By Leo Jennings
Political consultant with Rubenstein Associates
Cardinal Rule: A fundamental rule, upon which other matters hinge. Wiktionary
If you’re engaged in any type of activity that involves the development and implementation of a strategic plan you run into them all the time: Cardinal Rules. Know them, abide by them, and your strategy may well succeed. Ignore or violate them, and your plan will almost certainly crash and burn. In football, for instance, avoiding turnovers is a cardinal rule. In warfare the rules warn against being outflanked by the enemy and outrunning supply lines. Those of us who plan and execute political campaigns live by this one: “Don’t write the other guy’s commercial.”
Apparently GOP Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the architect of a plan that will supposedly reduce the federal budget deficit by six trillion dollars over the next ten years, missed that page in the political strategists’ handbook. And Democrats everywhere, essentially messageless since November of 2008, are rejoicing, because in calling for the privatization of Medicare the Chair of the House Budget Committee didn’t give them fodder for one ad, he handed them enough material to make a couple thousand.
Speculation abounds as to why Mr. Ryan, a savvy politician who played a key role in the Republican takeover of the U.S. House, proposed a policy sure to raise hackles and howls among seniors and those who soon will be. Conservative pundits and commentators explain it by saying he’s courageous and laud the plan as bold and groundbreaking. Liberals question his sanity. (more…)
Republicans concocted death panels in an attempt to terrify Americans about health care reform, then propagated the lie because they wanted insurance corporations to profit from illness and injury unfettered.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed anyway, but now the GOP has announced that it plans to kill the reform, and Medicaid and Medicare too.
In one fell swoop, Republicans would foreclose on Americas’ long-held and cherished expectation that they’ll receive health coverage from their government in their old age, impoverishment or infirmity. For the elderly, poor, unemployed, disabled and juvenile who can’t afford insurance, the GOP offers no death panels, just death from lack of care.
U.S. Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee, disclosed the GOP scheme to massacre Medicare and Medicaid. Instead of the government directly paying for medical services for the elderly and impoverished, Republicans would shift costs to states and the elderly. Under their plan, instead of Medicare, the federal government would give seniors an unspecified amount of money toward the cost of premiums for private health insurance. Also, instead of Medicaid, the GOP would give states some money to help pay for insurance for the poor, which includes nursing home care for the elderly. States and the elderly then would be stuck paying insurance costs above the amount provided by the federal government.
Ryan and his GOP gang transfer medical costs to the elderly and impoverished to compensate for federal revenues lost when they slash income taxes levied on the rich and corporations by an additional 30 percent.
The GOP message to the rich and to corporations: keep your tax break and take another 30 percent. The GOP message to the middle class: pay more and lose your safety net.
The founders of the United States intended the government to serve the people not prostrate itself to the privileged. The signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the U.S. Constitution discarded the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the idea that monarchs derived their authority from God and thus were not subject to the will of the governed.
Instead, the founders and framers determined that rich and poor, men and monarchs are equal, that they possess inalienable rights and that the function of government is to secure those rights. Their vision of government is an organization operating with the consent of the people to protect the people. That is, to protect their inalienable rights, to protect them from inequities, to protect them from internal and external threats.
The GOP budget is a manifestation of a very different government philosophy. It subjugates the people to the divine right of corporations and the rich.
If the wealthy and corporations had paid their share of federal income taxes over the past 30 years since successive Republican presidents began cutting them, the federal deficit would be relative peanuts, if it existed at all. If the wealthy paid their share of social security taxes, the program would not face shortfalls after 2036. If corporations and the wealthy paid federal income taxes at the rates they did during the presidencies of Republicans Dwight D. Eisenhower or Richard Nixon, no one would be talking about killing off Medicaid and Medicare.
The nation’s largest corporation, General Electric, accumulated $26 billion in American profits over the past five years, while demanding $4.1 billion in “rebates” from the IRS and paying absolutely no federal income taxes last year. Two out of three U.S. corporations paid no income taxes from 1998 through 2005. The effective tax rate for the wealthy – the rate after loopholes and special deals — is nine points lower than that paid by the typical worker.
Still, Paul Ryan and his Republican crew insist that corporations and the rich are paying too much and demand that they pay an official rate of 25 percent instead of 35 percent. Because that will mean billions in lost revenue, the GOP slashes programs that protect the masses in the middle, education, health care reform, veterans benefits, public transportation, health and safety regulation, food and import inspection, Medicaid and Medicare. The GOP guts government for the people.
