Tag: Daily Intelligencer

From the moment President Obama set out to reform the health care system, Republican opposition was a Terminator robot driven by boundless, remorseless determination to kill. Every single Republican in Congress opposed the bill, and Republicans who even considered supporting something vaguely like it were ruthlessly purged. Even after it was passed, Republicans ginned up far-fetched legal challenges, held endless votes to repeal it, and vowed not to implement it at the state level. They couldn’t be bargained with, couldn’t be reasoned with, and felt no pity.

The repeal machine has suffered a series of devastating blows – the Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate, Obama’s reelection, the decision of several Republican governors to accept the program’s expansion of Medicaid – and continued to lurch forward. But Governor Rick Scott’s announcement that he will enroll uninsured Floridians in Medicaid appears to be a real death blow, the moment the cyborg’s head is crushed in a steel press.

From the moment he appeared on the national stage, Scott seemed to be engineered to fight health care reform. The wealthy owner of a vast hospital chain that paid massive fines for overbilling Medicare during his tenure, Scott bankrolled an anti-reform lobby, then ran and won in 2010 on a platform of obsessive opposition to Obamacare. He has steadfastly vowed to turn down federal subsidies to cover his state’s uninsured, and even concocted phony accounting assumptions to justify his stance. Rick Scott really hates health care reform.

But Scott is a vulnerable incumbent in a swing state. And his refusal to accept Medicaid expansions would have left his state’s hospitals on the hook for $2.8 billion when uninsured Floridians show up in emergency rooms, prompting them to lobby Scott to change his mind. And so he has. For an enjoyable sampling of conservative apoplexy, try Philip Klein (“waving the white flag is an accurate description of Scott’s decision,”) Mario Loyola (“the most grievous blow since the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Obamacare last year,”) and Michael Cannon (“will he sell out Florida’s job creators too?”).

Cannon’s outrage in particular is almost poignant. He has served as a health care adviser to Scott in Florida, and as a founder of the “Anti-Universal Coverage Club,” lent Scott the closest link, of all the governors, to the conservative movement’s maniacal hatred for providing health insurance to those too sick or poor to obtain it on their own. The ability of governors to turn down Medicaid funding is the last line of defense against Obamacare, and Scott’s betrayal of the cause – choosing the financial health of his own state’s hospitals over the chance to deny medical care to his own state’s poor – lands a blow of both substantive and symbolic power.

We are not about to enter a new era of peace and health care love. The death struggle between liberals fighting to make health insurance a basic right and conservative fighting to prevent that is over. What’s replacing it is a more mundane form of trench warfare. The new conservative position will come to revolve around expanding the role and prerogative of private insurance, and the liberal goal will be to strengthen regulation and help the poor and sick.

A glimpse of the new conservative health care line comes from former Romney adviser Avik Roy and conservative think-tank apparatchik Douglas Holtz-Eakin in a joint-bylined column. In it, they point the way toward the future of the health care debate. Gone is the millennial struggle to preserve the dying embers of freedom. They actually allow that the central architecture of Obamacare – the establishment of subsidized exchanges where individuals can purchase private insurance – is an “important concession to the private sector.”

Right! It’s a Republican-designed idea! It might have helped if Republicans had noticed this, instead of screaming about socialism, back when Obama was trying to pass the plan.

In any case, Roy and Holtz-Eakin argue that their discovery that Obamacare consists mainly of a free market health insurance mechanism offers conservatives a wonderful opportunity. Here their thinking grows extremely confused. The problem with Obamacare , they argue, is that the exchanges are regulated. The “community rating” provision, which prevents insurers from charging higher rates to people more likely to get sick, “will dramatically increase premiums for young people.” They propose to get rid of such regulations and turn the exchanges into a free-market paradise “modeled on the Swiss system.”

As a policy guide, this is utterly daft. Health care economist Aaron Carroll fisks the op-ed and concludes that they have no idea at all how the Swiss system works. It’s more regulated than Obamacare, not less. Community rating is needed because that’s how you make insurance affordable to sick people – otherwise, insurers will just sign up healthy customers.

But as a political roadmap, Roy and Holtz-Eakin offer what looks like the most plausible way forward for the GOP. The health insurance industry doesn’t want the government forcing them to sell products to money-losing sick people. Insurers will want to skim the healthiest people from the pool. And conservatives don’t like regulation. That is a perfect match of constituency and ideology.

