OPINION
Obamacare reality means new GOP Rx
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ew Year’s was a new day, too, for that abused two-and-a-half-yearold ragamuffin known familiarly as Obamacare, the milestone marking the end of any chance of its demise. With some nine million Americans now enjoying the new protection of health insurance guaranteed by the U.S. government and millions more assured by the end of the first enrollment period this spring, Republican leaders acknowledged that it had passed the point of no return. Like Social Security, disability insurance, Medicare and other rights conferred by the government, Obamacare reached the point that too many people who are not extremely poor are beneficiaries to go back. A Republican majority in Congress and president, both possibilities in 2017, may repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act but in name only. Three more enrollment periods by the spring of 2017 will have left only a relative handful of people uninsured, and only the flintiest congressman would vote to lift their protections.
Republicans are beginning to craft reforms to replace the Affordable Care Act, but they largely keep and in some ERNEST cases build upon DUMAS the central features of the law or else are calculated to dismantle it subtly over time, as they hope to do with Medicare and Social Security with a voucher or privatization scheme. A piece in The New York Times outlined the Republican strategy on Obamacare from Jan. 1 forward. This year, as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina explained it, everyone will continue to blast away at the failures of Obamacare as the chief weapon for the 2014 congressional elections but begin to develop reforms that would replace the law with something they could claim would be better. It is the strategy they hope will defeat Sen. Mark Pryor and a couple of other Southern senators and give Republicans control of the Senate in 2015. Pryor and the others at risk
The do-right rule in Arkansas
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o paraphrase Tolstoy, every successful small business shares the same traits. And they all begin with high quality employees. I’m thinking of three local establishments where I’ve traded for years: an auto repair garage, a dentist’s office, and a one-size-fits-all country store where I buy cattle and horse feed. Along with just about everything else the aptly named “Toad Suck One-Stop” might conceivably carry: from crickets and minnows to motor oil, pain remedies, kitty litter and homemade sandwiches. If you get up early enough, they’ll even fix you breakfast while somebody else loads feed sacks into your truck. (Toad Suck is a place name designating a long-ago ferryboat stop on the Arkansas River.) It’s much the same at George Jett’s auto garage down in Little Rock; also at my dentist’s, whose name is Lamar Lane. The first thing you notice is familiar faces. People who work at these places stay for years. And they do so because they’re well-paid, earn decent benefits, and are treated respectfully. So they like their jobs, take pride in their work, and are glad to see familiar customers. Now I’m not going to lie that I love going to the dentist. But I do like feeling among friends, even if it means hearing Dr. Lane carry on about his LSU Tigers. (Because
my wife was born in Baton Rouge, where her daddy played ball, I get a double dose.) Something else: GENE how a business LYONS treats employees also tends to be a reliable predictor of how they treat customers. Dr. Lane does highquality work and stands by it. If a crown breaks, he replaces it free without asking were you shelling pecans with your teeth. My man George Jett hires good mechanics, values their skills, and guarantees their work. If the rattle’s still there, he’ll drive the vehicle around the block and then put it back on the lift to figure out why — also at no additional charge. Jason down at the One-Stop isn’t exactly a philanthropist, at least not where Bermuda grass hay and Canadian night-crawlers are concerned. Keeping a business with so many moving parts running requires constant attention to detail. New hires that stand out back smoking when shelves need restocking tend not to last. Loyal long-time employees won’t cut them much slack. Gas is cheaper at the Walmart across the river in Faulkner County, but the OneStop’s pumps stay busy. It’s the community’s
have a more forlorn hope: that the benefits of the Affordable Care Act will sink in, the alarms built by three years of broadsides will subside, and he will be recognized for having done the decent thing by voting for it. Some 150,000 Arkansans who didn’t have it in 2010 by November will enjoy medical insurance, although many may not acknowledge how they got it. Most people’s insurance premiums will not be rising, or at least not at the rate of previous years, as they have been told repeatedly they would. Health care costs have been relatively flat since work on Obamacare began and new cost-saving initiatives undertaken in Arkansas and other states under the new law are flattening or even reducing health spending. People still see their doctor and take his advice, and Grandma gets even more treatment under Medicare rather than having it withdrawn as Republicans had threatened. But the Republicans seem to have a surer political strategy than Pryor or the Democrats. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a teaparty hero, acknowledged that nothing could be done now to scrap the law, although he filed suit last week to block his own coverage under Obamacare. “There’s something there now,” he said. “We have
to recognize that reality. We have to deal with the people that are covered under Obamacare.” Graham acknowledged that the Republicans must offer something better, not just a return to the terrible past. A conservative Republican congressman from Georgia, a doctor, is promoting his bill to repeal Obamacare but keep many of its provisions in some form, like requiring insurance companies to insure people with pre-existing conditions, barring them from cutting off insurance to the chronically sick, providing insurance pools for small businesses and giving tax credits up to $5,799 to help people buy insurance. Rep. Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate, will introduce his Obamacare substitute, which would tax people’s employer-based health benefits and, much like Obamacare, use the money to provide tax credits for people to buy insurance. Like Obamacare, it would bar insurance companies from cutting off the sick and fix benefits that every policy must provide. Another GOP plan in the works would repeal Obamacare’s mandate for people to buy insurance and instead enroll everyone automatically unless they directly instructed the government not to insure them. Obamacare Lite, in other words.
unofficial town hall. If you want to know lant” and “unpresidential.” His hawklike who’s looking for a lost blue heeler or how visage appeared prominently in a Forbes Holly’s orphaned baby raccoons are doing, photo lineup of “Anti-Obama Billionaires.” it’s got to be the One-Stop. Scrutinizing the list, I noticed that almost Ordinarily, such commonplaces would everybody on it made his pile either by hardly be worth recording. So there are manipulating money or squeezing minifriendly folks at the country store. mum wage workers dry: casino operators, Who’d of thunk it? real estate speculators, corporate buyout Unless, that is, you live in the United scammers, hedge fund geniuses, fast food States of America, a large proportion of franchisers, big box retailers and Donald whose tycoon class appears determined to Trump. drag us back to the Gilded Age. Not a creator or manufacturer in the lot. If they gave a Scrooge McDuck Award This is our would-be new American arisfor the nation’s greediest knucklehead, the tocracy, largely bereft of — indeed actively 2013 winner would be Home Depot’s bil- hostile toward — the retail virtues I’ve cellionaire founder Kenneth Langone, a Catho- ebrated. (None of whose practitioners neclic who voiced public alarm at Pope Fran- essarily share my partisan views; I’m talking cis’s seeming enthusiasm for the gospel of morals here, not politics.) Matthew 19. That’s where Jesus observes But the good news is that according to that “it is easier for a camel to go through Adam Davidson in the New York Times, the eye of a needle than for someone who old-fashioned business ethics may be makis rich to enter the kingdom of God.” ing a comeback through the unlikely agency The Pope didn’t cite that verse, nor dis- of a Turk. According to Davidson, the going thing cuss politics as such. However, his encyclical Evangelii Gaudium did warn against “crude in corporate circles is “The Good Jobs Stratand naive trust in the … sacralized workings egy,” a book by Zeynep Ton, an M.I.T. business professor. of the prevailing economic system.” What, not worship money? Never mind Ton argues that what some call the that this is elementary Christian doctrine. “Costco” strategy of hiring better-trained, Langone warned that American plutocrats better-paid employees “will often yield hapdon’t want to hear about it even in church. pier customers, more engaged workers and You may not be surprised this same wor- — surprisingly — larger corporate profits.” As I was saying, who’d of thunk it? thy also regards President Obama as “petuwww.arktimes.com
JANUARY 9, 2014
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