Because of those huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations, the Republican budget doesn’t even end the deficit until 2040. In fact, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office determined the tax cuts would increase the deficit’s share of the economy for the first 10 years of implementation. Under the GOP plan, public debt would rise to 70 percent of GDP by 2022. If the government maintained its current tax and spending levels, the debt would grow to 67 percent of GDP by 2022.
The GOP budget shows Republicans believe corporations and the rich are super citizens with divine rights, while the vast majority of the nation’s citizens, the middle class, are lesser beings who are to be taxed but not protected by their government.
Many of these citizens – the elderly, the poor, the disabled – won’t be able to afford health insurance under the GOP scheme. They’ve paid taxes all their lives to support programs like Medicare. Now, the GOP intends to rip that out from under them, to take away the protection that they believed their government — government for the people — would provide.
The GOP announced this week that it believes new tax cuts for the rich and corporations are more important than Medicare and Medicaid, more important than the lives of vulnerable Americans who will die for lack of health insurance to pay for care.
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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.
Until this week, the lies about death panels were some of the worst spread by Sarah Palin and the Republicans to scare seniors about health care reform and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Now there’s a real death panel, and John Boehner is in charge — it’s the Republican legislative campaign to undermine the ACA. Boehner and the Republicans want to give our health care back to the insurance companies, kill strong consumer protections that end the worst insurance company abuses and sentence more than 30,000 Americans a year to death because they can’t afford health insurance.
As one of the first acts of the 112th Congress, the Republicans plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and all the benefits and consumer protections that are making a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans right now. What are they replacing it with? Nothing. They’re referring that question to a bunch of committees that will deliberate for months and play political football with our lives and health. What does that really mean? It means letting the insurance companies off the hook so they can run roughshod over consumers and deny our care and jack up our rates whenever they please.
Seniors who received $250 checks from Medicare last year to help buy prescription drugs will have to return the money to the Treasury Department.
Seniors will lose the 50% discount on brand-name drugs when they have reached the “donut hole” of their prescription-drug plans – a benefit worth more than $12,500 over 10 years to those who qualify. Instead of closing over the next several years, the “donut hole” will stay open permanently.
Seniors will stop receiving no-cost annual physicals, mammograms and cancer screenings under rules that had just taken effect this week. Also, a voluntary program to enable seniors to live independently would be wiped out, forcing more people to crowd into nursing homes.
Millions of consumers, including children, will be denied coverage and care due to pre-existing conditions and branded “uninsurable.” Health plans will go back to kicking young adults off their parents’ coverage instead of providing benefits until age 26.
Many Americans with sick family members will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection when insurers restore lifetime and annual caps on benefits.
Health plan premiums will resume their double-digit increases as insurers return to grabbing however much they want from your premiums to pay for excessive profits, CEO pay, an army of lobbyists and a bureaucracy that turns away the sick. New programs to block unreasonable rate hikes would be dismantled.
Taxpayers would pay hundreds of billions of dollars in excessive fees to private health insurance companies that enroll seniors in Medicare Advantage plans at much higher costs than if the government provided benefits directly. The Medicare trust fund’s projected solvency will give back the 10-year extension it got from the ACA.
You can see an excellent overview here of what we will lose if the ACA is repealed. You can also see the district-by-district impact of health reform here.
After a century of legislative and political combat, working families and small businesses finally won and ended the insurance companies’ stranglehold over our health care. Naturally, Boehner wants to roll back the new health care law and let the health insurance companies resume their reign of terror. That’s why Boehner and his band of corporate shills, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a raft of presidential wannabes, have made repealing the law the Republican Party’s top priority for 2011.
“I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country… That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care.”
Wow. Sounds like the end of the world as we know it.
The Republicans are kowtowing to right-wing extremists, corporate executives and billionaire investors who secretly spent millions of dollars to help Republican election campaigns last fall, including deceptive ads attacking the health care law. Those deceptions continue still. The ACA protects consumers from the worst health insurance company abuses and provides seniors with better health care through the Medicare program.
