Tag Archives: ObamaCare

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Obamacare, Obamacare, Obamacare

09/25/2013 Nativegrl77 2 Comments

Health Care and the ACA ~~ Originally posted on 8/22/13

the Progress Report

In less than 6 weeks, millions of Americans will have the chance to sign up for quality, affordable health coverage for the very first time. Progressives are doing everything possible to educate Americans about the law and push back on the never-ending conservative misinformation campaign against Obamacare. Conservatives are, well, trying anything and everything in order to try and derail the law at the very last minute.

(Things are not going very well for conservatives.)

Here’s a roundup of the very latest Obamacare news:

Pro-Obamacare protesters confront Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) at town hall: Multiple pro-Obamacare protesters confronted the Tea Party senator at the Dallas stop of Heritage Action’s tour promoting a government shutdown over Obamacare. The town hall slid further downhill from there when Cruz’s father took the stage, railed against Socialism, said “Sarah Palin was right,” and warned of the dangers of death panels. Even Republicans have called this strategy and tour “political suicide” for the GOP.Meanwhile, Texas Governor Rick Perry is quietly lobbying the Obama administration for $100 MILLION in Obamacare funding.

Tea Party group calls on Congressional staffers to “burn their Obamacare cards: FreedomWorks, a right-wing group that has helped fuel opposition to health reform and other progressive policies since the earliest days of the Obama presidency, is currently engaged in a cynical effort to dissuade young people and others of securing affordable coverage under Obamacare, which it is offensively likening to Vietnam war opponents who burned their draft cards.A GOP amendment to Obamacare requires Congressional staffers to receive their health coverage through the Obamacare marketplaces starting next year and now FreedomWorks says it hopes they forego their health coverage and instead pay a fine, though the group concedes “everyone should do whatever’s best for them and their families.” We assume most Hill staffers (including Republicans), like most Americans, will prefer the security of health coverage.

More GOP congressmen concede they will help their constituents enroll in Obamacare: While Republicans remain united in their irrational opposition to Obamacare, even some vocal conservatives are now conceding that they will help their constituents find out about their rights, responsibilities, and new benefits under the law.

Two more states announce affordable premiums: Colorado and Montana became just the latest states to announce that their residents will find affordable premiums when they go to sign up for coverage offered through the new marketplaces that will be opening on October 1. Indeed, the growth in overall health care costs has slowed remarkably since Obamacare passed, contrary to fearmongering from many of the law’s opponents.

GOP civil war escalates: Republicans are locked in an all-out civil war over whether or not to shut down the government over Obamacare (which even Republicans concede won’t actually stop the law but will harm millions of Americans and the economy).Heritage Action is currently on a national tour to fan the shutdown flames, with former Tea Party Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), now the president of the Heritage Foundation, going so far as to tell a town hall audience that any Republicans who are afraid of shutting down the government ought to be “replaced.” To that end, his group and others are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads going after Republicans.

For the latest news, be sure and check out ThinkProgress health.

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Obamacare is working

09/23/2013 Nativegrl77

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Did GOP Sen. Mike Lee accidentally make the Democrats’ point about Obamacare and shutdowns?

09/20/2013 Nativegrl77

Sen. Mike Lee talks budget battles, 'phony scandal'

Key Republican lawmaker on ‘Fox News Sunday‘

Chris Moody, Yahoo! News 19 hours ago

He probably didn’t mean for it to come out this way, but Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, a leader of an effort in Congress to use mandatory spending bills to defund Obamacare, may have handed over messaging ammunition to Democrats.

Surrounded by Republican House and Senate lawmakers at a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday, Lee and his colleagues called on Democrats to pass a bill that would fund the government but also defund the health care law. The federal government will temporarily shut down on Oct. 1 if Congress does not pass a bill extending funding.

While arguing that Democrats should accept the Republican path forward on Obamacare, however, Lee said that the law “is not worth causing a shutdown over.”

“A shutdown is too much. We don’t want a shutdown, we don’t need a shutdown. We should avoid a shutdown, and Obamacare is a law that’s going to harm people. It certainly is not a good idea to shut down the government in order to force through the implementation of Obamacare at a time when the president has said he’s not going to follow the law and he’s made substantial changes,” Lee said. “Shutdowns are bad, shutdowns are not worth it, this law is not worth causing a shutdown over.”

That last line will probably return to bite Lee and Republicans who continue to push to delay the 3-year-old law, even though he was trying to make the opposite point: That he thinks Obamacare is so bad that Democrats shouldn’t fight for it to the point of a shutdown. But it may prove difficult to convince the American people that the party seeking to fund a law that has been on the books for three years and has been found constitutional by the Supreme Court is responsible for a shutdown.

On Friday, the Republican-led House is planning to vote on a spending bill that would keep the government open but strip funding for the health care law, which will go on to the Democrat-led Senate. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Thursday that the Senate would approve nothing less than a government spending bill with Obamacare funding intact and he will likely return the bill to the House with the health care funding in it.

