Hours before the full House voted on their respective budget plans, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the committee's ranking Democratic member, discussed entitlement reform, premium support and reasons why it's possible that 2013 could be a year for legislative action on Capitol Hill.
I caught up with both congressmen after they spoke about their financial blueprints to a crowded audience at a policy summit Thursday hosted by the National Journal. Ryan's budget plan—introduced last week—passed in the House today, but the bill is not expected to go beyond the lower chamber.
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A 2012 campaign strategy by Democrats appears to include both lashing Mitt Romney to the federal 2010 healthcare law and dismissing it as a campaign issue.
Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, a member of the Senate Democrat leadership, told reporters after a recent round of Supreme Court oral arguments on the law described Romney as a “walking talking amicus brief” in support of it.
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High importance, high energy. That was the vibe outside the Supreme Court on a sunny and chilly Tuesday morning, the second of the three days set aside to hear oral arguments about the Affordable Care Act. And many consider Tuesday the most important of these three days, as it focused on the individual mandate, the milestone healthcare law's centerpiece.
“What the lawyers say in here today, on both sides, and what the judges decide in the next several weeks will affect all of us as patients, and me, particularly as a doctor, and the people that I know and work with, for the rest of our lives. It will make a difference,” said Dr. Lincoln Sheets, a family practice physician from Springfield, Mo., who is in the middle of a four-month research program on informatics at the National Institutes of Health. “This is my bias, I think, in the way I think of this: that it will affect whether I mostly see the people that can afford to see me, or the people who most need to see me.”
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No protest, rally or parade would be complete without the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which musicians played and Affordable Care Act supporters sang outside the U.S. Supreme Court Monday morning.
But even with the trombones, the atmosphere outside the high court on day No. 1 of the three-day healthcare law case was far more subdued than the circus-like frenzy most everyone anticipated. That frenzy could come tomorrow, though—likely through protests—when justices will hear about the individual mandate, considered the lynchpin of the 2010 law.
On Monday, groups supporting or opposing the Affordable Care Act began chanting everything from “One, two, three, four, healthcare's what we're fighting for!” to “The ACA is here to stay!” and “We love the Constitution!” in the hours leading up to the arguments.
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House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Tuesday defended his fiscal 2013 budget proposal that includes sweeping changes to the nation's tax code and entitlement programs, saying inaction poses a greater threat for the country.
“If we simply operate based on political fear, nothing's ever going to get done. If we allow entitlement politics—fear that your adversaries will turn your reforms into a political weapon to use against you—and we cow to that, then America's going to have a debt crisis,” Ryan told reporters in the Capitol. He made the remarks shortly after his committee released the House GOP's financial blueprint for next year.
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A day before House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is scheduled to release a budget blueprint that's once again expected to include considerable changes to Medicare, his Democrat counterparts in the lower chamber emphasized they won't support any plan that leads to the end of the Medicare guarantee.
Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), chairman of the House Democrat Caucus, hosted a conference call Monday with fellow members Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) to tout the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will celebrate its second anniversary later this week. Becerra noted that the law—which Republicans have referred to as a “job killer”—has produced about 488,000 jobs since it was passed in 2010. Meanwhile, Schakowsky promised that House Democrats and public interest groups are gearing up for a “primary, organizing effort” to explain the benefits of the law in the coming months.
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This week's updated congressional projections on the 2010 federal healthcare law appear to have reignited the debate over the number of people who will lose their employer-provided coverage because of the law.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation (PDF) concluded Tuesday that up to five times as many people (5 million) will lose their employer-provided coverage by 2016 as the two fiscal organizations estimated would lose it last year.
“Some observers have expressed surprise that CBO and JCT's previous estimates did not show a much larger reduction in the number of people receiving employment-based health insurance,” the report's authors noted. They said the estimated impact on employer-provided insurance was mitigated by the law's continued “substantial financial incentives for firms to offer health insurance coverage” and its creation of some new incentives.
The growing number of people expected to lose their insurance drew sharp criticism from congressional critics of the law.
“This will force these hardworking Americans to purchase government-mandated health insurance in government-run exchanges or pay a penalty,” according to a statement from Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee.
The seriousness of an expected increased loss of employer-provided insurance also was recognized by the Obama administration, which dispatched Jeanne Lambrew, deputy assistant to the president for health policy, to massage the numbers on the White House health blog.
She emphasized that the number is still a relatively small share of the 150 million people who get their coverage through their jobs, and she highlighted earlier estimates that expected less reduction in employer insurance.
“Today's report also does not project major changes in the number of workers who will get coverage through their job,” Lambrew wrote.
Expect the issue to flame up again shortly when the two fiscal organizations are to release a range of estimates for the sources of insurance coverage in future years.
Follow Rich Daly on Twitter @MHRDaly.com.
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For nearly a year now, Democrats have repeated a phrase ad nauseam to describe their take on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's plan to privatize the Medicare program. “It's the end of Medicare as we know it,” they've said. After listening to some remarks that GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum gave last night, I wonder if he might steal that phrase and make it his own.
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So what does a key congressional Republican healthcare leader think about plans by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell to drop for the rest of this Congress any more votes to repeal the 2010 federal healthcare overhaul?
You decide.
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