Tag: obamacare

The 3 Lessons Of Sebelius: Don’t Panic, Never Give Up, Ignore Pundits

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source: ourfuture.org

Author: Bill Scher

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will finish her five-year tenure having implemented the biggest expansion of health insurance in 50 years. What should we learn from her success story? Three key lessons:

1. Don’t Panic

Yes, HealthCare.gov flopped at the start. But as anyone within earshot of my voice in the past six months knows, rough beginnings are typical for big projects, in both the public sector and the private sector.

Problems occur not necessarily because of rank incompetence, but because doing new things is hard and learning from mistakes is how people and institutions get smarter and sharper.

So when something goes wrong, there’s no need to panic. It’s just an unfortunate part of the process.

Figure out what your current team can still do to fix the problem, decide if some fresh eyes could also help. But panic firings only satisfy armchair generals. Serious governing requires more calm and trust.

This is the philosophy of President Obama, as reported by the National Journal earlier this month:

During the darkest days of the website meltdown, Obama made it clear to those who asked that it was crucial for him not to fire any high-ranking administration officials. Sebelius and McDonough both reasonably feared they would be shown the door.

Numerous business executives, even those who wish Obama well, criticized Obama publicly and privately for failing to “hold someone accountable” and using the power of a bureaucratic beheading to demonstrate his fury. Whether this is a sign of strength or weakness, it is characteristically Obama.

Holding a maligned, self-doubting team together in moments of peril is too often oversimplified by the phrase “No Drama Obama.” It’s more complex than that. Obama has convinced himself that scaring people with a ceremonial firing deepens fear, turns allies against one another, makes them risk-averse, and saps productivity. At no time was this distillation of presidential power put to more strenuous administration-wide test…

2. Ignore Pundits

Of course, panic firings is just what the pundit class, not to mention the army of Republican naysayers, was demanding.

Ezra Klein declared “Obama Needs to Fire Some People”, arguing that “It wasn’t just the technical challenges of HealthCare.gov that the administration managed poorly. The White House was completely unprepared for the furor over canceled insurance plans; that’s a political problem that Sebelius, a former insurance regulator, should’ve seen coming.”

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart basically called Sebelius a liar after he wasn’t satisfied with her responses to his obtuse question that failed to grasp the difference between the individual mandate – the linchpin of the entire law that cannot be delayed without delaying the entire program – and the mandate on large employers – which has a very narrow impact and can be delayed to help businesses transition without undermining the program.

But being a pundit punching bag didn’t mean Sebelius couldn’t do her job. And since nothing succeeds like success, pundits will eventually shift with the wind. In fact just yesterday, Klein was singing a different tune: “…there was too much to be done to fire one of the few people who knew how to finish the job. Sebelius would stay. The White House wouldn’t panic in ways that made it harder to save the law. The evidence has piled up in recent weeks that the strategy worked.”

Pundits like to demand accountability from others. But being a pundit is the least accountable profession in the world. Those who govern have to take a longer view, and take in a wider range of feedback, to persevere.

3. Never Give Up

Less known is how Sebelius salvaged the Medicaid expansion component of Obamacare. The Supreme Court weakened it by giving states the ability to refuse federal funds to expand Medicaid, and many Republican governors were more interested in undercutting Obama than helping their citizens get health care.

It would have been easy to dismiss all the Republican governors as a lost cause. But as ThinkProgress’ Igor Volsky recounts, Sebelius did not give up on them.

…Sebelius traveled the country, urging Republican governors to reconsider. As of today, eight GOP-controlled states have approved expansion — in no small part because of the flexibility Sebelius and her team provided.

To convince political opponents like Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R) or Arkansas’ Republican-controlled legislature to adopt one of Obamacare’s most significant coverage provisions, HHS approved alternative proposals that allowed states to use federal funding to cover their low-income uninsured populations with private insurance. Similarly, Sebelius permitted Oklahoma to continue using federal Medicaid dollars to subsidize private health insurance for low-income workers and extended to Indiana a one-year extension of its pilot Medicaid program, which provides coverage for low-income residents. Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder also signed a Medicaid expansion bill into law after receiving a federal waiver for cost-sharing provisions for Medicaid beneficiaries from the federal government

The solutions became politically tenable to Republican lawmakers because they could claim that they were covering their residents on their own terms, using unique state-tailored solutions that rejected the “one-size-fits all” prescription of Obamacare. Sebelius’ policy flexibility provided conservatives with enough political cover to implement key parts of the law.

This is another reason why a panic firing would have been dumb. Maybe Obama didn’t need Sebelius to fix code, but he needed her for other aspects of the program. As a former governor from a red state, Sebelius brought unique perspective to those negotiations that would have been lost had she been sacked.

I wrote previously that “Obamacare’s Troubles Will Be Good For Liberalism” in part because “we will not only be pleased with the final result, but we will also be better conditioned to tolerate a degree of initial imperfection, knowing that our government has the capacity to work through it.”

Sebelius is the personification of that lesson. Let’s treat the next government official in her position better.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://ourfuture.org/20140411/the-3-lessons-of-sebelius-dont-panic-never-give-up-ignore-pundits?utm_source=pmupdate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140411

GOP Grapples With The Unsettling Fear That Obamacare May Succeed

Happy Days are Here Again!

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Source: TPM

Author: Sahil Kapur

N.B.: see http://acasignups.net/

“In light of Obamacare achieving its goal of 7 million initial insurance sign-ups, William Kristol’s 1993 memo urging his party to block health care reform at all costs seems prescient. In it, the then-GOP operative’s message was remarkably candid: it’s a “serious political threat to the Republican Party.”

