I wanted to check in on libertarian small government conservative Rand Paul now that he’s running in the general, and it’s time to drop the Tea Party nonsense and get down to the serious business of running as a garden variety hard-Right Republican.
Which is, of course, what he is:
A well-funded national business group making noise across the country has muscled its way into the Kentucky U.S. Senate race, backing tea party favorite Rand Paul with a scare-tactic ad slamming Jack Conway
In a 30-second TV commercial that began airing statewide Wednesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused the Democrat of supporting Medicare cuts that would take 113,000 Kentucky seniors off the rolls by backing President Obama’s health care overhaul. It never mentions Paul’s name.
Paul announced the chamber’s endorsement during a news conference in his south-central Kentucky hometown of Bowling Green, where he lives and maintains his eye surgery practice.
The Medicare cuts Rand Paul’s backers are referring to are cuts to Medicare Advantage.
Senate Democrats somehow mustered up the courage to tell the truth about this huge taxpayer rip-off, and actually slow growth in a program that is a massive failure for taxpayers.
Essentially, it works like this: Congress allowed private HMOs to compete for Medicare patients under the rationale that they could offer better service at lower cost than the government. They couldn’t. So Republicans in Congress began boosting their payments, to the point that Medicare Advantage gets paid 114 percent what Medicare gets paid to care for a patient. That leads to some fun perks, like free gym memberships and complimentary aspirin and band-aids, which in turn leads seniors to defend the program because they like their perks. But it also means a lot of unnecessary expense for taxpayers.
Rather, economists have estimated that for every extra dollar we pay the program, 14 percent is passed on to seniors and 86 percent goes to profits or other costs. In other words, we’re getting only 14 cents of obvious value for every dollar of overpayment.
Republicans can change the label, and keep the Tea Party candidate’s names off the advertising, but it’s the same old product.
beltane
Same old product with new and crappier packaging. Republicans fall into two camps: the perpetrators of get-rich-quick schemes and the victims of get-rich-quick schemes. They need each other, and the rest of us don’t need any of them.
gex
Odd someone who would eliminate Medicare is trying to scare people that the other guy wants to make cuts to a premium service of Medicare. This *should* backfire.
Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Whew.
MattR
@gex: And that presents the dilemma. Do you attack the lies in the
advertisement(EDIT: commercial) or point out Rand’s position on Medicare?New Yorker
Let me know when there’s another “Reason” blog post about how the Tea Party is really about small government and fiscal restraint, and not just an incoherent mass of evangelical white victimhood and cultural paranoia.
beltane
@gex: I’d be happy living in a world where only Republican voters have to bear the consequences of their stupidity. Let the government keep its hands out of their Medicare, let the FDIC stop insuring their bank accounts. Let them simmer in their thin libertarian gruel for all I care.
Kay
@New Yorker:
Rand Paul will eliminate Medicare when his father stops directing ear marks to Texas.
In other words, never.
I think he has to run an ad denouncing the US Chamber of Commerce, and their advocacy of reckless spending.
beltane
@New Yorker: Even Andrew Sullivan has lost patience with them this time. The idiots at Reason are so estranged from the culture of this country that they might as well be living in Bhutan.
Zifnab
If ever there was a textbook example of the failure of privatization, this would be it.
Kay
@Zifnab:
It’s interesting, because it’s a voucher. When Brain Trust Conservative Rep. Ryan floated his brilliant health care voucher program, Paul Krugman was the only person who responded with “Medicare Advantage”.
New Yorker
@beltane:
Yeah, I saw that post. I wrote him an e-mail telling him (in more polite terms) that Reason has their heads up their asses.
Bootlegger
Rand’s opponent, Conway, began running his ads during pro football games last weekend. The ad I saw is positive and upbeat stressing his law and order record as AG complete with police endorsements. I’ll be surprised if Conway doesn’t wipe the floor with Rand by the time this is over.
