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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DanDerr who wrote (57035)	10/13/2012 11:20:49 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

To: DanDerr who wrote (57035)	10/14/2012 10:28:27 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

The bad news for small business in D.C.’s Obamacare plan By Dennis Bass Published: October 12 By January 2014, the states and the District must either establish their own health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), combine with other states to form a regional exchange or have the federal government set up an exchange for them. The District has opted for the first option, and this month it moved ahead with a model unlike anything pursued by any state in the nation, with the exception of Vermont: On Oct. 3, the D.C. Health Exchange Authority’s executive board unanimously approved a plan that would abolish the marketplace as we know it for firms with 50 employees or fewer and force them to obtain health insurance for their workers from the government-run exchange. Companies and associations with 100 employees or fewer would have to do so by 2016. If virtually everyone else is choosing a more cautious approach, I am compelled to ask: Is the District so much smarter than everyone else? The board’s decision was made despite clear opposition from the small employers who would have to live with it, and a broad coalition of 150 D.C. businesses and organizations has written to the board, the mayor and the D.C. Council to oppose the idea. Even the District’s own consultants have cautioned officials about this untested model. Yet the only option the board publicly considered has been this unpopular and unnecessary plan to close the private marketplace to many businesses. What will this mean for small and medium-size D.C. employers? While it’s too soon to know all the impacts, it’s certain to curtail choice. If you manage a small organization, as I did for 31 years at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and you’re happy with your current insurer and insurance — too bad. You must switch to an untested, government-run system. The damage caused by this highly disruptive proposition could be enormous, and the demand that small and medium-size employers accept that risk, sight unseen, is an overreach. Such an approach runs counter to the ACA’s essential promise of more — not less — choice. We can make some educated guesses about other likely effects of this decision, based on developments beginning to occur. First, our choices will be further curtailed as carriers move to standardized, cookie-cutter coverage in the government-run exchange. Health insurers are already moving to conform plan offerings to meet ACA requirements — a process that will eliminate many desirable consumer options. We can also anticipate higher costs. The ACA contains many new cost drivers, aside from two new administrative costs associated with the D.C. plan: the annual operating cost of the exchange, plus carrier administrative costs for the new systems that insurers will have to build to participate. And don’t forget that these costs are separate from the ongoing expense of care itself, which continues to rise as well. Small businesses simply cannot afford anything that adds to our financial burden in such challenging economic times. For some D.C. businesses, increased health insurance costs will mean the difference between staying in business and closing. I know our group struggles each year to provide quality benefits. The Affordable Care Act is the law, but the District can move much more carefully to limit the costs associated with the exchange. Other states are moving incrementally to structure their government-run programs in tandem with the existing private market, ensuring that the result is more choice and more competition — which are fundamental goals of health reform, after all. The District should carefully assess the full financial impact of eliminating the private marketplace before continuing down the path it is on. The changes being proposed for the District are far more than some esoteric public-policy debate. The decisions that the exchange board makes will affect small employers directly and personally. Implementing the core provisions of federal health care reform are daunting enough; there is no need to add to those uncertainties by instituting drastic and unnecessary changes to the marketplace. The writer is deputy executive director emeritus for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. washingtonpost.com