Kristol argued that it would cast Democrats as protectors of the middle class and “strike a punishing blow” to GOP ideals about the evils of government.

“[T]he long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse — much worse,” Kristol wrote. “It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”

Two decades later, Democrats have achieved their century-long dream, defeating the GOP’s revived Kristol-esque strategy to destroy health care reform at all costs. Obamacare unexpectedly crossed its first big milestone last week with 7 million sign-ups on the exchanges. While the law still faces many challenges, conservatives who broadly predicted it would collapse under its own weight are forced to reckon with the unsettling fear that health care reform might succeed.

Few understood the dilemma better than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who made it his personal mission to kill health care reform from its inception in 2009. His aggressive whip operation led to unanimous GOP opposition to the effort and a variety of scorched-earth tactics aimed at scuttling it. But the bill passed anyway. And in a cruel twist, it is performing especially well in his home state, cutting Kentucky’s uninsured rate by 40 percent. But McConnell, who faces re-election this year, isn’t relenting: upon news of the 7 million signups, he maintained that the law was a “catastrophe.”

Conservative policy wonks are more shaken, conceding that the law appears able to sustain itself and warning that simply repealing it is no longer feasible because it would strip away benefits from up to millions of Americans. Variations of that argument have been made by the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, conservative health care consultant Avik Roy, National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru and Kristol himself, who is now the editor of the Weekly Standard.

These conservatives are confronting the realities of Obamacare, which include roughly 7 million signed up on the exchanges, 3 million new Medicaid enrollees and 3 million young adults on their parent’s plan. They argue that the benefits are popular and can’t simply be taken away without a political backlash. But elected Republicans now face a difficult choice: rescind these benefits or demoralize their right-wing base, which remains animated for total destruction of the health law. And so GOP lawmakers haven’t flinched in their quest for repeal as reporters force them to confront the impracticality of undoing Obamacare.

“I don’t buy that for a second,” said House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI), maintaining that “the architecture of this law is so fundamentally flawed that I think it’s going to collapse under its own weight.” Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said Obamacare “continues to wreak havoc on American families” and vowed that House Republicans “will continue to work to repeal this law.”

The GOP’s political inclination to dig in runs deeper than keeping conservatives energized for the November congressional elections. It’s about preserving their party’s brand. Even minor concessions of Obamacare’s potential for success would gravely damage their credibility after relentless warnings for years that the law was fatally flawed, irreparably damaging to the health care system and ruinous to economic freedom. They don’t have a good option other than to stay the course and keep highlighting Obamacare’s downsides and flaws — of which there are plenty — at least through the 2014 election, where the fundamentals so strongly favor them that they’re unlikely to pay a price.

Indeed, Obamacare remains a vulnerability for Democrats in the mid-terms, threatening to damage incumbent senators in red states where the law remains unpopular. Republicans have cushioned the near-term blow by uniting against Obamacare in an unparalleled way, which has kept their base voters animated.

The long-run, however, is a different story. By 2016, the political cost of repeal will skyrocket as Obamacare is projected to cover 30 million Americans. Republicans were somewhat fortunate that Social Security and Medicare — which they also fought tooth and nail at the time, echoing rhetoric they use against Obamacare — weren’t named after a Democratic president. If the Affordable Care Act succeeds, the public will know who to attribute it to.

Kristol didn’t respond to a request for comment on this article. His 1993 memo emphasized the political potency of health care reform for Democrats.

“‘Health care will prove to be an enormously healthy project for Clinton… and for the Democratic Party.’ So predicts Stanley Greenberg, the president’s strategist and pollster,” he wrote. “If a Clinton health care plan succeeds without principled Republican opposition, Mr. Greenberg will be right.”

 

Emphasis Mine

See:

5 Things Conservatives Lie Shamelessly About

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Amanda Marcotte

Mark Twain once famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Twain wasn’t praising lies with this comment, of course, but modern-day conservatives seem to think he was dishing out advice instead of damning the practice of dishonesty. Conservatives have figured out a neat little rhetorical trick: One lie is easy for your opponents to debunk. Tell one lie after another, however, and your opponent’s debunkings will never catch up. By the time the liberal opposition has debunked one lie, there’s a dozen more to take its place.

Science educator Eugenie Scott deemed the technique the “Gish Gallop,” named for a notoriously sleazy creationist named Duane Gish. The Urban Dictionary defines the Gish Gallop as a technique that “involves spewing so much bullshit in such a short span on that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it.” Often users of the Gish Gallop know their arguments are nonsense or made in bad faith, but don’t particularly care because they are so dead set on advancing their agenda. Unfortunately, the strategy is so effective that it’s been expanding rapidly in right-wing circles. Here are just a few of the most disturbing examples of the Gish Gallop in action.

1. Creationism. It’s no surprise creationists inspired the coining of the term Gish Gallop, as they have perfected the art of making up nonsense faster than scientists can refute it. The list of false or irrelevant claims made by creationists, as chronicled by Talk Origins, numbers in the dozens, perhaps even hundreds, and more are always being spun out. Trying to argue with a creationist, therefore, turns into a hellish game of Whack-A-Mole. Debunk the lie that the speed of light is not constant, and you’ll find he’s already arguing that humans co-existed with dinosaurs. Argue that it’s unconstitutional to put the story of Adam and Eve in the science classroom, and find he’s pretending he was never asking for that and instead wants to “teach the controversy.”

