Softer Voices
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As we predicted and went into the special election to prove, Rep. Charles Djou, Republican from Hawaii, has a bright future. IWV spent around $250,000 to help Djou in his May special election campaign at a time when he was seen as a long shot. Now, however, Hotline, Washington’s favorite political tout sheet, has Djou ahead in the general election:
Just two-and-a-half months after winning his special election in HI-01, a new poll from Rep. Charles Djou‘s (R) camp shows he starts the general election in a rather strong position. In the survey, Djou led state Senate Pres. Colleen Hanabusa (D) 50-42%.
What does this show? That a little money, spent wisely and early, can have an enormous impact later. IWV was widely credited with being crucial to Djou’s first victory.
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We have seen the future—and it is Massachusetts, and it doesn’t work.
“We continue to study Massachusetts’ health overhaul experiment as a harbinger of ObamaCare. And we continue to see serious problems ahead,” observes Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute in a must-read piece on the disaster in the Bay State.
Turner has done an excellent job of breaking down the many ways in which the Massachusetts system shows “the near impossibility of containing costs in a system where incentives go in exactly the opposite direction.”
“On average, health insurance now costs $14,723 for a family of four in Massachusetts, compared to $13,027 nationally. That’s nearly 12 percent higher than the national average. Reform has not made insurance more affordable,” Turner notes.
“[S]ome small Massachusetts employers are dropping health insurance and sending their workers into the taxpayer-funded health insurance pool. They say they have no choice because of relentlessly rising costs. This spells trouble for taxpayers.”
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IWV Director and MSNBC Political Analyst Michelle D. Bernard, joined Hardball to discuss Sarah Palin’s future plans in politics and Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele.
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Liberals will be excited by this. A report from the Center for American Progress by Ruy Teixeira claims voting trends suggest that America will long be dominated by fans of big government.
All of his ducks seem to be in a row… except for one thing. Teixeira stakes his entire claim on one huge assumption: People who voted for Obama will vote for Democrats indefinitely.
Obama is a Democrat, I will give him that. But voting for Obama does not lock a voter into the socialistic, big government focus of today’s Democratic Party. Especially not now, when Obama’s approval rating has lost so much ground with unaffiliated voters and females. (Remember, in 2008, he won a majority of voters who identified themselves as unaffiliated or moderate and a strong majority of the female vote.)
Check out the president’s job approval ratings so far this summer, courtesy of Rasmussen Reports:
May 26, 2010: Among men, 20% Strongly Approve and 50% Strongly Disapprove. Among women, those numbers are 27% and 40%.
June 4, 2010: Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats Strongly Approve while 70% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 16% Strongly Approve and 46% Strongly Disapprove.
June 16, 2010: Forty-eight percent (48%) of Democrats Strongly Approve while 75% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 12% Strongly Approve and 52% Strongly Disapprove.
About half of Democrats give the president the thumbs-up, but Republicans and unaffiliated voters strongly disapprove of his performance in more instances. Gallup also released a report Wednesday that said Obama’s approval rating is down from 56% last summer to 38% this summer among Independents. And now many more women strongly disapprove of Obama’s performance than strongly approve. So it’s clear that it’s possible to change one’s mind after an election. Regret is tough – but it shows hope for the right.
Furthermore, voter participation was abnormally high in 2008. Is that trend going to continue? Is Teixeira going to assume the same numbers at ballot boxes this November, and every election after that? Here’s a piece of demographic data: Latino Decisions, a polling firm, found that political interest in the Hispanic community is at an all-time low. And it might be Obama’s doing! Some blame the decline on a deep disappointment with the president’s unfulfilled promise to take up immigration reform.
While the president’s liberal policies (such as his unpopular health care reform) may be to blame for his low approval ratings, there may also be a reality check with voters as far as the economy. Either way, it’s hard to support someone who didn’t deliver on his promises. So for lovers of liberty, the Teixeira report shouldn’t be anything to worry about. Americans across many demographics are changing their minds about Obama and about the Democratic Party.
It’s not right to make the huge assumption that so many demographics that voted for Obama will continue to vote for Democrats. Yes they can, but no, they probably won’t.
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President Obama has hailed the Massachusetts healthcare plan as being “essentially identical” to the one Congress enacted, despite public protests, just 100 days ago.
So, here’s the bad news: the Massachusetts plan is a total disaster. Joseph Rago, an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, has a devastating critique of it in today’s newspaper. You might want to take an aspirin before you read it…
Rago notes:
As events are now unfolding, the Massachusetts plan couldn’t be a more damning indictment of ObamaCare. The state’s universal health-care prototype is growing more dysfunctional by the day, which is the inevitable result of a health system dominated by politics.
