Is It Time Yet for a Technocratic Domestic-Policy Debate?: Tuesday Focus: February 11, 2014
This thinktank–the Washington Center for Equitable Growth–was started on top of John Podesta’s hunch and the Sandler family’s belief that it would soon be time to restart the bipartisan technocratic debate about what would be good policies to create an America of high upward mobility, equal opportunity, and broadly shared prosperity. That bipartisan technocratic debate–to the extent that it ever existed–stopped in, I believe, April of 1993, when then-senate minority leader Robert Dole (R-KS) told my boss Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX) that he, Dole, was going all-in to whip Republicans into unanimous opposition to OBRA 93, the Clinton administration’s deficit-reduction bill, which everybody up until then had seen as a second round to the George H.W. Bush administration deficit-reduction bill, OBRA 90, which had had Dole’s enthusiastic support.
Maybe, the thinking was, it is time to start again? Republican senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, when he took over at the start of 2007, did promise his troops that, if they maintained lockstep opposition to all Democratic priorities and filibustered them to the max, the resulting governmental dysfunction would redound to the electoral benefit of the Republican Party, and in one or at most two congressional cycles they would retake the congress and then do some legislatin’. Well, it’s been three cycles so far, and McConnell himself may not survive the fourth. Perhaps with Obama no longer on the ballot their would be the chance to actually get some bipartisan agreement on policies that would be good for America.
But the past two weeks, I must confess, have made me think that the time is clearly not yet ripe. So now I am thinking not now, but maybe a six month window in early 2015, and then January 2017 as our next chance for non-dysfunctional bipartisan government in the public interest.
What happened? What happened was that three Republican senators–Burr, Coburn, and Hatch–set forth an ObamaCare replacement plan that would (a) delink employment at a large firm and health-insurance by removing the tax preference for employer-sponsored insurance benefits, and (b) allowing those who maintain continuous coverage to purchase affordable insurance and avoid penalties for pre-existing conditions–thus keeping people from feeling that they are locked into their large-firm jobs by the requirement that they keep health insurance. And Burr, Coburn, and Hatch all of a sudden ran into the buzzsaw that (a) since ObamaCare’s (slow) moves toward equal tax treatment were a large tax increase on Americans their policy was an even larger tax increase, and (b) removing job lock is in fact encouraging sloth, and moocherhood.
I have seen no Republican technocrat out there willing to argue that (a) Burr-Coburn-Hatch is good, (b) the removal of job-lock and the decoupling of employment and insurance status are good, so (c) attack ObamaCare for other things–but not for those. I have seen no Republican technocrats out there willing to argue that (a) Burr-Coburn-Hatch is good, (b) the removal of job-lock and the decoupling of employment and insurance status are good, so (c) since ObamaCare does those things, it is not so bad. And I have seen no Republican technocrats dare to argue that removing job-lock and decoupling health insurance and employment are (a) bad when Obama does it via community rating and the Cadillac tax but (b) good when Burr-Coburn-Hatch do it via continuous coverage provisions and the equalization of the tax treatment of insurance.
So it is going to be a longer slog than I had hoped. I had hoped–naively–that this would be a one-year slog. It now looks like I was very wrong.
Let me turn the microphone over to E.J. Dionne:
E.J. Dionne: Must the Obamacare Debate Be Stupid?: “One of the best arguments for health-insurance reform is that our traditional employer-based system often locked people into jobs they wanted to leave but couldn’t because they feared they wouldn’t be able to get affordable coverage elsewhere.
