Month: April 2013

Whose family is it anyway?

by digby

This is just heartbreaking:

A Lee’s Summit man is fighting a restraining order that he says was issued against him after he says he was arrested for refusing to leave the bedside of his sick partner.

Roger Gorley went to visit his partner, Allen at Research Medical Center, 2316 E. Meyer Blvd., Tuesday afternoon.

He says when he got there, a member of Allen’s family asked him to leave.

When Gorley refused, he says hospital security forcibly removed him from the property and put him in handcuffs.

“I was not recognized as being the husband, I wasn’t recognized as being the partner,” Gorley said.

While not legally recognized as a couple in Missouri, Gorley says he and his partner Allen have been in a civil union for nearly five years, and make medical decisions for each other.

He says the nurse refused to verify they also share joint Power of Attorney.

This is illegal:

Jan. 19, 2011

Patients at nearly every hospital in the country will now be allowed to decide who has visitation rights and who can make medical decisions on their behalf — regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or family makeup — under new federal regulations that took effect Tuesday.

The rules, which apply to hospitals participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, were first proposed by President Obama in an April memorandum and later implemented by the Department of Health and Human Services after a period of public review.

They represent a landmark advance in the rights of same-sex couples and domestic partners who heretofore had no legal authority to be with a hospitalized partner because they were either not a blood relative or spouse.

Hospitals must now inform patients, or an attending friend or family member, of their rights to visitors of their choosing. The policy also prohibits discrimination against visitors based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability.

Janice Langbehn, who was barred from her partner Lisa Pond’s bedside at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami for eight hours after she suffered an aneurysm in 2007, hailed the development as bittersweet justice.

“Other couples, no matter how they define themselves as families, won’t have to go through what we went through, and I am grateful,” she said. “But the fact that the hospital didn’t let our children say goodbye to their mom… That’s just something that will haunt me forever.”

Langbehn, 41, had raised three adopted teenage children with Pond, her partner of nearly 18 years. At the start of a cruise vacation to the Bahamas, Pond collapsed suddenly and unexpectedly and later died at the hospital.

The couple’s story, and forced separation during Pond’s dying hours, inspired Obama to pursue a change to government regulations.

“The president saw an injustice and felt very strongly about correcting this and has spoken about it often over the years,” White House deputy director of public engagement Brian Bond wrote on the White House blog.

I’m sure the hospital will say that he was disruptive when “the family” told him to leave his sick partner’s bedside. I’ve been around enough hospitals in my life to know that families and friends are often “disruptive” for any number of reasons. People are often stressed, sometimes to the breaking point. Rarely does a hospital issue restraining orders and never to a spouse. In fact, if this was a straight couple, the “family” would have been the ones evicted in a dispute like this.

Not to mention, the sheer inhumanity of forcing someone’s chosen life partner, wife, husband, significant other, best friend whatever — from beside their sickbed is overwhelming. It’s as low as it gets and anyone who does such a hideous thing deserves to be haunted by their cruelty.

I hope he sues this hospital and makes a ton of money. And the federal government should demand that this hospital reverse this decision or give up its funding. That’s what the order was designed to do.

You have to love this statement from the hospital:

We believe involving the family is an important part of the patient care process. And, the patient`s needs are always our first priority. When anyone becomes disruptive to providing the necessary patient care, we involve our security team to help calm the situation and to protect our patients and staff. If the situation continues to escalate, we have no choice but to request police assistance.

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No harm no foul? Then why do poor people need protecting from it?

by digby

Some details are emerging about the so-called “softening” of the Chained-CPI for the most vulnerable. Here’s one analysis of what we know so far from Shawn Fremsted at CEPR:

And a just-released White House fact sheet claims that the proposal is coupled with “measures to protect the vulnerable and avoid increasing poverty and hardship.”

