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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on October 02, 2010, 07:07:25 AM
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Dems face day of reckoning
www.politico.com
By: Donald T. Critchlow
October 1, 2010 04:42 AM EDT
Americans, in large numbers, cast their ballots in 2008 for a noble dream of post-partisan, post-racial politics. Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress and the White House for the first time since 1994. They picked up 21 seats in the House and eight in the Senate in addition to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The Democrats were giddy with victory. They had arrived in the Promised Land! This, as their new president declared, was a moment of transformative change.
Convinced of its mandate, the Democratic Congress undertook a legislative agenda that has left the nation as polarized as ever, burdened with budgetary deficits and a national debt that threatens to transform America into a second-class country. Congressional Democrats profoundly misread the 2008 election results and have been left with a reputation as a party of grandiose ideas — with little financial sense or ability to govern sensibly.
The Democrats went shopping without looking at their checkbook balance or caring how to pay for their purchases. Whether the purchases were necessary may be debated — but everyone can agree that a buyer needs to figure out how to pay the bill.
Closer observers might have been more circumspect about the meaning of the 2008 mandate. While sick of the Bush administration, congressional corruption and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and frightened by the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Americans had not turned to the left in 2008. Exit polls showed that 22 percent of voters called themselves liberals; 34 percent described themselves as conservatives; the remaining 44 percent were moderates. These numbers were not that different from every presidential election in the past 20 years. The United States remained a center-right country.
With the sheer power of majority control, Democrats pushed through historic legislation: a massive economic stimulus program, health care reform, financial regulation, a takeover of General Motors and American International Group, and an array of other measures. Such a legislative record should have left them triumphant.
Instead, as the economy limped along with unemployment at nearly 10 percent, Democrats experienced a grass-roots backlash not seen by their party since 1854, when they passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and reopened the slavery question. So severe was the reaction that President Franklin Pierce is still the only sitting elected president to lose his party’s renomination.
As legislative successes multiplied, political polarization intensified. Conservatives accused Democrats of leading the nation to socialism. Democrats countered that their opponents were extremists. They labeled Republicans “the party of no” — though congressional leaders such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had issued “A Road Map for America’s Future,” in 2007. That plan offered detailed legislative alternatives in health care, Social Security reform and debt reduction, with many proposals scored by the Congressional Budget Office.
Instead of rehashing these ideological debates, let’s look at the Democrats’ crowning achievement: health care reform.
Aware that President Bill Clinton’s health care plan had crashed and burned, congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama crafted a plan to win over the health care industry. They assured physicians that the new plan would reimburse them, just as current private or government plans do. They told hospitals that they would no longer have to overcharge patients to cover the uninsured. Big Pharma would be allowed to charge high prices for patented drugs so the United States could maintain global drug leadership. The key to cost control was to be the public option — which would provide cheap insurance.
But once the public option ran into opposition, out of fear it would lead to nationalized health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) dropped it. With that, the Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 became seriously underfunded.
The plan included no effective taxation to support the new health care costs, for fear it would be attacked as a tax-raising proposal. Claims that savings would be achieved by cutting Medicare funding down the road had no political credibility. No one believed that fees on health care equipment and testing could make up the costs. Even tort reform was rejected, so as not to alienate one of the Democratic Party’s largest contributors trial lawyers.
Instead, Democrats accepted a plan that seemed to assume that funding would magically appear. Democrats said the cost was $60 billion per year, but subsequent Medicare actuarial estimates placed the costs at $180 billion per year. Spending on health care in America is expected to rise to 24 percent of gross domestic product from 16 percent — already the world’s highest level of health expenditure, because most industrialized nations pay 9 percent to 12 percent.
The Democratic Congress’s fiscal irresponsibility was apparent in other measures as well. Take the pork-laden stimulus act. Reid’s plan to build a railroad to nowhere in Nevada might win him votes among Vegas’s big contractors and unions, but it is a waste of $8 billion.
Incredibly, Obama’s deficits after less than two years have already exceeded President George W. Bush’s deficits after eight years. To make matters worse, the Democratic Congress, for the first time in modern budget history, will not have passed out of committee any part of the proposed budget by October, when the fiscal year begins.
In the end, Americans are still searching for political leaders willing to confront this impending disaster. Polling in advance of the November elections indicates that voters think Democrats, with their visions of transformative change, are committing fiscal malpractice.
A new kind of transformative change appears to be in the air.
Donald T. Critchlow, who holds the Goldwater Chair of American Institutions at Arizona State University, is the author of “The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History.” He is completing a book about the radicalization of liberalism in the past 50 years.
