This item is a special guest contribution by Paul E. Starr, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, co-founder of The American Prospect, and author of Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform.
The Supreme Court decision to allow states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion puts millions of low-income Americans at risk of losing coverage they would otherwise gain under the Affordable Care Act. But while the Court’s decision is unjustified as law and policy, Democrats and progressive activists ought to regard it as a tremendous political opportunity to build support and voter turnout in states under Republican leadership.
Under the ACA, the federal government will pay nearly all the cost of newly eligible Medicaid beneficiaries (100 percent for the first three years, declining to 90 percent thereafter). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the law will increase state Medicaid costs by less than 1 percent.
As the number of uninsured drops, moreover, hospitals will be relieved of much of their burden of uncompensated care and no longer need to transfer that cost to the privately insured. As a result, the Medicaid expansion will be a benefit not just to the poor but to insured middle-class families too, who will no longer pay the indirect tax for uncompensated care that has long been hidden in their health-care and insurance bills.
Besides paying nearly all the cost of the Medicaid expansion, the federal government will pay the entire cost of the subsidies for the near poor and lower-middle-income people who obtain private coverage through the new insurance exchanges. Together, the expansion of Medicaid and the insurance subsidies will bring billions of dollars into states with large uninsured populations. That revenue will strengthen their health-care institutions and have a multiplier effect, increasing jobs in related industries.
In states whose leaders currently threaten to refuse the Medicaid money, Democrats running for office should be able to make a forceful and persuasive case that carrying out health-care reform will be good for the state as a whole. They ought to use these arguments to put middle-income voters at ease about health reform, while mobilizing voter turnout in the low-income communities that will gain most directly. Accepting the federal funds to expand Medicaid will have clear, real-life benefits–for some people, benefits that can make the difference between life and death.
Moreover, this is not a situation where low-income groups and progressive activists will be on their own. Health-care providers will support efforts to persuade state officials to put aside ideology, consider the best interests of all their people–and take the money.
The mostly southern states that are resisting the Medicaid expansion have a long history of denying adequate social protections to low-income people, but there has never been a more advantageous moment for progressive-minded Democrats to organize around that issue. The Supreme Court shouldn’t have made the Medicaid expansion optional, but now that it has, Democrats should make the most of Republican block-headedness.
Month: July 2012
Undeterred by Charlie Cook’s skepticism about electoral college speculation, Veteran political analyst Albert R. Hunt crunches some numbers and takes a crack at it in his New York Times ‘Page two’ blog: “Under the scenario above Romney would have to win 80 of these electors while Obama would need to capture 52. If Romney carried Florida and Ohio, and North Carolina, he still would need to win 18 more electoral votes. If Obama wins two of the big three — Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio — he’s almost home..”
Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake have a post at The Fix arguing that Dems have a 50-50 chance of holding the Senate in the November elections, which is a lot better than the common wisdom pundits shared a year or so ago. “No matter what happens,” say Cillizza and Blake, “it’s a near-certainty that it will be a thin majority for either side in 2013…”
Jennifer Skalka Tulumello has a long post up at The Monitor, “Polling: a look inside the machinery of public opinion surveys,” with a lot of inside skinny on the inner workings of Gallup that should be of interest to poll-watchers.
Nathaniel Persily has a worrisome post, “Meet the hanging chad of 2012” at The New York Daily News about the new problems with absentee ballots under the current wave of voter suppression laws.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the GOP’s all-out voter suppression campaign, Democraticunderground.com has an interesting article on “Stealing Elections through Manipulation of County Central Tabulators.”
The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is mobilizing to turn out at least 12 million of America’s 22 million eligible Latino voters, many of whom will be voting in ‘battleground states.’ More on LULAC’s plans here and here.
Lois Romano of Politico has an encouraging profile of Obama’s “messenger in chief,” “top strategist and crisis manager,” Stephanie Cutter.
