The New York Times leads the day with an editorial about the GOP's juvenile tactics:
A mature and responsible political party would do more than prevent a government default; it would offer serious solutions to the nation’s most pressing problems instead of running from them.
And it is there that Republicans — whether adults or Tea Party members — continue to let the public down. [...] Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking member of the budget panel, says that keeping the current spending caps is a bedrock principle. Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, ostensibly an anti-shutdown “adult,” wants to use the conference to cut social-welfare entitlements and relieve the tax burden on corporations. “We have to make a down payment on the debt and deficit,” he told Congressional Quarterly. [...]
The obsession with deficits is already taking a huge toll on the poor, who have seen cutbacks in vital programs, and could well see more if the Republicans have their way. Next week, for instance, a House-Senate conference on the farm bill will consider a proposal from allegedly “grown-up” House Republicans that would cut $39 billion from food stamps, which would push three million people off the program a year. Democrats will be so busy fighting off that proposal that they will have a hard time reversing the scheduled cut for all food stamp recipients that begins next Friday. Senator Lamar Alexander says his party needs to persuade the public that it can be trusted with government. To do so, Republicans will have to do much more than simply reopen government’s doors.
Jules Whitcover explains how the GOP refuses to learn from its mistakes:
The heavy hit on the Republican brand has been emphatically underscored by the post-shutdown polls. The question is whether voters fed up with the party's increasingly sharp turn to ultraconservatism, one not seen since the days of Barry Goldwater, will remain turned off at voting time a year from now.
By then, Obamacare may or may not be a principal catalyst for decision-making at the ballot box, pro or con, on midterm election day. The same polls also indicate that Americans still worry much more about the state of the economy and, particularly, high unemployment than about the state of federally subsidized health insurance.
But for now, the House Republicans' reply to all the criticism of their stand against Obamacare is a promise of more of the same, along with hope that the law will indeed collapse, helping them recover from the severe political damage they have inflicted upon themselves.
Juliet Lapidos writes that the GOP roots for failure:
In theory, lawmakers hope that government programs work well, and if they don’t, try to fix them. In theory, our representatives hope that government agencies carry out their missions smoothly, and if something goes wrong, try to figure out what happened to avoid making the same mistake in the future.
Obviously that’s not how things work in the United States, where one of the two parties doesn’t even believe in government. Republicans want to shrink government until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub! They think there’s nothing scarier than the prospect of a government employee trying to help! With beliefs like those, it’s not surprising that — with disturbing frequency — they root for failure in order to score points. [...]
“If the [Healthcare.gov] Web site glitches are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, “it’s only a matter of time before the law sinks and takes with it those Democrats who wrote it, voted for it and are proud of it.” Breaking that down: If the glitches indicate deep problems, then health care reform will fall apart, in which case Republicans will pick up seats in the next election. In other words, disaster would be good for his party.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Sally Kohn takes on the claims that Healthcare.gov glitches will doom the Affordable Health Care Act:
You know what's relatively easy? Fixing a website. You know what's really hard? Ensuring access to affordable, quality health insurance for every single American and improving our broken health care system in the process. In the back-and-forth about the Obamacare exchange websites, let's not lose sight of the ultimate goal of health care reform -- a goal that, even with the exchanges problems, we are steadily achieving. [...]eBay wasn't built in a day. And neither was any major government initiative. From Social Security to Medicare to the Peace Corps to the income tax, other significant government programs were initially as overrun with snafus as they were with critiques. But eventually, employers figured out how to include workers' names and Social Security numbers in their earnings reports and the website for Medicare Part D was successfully debugged.
A few geeks locked in a room with a case of Mountain Dew will fix the Obamacare websites. But all the computer programmers and pundits and conservative nay-sayers in the land couldn't fix the fact that, three years ago, our health care costs were skyrocketing, tens of millions of Americans lacked health insurance and 14,000 more were losing their coverage every day.
We needed a law to fix that. Thankfully, we now have one. And whatever the ups and downs of the websites, the Affordable Care Act is working.
Mark Edwards at
The Washington Monthly looks at building "a better launch pad for young Americans." Here's one of several ideas he lays out:
While it’s increasingly clear that post-secondary education is critical to a young person’s economic security and mobility, the escalating cost of higher education is putting the dream of college success further out of reach. The real cost of the tuition and fees of a four-year degree at a public institution has more than doubled in the last twenty years, skyrocketing from $3,810 in 1992 to $8,660 in 2012. Families and students are borrowing more money to cover the costs. In 2011, nearly two-thirds of college graduates had student loan debt, with an average of $26,600. Barriers to college access and affordability disproportionately affect lower-income students. In 2009, just 8.3 percent of students from the bottom quartile of family income earned a four-year degree, compared to more than 82 percent of students from the top income quartile.
Zeke Miller at TIME examines Obama's immigration pivot:
“We’ve kicked this particular can down the road too long,” Obama said. But the latest turn to immigration is more about kicking the GOP when it’s down. Immigration reform remains popular nationally, and the GOP establishment openly admits the party is on the wrong side of the issue. ”Now it’s up to Republicans in the House to decide whether reform becomes a reality or not,” Obama said, directing the public’s blame on the most unpopular political entity in America.
Clay Johnson and Harper Reed in
The New York Times explain how the Healthcare.gov website is less about President Obama and the healthcare law and more about how government just isn't usually great at handling big tech projects:
So why is it that the technology available to Mr. Obama as president doesn’t compare to the technology he used to win an election? Much of the problem has to do with the way the government buys things. The government has to follow a code called the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which is more than 1,800 pages of legalese that all but ensure that the companies that win government contracts, like the ones put out to build HealthCare.gov, are those that can navigate the regulations best, but not necessarily do the best job. That’s evidenced by yesterday’s Congressional testimony by the largest of the vendors, CGI Federal, which blamed everyone but itself when asked to explain the botched rollout of the new Web site. [...]
HealthCare.gov needs to be fixed. We believe that in a few days it will be. As Mr. Obama said last week after the government shutdown ended, “There’s no good reason why we can’t govern responsibly, despite our differences, without lurching from manufactured crisis to manufactured crisis.” There’s no good reason we can’t code responsibly, either. We must find a fix to the federal procurement process that spares the government’s technology projects from the self-inflicted wounds of signing big contracts whose terms repeatedly and spectacularly go unmet.
Michael Millenson at
Forbes tackles the latest GOP talking point against the Affordable Care Act:
Obamacare opponents assert that the ACA undermines the traditional doctor-patient relationship - although I suspect that being able to pay your doctor because you have health insurance actually improves it quite a bit. Yet in calling for "patient-centered healthcare" instead of the more common "patient-centered care" or even patient-centered medicine, conservatives unwittingly abandoned doctor-patient language in favor of business-speak.
"Healthcare" as one word was pioneered by Modern Healthcare, a business magazine for hospital executives. The one-word version has become a business standard, whether used by the "healthcare" systems that own hospitals, like Tenet Healthcare, or by corporate entities such as GE Healthcare.
Doctors, on the other hand, "care for" patients. It is that rootedness in caring that explains why major medical journals spell "health care" as two words and professional societies focus on "patient-centered care," not "healthcare." In other words, those hard-right House Republicans putatively working to "restore" the traditional doctor-patient relationship are talking in language whose corporate overtones would make a traditional doctor bristle. "Patient-centered care," the language of patients, is the term employed in the ACA. However, what is oddest about the conservative demand for "patient-centered healthcare" is neither its obscurity nor its spelling, but its substance. The ACA can be fairly accused of many failures, but there has never been any major law anywhere that focuses so explicitly on patient-centeredness.