If the Republicans have their way and privatize Medicare, it will put millions of seniors at the mercy of health insurance companies and force them to pay $39 trillion more for Medicare coverage than they would under existing law, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). That’s why this is a massive windfall for insurers. The GOP budget plan will also shift trillions of dollars in costs onto America’s seniors and families. When the program begins, new Medicare enrollees would have to pay at least $6,400 more each year out-of-pocket for private coverage equivalent to current Medicare benefits. And the average Medicare beneficiary’s contribution to the cost of Medicare benefits would skyrocket from 25 percent under the existing system to an astonishing 68 percent in 2030, according to CEPR and the Congressional Budget Office.
The Republican plan will enrich insurance companies at the expense of consumers and actually increase the overall net cost of health care by $34 trillion over the next 75 years, the planning period Medicare trustees are required to use. The increased costs are because of the private health insurance industry’s excessive profits, obscene CEO salaries and the costs of the bureaucracy it creates to deny care to consumers. These private plan administrative costs often eat up 20 or even 30 cents of every insurance premium dollar compared to Medicare’s roughly 3 cents. And in the past few weeks it’s become clear that the industry’s profits keep going up as consumers are being crushed by ever-rising co-payments and deductibles. (more…)
That is what people should be asking Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill along with her fellow senators who are advocated strict caps on government spending. The idea being pushed by Senator McCaskill, together with Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and several other prominent senators, would limit federal spending to 20.6 percent of GDP. It would require difficult-to-obtain super-majorities to exceed this cap. Spending would be cut across a variety of programs if the cap is not reached.
This proposal is hugely deserving of ridicule for a variety of reasons. First, it operates from a blatantly wrong premise — that government spending has grown out of control.
Those familiar with arithmetic know that government spending had increased by little as a share of GDP prior to the downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. In 2007, the last year before the onset of the recession, spending as a share of GDP was 19.6 percent. That is 1.1 percentage points less than the 20.7 percent share 30 years earlier in 1977. So the idea that there is a long-term trend of out-of-control spending is simply not true, or what they call outside of Washington, a “lie.” (more…)
The Republican attacks on our health care apparently have no limits. The Republican Party is driven by a powerful, extremist obsession with turning back the clock on women’s health services and undermining the health security of America’s families. This was in evidence during last week’s budget talks when Republicans were willing to shut down the government over funding for preventive care at Planned Parenthood health centers.
Last week’s big fight in Congress was about continuing funding for the rest of the 2011 fiscal year. In many ways the Republicans hijacked the debate and muddied the waters with their focus on social issues and their attacks on women. Rather than fulfilling their campaign promises to create jobs and revive the economy, the GOP is bound and determined to take away access to basic health care for millions of women, along with seniors, children, people with disabilities, middle class families and every other one of us.
Thankfully, the President and the Senate – with the support of House Democrats – stood up to the attacks on Planned Parenthood and the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act. But more attempts to take away our health security are coming. The Republicans also want to eliminate Medicaid and Medicare as we know it, and take away guaranteed health care benefits for seniors, children and people with disabilities. (more…)
The Republican plan isn’t based on the principle of shared sacrifice. There’s no fairness. The idea that we solve big problems in this country by working together and sharing the burden can’t be found. The super-rich and big corporations aren’t asked to pitch in. Instead the Republicans manipulate the tax code so the rich get even richer. This budget blueprint changes the rules and reshapes this country in a breathtakingly dangerous way.
The Republican budget attacks every single one of us. Health care programs that everyone in this country depends on would be eviscerated. For example, we all depend on Medicare and expect that it will be there for us. What happens if it is not? What will people really do? Many of us have friends and relatives who receive Medicaid benefits, including millions in nursing homes. What happens when states slash benefits and dump people from the program? And the new health care law, the Affordable Care Act, has already made a huge difference in the lives of millions in its first year – and ultimately will directly touch 200 million of us. Affordable health care we can count on is a key to economic security. (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.
Congressman Paul Ryan is the new darling of both the Republican Party and the major media outlets. He has put forward bold plans for dismantling Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Congressman Ryan is prepared to tell tens of millions of workers that they can no longer count on a secure retirement and decent health care in their old age. In Washington policy circles, this passes for courage.
Outside of Washington, people have a different conception of bravery. After all, over the last three decades the policies crafted in Washington have led to the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of the population has seen is share of national income increase by close to 10 percentage points. This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as Representative Ryan might say, $90 trillion over the next 75 years. That’s almost $300,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
This upward redistribution creates the real possibility that many of our children will be poorer than we are. If Representative Ryan and his followers really cared about future generations, then we might expect him to push for policies that reverse some of this upward redistribution. (more…)
Tuesday Meghan McCarthy wrote a story in the National Journal that asked, “Are GOP Leaders Going Soft on ‘Obamacare?’” “Top tea partiers in Congress,” she wrote, “openly worry about the commitment to defund the health care law.”
Soft on “Obamacare.” That’s not exactly how I would term it. These tea party folks clearly have high standards for vigorous opposition. After all, in their brief time under the far-right leadership of Speaker John Boehner, the Republicans in the U.S. House have voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, defund it and eliminate all funding for life-saving health care services for women. They’ve launched several senseless investigations, and they obsessively and almost psychotically trash the new health care law using any microphone they can get near. When it comes to getting rid of “Obamacare,” I’d say Speaker Boehner appears to be giving it his all.
But for “top tea partiers” like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), that’s not good enough. According to McCarthy, they’ve been “leading an effort to strip an estimated $105 billion in mandatory funding from the statute,” but Bachmann “fears that the Republican leadership will try to placate the conservative base with empty gestures that leave the funding in place.”
Talking about her Republican leaders in advance of Tuesday’s budget extension vote, Bachmann explained: “I think there’s going to be a fake appeasement with the Planned Parenthood thing and a fake appeasement with the ‘Obamacare’ thing.” (more…)
In a week when the Republicans attacked Planned Parenthood, the freedom of workers to bargain for a better life, programs that help middle class families and a whole lot more, the one thing they didn’t challenge was the excessive profits of the health insurance industry.
In fact, they continued their relentless effort to undermine the Affordable Care Act, which will eliminate the worst of insurance company abuses (like arbitrary denials of our care) and put a check on out-of-control profits that fuel rising premiums that are crushing families and small businesses.
Yesterday Health Care for America Now released a report that shows that the big five insurers earned $11.7 billion in 2010 – a 51% increase since 2008 – as they cut the number of people insured by millions and reduced the share of premiums they spend on actual medical care. So they made more money by charging more and providing less. It’s a great business model if you can swing it – sell a product for higher and higher prices, offer less and then try to deny services to your paying customers when they actually need it. (more…)
You’ve probably read by now that Judge Vinson did the expected: The judge gave Republican governors and attorneys general what they wanted, a decision that advances the GOP’s extremist agenda to return control of our health care to the insurance companies. This is judicial activism on steroids. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final say on the legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, and it has corrected such lower-court mistakes when other major laws like Social Security, the minimum wage law and the Voting Rights Act were passed. Two other federal district judges have already upheld the new health care law.
Congress clearly has the authority to regulate the health insurance market, including protecting consumers from insurance industry abuses and reducing costs for families, seniors and businesses. The best way to protect consumers and control costs is to make sure everyone has health insurance, and that’s what the Affordable Care Act does.
With consumers already benefiting from the law, this litigation is really about the Republican Party protecting health insurance company profits at the expense of working families. The Republican politicians who marched in lockstep to bring this suit aren’t really interested in the new law’s individual-responsibility rule. This lawsuit is just another tactic in the Republican Party’s campaign to give our health care back to the insurance companies no matter what the cost. (more…)
By David Sirota
Political journalist, best-selling author and syndicated newspaper columnist
“For me, but not for thee” — this could be the motto of 21st-century elitists, or Republican politicians (which are more or less the same thing) and two stories this week show how that mantra works in practice.
The first comes from ThinkProgress about how 97 percent of Republican congresspeople are keeping their taxpayer subsidized health insurance while voting to deny that kind of health insurance to other Americans… because, you know, government health care is great for Republican politicians, but apparently too lavish for the Rest of Us:
According to a ThinkProgress analysis, seven, or just three percent of all the Republicans in the House have agreed to give up their insurance while they vote to repeal coverage for some 32 million Americans…The majority of the GOP still sees nothing wrong in purchasing tax-payer subsidized insurance while trying to deny coverage to the taxpayer. (more…)
