Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News

BlueRidgeNow.com

March 29, 2017

Forget the Republican rallying cry of “Repeal and Replace Obamacare.” The Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in an act of absurd stupidity, have rescued it!

Late last Friday afternoon, after President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan had no choice but to pull down their star-crossed bill that was headed for certain defeat on the House floor, Ryan admitted that “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

There’s abundant blame to go around. But at its heart are the three blind mice: Ryan, House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows and Trump. Have you ever seen such a sight in your life? Let’s see how they run.

In 2010, widespread public opposition to Obamacare enabled Republicans to win the House. In 2014, they captured the Senate. And last November, the election of Trump gave them the trifecta, which they have now squandered. It’s what happens when you combine incompetence, ideological zealotry and hubris.

Speaker Paul Ryan

Ryan became House speaker on Oct. 29, 2015. In an op-ed column published that day in another newspaper, I warned of the coming catastrophe: “He could have turned the tables on the House Freedom Caucus ... . Instead Ryan has trapped himself. ... Ryan blundered badly, sold himself short, and has set the stage for his own demise as speaker.”

Last week, Ryan’s Freedom Caucus chickens came home to roost.

But Ryan’s blunder goes way beyond not being able to bring the Freedom Caucus to heel. His bill was stillborn. Among its many flaws, the fatal ones were those that would take health insurance away from 24 million Americans and give the wealthy an enormous tax break. No competent policy wonk or congressional leader could ever expect such a proposal to pass in the House.

Although Ryan was correct in his postmortem on the failed bill by bleating that “governing is hard,” he missed the point. Governing isn’t possible when stupidity of this magnitude is at the center of one’s legislation.

Rep Mark Meadows

There are about three dozen members of the Freedom Caucus, all uncompromisingly rigid conservative Republicans. They exercise outsized power over all House Republicans by sticking together and thus denying the GOP the ability to move legislation when, as is too frequently the case, the caucus’ allies are all the Democrats.

This was the case with the health care bill and will likely be the case with much of the rest of Trump’s forthcoming legislative agenda. Think of members of the Freedom Caucus for what they really are and don’t realize: a front organization for Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats.

The caucus humbled and destroyed former Speaker John Boehner. Now they have emasculated Ryan. But to what end? Their uncompromising rigidity has rescued Obamacare.

The more House Freedom Caucus Chairman Meadows forced the bill to the right, the more mainstream Republicans jumped ship. If Meadows’ intention was to kill the bill, humiliate the speaker and save Obamacare, his strategy was as brilliant as it was destructive. That’s madness.

President Trump

The president promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. He failed. The tortured history of health care reform makes it starkly clear that it’s the third rail of domestic politics. Even a neophyte like Trump should have known this.

He should have led with something else, anything else. And he should have told Ryan not to talk to him about health care until he had a bill that enough Democrats would support so they would succeed on a bipartisan basis and not have to worry about the Freedom Caucus crazies. Such an accord would have been possible because Obamacare is imploding, and that’s sufficient motivation for Democrats to support a bipartisan effort to repair it.

Trump didn’t and thus revealed himself as the apprentice, not the deal-maker. Even worse, last week’s events underscore that Trump is the puppet of those who disembark from Clarabell (Reince) Priebus’ clown car that pulls up to the White House each day and from which the president’s pathetic White House staff tumbles out.

There may be a tiny silver lining in this fiasco. Perhaps Trump will realize the only way to fix health care is to call Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and open a genuinely bipartisan dialogue. That is, after all, how Washington is supposed to work!

Since these three blind mice don’t have tails, were I the butcher’s wife with a carving knife, I’d find something else of theirs to cut off

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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Yogi couldn’t have said it better

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.com

Times-News Online

March 19, 2017

“It’s deja vu all over again” is one of Hall of Fame Yankee catcher Yogi Berra’s best Yogi-isms. Little did he know he would be a prophet when it came to health care reform.

What that means is that in 2017 the Republicans are successfully cornering themselves on health care reform just as the Democrats did in 2009.

The election in 2008 gave President Barack Obama and the Democrats control of the levers of government at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As the newly minted president and his team were being assembled, the nation’s economy was imploding. Nonetheless, Obama chose to make health care reform his top priority.

He chose unwisely, and over the course of his tenure, he and the Democrats on the Hill would make many additional unwise choices regarding what came to be known as Obamacare.

For the Republicans, so long as they have has been in the minority, Obamacare has been the gift that never stopped giving. Voter fury directed at the way the Democrats railroaded it through Congress and at its extensive reliance on coercive federal regulatory and tax power enabled the Republicans to capture the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. The wave they rode was brilliant and simple to grasp — repeal and replace.

And in 2016, opposition to Obamacare played a significant role in producing the greatest upset in American political history — the election of Donald Trump. The Republicans, to their amazement, had run the table. At last they were in a position to govern, to demonstrate to the nation that they knew what to do and how to do it.

How have they begun? By unwisely starting with their long-standing promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. And that means the rest of President Trump’s legislative agenda — tax and regulatory reform, job creation, the infrastructure rebuild, border security and immigration reform, and more — is now held hostage to the GOP’s ability to successfully deliver on its Obamacare promise.

That’s not a risk you take if you don’t have a winning hand, and it’s clear the Republicans don’t. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that, under Speaker Paul Ryan’s bill, 24 million people will lose their health insurance over the next decade, including 14 million people next year.

In the House, the GOP has cornered itself between the speaker’s bill, which will result in millions of Americans losing coverage, and the strident opposition of the House Freedom Caucus, which is gung-ho for repeal of Obamacare but too unconcerned with either the human or the political consequences of its draconian worldview.

