Messaging
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The conversation I’d like to hear . . . .
“I’m losing my health insurance because of Obama-care. You’re a Republican Congressman, what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“What? Why not? Don’t you care about people?”
“Sure, I care; but Obama-care is the law of the land, passed by Democrats, implemented by Democrats, enforced by Democrats. As long as Obama-care is the law of the land, you’re sunk.”
“Can’t you fix Obama-care to let me keep my policy?”
“I’m afraid not. The only way to fix the problem is to junk the entire plan and start over. All of us Republicans support repealing Obama-care so you can keep your insurance but Democrats in Congress and the President agree they won’t let us solve the problem. The President and all his Democrats insist that you must lose your insurance policy, pay more for a replacement policy, and probably lose your doctor, too.”
Joe Doakes
Concise, truthful, and politically devastating among voters who are smart enough to be allowed the right to vote.
November 22nd, 2013 at 7:19 am
“The only way to fix the problem is to junk the entire plan and start over.”
Which GOP plan will they be replacing the ACA with?
The most likely changes are reductions in the penalties for businesses, and lowering the minimum standards for the basic plans to reduce costs. The overall structure will likely be retained, but businesses will find a way to start putting their employees on the exchanges instead of running their own health care plans. Which is not a bad thing, but it will require more funding. The realistic presidential candidates for 2016 will have stopped talking about eliminating the ACA; they will be talking about fixing it.
November 22nd, 2013 at 7:44 am
“Concise, truthful, and politically devastating among voters who are smart enough to be allowed the right to vote.”
And that right there is the problem. I fear there may not be enough of ’em.
November 22nd, 2013 at 8:55 am
The GOP is under no obligation to replace the ACA. Health care was not in crisis when Obama and the Dems rammed it through congress. 80% of Americans were happy with their plans before the ACA. The greatest marginal gains are probably to be made by dealing with people with preconditions and by expanding medicaid eligibility.
The ACA was never meant to give all Americans ‘access to healthcare’. It was designed to expand the power of the federal government and the Democrats.
November 22nd, 2013 at 8:58 am
“Which GOP plan will they be replacing the ACA with?” – If the Democrats are committed to forcing the country to jump off a cliff to its death, are Republicans required to offer an alternative suicide plan?
Now that the Obamacare train has gone off the rails, over the cliff and into the school in the valley we’re hearing that it’s all the Heritage Foundation / Mitt Romney’s fault. Obama & Congressional Democrats exclusively took a flawed system the Democrats created during WWII with price controls and wage freezes and made it exponentially worse with crony captialism, no-bid contracts and people whose only expertise appears to be as perpetual theorists & graduate students. Now Republicans are required to bring their mad competence skillz to run the Democrats creation and be responsible for its pre-ordained failure.
Want to fix this? Bring market incentive back. Let me keep the money I’ve earned to buy my own insurance just like I do my life, home and auto. Get rid of these fifty plus state administrators (with 50 plus D.C. times X opportunities for graft) who dictate what is required to be covered in their state and allow United Health, Humana, etc. to compete nationwide. Have a potion of the insureds premium go to a fund to cover the uninsured like we do with uninsured motorists.
You’re right about one thing, though Emery: If we burn down your plantation and free your slaves, we’re required have a fully developed Reconstruction plan waiting in the wings to make it all better.
November 22nd, 2013 at 9:03 am
“Ok, we’ve tried socialism (again), now can we try something that works?”, said every GOP commercial in 2014 and 2016…
November 22nd, 2013 at 9:18 am
Soon we will be told about the glories of the Swiss System, which resembles Obamacare in some ways, and by most accounts works for he Swiss.
Switzerland is a small, mountainous, landlocked country in the middle of Europe with a population of only 8 million. It has weak central government, and no immigration problem.
Other than that, it’s just like the US.
November 22nd, 2013 at 9:31 am
The Affordable Care Act, sold as a plan to insure the uninsured but effectively uninsuring the insured.
November 22nd, 2013 at 9:37 am
[Switzerland] has weak central government”
Indeed, their form of federalism probably works better than ours at this point.
November 22nd, 2013 at 9:41 am
Emery,
Since you asked: Not sure what to offer, now that Obama and his idiot minions have driven us so far through the looking glass I’m not sure there’s a graceful way out. Which was the intention, of course.