Paul Waldman’s American Prospect post “Mitt Goes into the Fog” shares an insight on Romney’s strategy: “When it became clear that Romney would indeed be the Republican nominee, people began speculating about how he would execute the “move to the center” that every nominee must undertake…Mitt hasn’t moved to the center, but he hasn’t stayed on the right, either. Instead, he’s just moved into the fog. You see, you can’t call Romney a flip-flopper if you can’t tell what he thinks about anything…If the economy continues to sputter, he might be able to win without saying much of anything about the country’s critical issues. But that in itself is a pretty risky chance to take.”
The best quote for Monday readers comes from Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, quoted from his appearance on ABC This Week yesterday, via Ben Jacobs Washington Monthly post “Unseemly and Disgusting“: “I’ve never known of a Swiss bank account to build an American bridge, a Swiss bank account to create American jobs, or Swiss bank accounts to rebuild the levies to protect the people of New Orleans.”
A subject I’ve been writing about at Washington Monthly that hasn’t gotten the national attention it deserves is in the area of education policy, where Mitt Romney’s little-noticed proposal to convert all federal K-12 education money into vouchers is getting a test run down in Louisiana, where his close ally and short-list running-mate prospect Gov. Bobby Jindal is turning over large sums of public money to private, largely religious schools with next to no accountability for educational standards or outcomes. As I noted in one post:
[The Louisiana program is using state funds to prop up marginal church-based schools with zero vetting of their curriculum, facilities, instructional credentials or standards. “The market,” or, I suppose, the Good Lord will sort them out eventually.
A separate piece on the Louisiana program by Alternet’s Bruce Wilson (published at Salon) notes that a number of beneficiary schools use textbooks that explicitly preach anti-evolution and anti-gay nostrums as science, along with revisionist history and political preferences.
Is this where Mitt Romney wants to push American education? And if he suggests (in the unlikely event he has to clarify his proposal anytime soon) schools will be vetted for quality or competence, how long will it be before that idea collides with the belief of Romney’s evangelical and conservative-Catholic allies that any regulation of religious bodies for use of public dollars is an assault on “religious freedom?”
Note this latest post for an update, where Jindal’s staff is scrambling to “vet” schools already receiving vouchers after bad publicity about what sure looks like a blatant effort to reward Republican religious constituencies with taxpayers’ dollars.
Ralph Nader can always be counted on for a blistering critique of Democrats and the Democratic Party from its left. The latest case in point would be his “The Serial Ineptitude of the Democrats” post at Counterpunch. And as usual, he makes some good points, among them:
Victory in politics often goes to those who have the most energy and decisiveness, however wrongheaded. The Republicans have won these races for years. To paraphrase author and lapsed Republican, Kevin Phillips, the Republicans go for the jugular, while the Democrats go for the capillaries.
The Democrats are tortured daily by Republican leaders, Speaker John Boehner and Eric Cantor but they do not go into these politicians’ backyards in Virginia and Ohio to expose the unpopular agendas pitched by these Wall Street puppets.
One would think that politicians who side with big corporations would be politically vulnerable for endangering both America and the American people. These corrupt politicians promote corporate tax loopholes and side with insurance and drug companies on costly health care proposals. They defend the corporate polluters on their unsafe workplaces, dirty air, water and contaminated food, push for more deficit spending in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, neglect Main Street based public works-repair-America-jobs programs, support high-interest student loans, cover for oil industry greed at the pump, and are hell-bent on taking the federal cops off the corporate crime beats.
…The Democrats should be landsliding the worst Republican Party in history. Talk about extremists. There are virtually no moderate or liberal Republicans left in Congress after being driven out by their own party hard-liners. So this Republican Party, united over their extremism, should be very easy to challenge.
Those are some of the nicer things Nader has to say about Democrats in his Counterpunch post. He takes Dems to task for their limp support of a needed minimum wage hike and their failures to “Get tough on Wall Street and corporate crime, protect pensions, end the wars, tax the corporate and wealthy tax-escapees, launch community-based public works programs, provide full Medicare for all, expand health and safety programs, to name a few.”