If Ryan’s bill squeaks by in the House, and that’s no certainty, it will be dead on arrival in the Senate. The Senate will rewrite it, and the only successful way to do that is on a bipartisan basis. Major social legislation such as Social Security, civil rights, voting rights and Medicare all had significant support from both parties on final passage and have endured. Obamacare didn’t, and Ryan’s bill won’t. Kapish?

Passing the bill in the Senate under budget reconciliation requires 51 votes. There are only 52 Republican senators, so they can’t afford more than two defections. That’s their Achilles’ heel. Three or more conservative GOP senators, led by Rand Paul of Kentucky, won’t vote for the Ryan bill because it’s too much like Obamacare. At the same time, a larger group of more moderate Republican senators won’t vote for the Ryan bill because it’s too conservative. Mollify either group, and you still don’t have 51 votes.

That reality kills the House bill. The only way to break this impasse is to add Democratic votes. Here’s how: The solution is to enable those millions of at-risk individuals to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP).

The FEHBP has been in existence since 1960. It is a working partnership between private health insurance companies and the federal government. Prior to Obamacare, it was the largest health insurance program in the nation. Try to find one of its millions of insured people who doesn’t like it. You can’t!

Its coverages exceed those of Obamacare. Its enrollees get to choose among multiple fee-for-service or HMO insurance plans during open season each year. Its premiums are reasonable because the federal government subsidizes them. Democrats and Republicans alike have enthusiastically supported the program for decades.

There is, however, a problem — the costs of the premium subsidies for those who would otherwise lose their health insurance. Those costs will be significant. But there is no way to cover all of these Americans now at risk of losing their insurance without some form of subsidy.

The Ryan bill proposes to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in Obamacare taxes, principally on the wealthy. The wealthy don’t need another tax break. Instead, those dollars should be used to subsidize the premiums of those entering the FEHBP.

The FEHBP option would replace Obamacare with a program that actually works. It would attract essential Democratic votes in Congress. It would at last make health care reform bipartisan.

Achieving this outcome won’t come from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Sen. Chuck Schumer. They’re too partisan. But it could come from President Trump. He’s told us he’s a master dealmaker. It’s time for him to put up or shut up. After all, Yogi also said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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Revenge of the middle class

Revenge of the middle class

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News Online

Sunday March 5, 2017

 

How did Donald Trump win the presidency when virtually everyone, including errant pollsters, most of the mainstream media and most elites, confidently assumed he was a goner? And will he be a one-term aberration, or a president who will successfully change the nation’s direction and be re-elected for having done so?

America is a deeply and dangerously polarized nation. The middle ground, heretofore the breeding ground for compromise and consensus, has become a no man’s land and a killing field for any elected official foolish enough to venture in. This long-standing polarization is best exemplified by the increasingly predictable split in the Electoral College between the blue and the red fortresses.

It has become a given that the Democrats will win 19 states and the District of Columbia with a total of 247 electoral votes, only 23 votes shy of the 270 necessary to win the presidency. It’s just as likely that the Republicans will win 23 states and 191 electoral votes. That leaves eight swing states and their crucial 100 electoral votes.

It is easy to see why Republicans hold the short end of the stick in this split. They must win at least 79 of the 100 votes in the swing states to get to the magic number of 270. And Trump did not do that. He won four of the eight swing states with a total of 68 electoral votes. Close, but no cigar.

But he won the election because he broke into Hillary Clinton’s blue fortress and won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with their 46 electoral votes. Trump would have won the election by carrying any one of these states. His formula for success was the same in all three. Let’s look at Pennsylvania.

The Democrats regularly win in these three states by running up huge margins in their major cities, their surrounding upscale suburban counties, and in counties having large universities. The Democrats last lost Pennsylvania and Michigan in 1988 and Wisconsin in 1984.

The Democrats’ rule of thumb in the Keystone State is to carry Philadelphia by about 400,000 votes, its four surrounding suburban counties by about 125,000 votes and Pittsburgh by about 100,000. When they do that, they carry the state almost every time.

Comparing how Barack Obama did in 2012 with how Hillary Clinton did last November is revealing. Obama carried the Democratic strongholds by 676,000 votes. But, contrary to what you might suppose, Clinton did better than Obama. She carried those strongholds by 740,000. She did not lose Pennsylvania because she underperformed Obama among African-Americans or other urban/suburban Democrats.

Her defeat occurred in the votes cast in the rest of the state. Four years ago, Obama lost the rest of the state by 366,000 and still coasted to victory in Pennsylvania. But Clinton lost that same territory by an astonishing 784,000 votes. It cost her Pennsylvania and the White House.

A very large proportion of those votes for Donald Trump came from traditional Democrats angered by their belief that Clinton and the Democratic Party had abandoned them. Call their votes for Trump the revenge of the middle class.

In order for Trump to be a successful president, to have a fighting chance to push an ambitious legislative program through the treacherous waters on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate, and to win re-election in 2020, he’s going to have to deliver for those middle-class voters, many of whom have been loyal Democrats for a very long time. That’s Trump’s prime directive.

His odds of success are very long indeed. Consider the peril he faces. For openers, he has surrounded himself with a White House staff that’s competent to run a political campaign but not competent to run, let alone transform, the executive branch.

In addition, his address to Congress last Tuesday previews what’s coming legislatively: fixing Obamacare, tax reform, border security and the infrastructure rebuild — a daunting agenda. The Democrats, berserk over Trump’s astonishing victory last November, will stop at nothing to destroy him, while at the same time Republicans on the Hill can’t get their act together. Look at their inability to agree on how to replace Obamacare.

Will Trump end up hero or goat? The Vegas oddsmakers will make goat the heavy favorite. But be careful. Trump has repeatedly proven to Republicans and Democrats alike that he can surprise to the upside against all odds. Fasten your seat belt. There’s turbulence ahead.

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident and can be reached at:

EmailMe