To: DanDerr who wrote (57035)	4/15/2013 12:32:23 AM
From: greatplains_guy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The Decline of Obama How to lose friends and influence. Apr 22, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 30 By FRED BARNES With President Obama, there’s always a catch. In the 2014 budget he announced last week, Obama proposed a more accurate way of calculating the inflation rate for annual cost-of-living increases in Social Security. It’s a technical change in pursuit of honesty and good government. And if adopted, it would cause benefits to grow more slowly, though almost imperceptibly so. Republican leaders in Congress ought to be delighted since they had “championed”—Obama’s word—the idea in the first place. Then came the catch. The president’s price for adopting this gentle reform was hundreds of billions in new tax increases. It was a price Republicans were certain to reject, as Obama surely knew. Rather than grounds for a bipartisan bargain, his “compromise” was a political contrivance to put Republicans at a disadvantage. It may work. Now Obama will accuse Republicans of not being serious about deficit reduction. Now he will blame them for obstructing a deal on spending and taxes. Now he will claim their motive was solely to shield the wealthy. We’ve heard all this before—and it’s worked before. But there’s something else involved as well. Under Obama, the presidency has been in decline. His use of the budget as a ploy against Republicans is an example of this. The biggest domestic issue is the looming fiscal crisis, but Obama has addressed it only rhetorically. Instead he’s used the budget largely as a political tool that cheapened the presidency. Other presidents have done this, but far less crassly or brazenly. At least they presented their budgets on time, as required by law. Obama was two months late. He erased one of Washington’s oldest adages: The president proposes, Congress disposes. By last week, both the Senate and House had already passed budget resolutions. Obama’s tardiness touches on another aspect of presidential decline: the loss of influence. By long tradition, any release of the budget produced by the White House was a major event. True, the impact of the president’s budget has waned in recent years. Obama has made it an afterthought. On Capitol Hill today, Obama has scarcely any clout at all. One reason: He acts as if spending time with members of Congress, even Democrats, is an unpleasant chore. Another reason: Having deferred to Democrats in his first term, he finds it difficult to pull rank on them in his second. And having ignored or alienated Republicans, he isn’t likely to achieve much by courting them over dinner in recent weeks. Immigration and gun control are the dominant issues in Congress at the moment, and Obama is a major player on neither of them. The “gang of eight”—four Democrats, four Republicans—is the driving force on immigration in the Senate. Obama is no force at all. Their bill, which was being finalized last week, would require near-total border security to be certified before immigrants here illegally are granted legal status and the right to seek citizenship. Obama’s version has never been released publicly, but was leaked in mid-February. It would give illegals an immediate path to citizenship. The gang of eight rejected that idea. After the Newtown massacre in December, Obama proposed a ban on many “assault” weapons and other restrictions. That got no traction in Congress. Now the expansion of background checks on gun purchasers is the last hope of gun control advocates. Obama promised to play a huge role in the gun control debate, but the issue has left him behind. He gave speeches in Denver and Hartford, Connecticut, to stir support. He flew parents of Newtown victims to Washington last week to lobby for gun control legislation. The result: no discernible impact. The bully pulpit has served Obama poorly, as it has every president since Reagan. Obama, however, was expected to be more eloquent than his predecessors, thus able to generate enthusiasm for his initiatives. If anything, he’s generating indifference. His speeches on health care failed to stop Obamacare from losing popularity. His speeches on gun control failed similarly. It drew minimal attention in March when Senate majority whip Dick Durbin of Illinois characterized the gang of eight as a model for progress on issues besides immigration. “We’re trying to establish a new standard in the Senate, a bipartisan dialogue that may result in a solution,” he said. “I think that people who have given up on Congress would be encouraged to know that there’s a real positive dialogue—a bipartisan dialogue—and perhaps—just perhaps—we can set the stage for a more positive dialogue when it comes to the budget,” Durbin told Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation. This doesn’t leave much room for Obama’s involvement, at least in the Senate. On gun control, a gang of two senators—Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania—has put together the measure to expand background checks. The decline of the presidency isn’t Obama’s fault alone. The media once treated Washington as a White House-centric town. They did so during the entirety of Obama’s first term. Obama was an obsession. Congress was unexciting and got far less coverage. But the press can be fickle, and its interest in Obama has dwindled. Now the media buzz in Washington is about who’s going to run for president in 2016 and who’s going to win. After Republicans captured Congress in 1994, President Clinton was asked if he was still relevant. He was. Presidents can always play defense, thanks to the veto, and focus on foreign policy, where they have considerable discretion. Obama is relevant. He’s just not the president he once was. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard. weeklystandard.com