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Rep. Van Hollen: GOP Medicare Reforms Nothing Like The Coverage Members Of Congress Receive

By Igor Volsky on Apr 12, 2011 at 5:40 pm

This morning, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) appeared at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and delivered a rebuke of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget. “At its core the Republican budget is the same old tired formula of extending tax breaks to the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of the rest of the country, except this time it’s on steroids,” he said before specifically going after Ryan’s claim that his Medicare reforms would give seniors the same health plan as members of Congress:

VAN HOLLEN: This is not like the Federal Employee Health Care Plan that members of Congress are on…The Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan, which members of Congress are on has something called the fair share formula. You share equally in the risk of higher health care costs. There is a fixed percentage — it is premium support. As the cost of the premium goes up, the share between the employer and the employee remains the same. It’s the exact opposite on the Medicare situation. The way they make money is to take advantage of the gap between what they’re going to provide the senior and the risking health care costs.

Watch it:

Indeed, Ryan is constraining the rate of growth in Medicare by offering seniors a defined contribution, regardless of the rate of growth in health care costs. The federal government’s contribution in the FEHBP program, by contrast, reflects actual increases in premium levels. According to the Office of Personnel Management, the FEHBP formula “is known as the ‘Fair Share’ formula because it will maintain a consistent level of Government contributions, as a percentage of total program costs, regardless of which health plan enrollees elect.” The difference is that Ryan’s proposal provides seniors with a set amount of money that, in order to reach the kind of savings he’s advertising, would have to depreciate each successive year — even as health care costs increase.

As the CBO concluded, “Under the proposal, most elderly people would pay more for their health care than they would pay under the current Medicare system.” “[T]he beneficiary’s share in 2030 would be 68 percent under the proposal” but only “25 percent” under current law.

Climate Progress

New study questions shale gas as a bridge fuel

By Joe Romm on Apr 12, 2011 at 5:35 pm

Leakage of methane from fracking boosts shale gas global warming impact; National Academy review is warranted

Natural gas fracking vs. coal

Comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from shale gas (with low and high estimates of fugitive methane emissions) [with other energy sources].  Top panel (a) is for a 20-year time horizon, and bottom panel (b) is for a 100-year time horizon.  Estimates include direct emissions of CO2 during combustion (blue bars), indirect emissions of CO2 necessary to develop and use the energy source (red bars), and fugitive emissions of methane, converted to equivalent value of CO2 as described in the text (pink bars).

I was a (relatively) early booster of shale gas as a potential game changer for greenhouse gas mitigation [see Game Changer, Part 1:  There appears to be a lot more natural gas than previously thought (6/10) and Part 2: "Unconventional gas makes the 2020 climate targets so damn easy and cheap to meet" (7/10)].

But there were always lurking concerns about the impact of methane leakage in from the unconventional gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, since methane is a considerably more potent greenhouse gas (GHG) than carbon dioxide.  Now three Cornell University professors have published a major analysis in Climatic Change, “Methane and the Greenhouse-Gas Footprint of Natural Gas from Shale Formations,” that seeks to quantify the impact of the leakage from the best available data.

They find a leakage rate large enough to seriously undercut gas’s GHG benefit even in high-efficiency combined cycle plants — and one that is all-but-fatal to any GHG benefit from using natural gas as a transport fuel. That conclusions is doubly true if one looks at the GHG impact over a few decades, rather than a century.

This is a potentially game-unchanging conclusion for one of the seminal energy policy choices of this decade — how hard to push shale gas here and around the world.  And yet, as the lead author Cornell Prof. Robert Howarth explained to me in an interview, it is based upon very limited data.  And that’s in part because the industry has fought efforts to get more data.  Prof. Howarth agreed with my suggestion that this would be a very ripe topic for the National Academy of Sciences to review.

The study’s basic conclusion is that shale gas production is a bigger, longer and more complicated enterprise than conventional drilling, and that methane leakage is much higher during production and processing:

Read more

Yglesias

Congress’ School Nurse

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 12, 2011 at 5:28 pm

(cc photo by kevindooley)

The United States Congress doesn’t generally believe in the idea of direct government-provided health care. One important exception is for veterans of the American armed forces. And another—less famously—is for members of congress themselves:

This fall while members of Congress toil in the U.S. Capitol, working to decide how or even whether to reform the country’s health care system, one floor below them an elaborate Navy medical clinic — described by those who have seen it as something akin to a modern community hospital — will be standing by, on-call and ready to provide Congress with some of the country’s best and most efficient government-run health care.