“Teaching the controversy” is a classic Gish Gallop apology. The conservative wants to make it seem like he’s supporting open-minded debate, but instead he just wants an opportunity to dump a bunch of lies on students with the knowledge that they’ll never have the time and attention to carefully parse every debunking.

2. Climate change denialism.This strategy worked so well for creationism it makes perfect sense that it would be imported to the world of climate change denialism. Climate change denialists have many changing excuses for why they reject the science showing that human-caused greenhouse gases are changing the climate, but what all these reasons have in common is they are utter nonsense in service of a predetermined opposition to taking any action to prevent further damage.Skeptical Science, a website devoted to debunking right-wing lies on this topic, has compiled a dizzying list of 176 common claims by climate denialists and links to why they are false. Some of these lies directly contradict each other. For instance, it can’t both be true that climate change is “natural” and that it’s not happening at all. No matter, since the point of these lies is not to create a real discussion about the issue, but to confuse the issue so much it’s impossible to get any real momentum behind efforts to stop global warming.

April 2, 2014  |

3. The Affordable Care Act. It’s not just science where conservatives have discovered the value in telling lies so fast you simply wear your opposition out. When it comes to healthcare reform, the lying has been relentless. There are the big lies, such as calling Obamacare “socialism,” which implies a single-payer system, when in fact, it’s about connecting the uninsured with private companies and giving consumers of healthcare a basic set of rights. In a sense, even the name “Obamacare” is a lie, as the bill was, per the President’s explicit wishes, written by Congress.

But there are also the small lies: The ACA funds abortion. Under the ACA, old people will be forcibly euthanized. Obamacare somehow covers undocumented immigrants. Congress exempted itself from Obamacare (one of the lies that doesn’t even make sense, as it’s not a program you could really get exempted from). Healthcare will add a trillion dollars to the deficit.

The strategy of just lying and lying and lying some more about the ACA has gotten to the point where Fox News is just broadcasting lies accusing the Obama administration of lying. When it was reported that the administration was going to hit its projections for the number of enrollments through healthcare.gov, a subculture of “enrollment truthers” immediately sprang up to spread a variety of often conflicting lies to deny that these numbers are even real. It started soft, with some conservatives suggesting that some enrollments shouldn’t count or arguing, without a shred of evidence, that huge numbers of new enrollees won’t pay their premiums. Now the lying is blowing up to the shameless level, with “cooking the books” being a common false accusation or, as with Jesse Watters on Fox, straight up accusing the White House of making the number up. Perhaps soon there will be demands to see all these new enrollees’ birth certificates.

4. Contraception mandate.The ACA-based requirement that insurance plans cover contraception without a copay has generated a Gish Gallop so large it deserves its own category. Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check chronicled 12 of the biggest lies generated by the right-wing noise machine in just the past couple of years since the mandate was even announced. It is not “free” birth control, nor is it “paid for” by employers. The birth control coverage is paid for by the employees, with benefits they earn by working. The mandate doesn’t cover “abortifacients,” only contraception. No, birth control doesn’t work by killing fertilized eggs, but by preventing fertilization. It’s simply false that the prescriptions in question can all be replaced with a $9-a-month prescription from Walmart, as many women’s prescriptions run into the hundreds and even thousands a year. No, it’s not true that the contraception mandate is about funding women’s “lifestyle”, because statistics show that having sex for fun instead of procreation is a universal human behavior and not a marginal or unusual behavior as the term “lifestyle” implies.

5. Gun safety. The gun lobby is dishonest to its core. Groups like the NRA like to paint themselves like they are human rights organizations, but in fact, they are an industry lobby whose only real goal is to protect the profit margins of gun manufacturers, regardless of the costs to human health and safety. Because their very existence is based on a lie, is it any surprise that gun industry advocates are experts at the Gish Gallop, ready to spring into action at the sign of any school shooting or report on gun violence and dump so many lies on the public that gun safety advocates can never even begin to address them all?

A small sampling of the many, many lies spouted by gun industry advocates: That guns prevent murder, when in fact more guns correlates strongly with more murders. That gun control doesn’t work. That gun control is unpopular.  That any move to make gun ownership safer is a move to take away your guns. That a gun in the home makes you safer when it actually puts your family at more risk. That guns protect against domestic violence, when the truth is that owning a gun makes abuse worse, not better. Even the standard line “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is a distracting bit of dishonesty, since most gun deaths aren’t murders but suicides.

How do you fight the Gish Gallop, when trying to debunk each and every lie is so overwhelming? There are a few tactics that help, including creating websites and pamphlets where all the lies can be aggregated in one place, for swift debunking. (Bingo cards and drinking games are a humorous version of this strategy.) A critical strategy is to avoid lengthy Lincoln-Douglas-style debates that allow conservatives to lie-dump rapidly during their speaking period, leaving you so busy trying to clean up their mess you have no time for positive points of your own. Better is a looser style of debate where you can interrupt and correct the lies as they come. I’ve also found some luck with setting an explicit “no lies” rule that will be strictly enforced. The first lie receives a warning, and the second lie means that the debate is immediately terminated. This helps prevent you from having to debunk and instead makes the price of participation a strict adherence to facts.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of “It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.”

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/5-things-conservatives-lie-shamelessly-about?akid=11677.123424.pmD4Yc&rd=1&src=newsletter978221&t=2

The Real Truth About ObamaCare

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Source: RSN

Author:Robert Reich

“Despite the worst roll-out conceivable, the Affordable Care Act seems to be working. With less than two weeks remaining before the March 31 deadline for coverage this year, five million people have already signed up. After decades of rising percentages of Americans’ lacking health insurance, the uninsured rate has dropped to its lowest levels since 2008.