Thankfully Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats in the Senate will stop Boehner in his tracks. However, when you cut through the political hyperbole, the GOP’s search-and-destroy mission is serious business. The repeal vote in the House scheduled for next week is part of an all-out assault on the new law in the Congress, the courts and state legislatures. And it’s an assault with well-funded corporate sponsors.
If that picture isn’t disturbing enough, look at the cynical demagoguery of GOP presidential hopefuls, like Fox News personality and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has been running TV commercials trashing the health care law and offering a petition to demand that Congress repeal it. It turns out that Huckabee hired a notorious scam artist to help him with the exploitative ad campaign, which is nothing more than a front to raise money. Three days after Think Progress reported about the scammer, Huckabee was forced to fire the guy. A few months ago, Huckabee, a Baptist minister with a pre-existing condition of his own, said it was OK for health insurance companies to turn their backs on people with pre-existing conditions. Like Boehner, he’s the new face of the Republican Party on health care. He works for the insurance industry and other big corporations, not the rest of us.
The interests of middle class and working families are of no concern to Republican Party leaders. To them, it’s just smart business to spend political capital on protecting the financial interests of the billionaires and big corporations who make up their base — the “haves and the have-mores,” as President George W. Bush famously described them.
Ethan Rome served as deputy campaign manager in HCAN’s 2009 successful campaign to win comprehensive health care reform. He has been a grassroots organizer, political activist, and strategic communicator for progressive issue and electoral campaigns for more than 20 years. From 2002until 2009, Mr. Rome directed public affairs for the 1.6 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). He managed national communications and media relations for International President Gerald W. McEntee and the union’s priority organizing, legislative and political campaigns. Prior to joining AFSCME in 1999, Rome was chief policy and political adviser to the speaker of the Connecticut House.
Was GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham correct when he told the New York Times Magazine that the Tea Party would “die out” because “they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country”?
It would be nice if that were the basis on which political parties and movements survived or collapsed. But the Republican Party did not have a coherent vision for governing the country between 2001 and 2008, and it is still around. (Michael Steele notwithstanding.)
The Tea Party can easily survive on blind hatred for responsive government, revulsion of shared responsibility, rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories.
How do I know? Because it has survived for decades.
The Tea Party is nothing new. It is merely the latest incarnation of the right-wing fringe that predictably overheats whenever a left-of-center reformer is elected to the presidency. It was the John Birch Society and the National Indignation Convention in the early 1960s, the Moral Majority and other “New Right” groups in the late 1970s, and Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads” and the militia movement in the 1990s. (more…)
During a webcast meeting with Organizing for America on Thursday, President Barack Obama outed the covert Republican plot to strangle Medicare to financial death.
He explained to the group that if Congress does nothing, if health care reform fails, “Medicare will run out of money in eight years.”
Obama and the Democrats are pressing for health care reform to provide people under 65 with some semblance of what those over 65 have – government-assured affordable medical insurance. At the same time, for Medicare, Obama said, “Part of what we want to do is strengthen it, so it is there over the long haul.”
“It is not as if,” he said, “if we just stand still, everything is going to be okay.”
Immobility is exactly what Republicans want, however. “No change” is their slogan. They’ve offered zero substantive reform for health care. In the years when they controlled Congress and the White House under former President George W. Bush, they did nothing to repair financial problems with Medicare. In fact, they falsely minimized the price tag of the new prescription drug program, Medicare Part D, and drove up the cost by forbidding government negotiation for lower medicine prices. In addition, although they failed to accomplish it, they pressed to privatize that socialist program called Social Security — just months before the stock market tanked.
This is philosophical warfare, and for the Republicans, Medicare is an appropriate casualty. The GOP has made it clear they believe the public option being proposed in health care reform is socialism – an evil that must be eradicated at all costs. Of course, Medicare, a government-sponsored health care program for all people over 65 actually is socialist.
It’s a slippery slope. First Republicans kill the opportunity for all Americans under the age of 65 to choose their own private insurance or get government-sponsored health care under the public option. Then, by doing nothing, Republicans destroy the ability of those over 65 to retain their government-sponsored health care.
Senior citizens are more frightened about health care reform than anyone else. That may be, President Obama said, because they routinely need health care more than any other group. So lying to them about it, especially for political gain, is cruel and despicable.
