Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 30, 2017

Boy Scouts, Priebus out, Mooch in power, Sessions on the ropes, GOP fumbles Repeal and Replace. Hard for the White House to have had a worse week than we just saw. Let’s hope it gets better. The worst thing this week was how the supposedly non-political boy scouts cheered or booed just when Trump wanted.

Whatever did the Donald say to the Boy Scouts?

Spicer and Priebus are out. Who’s next through the revolving door?

The foul-mouthed Scaramucci is the new Trump front man:

GOP is on to their next idea:

Expect the GOP and McConnell to be back at what they do best very soon:

Trump decides to ban Trans GIs:

 

Trump’s best deal:

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Buffett: Focus on Lower Health Care Costs, Not Corporate Taxes

The Daily Escape:

Ribbon Chapel, Onomichi Japan – photo by Koji Fujii

Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote about Warren Buffet and the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha. Thousands of people attend these meetings, which are known as “Woodstock for capitalists.” Sorkin reports that Buffet made this comment:

The tax system is not crippling our business around the world.

Sorkin said that Mr. Buffett, was blunt and pointed, implicitly rebuking his fellow chief executives, who have been lobbying the Trump administration and Washington lawmakers to lower corporate taxes. Buffett said that those who have been single-focused on seeking relief from their tax bills would be smart to shift their attention to health care costs, which are growing and swallowing evermore corporate profits. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 49% of Americans, about 156 million, are insured by their employer. More from Sorkin:

The need for corporate tax relief has become the lodestar of the corner office, with CEOs rhapsodizing  over President Trump’s plan to try to stimulate growth by cutting tax rates for businesses.

But as Mr. Buffett pointed out, these chief executives are missing the bigger issue: As a percentage of our GDP, the cost of maintaining our American health care system is rising at an alarming rate. And Corporate America pays a big (and growing) chunk of that bill.

Buffett wasn’t talking about the cost of health insurance, which is a fraction of the total cost of health care. He suggests that today’s corporate tax rates are a distraction, not a true impediment to growth:

If you go back to 1960 or thereabouts, corporate taxes were about 4% of GDP…And now, they’re about 2 % of GDP.

While tax rates have fallen as a share of gross domestic product, health care costs ballooned:

About 50 years ago, health care was 5% of GDP, and now it’s about 17%.

Buffett is a smart guy. He raises an argument for focusing on the underlying costs of our health care system, something that goes far beyond the debate around the Affordable Care Act, or what will replace it. Buffett says that our global competitiveness has fallen largely because our businesses were paying far more for health care — a tax by another name — than those in other countries.

As Buffett said: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

When American business talks about [corporate taxes] strangling our competitiveness, or that sort of thing, they’re talking about something that as a percentage of GDP has gone down…While medical costs, which are borne to a great extent by business, have swelled.

Here are the facts:

  • In 1960, corporate taxes in the US were about 4% of GDP. The percentage fell steadily, reaching a bottom in 1983 before rising slightly over the last few decades. Today, it is 1.9%.
  • In the meantime, health care costs as a percent of GDP have skyrocketed. Today our health care costs are 17.1% of GDP, up from 13.1% in 1995.
  • Germany’s cost is 11.3%, up from 9.4% during the same period. Japan’s is 10.2%, up from 6.6%. Britain’s health care costs are 9.1% of GDP, up from 6.7% percent in 1995.

That makes our health care cost disadvantage far greater than our tax differential. It harms American companies in particular, since they bear such a large share of those costs, which firms in our competitor countries do not. US Corporations spend $12,591 on average for coverage of a family of four, up 54% since 2005, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But Congress avoids the issue, and CEOs don’t talk about it. A final quote from Warren:

It’s very tough for political parties to attack it…it’s basically a political subject…

In fact, Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, is the rare Republican (Buffett is a Democrat) who has advocated for a single-payer health care system. Under his plan, the US would enact a sort of universal type of coverage for all citizens — perhaps along the lines of the Medicaid system.

