The Republican Party's "No" Line On Health Care
It is easy to imagine Rahm Emanuel chuckling when he read the Republican Party's new statement of principles for health care reform, which were released Monday. Like Democrats who decided in 2005 to oppose President George W. Bush's Social Security reforms without offering any real constructive counter-proposal, the Republican Party, under the leadership of Michael Steele, has laid out a strategic plan for health reform that is entirely negative in its substance. (It is also rather misleading, as the head of the AARP explains here.) The GOP has embraced, apparently, Emanuel's claim that it is the "party of no."
Steele lays out six principles, which are clearly written for their political effect, which I expand upon after the jump.
1. No cuts in Medicare, a government-run program Republicans like, which Steele admits is going "into the red in less than a decade." (Does this mean that Republicans now support tax increases to pay for the shortfalls? Or that there is no solution? Or that something else should be cut? What?)
2. No expansion of government-run healthcare, which could involve "boards that would decide what treatments would or wouldn't be funded." (Left unmentioned is the fact that such boards already exist in the private health care marketplace, and, in practice, in the Medicare system, which, in the words of its own website, "does not cover everything, and it does not pay the total cost for most services or supplies that are covered.")
3. No efforts to ration care based on age. (Left unmentioned is the fact that no one in the Democratic Party has proposed this. The citation most-often made for this piece of misinformation is to a paper by Ezekial Emanuel, a White House adviser, which discusses age-based rationing for a select group of cases in which there is an absolute scarcity of resources--like organ donation, or vaccine distribution. In the very paper, which has no connection to the current health reform legislation in Congress beyond Emanuel's authorship and the fact that he works at the White House, Emanuel says it would be inappropriate to apply the age-test to health care generally.)
4. No government interference with end of life care. (Left unmentioned is the fact that Democrats only want to allow for Medicare reimbursement of end of life consultations, which can reach any conclusion, including the decision by patients to ask for every possible treatment. This raises a philosophical dilemma: Is the government interfering by not allowing doctors to be reimbursed for speaking with their patients, or is the government interfering by allowing doctors to be reimbursed for discussions with their patients? If we follow the logic of #2 (see above), "not interfereing" would probably be giving patients more options, not less.)
5. Not cut the Medicare Advantage Plan. (Left unmentioned is the fact that Medicare Advantage provides a subsidy of about $17 billion a year to private insurance companies to offer services that would otherwise be offered by Medicare. The LA Times has a good explanation of this debate here.)
6. No increased costs for veterans under Tricare. (Left unmentioned is the fact that, though final reform proposals have not been formulated, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has said that Tricare would not be impacted. Last week, in Arizona, President Obama said, "Since there's been so much misinformation out there about health-insurance reform, let me say this: One thing that reform won't change is veterans' health care.")
The Steele document is a political document, designed to kill Obama's health care plan and increase Republican odds for the midterm elections in 2010. On that front, it is probably a smart move. But as policy, it has little merit. It offers no positive proposal to deal with the spiraling costs of health care, which Steele admits need to be dealt with, and it offers no suggestion about how to broaden coverage. Other Republicans have put forward proposals to deal with the hard policy issues. But they now belong to a party that is focused not on policy reform, but on winning the fight.
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1
"Like Democrats who decided in 2005 to oppose President George W. Bush's Social Security reforms without offering any real constructive counter-proposal,"
Very Kleinian. Now of course the Democratic position was that there wasn't a Social Security crisis so reform wasn't needed.
The republicans *say* there is need for reforming health care.But yeah, they are pretty much the same thing.
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1.1
As someone said (Josh Marshall??), the Dem counter-proposal was called Social Security.
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PNNTO: Bingo!
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And, BTW, has anyone done the math to see where a privatized SS fund would be if we had invested in 2005 at DOW=12000?
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The boat may be leaky, but its getting fixed and getting us there. Offering up a Kleenex and claiming that it is a life raft is a con job the congress and public thankfully saw through.
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2
Nice of you to follow where the facts lead and point out that every single one of the bullet points is seriously flawed.
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I am willing, however to take issue with your comparison to the social security debate. It is well known, (you even mention it) that Medicare has an impending cash-flow problem but it is also reasonably common knowlege that the retirment fund does not share its dire straits. It was not necessary for Democrats to offer an alternative plan to the Social Security Crisis because there WAS no crisis.
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I dare you to stand before us and assert that the Republicans need not come up with a HCR plan because there is no Health Care crisis... -
3
"The Steele document is a political document, designed to kill Obama's health care plan and increase Republican odds for the midterm elections in 2010. On that front, it is probably a smart move. But as policy, it has little merit."
