Keith Humphreys praises it: [O]ne of the reasons those of us who worked on the substance use disorder-related provisions of the Affordable Care Act are pleased with the legislation is that it allows parents to keep children on the family health insurance policy until the age of 26. Because the early 20s are high-risk years … Continue reading Obama’s Drug Treatment Record
[Re-posted from earlier today. Extensive coverage after the jump.]
1.12 pm. Normal blogging will resume shortly. My take on this morning's drama: for millions of people, this will mean one thing. They will have an opportunity to purchase healthcare that would otherwise be denied them because of a pre-existing condition or simply lack of means to buy it. This has been done through the private health insurance sector along lines many Republicans were proud of until very recently. And this is a good thing.
The fact that there is no constitutional issue in doing this federally, as opposed to by the states, also removes Mitt Romney's only argument in defense of his own almost identical law in Massachusetts. And so the GOP candidate will be running against his own record in his own state on no rational grounds whatever. And against a Chief Justice appointed by George W. Bush.
But that matters less to me than that someone in America who once had to suffer in silence may now get some help to tackle her health issues. For me, that's a moral principle. Much more needs to be done, specifically in restraining healthcare costs and reforming Medicare. But the core beginning of this process will be getting everyone in the same boat. That now seems unstoppable. So Obama's first term remains historic. And his re-election to cement this change essential.
A couple weeks ago, John McWhorter chewed out the president for continuing the War On Drugs and for alledgedly slashing drug treatment. Keith Humphreys sticks up for Obama on the second count: In reality, the Affordable Care Act is the largest expansion of treatment for addicted people in at least 40 years, and perhaps in … Continue reading Obama’s Drug Treatment Record
Friday on the Dish, Andrew demolished the image of Palin-as-naif some saw in Game Change, knocked down Mitt's fantasy foreign policy, and addressed a challenge to his view of Romney as-weak-candidate. We guessed Romney might run the world like Clinton, noticed some glitches in Mittbot's Southern programming, watched him rise in Mississippi, saw Alabama tighten, charted Santorum's … Continue reading The Weekly Wrap
Steve Benen is stumped:
9.56 pm. The weirdest debate so far: feisty but surreal. If I had to game this one, I’d say Bachmann stayed alive, Perry began very strong but wobbled, Romney did fine, and Ron Paul shone the way only he can. But clearly the crowd loved Perry the most. God help us. 9.54 pm. Oh God. Wolf Blitzer is getting cutesy. I’m throwing up in my mouth right now. As to the White House, we’re getting more beds, fewer tsars, the collected works of Hayek, a babe-wife, a bust of Churchill, sacred constitutional documents, flava, and a Harley. 9.50 pm. Perry all but coopts the Paul-Huntsman view of Afghanistan, but then wants a remaining “presence”. He wants to adopt non-interventionism, while not scaring the horses. Santorum and Gingrich are the only ones with neoconservative knees jerking. It really is over: Iraq and Afghanistan have seen to that. The most we’ll ever do is Libya for the forseeable future. In the end, neoconservatism abolished itself. 9.46 pm. Santorum wants to banish any notion of blowback. And what does America stand for? American exceptionalism! Then Ron Paul insists that foreign occupations, not American freedom, were the contributing factor to 9/11. And Huntsman reiterates his commitment to getting out of Afghanistan. Another great conservative answer. 9.44 pm. Gingrich grabs a bowler hat and a cigar. Really: an enormous security crisis? He packed more fear and hyperbole into one sentence than even Cheney can. Meanwhile, altogether now: God Bless Ron Paul. 9.40 pm. Perry is revealing some kind of compassion – if it weren’t framed merely as a way to crack down on welfare recipients. Huntsman mentions H1-B visas, a vital topic. But, with this crowd, I suspect the point didn’t get across. 