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Theres a new rule in American politics: Whichever party owns healthcare will come to regret it.

Seven years ago, Barack Obamas Democrats passed a health insurance law that promised to cover almost everyone and make medical care more affordable. Best of all, Obama said, the new plan wouldnt inconvenience anybody except the high-income folks who got hit with a tax increase.

If you like your healthcare, you can keep it, he pledged. Big mistake.

Obama succeeded in his basic aims, but he couldnt keep all his promises especially that one.

Ever since, whenever anythings gone wrong in the health sector whenever prices rose, or an insurance company dropped a line of business Republicans have had an easy target: Obamacare.

As we all know, the same Republicans who said Obamacare was fatally flawed swore they would replace it with a better, cheaper system just as soon as they regained power. Now they have, and just like Obama, theyve overpromised.

Were going to have insurance for everybody, President Trump said in January. People can expect to have great healthcare. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better, with much lower deductibles.

But the healthcare bill House Republicans unveiled on Monday cant keep all those promises. It doesnt even pretend to.

And in a telling mirror image, Democrats immediately dubbed the new plan Trumpcare.

From now on, you can depend on them to hang that label on any part of the American health system that isnt working, just as Republicans did with Obamacare.

The Republican bill would undo much of Obamas expansion of insurance coverage, especially for low-income people.

It provides much lower subsidies, on average, for people who buy health coverage on the individual market. The cuts are deep for people just above the poverty line, individuals earning between $15,000 and $30,000 a year.

The bill ends Obamas expansion of Medicaid, the insurance program for very low-income people, three years from now. At that point, the GOP bill would change the funding formula for Medicaid, making it easier to cut the programs expenditures in future years.

Not everyone will suffer: The GOP bill includes a nice tax cut for the wealthy, canceling the taxes they paid to support Obamacare.

And it preserves the most broadly popular parts in the Obamacare law: the ban on insurance companies refusing coverage to anyone with a preexisting condition, the ban on lifetime benefit limits and the rule allowing parents to keep children on their plans up to age 26.

Bottom lines:

The bill does not seek universal coverage. Republicans say their goal is universal access, but this bill doesnt provide subsidies big enough to make that practical.

The bill rewards some Republican constituencies: High-income taxpayers get a tax cut, businesses are freed from coverage requirements, middle-income older voters get bigger subsidies.

But it does that by reducing subsidies for low-income people, including low-income workers.

The inevitable result is that fewer people will buy health insurance and many of those will opt for cheaper, bare-bones insurance policies with high deductibles (not the lower deductibles Trump promised).

Dont take me at my word. Heres what Robert Laszewski, a nonpartisan insurance expert (and flinty critic of Obamacare) wrote on Tuesday: It wont work.

Obamacares flaw, he wrote, was that it took care of the poorest people but gave a raw deal to middle-income workers who couldnt afford its premiums. That was because the Democrats who passed it took care of their political base first and didnt have enough money left to subsidize everyone.

Now the Republicans are making the same mistake: taking care of their base and giving the Democratic base a lousy deal, Laszewski wrote.

What good will it do a person making $15,000 a year to get a credit only large enough to buy a plan with a $3,000 or $5,000 deductible? he asked.

Half the country will hate it just a different half.

Or listen to Avik Roy, a Republican healthcare scholar, who has argued that his party should be more generous to the poor. The House bill suggests that the GOP has a stubborn desire to make health insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans, and trap millions more in poverty, he wrote.

In short, the GOP would replace one flawed plan with another and transfer most of the pain from high-income taxpayers and middle-income insurance-buyers to low-income families. Democrats wont let voters forget that.

If the bill passes, millions of people will discover that their Obamacare subsidies have been reduced and their health insurance is less affordable and Democrats will blame Trumpcare.

Millions who have coverage now will lose it. There will be heart-rending stories about people who had insurance but couldnt afford to keep it only to contract a life-threatening illness. Democrats will blame Trumpcare.

Health costs will go up; they always do. Democrats will blame Trumpcare.

Insurance forms will still be infuriating, and insurance companies will still hassle their customers. Democrats will blame Trumpcare.

And Trumps fatal promise Were going to have insurance for everybody will be repeated by his opponents as often as Obamas.

They broke it. Theyll own it.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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Obamacare overhaul faces resistance in Congress from right and left

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If you thought the Obamacare backlash was bad, Trumpcare will give Democrats a whipping boy for the ages - Los Angeles Times

One of the most bizarre aspects of the all-consuming Russia frenzy is the Democrats fixation on changes to the RNC platform concerning U.S. arming of Ukraine. The controversy began in July when the Washington Post reported that the Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform wont call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.