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Only our modern media could characterize something done solely for the political, with no policy behind it, as a "smart move", even while having almost enough self-awareness to recognize it as hypocrisy.-
3.1
If your goal is to discredit a president and improve your party's chances in the next congressional elections, a "smart move" is anything that gets you closer to that goal. The Repubs occasionally give themselves away (ask Sen. DeMint), but mostly they pretend to want to fix what's wrong with health care even as they try to make it impossible to do so. That may be hypocrisy and lying, it might leave us with a health care system even more dysfunctional than what we now have, but Hey, it'll move the Republicans closer to regaining the power they've forefeited by their prior conduct, so how can it not be a smart move -- for them, if not for the country?
At least MS is drawing attention to the emperor's nudity. Haven't many of us been criticizing the MSM for failing to do just that? Let's give him a few well-earned brownie points.
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Like Democrats who decided in 2005 to oppose President George W. Bush's Social Security reforms without offering any real constructive counter-proposal...
Not exactly true. What is true is that many Dems felt that eliminating the payroll cap on SocSec taxes (or even talking about it) during campaign season was poor timing...
...which gets back to the point about policy reform versus winning the fight.
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So who asks Steele why the GOP opposes the Democratic proposals, all of which adhere to the first four principles, and correctly identifies Medicare Advantage as falling into the waste and fraud category?
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NO to more socialism? Works for me.
NO to more Blame America 1st lib loon appeasement? Works for me.
NO to more unilateral surrender? Works for me.
NO to abortion on demand as birth control? Works for me.
NO to legalized man-mutt sex as the new ACLU barrister standard? Works for me.
NO to my kids paying for Obama's smoking habit? Works for me.
NO to cashing in the CIA's field ops, but for the sake of 3 more Canadian electoral votes in 2012? Works for me.
NO to destroying one-sixth of the economy? Works for me.
NO to criminalizing defense of the nation? Works for me.
NO to ludicrous government expansion? Works for me.
NO to unregulated White House czars usurping Congressional and Judicial power? Works for me.
NO to more Lockerbie and Gitmo terrorist releases? Works for me.
NO to more $50,000-a-week vacation rentals while foreclosures hit 15%? Works for me.
NO to more union welfare, ACORN slush funds, DNC push polls, AFL-CIO thugs? Works for me.
NO to more IG firings, cement laying, cop bashing, and Tora Bora 2009? Works for me.
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7
Also, Dirks, Bush never proposed a plan to which an alternative could be prepared. There was never any kind of policy proposal laid out as an alternative, at any meaningful level of detail. Compare Howard Dean's detailed analysis of the health care crisis, and how it should be resolved.
Just MS tossing off a bit of requisite false equivalence.
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Grape,
The GOP also have their proposals on the margins. http://blunt.house.gov/Read.aspx?ID=1140
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8.1
Yup. Still, Wexler's (and David Obey's) proposals do qualify as putting 'forward proposals to deal with the hard policy issues', as is Blount's.
Funny thing is...I follow things more closely than some, yet I don't hear about Blount's proposal (or the Dem proposals that have already passed other Senate and House committees)...Care to hazard a guess why those don't get as much press as the one that hasn't passed committee yet?
I do realize that central idea of your post is the substitution of political gamesmanship for effective governance, a point which I can't disagree with.
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8.2
MS:
So why don't you confront Mr. Steele with these plain illustrations of his –OK, let's be charitable – "inaccuracies?"
Wouldn't that be more responsible reporting, certainly within the capabilities of a national news magazine's White House correspondent?
Without a serious effort to give the evidence of Steele's falsehoods the same exposure as the falsehoods themselves, your post looks more than a little like mere pandering to the limited universe of Swampland.
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Mr. Scherer: False equivalences are a huge problem with media, like Time, slipping into irrelevancy -- and yet you do exactly this in your second sentence. How can you not respond to this?
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Is this a joke? Did the DNC somehow dupe the Post and submit this as a Steele ultimatum when it's really written by Dem strategists?
So the GOP health care plan is, well, not to have a plan. That ought to win some votes...
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Michael Scherer:
But [Republicans] now belong to a party that is focused not on policy reform, but on winning the fight.
Three questions:
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1) Are the members of the House Progressive bloc that opposes the Gang of Six"focused not on policy reform, but on winning the fight"?
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2) Are the members of the Gang of Six that opposes the House Progressive bloc "focused not on policy reform, but on winning the fight"?
