Blog

‘Tis the season of resolutions. With the new year comes pledges to quit smoking, get out of debt and spend more time with family. Gym memberships jump. Weight Watchers’ profits fatten.

This also happens to be the season of political resolutions. It’s that every-fourth-year event featuring presidential candidates in a contest of campaign promise one-upmanship. Ron Paul pledges to legalize marijuana. Michele Bachmann swears she’ll cut gasoline prices to $2 a gallon. Newt Gingrich guarantees he’ll create millions of jobs “right now.” Mitt Romney assures every college graduate a job.

Unfortunately, this also has been, for some time, a season of damned lies. These are deliberate deceptions involving a higher level of scheming. The Contract with America and the more recent Pledge to America are examples. Republicans knew they couldn’t fulfill what they led the public to perceive as promises. But the GOP designed these “pledges” specifically so that Republicans couldn’t be labeled as failures when what they pseudo-promised never materialized.  That’s the stuff of damned lies.

Unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions are legendary.  Low calorie salad fixings fill fridges Jan. 2, and remain there, rotting, on Feb. 2.  The victim of this broken promise is also the perpetrator and therefore unlikely to protest the infraction.

These days, political resolutions strewn along the presidential campaign trail are picked up and carefully cataloged on the Internet by reporters and bloggers who hold candidates accountable for every syllable. That’s a good exercise, but the public generally recognizes political promise hyperbole and realizes that unexpected events may prevent a president from keeping his word.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, pledged not to involve the country in the European war, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mostly, the public shrugs off presidential contenders’ inflated political resolutions.

Damned lies, however, are dangerous because they subvert trust in the political system, which needs the faith of the electorate to function. Damned lies may, in fact, be an integral part of Republican strategy since the GOP hates government of the people by the people and hopes to shrink it small enough to drown in a bathtub.

In their 1994 Contract with America, Republicans vowed:

“in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.”

That, and calling it a contract, led Americans to believe it was a step above a pledge. It was inviolable, sacrosanct. It was a bond with no double-crossing footnotes.

Except it wasn’t. (more…)

Protesters disrupted a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event on health care, interrupting speaker Scott Serota, the CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield. Chanting “we are the 99 percent,” the protesters stood at the luncheon event and used a “human microphone” technique to read a statement about how the “the one percent in the health care industry” is only interested in profit “at the expense of human suffering and preventable death.”

Florida Gov. Rick Scott wants to cheat the families of his state out of $140 million in health insurance rebates. If Scott gets his way, it could harm consumers across the country.

Ripping off consumers and the health care system isn’t new to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. He got rich leading a hospital company that paid a record $1.7 billion in criminal fines and civil penalties to the Justice Department for systematically defrauding federal health care programs. Scott went on to lead a high-profile campaign against health reform backed by the infamous right-wing billionaire Koch Brothers, and Scott used that campaign as a springboard to the governorship.

Now Scott wants his state to be exempted from federal rules that would require insurance companies to send $140 million in premium rebates to families over the next three years. Enter the big winners, the health insurance companies that will get the money instead of Florida’s hard-working families.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enacted last year, health insurers that fail to spend at least 80% of your premiums on actual health services must give the difference back to consumers.This is one of the best and possibly least known provisions in health care reform. It requires insurance companies to become more efficient and keep less money for profits and CEO salaries. It says that people paying premiums should get more value for their money.

The goal of the rule isn’t to force companies to pay consumer rebates, it’s to hold insurance companies accountable and get them to change their behavior. But if they don’t, they’re supposed to pay, and they shouldn’t get off the hook just because they like their profits more than the new law. They should not be rewarded for failing to meet a basic standard because they can get politicians like Scott to take their side.

And let’s not forget the most important thing: While insurance companies are making record profits, struggling families are desperate for relief. The people of Florida need the $140 million they’re owed. But consumers won’t get their money if Rick Scott gets his way. The Republican governor — who’s been doing everything in his power to thwart implementation of the ACA — has been shamelessly trying to manipulate the law to pad the pockets of a private health insurance industry that will collect $934 billion in premiums this year. (more…)

Is the person elected to represent you listening to you, or is he or she hearing only Tea Party and GOP extremists who yell things like “let him die,” to the question of whether an uninsured person should get medical care?

The candidates for the Republican and Tea Party nomination for president stood silent at a debate when the questioner asked if society should allow an uninsured coma victim to die. The Tea Party audience, however, made clear its answer: let him die!

Beware: The Tea Party would have a 30-year-old uninsured man who falls into a coma die. In fact, the Tea Party and Republican crowd cheers when that possibility is suggested.

While the Republican candidates for President made it clear in their debate this week that they are happy to let uninsured people die if they have a serious illness, the Republicans in Congress are plotting to make people with insurance pay even more for their coverage to boost insurance company profits. How? By stealing nearly $2 billion in rebates that insurance companies owe consumers and small businesses and giving the money back to the insurers.

At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, this would be an astonishing transfer of money from consumers to the already overflowing coffers of the health insurance industry, whose top five companies alone made $11.7 billion in 2010. (more…)

I’ve just purchased tickets to see the new movie “Contagion,” about a mysterious virus that spreads with deadly havoc around the globe. But after reading this article by the Los Angeles Times, I’m realizing that the real health horror story is not coming from Hollywood but from Texas.

That is where we’re getting a real-world example of what conservative health care looks like, and what the entire country is likely to experience if conservatives succeed in dismantling health care reform.

The L.A. Times reports on what has happened to the state’s health care system under Gov. Rick Perry:

… [I]n the 11 years the Republican presidential hopeful has been in office, working Texans increasingly have been priced out of private healthcare while the state’s safety net has withered, leaving millions of state residents without medical care.

“Texas just hasn’t proven it can run a health system,” said Dr. C. Bruce Malone III, an orthopedic surgeon and president of the historically conservative Texas Medical Assn. (more…)

By Ethan Rome
Executive Director, Health Care for America Now!

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…)

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

You are a congressperson. You just voted for a budget that would destroy Medicare. Then you traveled home this week to meet with your constituents. Most of them like Medicare. What do you tell them?

Tell them you want to “save Medicare.”

Bloomberg reports:

House Speaker John Boehner said Republican lawmakers should tackle head-on the Medicare issue during the recess….

…Before the House vote, Republican leaders circulated a package of charts, talking points and fact sheets supporting the budget to members, including links to a document countering the main attacks on the plan.

The document encourages lawmakers to highlight how the budget “saves Medicare,” and offers “future beneficiaries access to the same kinds of health-care options now enjoyed by members of Congress.” (more…)