“A malign force in American history”: Why you should be terrified of the Supreme Court

Monday, Mar 30, 2015

Ridiculous theories, destructive effects and evil tragedies are SCOTUS trademarks, expert Ian Millhiser tells Salon 

Elias Isquith

Throughout his years as a national politician and in the White House, President Barack Obama has had many antagonists and foes: John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Eric Cantor and John Boehner come to mind. But despite their greater public profile, one could argue that none of these men have been quite as formidable a source of opposition and frustration as the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

Indeed, the closest Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, ever came to destruction was not in the House or in the Senate. It was behind the closed doors of the justices’ chambers, where it survived in 2012 by just one vote, and where, due to King v. Burwell, the latest case against Obamacare, it finds itself imperiled once again. The greatest threat to the Obama agenda, in other words, has manifested in the form of a purposefully opaque institution, and in the persons of five unelected conservative men.

Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs has led many a liberal or even moderate Democrat to pull their hair and grind their teeth out of aggravation. And when compared to the Supreme Court of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, which most progressives think of as a source of comfort and power for society’s downtrodden, the Roberts court looks anomalous indeed. But what if it’s the mid-20th century court, and not that of today, which stands as the exception to the rule? What if the Roberts court is more in keeping with U.S. history than liberals tend to think?

That’s the argument that Ian Millhiser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the editor of Think Progress Justice, makes in his new book, “Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.” As Millhiser sees it, the Supreme Court has spent most of its existence standing athwart history, yelling, Stop! From gutting the civil rights acts of the post-Civil War era to attacking business regulations to weakening protections for children, minorities and immigrants, the court Millhiser describes has much more often than not worked to return power to those in society who need it least, and abuse it most.

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Millhiser to discuss his new book as well as his thoughts on the Obamacare case currently in front of the court, the legitimacy of the institution, and why the next presidential election will have such a large impact on whether the court of the foreseeable future is one that fights progress, or acts as its shepherd. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

The Supreme Court has been a source of controversy for a long, long time. But what was it in particular that you wanted to get across with this book?

The notion that the Supreme Court has been a malign force in American history is by no means a new one. It dominated President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt’s rhetoric on the Supreme Court; it was the reason why many of the liberal justices on the Supreme Court were reluctant to to vote the right way on Brown v. Board of Education, because they were so fearful of judicial power that they were afraid to exercise it. It’s only fairly recently that liberals have come to think of the Supreme Court as something we shouldn’t view with extraordinary trepidation.

I wrote this book in large part because I think people — and not just liberals, not just people who think we should have things like child labor laws and Medicare — have lost an important understanding of our history. Meanwhile, people who want to dismantle a lot of the progress of the 20th century are busy building an alternative mythology about the Supreme Court that is very harmful and that we have not yet been effective in countering.

You mentioned how conservatives like to claim or imply that the Constitution prescribes a libertarian government. Why is that narrative mistaken?

The conservative mythology I keep referring to is basically a mythology of original sin. Their narrative is that government is something that the Constitution was very skeptical of and everyone understood this until Franklin Delano Roosevelt came along and tried to pack the court with up to 15 Justices in order to break the back of this understanding of the Constitution. That moment where the court gave in and allowed the New Deal to exist, that is the original sin in the conservative narrative.

The reality could not be more different. The reality is that George Washington, in the midst of the Revolutionary War, was tossing off angry letters saying that Congress didn’t have enough power to act and he wasn’t going to win this war if they didn’t have a more responsive national government. He and others pushed for a more expansive role of government. At the Constitutional Convention, the framers passed a resolution saying that a national government has to have full powers to do everything that the states are not competent enough to do on their own — and one thing the states aren’t capable of doing on their own is regulating a national economy.

Let’s move away from history for a moment to talk about the present court. Granting that the court, historically, has much more often been an enemy of progress rather than a friend, where would you rank the current Roberts Court?

I think what the Roberts Court is going to be remembered as is a transitional court. The Roberts Court is really bad; Citizens United is terrible, and striking down the Voting Rights Act is terrible. But compared to what has come from most of the Supreme Court’s history, it’s actually a lot better.

There are two things at play right now that are going to impact the future of the Supreme Court. At the last national conference of the Federalist Society, a very influential conservative legal group, there was a panel on rolling back anti-discrimination laws and repealing the minimum wage. This is the place where lawsuits like attacks on the Affordable Care Act, like Hobby Lobby, etc., are incubated and where conservative lawyers get together and refine their ideas before they get their friends on the Supreme Court to turn them into law.

The Federalist Society, which is going to have a tremendous impact on who the next Republican president nominates for the Supreme Court, is raring for a return to the bad old days, to the era where the Supreme Court viewed its job as engaging in wholesale skepticism of business regulation. If they succeeded in getting the ear of the next president — and they did have the ear of President George W. Bush and previous Republican presidents — we’re going to be in for a wild ride.

Why else do you see this court as being transitional?

The second thing to keep in mind is that there are four justices right now over the age of 76: Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg and Breyer are all in their late 70s or early 80s. When the next president is sworn in, there will be three sitting justices in their 80s — assuming none of them leave before then— so there’s a very real chance that the next president of the United States could replace four justices.

There’s already a fifth justice on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, who has said that he agrees with [the pre-New Deal court's worldview] and the legal argument that was used to attack the Civil Rights Act of 1964; so if he got his way, we probably couldn’t have a ban on whites-only water fountains. Right now, the fact that there’s one justice who embraces this radical anti-government vision doesn’t seem all that scary. But if four more get up there, we could be on the bridge to the 19th century right now.

At the same time, if those four justices are replaced by someone who thinks more or less the same way our current president thinks, then we could have, for the first time in my lifetime and for the second time in the Supreme Court’s history, a court that is very much interested in letting individual rights flourish, in letting voting rights flourish, and in allowing our democracy to function without having ideological justices second-guessing the decision that are made by the people and their representatives.

One question that occurs to me now, and which has been in the discourse about the court for the past few years, is the idea of “legitimacy.” If the current court ends up tarnishing the institution’s legitimacy, that might affect how the next court can operate. But legitimacy is pretty vague concept. Do you think it’s real? Or is it one of those messy ideas we use without adequate interrogation?

That’s a very timely question because there’s this King v. Burwell case in front of the Supreme Court seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act. If that case prevails, an estimated 10,000 people are going to die every year who otherwise would have lived. In addition to that, the legal theory they would use to gut Obamacare is not a bit of a joke; it’s a huge joke; it’s a ridiculous theory. People are very much talking right now about this question of whether we even want the Supreme Court to have this kind of power and whether they are truly legitimate if, based on such a ridiculous legal theory, they could produce such an evil result.

How unprecedented is it that people are talking about the court this way?

