A few days ago I got into a fairly wide ranging debate on facebook with a friend and as usual these things tend to spiral into several topics. Instead of hashing out on facebook I thought it might be more appropriate for our blog. The conversation started off of a post of kind of a snark comment that I made about Michelle Bachmann not seeking re-election after this term. That didnt seem to be the issue for my friend though as he asked me what my thoughts were on "the recent scandals rocking the Obama administration these days". The issues he chose bring up were "the IRS targeting political opponents of the president, The Justice Department subpoenaing phone records of the media without notifying them to defend themselves, HHS pressuring businesses to donate money to Obama care because it is vastly underfunded and going to jack the price of medical care through the roof, along with no one in the administration ever knowing anything about anything until they hear about it through news reports." I will try to address them individually to make sure I cover everything in our conversation.
The one I wanted to start with was the justice department scandal with the Associated Press. There wont be any argument from me on this one nor was there an argument on the facebook post. I stated that I despise the idea of government doing any kind of spying on anyone without a warrant and any kind of Patriot Act nonsense that goes on with the government. That was the easy one for me. However, I havent seen anything to this point linking this to the President and unfortunately because of horrible laws like the Patriot Act what went on with this story although immoral, was technically not illegal.
As far as the IRS targeting political opponents of the President for auditing their tax exempt status, on its face it seems dispicable. The IRS is supposed to be non partisan and if this is actually what happened there is no excuse for it and heads need to roll. Its my understanding though that there is a little more to the story here. Section 501c of the tax code says that all tax exempt organizations are to be used for social welfare and forbids the use of tax exemption for political purposes. After the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case in 2010 there was a massive influx of organizations applying for tax exempt status who's names included words like "Tea Party" and other political labels. I dont see how this doesnt raise red flags when your job in the IRS is to make sure that these organizations arent exploiting the tax code for political purposes. Again, there really hasnt been anything to this point that says that Obama has anything to do with what went on here. If more information comes out linking him to this I reserve the right to criticize the President but right now there just is nothing there. I also made the point that it was a little hard for me to take some critics serious because when this type of thing was going on with the NAACP during the last administration no one seemed to be raising a stink about it. My friend then went on to accuse me of trying to use the "two wrongs make a right" argument because I raised this point. This is rediculous. My point actually was that because no one talked about it in the prior administration that there motivation for turning this into a scandal seems to be politcally motivated because of thier distaste for the president and not that they are actually concerned about what the IRS was doing here. That doesnt mean more information wont come out and who knows, maybe it will turn out to be more serious but all I was saying is that its tough to take some critics serious for this reason.
The next issue I want to talk about was the argument that my friend made that "HHS pressuring businesses to donate money to Obama care because it is vastly underfunded and going to jack the price of medical care through the roof". The point that I made was that ever since the Republican Party took majority of the House of Representatives in 2010 they have been talking about de-funding the bill as a means to dismantle the new law. To address this HHS issue specifically, this is exactly what happened. The government had set aside not trillions, not billions, but a few million dollars to promote the implementation of the new law. They wanted to make sure people were informed on certain things like how to join the new exchanges, and that subsidies were going to be made available for some people and also who would now qualify for the Medicaid expansion. The House has decided to get in the way of this advertising by blocking the funds so the only way to get the money to help people get informed was to go out and try to raise money from private industry. This actually was likely going to happen anyway because many of the private health insurance companies are going to be getting millions of new customers and they would likely want all of the new eligible Americans to know how to get access to their product. This somehow got twisted into the HHS "pressuring businesses into donating money".
You may have seen reports recently from noted non partisan think tanks(sarcasm) like Fox News, The Blaze, or the Heritage Foundation that say the cost of Obamacare is now going to be double and millions will be left without insurance. My friend also stated in our conversation that Obamacare is "going to jack the cost of health care through the roof". First of all, the latest projections from the CBO , as of about 2 weeks ago, shows very little change in the cost of the ACA. Secondly, there has been a lot of speculation that the cost of care is going to sky rocket after the law is fully implemented. My response to that is rise in costs compared to what? Our current system? Since the 1990's and prior to the ACA being passed into law the cost of health care has been skyrocketing faster than any other country in the world. In fact, since the law was passed in 2010 the cost of health care in the US has actually risen slower than projected. Now while the hard core left will attribute this slowing of growth to the ACA I actually dont share that opinon. Most of the few cost controlling measures in the bill have not yet been implemented yet so its hard to draw that conclusion if we are going to be honest. This idea that somehow all we have to do to control costs is repeal Obamacare is very trivial to me. All I have heard to this point though is speculation. "The new taxes will kill business!". "This provision will do this and this provision will do that!". I havent seen any data outside of the non partisan organisations that shows that the cost of health care will rise any faster than it already has without the ACA. Who knows, maybe some of that stuff will turn out to be true and if it does, well then that is something that will need to be fixed in the bill. But until I see something more than speculation I am just not savvy enough to know more than organizations like the CBO who do this stuff for a living. I guess you could try to discredit these organizations and say they will just be wrong and you may actually be right. Of course a partisan pundit would assume only that they could be wrong and the bill will cost more than expected. Based on the most recent significant health care reform which was the Mediacare Part D that the CBO scored they actually predicted that the bill would cost more than it actually did. This means that they sort of overshot their projections and it was actually cheaper than expected. That doesnt mean you still cant try to discredit the CBO but you cant use precedent to do it.
The final part of our debate was me blaming the House of Representatives for doing whatever they can to block funding for the bill and then criticizing the bill for not working. Like the situation with the HHS I talked about earlier, they are doing everything they can to block the implementation of the bill so they can point the finger at Obama later and say how much of a failure it was. The same thing is happening with a bunch of states who are refusing the Medicaid expansion. To avoid sounding partisan I wont name the political party that the vast majority of the governers of the 35 states are that are refusing the expansion. The point is though that about half of the 30 million uninsured people that were supposed to get insurance now wont be able to because they wont be allowed medicaid by their states. Ironically enough these states will still have to pay all of the new federal taxes associated with the ACA so that people in other states that participate in the medicaid expansion can still get insurance. Clearly this is partisan bickering and political posturing when you put principle in front of people. You may think this is OK and that is your right, but I just wont hear criticism about what wont work when crucial parts of the entire bill are being blocked for political purposes.
I hope this inspires some debate because some of this stuff I am really passionate about and I'm sorry for the length of the topic but these type of debates always spiral out into several topics.