Ever since then, Democrats have used this language change as evidence that Trump and his key advisers have sinister connections to Russians and corruptly do their bidding at the expense of American interests. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke for many in his party when he lambasted the RNC change in a July letter to the New York Times, castigating it as dangerous thinking that shows Trump is controlled, or at least manipulated, by the Kremlin. Democrats resurrected this line of attack this weekend when Trump advisers acknowledged that campaign officials were behind the platform change.

This attempt to equate Trumpsopposition toarming Ukraine with some sort of treasonous allegiance to Putin masks a rather critical fact: namely, that the refusal to arm Ukraine with lethal weapons was one of Barack Obamas most steadfastly held policies. The original Post article that reported the RNC platform change noted this explicitly:

Of course, Trump is not the only politician to oppose sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. President Obama decided not to authorize it, despite recommendations to do so from his top Europe officials in the State Department and the military.

Early media reports about this controversy from outlets such as NPR also noted the irony at the heart of this debate: namely,that arming Ukraine was the long-time desireof hawks in the GOP such as John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio, but the Obama White House categorically resisted those pressures:

Republicans in Congress have approved providing arms to the Ukrainian government but the White House has resisted, saying that it would only encourage more bloodshed.

Its a rare Obama administration policy that the Trump campaign seems to agree with.

Indeed, the GOP ultimately joined with the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party to demand that Obama provide Ukraine with lethal weapons to fight Russia, but Obama steadfastly refused. As the New York Times reported in March, 2015, President Obama is coming under increasing pressure from both parties and more officials inside his own government to send arms to the country. But he remains unconvinced that they would help. When Obama kept refusing, leaders of the two partiesthreatened to enact legislation forcing Obama to arm Ukraine.

The general Russia approachthat Democrats now routinely depict as treasonous avoiding confrontation with and even accommodating Russian interests, not just in Ukraine but also in Syria was one of the defining traits of Obamas foreign policy. This fact shouldnt be overstated: Obama engaged in provocative acts such asmoves to further expand NATO, non-lethal aid to Ukraine, and deployingmissile defense weaponry in Romania. But he rejected most calls to confront Russia. Thatis one of the primary reasons the foreign policy elite which, recall, Obama came into office denouncing and vowing to repudiate was so dissatisfied with his presidency.

A new, long article by Politico foreign affairs correspondent Susan Glasser on the war being waged against Trump by Washingtons foreign policy elite makes this point very potently.Say what you will about Politico, but one thing they are very adept at doing is giving voice to cowardly Washington insidersby accommodating their cowardice and thusroutinely granting them anonymity toexpress themselves. As journalistically dubious as it is to shield the worlds most powerful people with anonymity, this practice sometimes ends up revealing what careerist denizens of Washington power really think but are too scared to say. Glassers article, which largely consists of conveying the views ofanonymous high-level Obama officials, contains this remarkable passage:

In other words, Democrats are now waging war on, and are depicting as treasonous, one of Barack Obamas central and most steadfastly held foreign policy positions, one that he clung to despite attacks from leading members of both parties as well as the DCNational Security Community.Thats not Noam Chomskydrawing that comparison; its an Obama appointee.

The destructive bipartisan Foreign Policy Community was furious with Obama for not confronting Russia more, and is now furious with Trump for the same reason (though they certainly loath and fear Trump for other reasons, including the threat they believe he poses to U.S. imperial management through a combination of ineptitude, instability, toxic PR, naked rather than prettified savagery, and ideology; Glasser writes: Everything Ive worked for for two decades is being destroyed, a senior Republican told me).

All of thisdemonstrates how fundamental a shift has taken place as a result of the Democrats election-related fixation on The Grave Russian Threat. To see how severe the shift is, just look at this new polling data from CNN this morning that shows Republicans and Democrats doing a complete reversal on Russia in the span of eight months:

The Democrats obsession with Russia has not just led them to want investigations into allegations of hacking and (thus far evidence-free) suspicionsof Trump campaign collusion investigations which everyone should want. Its done far more than that: its turned them into increasingly maniacal and militaristic hawks dangerous ones when it comes to confronting the only nation witha larger nuclear stockpile than the U.S., an arsenal accompanied by a sense of fear, if not outright encirclement, from NATO expansion.