Punchy
OT:
This never would have happened if only patients were allowed to pack heat.
gex
@Zifnab: They sold us out for 14%? C’mon old people! Demand at least 40% of the profits off the toil of the young folks.
suzanne
@beltane: Seriously. I’m getting pretty damn tired of acting like the mature older brother when they really need a proverbial (or literal, I’m not picky) smack upside the head for their stupidity.
Ironic that it’s the left wing that understands that personal responsibility actually means taking care of more than just oneself.
morzer
@beltane:
Don’t worry, Sullivan’s medication will be restored and he’ll be back fluffing glibertarian nonsense within a couple of days.
Stooleo
OT True Conservative.
h/t Sully
binzinerator
I remember this from Tweety, back in 08, when he ripped into Cantor for insisting goopers weren’t in any way responsible for the previous 8 years of Bushie fuckups:
“Congressman Cantor, you’re trying to change the rules now and saying, ‘oh, if we take off our uniforms and don’t say we’re Republicans this week, the people will be fooled.’
[…]
“You have to take responsibility, sir, for the policies of this administration that have gotten us into this mess. You can’t walk away and say, ‘oh, we had nothing to do with this,’ can you?”
The Tea Party is proof they can. They did exactly that.
New Yorker
@Stooleo:
The line “she’s a professional politician, she’s just really fucking bad at it” was classic.
El Cid
You see, conservatives want to stop all the spendin’ and all the waste, like this.
Roger Moore
@binzinerator:
No. The Tea Party is proof they can try. The election will tell if they can get away with it.
Svensker
USA, Inc.
We’ve met the future and it stinks, folks. Not to be a downer or anything.
El Cid
On Hardballed, Mark Halperin is simply stating that Republicans will take over the House and the Senate and thus the Tea Party stuff is just a bit of dissent within the Republican Party.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
So, not only is the government as efficient as private enterprise, it’s actually more efficient, considering that 14 cents of the overpayment still had to be spent on seniors.
General Stuck
Deep Thoughts of Christine O’Donnell
By gawd, something I agree with.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
Hold on. Do you mean they’re not being entirely straight with us?
I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
(But I have noticed that the Republican Party as a whole is not, apparently, as entirely straight as they would like to believe themselves to be, so…).
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@General Stuck: Did she not notice that Arwen essentially became a warrior princess in the movies?
Did that not bother her sense of the films’ legitimacy?
El Cid
Oh, Jeebus fucking cripes. Tingly leg Matthews on Hardballed just asked on the question of letting $250K+ tax breaks elapse while keeping $250K- ‘hey, d’you think the hardworkin’ guy who comes up, does well, making $100K, you think he’s lookin’ at the guy paying $250K as the rich guy he wants to go after, wants punished? You know a Madam DeFarge type thing?’
Zifnab
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Well, that was going towards providing greater quality of service (see the perks: Gym membership, aspirin and band-aids, etc). But it still raising the issue that if Medicare actually wanted to offer these perks themselves, it would cost the administration 14 cents on every HMO dollar.
El Cid
Tingly leg: ‘I think the Democrats ought to run the country and not blame the other guys.’
TooManyJens
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther: She noticed, and she didn’t like that part. She thought it detracted from Arwen’s strong “woman behind the man” role, or something like that.
Roger Moore
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
That’s assuming that the 14% that they’re spending is actually going toward regular services. I practice, it sounds as if it was going to
bribesextra services to get people to switch.@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
That was one change I approved of. The problem with movie versions of books is that the movie usually has to abridge the book in some way to fit time constraints. Replacing Glorfindel with Arwen managed to reduce the excess of minor characters to keep track of while simultaneously giving more time to a more important character who was given a short shrift in the book. That’s especially important because Tolkien’s under-writing of Arwen made Aragorn look like a jerk for the way he treated Eowyn. So the “Arwen, Warrior Princess” bit managed to strengthen the movie in a couple of ways; it seems like a good result for a minor infidelity to the original.
cat48
Seniors love free stuff/O should have included free aspirin, etc. w/the HC change and they would have liked HC!