Meanwhile, the rise in health care costs has slowed drastically. No one knows exactly why, but the new law may well be contributing to this slowdown by reducing Medicare overpayments to medical providers and private insurers, and creating incentives for hospitals and doctors to improve quality of care.

But a lot about the Affordable Care Act needs fixing — especially the widespread misinformation that continues to surround it. For example, a majority of business owners with fewer than 50 workers still think they’re required to offer insurance or pay a penalty. In fact, the law applies only to businesses with 50 or more employees who work more than 30 hours a week. And many companies with fewer than 25 workers still don’t realize that if they offer plans they can qualify for subsidies in the form of tax credits.

Many individuals remain confused and frightened. Forty-one percent of Americans who are still uninsured say they plan to remain that way. They believe it will be cheaper to pay a penalty than buy insurance. Many of these people are unaware of the subsidies available to them. Sign-ups have been particularly disappointing among Hispanics.

Some of this confusion has been deliberately sown by outside groups that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision, have been free to spend large amounts of money to undermine the law. For example, Gov. Rick Scott,  Republican of Florida, told Fox News that the Affordable Care Act was “the biggest job killer ever,” citing a Florida company with 20 employees that expected to go out of business because it couldn’t afford coverage.

None of this is beyond repair, though. As more Americans sign up and see the benefits, others will take note and do the same.

The biggest problem on the horizon that may be beyond repair — because it reflects a core feature of the law — is the public’s understandable reluctance to be forced to buy insurance from private, for-profit insurers that aren’t under enough competitive pressure to keep premiums low.

But even here, remedies could evolve. States might use their state-run exchanges to funnel so many applicants to a single, low-cost insurer that the insurer becomes, in effect, a single payer. Vermont is already moving in this direction. In this way, the Affordable Care Act could become a back door to a single-payer system — every conservative’s worst nightmare.

Emphasis Mine

See:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22724-focus-the-real-truth-about-obamacare

The Koch Brothers Are Accidentally Advertising the Benefits of Obamacare

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Source: New Republic

Author: Jonathan Cohn

Some new advertisements attacking the Affordable Care Act actually show why the law is working.

The ads are running in Colorado and Louisiana, two states where incumbent Democratic senators face difficult reelection fights. They come from Americans for Prosperity, the conservative organization backed by the Koch Brothers. And in the spots, a woman makes some fairly sweeping claims about how Obamacare is hurting average Americans: “Millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less.”

The statements leave out critical context, as Politifact has observed. But the interesting thing about the ads is their style. The narrator isn’t claiming these things happened to her or, for that matter, to any particular person. It’s all very broad and unspecific.

That’s a change and it’s probably because so few “Obama-scare” stories have held up to media scrutiny. Remember “Bette in Spokane”? House Republicans claimed she had to pay twice as much for her new coverage. Reporter David Wasson, a local reporter with the Spokesman-Review, tracked her down and determined that Bette could actually save money if she bought Obamacare coverage on Washington state’s online marketplace. Then there was Whitney Johnson, a 26-year-old with multiple sclerosis, who claimed that she’d have to pay $1,000 a month for her new insurance in Texas. That didn’t sit quite right with journalist and policy expert Maggie Mahar. Mahar dug into the details and, in an article for healthinsurance.org, revealed that Johnson had actually found coverage for about $350 a month—what Johnson had been paying previously. Maybe the best-known story is the one of Julie Boonstra, a Michigan cancer patient who said that her new insurance policy was “unaffordable.” A series of reporters, first at the Washington Post and then at the Detroit News, determined that Boonstra is probably saving money because of Obamacare—all while keeping the physicians who provide her cancer care.

The conservatives’ struggle to find more airtight stories might seem mystifying, given that there’s no shortage of people with real and serious complaints about the Affordable Care Act. Quite a few Americans, probably numbering in the low millions, lost their old policies and are now paying more for replacements—usually because the old plans lacked benefits like maternity and mental health or because insurers can no longer avoid the sickest and most expensive beneficiaries. You’ve read about some of those people in these pages. These people are not happy and it’s easy to see why: The president and his allies promised that everybody who liked their olds plans could keep them. But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has observed, these stories inevitably have a lot of nuance. These are people who, almost by definition, are healthy enough to have gotten cheap insurance before or make enough money that they don’t qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s insurance discounts. That makes their tales less dramatic.

(Read More: How Obamacare Is Changing Health Insurance Premiums)

A better subject for future conservative advertisements might be people with serious, even life-threatening diseases who need access to very specific specialists or hospitals—and are now having difficulty, because their new plans have very narrow networks of providers. But even these stories have mitigating circumstances that media attention would reveal. Most of these people can find their way to comparable, albeit different, doctors and hospitals—and at least some can keep the old ones if they’re able and willing to pay more for it. Also, this kind of thing was a problem long before Obamacare came along. And that’s not to mention the fact that, previously, many of these people lived in fear of losing their insurance altogether.

In short, these stories may generate sympathy but they are rarely the stuff of tragedy. And that’s because of the protections Obamacare provides—which is to say, the very things that Koch-funded right-wingers want to gut.