9.34 pm. A tiny piece of reality peeps in: Latinos exist and they can vote. Perry gets booed for providing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. He stands firm. But it’s obviously a problem for him. He has had to live in the real world in a border state so that this issue is not an easy abstraction. But it is for Bachmann and she takes another whack. Perry has a black eye, and Bachmann has had a stronger second half. 9.32 pm. “What would you do to remove illegal immigrants from this country?” Not: how do we secure the border? But: how do we find these eleven million people and throw them out? Santorum seems genuinely offended by the brutalism of his party base. Perry, meanwhile, seems to want to militarize the entire border region. 9.27 pm. Just before she stalked off the stage to get her make-up freshened up, Bachmann rallied around her hatred of the Affordable Care Act. It played well to the crowd. But this debate is revealing how much of the far right oxygen Perry has now removed. 9.23 pm. I was surprised by the ineptness of Perry’s attack on Romneycare. But I am more surprised at the cheering of someone dying because he couldn’t afford intensive care. Yes, the GOP is now not only cheering executions; they are cheering people dying because thay cannot afford any health insurance. Cheering death by poverty. “Yeah!” came the cry at the thought of a twentysomething dying because he didn’t have insurance. I didn’t think I could be more shocked by the instincts of those in the Republican base, but I just was. 9.22 pm. Romney is now accusing Obama of cutting Medicare spending. Do they hear themselves? 9.20 pm. Wow. Romney is actually talking about how to cut healthcare costs. No, really. 9.18 pm. Cain wants to cut healthcare costs by repealing the first systematic attempt to restrain healthcare costs. Then … tort reform. By the way, I count two shots by now. 9.13 pm. Bachmann is accusing Perry of being a giant, walking syringe from big government. And now she’s accusing him of being corrupt, because of his close association with a drug company behind the HPV vaccine. And then Perry actually says that he cannot be bought for $5,000; you need to bribe him with much more money than that! Amazingly inept response. Then the Christianists take aim – a Bachmann-Santorum tag-team in defense of “innocent little girls”. And Perry is reeling. 9.09 pm. Now the recession of 2007 – 2009 is the “Obama depression”. Is there anything these people will not say? Then they’re going to promote tax reform and tax cuts – which is Obama’s position. At no point has anyone intimated that drastic austerity right now might actually hurt the economy in the short term. The sheer crudeness of this panderthon is gob-smacking. That must be why this debate has become so execrable. It’s not CNN’s debate. It’s a CNN/Tea Party debate. And so you almost force these people to be as craven and moronic as possible. 9.06 pm. Huntsman again pushes his tax reform, especially corporate welfare. 9.03 pm. Perry is alleging that Ben Bernanke is in collusion with Obama to attack the financial stability of the country in order to facilitate Obama’s re-election. And that is close to treason. Seriously. The mild-mannered, principled Republican appointee is now a tool of Obama. And the man making ths kind of charge – and refusing to take back his implicit threat of mob violence – is the front runner. Good God. 8.56 pm. If this were still a secular conservative party, Jon Huntsman would be an overwhelming front-runner, don’t you think? But they can’t handle him, can they? This debate is depressing me much more deeply than I’d expected. It’s that twinkle in Perry’s beady eyes that reminds me of W – but without even the smidgen of vulnerability Bush Jr had. 8.51 pm. Every time he has been asked, Ron Paul has brought up spending on wars and empire. It’s his trademark now. And he has the usual support in the crowd. 
