’s some waste in the defense budget. But I do think that here, as in the domestic budget, we shouldn’t exaggerate its extent particularly because there’s no such thing as a gigantic waste-free organization. The main reason defense spending is high is that the American military does a lot of stuff. Obviously you can be cute and point out that since invading Iraq was strategically counterproductive, all the money we’ve spent on the war was “wasted.” But this isn’t really an issue of efficiency, it’s an issue of fighting too many wars.

Right now we’re trying to be the dominant military power in North America. And also the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. And also the dominant military power in Northeast Asia. And also the dominant military power in South America. And also the dominant military power in Europe. And also to maintain robust expeditionary capacity throughout Africa and Central Asia. That’s expensive stuff. To seriously curb defense spending, we need to restrain the mission.

Politics

Tancredo’s Conspiracy Theory: Obama Hides His Birth Certificate To Stir Up The Right And Make Us Look Crazy

By Ben Armbruster on Apr 28, 2010 at 4:25 pm

tom-tancredoDuring a speech in 2008, Michelle Obama mentioned her husband’s famous trip to Kenya in 2006 and referred to it as his “home country,” most likely referring to the fact that he has immediate ancestral ties there. Video of the comment recently surfaced on YouTube, sending the far-right birther movement into a frenzy.

Referring to the comments, former GOP congressman and anti-immigrant crusader Tom Tancredo told a Tea Party audience, “If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don’t we just send him back?” Fox News’ Alan Colmes asked Tancredo about his statement on Colmes’ radio show yesterday. “Do you think he was born there?” Colmes asked. “I have no idea, believe me I have no idea,” Tancredo said, adding that whether or not he was born there, “I do not believe Barack Obama loves the same America that I do” because he wants to turn the U.S. into “a socialist system.” Tancredo then placed himself firmly in the birther camp:

COLMES: Do you really believe – you know he was born in Hawaii right?

TANCREDO: I have absolutely no idea where he was born.

COLMES: You’ve seen he was born in Hawaii; he was in two Hawaiian newspapers within two days of his birth.

TANCREDO: Anybody can put an article in a newspaper. Just show me your birth certificate!

Tancredo then claimed that Obama is purposefully withholding his birth certificate in order to fuel birther conspiracies that make the right wing look nuts:

TANCREDO: Now they very well not want to show it because they want to propagate this whole thing that’s going on about birthers. … They may be doing it for that reason; I don’t know why they don’t want anyone to see it. … They want it propagated because you know –

COLMES: It makes your party look nuts!

TANCREDO: Yeah well maybe that’s why they don’t produce document, I don’t know.

Listen here (starting at 8:22):

Fox News’ Glenn Beck has also claimed that “the birther issue” is a conspiracy created by the Obama administration, alleging that “operatives on the left” leaked video of Michelle Obama’s speech to “stir the pot.”

“I could probably fill the better part of my afternoons responding to the general lunacy of somebody like Tom Tancredo,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said of Tancredo’s original comments, adding, “I have no real desire to do that.”

Transcript: Read more

Health

Insurance Industry May Reclassify Costs As ‘Medical Care’ To Maintain Profits And Meet Reform’s Requirements

By Igor Volsky on Apr 28, 2010 at 4:20 pm

Draft guidelines issued by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) suggest that health insurers may attempt to game the medical-loss ratio (MLR) requirements in the new health care law by re-classifying certain administrative expenses as medical costs and “deducting taxes and regulatory fees from the premium expense insurers must report.”

The new health care requires insurance companies to spend at least 80% of customers’ premiums on medical care in the individual insurance market, and 85% in the employer/group market until 2014; insurers who can’t meet these minimum standards will have to issue rebates to their customers. But the draft guidelines posted on the NAIC’s website say that insurers may try to “spend more” on medical care without sacrificing profits by expanding the definition of medical service. From the draft:

The denominator (premiums) in the PPACA MLR is reduced by federal and state taxes and licensing or regulatory fees and the numerator (claims) is increased by expenses for activities that improve health care quality. Both of these adjustments will result in a higher MLR than one calculated as incurred claims divided by earned premiums with no adjustment. As discussed below (question B.1.c), PPACA could be read to also include loss adjustment expenses in the numerator, which would further increase the result. In either case, we believe current MLR’s for most issuers in the small group and large group markets, when calculated with the PPACA adjustments, would be higher than the PPACA minimums. The situation is less clear in the individual market. Some issuers would likely have MLR’s below 80% even after the adjustments, while others would be well above the minimum.

The health care law tasks the NAIC — a private body not subject to federal transparency rules and largely funded by the insurance company — with defining the standard definitions, “subject to the certification of the Secretary.” As Judy Dugan, Research Director at Consumer Watchdog, told me during a phone interview, “Previously, having a low MLR was beneficial for a company because Wall Street liked a low MLR, so insurance would be very strict just doing direct medical costs in MLR.” “Now they want to shift the game” by announcing to Wall Street, “our MLR is going to go up by a couple of points but don’t worry we’re shoving administrative costs into it.”

According to page 19 of the health law, administrative costs simply have to meet the new broad definition of “activities that improve health care quality” to be added to the company’s medical loss ratio percentage. “This is how WellPoint has already increased their MLR average by two percentage points,” Dugan said, referring to the company’s recent call with investors. “They just unilaterally announced that they are shifting a number of functions that were previously considered administration into MLR category.”

A recent report from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation also noted that health care industry analysts predict “companies will review their current spending and attempt to shift as many expenses as possible from administrative to medical,” concluding that “a key to the insurance industry’s profitability over the next several years will be ‘how much MLR recharacterizaiton the HHS Secretary allows.’” Consumer advocates believe that the NAIC’s central role in defining MLR categories and insurers’ ability to reclassify costs as “activities that improve health care quality” category will keep ensure the “industry’s profitability.”

Related Posts

Yglesias

Who Is Bailed?

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 28, 2010 at 3:57 pm

(cc photo by simon_music)

(cc photo by simon_music)

An important point from Atrios that he makes specifically about Greece but has general applicability—a bailout “of Greece” would largely be a bailout of Greece’s creditors, you’d be giving Greece money that Greece would use to pay people who own Greek bonds. Obviously that’s win-win for both the bondholders and for Greek people, but it’s actually the bondholders who have more at stake. A roughly parallel situation existed with the AIG bailout, which was less a bailout of AIG than it was of institutions to whom AIG owed money and who failed to do due diligence on AIG’s financial situation.

This is part of what, to me, makes northern European (and especially German) stinginess and self-righteousness about the situation a bit hard to take. The political discourse makes it seem like we’re talking about showering Greece’s citizens with the thrifty Germans’ cash when in fact we’re talking about Greece’s citizens facing tax hikes and spending cuts while German money just cycles back to the big European banks who’ll have holes in their balance sheets if Greece defaults. And in the terms that Tyler Cowen used to frame it, it’s not just that Greece was pretending to be richer than it is, the financial institutions that lent to Greece agreed to believe them! But nobody forces banks to lend to countries with shaky political systems and questionable public finance practices.

Alyssa

Yes. That’s Exactly Right.

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 28, 2010 at 3:52 pm

And by “that,” I mean this conception of how Nick Fury is going to work in Iron Man 2: 

In Jackson, Favreau says, Marvel has a charismatic player with a black-ops grin who can hold his own in a room full of super-powered types.

“He has tremendous presence,” Favreau said. “We have a scene in the film at Randy’s Donutswhere Tony, after a rough night, needs a talking-to. And as Fury, Sam is a combination of sponsor and mentor and also this mysterious guy who is indoctrinating him into this order of superheroes.”

Not to be a huge nerd, but one of the things I think is really interesting about superheros is the idea that there are communities of practice, that you can wake up superpowered one day, but that doesn’t actually make you a superhero: rather, that’s something you learn along the way.  I was actually sorry Kick-Ass didn’t do more with Hit-Girl and Big Daddy actually pushing Kick-Ass to figure out what it actually means to be a hero other than showing up, saving his ass, and showing him he’s an amateur.  One thing I thought The Incredibles did quite well was to demonstrate that in the absence of a community, people with superpowers may end up intervening in ways that aren’t helpful, or that they aren’t actually in training to do: running into a burning building and ending up in a confrontation with the cops is the kind of thing that’s a natural product of confusion and a lack of professionalism that leads people into real and serious danger.  In Civil War, there’s this great tension over whether Captain America is going to accept the Punisher as a member of his faction, despite the fact that he doesn’t actually adhere to the generally accepted superhero code of behavior.  Superheroism is most interesting when its definition is in tension.  And Samuel L. Jackson as one of its key definers promises to bring the awesome.  

Politics

Crist reverses flip-flop on drilling as oil spill nears coast.

By Brad Johnson on Apr 28, 2010 at 3:39 pm

Crist & ObamaWith a giant oil spill nearing the Florida coast, Gov. Charlie Crist (R-FL) has reversed his 2008 election-season flip-flop on offshore drilling. Crist changed his stance as the U.S. Coast Guard is preparing to set fire to the oil slick caused by the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the Louisiana coastline a week ago. In his 2007 inaugural address, Crist pledged to a vision of “coastlines free of oil drilling“:

Clean rivers, beautiful beaches and coastlines free of oil drilling.

However, in 2008 Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) flip-flopped on offshore drilling amid the oil industry’s “Drill Baby Drill” campaign. Supporting McCain, Crist “reversed course” and supported the end of the drilling moratorium:

I think that’s a very good place to be. Not having that blanket moratorium and letting states’ rights be recognized is certainly appropriate.

Yesterday, as the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate slips from his grasp and a massive oil slick spreads towards Florida, Crist flip-flopped back:

Clearly that one isn’t far enough, and that’s about 50 to 60 miles out. It’s clearly not clean enough after we saw what we saw today — that’s horrific — and it certainly isn’t safe enough. It’s the opposite of safe.

President Barack Obama has not yet indicated whether this offshore drilling disaster has caused him to rethink his own support for expanded drilling.

Economy

Shelby: Consumer Protection Is Still ‘The Biggest Obstacle’ On Financial Reform

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 28, 2010 at 3:20 pm

For what seemed like an eternity, the financial regulatory reform debate was bogged down over the question of consumer protection. Democrats wanted to create an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) — such as that passed by the House of Representatives last year — while Republicans wanted to leave consumer protection responsibilities with the already existing bank regulators, which essentially amounted to an endorsement of the status quo.

The GOP complaint at the time was that the new agency constituted an overreach, and they falsely claimed that it would have to power to regulate Main Street businesses and would undermine bank profitability. So Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) tried to compromise in his financial reform legislation by placing a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection within the Federal Reserve (which didn’t garner him any votes in the Senate Banking Committee).

And evidently all the time spent on this issue hasn’t changed very much, as Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) said yesterday that consumer protection still constitutes the “biggest obstacle” to forging a financial reform deal:

“The biggest obstacle is probably the consumer agency and the reach and the scope of it right now,” Shelby told reporters at the Capitol. “If they will meet us halfway on that, I think we could get a bill.”

Remember, Shelby has said that bank profits should always trump “consumer finance whatever.” To get a sense of what the Republicans consider “halfway,” we can take a look at their financial reform “alternative,” which has been floating around today (though doesn’t seem to be owned by any GOP lawmaker in particular):

Title III creates an independent Council for Consumer Financial Protection (“Council”) that will have the authority to promulgate rules for all of the enumerated consumer protection statutes. The Council will be composed of three independent consumer protection experts, the Chairperson of the FDIC, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve. The composition of the Council will ensure that all rules, regulations arid orders promulgated by the Council appropriately consider the, safety and soundness considerations of financial institutions while ensuring that adequate consumer safeguards are in place.

A council, particularly one without a clearly defined director, will be almost powerless to stand up to the bank regulators. And of course, since the regulators themselves sit on the council, the council will almost inevitably be relegated to secondary status, all but enshrining that bank profitability is more important than consumer protection. Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID) and a band of conservative Democrats had the same idea during the House financial reform debate, and it’s as bad now as it was then.

Plus, to make matters worse, the Republican alternative allows the federal government to preempt any and all consumer protection rules that individual states might put in place. So As Matt Yglesias put it, “on the one hand, [the GOP alternative] seemingly weakens the independence of the consumer regulator. On the other hand, it has the consumer regulator preempt any and all state regulations. This is a helpful reminder that nobody on the right actually gives a damn about federalism except as a tool to advance conservative substantive policy.”

Update

The GOP seems poised to finally let Dodd’s bill come to the Senate floor. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has announced that she will vote to move to debate, giving Dodd one of the votes he needed.


Update

,Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) will also vote to proceed to debate.

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