Author Archives: BufordLindley

Raw Data: By 2017, Obamacare Will Be Covering 36 Million People

by BufordLindley Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Megan McArdle asks, “Is Obamacare now beyond repeal?” Good question! McArdle goes through the various estimates of enrollment figures, concluding that something in the neighborhood of 5.5-6.5 million people are likely to sign up this year, depending on how much enrollment accelerates in the last few days of March and how many people drop out because they fail to pay their premiums. That sounds reasonable to me. Then this:

Does that mean that Obamacare will basically be beyond repeal, as its supporters hope? It certainly makes things harder. But we still don’t know how many of these people are newly insured, or how many of the previously insured like these policies better than their old policies — nor how much pressure it is going to end up putting on the budget. Those are things we won’t know for quite a while. But if it were impossible to ever cut off an expensive entitlement that goes to the middle class, TennCare would never have been cut.

But there’s something missing here. It’s something that nearly everyone has neglected in the frenzy to figure out what’s happening right now. Here it is: the world doesn’t stop in 2014. Enrollment of around 6 million makes Obamacare hard to repeal, but for now that’s not really what’s holding it in place. What’s holding it in place is the fact that Democrats control the Senate and Barack Obama occupies the White House. And even if the Senate switches parties next year, I think we can all agree that Obamacare is going nowhere as long as Obama stays president. So 2017 is the earliest it could even plausibly be repealed.

But what do things look like in 2017? The chart on the right shows the latest CBO estimates. By 2017, a total of 36 million Americans will be covered by Obamacare. Of that, 24 million will have private coverage via the exchanges and 12 million will be covered by Medicaid. Those are very big numbers. Even if Republicans improbably manage to get complete control of the government in the 2016 election and eliminate the filibuster so Democrats can’t object, they’ll still have to contend with this.

Does this make Obamacare invulnerable? Of course not. Nothing makes it invulnerable. It’s always possible, though it seems vanishingly unlikely at this point, that it will fail so badly that even Democrats sour on it in a couple of years. It’s also possible that Republican hostility will remain so furious that they just flatly don’t care about 36 million constituents. And maybe they won’t care that the health care industry is fully invested in Obamacare and will fight efforts to get rid of it.

Anything is possible. But when you talk about the chances of repealing Obamacare, you should be talking about 2017. And if you’re talking about 2017, then the number that matters isn’t 6 million, it’s 36 million. That’s a mighty big nut to crack.

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Raw Data: By 2017, Obamacare Will Be Covering 36 Million People

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Congress Reaches a Budget Deal and Conservatives Already Hate It

by BufordLindley Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have spent the past several weeks huddled with their staffs in budget negotiations, and Tuesday evening they emerged with the impossible: a deal to keep the government open and avoid another shutdown when current funding expires next month. Their proposal will replace part of sequestration—the automatic cuts to domestic and military spending in the Budget Control Act that averted the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff—for the next two years. Domestic and military spending will be set at $1.012 trillion for fiscal year 2014, higher than the $967 billion called for by sequestration but far less than the $1.058 trillion Murray’s original budget called for. That amounts to $63 billion in reductions to sequestration’s cuts over the next two years, split between defense and other domestic government programs. It’s a positive, but small step, replacing about 33 percent of sequestration for the next two years and allowing agencies to reallocate the across-the-board cuts.

The proposal covers the rise in spending by increasing a few fees—TSA surcharges for example—and cuts in pensions for federal employees and military veterans, among other small changes.* The deal creates a little more than $20 billion in net deficit reduction, though those extra cuts won’t come until 2022 and 2023. The agreement doesn’t close any tax loopholes, as Democrats originally sought, nor does it extend long-term unemployment insurance. It’s no grand bargain, just a puny accord meant to avoid the turmoil of October’s shutdown.

Despite the limited aims of the deal, conservatives—both Tea Party members of the House and outside groups—began complaining before negotiators released the proposal. FreedomWorks denounced the concept behind such a deal on Tuesday. Heritage Action, the outreach arm of the conservative think tank, lambasted the early reports of a deal. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page hammered the “defense hawks and appropriators who want to break the annual spending caps in current law.” A cohort of 18 of House Republicans wrote a letter calling on House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to ignore the potential deal and vote on a “clean” budget resolution.

Why were conservatives so preemptively outraged? All of the sequester offsets will come in 2014 and 2015, but the new revenues are spread out over a ten-year window. So, for example, the $6 billion in savings from federal pensions will be distributed over the next decade, averaging out to $600 million per year. Basically, the proposed deal front loads spending that ameliorates the draconian sequester while pushing much of the deficit reduction off until later. Think of it as a minor jolt of stimulus compared to current law. That’s exactly what liberal economists have called for since the start of the recession: the government should pump more money into the economy while it is still in the doldrums and save deficit reductions for the future when the country will, presumably, be on more stable footing.

Leaders from the two parties should be able to wrangle enough votes for the budget negotiation thanks to the stamp of approval from conservative idol Paul Ryan. “I think we will pass it through the House,” Ryan said at the Tuesday press conference announcing the deal. “I have every reason to expect great support from our caucus.” But there could still be a battle on the right. For most hardcore rightwingers, any effort to change the sequester cuts will be sacrosanct. “Sequester is the big win,” Grover Norquist, the taskmaster of Republicans’ tax agenda, said earlier this year. “It defines the decade.” Any deal that sidelines some of those cuts while shunting deficit reduction off to a later date should count as a win for progressives—and a cause for more conservative-on-Republican sniping.

Update: Here’s a wonky, four-page breakdown of what exactly is included in the budget proposal.

Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the nature of the pension cuts.

Continued:

Congress Reaches a Budget Deal and Conservatives Already Hate It

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Yet Another Conservative Urban Legend Takes Root

by BufordLindley Posted on September 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I noticed an item reporting that Warren Buffett thought Obamacare should be scrapped. It took about ten seconds of googling to figure out that (a) Buffett’s statement was made three years ago, and (b) he was lobbying for a better bill, not for health care reform to be abandoned. In fact, he specifically said that given a choice between the status quo and the bill wending its way through Congress, he’d take the bill. I considered writing a post about this, but the source seemed to be pretty obscure and nutballish, and anyway, my big toenail needed clipping. So I didn’t bother.

That might have been a mistake. It turns out that this is an object lesson in how eager conservatives are to pick up even on things that are so plainly wrong they’d embarrass a five-year-old. Jon Chait does the honors:

The quote was picked up by Jeffrey H. Anderson of the Weekly Standard — “You know things are bad for President Obama when even Warren Buffett has soured on Obamacare and says that ‘we need something else’” — and ricocheted around the conservative-news world….In fact, the Buffett quote came from comments he made in 2010, when the health-care law was being cobbled together in Congress. His denunciation of “what we have right now” refers to the pre-Obamacare status quo.

….Anderson hilariously issued an “update” to his completely false item, in which he notes: “It appears that Buffett made his anti-Obamacare comments in 2010, thereby showing that he, like most of the American people, has opposed Obamacare since even before it was passed.”

Buffett immediately issued a statement calling these reports “100 percent wrong,” and pointing out that he’s supported Obamacare from the very start.

Too late, Warren! This is now officially a conservative urban legend that will never, ever go away. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t really matter.

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Yet Another Conservative Urban Legend Takes Root

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