8.49 pm. Does Perry really think that the stimulus created no jobs? Truly, a wretched little twerp, dispatched on Tea Party theology by Ron Paul. 8.46 pm. So far, we have repealed universal health insurance, Dodd-Frank, much of the Pentagon, the Department of Education, and are so-so on Medicare and social security. What should government actually do to help the economy? Cut and reform taxes. Unless Obama proposes to cut taxes. Then that’s more spending. 8.43 pm. Perry seems to believe that tax cuts will be paid for by tax raises. Seriously, this guy is frightening. He gets asked how to pay for tax cuts, and he gives us a lecture about spending. Now, tax cuts are government spending – just because Obama is proposing it. That really is staggering. They will offer no response on Obama’s jobs bill and can only really offer platitudes and doctrines. God this is depressing. 8.41 pm. Huntsman offers a serious case for tax reform. Goes down like a lead balloon. 8.39 pm. Round One: Romney wins easily on points, but Perry reveals a kind of smug teflon smirk that this crowd is lapping up. There you see the choice – and Perry seems to me to be winning. As he strutted onto the stage he looked like a rooster in an Italian suit. He really is like W, but as a parody of the brash, slick and callous side of him. 8.38 pm. I think I’m going to have a shot every time I see a non-white person in the crowd. 8.37 pm. Bachmann is also on a roll of buzzwords. Is Palinism contagious? 8.35 pm. So they all want to repeal Obamacare, but no one wants to touch the Medicare Prescription Drug Entitlement. Blow me over with a feather. 8.33 pm. Santorum just gave us the doctrine – with all the boogey words “big government”, “one-size fits all”, Washington blah blah blah. Zzzzz. 8.30 pm. And the biggest applause of the night goes to Newt Gingrich for saying that Barack Obama is “scaring” the American people. Then he uses what I think is a reference to the effects of a national default as if it were a free-floating threat to senior citizens. Pretty much disgusting, when you think about it.
My initial impression is that this looks a lot like the Simpson-Bowles report, but in a good way. It doesn’t go quite as far on defense cuts, but it also doesn’t implement a cap on tax or spending. It goes a lot further than Ryan’s budget does in terms of actually figuring out ways to save money rather than just using caps to shift costs onto states/beneficiaries.
In truth, Mr Obama’s speech today was less a blueprint of how to save America from fiscal ruin than a means to establish a stronger negotiating position. Until last week, Simpson-Bowles had represented the centre of the fiscal debate; it was the basis for the Gang of Six’s deliberations. Mr Ryan’s plan threatened to move the centre of debate significantly to the right. By staking out ground to the left of Simpson-Bowles, Mr Obama may succeed in moving the debate back to the centre.
I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.
His rebuttal of the Ryan plan was all very well–I agree it's no good–but the administration still lacks a rival plan. That, surely, is what this speech had to provide, or at least point to, if it was going to be worth giving in the first place. His criticisms of Ryan and the Republicans need no restating. And did the country need another defense of public investment in clean energy and the American social contract? It wanted to be told how fiscal policy is going to be mended: if not by the Ryan plan, with its many grave defects, then how?
Chait is on the same page as me: Ryan, like many conservatives, prefers to reside in an alternate universe in which the Affordable Care Act is not a budget saver but a massive drain on the federal budget (like, say, the prescription drug entitlement he supported.) The Bowles-Simpson commission examined the issue and sensibly concluded … Continue reading Paul Ryan: Fiscal Fraud, Ctd
I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. But imagine for a moment that the opt-out public option passes and becomes law (I give it a 65 percent chance at this point). Then what happens? Well, there has to be a debate in every state in which Republicans, where they hold a majority or the governorship, will presumably decide to deny their own voters the option to get a cheaper health insurance plan. When others in other states can get such a plan, will there not be pressure on the GOP to help their own base? Won't Bill O'Reilly's gaffe – when he said what he believed rather than what Roger Ailes wants him to say – be salient? Won't many people – many Republican voters – actually ask: why can't I have what they're having?
This is why this is lethal. The argument against new entitlements requires a macro-level perspective. You have to argue that although a measure may help an individual get something she wouldn't otherwise have – like adequate and reliable, if barebones, health insurance – its consequences will come back to haunt us all. You have to remind people that money doesn't grow on trees, that in the long run, more government involvement might hurt healthcare excellence, that you just need to rely on the wonderful private sector to deliver the goods in a more market-friendly way. This is always a tough sell because it requires voters to put abstract concerns over practical short-term gains. It's why conservatism always has a tough time in welfare state democracies.
But with health insurance companies, the GOP may not only have to make this argument, they may be onto a defining alliance they really, really don't want or need.
After the jump, the full text: To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation; With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States. Let me express my thanks to the historic slate of candidates who accompanied … Continue reading Obama’s Speech
