GOP hopeful Scott Walker offers health plan with tax credits
Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker‘s plan for replacing President Barack Obama‘s health care law would extend refundable tax credits to help pay for private health insurance based on age instead of income, restructure Medicaid and allow people to shop for insurance across state lines. The Wisconsin governor provided details of his proposal to The Associated Press in advance of a Tuesday speech in suburban Minneapolis where he was to outline his first major policy initiative of the presidential campaign. Walker’s plan does not include cost figures or an estimate of the number of people who would be covered, making it nearly impossible to compare with current law. For the period from April to June of this year, 11.4 percent of U.S. adults were uninsured, which translates to about 16 million people gaining coverage since the rollout of Obama’s health care law in 2013. Walker’s campaign said the plan would be paid for by eliminating $1 trillion in taxes that are levied under the current law and by making other changes to Medicaid and how health insurance is taxed. The Supreme Court in June upheld a key portion of the Affordable Care Act allowing for federal subsidies to defray the cost of coverage, a major defeat for opponents of the law. Walker and other Republican candidates have insisted they would repeal the law, starting on the first day of a GOP presidency. The biggest hurdle Walker, and any opponent of the law, faces is getting it repealed. That would take 60 votes in the Senate, and Walker’s plan does not address how he would undo the law in any other way. Walker, in excerpts of his speech released by his campaign, blamed fellow Republicans with not doing enough to repeal the law. “Republican leaders in Washington told us during the campaign last year that we needed a Republican Senate to repeal Obamacare,” Walker said in the prepared remarks. “Well, Republicans have been in charge of both houses of Congress since January and there still isn’t a bill on the president’s desk to repeal Obamacare.” Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank often aligned with the White House, said Walker’s plan would be a step backward. “The math only adds up if he’s slashing Medicaid and increasing taxes on middle-class people with employer plans,” Spiro said. While the Walker plan would repeal the Affordable Care Act, it appears to use some similar kinds of tools to promote coverage. For example, there would be no requirement for individuals to carry health insurance or face fines, as there is currently. But, in order to be guaranteed affordable coverage without regard to pre-existing medical problems, individuals would have to “maintain continuous, creditable coverage.” There’s merit to Walker staking out his position on the issue, even though he doesn’t explain how the law would be repealed, said economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank. “There’s a lot of this that is fairly standard conservative health policy reform,” Holtz-Eakin said. “The basic plan looks familiar.” Walker, similar to current law, would also provide tax credits to help with the cost of coverage for people whose employers don’t offer insurance. But unlike current law, those credits of between $900 and $3,000 would be based on age and not be keyed to a person’s income. So they may not help low- to moderate-income people as much as the existing tax breaks do. Walker’s plan calls for eliminating unspecified regulations in the current law, a move that Walker claims would lower premiums by 25 percent. Other elements of the plan would include extending a $1,000 refundable tax credit for anyone who signs up for a health savings account, allowing people to shop for health insurance across state lines, reorganizing Medicaid into smaller programs, and giving states more regulatory authority. He would also allow for new health insurance purchasing agreements and deregulate the long-term care insurance market. The reality of outright repealing the law as Walker wants to do is stark: Doing away with it completely would kick 19 million people off insurance in the first year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Walker isn’t the first Republican to put forward a detailed plan for replacing Obama’s law. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal released his plan last year and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio outlined his approach in an opinion piece published Monday. And while alternatives have been introduced in Congress, none has gotten traction as Republicans have yet to coalesce around any particular idea. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Democrats worry Jeb Bush’s Latino connections could hurt Hillary Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s campaign probably didn’t need a reminder of how crucial Latino voters could be to her presidential campaign. She got one anyway from Jeb Bush. The former Republican governor of Florida spoke fluent Spanish during his 2016 campaign kickoff this week, at which he introduced his wife, a native of Mexico, to an adoring crowd that cheered as he effortlessly deflected an attempt by immigration protests to interrupt his speech. “Ayúdennos a emprender una campaña que les da la bienvenida,” Bush said, which can be translated as, “Help us run a campaign that welcomes you.” Clinton will address the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on Thursday in Las Vegas at a time when Bush’s bilingual pitch is prompting quiet pangs of concern among some Democratic strategists. They worry that a campaign that successfully presents Bush as the product of his Hispanic-infused South Florida home could cut into their party’s sizable demographic advantage with Latino voters, particularly in hard-fought states such as Florida, Colorado and Nevada. Bush comes across as “genuine and comfortable in his own skin,” said David Axelrod, a former strategist to President Barack Obama. “If he hangs tough and survives (the primary), Democrats should be sober. He would be a formidable opponent.” Bush may be the white scion of a political dynasty with deep roots in New England, but he has adopted Hispanic culture as his own. He made his career in the bilingual mecca of Miami, Spanish is his primary language at home, and he brags about buying cilantro to make Latin cuisine for his wife. On the campaign trail, Bush switches seamlessly between English and Spanish when answering questions, his skills in the language honed during the two years he spent in Venezuela as a young man. He also travels with Raul Henriques, a fresh-faced “body man” recently hired because Bush wanted a Spanish speaker. Republicans think Bush could help their party close a yawning political gap among Latino voters. GOP nominee Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of the Latino vote in 2012, the smallest margin in a decade. President George W. Bush, who had far weaker ties to the Hispanic community than his younger brother Jeb, earned as much as 40 percent of their vote during his 2004 re-election race. Maintaining a broad Democratic advantage among one of the country’s fastest-growing minority groups will be essential to Clinton’s path to the White House. Almost 28.2 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote in the 2016 presidential race, an increase of about 17 percent over 2012, according to an analysis of census data by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Clinton advisers have long singled Bush out from the rest of the crowded Republican field as a possible threat, arguing that his personal connection to the Latino community could help his campaign make inroads in several battleground states. “If Republicans were to win Florida and Ohio and Colorado, it’s hard to total up 270 for Democrats,” longtime Clinton confident Harold Ickes told reporters in November. For months, Clinton and her team have worked hard to develop and deepen relationships with Hispanic leaders. In May, she tapped Lorella Praeli, a leading immigrant-rights activist brought to the U.S. illegally as a young person, to lead outreach to Latino voters. Less than a month after announcing her plans to enter the race, Clinton called for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Her position left little political wiggle room for Republicans open to an immigration overhaul, Bush included, who favor granting legal status for some of the 11 million workers in the country illegally but not full citizenship. “We should offer hard-working, law-abiding immigrant families a path to citizenship,” Clinton said during her kickoff speech last weekend. “Not second-class status.” Campaigning in Iowa on Wednesday, Bush said he would support citizenship for some immigrants brought to the country illegally as children and a pathway to legal status for their parents, a step Obama took by executive order three years ago. But Bush’s efforts to woo Latinos may be complicated by the Republican primaries, where a vocal conservative minority holds outsized influence. In an indication of the potential toxicity of the issue to his primary bid, Bush had no plans to mention immigration during his Tuesday kickoff speech. But he couldn’t resist responding to the chants of protesters heckling him from the crowd with a pledge to tackle immigration legislation. “I believe what I believe, and I believe in comprehensive immigration reform,” he said in Iowa the following day. “People don’t agree with me in my own party, not everybody, but, trust me, there are a lot of people that have a differing view.” Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