The one other time when you saw serious talk about that question come up was during the Roosevelt administration, when you had this huge national crisis, the Great Depression, going on. Roosevelt was doing everything he could think of to restore economic order, and the Supreme Court kept striking it down. In the midst of that tragedy, not only were there serious questions about the court’s legitimacy, but Roosevelt went so far as to propose adding Justices to the Court in an effort, basically, to neutralize it.

Do you think that kind of pressure works? That the court is less radical if it feels like it’s being closely observed and will come in for significant criticism if it’s seen as overstepping its bounds?

I do think it’s the case that at least certain members of the court in the past have become reluctant to do things that are both immoral … when they realize that people are looking over their shoulder — and that people are more likely to look over their shoulder when the results they would produce are particularly tragic.

That’s why I want people to be aware of the consequences. I want people to be terrified of the Supreme Court because we’ve seen over and over again throughout history that when they go off the rails, the results are absolutely disastrous for ordinary Americans.

How do you feel about proposals for reforms to the Supreme Court, like changing it so justices don’t serve in perpetuity but have fixed term limits? Do you think that’s a workable solution? Or is it not really adequate to the task?

I don’t think term limits are going to solve the problem, even if we manage to get them through; I think there is sort of a backhanded way to do it without a Constitutional amendment, but it would take a really long time. The fact remains that Justice Scalia is the longest-serving member of the court and he’s pretty terrible; but Justice Alito hasn’t been there very long, relatively speaking, and he’s even worse. I don’t think there’s a correlation between the tenure of the Justice and whether they’re a good or a bad Justice.

One of the main things you focus on in the book is that Supreme Court decisions have real-world consequences for regular people — and they’ve often been bad. What do you think of the argument raised by some, perhaps most prominently Dahlia Lithwick, that the court would be more likely to understand the human stakes if it weren’t comprised of so many law school all-stars, and had more politicians, as used to happen, instead?

I love Dahlia Lithwick; she may be the single best writer in the Supreme Court issues space. I disagree with her on this point, though. The reason why is because the court has almost always been terrible; it was terrible when you had brilliant scholarly and very dastardly men like Stephen Field leading the charge to dismantle the regulatory state, and it’s been really terrible when you had ignorant bigots like James Clark McReynolds.

SCOTUS vs the ACA

The ACA and America’s Health-Care Mess

Tuesday, January 21, 2014 by Dollars & Sense

by Gerald Friedman

While it was enacted in 2010 without a single Republican vote, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), a.k.a. “Obamacare,” was built model first proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s and implemented by Republican Governor Mitt Romney in Massachusetts in 2006. The ACA extends the public safety net to more of the working poor but otherwise keeps the private health insurance system intact. Rather than replacing the private system—and far from the “government takeover of health care” its critics claim—it provides subsidies for individuals to buy private health insurance through state-level “exchanges.”

As social policy, the ACA is a qualified failure. The expansion of Medicaid and mandates for individuals to buy subsidized private insurance will expand health insurance to an additional 30 million people. Regulations establishing minimum standards for coverage and barring exclusions for pre-existing conditions will improve coverage for many. On the other hand, by maintaining the existing system of for-profit medicine and private insurance, the ACA does little to rein in out-of-control cost growth while leaving millions without coverage. We can hope that the ACA’s strengths and its failures will soon pave the way for a rational universal system such as single payer health care.

Not Everyone Will Be Insured: While the ACA will provide health insurance to millions of Americans, millions of others will remain uninsured. While over 25 million will gain coverage either through the expansion of Medicaid or by buying subsidized private insurance, somewhat more will remain without coverage. Some are not covered by the act (including undocumented immigrants); others will be excused from the requirement to have insurance because of cost; and others will not comply (see Figure 1).

Problems of People with Insurance Will Remain: Because it builds on the existing private health-insurance system, the ACA does little to reduce access problems for people with health insurance. Those with insurance have dramatically fewer problems accessing health care (including seeing doctors, arranging follow-up visits, and filling prescriptions) than those without. But even insured Americans are twice as likely as citizens of countries with public insurance to have trouble getting care (see Figue 2).

States Rejecting Medicaid Expansion and Exchanges Are Lowering Enrollment: The ACA’s Medicaid expansion would cover everyone with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level. Half the states, all with Republican governors, rejected expansion, denying coverage to 7.5 million people. States can establish “health exchanges” for people to choose a health plan and sign up for federal subsidies. Republicans refused to establish exchanges in 34 states.

After a slow start, enrollment has picked up states with their own exchanges. Problems with the federal website slowed errollment elsewhere, though it has recently surged as well. Including those newly covered by the Medicaid expansion, the ACA has now extended coverage to about 4% of the uninsured in non-cooperating states, compared to over 15% of those in the cooperating states. If the proportion enrolling were the same in the non-cooperating states as in states with their own websites, an additional 4 million Americans would now have health insurance (see Figure 3).

The ACA Is Highly Redistributive: The ACA will reduce out-of-pocket spending on uncovered expenses, deductibles, and copayments. Federal subsidies will reduce premiums while coverage expansion will lower reduce hospital surcharges for the uninsured. Public spending will increase, on Medicaid and subsidies; expenditures paid for with other savings taxes on expensive insurance plans, and increases in the Medicare payroll tax for high-income individuals. Taxing the rich to provide health care for the working poor, the ACA is the largest redistributive program enacted since the 1960s (see Figure 4).

The ACA Does Not Control Costs; Single-Payer Would: The ACA does not establish a sustainable health-care finance system in the United States. Under the ACA, health care spending will continue to increase significantly faster than the economy as a whole and the share of the economy going towards health care will rise in the next decade to nearly 20%. By controlling administrative costs and drug prices, a single-payer system can hold healthcare spending to less than 17% of the GDP (see Figure 5).

© 2014 Dollars & Sense

Weekly Ha Ha's...

Obamacare vs GOP

ObamaCare: Worse Than Doing Nothing?

Keeping the Insurance Companies in Command by RUSSELL MOKHIBER


That’s the conclusion of single payer advocate Dr. Quentin Young, national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), in his just released autobiography – Everybody In, Nobody Out: Memoirs of a Rebel Without a Pause.

“Had I been in Congress, I would have unequivocally voted against Obamacare,” Young writes. “It’s a bad bill. Whether it’s worse than what we have now could be argued. We rather think because of its ability to enshrine and solidify the corporate domination of the health system, it’s worse than what we have now. But whether it is somewhat better or a lot worse is immaterial. The health system isn’t working in this country — fiscally, medically, socially, morally.”

Young rejects the idea that President Obama should have compromised on single payer in the face of industry opposition.

“I don’t have any sympathy for the idea that the president had to compromise because his opposition was strong,” Young writes. “Winning is not always winning the election. Winning is making a huge fight and then taking the fight to the people — re-electing people who are supporting your program and defeating those who aren’t.”

Young first met the young Barack Obama in the mid-1990s at social gatherings.

At the time, Obama was lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School and practicing law.

“We did not become bosom buddies after a few of these social gatherings — I just viewed him as a nice, bright guy living in the neighborhood,” Young says.

When Obama ran for the Illinois Senate, Young supported him.

“I was happy with his views on health care,” Young writes. “He recognized that major reform was necessary and indicated support for a single-payer approach. No blushing friend, I took every opportunity to solidify his position. While not an official adviser, I tried to influence him as much as I could. My colleagues and I sent him notes touting the advantages of single-payer and the form it might take and talked with him and his staff about it whenever I had the chance.”

“I felt I did influence him,” Young said.

When Obama ran for the Senate in 2003, Obama told the Illinois AFL-CIO:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

But just a year later, Obama had flipped and came out against single payer in Illinois.

“I was very disappointed by his move to the right to keep the insurance companies in command,” Young told the Springfield State Journal Register in 2004. “I’m not accusing him of lying or misconduct. I’m accusing him of a lack of courage.”

But despite Obama’s “lack of courage,” Young supported Obama in his run for U.S. Senate and later for president. Young was just setting himself up for more disappointment.

At a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in August 2009, Obama was asked whether he supported a universal health care plan.

“First of all, I want to make a distinction between a universal plan versus a single-payer plan, because those are two different things,” Obama said.

“A single-payer plan would be a plan like Medicare for all, or the kind of plan that they have in Canada, where basically government is the only person — is the only entity that pays for all health care. Everybody has a government-paid-for plan, even though in, depending on which country, the doctors are still private or the hospitals might still be private. In some countries, the doctors work for the government and the hospitals are owned by the government. But the point is, is that government pays for everything, like Medicare for all. That is a single-payer plan.”

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter because, frankly, we historically have had a employer-based system in this country with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that I believe would be too disruptive. So what would end up happening would be, a lot of people who currently have employer-based health care would suddenly find themselves dropped, and they would have to go into an entirely new system that had not been fully set up yet. And I would be concerned about the potential destructiveness of that kind of transition.”

“All right? So I’m not promoting a single-payer plan,” Obama said.

In March 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — by a narrow margin.

“PNHP’s policy experts did a line-by-line examination of the bill and, while acknowledging that it contains some modest benefits that make changes around the edges of our existing system, basically gave it two thumbs down,” Young writes. “To this day, much to the chagrin of many of our friends who wanted reform, I remain adamant in my rejection of Obamacare.”

“Why? We want a system that excludes the private insurance companies,” Young writes. “ We demand such exclusion not because these companies are good or evil (although we think they’re pretty evil). Rather, the reason to exclude them is that they don’t address the needs of the American people.”

Young also rejects the idea of a “public option,” pushed by Democrats such as Howard Dean. A public option “would not have made any significant difference on the overall impact” of Obamacare “contrary to the view of many progressive who believed that it would,” Young says.

“Since WWII, we have learned a lot about disease and certainly have had dramatic improvements in what we can do,” Young writes. “I’m talking about surgery of the heart, vaccination, nutrition issues. All these things have been largely defined in the last half-century. We’ve had something approaching a 12-year life expectancy rise just from scientific intervention.”

“We have all this knowledge, all these options, but we have a very backward financing and delivery system and the result is a great deal of human suffering,” Young says. “And that’s why we remain opposed to the Affordable Care Act. We think we have a winning proposition despite the reality in Congress. Polls repeatedly vindicate our position. A solid majority of the public and 59 percent of doctors support the single payer approach.”

“President Obama could have made it happen,” Young says. “He could have stuck to all the virtues of single payer. And I won’t deny he may have been defeated in the first round. There’s no question that this fight has been dirty and it’s going to get dirtier.”

People Want Full Medicare for All

Time for Single Payer
by RALPH NADER


Freshman Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who somehow got through Princeton and Harvard Law School, is the best news the defaulting Democratic Party has had in years.

As the Texas bull in the Senate china shop, he has been making a majority of his Republican colleagues cringe with his bare-knuckle antics and language. His 21 hour talkathon on the Senate floor demanding the defunding of Obamacare made his Republican colleagues gasp. His Nazi appeasement analogies, and threats to shut down were especially embarrassing.

After listening to his lengthy rant on the Senate Floor on Tuesday and Wednesday, one comes away with two distinct impressions. Ted Cruz cannot resist inserting himself here, there and everywhere. And nothing is too trivial for Senator Talkathon. He likes White Castle hamburgers, he loves pancakes; he talked about what he liked to read as a little boy, where he’s traveled, what clothes he wears and other trivia.

You’d think he would have used his time to talk specifically about the suffering that uninsured people and their children are going through, especially in the Lone Star State. Or about what could replace Obamacare other than his repeated “free market” solution, which is to say the “pay or die” profiteering, tax-subsidized corporate system.

It was puzzling why he never mentioned that during his two days of talking, over two hundred Americans died, on average, because they couldn’t afford health insurance to get diagnoses and timely treatment. (A peer reviewed study by Harvard Medical School researchers estimated about 45,000 die annually for lack of affordable health insurance every year.)

The other reaction to Senator Cruz was that many of his more specific objections to Obamacare – its mind-numbing complexity, opposition by formerly supportive labor unions, and employers reacting by reducing worker hours below 30 hours a week to escape some of the law’s requirements – are well-taken and completely correctible by single-payer health insurance, as provided in Canada. Single-payer, or full Medicare for all, with free choice of physician and hospital has been the majority choice of Americans for decades. Even a majority of doctors and nurses favor it.

Single-payer’s advantage is that everybody is in, nobody is out. It is far more efficient, allows for better outcomes, saves lives, prevents injuries and illnesses, relieves people of severe anxieties and wasted time spent figuring out often fraud-ridden, inscrutable computerized bills and allows for the collection of pattern-detecting data to spot harmful trends.

For example, in Canada, full Medicare covers everyone at half the per capita cost that Americans pay even though 50 million Americans are still not covered. The U.S. per capita figure is almost $9,000 a year and over 17% of our total GDP. In Canada, administrative costs are much lower.

Symbolically, the single-payer legislation that passed in Canada over four decades ago was 13 pages long, compared to over two thousand pages for Obamacare.

Critics of Canada’s system charge it with delays for patients. For some elective procedures, provinces that were under-investing have experienced some delays until Ottawa raised its contributions. Canada spends just over 10% of its GDP on healthcare, by comparison.

But in the U.S. not being able to pay for treatment is the biggest problem. And in the U.S., who hasn’t heard of delays in various areas of the country due to lack of primary care physicians or other specialties? I have many friends and relatives in Canada who have not complained of delays for routine, essential or emergency treatments.

For those who prefer to believe hard-bitten businesspeople, Matt Miller, writing yesterday in The Washington Post, interviewed big business executives – David Beatty who ran the giant Weston Foods and Roger Martin long-time consultant to large U.S. companies in Canada. They were highly approving of the Canadian system and are baffled at the way the U.S. has twisted itself in such a wasteful, harmful and discriminatory system.

Mr. Beatty wondered why U.S. companies “‘want to be in the business of providing health care anyway’ (‘that’s a government function,’ he says simply).”

Mr. Martin, an avowed capitalist, who has experienced healthcare in the U.S. and Canada, according to Mr. Miller, called Canadian Medicare “incredibly hassle-free,” by comparison. (In Canada, single-payer means government insurance and private delivery of healthcare under cost controls). Now Dean of the business school at the University of Toronto, Mr. Martin told reporter Miller: “I literally have a hard time thinking of what would be better than a single-payer system.”

So why the U.S. is the only Western country without some version of a single-payer system?

Most concessionary Democrats, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, have said in the past that they prefer single-payer, but that the corporate forces against it cannot be overcome. (They use phrases like “single-payer is not practical.”)

But with the Cruz crew in Congress going berserk against Obamacare, now is the time to press again for the far superior single-payer model. Or at least get single-payer into the public discussion. Unfortunately, even some of the major citizen groups organized for single-payer, behind H.R. 676, are keeping quiet, not wanting to undercut Obama and the Congressional Democrats.

Go to Single Payer Action and connect with the movement that does not play debilitating politics and seeks your engagement.

Beyond Obamacare: How a Single-Payer System Can Save US Health Care

Wednesday, April 24, 2013 by Common Dreams
by Dave Dvorak, MD

As physicians, health care leaders and legislators grapple with the complex changes brought by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), many are concerned that even after the law is fully implemented, hundreds of thousands of people will remain uninsured while health care costs continue to spiral.

What if there were a simple, streamlined solution that would guarantee health coverage while saving billions of dollars? A growing number of physicians are endorsing what they consider to be such a solution: single-payer health care. Weary of having to comply with hundreds of different insurance plans’ administrative requirements while their patients are denied needed tests and treatments, these physicians are drawn to the simplicity, cost-effectiveness and truly universal coverage offered by a single-payer system.

Their views were supported by an independent analysis last year demonstrating that with a state-based single-payer system, every person could have comprehensive coverage while the state would save billions annually.

A deeply flawed system

The desire for meaningful reform comes in the face of the U.S. health care system’s long-recognized dysfunction. Despite health care accounting for 18 percent of the nation’s economy—twice that of other wealthy democracies—48 million Americans lack health coverage. Another 29 million are underinsured, having poor coverage that exposes them to unaffordable out-of-pocket expenses. Health insurance premiums have doubled over the past decade, with the average annual cost for family coverage now exceeding $15,700; and health care costs now account for two-thirds of personal bankruptcy filings in the United States.

At the root of these problems is the fact that we have a fragmented, highly inefficient system. Employed Americans younger than 65 years of age have job- based insurance, if their employer chose to provide it; the elderly and disabled are covered through Medicare; the poor by Medicaid; military veterans through the Veterans Administration; and American Indians through the Indian Health Service. Persons who do not fall into any of those categories must try to purchase individual coverage in the private market, where it is often prohibitively expensive or unobtainable if they have a pre-existing health condition.

Owing largely to this fragmentation and inefficiency, a staggering 31 percent of U.S. health care spending goes toward administrative costs, rather than care itself. Inefficiency exists at both the provider and payer level. To care for their patients and get paid for their work, physicians and hospitals must contend with the intricacies of numerous insurance plans—which tests and procedures they cover, which drugs are on their formularies, which providers are in their network. Meanwhile, private health insurance companies divert a considerable share of the premiums they collect toward advertising and marketing, sales teams, underwriters, lobbyists, executive salaries and shareholder profits. The top five private insurers in the United States paid out $12.2 billion in profits to investors in 2009, a year when nearly 3 million Americans lost their health coverage.

The ACA of 2010, known widely as Obamacare, is expected to extend coverage to 32 million more Americans But it accomplishes this goal primarily by expanding the current fragmented, inefficient system and maintaining the central role of the private insurance industry in providing coverage. As a result, the ACA is expected to do little to rein in health care spending. Furthermore, it will fall far short of achieving universal coverage, as tens of millions of Americans will remain uninsured after its full implementation.

The solution

The central feature of a single-payer health care system would be one health plan that covers all citizens, regardless of their employment status, age, income or health status. Having a public fund that pays for care would slash administrative inefficiencies and eliminate profit-taking by the private insurance industry.

Under a single-payer system, the way society pays for health care would change, but the market-based health care delivery system would remain. Physicians and hospitals would continue to compete with one another based on service, quality of care and reputation. The chief difference is that they would bill a single entity for their services, rather than numerous insurers.

Individuals would benefit immensely by having continuous coverage that is decoupled from their employment. This would alleviate “job lock,” in which people remain in undesirable employment situations in order to maintain coverage. In a single-payer system, individuals could choose to see any provider, in contrast to the current system in which choice is restricted to those who are in-network. Deductibles and copays would be minimal or eliminated, removing cost as a barrier to obtaining needed care.

A single-payer system would be funded through savings on administrative costs, along with modest taxes that would replace the premiums and out-of-pocket expenses currently paid by individuals and businesses. The cost savings to individuals, businesses and government would be considerable. The nonpartisan U.S. General Accounting Office concluded that single- payer health care would save the United States nearly $400 billion per year, enough to cover all of the uninsured.

Physician support for a simplified, universal health care system is robust and growing. A 2008 survey published in Annals of Internal Medicine found that 59 percent of physicians supported a national health insurance system—up from 49 percent in 2002. Physicians for a National Health Program, a national organization advocating for single-payer reform, reports a membership of 18,000. In Minnesota, single payer has been formally endorsed by nearly 800 physicians, other providers and medical students.

Recognizing the implausibility of achieving single-payer reform at the national level in the current political climate, many single-payer advocates have turned their attention to state-level reform. The ACA provides for “state innovation waivers” to be granted beginning in 2017, allowing states to implement creative plans they believe would work best for them. With this in mind, organized single-payer movements have taken root in states as varied as Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, New York, California, Oregon and Vermont. Vermont’s governor and Legislature passed a law in 2011 setting the path for the state to move toward single payer.

Conclusion

With nearly 50 million uninsured people in the United States and skyrocketing health costs, the need for profound reform of our health system could not be more clear. The ACA is a start, but it will fall far short of achieving universal coverage, and it allows unsustainable spending growth to continue. Single-payer health care would eliminate administrative waste and inefficiency, thereby creating an opportunity to achieve truly universal, cost-effective health care.

Many Low-Wage Workers Will Get Left Out of Obamacare

(not to mention the unemployed who can't afford the mandate)

Saturday, 06 April 2013
By Richard Kirsch, Next New Deal | Op-Ed


Reformers should start building a coalition to push for expanding the bill and making it more affordable.

The whining from some fast food chains that they won’t be able to afford paying for their employee’s health coverage under Obamacare have gotten a lot of press. But what is more troubling is the recent news that some big chains are concluding that the costs won’t be nearly as high as they had projected. The reason: their employees won’t be able to afford the health insurance and will instead pay a fine and remain uninsured. This fight is just the first battle in the coming war over Obamacare that will center around those who get left out. Big flaws in the bill will mean that many low-wage workers will be forced to choose between paying huge chunks of their income on premiums or on a penalty that leaves them with no coverage at all. Reformers should take note and get ready for the coming struggle.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Wendy’s lowered its estimate of the cost of Obamacare for each of its restaurants by 80 percent, from $25,000 a store to $5,000. The hamburger chain figured that many of its full-time employees, who will be offered health insurance through the company, will turn down the coverage because, as the Journal reported, “they can get insurance through Medicaid or a family member, or because they prefer to pay the penalty for not having coverage.” That penalty starts at $95 a year, although it will go up to $695 by 2016.

Wendy’s isn’t alone. Several other fast food chains have come up with similar estimates. One example is Popeyes, which figures that since only 5 percent of its employees have signed up for the high deductible plan now offered at a price of only $2.50 a week, few workers will choose to pay an estimated $25 a week for the improved coverage it will offer under Obamacare. While the new coverage required under the law will be far superior to the plan Popeyes now offers, with a good list of benefits, it will still include a steep deductible, particularly for a low-wage worker.

The debate over fast food chains and their workers is revealing one of the biggest flaws in the Affordable Care Act. Many low-wage workers will be put in a very difficult position: pay a big chunk of their limited wages for health insurance that is costly to use, or pay a fine for the privilege of remaining uninsured. This is an example of how the debate around Obamacare is about to take a huge turn. Instead of partisan opponents fearmongering about the theoretical impact of the law, the new struggle will be around the actual experience of those Americans whom the law was written to protect: people who are uninsured because they can not afford coverage or are locked out of the system because they have a pre-existing health condition.

Come January 2014, millions of people will get affordable health coverage for the first time. These will mostly be working people who do not get insurance on the job now but will become newly eligible for Medicaid or income-based tax-credits to buy insurance in the new health insurance marketplaces (“exchanges”). This will also include those who will no longer be turned down because of a pre-existing condition. The expansion of Medicaid – in states that give that the green light – and the income-based subsidies will create a huge new constituency for Obamacare that will oppose any attempts to roll back the law.

But due to problems written into the Affordable Care Act, the news won’t all be good for many people who can’t get affordable coverage now. There are some for whom the coverage in the marketplaces will still be too costly because the subsidies are too stingy. For example, a single person who earns just $33,500 will be required to pay $258 a month in premiums, which is more than 9 percent of his or her gross income, for coverage. That’s a big chunk out of a moderate income and is more than twice as much as that person would pay under Massachusetts’s current, successful law. In fact, people who earn more than two times the federal poverty level would be required to pay premiums from 6.3 percent to 9.5 percent of their incomes. If those costs are out of their financial reach, the bleak alternative is to pay a fine for remaining uninsured. It’s true that the coverage will include good benefits, free preventive services, and a cap on out-of-pocket costs. But unless it is already paying high medical bills, it won’t help a working family pay a high premium. The millions who face this dilemma will not be happy to have to make the choice between premiums that will put a big squeeze on an already tight budget or paying a fine they can’t afford for no benefits at all.

Which brings us to the second big group of people who will face this dilemma: low-wage workers who work more than 30 hours a week for a business that has 50 or more full-time employees. These employers can require employees to pay up to 9.5 percent of their incomes as premiums. The premiums are likely to be less for individuals; Popeyes estimates $1,200 a year, which would be similar to what has been found workable in Massachusetts. However, unlike in Massachusetts, the minimum coverage will have very high out-of-pocket costs, so workers will face high premiums for coverage that they can’t afford to use (although preventive care will be free). Furthermore, employers could decide to put more of the costs on to their workers, forcing them to choose between the premium and fines.

The news is much worse for family coverage. The IRS ruled earlier this year that the 9.5 percent rule will apply to the cost of individual coverage, even if family coverage costs much more than this. Here is how the New York Times editorial board explained the impact, in an editorial titled, “A Cruel Blow to American Families”:

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that in 2012, employees’ annual share of insurance premiums averaged $951 for individual coverage and $4,316 for family coverage. Under the I.R.S. rule, such costs would be considered affordable for an employee with a household income of $35,000 a year — making the employee’s spouse and children ineligible for a public subsidy on a health exchange, even though that family would have to spend 12 percent of its income for the employer’s family plan.

The Times goes on to report that between 2 million and 3.9 million spouses and children could lose access to affordable coverage because of the ruling. Those are millions of people for whom the law will be an empty promise.

The major purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to make decent health coverage affordable to Americans, and the law’s success will depend on how well it does just that. Next year, many millions of now uninsured people will gain access, but there will be millions of others for whom the promise remains out of reach. In the toxic political atmosphere surrounding Obamacare, the people left out will take center stage.

Republicans will seize on this situation to argue that the law is not working and use these people’s frustrations to portray the law as an expensive failure. The task for the champions of the ACA will be to unite those who are benefiting under Obamacare with those who will only benefit if the law is made more affordable. And since making coverage more affordable will take the government and, ideally, employers paying for more of the premiums, enacting the fixes will require a big political lift, particularly in the current Congress. Meeting this challenge will require organizing the winners and the losers to push for strengthening the law together.

All of this will become an issue in the 2014 and 2016 elections. In this way, Obamacare will join Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid as perennial issues of public debate, with competing visions of the role of government in assuring the security and well-being of our citizens. It’s a fight that never ends.

Health Insurance is Not Healthcare

 Nothing lets the wind out of my sails more than this monumental missed opportunity to provide the citizens of this country affordable health care, not just mandated health insurance. The fix was in from the start, and this shitty "reform" bill  will cost more lives than it ever hopes to save.


"Insurance is a Bet"
by JP SOTTILE


Insurance companies make a simple wager with you each time you sign a policy. They are betting that, over the life of the policy, they will pay out less to you and your beneficiaries than you will pay them.

Insurance companies of all kinds make tidy profits on this simple wager. If they don’t, sometimes the government will bail them out.

Either way, insurance is still just a bet. And in America, we do not have a healthcare system. We have a health insurance industry.
That industry has been one of the most profitable sectors of the economy for well over a decade. But costs skyrocketed and care suffered. We heard horror stories about rationed care, denied procedures and corporate bureaucracies run amok. Ironically, these were the horror stories we were supposed to hear if the government took the reigns of the “best healthcare system in the world.”

So, instead of a single-payer healthcare system, we got The Affordable Care Act—aka Obamacare. Instead of retiring the health insurance industry and its actuarial tables and profit margins and wagers, Obama “saved” the health insurance industry and enshrined it in perpetuity as the “Health Insurance-Industrial Complex.”
As the Affordable Care Act’s provisions begin to take effect, the folks in the Complex are wasting no time doing what they can to keep their profits tidy. Leading insurers in California are seeking increases in premiums ranging from 20% to 26%. Regulators in Florida and Ohio have already approved increasing premiums as much as 20%, and, since the ACA doesn’t set federal standards, insurance companies are moving in a number of states to force these spikes in premiums.

Remember, if you can “afford” health insurance, you have to buy it. If you refuse, you’ll pay a penalty to the government at tax time. Some are exempt from this mandate. But, in effect, the ACA has guaranteed the health insurance industry a captive market.

Meanwhile, they continue to change the terms of all those bets they’ve placed against millions of Americans and the cost of the “best healthcare in the world” continues to rise. When compared to other nations with some form of single-payer system, the difference is so stark that it’s almost obscene. It’s not just the $800 difference between an MRI in France versus the U.S., it’s almost every part of a system that has at its heart the relentless desire to turn a profit.

Even worse, a much-ballyhooed part of the promised “21st Century transformation” into greater “affordability” has turned out be little more than a profiteering scheme.

Remember the “streamlining” and “cost savings” guaranteed from the conversion to electronic medical records? Well, it hasn’t quite panned out. In fact, the only real beneficiaries of the conversion are companies like General Electric that sell electronic medical records systems. Not coincidentally, GE and other interested parties funded the key RAND study in 2005 that both predicted $81 billion in savings for America’s health care system and also became the driving rationale for the profitable conversion.

This type of closed system is par for the course in Washington, D.C.

Every door revolves in the nation’s only recession-proof city. Is it any surprise that the woman who wrote the Affordable Care Act is now leaving the White House for a job with health care giant Johnson & Johnson? Liz Fowler worked for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) during the drafting of the ACA and had the primary responsibility for authoring the legislation. After its passage, she migrated to the White House to help with implementation. Seems reasonable enough. However, it is important to note where she was before joining the staff of Senator Baucus. Yup, you guessed it…she was a bigwig at WellPoint, the nation’s second leading health insurance company with nearly 54 million policyholders.

All of this makes you wonder who knew whom in the breast milk-pump industry, which is seeing a huge spike in its profits thanks to a new coverage requirement written into the ACA.

It may be too early to render judgment on a law that hasn’t yet been fully implemented, but it is not too early to determine that the profit motive might simply be incompatible with the equitable delivery of healthcare. As matter of course, businesses try to lower costs and increase revenue. That may be okay when they sell scissors or candlesticks, but it seems ill-suited to deliver labor-intensive care for those who are most vulnerable.

And as far as the health of the insurance industry, it’s a safe bet that they’ll keep coming out on top as the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented.

The four business gangs that run the US

Ross Gittins
The Sydney Morning Herald's Economics Editor


IF YOU'VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ''Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,'' he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ''corporatocracy''.

First is the well-known corporate military-industrial complex. ''As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,'' he says.

Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.

These days, almost every US Treasury secretary - Republican or Democrat - comes from Wall Street and goes back there when his term ends. The close ties between Wall Street and Washington ''paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government''.

Third is the Big Oil-transport-military complex, which has put the US on the trajectory of heavy oil-imports dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East, he says.

''Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.''

Big Oil has consistently and successfully fought the intrusion of competition from non-oil energy sources, including nuclear, wind and solar power.

It has been at the side of the Pentagon in making sure that America defends the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, in effect ensuring a $US100 billion-plus annual subsidy for a fuel that is otherwise dangerous for national security, Sachs says.

''And Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.''

Fourth is the healthcare industry, America's largest industry, absorbing no less than 17 per cent of US gross domestic product.

''The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control,'' Sachs says. ''Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.

''The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.''

Now do you see why the industry put so much effort into persuading America's punters that Obamacare was rank socialism? They didn't succeed in blocking it, but the compromised program doesn't do enough to stop the US being the last rich country in the world without universal healthcare.

It's worth noting that, despite its front-running cost, America's healthcare system doesn't leave Americans with particularly good health - not as good as ours, for instance. This conundrum is easily explained: America has the highest-paid doctors.

Sachs says the main thing to remember about the corporatocracy is that it looks after its own. ''There is absolutely no economic crisis in corporate America.

''Consider the pulse of the corporate sector as opposed to the pulse of the employees working in it: corporate profits in 2010 were at an all-time high, chief executive salaries in 2010 rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, Wall Street compensation in 2010 was at an all-time high, several Wall Street firms paid civil penalties for financial abuses, but no senior banker faced any criminal charges, and there were no adverse regulatory measures that would lead to a loss of profits in finance, health care, military supplies and energy,'' he says.

The 30-year achievement of the corporatocracy has been the creation of America's rich and super-rich classes, he says. And we can now see their tools of trade.

''It began with globalisation, which pushed up capital income while pushing down wages. These changes were magnified by the tax cuts at the top, which left more take-home pay and the ability to accumulate greater wealth through higher net-of-tax returns to saving.''

Chief executives then helped themselves to their own slice of the corporate sector ownership through outlandish awards of stock options by friendly and often handpicked compensation committees, while the Securities and Exchange Commission looked the other way. It's not all that hard to do when both political parties are standing in line to do your bidding, Sachs concludes.

Fortunately, things aren't nearly so bad in Australia. But it will require vigilance to stop them sliding further in that direction.

A Tale of Two Healthcare Plans

Wednesday, September 12, 2012 by Reuters

by David Cay Johnston

 

 

No issue affecting taxes so clearly divides the two parties in the U.S. election as healthcare. The two parties, in their platforms, describe very different approaches to healthcare economics. Both use political plastic surgery to cover up ugly truths.

The stakes are huge. Americans spend $2.64 per person for healthcare for each purchasing power equivalent dollar spent by the 33 other countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD data shows the U.S. spends $8,233 per capita compared with an average of $3,118 in the other 33 countries.

A growing share of federal tax dollars, in direct spending and in tax breaks, is going to U.S. healthcare as the population ages, even though about one in six Americans lacks health insurance.

America‘s healthcare system, more accurately described as a non-system sick care system, totaled 17.6 percent of the economy in 2010, compared to an average of 9.2 percent in the other 33 countries, as the OECD data shows.

In the United States, total public and private cost of healthcare is significantly greater than the total of corporate and individual income taxes, as well as payroll taxes. For each dollar paid in all three of those taxes in 2010, healthcare came to $1.29.

If we just lowered our costs to those of France, which has universal care in what is widely regarded as one of the best systems if not the best, it would save almost as much money as Americans paid in individual income taxes in 2010. The French spend 6 percentage points less of their economy on healthcare. In the United States, the individual income tax in 2010 came to 6.3 percent of the U. S. economy, the lowest since Truman was president.

Take a look at your pay stub to get an idea of the kind of money being spent on a system that fosters bankruptcy, bedevils small business and ranks 31st among the 34 OECD countries in preventing premature death.

REPUBLICAN PLAN
The Republicans say the federal government is “structurally and financially broken” and that “three programs - Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security – account for over 40 percent of total spending,” which is “harming job creation and growth, (while) projections of future spending growth are nothing short of catastrophic, both economically and socially.”

The Republicans promise to “empower millions of seniors to control their personal healthcare decisions,” a vow immediately followed by a promise to cut federal spending.

The clearest explanation of what that would mean comes from Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential nominee. Before he started obfuscating, Ryan laid out his plans in detail. He boasted that by changing Medicare from a plan that provides treatment for every older American into one that gives seniors a fixed sum to buy their own health insurance, taxpayers would save through 2084 the present equivalent of $4.9 trillion.

What Ryan did not mention is that his plan would also mean $8 of increased private spending by seniors and the disabled for each tax dollar saved.

We know how Ryan’s plan would raise total costs because David Rosnick and Dean Baker, economists at the Center for Economic Policy and Research which promotes government policies that it says would benefit workers and the poor, used the same formula that Ryan (or his staff) applied to the same Congressional Budget Office data, but on private medical care spending. Ryan’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the fact that it makes no sense to spend $8 to save $1, older people do not have the money. A tenth of Americans age 75 and older live below the official poverty line. Another 24 percent have only saved a tad more.

Every indicator shows that Americans have not enough for their old age and that a shrinking number have pensions while the Republicans now in charge of the party want to cut Social Security benefits, if not kill the program.

So why would any Americans under age 55, whose healthcare benefits Ryan wants to cut when they reach 65, think they can afford to spend $8 to save $1? Recently Ryan has softened his plan to let those who wish stay in traditional Medicare. Since anyone not rich who can count would stick with Medicare, Ryan’s promised taxpayer savings would never materialize.

Alan Grayson, the combative one-term Democratic representative from Florida, got it right when he said on the House floor in 2009: “The Republican plan – don’t get sick and if you do get sick die quickly.”

DEMOCRATS FAVOR UNIVERSAL CARE

 The Democratic platform calls for universal healthcare. “We will end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable healthcare,” they say, though after six decades that party promise remains unfulfilled.

President Barack Obama‘s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will enable those with pre-existing conditions and twenty-somethings without work to get health insurance. But the plan does nothing to address the larger economic problem. American healthcare costs too much and needs replacement, not a nip and tuck.

Portugal, with half the income per person as America, provides universal healthcare. Cuba, the CIA tells us, ranks 40th in infant mortality, while the United States is nine steps lower at 49th, an astonishing fact given U.S. spending compared to the poverty induced by Castro’s collectivist economic policies.

Doing worse than Portugal and Cuba is, in my view, not just costly but immoral.

Just as Republicans are trying to limit the franchise, so are they trying to limit who gets healthcare. The Democrats are better only because they recognize that universal care can be cheaper while removing an annoying and costly distraction from business.

Death and taxes will always be with us. What we need is to spend less on taxes while doing the best we can to stave off death.

Myths Both Parties Want to Maintain Through the Presidential Election

Ed Krayewski|Aug. 16, 2012 Reason.com

To those NOT enamored by Teams Blue and Red, the rhetorical gymnastics performed in the run-up to a presidential election can be daunting. Yet underneath the hyper-partisan back and forth is an uncomfortable truth: a lot of what both sides are saying on the campaign trail is complete bullshit. Previously I broke down four misperceptions about Barack Obama some of his supporters advance. Some political misperceptions, however, are beneficial to partisans on both sides of the aisle, albeit for different reasons. Here are four myths that both the Democrats and the Republicans want to keep in circulation until the November election.




Paul Ryan Is a Deficit Reducing Fiscal Hawk
In the selection of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate, we had the opportunity to witness the creation of a bipartisan myth in overdrive. In this case, the myth was that Paul Ryan was a fiscal hawk, a libertarian, even an extremist. Anyone who’s given the Paul Ryan budgets serious study knows that none of this true. Nick Gillespie noted earlier this year that Ryan’s latest budget runs a deficit of $1.2 trillion, while the president’s ran a deficit of $1.3 trillion. What’s $100 billion between friends? By 2022, the Ryan budget envisions the federal government spending 4.9 trillion dollars. As Gillespie points out, though the Ryan budget doesn’t deny the massive debt problem facing America, it’s “weak tea” considering it does nothing to shrink annual deficits, and in fact doesn’t even try to balance the budget at all in the next 10 years. Yet Romney selected Ryan to energize the small government and Tea Party base, and President Barack Obama has decided to pin his campaign’s hope on painting his opponents as extremists, so playing on the misperceptions of Paul Ryan as a fiscal hawk is politically beneficial to both sides.
NEXT: Did you hear about Obama's amnesty?




Barack Obama Is Pro-Amnesty
While the DREAM Act languished in both the Democrat- and the Republican-controlled House as well as the Democratic Senate, even when Democrats held a 60-vote filibuster proof majority in that chamber, the Obama Administration hit record-breaking deportations rates and resisted reform of detention practices. Yet since President Obama announced temporary relief for some young people threatened by deportation a few months ago, his disenchanted Latino base has largely been re-invigorated. The unilateral presidential action also made passing immigration reform in Congress that much harder. But you wouldn’t think the president’s record was so muddied based on the rhetoric surrounding it. House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), called Obama’s limited waiver via executive order an “amnesty.” A simple Google search will reveal Smith's not alone in characterizing Obama’s move that way. At the other end of the spectrum, the Obama campaign’s “Truth Team”—normally quick to spin any dissenting political opinion as factually untrue—debunked the myth of the Obama amnesty just once, a full nine months before the president’s executive order. In the meantime, “Latinos for Obama” even created an infographic claiming Mitt Romney would “repeal the DREAM Act,” almost as if the president and Democrats had actually passed it, beefing up their pro-immigration bona fides.
NEXT: Dude, our president is a peacemaker, he even got a prize for it!

