Paul Ryan Just Busted Secretly Working With Obama To Keep His Most Sacred Law alive
Once again we see Speaker Paul Ryan showing his true colors.
Although he fooled most of us conservatives into thinking he was one of us in the time
leading up to and during the failed 2012 Mitt Romney presidential run where he ran as Romney's
Vice Presidential pick, once he became Speaker of the House things changed.
And not for the better.
In February of 2010, Congressman Paul Ryan as a ranking member of the House Budget Committee
referred to the Obamacare as a bill that was full of gimmicks and smoke and mirror.
His way of describing the law was so popular that publications such as the Wall Street
Journal published his remarks in an op-ed piece.Via The Federalist:
"While most of Washington remains consumed on the drama surrounding immigration negotiations,
leaders in the House have quietly pursued other policy objectives.
According to multiple sources on Capitol Hill, House leaders, particularly Speaker Paul Ryan
(R-WI), have concocted a plan that would 1) use a budget gimmick that arguably violates
the law to 2) bail out Obamacare and 3) provide taxpayer funding to plans that cover abortion.
As a certain congressman from Wisconsin said back in 2012: "With allies like that, who
needs the Left?"
Budgetary Smoke and Mirrors Ryan obliquely alluded to the plan in a recent
interview, discussing a "bipartisan opportunity" to implement policies like reinsurance.
Ryan's recent positioning has led Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to conclude that Congress would
enact such a "stabilization" package in an appropriations measure.
In a nutshell, the gimmick under consideration would have the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) raise the budgetary baseline so Congress can lower the baseline and spend the artificial
"savings."
It's a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have
been proud of.
Here's how it would work.854 SHARES
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Once again we see Speaker Paul Ryan showing his true colors.
Although he fooled most of us conservatives into thinking he was one of us in the time
leading up to and during the failed 2012 Mitt Romney presidential run where he ran as Romney's
Vice Presidential pick, once he became Speaker of the House things changed.
And not for the better.
In February of 2010, Congressman Paul Ryan as a ranking member of the House Budget Committee
referred to the Obamacare as a bill that was full of gimmicks and smoke and mirror.
His way of describing the law was so popular that publications such as the Wall Street
Journal published his remarks in an op-ed piece.
But that was then and this is now.
Via The Federalist:
"While most of Washington remains consumed on the drama surrounding immigration negotiations,
leaders in the House have quietly pursued other policy objectives.
According to multiple sources on Capitol Hill, House leaders, particularly Speaker Paul Ryan
(R-WI), have concocted a plan that would 1) use a budget gimmick that arguably violates
the law to 2) bail out Obamacare and 3) provide taxpayer funding to plans that cover abortion.
As a certain congressman from Wisconsin said back in 2012: "With allies like that, who
needs the Left?"
Budgetary Smoke and Mirrors Ryan obliquely alluded to the plan in a recent
interview, discussing a "bipartisan opportunity" to implement policies like reinsurance.
Ryan's recent positioning has led Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) to conclude that Congress would
enact such a "stabilization" package in an appropriations measure.
In a nutshell, the gimmick under consideration would have the Congressional Budget Office
(CBO) raise the budgetary baseline so Congress can lower the baseline and spend the artificial
"savings."
It's a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have
been proud of.
Here's how it would work.
Congress would direct CBO to assume that Obamacare's cost-sharing reductions (CSRs) would not be
paid.
While the Trump administration did cut those subsidies off last October, due to the lack
of a constitutional appropriation for them, the budget scorekeeping conventions (discussed
in detail below) indicate that CBO should still assume the subsidies would continue.
However, Congress would instruct CBO to override that precedent.
CBO would then increase the spending baseline for Obamacare, because of the interactions
between CSRs and the law's insurance premium subsidies.
Essentially, eliminating the former would cause spending on the latter to rise, as insurers
raise premiums to reflect the lack of CSR payments.
(Under the law, insurers must reduce cost-sharing for low-income individuals regardless, so
they would adjust premiums upward—as they did in most states for 2018—to reflect the
cost of this regulatory mandate.)
Higher premiums will lead to higher federal subsidies for those premiums, at $194 billion
over a decade, according to an estimate CBO released last August.
After instructing CBO to assume that CSR funds would not be appropriated, Congress would
then turn around and appropriate those funds, for a defined period of perhaps two years.
Having permanently increased the spending baseline in step two above, CBO would then
score a bill temporarily appropriating cost-sharing reductions as saving money for that defined
period, because spending on CSRs would lower spending on premium subsidies—the opposite
of the effect described above.
Congress would then take the "savings" from appropriating funds for CSRs—which,
as explained above, consists not of legitimate deficit reduction so much as a phony gimmick
derived from playing budgetary games—and spend that money on reinsurance and other
corporate welfare payments to health insurers.