Formally called the Office of the Attending Physician, the clinic — and at least six satellite offices it supports — bills its mission as one of emergency preparedness and public health. Each day, it stands ready to handle medical emergencies, biological attacks and the occasional fainting tourist visiting Capitol Hill.

Officially, the office acknowledges these types of services, including providing physicals to Capitol police officers and offering flu shots to congressional staffers. But what is rarely discussed outside the halls of Congress is the office’s other role — providing a wealth of primary care medical services to senators, representatives and Supreme Court justices.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable idea to me. And Congress seems to be in no hurry to replace it with a system of vouchers used to purchase private insurance that decline in value every time laptops become cheaper.

Climate Progress

Budget battle torpedoes NOAA Climate Service

By Climate Guest Blogger on Apr 12, 2011 at 5:25 pm

By Michael Conathan, CAP’s Director of Ocean Programs

The EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gasses as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act survived the FY11 budget battle.  But climate hawks came out on the short end of another, lower-profile but no less vital, struggle related to the climate monitoring efforts of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

E&E’s Greenwire (subs. req’d) reported today on an overlooked rider to H.R. 1 and also included in the final deal on the full year continuing resolution that the House and Senate will vote on this week:

Read more

Politics

Bachmann Says She Doesn’t ‘Have An Answer’ On Whether Homosexuality Is A Public Health Hazard

By Igor Volsky on Apr 12, 2011 at 5:05 pm

Yesterday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) — who is seriously considering launching a campaign for the presidency — appeared before the FAMiLY Leader, an anti-gay social conservative group in Iowa. Both the Leader and its head, former gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats, have argued that homosexuality is a public health hazard akin to second hand smoke and have directed its members to literature promoting discredited ex-gay therapies. In fact, during an interview with ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes, Plaats argued, “If we’re teaching the kids, ‘don’t smoke, because that’s a risky health style,’ the same can be true of the homosexual lifestyle. That’s why I think we need to speak the truth once in a while.”

But Bachmann did not openly embrace this line of thinking during her appearance. Asked if she agreed with Vander Plaats and the Leader about the health risks of being gay, Bachmann seemed startled and confused by the question and, after a pause, simply said, “I don’t have an answer for that”:

VOLSKY: Congresswoman, some groups — including this one, I believe — have argued that homosexuality is a public health crisis akin to second-hand smoking. I was wondering if you agreed with that.

BACHMANN: Um. I — I don’t have an answer on that. I don’t have an answer. Why don’t I have another question.

Listen here:

Last week, Bachmann’s potential Iowa political state director, State Rep. Kent Sorenson (R) actually disagreed with the public health meme and claimed that nobody has advanced this argument. “I think that’s absurd. … I would never make that argument and I haven’t heard anybody in Iowa make that argument, so I’m not sure where you’re coming up with that from,” he said.

Cross-posted on The Wonk Room.

Climate Progress

Budget Deal Kills Innovation Economy, Slashing High-Speed Rail, Green Jobs, Climate Programs

By Brad Johnson on Apr 12, 2011 at 4:55 pm

Stop The CutsThe Republican slash-and-burn budget accepted by President Obama to avoid a government shutdown will put our fragile economic recovery in jeopardy. Moreover, the cuts are ideologically motivated, preserving massive subsidies for fossil fuel polluters while knocking out support for a cleaner, more innovative economic future. These cuts from President Obama’s budget request and funding prohibitions include:

– Environmental Protection Agency: $1.6 billion, including $50 million from science and technology programs, $110 million from environmental programs and management, $4 million from buildings, $10 million from Superfund, $797 million from the Clean and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds program, and $223 million in other state and tribal assistance grants

– High Speed Rail: $1.4 billion

– Title 17 Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program: $860 million (worth $18 billion in loans)

– Wildland Fire Programs: $735 million

– Defense Environmental Cleanup: $584 million

– Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: $550 million

– National Science Foundation – Research: $444 million

– International Clean Technology and Strategic Climate Funds: $400 million

– Land and Water Conservation Fund: $318 million

– Department of Energy Office of Science: $252 million

– Department of Interior Climate Programs: $116 million

– Green jobs innovation fund: $40 million

– No funds are allowed to be used to establish the NOAA Climate Service.