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2) Is the Obama White House (as personified by a chuckling Rahm Emanuel) that opposes the House Progressive bloc "focused not on policy reform, but on winning the fight"?
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When you correctly say that the Republicans are for winning (and not for reforming), I'm wondering who best represents Democrats' goals: the House Progressives, or Rahm, Obama and the Gang of Six? -
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Health care reform is supported by a large majority of the American people. Bush's proposals for social security were very unpopular. Talk about comparing apples to oranges.
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MS
I suppose Blunt's one page summary of some vague principles is a "proposal" in the same way Bush vaguely saying there should be private accounts and reductions in payroll taxes was a "proposal"
But there is nothing in either instance that actually was an alternative to the status quo. No budget, no timeline, no provisions, no nothing.
Just because a politician says something is a plan doesn't make it so.
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I didn't see much coverage of this study - Health premiums up 95% since 2000; income up 17.5%. Of course this doesn't fit the Repub line...
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Didn't George Will (on This Week... ) say that the shelter/fuel/healthcare bite out of the household budget only went up 2% in the last ten years? Well, something like that. Gee, I don't know whether to give my personal savings to my bank, my doctor, or Exxon.
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My initial version of this post left off the sixth principle of the RNC plan--about Tricare. I have since fixed that.
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"Like Democrats who decided in 2005 to oppose President George W. Bush's Social Security reforms without offering any real constructive counter-proposal, the Republican Party, under the leadership of Michael Steele, has laid out a strategic plan for health reform that is entirely negative in its substance."
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False equivalence rears it's ugly head again.
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Might I point out Micheal, a simple answer to this comment in the form of a question:
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How many Americans would have lost their life savings under Bush's "reform"?
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Micheal, you are a dumbass. In hindsight, it appears that the Dem's response was more than adequate. I simple no was all that was needed for that lowzy idea!
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Now, if you can search what you have left of a brain, and try to come up with a good reason why a simple 'no' on health care reform is the best answer, I will be the first in line to congratulate you!
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False equivalence is only a dream, Micheal, and it gives you and other GOP shills an out to avoid the horrible deficiency that the GOP represents. -
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Other than the false analogy, not a bad piece. The Republican alternative plan doesn't exist, and most of their so-called principles are straw men. Seems about par for the course to me. The only thing missing are some random slurs, accusations of hating America, Hitler analogies, and arguments that Hitler was really a socialist.
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Just exactly which Michael Steele are we supposed to believe? The one published today - who must have had some type of epiphany and is all for protecting the health care for the elderly, or the Michael Steele that appeared on MTP in 2006 and said the following...
MR. RUSSERT: It's the same in the federal government.
LT. GOV. STEELE: It's the same. And my point…
MR. RUSSERT: Seventy percent is Social Security, Medicare and Defense.
LT. GOV. STEELE: Absolutely. Absolutely.
MR. RUSSERT: Would you touch those?
LT. GOV. STEELE: Abso — Tim, everything has…
MR. RUSSERT: Everything's on the table.
LT. GOV. STEELE: Everything has to be on the table, my friend. We are living in a time — we have to — government has to act like the rest of, the rest of the world and sit back and look at your budget. If you don't have enough money in any given month, what do you do? You've got to reprioritize. You've got to take care of the business at hand.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/24/steele-medicare-savings/
Which side of his mouth should we believe?
It's despicable to see him fear-mongering the elderly. If he was truly concerned about health care for the elderly - he'd be offering solutions, not verbal vomit that appeared in WaPo today.
Steele is a trainwreck.
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19.1
'Which side of his mouth should we believe?'
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Wouldn't this be an example of a false dichotomy?
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20
[...] balking over health care legislation. Underscoring how much Republicans have become the “party of no” and how much the Senate Finance Committee legislation has been watered-down, Frist said that [...]
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[...] balking over health care legislation. Underscoring how much Republicans have become the “party of no” and how much the Senate Finance Committee legislation has been watered-down, Frist said that [...]
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[...] I really would prefer to debate democratic spending at another time as I think a thorough in depth look at the Republican party would show that they currently do not have a much better track record. They had almost 8 years of unchecked power and increased not decreased our national debt. Government expanded not decreased during the Bush years as did spending. The Iraq war began under Bush( currently 1.05 trillion), so did TARP (700 billion). The facts just don’t support that the Republican Party does any better managing spending than the Democratic Party. The health care system is broken, the current plan stinks, but republicans don’t even want to fix it. Many Republicans have stated that they would oppose any change to the heathcare system. http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/08/24/the-republican-partys-no-line-on-health-care/ [...]
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