There’s no danger, however, that Republicans will leverage Nader’s critique, since they are much worse than Democrats on all of the issues he touches on. Some might argue that, in a way, Nader’s critique positions Democrats at the political center, where they need to be. In any event, it wouldn’t hurt Dems if they toughened up their populist creds a little along the lines Nader has suggested.
I’ve never blamed Nader for Gore’s loss in 2000, as have some of my Democratic friends (Looks to me like it was stolen by voter suppression). But I do wish Nader had run in Democratic presidential primaries over the years, which he might have won or, at least pushed the intra-party debate to the left. Nader hates the Democratic party so much, it seems as if he would rather see it replaced than fixed.
Nader will likely never challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination in future elections. But I hope that someday, some equally-eloquent challenger with similarly fierce populist instincts will enter the fray and put some of Nader’s legitimate concerns on the actual agenda.
The following article is cross-posted from The American Prospect:
Today featured contradicting reports on the presidential election’s fundraising front. In The New York Times Magazine, Robert Draper describes the long, hard slog of pro-Obama Priorities USA, the self-acknowledged underdog of super PACs that is bound to be beaten by American Crossroads–the super PAC Hulk masterminded by Karl Rove. Because of the well-known troubles of Priorities USA, it was surprising to see the National Review report on Obama’s super PAC advantage, citing FEC reports that showed that anti-Romney spending far outweighs anti-Obama spending.
Just a little oversight in this analysis, though. The biggest conservative spenders in 2012 aren’t likely going to be super PACs. The real scary fundraisers are the 501(c)4 nonprofits, which don’t face the same disclosure requirements as their more overtly political super PAC brethren. As TPM’s Brian Beutler points out, American Crossroads’s nonprofit sibling, Crossroads GPS, dropped $24 million on one ad buy in May.
If we take another step back, the Republicans’ advantage in political spending grows even starker. National Review only covered outside spending on the presidential campaign–not on state and local races. But congressional and state races are where conservative outside groups truly have liberal groups beat. The top Republican-leaning outside groups plan to spend $1 billion in 2012, and the bulk of that money is going to go toward winning Congress–not the White House. Labor unions, on the other hand, are expected to spend between $200 to $400 million on Democratic campaigns. Priorities USA only plans to spend $100 million by November, and they are by far the biggest Democratic-leaning outside group. As much as Draper paints Priorities as an underdog, the other more localized Democratic-leaning outside groups are miles behind the rest of the pacs, and that’s where the Republicans’ true advantage lies.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 3, 2012.
Greg Sargent reports on the decision of five Republican governors to screw impoverished and working people out of the health care they are supposed to get from Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As Sargent explains:
Iowa governor Terry Branstad has now become the fifth GOP governor to vow that his state will not opt in to the Medicaid expansion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. He joins the ranks of Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, Florida’s Rick Scott, South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.
It’s worth keeping a running tally of how many people could go without insurance that would otherwise be covered under Obamacare if these GOP governors make good on their threat.
The latest rough total: Nearly one and a half million people.
…And counting. Sargent rolls out the breakdown estimates for the five states, with Florida leading the pack with more than 683,000 citizens at risk by Governor Scott’s threat. Sargent adds,
Of course, it’s still unclear whether these governors will go through with their threats. David Dayen and Ed Kilgore have both been making good cases that they will. As Dayen and Kilgore both note, some of these GOP governors are relying on objections to the cost of the program to the states — even though the federal government covers 100% of the program for the first three years and it remains a good deal beyond — to mask ideological reasons for opting out…Dayen rightly notes that the media will probably fail to sufficiently untangle the cover stories these governors are using.
if there is a silver lining behind the shameful threats of the five Republican governors, it is that there is a good chance that their actions will provoke mass demonstrations in at least some of their states, hopefully right in front of the gubernatorial mansions, where possible. And wouldn’t it be justice, if those demonstrations were lead by people with serious health problems, bringing along their oxygen tanks, wheelchairs, dialysis machines and other health care devices, joined by nurses and hospital workers in uniforms for exactly the kind of photo ops these governors don’t want?