This worry was pronounced for people with pre-existing conditions but not limited to them…. By broadening access to health insurance, the Affordable Care Act ends the tyranny of “job lock”… increases both personal autonomy and market rationality by ending the distortions in behavior the old arrangements were creating. But that’s not how the study has been interpreted, particularly by enemies of the law. Typical was a tweet from the National Republican Congressional Committee declaring that “#ObamaCare is hurting the economy, will cost 2.5 millions [sic] jobs.”… The reaction to the CBO study is an example of how willfully stupid–there’s no other word–the debate over Obamacare has become. Opponents don’t look to a painstaking analysis for enlightenment…. The media go along by highlighting the study’s political impact rather than focusing on what it actually says…
And that wasn’t all. Also crossing my desk is:
John Podhoretz of the New York Post:
Now the CBO is saying that in 10 years about the same number of people will lack insurance as before. This, after new expenditures of as much as $2 trillion and a colossal disruption of the US medical system….
First, Obamacare’s architects were out to do a lot more than simply help the uninsured get coverage…. Second, and more importantly, conservatives would have you believe CBO thinks the new health law won’t put a real dent in the number of uninsured. That’s not at all what CBO said. CBO actually starts with a much higher… number of uninsured…. (Estimates of the uninsured vary a lot depending on which survey you choose and how you define the term.)… By 2017, according to CBO, Obamacare will have reduced the number of Americans without insurance by nearly half—or more, if you don’t count undocumented workers….
In a follow-up for Commentary, Podhoretz defended his argument:
If 31 million uninsured was unacceptable in 2009 and the key fact in creating this new $2 trillion program, how could the projection that there will be 31 million uninsured in 2024 be considered an endorsement of ObamaCare’s success? In any case, what is missing from any such projection is… that… had there been no ObamaCare… we can’t know what other changes might have been made, [so] we can’t possibly know how many uninsured there might have been in this alternate 2024…
And there is lots more!:
Brian Buetler: GOP steps in Obamacare trap: Watch their false claims blow up in their face!: “Late last year, when conservatives everywhere were grieving publicly for each American who’d received a cancellation notice from a health insurance carrier, the smartest among them realized they had a small problem….
By turning an insurance market disruption into a… normatively bad thing Republicans had left themselves very little room to advance conservative health policy ideas. [For] the cornerstone of nearly every conservative health care reform plan is to eliminate or dramatically reduce the tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance… the disruptions that would entail would dwarf the ones Obamacare is creating…. Conservative wonks realized that by opportunistically attacking Obamacare, political operatives had just crafted the very attacks that could ultimately doom their own policymaking pursuits….
Two weeks ago a trio of Republican senators introduced a plan to replace Obamacare. Conservatives everywhere, including Ponnuru and his National Review colleagues, applauded it. But its authors… are caught in the trap their own party set for them in the fall…. Then last week, conservatives boxed themselves in even further…. The problem is that, due to design similarities, the Senate GOP health care plan would generate the exact same phenomena. And so Republicans will be under tremendous self-imposed pressure not to break the link between employment and insurance and–at the very least–not to means-test the benefits of their ACA alternative…. Conservative health care guru Avik Roy forcefully endorsed the [Republican] plan’s means testing–then turned around and decried Obamacare’s work disincentives after the CBO report dropped. Conservative health policy is thus being shaped less by principle than by the right’s own anti-Obamacare opportunism. This is what happens when a political movement believes the chief duty of its policy entrepreneurs is to create the illusion that its party stands for more than just “no!” and tax cuts for the affluent…
And:
Sahil Kapur: Republicans Wanted To Free Workers From Bad Jobs Until Obamacare Did It: “It has been an important conservative goal–before and after the Obamacare debate poisoned intra-GOP politics–to give workers more flexibility and freedom to retain health insurance if they switch jobs or quit…. Obamacare seeks to fix this problem by providing financial assistance to get coverage and prohibits insurance companies from shutting out sick people…. Conservatives set about proposing new ways of disentangling health insurance and employment…. The most recent of these proposals was put forward recently by Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch (UT), Tom Coburn (OK) and Richard Burr (NC). It provides subsidies for Americans to buy insurance regardless of their employment situation…. The goal is similar to that of Obamacare, and portends similar behavioral consequences…