The problem addresses is that the program is simply financially unsustainable—insurance companies have higher costs because of the system, and the government has only one way to halt the rise in costs: caps. Caps, really, are a solution only in an imaginary world. They do not stop the cost to the companies from going up; they simply mandate the companies can’t charge an adequate amount to sustain them. That means that companies won’t remain solvent.
Rago reports:
Mr. [Robert] Dynan [a career insurance commissioner] added that “The current course . . . has the potential for catastrophic consequences including irreversible damage to our non-profit health care system” and that “there most likely will be a train wreck (or perhaps several train wrecks).”
Sure enough, the five major state insurers have so far collectively lost $116 million due to the rate cap. Three of them are now under administrative oversight because of concerns about their financial viability. Perhaps [Governor Deval] Patrick felt he could be so reckless because health-care demagoguery is the strategy for his fall re-election bid against a former insurance CEO.
Like the national plan, the Massachusetts plan was sold to the public (to the extent it was sold to the public at all) in a misleading way. Rago:
An entitlement sold as a way to reduce costs was bound to fundamentally change the system. The larger question—for Massachusetts, and now for the nation—is whether that was really the plan all along.
“If you’re going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth,” said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. “It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect.” Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts “connector,” the beta version of ObamaCare’s insurance “exchanges,” and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator.
He went on to explain that universal coverage was “fundamentally a political strategy question”—a way of finding a “significant systematic way of pushing back on the health-care system and saying, ‘No, you have to do with less.’ And that’s the challenge, how to do it. It’s like we’re waiting for a chain reaction but there’s no catalyst, there’s nothing to start it.”
In other words, health reform was a classic bait and switch: Sell a virtually unrepealable entitlement on utterly unrealistic premises and then the political class will eventually be forced to control spending.
But the political class can’t control spending. All the government mandates or price caps in the world won’t reverse the costs of the Massachusetts plan, and, when a similar system goes into effect nationwide, the problems of Massachusetts will be multiplied fifty-fold. We will have a healthcare system that simply can’t be sustained. Whom does that benefit?
Health insurance companies were vilified during the debate (if you can call ramming an unpopular bill through Congress a debate), but if they go under, we’ll regret it. I guess we’ll just have to mandate that they stay in business?
Here’s an idea: If the political class can’t control spending, then the national bill must be repealed and replaced.
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Kathleen Sibelius, who as Secretary of Health and Human Services will be in charge of developing much of our new healthcare system, had an intriguing piece in Roll Call this morning. If you peruse the secretary’s article, you get the impression that the new healthcare system is already improving the lives of many Americans.
However, if you read Sibelius’ piece carefully, you might be more inclined to come away thinking that it is more rhetoric than reality. “In general,” said Cato Institute healthcare expert Michael Cannon, “the piece paints a picture of what they hope will be accomplished by the healthcare legislation as opposed to what it will actually accomplish.”
Let’s look at some highlights of the Roll Call piece.
Sibelius: Small businesses, which have increasingly been forced to drop health care coverage over the past decade, are also getting some relief: In addition to new tax credits available this year, small businesses will be able to band together in new Small Business Health Options Programs to negotiate better deals for health insurance beginning in 2014. And large employers have gotten help, too, in the form of an early retiree reinsurance program, which will help ease the burden of soaring legacy health costs.
In reality, the heralded tax credits for small businesses are so small as to be insignificant, more window dressing than anything else, say critics. A calculator chart by the National Federation of Independent Business estimates that the small business credit for a typical employee making around $36,000 a year will be something in the neighborhood of $308. The NFIB cautions that these figures are tentative since the provisions of the legislation are just now unfolding. But I think we can all agree that $300 isn’t going to make much difference to any business.
Some critics of healthcare reform have gone so far as to claim that the credits are so small as to be utterly meaningless.
Sibelius: Meanwhile, all Americans are beginning to see the impact of strengthened consumer protections, which are being implemented ahead of schedule through our partnerships with insurance companies. Private insurers have promised to end the practice of rescinding coverage from people when they get sick because of paperwork errors, and 65 of our largest insurance companies have agreed to allow young adults under age 26 to stay on their parents’ coverage.
In reality, you’d have to have an inaccurate picture of what health insurance companies can do now to buy this claim. “There’s nothing new here,” said Marie Grace Turner of the Galen Institute, which focuses on health and tax policy, “it’s just rhetoric. Companies legally now can’t rescind insurance coverage when people get sick—they can only rescind coverage when people commit fraud.”
Turner admits that allowing young people to remain on their parents’ policies is having an impact: it is causing premiums to rise. You simply can’t have new services without somebody picking up the tab.