One option at this point might be something akin to the German system, which has an individual mandate (and an excessively high level of mandated service by what WERE US standards), but meaningful risk pooling, so that 22 year old personal fitness trainers are subsidizing other 22 year old personal fitness trainers, rather than 60 year old diabetic smokers.
November 22nd, 2013 at 10:13 am
I think Emery prefers the “Eskimo System”. You know, when your teeth fall out and you can’t chew walrus hide or blubber they put you on an ice floe with a little food and water and off you go with the tide, into the Arctic night.
November 22nd, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Can’t fix it, because the only viable paths are single payer and going back to freedom, which would repeal not only the Health Insurance Deform Act, but also Truman’s edict encouraging employer paid health insurance.
You can’t fix it right now with single payer, since the infrastructure would take years to develop. We simply don’t have the time. (those who fail to plan…..) So you’ve got to go back to freedom and (a) equalize the tax treatment of self-paid insurance and employer paid, (b) require employers that pay for health insurance to provide a similar amount to those who want to carry their own insurance, and (c) create a set of minimum standards for major medical insurance that is portable across state lines.
The bill would be 20 pages max, and would do a tremendous amount to reduce the number of uninsured and their Medicaid impacts, and would also greatly reduce the terror of losing employment with insurance.
November 22nd, 2013 at 3:14 pm
And no, you can’t “fix” Obamacare without repealing it. There are simply too many perverse incentives in the warp and woof of those 2700 pages.
November 22nd, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Not to mention the 1,000 plus lines that begin, “The Secretary shall determine…”
November 22nd, 2013 at 5:57 pm
Obamacare is in trouble because it tried to make a big social change while hiding who would pay for that change. The honest truth has always been that the rich, young, and healthy, and those on existing plans, will have to pay more for less, so that the poor, old, and sick can receive more. Had that been made clear, the present policy cancellations would be expected. Instead, Obama made every effort to claim that Obamacare would give us something for nothing. People hate being lied to, even for a good cause.
November 22nd, 2013 at 6:20 pm
PM says: “The GOP is under no obligation to replace the ACA.”
The GOP can’t come up with a plan because all roads lead either to one with a mandate or to a Medicare/public option. The ACA is the GOP plan and if Mitt Romney hadn’t been forced to run against his own work to be candidates for President, he would admit it – as he did before the GOP turned on their own ideas about healthcare.
Seflores says: “Want to fix this? Bring market incentive back.” & “Get rid of these fifty plus state administrators..”
That said, all insurance is risk pooling, all insurance shifts costs. I think people tend to confuse the idea of “I’m buying insurance” with the “business of insuring”, which uses risk models and actuaries to calculate how many policies will pay off versus what they collect and what they earn in the markets.
All insurance policies contain state-mandated minimums–even a catastrophic policy has a set of requirements. That is one of the two main purposes of state insurance regulation, the other being making sure that the insurers have sufficient capital and trustworthy procedures to pay off claims (within the limits allowed by the state regulators).
November 22nd, 2013 at 8:39 pm
” . . . as he did before the GOP turned on their own ideas about healthcare.”
Emery, this is simply false. The mandate was not a GOP idea. You cann ot demonstrate that it was a GOP because, despite what many on the left say, it was not. They are lying.
November 22nd, 2013 at 9:51 pm
/In 1992 and 1993, some Republicans in Congress, seeking an alternative to Hillarycare, used these ideas as a foundation for their own health-reform proposals. One such bill, the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, or HEART, was introduced in the Senate by John Chafee (R., R.I.) and co-sponsored by 19 other Senate Republicans, including Christopher Bond, Bob Dole, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, Alan Simpson, and Arlen Specter. Given that there were 43 Republicans in the Senate of the 103rd Congress, these 20 comprised nearly half of the Republican Senate Caucus at that time. The HEART Act proposed health insurance vouchers for low-income individuals, along with an individual mandate./
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/
/Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation proposed a plan he called “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.”/
“[This mandate is based on two important principles. First, that health care protection is a responsibility of individuals, not businesses.].. [Second, it assumes that there is an implicit contract between households and society, based on the notion that health insurance is not like other forms of insurance protection.”]
November 23rd, 2013 at 3:14 pm
Here’s the fix: Repeal Obama-care.
That’s it, that’s the fix. Now if people like their insurance, they can keep it.