After all, it’s Obamacare that sets a minimum standard for insurance, so that all policies include comprehensive benefits and set limits on out-of-pocket spending. It’s Obamacare that puts coverage within financial reach of many more people than before, by offering those subsidies and then, for some people, reducing out-of-pocket expenses even more. In the old days, it wasn’t so hard to find tear-jerker anecdotes: People without insurance or with inadequate insurance were filing for bankruptcy, losing their homes, and missing out on essential medicine. Now those stories are less common and, for the most part, they are among people who had these same problems previously. Telling the stories of these people would be a rationale for expanding the Affordable Care Act, not repealing it.

At some point, conservatives will find some tragic stories that are real. It’s a big country, and a complex law, and there are bound to be a few people for whom the new changes work out really badly. But there are also good news stories—lots of them. And while those stories inevitably have complications of their own, some are pretty dramatic. Democrats may not have figured out the politics of Obamacare. But it looks increasingly like they got the policy right.

Emphasis Mine

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Wingnuts are gullible! How GOP’s bubble of ignorance keeps leading to humiliation

Why does the right keep falling for false stories about poverty and social programs? Hint: An ideological fixation

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Salon.com

Author: Brian Buetler

“Looking back on the events of last week, I’m struck by how lucky Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was to be awarded the uncoveted early-Thursday speaking slot at CPAC Thursday morning.

Because though kicking things off at a three-day event like CPAC means speaking to smaller audiences and fewer cameras, it also means that there are three days of intensifying stagecraft ahead of you to distract attention from whatever errors you might make.

And Paul Ryan made a doozy of an error. It attracted plenty of coverage anyhow, but probably would’ve attracted more if it hadn’t happened before all the jousting began. In case you missed it, Ryan recounted a story he heard secondhand about a poor child who felt bad about being on a subsidized school lunch program while other kids brought their lunches to school in brown bags, to serve the argument that parents who can’t afford to bag their children’s lunches for them don’t care about their kids as much as better-off parents do.

The view he expressed is strange enough. Being an impoverished parent isn’t actually coterminous with being a “poor” parent, in the normative sense of the word. And even though children on school lunch programs are surely stigmatized by their peers in some communities, the solution is to combat the stigma, not to moot it by just letting those kids go hungry.

But as you’ve probably heard by now, the story he told never happened. He recapitulated the erroneous testimony of a fellow social spending scold without vetting her story, which she had taken from some pro-social spending literature and tortured beyond recognition.

For someone like Ryan who often treats politics as a contest of character, that’s a pretty epic blunder. He’s since apologized for not checking his facts, which undoes some of the damage. But that mainly just changes the frame of the story. In addition to making an incredibly questionable moral argument, he also exposed the depths of his most politically problematic ideological fixation. Either he doesn’t care about truth, or his faith in the ubiquity of poverty traps and dependency and so on is so strong that he sees no reason to doubt any corroborative anecdotes, no matter how apocryphal.

This is a familiar epistemic problem, but I’m bringing it up now because it has metastasized into a national campaign strategy.

If you’re sure your ideas are correct and confident your solutions are the right ones you’ve already erected a significant barrier to self-examination. And when admitting error carries enormous financial, personal and ideological risk, it feels easier not to check. You’re shocked when your candidate loses, because none of your friends voted for the other guy. And you just pass along stories they tell you about the soul-crushing nature of welfare, or the horrors of the Affordable Care Act, without bothering to apply a smell test.

Combine that instinct with a well-heeled, amoral campaign apparatus and you get a bunch of Americans for Prosperity ads that wither under scrutiny.

For instance: “A Dexter cancer patient featured in a conservative group’s TV ad campaign denouncing her new health care coverage as ‘unaffordable’ will save more than $1,000 this year under the plan, The Detroit News has learned.”

(They’re referring to Julie Boonstra, whose story we’ve examined multiple times, and have confirmed what I and others long suspected.)

That’s not to diminish the annoyance and uncertainty she felt when her old plan was eliminated, but to say that the premise of her complaint about her new plan is wrong. AFP probably doesn’t care; it’s just as likely that they never bothered to check. Here’s what Boonstra had to say.

When advised of the details of her Blues’ plan, Boonstra said the idea that it would be cheaper “can’t be true.”

“I personally do not believe that,” Boonstra said.

Of possible relevance to her incredulity: “Boonstra is the ex-wife of Mark Boonstra, the former Washtenaw County GOP chairman whom Gov. Rick Snyder appointed to the Michigan Court of Appeals in 2012.”

Back East, AFP found similar ACA victims. “Two New Hampshire women featured in a major television advertising buy critical of Democratic Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Ann Kuster’s support for the Affordable Care Act are state Republican activists.”

Again, I don’t think the collapse of these stories suggests that nobody is genuinely worse off because of Obamacare. Slate’s Dave Weigel found some that seem to fit the bill in Florida just last week! But there aren’t as many as Republicans would have you believe, and inconveniently they are unlikely to be older people with preexisting conditions, because the law is designed to make sure people like that aren’t left behind. Conservatives aren’t venturing very far outside of the movement to find them, though. Because on the right, a story about a child who feels unloved due to his family’s poverty must be true, in the same way that a story about Obamacare hurting a cancer patient can’t possibly be false.”

Brian Beutler

Brian Beutler is Salon’s political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.salon.com/2014/03/11/gops_sick_welfare_obsession_how_a_bubble_of_ignorance_keeps_leading_it_astray/

When You Hear Conservatives Talking About Religious Liberty, Watch Out

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Source: Alternet

Author: Bob Shryock

“At the dawn of the Tea Party revolution, many conservatives were optimistic. The prevailing attitude among reporters and insiders alike was that the Republican Party had shed its misguided moralism and embraced hard-nosed economic realism as its core platform. Political author Dick Morris wrote, “No longer do evangelical or social issues dominate the Republican ground troops….There is still a litmus test for admission to the Republican Party. But no longer is it dominated by abortion, guns and gays. Now, keeping the economy free of government regulation, reducing taxation, and curbing spending are the chemicals that turn the paper pink.”