Sibelius: Over the past year, President Barack Obama has made it clear that these people should be able to keep their plans. To make sure that happens, we recently issued a new regulation on “grandfathered” plans that gives important new protections and benefits to Americans while ensuring that insurers have the flexibility to keep offering preferred plans.
Where to begin? The problem is that, yes, you can keep a plan that is grandfathered into the new system, but the plan will likely have so many mandated, new features, none of which are free, that it’s really not your old plan at all. The National Federation of Independent Businesses has figured out what the allegedly grandfathered policies will really be:
“Unfortunately, the restrictiveness of these regulations removes the already limited choices small businesses have to try to keep up with the ever-increasing cost of plans. The Administration is essentially making it harder for small firms to continue offering healthcare, much less keep what they’ve got,” notes in a report on its website.
Sibelius: The Affordable Care Act takes aggressive steps to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in our health care system — especially in Medicare, where billions of dollars a year are lost and seniors pay the price.
Well, good luck! Who’s not in favor of eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse? But if it were that easy, we’d have done it long ago.
Sibelius’s piece is just one more effort to convince people by rhetoric of things that their lying eyes (and checkbooks) will perceive otherwise. All the happy talk in the world isn’t going to change public perception of the emerging, new healthcare system.
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The Washington Examiner
By: Sally C. Pipes
Devotees of big government, like Archimedes, believe that if they have a long lever and a place to stand, they can move the world.
In 2006, a bipartisan band of such politicians in Massachusetts immersed themselves in wishful thinking, ignored both hard facts and proven theory, and used their political muscle to build bureaucracy, increase taxes, and aggregated power to remake health care in the Bay State.
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took the act nationwide with the passage in March 2010 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Like the canary in a mineshaft, Massachusetts provides a strong indication of our fate.
By now, Bay Staters should be celebrating reform. It promised to benefit all. The bureaucrats would design and broker affordable health plans, doctors and hospitals would get a bump in Medicaid rates, and the uninsured would no longer be a burden.
The system was cracked from the beginning, its promises undelivered even as it picked the pockets of business owners and taxpayers. The crack turned into a chasm this spring, when the state’s private carriers filed for double-digit rate increases for individual and small group plans.
This incensed Democratic Gov. Duval Patrick and the bureaucrats who simply said no. A court upheld their authority, and carriers were forced to continue at 2009 prices, booking loses daily.
They are still fighting in court, and another ruling is expected on the applications for rate increases on plans this summer.
In early June, two large carriers came back with more double-digit increases for plans renewing in July. They expect them to be declined. They are simply positioning themselves for a two-front war: One with the regulators and one with the providers they pay.
The system is inherently unstable and primed for a series of nasty fights. Like dry season at an Everglades watering hole, all the players confined in a tight space, hungry, and all eyeing the same receding resources. Like this tight ecosystem, the players will start to feed on each other, as survival of the politically-fittest takes hold.
This is the case in Massachusetts now. The state’s four largest carriers are hemorrhaging $150 million a month. Roughly a third of contracts are up for negotiation and they are pushing for givebacks.
Providers are crying poor. Reform actually hurt their numbers, as most of the newly-insured enrolled in government-run and subsidized plans under Commonwealth Care that pay less than the actual cost for care.
When you lose money on every unit, you can’t make it up on volume. Traditionally, the cost has been shifted to those with private insurance, but those days are over.
Hospitals and clinic operators maintain that two-thirds of the monies they collect are simply passed on to doctors, nurses, and other essential staff. Cuts here are akin to cuts in wages. Wage cuts will be resisted. The unionized will strike. Those who aren’t will slow down on the job. Doctors will reduce their level of service and some will take early retirement.
The political and bureaucratic response is naturally to clamp down with more control. Massachusetts’ political leaders and activists are making a strong push for a structure of mandatory global payments, which is merely a state-dominated HMO or single payer system. This, they claim, is the next logical step of health care reform.
Meanwhile, a bill in the state senate would force doctors to accept cut-rate reimbursements for Medicaid patients as a condition to practice medicine in the state. When voluntary exchange doesn’t work for politicians, they move to conscription.
In Massachusetts, it took four years to get to this point, and it’s certainly a downhill slide from here. Nationally, Obama’s bureaucrats are just getting started. The administration has yet to comply with the law’s requirement that it detail the myriad of powers it’s been granted, yet it has put the bureaucrats in place to get the job started.
While Obama did not get his Health Insurance Rate Authority into the final bill, the newly-created Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight within HHS will perform the same function.
The new authority has been staffed at the top by four individuals known to be tough on private insurers and more comfortable with the views of Ralph Nader than Adam Smith.
Former Missouri Insurance Commissioner Jay Angoff is the head watchdog. We can expect this team to pick up where Obama and Democrats in Congress left off beating up the insurance carriers including writing regulations to define when premium increases are reasonable.