Which brings Wrongo to his final point: Medicaid expansion is the one part of Obamacare that can be said unequivocally to work. It’s a single payer program funded by the Federal government. So it’s bitterly ironic that the Republican’s reaction to Obamacare is to assault and roll back an existing Federal program, from LBJ days.

Of course, kicking poor people who benefit from Medicaid will always be popular with Republicans. So, Republicans, by making Medicaid worse, will try to restore their natural order of things.

Lazy, uninformed voters = Lazy, uninformed legislators = Lazy, uninformed policy.

It’s that simple.

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The CBO and the Ides of March

The Daily Escape:

(Provence – Photo by Veronika K. Ko.)

The Ides of March are today. The Netherlands holds its parliamentary election, the US debt ceiling agreement expires, and Trump is gonna get a ton of postcards.

Congressional Budget Office estimates for Trumpcare (AHCA) came out on Monday, and they’re worse than expected.  Sarah Kliff, Vox’s healthcare reporter, has this:

  • CBO estimates 14 million would lose coverage in 2018. The report projects that much of the early coverage loss would stem from repealing Obamacare’s mandate that all Americans purchase coverage or pay a fine.
  • After that, increases in the uninsured would be from Medicaid cuts. After 2018, CBO thinks that most of the increase in the number of uninsured would stem from changes the AHCA would make to Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, an expansion that allowed many more low-income adults to enroll in the program.
  • The bill would “freeze” enrollment in that program on January 1, 2020. Medicaid enrollees would trickle off the rolls as their incomes changed. And this would lead to another big decline in coverage.
  • The number of uninsured, CBO projects, would rise by 21 million in 2020 and hit 24 million in 2026.
  • The CBO projects that as the individual market shrinks, premiums would rise between 10% and 15% as some healthy people flee in 2018. But over the next few years, the agency expects premiums to go down to 10% lower than under Obamacare.
  • CBO thinks more young people will come into the market, as the GOP plan offers incentives to make the market more appealing to younger, (healthier) enrollees.
  • AHCA would be a huge cut to Medicaid. CBO estimates it would reduce spending on the health program for low-income Americans by $880 billion over the next decade. This helps explain why AHCA would reduce the deficit: The bill spends a lot less money on entitlement programs.

When Paul Ryan’s talking points are that their plan will reduce the deficit, and that premiums will go down by 10% OVER THE LONG TERM, you know that he doesn’t care that 24 million people will lose healthcare insurance.

That the GOP is choosing deficit reduction over covering American citizens is what the public will remember. When you kick out the poor and older folks, of course premiums will go down. But premiums will remain high for those in the 50-64 age bracket, and their premiums will be higher than currently.

The CBO report also finds that this legislation will provide massive tax relief, and make the most fundamental entitlement reform in more than a generation, if throwing people off Medicaid truly is “reform”.

Even before the CBO report was released, the Trump administration began laying the groundwork to discredit the agency and their report. White House press secretary Sean Spicer:

If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place…they were way, way off last time in terms of how they scored and projected Obamacare.

Since this is the Ides of March, you should have expected some stabbing.

Their criticism is centered on the fact that CBO previously overestimated the number of people who would enroll in the marketplaces. That’s true: Earlier CBO reports estimated that the Obamacare marketplaces would have 26 million enrollees this year. Last year, CBO revised that estimate to 15 million.

Critics don’t mention that the CBO also underestimated how many people Medicaid expansion would cover. The overestimate and the underestimate essentially cancel each other out: Obamacare is covering just about as many people as CBO expected back in 2013.

Curiously, Trump said his health care plan would cover EVERYONE, and it would be much cheaper and much better. Except it won’t.

When you think about bad data, remember that Trump said we shouldn’t trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers on monthly employment last year, he said they were fake. Now, Trump says the numbers in this month’s data release are real. You be the judge:

Obama in February 2016 — 237,000 new jobs
Trump in February 2017 — 235,000 new jobs

Trump: Making America a Slightly Less Great Again.

