Republican Incumbents Who Voted To Phase Out Medicare Are Desperate To Hide Their Records From The Voters

Trump rubber stamp Bruce Poliquin wants to take away Mainers' healthcare... and pretend it's the Democrats

This morning I was on the phone with Mike Siegel, the Blue America-endorsed candidate in a gerrymandered Texas district (TX-10) that goes from north Austin all the way through Weimar, Brenham, Columbus and Prairie View into Cypress and Tomball in the exurbs northwest of Houston. He had just gotten back his new polling and it was the best yet. He and longtime right-wing incumbent Michael McCaul are running neck-and-neck and a big reason is their approaches to healthcare. McCaul is basically against it and would like to gradually eliminate Medicare altogether. Siegel favors a strong Medicare-for-All agenda. And when he speaks with Democrats, independents and even mainstream Republicans, they're interested. Voters tell pollsters throughout TX-10 that healthcare is their #1 issue-- and that's bad news for McCaul. (You can help Siegel's campaign here.)

It's the same up in Maine's second district, where polling shows a neck-and-neck race between state House majority whip Jared Golden and incumbent Bruce Poliquin, another Wall Street pawn and anti-healthcare Republican. Voters in ME-02, who backed Bernie against Hillary in 2016, are familiar with what Medicare-for-All means and Jared Golden is campaigning on it as one of his top issues. Poliquin, who has voted to take away healthcare from working families at every single opportunity-- even when Republican Senator Susan Collins refused to-- has resorted to lying about his-- and Golden's-- healthcare stands. And he has plenty of corporate cash to spread the lies across the broadcast networks.

His claims are preposterous and depend on uniformed, easily manipulated voters. As Ian Millhiser pointed out Monday at Think Progress, Poliquin's latest deceitful ad paints a dire, frightening picture of Golden's intentions towards Medicare-- the polar opposite of Golden's campaign platform. Poliquin falsely claims that Golden "will end Medicare as we know it" and accuses him of wanting to impose "over $32 trillion in higher costs." The climax of the ad features an image of a very stern older white lady shaking her head. He's counting on no one looking up his record-- or Golden's.

The implication is that seniors should be very, very afraid. If Golden is elected, things will happen to Medicare! And those things will be bad! For you!

This isn’t a new strategy. The GOP often appeals to older voters by suggesting that Democratic spending on some other demographic group necessarily implies fewer benefits for the Republican Party’s elderly base. In 2012, for example, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran an ad accusing President Obama of cutting Medicare to pay for “a massive new government program that’s not for YOU.”

Poliquin’s ad is an especially obnoxious example of this tactic because it deploys one of the most meaningless phrases in American politics-- “end Medicare as we know it.” This is both literally true and intentionally misleading.

Yes, Golden wants to end Medicare as we know it. But that’s because Golden would transform Medicare from a program that only covers some Americans in one that covers all Americans. That’s hardly a reason for seniors to sternly shake their heads at him.

...Poliquin’s claim that Medicare-for-All would lead to “over $32 trillion in higher costs” is also worth unpacking. The source for this claim is a Koch Brothers-funded study that determined  the specific Medicare-for-All plan pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would cause the government to spend $32.6 trillion on health care over a ten-year period.

That sure sounds like a lot! But if the United States does nothing-- that is, if it leaves its current health care system in place-- we will spend even more money than we would under a Medicare-for-All system. In 2016, America’s total health expenditures were $3.3 trillion a year, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, when you include both public and private spending. That means that, even before you account for inflation, the United States will spend $33 trillion over the next decade on health care if it stays its present course. And $33 trillion is, of course, more than $32.6 trillion.

The idea that the United States could save money by adopting a universal, single-payer health plan that guarantees coverage to all Americans may sound counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you understand the economics of the health industry. Under Medicare-for-All, more people would receive quality care, but that care would cost a lot less.

Currently, Medicare pays significantly less for the same medical procedure than private insurers typically do. The reason for this is that seniors account for about a third of all health care costs in the United States, and Medicare provides health coverage to the vast bulk of these seniors. That gives Medicare tremendous power when it negotiates with health providers to lower costs.

If a particular health provider charges too much, Medicare can threaten to cut off that provider-- and few providers can afford to lose so many older patients.

The entire premise of a single-payer system is that everyone (or, at least, nearly everyone) would be covered by the same government-run program. In this world, the government would have even more power to bargain down prices because hardly any health providers could afford to be cut off from Medicare-for-All patients.

For the moment, Medicare-for-All is also quite popular. A March poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 59 percent of respondents support a universal, single-payer system. In the past, however, the most potent message a politician can bring into a health care debate is often “we should keep the status quo.”

This implicit message benefited Republicans seeking to kill Obamacare in 2009, and it benefited Democrats seeking to preserve Obamacare in 2017. Poliquin’s now hoping it will save him in 2018-- even if he is being completely dishonest.