OT: Sen Gregg tells the Hill that he doesn’t want Warren at CPFB because she “will promote social justice.” Beck really started something w/his hammering “social justice.”
mcd410x
Sullivan found this video over at Reason illustrating the Delaware election. And it’s actually funny.
Mary G
The Republicans are running ads in California over the scary music from “The Exorcist” all about how Barbara Boxer wants to take away our Medicare and voted to cut half a billion dollars, etc., etc., call her and tell her to knock it off. Makes me want to gag.
This is going to be very effective, I’m afraid to say. Many, many older people of limited means sign up for stuff like Secure Horizons and other Medicare Advantage plans. They get extra benefits included, like vision care and drugs, that cost a lot of money to buy separately. In return, of course, much like an HMO, you have to wait weeks to get an MRI approved or the OK to see a specialist, are limited in how many days you can stay in the hospital, can’t get some brand-name prescriptions, and so on.
They tend to feel it’s well worth it. The specter of having all the extras taken away is what’s fueling a lot of the “Hands Off My Medicare” tea party fervor. Not all old white people are in it to be bigots. They have a logical self-interest in continuing the status quo. I think the Democrats need to address this.
mcd410x
@El Cid: We will bankrupt the country because media type can’t do math.
You can book it.
slag
@Kay:
Awesome. The ad could star Sarah Bridge-to-Nowhere Palin.
General Stuck
OT
I really thing this is a seminal event in our politics, it’s Appomattox in reverse for the GOP. A passing of the dildo, so to speak, to the new guard and pure grade wingnut.
Oh hath the mighty fallen.
Warning – Blog whore alert
Tonal Crow
@General Stuck: Why isn’t she condemning Tolkien for promoting spiritism or Satanism or whatever wingnuts call cultural attitudes with which they disagree?
MikeB
Oh yeah, Mary G, the advantage plans have lots of nice little (inexpensive) perks,
but when you need serious medical attention, the old HMO cost cutting
measures kick in and you find yourself on the phone talking to some low level
office drone about how to get grandma into the hospital or the specialist’s
office.
I had this experience with my elderly mother in law several years ago,
when she suddenly needed surgery. I could not get approval for
anything for weeks. Since the plans use their own doctors, she did
not have a personal GP.
My doctor refused to see her until she went back on regular Medicare,
saying he didn’t want the advantage “plan” telling him how to treat his
patients.
A couple days later, we canceled the advantage plan, my doctor fixed her and all is well,
but beware the 14%.
Triassic Sands
In a sense it’s an even worse product. While there are virtually no good Republicans left in public office, there are worse, worser, worserer, and worserest [sic] Republicans. No one who assumes the mantel of Tea Bagger is going to come from anything but the worst possible category.
Imagine the difference between a Republican led Senate made up of 67 Olympia Snows, Scott Browns, etc. (the etc. is almost as long as the potential list — let’s see there’s Collins, and maybe Lugar…) and 67 Inhofes, DeMints, Rand Pauls, and Sharron Angles (not to mention O’Donnells).
In the first instance, we’d live in a Republican hell-hole, but the latter would probably mean internment camps, abortion would be a felony punishable by death, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid would be history, education would be privatized, the prison industry would be the largest sector of the economy…it’s too horrible to contemplate. With 67, the Republicans could begin to rewrite the Constitution and I think we have a pretty good idea of what that would look like. America’s borders would be overrun with immigrants — trying to get out. Just imagining such a scenario has made me physically ill…
Church Lady
@MikeB: I don’t have any idea what Medicare Advantage plan your mother was under, but it is nothing like the one my Mom uses. Her plan, Secure Horizons, has never given her any problems. She’s had two knee replacements under it and my father went through two years of dealing with three different types of cancer under that plan. They even covered his hospice care at 100%. Obviously, some of the plans are better than others and I’m sure their monthly premiums reflect that difference. My parents paid extra for the plan they chose, and Mom has been quite happy with it. When the Advantage plans are phased out, she will be really pissed, because her present internist (for the last 15 years) does not take traditional Medicare patients.