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC
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great article and he did not evenmention AZ, KSM, the mosque, etc etc.
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hmmm...
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What's funny is my best friend is puerto rican and he is from the Bronx as well. He is as right wing as I am, yet people assume he must be a lib cuz he is a PR. He went to West Point, is a succesful manager in business, is smart, etc etc.
Its so funny seeing him light up guild ridden whites on politics who think cuz he is spanish background he must be a lib. since he was an army officer - he dresses these panzxi ass white pussies down till they cry and I just laugh my ass off.
He hates Obama even more than I do.
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He hates Obama even more than I do.
Well that's not too bad, you don't hate Barry that much.
Oh wait...
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Notice how 2 years later, not one dem can even make a half assed attempt to defend any of this craziness?
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They run from it as fast as they can.
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States face Medicaid challenge
By: Jennifer Haberkorn
October 5, 2010 04:39 AM EDT
Political hostility over the health care law and the potential for turnover in statehouses this November are creating uncertainty for state Medicaid leaders as they prepare for a huge expansion of their programs.
By 2014, state Medicaid programs must be able to cover millions more Americans and significantly improve their computer infrastructure — all while many state attorneys general are suing to stop the law in its tracks and new health reform foes are poised to win gubernatorial races next month.
Under the health care law, the Medicaid program for the poor will be expanded to cover nearly all adults who earn up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Today, the program covers adults who have children and make less than the poverty level — or $22,050 for a family of four.
In addition, by 2010, the process of determining Medicaid eligibility will be rolled into the state insurance exchanges — the one-stop shopping spot that most Americans will use to access their health insurance.
The biggest obstacle for Medicaid programs, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation’s Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, is setting up the new eligibility processes for the state insurance exchanges. People will be able to go to an exchange to determine in one swoop if they’re eligible for Medicaid, for the law’s tax subsidies or for buying insurance through the exchange.
The move requires Medicaid directors to combine their programs with those of other state agencies and insurers, a significant change in information technology in just three years. Most Medicaid programs are already underfunded and using old technology.
“It’s a whole new world for Medicaid program directors, who are turning their attention to [creating] an interface with the insurance industry that they haven’t had to have in the past,” said Vernon Smith, principal at Health Management Associates and a co-author of the Kaiser report.
State Medicaid leaders told Kaiser that they’re aware of the politics but that they’re pushing ahead, following current law.
“Those who are in the trenches, so to speak, are looking at what is law and are preparing what they do to implement it,” Smith said.
Alabama is one of the 20 states participating in the lawsuit against the health overhaul, but the state’s Medicaid program is continuing as if the law and its Medicaid expansion will remain in place.
“My attorney general is part of the lawsuit in Florida, but we’re moving forward with the idea that when we make these systemic changes, ... we’re a better Medicaid program,” said Alabama Medicaid Commissioner Carol Steckel.
Several governors — most of them Republicans — have been outspoken against the expansion, arguing that the federal government isn’t paying for the whole thing, which leaves states with the rest of the tab.
If the states want to continue in the Medicaid program, they have to expand it. Although they could choose to end the Medicaid program, that’s not a politically viable option.
vsaid the Medicaid expansion will cost his state between $526 million and $766 million over the next decade and called the cost “potentially devastating” to the state’s budget.
“This unfunded and unparalleled expansion of Medicaid is an unfair and unsustainable mandate on Nebraska and other states,” said Heineman, a Republican. “This analysis confirms that the federal health care law is an extraordinarily large and excessive unfunded mandate for states.”
Leighton Ku, professor of health policy and director of the center for Health Policy Research at The George Washington University, said that many of the state estimates of cost are overblown. And even if they are on par, the federal government will end up paying a significant majority of the increase, he said.
“This will support jobs and economic activity in the states. Physician salaries, nurses, rent in capital facilities, in clinics and hospitals, pharmacies — all this comes in and helps the economy out and, in turn, generates more state revenue,” Ku said.
While preparing for the changes under the reform law, states have seen their Medicaid enrollments swell by an average of 8.8 percent so far in 2010, according to Kaiser. Analysts attributed the spike to the recession, as the newly unemployed turned to the program.
It was the largest rate of growth in eight years and well above states’ original projections of 6.3 percent.
States expect that increase to slow in the coming years and hope that the recent rise is all but gone by 2014.
While the recovery act provided some extra funding to help with the costs, several states implemented their own cost-cutting measures. Some eliminated dental benefits, and 39 states instituted provider rate cuts or freezes; 37 states plan similar moves next year.
© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC