Next up in the health care debate: Let’s defund Medicare

Earlier this week, I mentioned how Paul Krugman called the GOP’s power brokering in Washington “unprecedented” in American politics, but what must be even more astounding as we sit this side of the government shutdown that has already affected national parks, the Statue of Liberty site, 800,000 jobs and more, is the fact that House Republicans have held the government hostage on a disagreement about a health care act, Obamacare, that is already on the books.

If the Affordable Care Act was just a proposal or an unpassed piece of legislation sitting on someone’s desk, this might not be such a big deal. But here we are talking about current law that is being disputed at the expense of funding the next fiscal year of government. It would be the same if Republicans decided just out of the blue that they no longer want to fund Medicare, and they were determined to block any legislation for funding the general government until Medicare was dismantled. Imagine the blow back from this. Of course, this particular scenario would never happen since the GOP largely depends on the senior demographic for a good majority of its support. Meanwhile, young and minority voters can just fend for themselves and can go straight to the poverty line if they happen to get sick. What do House Republicans care, since most of those votes will go to Democrats anyway? And Republicans wonder why they can’t turn out more of the young vote and why they are becoming more irrelevant with each passing year.

Needless to say, the current maneuvering on the health care bill is a dirty and shameful bit of politicking on the part of Tea Party Republicans, and if it’s not blatantly obvious at this point, Speaker John Boehner has clearly lost control of his own party in the House.

Boehner and climate change

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., along with 21 members of Congress sent a letter this week to Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, requesting a debate on climate change. The letter is available in PDF form here. The lawmakers who signed the letter are Reps. Henry A. Waxman, Bobby L. Rush, Chris Van Hollen, Doris O. Matsui, Jared Huffman, Earl Blumenauer, Rush Holt, Raul M. Grijalva, Peter DeFazio, Jim Moran, Barbara Lee, Steve Cohen, John Garamendi, Donna F. Edwards, Ben Ray Lujan, Peter Welch, Paul D. Tonko, Lois Capps, Hank Johnson, Carolyn B. Maloney, Keith Ellison and Adam Schiff.

Of course, given Boehner campaign contribution interests, don’t expect the speaker to be baited into holding a debate. Based on data from Open Secrets, I calculated that Boehner received at least $1.2 million from oil and gas and other related energies from 2011 to 2012, and according to MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization, that figure could be higher. Conversely, the lawmakers who sent the letter to Boehner received 77 percent less money from carbon polluting industries than representatives who did not sign the letter.

As this chart shows, the non-green energy sector is Boehner’s fourth largest contributor, just behind “miscellaneous,” which could just as well include other cardon-related industries:

Picture 1

Credit: Open Secrets

The Obama Administration has been working on a plan to address climate change that is largely geared toward energy efficiency and renewable resources, which Boehner, to no one’s surprise, has called “absolutely crazy:”

Why would you want to increase the cost of energy and kill more American jobs at a time when the American people are still asking where are the jobs? Clear enough?

Notwithstanding what he sees as the economics of energy reform, Boehner has long ridiculed the notion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is harmful to the environment, ridiculously citing cow farts as an example, and well, our own respiration:

Here he is in 2009:

The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.

It’s clear we’ve had change in our climate. The question is how much does man have to do with it and what is the proper way to deal with this? We can’t do it alone as one nation.

At least he admits that some type of climate change is happening, although he has been refuted many times over (Here and here, to name a couple examples) for his stance on the damage carbon dioxide is causing to the environment. As the letter to Boehner suggests, the Republican strategy on climate change seems to be, like most other issues of import, to do nothing and hope the problem goes away, meanwhile collecting their big checks from energy interests.

Here is a portion of the letter sent to Boehner:

The Safe Climate Caucus is comprised of 25 members of the House who have made a commitment to talk every single day on the House floor that we are in session about the urgent need to address climate change. Every day, we have given speeches on topics relating to climate change, including the importance of preparing communities to mitigate the impacts of extreme weather events, the potential for clean energy technologies, and the threats of rising temperatures across the country.

But despite our continued and ongoing efforts to speak out on this issue on the House floor, no Republican member of the House has shown up to explain why House Republicans refuse to accept the views of every scientific institution or to justify their inaction to future generations.

Like evolution, the best approach the GOP seems to be able to come up with is to put their fingers in their ears and hope the scientific community and people who care about the long-term effects of climate change will simply go away, which is a good reason why, if the Republican Party itself doesn’t evolve and step into the 20th century — much less the 21st — the Grand Old Party might turn into the Grand Dead Party and may not even exist in 30 years as smarter, more conscientious voters come of age.

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Boehner again calls for nation to default

Just how out of touch is John Boehner anyway?

Last year, he nearly caused the United States to default on its debt, and this year, he’s whistling the same tune, refusing to raise the debt ceiling and calling for spending cuts.

We shouldn’t dread the debt limit. As a matter of fact, I think we should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction.

A town “infamous for inaction?” Doesn’t he means a party infamous for inaction?

The GOP unanimously said “no” to the health care reform bill. “No” to the $787 billion stimulus package, which, by the way, is responsible for many job-creating infrastructural improvements across the nation, and “no” to nearly everything else Obama has put on the table.

U.S. House Speaker Boehner commemorate Holocaust victims and survivors in Washington (Benjamin Myers Reuters, REUTERS / May 16, 2012)

The GOP has languished in Washington the last four years and has been little more than dead weight, unceasingly complaining about Obama, yet accomplishing next to nothing, unless pushing the party even further to the right, “symbolically” passing votes and “symbolically” reading the Constitution counts for accomplishing something.

And at a time when we can clearly witness austerity cuts in Europe failing miserably, Boehner is calling for — wait for it — more austerity cuts. Lucid as ever, Fareed Zakaria identifies the problem with spending cuts in already sagging economy:

The problem is that as these governments cut spending in very depressed economies, it has caused growth to slow even further — you see government workers who have been fired tend to buy fewer goods and services, for example — and all this means falling tax receipts and thus even bigger deficits.

Spending cuts don’t just affect government workers. That’s just one obvious example. If the government starts hacking away at services that improve people’s lives, their quality of life diminishes, thus, not only are they less happy, more apathetic and more likely to hoard what little savings they do have, but they are less likely to turn around and invigorate the economy with new consumer-side spending.

I’m reminded of two memorable lines from Tony Benn, who was interviewed for the 2007 movie, “Sicko:”

Keeping people hopeless and pessimistic – see I think there are two ways in which people are controlled — first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

and

An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.

So, let’s look at the other side. What about people that make more than $250,000 per year? When government hands them tax breaks, do they help stimulate the economy? Not so much. Sure, they spend some, but I would wager that rich people are not primarily concerned with consumer spending, but with saving and investing. After all, there is a reason some people are able to accumulate mass amounts of wealth. They happen to be good with managing money and have some smart investment sense. Good for them. But that doesn’t help the national economy or the American public.

Shutdown averted

Cutting it down to the wire, Boehner and Reid have apparently sold their fellow lawmakers on a compromise deal that would cut some $38.5 billion from the federal budget.

Read here.

Boehner best hope that the spending cuts appease his Tea Party friends, who have made quite a fuss in his home state over the federal debt.

Shutdown hours away

We are T-minus three hours away from the first government shutdown in more than 15 years if politicians in Washington don’t come to an agreement on budget negotiations. According to this article from The New York Times, one of the main points of contention is funding for Planned Parenthood and other services for poor women. This morning, Republican [[Sen. Jon Kyle]] from Arizona made this flagrantly false statement about the organization:

Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals, so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

Here’s the video:

Had Sen. Kyl bothered to check the Planned Parenthood website, he would have found that abortion services only account for 3 percent of services rendered by the organization. Some of the services available are as follows from the site:

  • Planned Parenthood health centers focus on prevention: 83 percent of our clients receive services to prevent unintended pregnancy.
  • Planned Parenthood services help prevent more than 612,000 unintended pregnancies each year.
  • Planned Parenthood provides nearly one million Pap tests and more than 830,000 breast exams each year, critical services in detecting cancer.
  • Planned Parenthood provides nearly four million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
  • Three percent of all Planned Parenthood health services are abortion services.
  • Planned Parenthood affiliates provide educational programs to nearly 1.2 million young people and adults each year.

Ezra Klein offers a brief rundown and with a handy chart:

Planned Parenthood)

Here’s the link to C-SPAN’s live coverage of the budget debate in the Senate.

Time ticking away on budget talks

So, let me get this straight: leaders in Washington are essentially quibbling about $5 billion — Republicans have proposed $39 billion in cuts, while the Democrats came back with $34 billion — when we are one day from a government shutdown? This is the basic impasse? Stunning.

What’s more, Tea Party officials, known for their anti-spending rhetoric, actually voted against a bill that would have at least kept the government running for another week, citing incoherent reasons.

Here’s the brilliant Michelle Bachmann:

I had previously pledged to reject any [budget bill] which does not defund that (health care reform) spending. Unfortunately, today’s [bill] does nothing to defund ObamaCare and that is why I voted ‘no’.

Why would the budget bill defund that spending? The health care bill already passed, and has little to do with current negotiations. So far as I know, for health care funding to be removed from current budget considerations, Congress would have to go back and repeal the already passed law and that repeal would then have to go back to the president’s desk for a signature, which we all know, would be a futile exercise since health care reform was one of Obama’s main domestic goals.

Further, we know from past studies that a government shutdown will cost money. A lot of it. The shutdown of the early-1990s cost an estimated $245 million to $607 million, and the one in the mid-90s cost about $1.4 billion. Thus, the advocates of a shutdown, in their notions about reining in spending and their near-hysterical attempts to do anything in their power to thwart the Obama and the Dems’ policies, would essentially bring more, not less, financial burden to the American people. Stunning again.

This article provides a detailed look at the cost of government shutdown of the mid-90s, and here is an L.A. Times analysis of what a current shutdown might be.