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, agreed. “For decades, faith and family have been at the center of the conservative movement. But as the Tea Party infuses conservatism with new energy, its leaders deliberately avoid discussion of issues like gay marriage or abortion.”

Yet despite its focus on libertarianism, this new Republican bloc has spent the last three years fighting with unprecedented aggressiveness on the very social issues it was supposedly unconcerned with. Between 2011 and 2013, Republicans enacted 205 anti-abortion laws, more than they had in the prior 10 years combined (189). The Kansas house passed a bill that would give any individual, even essential government employees and hospital workers, the right to deny service to gay people. Though the bill did not pass the senate, similar bills are being introduced in at least nine other states, according to Mother Jones.

So what had changed? More than anything, it was the way that opposition to abortion and gay rights was justified: in the words of BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, “in terms of protecting religious freedom instead of enforcing ‘family values.’” This change made Republicans appear more moderate, but actually signaled a rightward shift. Conservative ideas of religious liberty posited that the government’s eventual goal was the oppression of conservative Christians, and compromise on any religious liberty issues—which encompassed abortion, gay rights, and the Affordable Care Act—would be a violation of Christian faith. The notion of religious liberty thus gave small-government politics a cosmic imperative.

The Rhetoric of Religious Liberty

In the last few years, Republicans have become more and more focused on not “paying for abortions.” In February, Jeff Jimerson, one of the chief petitioners for a ballot measure in Oregon that would outlaw using state funds to pay for an abortion, summarized this view in the New York Times. Jimerson said, “We don’t want to make this a pro-life thing. This is a pro-taxpayer thing. There are a lot of libertarians in Oregon, people who don’t really care what you do, just don’t make me pay for it.”

Jimerson’s views happen to be in line with the official 2012 GOP platform, which opposed “using public revenues to promote or perform abortions or fund organizations which perform or advocate it” and said the party would not “fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage.”

On the surface, this position may seem a softer stance, perhaps one that could offer a place for abortion rights with a conscience exemption. This makes it all the more strange that the last three years have seen renewed anti-abortion efforts at the state level. Stranger still, the laws passed during the last three years have done very little to block the government from funding abortions: the four most popular restrictions in 2013 were laws that limited insurance coverage, banned abortion pills, instituted 20-week bans, and restricted the function of abortion providers.

How did opposing paying for abortions lead to the largest anti-abortion rights push in memory? According to New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, “by framing the abortion debate in terms of fiscal conservatism, [Republicans] can make a connection to the issue they believe will ultimately decide who controls Congress next year — the Affordable Care Act.”

Eric C. Miller, professor of communication ctudies at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, noted in an analysis of a recent Bobby Jindal speech that, “When he takes up the claim that ‘the freedom to exercise your religion in the way you run your business’ is ‘under assault,’ for instance, you can bet that he’s talking about abortion. You can also bet that a Hobby Lobby anecdote is about to drop. Here the freedom to run a business according to conscience routinely stands in for the less marketable freedom-to-not-provide-comprehensive-health-insurance-for-female-employees.”

Besides worrying that the ACA’s contraception mandate would force religious employers to fund birth control, conservatives also expressed concerns that the ACA would create a “ financial windfall” for Planned Parenthood, and that it would “ entangle taxpayer funds in abortion coverage.”

All of these concerns can be encompassed by objections to the state funding abortion. Because of this, legislation that attempts to prevent government funding of abortion is often also anti-Obamacare legislation. As Jimerson’s petition website claims, “This initiative would prohibit public funds in Oregon from being used to pay for…government-subsidized health insurance plans created by ObamaCare.”

Still, why all the anti-abortion laws that seem to have no connection to the ACA? In fact, the fight against the ACA has simply caused conservatives to connect liberty with anti-abortion laws more generally, not just ones that directly deal with “paying for abortions.”

The evangelical Christian minister David Barton said that people who are “pro-abortion” are really “pro-socialism.” This is, “they’re pro bigger government, less individual rights and responsibilities.” In Barton’s mind, pro-choice ideas are always connected to big government liberalism, and libertarianism is thus pro-life. In this environment, fighting government, fighting the ACA, and fighting abortion have been so connected that a blow against abortion rights is a blow against the ACA, and also the (imagined) repressive state, even when the specifics of the law have everything to do with restricting individual freedom and nothing to do with the ACA at all.

Religious Liberty Justifies New Anti-Gay Movement

In 2013, a new brand of “religious liberty” stories circulated around right-wing news outlets. Townhall.com told readers about an “ Air Force Officer Forced to Remove Bible From Desk,” a Fox News article titled “Soldier Who Read Conservative Books Now Faces Charges” gained 12,000 likes, and “Investigation: Bakery Forced to Make Lesbian Wedding Cake” made headlines at WorldNetDaily. “ Judge Orders Wedding Cake Baker to Serve Gay Couples,” wrote the Drudge Report in December. According to Todd Starnes, a Fox News journalist who popularized many of these stories, “Christians are trading places with homosexuals,” that is, events like the repeal of don’t ask/don’t tell had flipped the narrative of oppression and oppressor.