Put another way, establishment Democrats with a largely political impetus but now as a matter of conviction have completely abandoned Obamas accommodationist approach to Russia and have fully embracedthe belligerent, hawkish mentality of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, the CIA and Evan McMullin. It should thus come as nosurprise that a bill proposed by supreme warmonger Lindsey Graham to bar Trump from removing sanctions against Russia has more Democratic co-sponsors than Republican ones.

This iswhy its so notable that Democrats, in the name of resistance, have aligned with neocons, CIA operatives and former Bush officials: not because coalitions should be avoided with the ideologically impure, but because it reveals much about the political and policy mindset theyve adopted in the name of stopping Trump. Theyre not resisting Trump from the left or with populist appeals by, for instance, devoting themselves toprotection ofWall Street and environmental regulations under attack, or supporting the revocation of jobs-killing free trade agreements,ordemandingthat Yemini civilians not be massacred.

Instead, theyre attacking him on the grounds of insufficient nationalism, militarism, and aggression: equating a desire to avoid confrontation with Moscow as a form of treason (just like they did when they were the leading Cold Warriors). This iswhy theyre finding such common cause with the nations most bloodthirsty militarists not becauseits an alliance of convenience but rather one of shared convictions (indeed, long before Trump, neocons were planning a re-alignment with Democrats under a Clinton presidency). And the most ironic and over-looked aspect of this whole volatile spectacle is how much Democratshave to repudiate and demonize one of Obamas core foreign policy legacies while pretending that theyre not doing that.

Read more from the original source:
Democrats Now Demonize the Same Russia Policies that Obama Long Championed - The Intercept

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton delivers a videotaped address at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting last month in Atlanta. Erik S. Lesser / EPA

Obama and both Hillary and Bill Clinton were closely watching the DNC's recent elections. Former Vice President Joe Biden and top Obama aides like Valerie Jarrett worked the phones for Perez, whom the former president personally lobbied to enter the race. And other DNC candidates sought the blessing of the Clintons for their bids.

Obama has thrown his weight behind a major campaign on congressional redistricting, run by his former attorney general Eric Holder. And he can ultimately decide the fate of Organizing for Action, the group that grew out of his presidential campaigns. OFA recently relaunched to criticism from many Democrats, who say it undercut the official party.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, has been an active campaigner for down-ballot Democrats, and he is known to wield his celebrity and fundraising prowess to snub Democrats who have crossed him or his wife.

"Keep fighting," Hillary Clinton said in a recent video message to Democrats. "I'll be right there with you every step of the way."

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Five New Power Centers: A Guide to the Fractured Democrats - NBCNews.com

By Brett Guthrie By Brett Guthrie March 6 at 1:57 PM

Brett Guthrie, a Republican, represents Kentuckys 2nd District and serves as vice chairman of the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

With Congress moving forward to repeal and replace Obamacare, it is no surprise that the laws advocates are worried about their Washington-centered approach to health care being scrapped. It was surprising, however, to see former congressman Henry Waxman take up his pen to decry potential reforms to the Medicaid program especially since the policies he criticized were ones he once supported.

In a recent opinion piece for The Post, Waxman lambasted the idea of curbing federal spending on Medicaid by adopting a per-capita allotment reform. Waxman said it would be an unprecedented abandonment of federal responsibility that would pass the buck to the states and deny care to the most vulnerable among us. He claimed that imposing a per-capita cap or block grant would rip health-care coverage from the most vulnerable and dramatically shift the burden of costs to the states.

The policy idea behind a Medicaid per-capita cap is that the federal government would continue to provide matching funds for each individual enrolled in a states Medicaid program, but unlike in the current arrangement, the federal government would set a limit on the maximum allowable amount per enrollee. There would be spending limits per state in each of the main Medicaid eligibility groups: the elderly, people with disabilities, children, and nondisabled, nonelderly adults. These caps would be based on each states historical average cost for an enrollee in each eligibility group.

It is true that this change would significantly change Medicaids financing, but Waxmans critique of adopting a per-capita cap rings hollow. Although congressional Republicans support this idea, it also gained traction two decades ago with a Democratic president. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton proposed putting federal Medicaid spending on a more sustainable path by adopting a per-capita cap reform. And when a Democratic president proposed them, Waxman applauded per-capita reforms.

At a 1996 congressional hearing, Waxman noted that under a per-capita cap reform, the federal government would maintain its commitment to sharing in the costs of providing basic health and long-term care coverage to vulnerable Americans. He correctly pointed out that states would have both the incentives and the tools to manage Medicaid more efficiently, and the continued federal commitment would help when states face cost increases for reasons beyond their control, including recessions, regional economic downturns, natural disasters, and outbreaks of contagious disease.

We know how the Clinton-era effort ended: The president and Congress failed to pass reforms that would restrain Medicaids growth. As a result, todays Medicaid program is about three times larger than it was when Clinton proposed his reforms. The program consumes about 1 in every 6 state dollars. Next year, overall Medicaid spending is projected to be larger than the entire defense budget, and by the end of a decade, federal and state spending on Medicaid will total roughly $1 trillion each year. The program is projected to continue to grow at a rate faster than the economy or incoming revenue, an objectively unsustainable path.

Modernizing Medicaids financing by putting the program on a budget isnt draconian, its common sense. The fever-pitched fear-mongering against any effort to constrain Medicaid spending shows just how far to the political left Waxman, and the Democratic Party, have drifted. If more spending and more government were the answer, Medicaid patients would have access to world-class health care. Yet, research from an array of scholars has shown that too few providers accept Medicaid patients to meet existing needs and that Medicaid coverage often fails to improve health outcomes for many patients. We must focus on modernizing this Great Society program so it can offer real access to providers and improved health outcomes for decades to come.

No single bill will fix all the challenges Medicaid faces, but Congress and the president have a historic opportunity to adopt permanent reforms. Working together with governors and state Medicaid reformers, we can empower states with new statutory flexibilities. We can modernize the waiver process so states can focus on managing their programs based on the needs of their patients, not managing paperwork for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. We can create better tools and incentives for states to reduce costs, boost quality and improve health outcomes.

The basic architecture of Medicaid has remained largely unchanged over the past 50 years. We now have an opportunity to improve and modernize the program so it remains strong for the next 50 years. In the meantime, Democratic attempts to score political points by manufacturing fear of per-capita cap reforms not only are misguided, they are hypocritical.

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Democrats' hypocrisy on Medicaid reform - Washington Post

State Senate Democratic leader Jay Costa said Monday that while his caucus has been frozen out of its computer network, "Our phones are operating, our offices are open, our members are conducting business as usual."

A Friday-morning "ransomware" cyberattack from an unknown source has left state Senate Democrats unable to access emails, internal working documents and other files.

Ransomware attacks frequently encrypt the contents of a server, making it inaccessible to its owner absent some form of payment, often in online currency.

Mr. Costa, who said he was following the guidance of investigators, would not disclose the terms being set for return of the material. But he added that "Right now we have no intention of dealing with the demand."

Mr. Costa said Democrats are continuing to work with Microsoft and law-enforcement on a forensic audit of the system, which he hoped would be available later Monday. That, he said, should give Democrats a sense of how broad the attack is, and how the Senate Democrats' servers were infiltrated.

This is different than a hack," Mr. Costa said. "As we know right now, theres been no compromise of the data. ... Theyre simply blocking access to us to be able to access our own data."

Mr. Costa said the FBI and the state Attorney General's office were involved in assessing the source and extent of the attack.

At a minimum, the material at issue includes Senator's emails, and working documents like analyses of the state budget currently under discussion in Harrisburg. Also frozen are information in the Democrats' constituent tracking service, which handles feedback from their districts.

Most of that material is backed up nightly, Mr. Costa said, meaning that even if the entire computer network has to be wiped clean, Democrats should eventually have access to material from as recently as Thursday evening. But he noted that would depend on whether the backed-up files had themselves been affected by the attack.

"I believe that wed be able to draw everything back down, provided that it wasnt compromised," Mr. Costa said. "We dont know that yet.

Asked why Democrats had been subject to attack, Mr. Costa said he had reached no conclusions, though he did refer to recent reports "that progressive agencies have been subject to attacks like this." Bloomberg News has reported that hackers, apparently from Russia, have been threatening to divulge information obtained from the networks of left-of-center groups like the Center for American Progress.

Although none of the other caucuses have been affected by a ransomware attack, Mr. Costa said that Senate Democrats "have everything that we should have, based on what Microsoft has told us .. in terms of defensive mechanisms.

He said the inaccessibility of fiscal documents would not affect the course of budget negotiations, but he added, At this point, were trying to ascertain the scope of what we dont have access to."

He said he hoped Microsoft could provide a "side-by-side" email system by Wednesday or Thursday to allow emails to come through. In the meantime, though, "Each of our members are communicating with folks in our district to let the know that a phone call will be preferable."

Chris Potter: cpotter@post-gazette.com

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Cyberattack still affecting computer network of Pa. Senate Democrats - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette