The Republican Health Care Plan... Same As It Ever Was

I hope you had the time and concentration to read today's second post (long but lots of pictures). Originally, this one was supposed to be part of it. Then I realized it was already way too long and intimidating. So... let's pick up where we left off-- the very well-articulated Republican plan to destroy democracy and, alas, America. (You realize that's the theme of the DWT blog, right?) Anyway, you may have missed Kevin Sack's article in Saturday's NY Times about how those sneaky Republican candidates' stances on health care mask their gubernatorial records.

Like the worst and most deranged of the current crop of extreme right GOP governors-- your Kachichs, Snyders, Brewers, Corbetts, Cristies, LePages... your Rick Scotts and Scott Walkers-- the current Texas governor and two former governors running for the Republican presidential nomination all want to repeal what they derisively refer to as Obamacare. Scratch the surface and they would all-- governors and former governors alike-- also prefer to wreck and replace Medicare and Medicaid, something right-wing ideologues have always seen as "socialist." As Mike Lofgren explained in his post for TruthOut Saturday, "You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. 'Entitlement' has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is 'entitled' selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them 'earned benefits,' which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them?" Ending these earned benefits is part of the Republican Party jihad against the American middle class-- or what's left of it-- something we should be referring to as what it is-- a class war.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes-- among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.

And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

But what Sack points out in his Times piece is that as governors they haven't exactly lived up to their crazy, base-and-Koch-pleasing rhetoric.

The place of health care in the Republican primaries will necessarily be defined by Mr. Romney’s skill at neutralizing criticism of his landmark Massachusetts experiment and its paternity of “Obamacare,” as opponents have dubbed the law. But each of the governors has vulnerabilities, and they have sought thus far to credential themselves less by their own past records than by their current opposition to what is officially known as the Affordable Care Act.

“They are more focused on expressing that view than showing how their health care records as governor reveal what they would do as president,” said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy.

The politics of the primaries have made toxic any consideration of once-conservative concepts like health insurance mandates and marketplace exchanges, because of their association with Mr. Obama’s plan. But in a different day and environment, Mr. Romney in Massachusetts and Mr. Huntsman in Utah embraced those very devices as state solutions, to differing degrees.

Mr. Perry, by contrast, eschewed direct efforts to expand coverage in Texas and cemented its status as the state with the highest rate of people without insurance.

When Mr. Perry succeeded George W. Bush in December 2000, about 22 percent of Texans had no insurance, second only to New Mexico. After Mr. Perry’s decade in office, Texas now claims the highest uninsured rate, at 26 percent, as well as other distinctions like the lowest rate of prenatal care.


...Mr. Perry continues to pay a political price for one decision he made to impose a health care mandate-- an executive order in 2007 that made Texas the first state to require young girls to be vaccinated against cervical cancer with Gardasil. The order infuriated conservatives, and the Legislature quickly passed a bill to overturn it, which Mr. Perry allowed to take effect without his signature.

The governor, whose former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck, the maker of Gardasil, defended his “pro-life decision” in a debate last year. But after announcing his bid for president last month, he began describing it as a mistake.

One day before Mr. Romney signed his landmark 2006 health care bill amid pomp at Faneuil Hall, he declared victory in a column in the Boston Globe: “Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced.”

Mr. Romney is batting .500.

For the 10 percent of residents who had been uninsured, the commonwealth’s coverage mandate, coupled with government subsidies for the poor, has proved a striking success. A study last year concluded that 98.1 percent of residents, and 99.8 percent of children, had health insurance, leading the country. The state also found, to the surprise of some, that the share of employers contributing to their workers’ coverage (rather than accepting a modest penalty for not doing so) had risen.

But the law was not intended to make a serious assault on the state’s above-average health costs. A recent state report concluded that growth in private insurance premiums since 2006 had outpaced the increase in national heath care spending.

In pushing for the law, which features an exchange and requires insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, Mr. Romney championed an insurance mandate as the “ultimate conservative idea.” The targets of his “personal responsibility principle” were the free-riders who gambled by not buying policies and then relied on taxpayers, hospitals and the privately insured to cover the cost of their uncompensated care.

Mr. Romney could not have known then that his legacy would become such a bludgeon, with Mr. Perry, Mr. Huntsman and, impishly, Mr. Obama crediting him for the blueprint of the federal overhaul.

Tax increases have been needed to keep the Massachusetts plan afloat. But they have not been back-breaking, largely because the federal government underwrites much of the subsidized coverage. Mr. Romney is quick to remind voters that the Democratic-led Legislature overrode his veto of the requirement that employers contribute to their workers’ coverage and of benefits he considered gold-plated.

As a national candidate, Mr. Romney has argued that the law was appropriate for Massachusetts but is constitutionally prohibited as a federal solution. He does not, however, disown it.

Then there's some stuff about Huntsman but since he's only polling around 1% it makes no sense to cover him as a serious presidential candidate, and certainly not one more serious than Michele Bachmann, who the Republican Establishment and the Beltway corporate media hope to make disappear by ignoring her, the way they do Ron Paul. The person who had right-- and had it right first-- about the Republican health care plan was Alan Grayson. Remember, "don't get sick" and "die fast?" Here's the video... it's worth watching again-- and it helps explained why they spent more money on negative ads in Grayson's district than on any other district in the country: