William Kristol hasn’t said anything intellectually coherent in years:
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday told Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol that his argument over why President Barack Obama’s health care reform law should be delayed was based on “policy ignorance.”
During a panel discussion on ABC News, Kristol predicted that if the president refused to delay the health care law and Republicans forced a government shutdown, the GOP would not face a backlash.
“There have been shutdowns througout the last over last 25 years and, as you know, they don’t always backfire,” Kristol insisted. “It’s a little delicate. But look, why not delay at least parts of Obamacare for a year?”
“It happens, in fact, to be a very good law,” Krugman insisted. “You see, one of the things, I think, that’s going on here is just a failure on the part of the Republican caucus to actually understand anything about this thing… In fact, almost all of the substantive news about Obamacare over the last couple months has been good. The premiums are coming in well below expectations, health care costs are moderating. Probably there will be some technical glitches with computer systems, but those are not fundamental.”
“Should the president have delayed the employer mandate?” Kristol asked. “Should he, yes or no?”
“Yeah,” Krugman replied.
“But not the individual mandate?” Kristol pressed. “Big businesses get the delay but the individuals don’t.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Krugman declared. “This policy ignorance, not understanding that the employer mandate is basically a trivial add-on to the law, while the individual mandate is central to it. You don’t understand that.”
“You can’t really blame people who ran, saying they would do their best to delay this bad law from happening from trying to do that,” Kristol later added. “Democrats ran in ’06 saying they were going get us out of Iraq, and they spent all of 2007, 2008 undercutting our efforts in Iraq.”
“But, Bill, this law passed and was signed by the president,” President George W. Bush’s former chief strategist Matthew Dowd observed. “Then the president ran a re-election campaign, the American public voted for him overwhelmingly. The Republicans need for fold their tent and say it’s the law.”
The ficton spoken by Ted Cruz and Bill Kristol is an invention of the 1%. Both Cruz and Kristol are well paid by the 1% to use the corporate media to spread their nonsense. Right wing extremists (free market religious fanatics) have always opposed any kind of social contract (social security, medicare, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, a universal health care system, the elimination of slavery, etc.) with labor which is enforced by the “government.” The Capitalists (1%) want free rein to structure society in a way that limits the exercise of power by the 99%. The 1% wants ALL the profits. The rank and file of the corporate sponsored T-bagger movement are the least knowledgeable voters in America. Kristol speaks to them.
All I feel is “I shall watch our future progress with considerable interest.” There are so many conflicting factoids about this thing.
— Premiums are lower than expected. Turns out they mean lower than the CBO expected last year. Good. Lower is good. But is this an “Introductory Offer”? I’d understood there were no actual limits on premiums in ACA. I gather 80% of premiums have to be spent on medical care by the insurance companies, and that percent increase is limited each year. (To 20%? Less? More? I don’t know.) Will that be enough to work for us?
— I just read that the subsidies are not what you and I would call a subsidy. They’re tax credits. ?? Really? Wouldn’t that imply that you can never get more subsidy than what you owe in taxes? So the poorer you are, the less actual subsidy you get. ?? That can’t be right. And yet, if you read the ACA stuff carefully, “subsidy” and “tax credit” are used interchangeably. So what’s the story?
— Then there’s the whole Medicaid cost recovery thing. Apparently, if you’re over 55 and wind up using Medicaid, the state can recover those costs from whatever assets you have (house, bank account, car, etc.). Under ACA, they’re said to be working at streamlining the enrollment of people in Medicaid if they qualify. When I first heard that, I thought that’s a good thing. If all it does is make your (few) assets “recoverable,” maybe it’s not so good.
— Also, about the penalty for not signing up. I keep hearing $95/year for the first year. But that’s “or 1% of income, whichever is greater.” If you make $18000, that would be $180. $30,000: $300.
— The adjusted gross income they use to figure out how much subsidy/tax credit you get includes some sources of income that the IRS doesn’t. Tax-free interest, for instance. Okay, not a big concern for most people. But what about food stamps? Is the cash value of those added to your income? It better not be, but it’d be nice to know for sure that it wasn’t. Otherwise that could be a big deal.
Anyway. The list of questions just gets longer the more I hear about this. And I’m sort-of trying to pay attention. As I say, all I’m feeling is that I don’t have any idea how this will really play out.
“But look, why not delay at least parts of Obamacare for a year?”
Krugman should have responded, “You can either say things like that or be taken seriously. Not both.”
Good post Quixote. I can answer the tax credit question. They use tax credit the way it is used in the Earned Income Tax Credit. You will be issued a check in excess of your withholding.
Iless, good to know. I was hoping it was something like that. Otherwise it made no sense at all. Why don’t they make this stuff clear?