Accoroding to Starnes, the government was now in the process of staging a war on Christianity. Ken Klukowski, a professor at Liberty University, at the time the director of the Family Research Council’s (FRC) Center for Religious Liberty, accused President Obama of “Chicago-style thuggery” toward Christians in an interview with the Christian Post last October. Retired Lt. General and Family Research Council vice-president William Boykin accused Obama of, in the words of a Christian Post reporter, supporting a “large and secretive Marxist movement seeking to remove all dependence on God and references to the deity from civil society.”

The FRC, an organization focused narrowly on abortion and same-sex marriage, could thus say without irony, “Our message is simple but enormously important: Everything we care about hinges on religious liberty.” Republican advocacy groups weren’t the only ones obsessed with the idea: every major Republican presidential candidate in 2012 claimed religious freedom was under attack.

The rhetorical transformation did not go unnoticed. Jay Michaelson of Political Research Associates wrote in a report titled “Redefining Religious Liberty” that “Religious conservatives have succeeded in reframing the debate, inverting the victim-oppressor dynamic, and broadening support for their agenda” and that the religious liberty argument represented a “key front in the broader culture war designed to fight the same social battles on new-sounding terms.”

It may have sounded nicer, but the practical implication of religious freedom rhetoric was a more virulent homophobic agenda. Michaelson wrote that this new discourse should not be understood “as an attempt to create not religious exemptions” but rather “ the evisceration of civil right protections themselves. If any individual or business can refuse to recognize a person’s civil rights on the pretext of religious belief, those rights are functionally meaningless.”

Religious Liberty Rhetoric Leads to Government Shutdown

On the eve of the government shutdown, Representative Michelle Bachmann told a reporter from the Washington Examiner, “This is historic, and it’s a historic shift that’s about to happen, and if we’re going to fight, we need to fight now.”

Less than a month prior, Bachmann stated, on the radio show of Olive Tree Ministries’ Jan Markell that Obama’s actions as President signaled the rapture: “Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, his day is at hand…. When we see up is down and right is called wrong…these days would be as the days of Noah.”

Bachmann wasn’t the only one to view herself as what the Daily Beast’s Joe McLean called a “ modern prophet of the apocalypse.” Four days later, Ted Cruz said at the FRC’s Values Voters Summit that America was “a couple of years” away from the “cliff of oblivion.”

Apocalyptic ideas have been part of America since its founding, and among conservative Christians, they’re experiencing something of a renaissance. According to author Chip Berlet, “Since the early 1990s, a sector of the political right in the United States has embraced a specific set of conspiracy theories revolving around government plans to impose tyranny.”

In the ’90s, this synthesis of evangelical Christianity and anti-government paranoia was restricted to the margins: militias, homeschoolers and scattered megachurch pastors. But they gained a wider audience through media: radio shows, websites and books, most notably, the apocalyptic thriller series Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye. In Left Behind, satanic forces and government forces literally mix—the antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia, ascends to power by becoming president of the United Nations, and uses that role to bring the world under his control, all with the aid of the (mostly liberal) folks who hadn’t been raptured. Left Behind sold 63 million copies. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell said Left Behind had a greater “impact on Christianity” than “any book in modern times, outside the Bible.”

Today’s conservatives may not have quite so dramatic a vision of the apocalypse, but Tea Partiers like Bachmann and Cruz seem to have internalized the idea that, to borrow a phrase from progressive Christian blogger Fred Clark, “the abolition of all religion…is exactly what [liberals] are hoping for.” They’ve also made use of the conservative infrastructure LaHaye helped to construct: a group he founded, the Council for National Policy, called the “most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of” by ABC, designed and built the government shutdown.

According to the Nation’s Lee Fang, the CNP’s ad-hoc coalition, the Conservative Action Project, “initially floated the idea of attaching funding for Obamacare to the continuing resolution, and followed up with grassroots organizing, paid advertisements and a series of events designed to boost the message of senators like Ted Cruz.” The justification for these actions was, in the words of the Conservative Action Project, the Affordable Care Act’s “ unprecedented  attack on life and religious liberty.”

For conservatives, religious liberty was built on an anti-government, apocalyptic attitude, which posited what Eric C. Miller calls an “overarching conspiracy.” Conservative religious liberty claims rely on the idea that people in power really do desire the end of, or at least dramatic restrictions on, conservative Christianity.

Jay Michaelson wrote, “One recurring theme in the right-wing literature is the sense of a ‘coming storm’…Like the red menace, the secularist danger is imminently looming. The metaphors are appropriately biblical: soon there will be a flood of litigation, a firestorm of controversy. Indeed, these apocalyptic pronouncements resonate closely with…Christian Reconstructionism/pre-millennialism specifically. The ‘coming storm’ and the End Times are not distant from one another.”

Rob Shryock is a freelance journalist covering topics such as evangelical Christian culture, religion in the military and Islamophobia. He frequently writes for Religion Dispatches.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/when-you-hear-conservatives-talking-about-religious-liberty-watch-out?akid=11561.123424.lwfyaK&rd=1&src=newsletter965135&t=5

Republicans Are Officially Out Of Obamacare Attacks

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: National memo

Author: @LOLGOP

It may take a few more elections for Republicans to figure this out, but health care just isn’t a good issue for them.

You can understand why they’re confused.

In 2010, their histrionic “OMG! Death panels!” Obamacare attacks were a small part of a massive landslide victory that owed more to the economy cratering than anything else. And the most successful tactic was going after Democrats for “cutting” Medicare by reducing overpayments in the Medicare Advantage program, reversing a strategy that the left employed successfully for decades.