High-speed rail strengthens cities, takes money from oil companies, and provides a strong base for high-paying unionized jobs. The staggering cuts in high-speed rail reflect the Tea Party agenda to keep America locked in fealty to big oil.

Due to the strength of the outcry over Republican efforts to deny global warming and block EPA regulation of carbon pollution, the EPA budget will not restrict protections against greenhouse pollution. Instead, the cuts to the EPA budget emphasize a major drawdown in the federal funding for state-level clean water projects, which threatens state efforts to limit drinking water pollution from natural gas fracking, industrial agriculture, and other polluters.

These cuts will not only ensure our continued dependence on dirty and dangerous fossil fuels, keeping gas prices high at the pump while poisoning our air, land, and water, but will also kill investment in the new technologies and new industries that could restore our economic health.

Alyssa

Red Planet

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 12, 2011 at 4:51 pm

Big, big news: Paramount’s going to make a Martian Chronicles movie. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and would love to see a network like HBO make a show or miniseries out of the books. But even if this isn’t the Mars exploration story I’d most like to see adapted, it is a sophisticated look at what happens when humans try to start a society from scratch. And it reverses the standards Aliens Invade For Inexplicable Reasons And We Respond By Kicking Ass But Learning Nothing narrative (I mean, isn’t it really bizarre that we always end with the battle, not what we’ve learned from captured alien technology, or whatever? We really need a terrific movie about what happens after the invasion along the lines of District 9. Or, you know, an Ender’s Game adaptation that isn’t horrible.) by having us be the invaders. We need smart science fiction that goes beyond the wreck of Los Angeles, beyond superheroes, and it sounds like we’re actually going to get some of it.

Yglesias

Dealing Yourself A Weak Hand

By Matthew Yglesias on Apr 12, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Democrats’ negotiating posture as we head into the debt ceiling issue is that this is a mess of their own making. Back during the lame duck, a lot of us thought the debt-increasing tax deal ought to include the debt ceiling issue but Democratic leaders thought this was going to be a winning issue for them come springtime:

Reid also said that he would like to push off raising the debt ceiling until next year — when Republicans control the House, but that he has not discussed the matter yet with his caucus.

“Let the Republicans have some buy-in on the debt. They’re going to have a majority in the House,” said Reid. “I don’t think it should be when we have a heavily Democratic Senate, heavily Democratic House and a Democratic president.”

Now Reid’s getting what he wants. The debt ceiling will be raised, eventually. And Republicans will have more buy-in on it than they would have had if it happened in December. On the other hand, Republicans now have an opportunity to extract massive policy concessions in exchange for something they favor doing anyway.

Politics

Frank Gaffney-Grover Norquist Islamophobia Feud Erupts In Public At Conservative Conference

By Scott Keyes on Apr 12, 2011 at 4:20 pm

ThinkProgress filed this report from The Awakening 2011 conference in Lynchburg, VA.

As the Tea Party continues to its quest to pull the Republican Party further and further to the right, fault lines are beginning to open up among conservatives, particularly regarding the future of minority voters and the GOP.

This battle between the conservative pragmatists and hardliners was on full display Saturday as anti-Sharia activist Frank Gaffney and anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist hurled charges against one another at a conservative conference in Lynchburg, Virginia.

ThinkProgress spoke with Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, following his panel discussion on conservative economics. Norquist accused anti-mosque activists like Gaffney of waging “a direct attack on religious liberty.” When I asked if Gaffney was playing a constructive role, Norquist’s distaste for him was so intense that he would not even speak his name, saying instead that “The other guy has his own agenda which is not useful”:

KEYES: There’s a real movement spearheaded by Frank Gaffney to raise concern about Sharia law and a lot of movement in these states. Do you think that’s going to play a constructive role for the GOP or do you think that’s turning off a lot of voters?

NORQUIST: I don’t know that it’s having much impact one way or another. The challenge there is a religious liberty issue. When you say, we’re going to start telling people you can’t build a church, a synagogue, or a mosque somewhere, that’s a direct attack on religious liberty. [...]

KEYES: So you think voices like [Herman] Cain and like Gaffney are probably not playing a constructive role?