At the end of the day, the carriers are merely pass-through entities that are necessary to administer the system. They will probably survive but, like regulated public utilities, will be guaranteed after their Medical Loss Ratios (the percentage that an insurer must pay out in claims) and administrative costs are controlled by government, a modest surplus for their efforts. The ultimate payers will be consumers and taxpayers, who will either pay more for less or more for nothing at all. What happens in Mass won’t be staying in Mass.
Sally C. Pipes is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, and author of The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care.
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Carrie Lukas joins the Martha Zoller Show to discuss feminism issues.
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The Wall Street Journal
The Primaries are producing some welcome new talent.
American democracy is nothing if not responsive, and on the evidence of the current primary season the frustrated American voter is demanding a transfusion of new political blood. The results have been volatile, and sometimes bewildering, but overall the elections are throwing up more candidates who are refreshingly unconventional.
Meg Whitman, left, winner of the Republican nomination for governor of California, and Carly Fiorina, the GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate from California, celebrate at a post-primary election celebration in Anaheim, Calif.
Take California, where the Republican Party—the party of primogeniture and middle-aged white males—has nominated a pair of female former Silicon Valley CEOs to run for Governor and the Senate. Neither has run for office before, and both are running as pragmatic but unapologetic conservatives seeking to reform runaway governments in Sacramento and Washington. Both face difficult autumn races in that Democratic-leaning state, but this is the kind of tumultuous year when they might win.
If Carly Fiorina can defeat liberal Barbara Boxer, she would represent the largest ideological shift in one Senate seat in many years. Ms. Boxer is so doctrinaire, and so unpersuasive to her peers, that Democrats have stripped her of Senate leadership on climate legislation. But she is also a brutal and well-funded campaigner who will portray Ms. Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard boss, as a cross between BP and Goldman Sachs who also favors back-alley abortions.
Ms. Fiorina’s message can be distilled into two themes: Grow the economy and cut spending. If that prevails on the Left Coast, we really do have a lovely revolution on our hands.
As for former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, she has the task of convincing voters that a rookie Republican can tame the special-interest mobs that run Sacramento. Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected on a similar promise but was broken by the unions and his own desire to be liked. Ms. Whitman will have to convince voters she won’t be rolled in the same way. Her support for a one-year moratorium on the state’s self-destructive climate-change rule AB32 is a tepid start, but she’ll need both tax- and spending-limit proposals if she’s going to win a mandate to overcome the gerrymandered far-left legislature.
Her Democratic opponent, former two-term Governor Jerry Brown, is a career politician but one who has been quirky enough in the past to make us wonder if he might take on Sacramento’s Greek chorus. On the other hand, he may now be so beholden to the unions to help him defeat Ms. Whitman that he won’t be able to challenge them on spending and pensions. This is the kind of big reform debate that California voters deserve.
Tea party candidates also showed their mettle on Tuesday, though in ways that make their staying power in November unpredictable. The rise and triumph of Republican state legislator Sharron Angle in Nevada’s Senate primary against two better known candidates happened so fast that we wonder how many Nevadans really know her generally conservative voting record.
She’d better know how to defend those votes, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is preparing to run ads portraying her as a radical even as you read this. “Further and Further Right” is the headline on a Democratic fund-raising pitch we recently saw describing several GOP Senate candidates, and with President Obama and his agenda down in the polls, going negative and ad hominem will be the party’s Alamo strategy.
Perhaps nowhere was the voter rebellion greater than in conservative South Carolina. Incumbent Republican Congressman Bob Inglis was crushed after his dalliance with cap and tax and his vote for TARP. Tea party favorite Nikki Haley prevailed over no fewer than three pillars of the GOP establishment, including the current Lieutenant Governor, state Attorney General, and a Member of Congress—and the state’s media establishment. The articulate conservative and daughter of Sikh immigrants barely missed avoiding the need for a runoff with 49% of the vote and is the favorite to win that on June 22.
Perhaps most revolutionary was the strong showing by black Republican Tim Scott in his Congressional primary against scions of two legendary South Carolina political families. Mr. Scott, a state legislator from the Charleston area where the Civil War began, ran well ahead of former Senator Strom Thurmond’s grandson and the son of former Republican Governor Carroll Campbell.
He faces a runoff against Paul Thurmond in the heavily GOP district, but his showing to date demonstrates how far the South has come on race matters. He would be the first black Republican in Congress from the Old Confederacy since Reconstruction.
The Obama Democrats lit the match for this voter tumult with their radical expansion of government. The voters are responding with a healthy fervor, with Republicans in particular looking for standard-bearers who will fight more than accommodate the status quo. While some of these new faces will falter before November, others look to be the kind of determined reformers that our political class naturally fears. So much the better