Poliquin may be one of the most bold-faced liars in Congress, desperate to hold onto his job as he watches Golden overtake him, but Golden-- who you can contribute to here-- but he and McCaul are not the only Republicans trying to hide their antipathy for healthcare and twist their opponents' proposals. Unlike Siegel and Golden, Sean Casten in Chicagoland is not a progressive at all and it not an advocate of Medicare-for-All, just of more Obamacare. But this is the maliciously misleading add his anti-healthcare opponent, Pete Roskam, has been sending out:

Politifact checked it and awarded it a rare "Pants on Fire Rating," which is usually saved for lies that are purposely false. In reality they could give that rating to the campaign of pretty much every GOP incumbent!

It’s no surprise that Roskam, a six-term Republican incumbent fighting to keep his 6th District seat in the Western suburbs, doesn’t see eye-to-eye on health care with Sean Casten, a clean-energy entrepreneur from Downers Grove.

Roskam was a key architect of last year’s congressional tax overhaul that struck the controversial Obamacare penalty for not having health insurance. Casten has made protecting and expanding health care access under Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, a top priority of his campaign.

Republicans have been complaining about the effects of Obamacare for years, but Roskam is taking some wild swings with this attack on Casten. There’s a lot here to unpack, so to keep it simple this fact-check focuses on the ad’s unsubstantiated health care claims.

Veronica Vera, a Roskam campaign spokeswoman, said the ad connected the dots between Casten’s support for Obamacare and a federal report-- itself containing a number of caveats-- that found premiums sold to individuals on the federal health care exchange were 105 percent higher in 2017 than premiums for existing individual market plans available in 2013 before the exchange opened.

If it happened in the past it surely then will happen in the future, Vera reasoned, and so to the Roskam campaign that means Casten backs a doubling of premiums.

One obvious problem with that line of thinking is that the Roskam campaign could provide no evidence that Casten had ever said such a thing.

What’s more, experts say a major factor behind recent premium spikes on the individual market was uncertainty over the law’s future given frequent attempts by Roskam and other Republicans, including President Donald Trump, to kill or weaken Obamacare.

Even so, there is evidence in Illinois that the days of Obamacare sticker shock may be over. Illinois’ largest insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has proposed a slight reduction in its premiums for Obamacare plans next year.

It’s also important to note that most Americans obtain insurance through their employers, not Obamacare. Overall, premium hikes for work-based policies have been modest in recent years.

For those who do rely on Obamacare, just a small share have been exposed to the full brunt of past Obamacare premium increases. Of the 15.2 million Americans who in 2017 purchased Obamacare coverage through the federal health care exchange, 8.2 million qualified for federal subsidies that cushioned them from increases, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a leading authority on health care.

Another 5.4 million Americans also purchased full-price individual insurance through the off-exchange plans that existed prior to Obamacare, according to Kaiser.

"We’re really talking about maybe 2 percent of the population that’s paying full-price premiums for the individual market overall," said Cynthia Cox, a health reform and private insurance expert with the Kaiser Foundation.

"It's important to think about these people because the ACA was intended to make insurance more affordable," she said. "But putting it into perspective, it's a relatively small share of the population."

Roskam’s other health care attack on Casten is also convoluted.

The logic works this way: Obamacare shoppers had fewer options when picking plans for 2018, so that must mean that if Obamacare were expanded as Casten wants the options would narrow even further.

"Expanding the ACA would mean limiting health care options for everyone affected," Vera wrote.

That argument is riddled with holes. Obamacare plans didn’t exist prior to 2014, so any number of options offered on the exchange are a plus, even if pared back. A key reason for the reductions was uncertainty over the law’s future following the election of Trump, who demanded it be scrapped.

And Obamacare also mandates minimum levels of coverage that did not exist prior to implementation of the health care law, which vastly expanded access to coverage for millions of Americans who previously had none, including those who didn’t qualify based on their health.

"Before the ACA, if you had a pre-existing condition, there could be any number of plans to choose from, but you couldn’t get any of them," said Cox, the insurance expert with the Kaiser Foundation.

Our ruling

Roskam alleges that Casten supports "doubling premiums" and "cutting current health care plans" for Illinois families.

Casten doesn’t support doubling premiums or reducing options-- and Roskam’s campaign could point to nothing that said he did.

The crux of Roskam’s argument centers on Casten’s support for expanding Obamacare options. Premiums on the federal exchange have spiked in past years, but Illinois’ largest insurer now says it expects them to go down slightly for 2019.

What’s more, most Americans get insurance through employers, not Obamacare. But among those who do, most have been insulated from the full force of premium increases by federal subsidies.

Health care policy has more wrinkles than a Shar Pei dog, and the complexity makes it easy for partisans to demagogue. Roskam’s claims are a clear example.

They’re not just wrong, they’re absurd. We rate them Pants on Fire!