It’s true, Democrats want change. They seek to reform and improve the health care system so that Medicare is strengthened and funded for the future. For example, Obama noted, under the Democrats’ plan, the “donut hole” in Medicare Part D, during which senior citizens must pay for their prescription medications, would be eliminated. President Obama got the pharmaceutical companies to step up and pay more – if Congress manages to pass reform.
A huge portion of the cost of health care reform would come from changes in the way the federal government pays for Medicaid and Medicare. What the Democrats want to change are payment methods that are just wrong. No bid contracts, for example. Introducing real capitalist competition in the system would reduce costs without affecting benefits. “No one is talking about messing with your Medicare benefits,” Obama said, attempting in a mere statement to counter screaming “tea baggers” featured continuously on Fox News. Of the Democrats he said, “We think Medicare is a sacred trust.”
On health care reform, the Republican plan to do nothing means death. Death for the public option. But also death for Medicare.
President Obama explained: “The status quo is unsustainable. If you like what you have now, unless we make some changes, you are not going to have what you like because health care costs are rising three times faster than wages. . . If you have a private plan, you have something to worry about. If you are on Medicare, you have something to worry about because we are going to run out of money.”
Democrats are trying to resuscitate Medicare and deliver health care reform. Republicans are forming death panels to kill all of it.
As a basic rule, politicians will say anything they can get away with. If an effective politician thinks that he can call his opponent a drug-dealing, serial-murdering gangster, and have the charge taken seriously by the media, then he will do it, even if there is no reality whatsoever to the allegation. The reason that most politicians don’t describe their opponents this way is because the media will denounce them as liars, who are unfit for responsible public office.
This basic truth must be kept in mind in understanding the health care debate. The debate has trailed off into loon tune land, and it’s the media’s fault.
The lunacy was most clearly in evidence in former Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim that President Obama’s plan would force her to stand in front of a “death panel” to argue for the life of her baby with Down Syndrome. This “death panel” is a complete invention by Governor Palin. There is no twist or turn or contorted permutation of President Obama’s plan that would prevent Ms. Palin from providing as much health care as she wants to her baby.
It would have made as much sense to claim that the transportation bill will deny medical care to her baby. After all, if the roads in front of her home are not properly maintained, and her baby has a medical emergency, then the transportation bill would have effectively sentenced her baby to death because she won’t be able to get medical attention in a timely manner.
The reason that Governor Palin thought she could make up stories about President Obama’s death panels is that the media have treated all sorts of other absurd inventions about his health care plan with respect. At the most basic level, opponents have repeatedly said that President Obama’s plan will lead to rationing of health care.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing in President Obama’s plan that resembles rationing. He certainly intends to limit the type of medical procedures that the government would fund, but opponents of the plan don’t want the government to fund any procedures. So, how is restricting the procedures funded through a government plan rationing? Anyone who wants to is entirely free to buy as much health care as they want outside of the government-subsidized plan. Where is the rationing?
Using Governor Palin’s story, there may be mothers who are less wealthy than her who will be able to care for a baby with Down Syndrome or other serious affliction as a result of President Obama’s plan. These mothers might not otherwise have this option because they could not afford the health care. It is easy to see how President Obama’s plan can lead to life compared with the current situation. It’s virtually impossible to see how it leads to death.
The media have allowed the politicians to turn life into death and night into day when it comes to the health care debate because they decided that anything said against President Obama’s plan should be treated with respect, no matter how absurd it might be.
The line about rationing isn’t the only place where the media have fallen down on the job in the health care debate. Instead of telling us that the cost of the plan was “huge,” as the have often done, the media could have put the cost in a context that would make it understandable to people who are not policy wonks. They could have told us that the projected $1 trillion cost over the next decade is equal to about 0.5 percent of GDP, less than half of the cost of Iraq-Afghanistan wars at their peak.
The $250 billion ten-year shortfall that Congress is struggling to fill is a bit more than 0.1 percent of GDP, rounding error in the total budget. But the media only assured the public that this gap was a big hole in the budget; they didn’t try to tell us how big.
The media have the job of informing the public. They have the time and the resources to know that when opponents of President Obama’s plan talk about rationing, they are not telling the truth (i.e. they are lying). If the media just pass these assertions on to the public without comment, then they are giving them credibility.
And if the opponents of health reform think they can get away with one really big lie, then why shouldn’t they start moving forward with even bigger ones. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with Governor Palin’s death panel line. For this we owe our thanks to The Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media.