The impasse could lead to a traditional filibuster in the Senate. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday said he would be open to procedural maneuvers that would aim to block the government-funding bill.

“I will do everything necessary and anything possible to defund Obamacare,” Cruz said when asked about a filibuster. “Any procedural means necessary.”

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OBAMACARE by the Numbers …

09/06/2013 Nativegrl77 3 Comments

Guess how some members of Congress are spending their August vacation:
They’re touring the country, going state by state and district by district to convince people that Obamacare isn’t working — never mind the benefits that millions of families are already feeling.
After trying and failing to repeal the law (40 times!), they’re starting to get desperate. OFA’s Truth Team is here to set the record straight.
Fight back against the cynical opponents of Obamacare by sharing some truth about how Obamacare is already helping folks all across the country — here’s a perfect graphic to get started:

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Burning Down the House

08/21/2013 Nativegrl77

Will GOP Obstructionism Hand the House to Democrats?

The Progress Report

As we’ve been discussing, the Republican Party is in the midst of a meltdown over Obamacare. The party is united in its irrational opposition to the law’s offer of health security to millions of Americans; however, the GOP is nevertheless engaged in an all-out civil war over whether or not to shut down the government in a last ditch effort to try and derail the law.

(Ironically, even Republicans admit that shutting down the government won’t actually stop Obamacare from moving forward.)

Dozens and dozens of Congressional Republicans have signed onto letters advocating a government shutdown over Obamacare.

Yesterday, Heritage Action began a national pro-government shutdown tour that NPR reports even Republicans think means “political suicide” for the party. The former Tea Party Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), now the president of the Heritage Foundation, told a town hall audience that any Republicans who are afraid of shutting down the government ought to be “replaced.”

DeMint may get his wish, sort of. Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira, an expert in political demography, explains how the GOP’s “coordinated campaign to alienate anyone interested in functional governance” could hand Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 2014.

Teixeira’s analysis is a bit of a longread for this space, but it’s worth it:

Why are Republicans so freaked out?

At this point, they have a good chance — perhaps around 50-50 — of picking up enough seats to take the Senate, while Democrats’ chances of picking up the 17 seats they need to regain control of the House look considerably smaller than that. And yet, as one Politico story put it, “it is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be.”

Politico suggests the reason for the glumness is fear about the political fallout from the GOP’s unyielding, nihilistic approach to governance on issues like Obamacare and the debt ceiling. That problem may be far worse than they imagine. A close scrutiny of the data reveals several demographic weak points that the current wave of Republican crazy could activate, leading to the outcome they dread the most: Democratic control of both houses of Congress.

Start with minorities. It’s not well-known, but Republicans in 2010 benefited not only from relatively low minority turnout (standard for an off-year election) but also from relatively low minority support for Democratic candidates. Emphasis here is on the relative: minority support for House Democrats in 2010 was 73-25 — high, but below the 77-22 margin that minorities averaged in the three off-year elections that preceded 2010. If minorities snap back to 77-22 Democratic support as a consequence of Republican misbehavior, and the expected 2 percentage point increase in the share of minority voters from population trends emerges, then the Republican 6.8 percentage point margin in 2010 will be immediately sliced in half. And if the minority vote goes even stronger for the Democrats, reaching 2012 levels, that would eliminate about three-quarters of the Republicans’ 2010 advantage all on its own.

Another demographic problem for the GOP comes from a more surprising quarter: seniors. As Erica Seifert of Democracy Corps noted in a recent memo:

There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP. This is apparent in seniors’ party affiliation and vote intention, in their views on the Republican Party and its leaders, and in their surprising positions on jobs, health care, retirement security, investment economics, and the other big issues that will likely define the 2014 midterm elections.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

It is therefore quite plausible that the GOP will benefit far less from senior support in 2014 than in 2010. If the senior share of voters returns to normal levels (19 percent) and the Republican margin among this group drops to its post-2000 average (6 points, about where it is right now in the Democracy Corps polls) that would take care of the rest of the GOP margin from 2010, getting the Democrats slightly past the break-even point in the popular vote.

Of course, given the well-known GOP advantage in translating seats to votes, Democrats probably need to do substantially better than breaking even to attain a majority in the House. That won’t be easy, but there are certainly potential avenues to shift the 2014 House vote even farther in Democrats’ direction. There is the youth vote, for example, which was relatively poor for the Democrats in 2010 (55-42) and could certainly improve, as well as possibly turn out in larger numbers. The latter could also be true of the minority vote, whose projected 2 point increase in voter share, is due solely to population increase. If relative minority turnout is better in 2014 than 2010, then there will be an even larger increase in minority vote share over 2010, pushing the Democrats’ margin farther toward what they need to take the House.

Make no mistake about it: the Democrats face an uphill climb. But the possibilities outlined above inch closer to reality every day the GOP continues its coordinated campaign to alienate anyone interested in functional governance.

BOTTOM LINE: If Republicans shut down the government over Obamacare or their demands for more damaging austerity, they might get to personally experience repeal and replace after all.