Perhaps the key player in mobilizing mass demonstrations against the Republican Medicaid-bashers would be the nurses unions, which did such an outstanding job of making former Governor Schwarzenegger eat crow in CA over staffing ratios in hospitals.
In a way, the five governors are daring sick and needy people to protest against being targeted for health hardships. Given the large numbers of those threatened in these states, it’s an arrogant dare they may regret very soon — as well as on November 6.
This item by TDS Contributor and Democratic political strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 29, 2012.
The most important thing about today’s Supreme Court health care decision is the victory for the millions of Americans who will live longer, happier, healthier lives because of the new health care law.
It is also an historic day for the thousands of health care warriors who have fought to make health care a right in America for decades and have finally seen their struggle rewarded with success.
But the Supreme Court’s decision has massive political implications as well:
First, this victory will send another bolt of electricity through Obama’s base. Nothing succeeds better than a hard-fought victory at pumping people up — and firing them up for the next great battle. The victory will send thousands of volunteers streaming into Obama campaign offices — and millions of dollars into its coffers. It will invigorate Obama’s army of volunteers.
It is particularly important when coupled with the president’s decision two weeks ago, protecting Dream Students from deportation. That decision already had a major impact on enthusiasm among Obama supporters — and particularly Latinos.
Their Supreme Court defeat will also dispirit the right-wing — particularly because they were abandoned by their own iconic, conservative Chief Justice who wrote the opinion finding the law constitutional.
Enthusiasm is a huge factor in electoral politics.
Second, the Romney campaign — and Republican candidates across the board — have now been forced to double down on repealing the entire bill. They will argue that now, the only way to get rid of the bill is to elect a new president and a Republican House and Senate.
Opponents of health care for all can no longer rely on arguing that the bill is an “unconstitutional usurpation” of government authority. No less a conservative icon than Chief Justice John Roberts found the law constitutional.
Since Obama Care is now a reality, Democrats can now move from defense to offense on health care.
By supporting repeal of the entire law, Republicans also support taking away the law’s protections against discrimination because of pre-existing conditions.
They support taking away access to free preventive health care for seniors.
They support taking away health care from millions of young people who can now stay on their parent’s insurance policies until they are 26 years old.
They support taking away access to contraception for women.
They support taking away enhanced prescription drug coverage for seniors.
They support taking away provisions that no longer allow discrimination against women.
They support taking away provisions that prevent people from being just one serious illness away from bankruptcy.
The support ending provisions that require that insurance companies can must spend 80 percent of their premium dollars on medical care — not on administrative costs and profits.
People may be afraid of things they don’t know much about. That helps explain some of the past opposition to the health care law by people who would benefit from it. But people are furious when you try to take something away from them. Romney will lose that argument over the months ahead.
Third, ironically, the past unpopularity of the law now positions the president as a strong, resolute leader, who does things because they are right — not because they are politically popular.
Passing health care reform was incredibly difficult and politically risky. Barack Obama is a leader that is a committed to principle — the mirror opposite to Mitt Romney, who has no core values whatsoever. Most voters want leaders who stand up for what they believe. That is a huge advantage for Barack Obama’s candidacy for re-election.
Finally, the Supreme Court victory creates political momentum. In politics as in sports, momentum — the bandwagon — is absolutely critical to the outcome. People like winners — they like to be with winners. Today Barack Obama — and the people of the United States — were winners.
That fact will give the president a major boost — a long-term boost — among swing voters over the months ahead.
This is a very, very big day for the lives of ordinary Americans.
It is also a very, very big day for the critical November battle that will chart our nation’s future.
This post by TDS Contributor and Democratic strategist Mike Lux is cross-posted from HuffPost, where it was originally published on June 22, 2012.
This news about Bain Capital being a pioneer in outsourcing, investing in some of the leading early companies that advised American companies in how to most effectively do it, is a pretty big deal on the face of it, but it has even deeper implications than many people realize. Being in this kind of business when the vast majority of Americans are so upset by out-sourcing is just one of Mitt Romney’s deep dark secrets that he has been trying to hide, and helps to powerfully make the case that Romney’s entire business career has been fundamentally at odds with the interests of the American middle class.
The other thing this news does is that it very likely ends the debate within the Democratic party as to whether it is okay to talk about Bain Capital’s business practices. There are still going to be Wall Street Democrats squeamish about beating up on this kind of wealthy financial company, but to defend a company that was literally a pioneer in helping American companies out-source jobs would be incredibly unpopular. Given how deeply unhappy voters are about out-sourcing, given how it generally is one of the top issues mentioned by voters in any poll I have seen over the last decade, it would be political malpractice not to attack Bain and Romney over this news, and any honest Democrat will have to understand and acknowledge that fact.
The reason this story goes so deep is that Romney’s entire political strategy is based on carrying blue collar white voters very heavily. Obama won 53 percent of the vote in 2008 while losing white working class voters by 18 percent. Even if you assume Obama doesn’t do quite as well turning out his base voters, to win this election Romney will have win that white working class demographic by at least 62-38 percent. Given how big a deal out-sourcing is to blue-collar workers, this story becomes close to a deal-breaker for Romney.
The Romney campaign’s reaction to the story is hilarious:
“This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring nor versus work done overseas to support U.S. exports.” The very incoherence of the quote speaks to their strategy: try to confuse the issue, try to make it sound complicated. The problem for Romney is that this is a remarkably simple story: whether you call it out-sourcing or off-shoring (and I don’t see how the new word helps him), Romney was caring only about his company’s profits and not at all about creating jobs here in the U.S., and he saw out-sourcing jobs as a great new way to make money.
Perhaps as interesting as the story itself is the fact that after four years as governor of Massachusetts, and more than six years of his running for the presidency non-stop, even with all his talk about his business career helping him understand job creation, this is the first time we have heard about these investments. Mitt Romney is big into secrets, and is very good at keeping them. He has Swiss bank accounts, and Cayman Island accounts as well. His financial disclosure for years past has been unusually secretive in nature. He won’t say what his positions are on a whole range of critically important issues. I think we can guess why Romney tried to hide the news about his being a pioneer in out-sourcing, but why does he have secret off-shore bank accounts and so little information in his financial disclosure reports? What has he invested money in all those years that requires such skullduggery? This is as secretive a man as has run for president at least since Dick Nixon with all his dirty little secrets.
This is the candidate who said that we must only speak of issues about the concentration of wealth “in quiet rooms”. He prefers speaking about these kinds of things in quiet rooms, because to be open about how he made his money would be such an insult to the exact voters he most needs to win this election. But Romney made his incredible fortune by doing insider deals in those quiet rooms, by quietly helping companies turn a profit by out-sourcing their workers. After he made his money off these kinds of deals, he hid a great deal of it in secret Swiss and Caymans bank accounts. Is a man with these kinds of values — and these kinds of secrets — the kind of man we want to be president?
TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore posts at the Washington Monthly today on “The General Election as a Continuing Primary,” which attributes a unique if dubious achievement to the GOP’s presidential nominee-apparent:
What we may be witnessing is a truly rare phenomenon: a general election where one party’s candidate is so manifestly without trust among key elements of his own “base” that they are demanding he continue to campaign as though the primaries are still going on….This is all about what conservative activists want because they did not get the assurances they wanted from their nominee during the primary season, in no small part thanks to their crappy field of candidates, and also, of course, as a reflection of Mitt’s richly earned reputation for lying.