Four years later, Republicans have two huge problems: They can’t say how they’d replace Obamacare, but they have said how they would ruin Medicare.

After taking the House in 2011, Republicans elected with a mandate to protect Medicare passed a budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) that would gut the program and pass massive costs on to seniors by turning the program into mostly privatized “voucher” system. In 2013, Ryan proposed similar cuts that would remake America’s health care system for seniors, along with the same reforms of Medicare Advantage that they ran against in 2010, in an effort to endorse a plan that would balance the budget in 10 years.

So what are Republicans doing in 2014, as they’re supposed to be laser-focused on what a disaster Obamacare is?

A new memo from House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) says the GOP will focus on cuts to Medicare Advantage.

The only problem?

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.nationalmemo.com/republicans-officially-obamacare-attacks/

Ho-ray Ho-ray for the ACA!

The defeated Republican anti-Obamacare forces are in full retreat after ACA enrollment in healthcare plans surged past 3 million.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Politicsusa

Author: Jason Easley

The defeated Republican anti-Obamacare forces are in full retreat after ACA enrollment in healthcare plans surged past 3 million.

In a blog post, HHS reported that,

Since the beginning of open enrollment, millions of Americans are gaining access to health coverage-many for the very first time—thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The most recent data indicates that approximately 3.0 million people have now enrolled in a private health insurance plan through the Federal and State-based Marketplaces since October 1.

….

Additionally, between October and December over 6.3 million individuals were determined eligible to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP through state agencies and through state-based Marketplaces. These numbers include both Medicaid and CHIP new eligibility determinations in states that expanded coverage, determinations made on prior law, and in some states, Medicaid renewals and groups not affected by the health care law. This does not include eligibility determinations made through HealthCare.gov.

800,000 people have signed up in the few weeks between late December and January 15. This surge in enrollment means that the administration is only 300,000 behind their original target of 3.3 million enrollees. Once the full numbers for January are released, it is expected that the ACA will not only be on target, but may be ahead of schedule.

The mainstream media isn’t reporting this, but the ACA is turning into a huge victory for President Obama.

Before leaving on their current vacation, Republicans signaled their defeat by voting to fund the healthcare law for 2014. Now Republicans like John Boehner and John McCain are completely dropping the repeal and only repeal ruse, and suggesting that the GOP needs to come up with its own healthcare alternative.

It’s too late for alternative plans. The ACA is the law of the land. Millions of people have signed up. This isn’t a policy discussion anymore. Republicans can’t escape the fact that any alternative that they suggest will involve taking health insurance away from millions of people.

The time for Republicans to suggest policy alternatives was in 2009 and 2010, but they chose to demonize the ACA instead of engaging in a serious discussion about healthcare. They put all of their eggs in the ACA failure basket, and now that the program is a success, they suddenly want to talk about healthcare.

The ACA was the original Republican healthcare plan. Anything that they come up with now will be smoke and mirrors that won’t cover the uninsured.

Republicans are being proven wrong every single day on the ACA. The GOP is still going to try to sucker their base with talk of repeal during the 2014 election campaign, but they are in full retreat. There will be no repeal. It is unlikely the law will ever be replaced. The ACA is here to stay.

Republicans Are In Total Retreat As Obamacare Enrollment Skyrockets Past 3 Million was written by Jason Easley for PoliticusUSA.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.politicususa.com/2014/01/25/republicans-total-retreat-obamacare-enrollment-skyrockets-3-million.html

New poll: Americans optimistic about Obamacare, overwhelmingly oppose GOP position

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: The Jed Report, via Daily Kos

Author: staff

(N.B. The term ‘Obamacare’ is a conservative term for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) used by it’s GOP conservative critics.  As the ACA succeeds, will these critics still want their arch enemy’s name on it?  It might also be noted that as the law addresses health care insurance, not health care itself, ‘health care law’ may be a bad frame.)

“CNN has a very interesting new poll that not only debunks the notion that Americans have already decided Obamacare is a failure, but also reveals that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the GOP’s conservative critique of the health care law.

According to the poll (pdf), which surveyed American adults between Nov. 18-20 with a margin of error of ±3.5 points:

  1. Most Americans believe Obamacare’s current problems will be solved. 54 percent say they believe current problems will be fixed, compared with 43 percent who say they won’t be.
  2. Most Americans believe it’s too early to judge whether Obamacare is a success or failure. A total of 53 percent think it is too early to say whether Obamacare is a success or failure. A total of 39 percent think it’s a failure and 8 percent already think it is a success.
  3. Most Americans do not support conservative critiques of Obamacare. According to the poll, 41 percent of Americans think Obamacare is too liberal, slightly more than 40 percent who support Obamacare. But 14 percent think it’s not liberal enough.

As you might expect, the poll’s crosstabs show that most Republicans are certain Obamacare can’t be fixed and has already failed, but outside of the GOP universe, people aren’t merely open to Obamacare, they are optimistic about its prospects and want it to work.

Obviously, it doesn’t matter how open or optimistic the public is if the Obama administration can’t ultimately deliver on the promise of Obamacare, but if they do, most Americans are on their side. Republicans have bet everything on failure. If they lose that bet, it will be an absolute political nightmare for them—and it should be.”

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO THE JED REPORT ON WED NOV 27, 2013 AT 09:41 AM PST.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY DAILY KOS.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/27/1258749/-New-poll-Americans-optimistic-about-Obamacare-overwhelmingly-oppose-GOP-position