Your daily musical interlude appropriately is from the group the Ides of March. Here is “Vehicle”, their only hit, originally published in 1970, and performed live at the Chicago House of Blues in 2014:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aHe5-2SsJY

That 70 year-old guy can still sing.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Sample Lyrics:

Well, I’m the friendly stranger in the black sedan

Won’t you hop inside my car?

I got pictures, candy, I’m a lovable man

And I can take you to the nearest star

 

Kinda like the GOP promises on healthcare.

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Monday Wake Up Call – Repair and Replace Edition

Where is the GOP plan for repealing and “replacing” Obamacare? It has been moved to an off-ramp on the Trump highway. Why? WaPo’s Greg Sargent explains: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

For weeks now, Republicans have employed a range of tortured talking points designed to push one idea: The GOP repeal-and-delay plan will not leave anyone without health coverage, and is merely designed as a transition that will ultimately move us seamlessly to the new, improved health care system Republicans envision, with the details to be worked out later.

The GOP’s problem is that several red states could be taken out of the individual insurance market completely. The Congressional Budget Office recently examined a version of the GOP repeal-and-delay bill (one passed by Republicans in 2015 and vetoed by Obama), and concluded that insurers would exit the market, and 10% of Americans could be living in an area that had no participating insurers at all.

And that 10% of the population is concentrated in Republican areas.

Jeanne Lambrew, a former Obama administration official involved in implementing the ACA, conducted an analysis to determine where that 10% percent resides. Using data furnished by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Lambrew singled out counties that met two criteria:

  • They have low populations
  • They currently only have one insurer serving individual market customers

It’s a big list. The states include: Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and West Virginia. In addition some at risk counties are in swing or blue states like North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois. And in a few cases, entire states would lose coverage. In Oklahoma, Wyoming, Arizona, South Carolina and Alabama, individual markets would be completely eliminated.

In other words, Repealing and delaying Replacement could be a political bloodbath for Republicans, at least in the House in 2018. And the GOP knows it. At the GOP Strategy Meeting in Philadelphia, Tom McClintock (R-CA) said: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created with repeal. That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.

The judgement has already started. The LA Times reports that the execrable Rep. McClintock ran into a buzz saw at his raucous town hall meeting in Roseville CA:

The California congressman ultimately was escorted out by police.

KQED’s Katie Orr reported that the 200 seats for the town hall set up by the Republican in Roseville, CA were filled, and hundreds more people remained outside. More from the LA Times:

McClintock is one of many members of Congress who have been encountering protests at their district offices or town hall meetings since President Trump took office just over two weeks ago. Most protesters have been asking members to fight the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act…

Some Republicans seem to be open to “repair” instead of replacing Obamacare. The term “Repair” was suggested by Republican wordmeister Frank Luntz. Luntz, according to Bloomberg, recommended the term because it:

Captures exactly what the large majority of the American people want…the public is particularly hostile about skyrocketing costs, and they demand immediate change.

Luntz understands that Americans want their health insurance to be both generous in terms of coverage, and affordable in terms of premiums. The ACA tries to deliver that by subsidizing poorer people’s premiums. Those subsidies cost money, and that money is partly funded by taxes on the rich.

But Republicans got elected by promising to reduce rich people’s taxes. This means whether they replace or repair, their plans involve rolling back the taxes paid by the rich. That leaves less money to subsidize insurance for the non-rich, and that means the non-rich will either pay higher premiums, or accept worse coverage.

Keeping voters in Red States on board with the GOP requires that they abandon repeal, or pass a repeal/replace bill that essentially leaves the law intact.

If they repeal the tax increases and use deficit financing, they could accomplish 90% of what their main constituents, plutocrats and the white working class, care about. Whether they are smart enough to go this route is questionable.

Time for Congress to wake up! Time is against them since they voted to repeal the ACA 50+ times, but STILL have no plan for replacing it. To help them wake up, here are Jeff Beck, Lizzie Ball (violin), Tal Wilkenfeld (bass) & Jonathan Joseph (drums), playing the Irish instrumental “Women of Ireland” live at the “Crossroads Guitar Festival” in Madison Square Garden NYC, on April 13th 2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ej_X2_SggQ

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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