There you have it: A fiscal Ponzi scheme that would give health insurers their two major
desires—cost-sharing reductions and reinsurance—in one big bailout.
If it passes once for a two- or three-year period, you can bet your life this scheme
would turn into an Obamacare perpetual bailout machine, with insurers coming back time and
time again for more crony capitalist cash.
Violates Budgeting Principles This plan not only violates the pretense that
Republicans care about repealing—as opposed to bailing out—Obamacare, but it also violates
budget scorekeeping principles laid out in statute.
Specifically, Section 257(b)(1) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of
1985 (the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings statute) includes the following direction when developing the
budgetary baseline: "Laws providing or creating direct spending and receipts are assumed to
operate in the manner specified in those laws for each year and funding for entitlement
authority is assumed to be adequate to make all payments required by those laws" (emphasis
mine).
Section 1402(c)(3)(A) of Obamacare includes such entitlement authority.
It states that the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) "shall
make periodic and timely payments" to health insurers for cost-sharing reductions (emphasis
mine).
Granted, the law does not include an appropriation for HHS to make those payments.
That lack of appropriation prompted the House of Representatives to sue the Obama administration
for exceeding its constitutional authority, and caused the Trump administration to stop
the payments last fall.
But whether an appropriation actually exists is immaterial to the separate and distinct
question of whether the law requires the secretary to make payments.
Obamacare includes such entitlement authority over CSRs.
Therefore, under the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, the budget baseline should assume that
those cost-sharing reductions will be paid.
In its August 2017 report on CSRs, CBO agreed.
In a section regarding the budgetary treatment of the cost-sharing payments, the budget analysts
noted that "the agencies have recorded the CSR payments as direct spending (that is,
spending that does not require appropriation action)—a conclusion reached because the
cost-sharing subsidies were viewed as a form of entitlement authority" (parentheses in
original; italics mine).
CBO provides a very clear response to the argument that because the Trump administration
stopped the payments, the budgetary baseline should not score CSRs as "direct spending."
In reality, the entitlement authority—the underlying language of Section 1402(c)(3)(A)
of Obamacare—prompted CBO to score the cost-sharing reductions as direct spending in the first
place.
All budgetary scorekeepers—both CBO and the Office of Management and Budget—have
never disputed the validity of the entitlement, as opposed to the separate and distinct legal
question of whether a valid appropriation exists.
That entitlement language remains unchanged; therefore, the budgetary treatment of CSRs
should remain unchanged—unless Republican leaders attempt to strong-arm CBO as an accomplice
to their scheme for bailing out Obamacare.
Dropping Principles and Promises to Win An Election
After reading all this, some may wonder why Republican congressional leaders have taken
the time to concoct such a scheme.
In part because Congress (wrongly) repealed only the individual mandate as part of the
tax reform bill, members worry about big premium spikes as a result of their actions, which
will hit right around the time of the midterm elections this fall.
Just as Senate staff talked openly last summer about how they structured their "stability
funds" to yield premium reductions in November 2018, House leaders now want to "stabilize"
the insurance markets this fall.
Or, to put it more cynically, they value preserving power more than they do their principles.
Make no mistake, this plot would violate just about every principle conservatives hold dear.
It makes no attempt to repeal Obamacare.
Instead, it strengthens and entrenches it.
It relies on budgetary smoke-and-mirrors to raise federal spending—a gimmick so laughable
that it would destroy any credible claim Ryan could make toward fiscal responsibility and
honest budgeting.
It would also increase taxpayer funding of plans that cover abortion, because Democrats
will never agree to this scheme if it includes robust pro-life protections in law, as doing
so would effectively prohibit exchange plans from covering abortion.
Back in 2012, when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich attacked conservative proposals to
reform Medicare, Ryan famously asked, "With allies like that, who needs the Left?"
Six years later, given the shady nature of the Republican leadership scheme to bail out
Obamacare, some may be saying the same thing about him."
Now Ryan has made a 180-degree turn.
Instead of following President Trump's lead in letting Obamacare fall under its own weight,
he is looking for plans to bail it out by circumventing the order the president gave
to stop making CSR payments from the Federal Government as of last October.
Stopping the payments will effectively reduce the time in which Obamacare will suffer its
impending collapse.
Republicans seem to forget who are the people who put them in office.
Speaker Ryan, instead of following President Trump's lead in stopping Obamacare has decided
to go the way of Senator John McCain of Arizona who campaigned on the repeal of Obamacare
but when came time to vote he was the vote which kept it going.
Because of health issues, chances are McCain won't be around when his current term is
up, but Paul Ryan is young and has a ways to go.
And it's doubtful the lobbyists he is catering to are the ones who will get him reelected.
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