So the broader struggle will never end. But the conservatives understand that the struggle to preserve “American exceptionalism” in health care – America’s standing as the sole advanced democracy without universal citizen access to medical care – is over.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

Filed Under:
the national interest
,politics
,obamacare
,rick scott

via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/scott-delivers-death-blow-to-obamacare-repeal.html

The Washington Free Beacon has a report, sourced to “Washington Free Beacon Staff,” that Chris Hughes is purging Jews from The New Republic. (Occasionally the Free Beacon publishes stories too embarrassing for any staffers to be associated with by name.) The sensationalism of the article is structured in hilariously descending fashion, with each successive addition to the story draining its plausibility until nothing remains at the end. But the Free Beacon’s report offers a helpful window into a social problem, in which millions of conservatives are held in a constant state of bug-eyed rage because they’re being manipulated for financial and ideological profit by right-wing pseudo-journalists.

The headline — “Hughes Drops Jews” — implies that the magazine’s new owner has undertaken a broad anti-Semitic purge, a prospect that would surely alarm, among others, his newly hired Jewish editor, Frank Foer. The introduction to the story blares, “The New Republic has quietly dropped at least five prominent Jewish writers from its masthead in a move that may signal the publication’s continued drift away from a staunchly pro-Israel standpoint.” Oddly, this sentence conflates Jewish writers with pro-Israel writers, an odd equation favored by hard-core anti-Semites.

As we read on, “masthead” turns out to mean the list of “contributing editors,” which is a broad list of former staffers, friends of the owner, or people generally enlisted to fill out a masthead without getting paid. As a rule, few contributing editors contribute, and no contributing editors edit. (Michael Kinsley once joked, “There are two kinds of contributing editors — the kind who don’t write, and the kind who you wish wouldn’t.”) I happen to be a contributing editor at TNR. The pay isn’t good (by which I mean, it is nonexistent), but, then, the demands are equal to the pay.

Needless to say, none of this context is provided in the Free Beacon’s story. Instead, the story describes the purged Jews as “well-respected longtime contributors to the magazine,” an odd description for a group that has — with, I think, one exception — not published anything in the magazine for years.

However, by the end of the fourth paragraph, after listing the purged Jewish contributing editors, the story notes by the by that one of them, Peter Beinart, “is the publisher of Open Zion, an anti-Zionist Daily Beast blog sponsored by the New America Foundation,” a development the story concedes, with hilarious understatement, to be “complicating the picture.” So it’s sort of a combined purge of Jews and anti-Zionists?

Then finally, by the end, the piece includes still more information. “Seven additional writers have been dropped from the newly redesigned masthead. They include: Gregg Easterbrook, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jeremy McCarter, Maggie Scarf, R.V. Thaw, Alan Wolfe, and Robert Wright.” So the facts of the story turn out to be that a magazine has conducted some routine trimming of its unpaid, ceremonial list, and five of the writers deprived of their ceremonial title are Jewish and seven are not! (Wolfe is reportedly Jewish, an easily Google-able fact the Free Beacon misses in an immovable object-versus-irresistible-force collision of the Beacon’s desire to make the story as sensationalist as possible against its lack of basic journalistic competence.

So, in a mere 314 words, we have gone from a purge of Jews to a report that half the writers removed from a titular list of former contributors are Jewish, and some of them hold hawkish positions on Israel, and one holds dovish views. (A scan of the current and still rather long contributing editor roster suggests that the remaining proportion is at least as heavily Jewish as those ushered off it.) This is not quite the publishing Kristallnacht the Free Beacon’s readers were promised.

The Washington Free Beacon is a smear sheet founded by Matthew Continetti, occasional contributor to the Weekly Standard and son-in-law of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. Continetti wrote a founding credo for the Free Beacon, titled “Combat Journalism,” which is notable because it openly defined an ethos that has come to define large chunks of the conservative journalism world. Continetti described what he perceives as a lurid conspiracy of the liberal establishment, and promises to match it:

At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.

If that is not clear, Continetti assails his opponents for their “hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole” and open partisanship, and then, in the next sentence, promises to do the same thing right back to the liberals. The results are precisely what you’d expect. There has always been a certain amount of bad reporting and shoddy argumentation in journalism, but mostly it arises out of genuine ignorance or ideological fanaticism. The Free Beacon is an important innovator in the right-wing pseudo-journalism world. Hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, and paranoid hyperbole are not the accidental by-product of ideological zeal but its stated goal.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

Filed Under:
the national interest
,politics
,chris hughes
,the new republic
,washington free beacon

via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/hitler-alive-and-well-owning-liberal-magazine.html