 


Mitt Romney Is More Pro-War than Barack Obama
President Obama was announced as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize just 10 short months after taking office. Amazing, right? Why did the Norwegians award our president this prize? "[F]or his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Specifically, the committee cited our newly-minted president’s efforts to reach out to the Muslim world. The president admitted he didn’t think he deserved the award, adding, “but I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world… all Americans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.” What has Obama done since then? By the end of 2009, there had already been more drone strikes in Pakistan than under the last four years of the Bush administration. A New York Times expose of the president’s drone war revealed that the Obama administration considered conversations within the executive branch about the justification for ordering drone killings as sufficient to meet the constitutional due process standard. So much for the promise of our founding documents. Obama also sent U.S. military forces to help bombard Libya during its civil war, violating the constitutional limits on war making. The war in Afghanistan, of course, continues bloodily, and though many believe the war in Iraq has ended, that’s not completely true either. Not exactly a peacemaker. Reason has repeatedly explained how Obama’s foreign policy mirrors George W. Bush’s while various foreign policy analysts have noted that Obama and Romney’s foreign policy plans are pretty much the same. Even on the issue of Iran, the difference between Obama and Romney has been described as more a difference in style than substance. Yet both Obama apologists and Romney boosters will claim a substantive difference in foreign policy, one that paints Romney as the more warmongering candidate and Obama as “weak” on foreign policy.
NEXT: Only Romney can stop Obamacare, right?




Mitt Romney is Opposed to Government Intervention in Health Care, Like Obamacare!

When it comes to health care reform, the motto of the Tea Party has been “repeal Obamacare,” but for Mitt Romney it’s “repeal and replace.” But replace with what? Romney defended his own government intervention in health care in Massachusetts, Romneycare, in a similar way to Obama’s defense of Obamacare. An MIT professor who helped formulate Romneycare and advised Democrats on Obamacare noted many similarities between the two laws. The president himself identifies the Massachusetts law as a blueprint for his own program (though as Romney notes, he was never consulted for his expertise by the Obama administration). Recently, Romney was the target a vicious attack ad trying to connect him, through his work at Bain Capital, to a woman who lost her health insurance and died of cancer. Romney’s chief spokesperson, Andrea Saul, didn’t rebut the attack by pointing out the glaring inconsistencies of the narrative, but instead noted that had the woman lived in Massachusetts when Romneycare was in effect, she would’ve never lost her health insurance. Not exactly the kind of defense a candidate opposed to even more government intervention in an already heavily-regulated health care market would give. The comment drew calls for Saul’s resignation, but she remains on Team Mitt.

At the same time, the Obama campaign uses the threat of the repeal of Obamacare to marshal support for the president. Just this week, the first lady framed the debate over Obamacare as a question of health, asking an audience “Do we want these reforms to be repealed? …Or do we want the people we love to have the care they need? That’s the choice we face.” Although Romney may bank on the unpopularity of Obamacare, especially among the conservative grassroots, he’s never repudiated the idea of government intervention in the health care market. He even went so far as to tout the Israeli government's intervention in health care as an aspirational model. But what if Romney is actually sincere about repealing Obamacare, and the “replace” part of his mantra is just him trying to play both sides like politicians are wont to do? In June, The New Yorker laid out what it would take to repeal Obamacare and why a President Romney wouldn’t be able to do it. The most compelling point? Republicans are highly unlikely to get the 60 votes in the Senate needed to repeal the law.




Barack Obama’s foreign policy is not as destructive as George W. Bush's was (or Mitt Romney's would be).
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama leveraged his outspoken opposition to the Iraq War (while in the Illinois State Senate) to appeal to anti-war voters. To hear Mitt Romney tell it, Obama’s foreign policy hasn’t been sufficiently militaristic. This while a list of presidential accomplishments recently released by a Democratic group is riddled with the people killed while Obama has been commander in chief. Even as Joe Biden is calling Mitt Romney’s foreign policy weak, and mocking the sensible sounding idea of “subcontract[ing] our foreign policy to some expert at the State Department” (as opposed to the CIA or DoD, Joe?), the left continues to portray Romney as being more neo-conservative than Obama, the very president that neo-con leader Bill Kristol has claimed as one of his own. The truth is Romney would probably fit right in with Obama’s cabinet when it comes to making foreign policy decisions, and Obama’s foreign policy itself is a natural extension of President George W. Bush’s.


Barack Obama’s immigration policies are compassionate and humane.
 Obama's pro-immigration reform supporters were already growing disenchanted with Obama when he announced temporary relief for some young people threatened by deportation. While the move is expected to help thousands of people begin to normalize their legal status in the country, it comes as part of a broader approach from this president that has included record-breaking deportations rates and resistance to detention reform. Nevertheless, the “temporary stop gap measure” may have been enough to renew enthusiasm for Obama among Latinos and other pro-immigration voters, even while the unilateral action by the president makes efforts to pass immigration reform in Congress that much harder. Nor did Obama spend any political capital on immigration reform early in his presidency, even though Democrats held both chambers at the time, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.


Obama’s support for gay marriage is groundbreaking.
When President Obama came out last month and staked a position on same-sex marriage that, as critics noted, Dick Cheney held back in 2004, it was nonetheless heralded as a grand moment in the gay rights struggle. Newsweek even dubbed Obama America’s “first gay president,” burying James Buchanan deeper into the nation's historical closet. What did Obama do to earn such accolades from supporters? Although he voiced support for same-sex marriage early in his political career, as president Obama waited until the day after North Carolina voters amended their Constitution to prohibit same-sex unions before telling ABC News about his personal support for gay marriage. While the president has instructed the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court, both the president and his aides have indicated that Obama sees gay marriage as an issue best left up to the states. Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, on the other hand, supports the right to gay marriage on a federal level.




Barack Obama will end the war on drugs, eventually.
This is the most pervasive and consistent fantasy about former pot-smoker Barack Obama espoused by his supporters. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell went so far as to say that Obama legalizing drugs after the election is the “204th reason to vote for President Obama.” While Mitt Romney might be the kind of neighbor to tell you to extinguish your joint on the beach, Barack Obama is the kind of president that doesn’t understand the economic benefit of marijuana legalization and, more important, who has ramped up federal raids on medical marijuana clinics operating legally under state law, whose government seeks life sentences for medical marijuana dispensary owners whose activities are too profitable, and who refuses to allow any discretion in the execution of a deadly and never ending drug war. Obama is a drug warrior, plain and simple.