Tag: David A. Graham

Even if he wanted to choose the Wisconsin representative, why would Ryan want to leave his powerful post in the House?

If whispers are any gauge — and who knows? — Rep. Paul Ryan seems to have made a late charge into the shortlist for Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential nominee. The New Yorker just published a long profile of the Wisconsin wonk, and he scored a high-profile boost over the weekend when The Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Hayes and Bill Kristol wrote a plea for either Ryan or Marco Rubio to be the running mate:

The 2010 election was the best for Republicans in a long time. Ryan and Rubio embody the spirit of 2010. [Tim] Pawlenty and [Rob] Portman [[LINK HERE]] don’t. But beyond all of the calculations — beyond demography, geography, and the polls — is the most compelling reason for Romney to pick Ryan or Rubio: Doing so would signal that Romney understands the magnitude of the problems facing the country and would demonstrate that he has the will to solve them.

Still, Ryan seems like a pretty serious long-shot for the spot, and not just because Bill Kristol is almost always wrong about everything (I explained why Rubio, for his part, was an unlikely pick back in May).

With Ryan, the strengths and weaknesses come back to one thing: His sweeping vision of the federal budget. Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee, and he’s used that perch to push for serious changes to the government, especially transforming Medicaid into block grants to states and making deep cuts to the federal budget elsewhere. It’s that sort of aggressive talk that endears him to people like Kristol (and the conservative base); it also makes him an easy target for the other side, since voters tend to be horrified by deep cuts to entitlements and anything else that entails serious upwards redistribution of wealth.

No one disagrees about this — the question is how they conduct the cost-benefit analysis. Kristol and Hayes, for example, argue that Romney has already embraced Ryan’s budget to such a degree that he might as well go whole-hog, since Democrats will already lump them together. Fellow conservative Byron York, however, counters that while Ryan and Romney agree on many things, the presidential candidate has mostly shied away from the most politically toxic parts of the Ryan plan: “Yes, Romney talks about bringing federal spending under control. But Ryan-like plans to curb entitlement spending? That’s just not something Romney emphasizes.” Democrats fantasize over the idea of running against Ryan, so Republicans would face an onslaught, but a strong sell on an aggressive platform might be just what Romney needs to close the gap with Obama.

What else would Ryan bring to the table? He’s very young — just 42 years old. Wisconsin remains a likely Obama win, but Republicans have been eying the state since Gov. Scott Walker defeated his recall vote in June, and a Public Policy Polling survey in July found that adding Ryan to the ticket would essentially bring the race to a tie. Like Romney and the other names at the top of his shortlist — Pawlenty, Portman — Ryan is a sober, straightforward Midwestern-born white guy with a head for numbers and good hair. Like them, he wouldn’t add much in the foreign policy department. And he’s never run in any constituency larger his congressional district, which centers on a town where his family has been prominent for generations. While he might be a very effective nationwide campaigner, he’s simply not proven.

Perhaps a more important question than whether Romney would want Ryan is whether Ryan would have any interest in the job. Even though Dick Cheney and Joe Biden have both expanded the power of the vice presidency, it remains a somewhat impotent job. It’s also significant that Cheney and Biden have gained that power largely through their foreign-policy know-how; there’s not really any precedent for the vice president leading a major overhaul of the federal budget. Meanwhile, Ryan has managed to obtain a position of great power from his perch in the House; his seat is safe, and he is the undisputed GOP budget king. Why leave such a sinecure? He’s young enough that he’ll still have plenty of shots at the White House, cabinet, or Senate if he wants them, whereas it’s unclear where he’d go after four or eight years as VP.

There is one possible reason he might do it, if offered the chance. House Republicans installed term limits for chairs and ranking members of committees when they took over in 1994. Ryan, having served as ranking member since 2006, is term-limited after this year. He has said he hopes someday to leader the powerful Ways and Means Committee, but its current chair, Michigan’s Dave Camp, doesn’t reach his limit until 2014. GOP leaders could grant Ryan a waiver through 2014 to keep him in his current spot; that’s something they’ve been reluctant to do, but given Ryan’s status within the party, they might make an exception.

Romney and Ryan have spent some time stumping together and Romney’s willingness to praise the Ryan plan shows he’s not terrified about its political risks. But overall, the Ryan buzz — not unlike his budget — just doesn’t completely add up.

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/why-a-paul-ryan-vp-selection-wouldnt-add-up-for-mitt-romney/260757/

The states that have vowed to refuse federal money to cover the poor also have the highest rates of uninsured residents.

Here’s a hard truth about the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act: The people who are going to suffer most from it are the people who need the help most.

To see why, look at this map from our friends at the Advisory Board (larger version here). One key element of the ACA was to expand Medicaid to cover everyone who wasn’t covered by Medicare but made as much as 133 percent of the federal poverty level. That was meant to fill the gap for people who couldn’t afford insurance, but were deemed to be poor enough to exempt from the penalty for not holding insurance, even with a subsidy (that penalty is the one that the Court found was a tax). But the justices ruled that the expansion was unconstitutional because it rested upon coercion: The federal government can’t force the states to take money and spend it on the expansion.

That means that each state can decide whether it wants to opt into the expansion and receive billions of dollars to expand coverage, with the risk that federal support will fall below the threshold of 90 percent of cost after 2020 (you can find a little more technical detail, but not too much, on this Kaiser Family Foundation fact sheet).

Now, for reasons that range from cost concerns to partisan grandstanding, a variety of governors are rejecting the expansion or threatening to do so. Some say they’re concerned that their states will be left with an unmanageable bill in the future; others are rejecting it purely because they disapprove of expanded government involvement in health-care provision.

What this map makes clear is the rather strong correlation between high rates of uninsured residents and states that have rejected or seem likely to reject the Medicaid expansion. You can click on each state to find out where it stands on the law. The five states that have definitively ruled out the expansion — Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana — all have a population that’s 20 percent or higher uninsured. All five also joined the lawsuits against the ACA and have Republican governors and legislatures. Elsewhere, California, which also has a high rate of uninsured (and is run by Democrat Jerry Brown) has announced it will participate in the expansion; Arkansas is leaning toward it (believe it or not, the state has a Democratic governor and legislature). Meanwhile several of the states with the lowest rates of uninsured, such as Minnesota and Vermont, have committed to the expansion. So has Massachusetts, which has among the lowest rates of uninsured in the nation — thanks to a landmark health-care overhaul led by the state’s previous governor, a man named Mitt Romney.

If President Obama is reelected, or if the GOP fails to effectively repeal Obamacare, it will be interesting to see the longer-term results of these choices. Many analysts seem convinced that every state will eventually give in and accept the expansion, finding they can’t just leave all that money on the table. But what if they don’t? Will there be a gradual but inexorable migration of lower-income citizens to states that expand Medicaid? Will states that refuse the expansion develop a sort of permanent medical underclass? Or will those governments eventually devise some sort of alternative system?

As the old saying goes, only time will tell.

via Politics : The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-fraught-politics-of-the-medicaid-expansion-in-1-interactive-map/259892/