What’s that? The uninsured? Their choice. Buy insurance or take the risk of having to file bankruptcy. If getting uninsureds to buy insurance is important enough, maybe we could tinker with the tax code to make it tax deductible, same as employer-paid.
Poor people? Welfare. Possibly income-qualified subsidies credited toward premiums paid.
Pay for it? Borrow from ourselves until the system collapses and it’s every man for himself if the zombie apocalypse.
What? Whatchabitchin about?
It’s the same end result at your plan, Emery, I just get there more honestly.
November 23rd, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Emery, the Forbes piece says that at one time some conservatives supported the idea of an individual or mixed employer-individual mandate. It does not say that it was a GOP idea.The first person to come up with it in some form was a Heritage foundation researcher who was not an American citizen at the time, let alone a Republican.
November 23rd, 2013 at 7:37 pm
That must be the most asinine comment you’ve written in some time. I especially like the part regarding the Heritage Foundation researcher who was (red herring alert) not an “American citizen”. I hope you didn’t injure yourself with all that twisting. ;^)
November 24th, 2013 at 11:10 am
Emery, I presume that you were responding to my comment that “The mandate was not a GOP idea.”
It was not. The Heritage Foundation is not the GOP. The man who some people believe first introduced the idea, as the article you cite states, was named ‘Stuart Butler’, Butler was a British citizen and an academic specializing in health care, and produced a paper for Heritage endorsing the idea of an individual mandate in 1989. This proposal was taken as a starting point by some GOP politicians in the early 90s, when they were attempting to short-circuit Hillarycare. Other conservatives (and Republicans) denounced the idea of the mandate because it was not conservative.
The argument that the individual mandate is conservative and should be supported is that it promotes — indeed it requires — that an individual take responsibility for his or her own health care.
The argument that the individual mandate is not conservative is that the mandate is not a pro-market instrument. The government will never be satisfied with simply requiring that you buy health insurance. It will instead require coverage that it chooses for you based its needs, not yours. Men will be required to get maternity coverage, Catholics will be required to pay for abortion and birth control, etc.
Look at the title of the Forbes piece: “The Tortuous History of Conservatives and the Individual Mandate”.
November 24th, 2013 at 2:34 pm
The lede for the Forbes story says it all:
“The Tortuous History of Conservatives and the Individual Mandate”
/Romney said…., “we got the idea of an individual mandate…from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation.” Politically, it’s an important point, because Romney is inaccurately being portrayed as some kind of left-wing outlier, when in fact there were some major conservative institutions (like Heritage) and figures (like Gingrich) who supported the mandate./ http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/
The Heritage Foundation and the GOP find themselves having a John Kerry like moment. They were; “for it [the individual mandate] before they were against it”.
November 24th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
From the Forbes article:
The author of the piece also notes that a voucher system in place of medicare was originally proposed by liberal health care wonks.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/
November 25th, 2013 at 6:24 am
This allows us to get back to the heart of what health care reform really means. It is a massive tax increase on young people and small business to pay for health care for old and poor people. The unpopularity of the mandate will translate into relatively small penalties for not joining. Companies will abandon their health plans, pay the penalty, and leave everyone to the exchanges, the subsidies for which will overwhelm the government in excess cost.
And then we’ll see the real reform. It’ll probably look a lot more like Paul Ryan’s plan [a voucher system] than Obama’s.
November 25th, 2013 at 10:40 am
Any plan will fail, Emery, if it does not take into account the fact that 80% of Americans think that their health care plan is good.
Social Security and Medicare were introduced when large majorities did not like the existing options for retirement and healthcare for the elderly. The same can be said for Bush’s Medicare part D entitlement.
Health care has strong constituency that is fine with the current system — people who get insurance through their work and older people on Medicare. Despite what Obama says, Republicans did not oppose the ACA because they wanted to see people die or go bankrupt (yes, he has said that), the GOP opposed the ACA because they believed that it was worse than the current system.
Any discussion of the ACA needs to take into account the fact that Obama does not understand American national politics (how public policy is determined and implemented), or how the Federal government works, or how the health care system works.
November 25th, 2013 at 9:05 pm
Sometimes I believe as many as six contradictory things before breakfast. I also find the expansion of the health care industry vaguely unsettling. I keep thinking of hospitals like the pyramids of ancient Egypt–monolithic transfers of wealth to the dead. It is not exactly rational, but then again, what are the fiscal multipliers in the health care industry?