NORQUIST: I hope that Cain’s retraction was sufficient and total. The other guy has his own agenda which is not useful.

Listen here:

However, Norquist’s comments paled in comparison to the volley Gaffney unleashed during his panel. In the midst of discussing how the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated the conservative movement in the United States, Gaffney put a picture of Norquist up on the PowerPoint presentation, telling the crowd “this is how that has happened.” Gaffney went on to note that it had been his “personal burden for the past 12 years” to expose Norquist, telling the cheering crowd that Norquist has been “actively involved both enabling and empowering Muslim Brotherhood influence operations against our movement and our country”:

GAFFNEY: One might ask, “how did an organization like this with Brotherhood ties and personnel and funding, get into the conservative circles?” I can tell you more about how deeply that’s happened if you like. But this is how that has happened. [Puts Grover Norquist's picture up on the PowerPoint.] I don’t know how many of you were in the room when he addressed this very meeting earlier today. But I have had it as my personal burden for the past 12 years to have been trying to warn conservatives that one of their own has been actively involved both enabling and empowering Muslim Brotherhood influence operations against our movement and our country. And I must tell you, I think this is time to bring it to a stop. I want you to be awakened to that problem.

Watch here:

Though this weekend was the most public airing of grievances between the two men, it is hardly their first. Gaffney has long made a name for himself with fabulous claims like the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated not just the federal government, but the conservative movement as well.

These repeated falsehoods led Norquist to speak out against Gaffney, calling on the GOP to “marginalize” Islamophobia within the Party. The feud boiled over earlier this year when Gaffney was banned from speaking at the major conservative conference CPAC. Gaffney claimed to be “boycotting” the conference instead, saying it had been infiltrated by Muslim extremists. In the end, Gaffney bravely showed up in order to warn conference-goers about Grover Norquist.

In a moment of candor toward the end of his speech this past weekend, Gaffney called the idea of a “big-tent party” an “influence operation of the worst sort.” Indeed, if voices like his continue to receive a platform in the GOP, Gaffney’s desire to see Republicans avoid becoming a big-tent party may just become reality.

Security

Budget Agreement Leaves Defense Spending ‘Relatively Untouched’

By Ben Armbruster on Apr 12, 2011 at 4:10 pm

The Washington Post reports today that “more than half of the $38 billion in spending cuts” the White House and congressional leaders agreed to last Friday “in the 2011 budget compromise that averted a government shutdown would hit education, labor and health programs.” But it looks like the deal has taken a page from the Paul Ryan playbook because, as Defense News reports, “defense spending is left relatively untouched.” New America Foundation fellow Romesh Ratnesar expounds:

The budget compromise reached by the White House and Congress this weekend included a “historic amount of cuts,” as House Speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in their joint statement announcing the deal. “The largest annual spending cut in our history,” boasted President Obama. [...]

And yet there is one, massive piece of the federal budget that these brave hawks dared not touch: defense. Not a solitary penny of the $38 billion in spending cuts will come out of the Pentagon’s coffers. In fact, defense spending will increase by $5 billion over 2010 levels, to $513 billion. And that doesn’t even include the cost of ongoing “overseas contingency operations,” otherwise known as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The defense budget represents 20 percent of the overall budget (50 percent of the discretionary portion) and has nearly doubled over the past 10 years. Total defense spending is now higher in real terms than at any time since the Second World War and the U.S. spends 43 percent of total military spending world wide — six times more than China. Moreover, “the U.S. and its allies possess 80% of the world’s economic and military power.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates even recently questioned why the Navy needs 11 carrier battle groups when no other country can match one (Gates then refused to endorse scaling back these programs).

Yet, what did both Democrats and Republicans cut in the budget deal? As Pat Garofalo noted, the plan cuts funding primarily for “programs upon which the middle-class and low-income Americans depend,” such as community health centers, green jobs funding, state and local law enforcement, the WIC program, infectious disease prevention, the NIH and Pell Grants for higher education. At the same time, the deal actually increases baseline Defense spending by $5 billion.

So given that the United States clearly has room to scale back its military spending, why does the Pentagon’s budget get ignored? Some have argued cutting defense spending is tantamount to political suicide. However, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released last month found that a majority of Americans prefer cutting defense spending to reduce the deficit over taking money from other popular social programs. So it appears the American people are on board, now it’s Washington’s turn.

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