So Romney is going to have to spend his time between now and election day not only trying to beat Barack Obama, but proving himself over and over again to “the base,” running a primary as well as a general election campaign. If I wasn’t so aware of how he’s put himself into this situation throughout a career of serial pandering to anyone he needed to fulfill his ambitions, I’d almost feel sorry for him.
Romney’s schitzy campaign looks increasingly unable to generate the needed level of enthusiasm in his “base.” And it looks like Dems have plenty of evidence to make the case to blue collar workers he is counting on that he is more likely to export their jobs than to protect their employment security. Hard to see an easy fix for either one of those problems, which is encouraging for Democrats, up and down ballot.
For those who missed it last week, kiljoy Charlie Cook has some discouraging, but hard to refute words for those of us who have engaged in the folly of electoral college bean-counting months ahead of the general election: “It is a source of constant amusement to me that so many people obsess – as if fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube – over the various combinations of states that could get either President Obama or Mitt Romney to the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College. The guilty include pros at both ends of the political spectrum; people who ought to know better; and armchair analysts who seem to think that they can crack the magic code.”
Yet also at the National Journal, we have Josh Kraushaar’s “Electoral Map Math Favors Romney.” Go fig.
Once again at the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein’s “More Swing State Storm Clouds for Obama, Romney” offers this mixed bag observation: “The NBC/Marist Polls showed Obama holding only a narrow advantage over Romney in Michigan (47 percent to 43 percent) and North Carolina (46 to 44 percent) while the two men are running dead even in New Hampshire (45 percent to 45 percent). Of those three, Michigan is by far the most important for Obama…The best news for Obama, of course, is that he’s ahead in two of the new states and even in the other. The bad news is that his vote share stands below 50 percent in all three of the new states surveyed…And just as in the Quinnipiac polls, Obama’s approval rating doesn’t crack the 50 percent barrier in any of the three new surveys, either: He’s at 48 percent in Michigan, 47 percent in North Carolina and 47 percent in New Hampshire. Those aren’t ominous numbers, but neither are they entirely reassuring.”
They call the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare,” but do read Eleanor Clift’s richly-deserved tribute to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose creative leadership and determination was pivotal in making sure that tens of millions of American will soon have real health security.
Attention Democratic oppo watchers: To understand how the Republicans may leverage the “budget reconciliation process” to destroy the ACA, read “A Strategy to Undo ObamaCare” in the Wall St. Journal by Keith Hennessey, Bush’s director of the National Economic Council.
Nice tribute here to a rock-solid southern progressive Democrat, the late Andy Griffith.
All the elaborate legal arguments about why Roberts upheld the ACA strike me as myopic. IMHO Roberts calculated quite correctly that this was his the best chance he was likely to get to lead and frame a legacy. Had he gone the other way, Justice Kennedy, who is reportedly livid about the Roberts’ ruling, would still be the belle of the ball. Instead, from now on, it’s “the Roberts Court,” and Justice Kennedy is just another reactionary jurist — unless he gets off the GOP bandwagon.
What’s this, a Republican Governor opposing voter suppression? Not so much because of discrimination against Latinos and African Americans. He says he “appreciates the issue of ensuring voters are eligible and U.S. citizens, however, this legislation could create voter confusion among absentee voters.”
Micah Cohen continues with FiveThirtyEight blog’s series on Presidential Geography with a profile of Georgia, where Obama got 47 percent of the votes in ’08. Cohen notes that “The number of minority residents in Georgia has increased dramatically, particularly in the Atlanta area. Black residents made up 31 percent of the state’s population in 2010, up from 26 percent 2000, and the percentage of Hispanic residents increased to 9 percent, from 5 percent.” However, notes Cohen, “Through 2012, the voters Democrats have gained in Georgia from the state’s growing minority groups have largely been canceled out by the white voters the party has lost. Indeed, Mr. Obama has just a 3 percent chance of winning Georgia’s 16 electoral votes according to FiveThirtyEight’s current projections.”