Does this mean people who rely on means-tested benefits and low-income income people generally should breathe a sigh of relief? Hardly. Here are some reasons why (setting aside for the moment the impact of the chained CPI on Social Security for low-income retirees, which I’m sure my colleague Dean Baker will have more to say about):

1) Although Disability Insurance is not a means-tested benefit, the benefits it provides and the typical incomes of the workers receiving benefits are already quite modest. On average, female workers receiving Disability Insurance receive a benefit of only $993 a month and male workers receive a benefit of $1,256 a month. As a result, a woman with a disability living on her own and relying solely on an average Disability Insurance benefit has an income that is barely equal to the extremely austere poverty line (HHS’s monthly poverty guideline for 2013 is $958). Thus, for typical disabled workers receiving Disability Insurance, even seemingly modest benefits cuts over the short run can be a big deal. The White House fact sheet says that their plan includes a “benefit enhancement” for people who receive Disability Insurance benefits for more than 15 years, one that is phased in over a subsequent 10-year period. But that means 15 years of cuts first. And many disabled workers will not live long enough to see any of the subsequent phased-in “enhancement.”

2) The exemption of means-tested programs (including Medicaid, ObamaCare premium assistance, Supplemental Security Income, Pell Grants, and certain nutrition assistance programs) and the poverty guidelines detailed in the White House fact sheet will almost certainly be only a very temporary exemption. Once the chained CPI is adopted for the tax code and Social Security—an immensely popular program, in large part because it is tied to workers’ contributions—it will only be a matter of time until it is applied to the less-popular, non-contributory means-tested ones. And, until the chained CPI is applied to means-tested programs, conservative opponents of those programs will have a field day decrying what I imagine they’ll label along the lines of “liberals’ special treatment for welfare recipients” and perverse preference for “welfare over work.” It’s worth remembering here that some means-tested programs have no automatic inflation adjustments. Funding for Temporary Assistance, for example, has been frozen in nominal dollars for nearly two decades. So, advocates for low-income people shouldn’t be optimistic about holding the line against the chained CPI in the means-tested programs that lucky enough to have COLAs.

Once applied to means-tested programs, the chained CPI would produce substantial cuts over time as Alison Shelton of the AARP Public Policy Institute shows in an excellent brief detailing the impact of the chained CPI on benefit programs.

3) Applying the chained CPI to the tax code will reduce the value of refundable tax credits, particularly the Earned Income Tax Credit, and increase tax rates on low-income, working class people. CBO had previously estimated that the cuts to refundable tax credits would add up to $17.9 billion over the next ten years. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center has estimated that 45 percent of tax units in the lowest income quintile (below $26,000) and 84 percent of tax units in the second quintile (roughly $26,000 to $47,000) will pay about $175 more on average in taxes in 2020. Now, this may not seem like a lot, but if you’re a poorly compensated worker trying to raise two children on $10 an hour, every dollar counts.

And again, if the Chained-CPI is just a “re-calculation” that more accurately reflects the cost of living, why should this be necessary? It should be no harm, no foul, right?

Unless the truth is that these programs are already inadequate and this will make things worse, there should be no need to mitigate its effects in the first place. And if this is any indication, even that mitigation isn’t going to help much.

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The ideologues are right. The technocrats are incompetent.

by David Atkins

Does anyone think this means tested Rube Goldberg Social Security slicing machine is actually supposed to work?

The White House, fighting back against liberal critics who say he’s giving away too much, released details Wednesday of the protections Obama would include to make sure older seniors and low-income people don’t get hurt by lower benefits.

He’d give a special increase in Social Security benefits, starting at age 76, to help compensate older seniors for the losses that would build up over time. And he’d exempt several social programs that are focused on low-income people.

But here’s who wouldn’t be protected: Seniors younger than age 76, veterans who get compensation for war-related injuries, and some low-income families who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit. The proposal also wouldn’t stop people from rising into higher tax brackets more quickly, since the tax brackets won’t get as much of an adjustment for inflation.

What are the details?

To help older seniors recover from smaller Social Security increases, Obama would include a special hike in benefits that would be phased in over 10 years. It would start at age 76, and seniors would get the full increase at age 86. They’d get about 5 percent of the average retiree benefit, which would be around $800 today.
But everyone under age 76, of course, would still get the smaller cost-of-living increases with nothing to make up for it. And even the 76-year-olds wouldn’t get very much, since it would take 10 years for them to get the full increase. (One bit of good news: If they live to age 95, they’d get a second increase.)
The proposal would also carve out several social programs that have means-tested benefits, meaning they’re aimed at people with low incomes. They include Supplemental Security Income, a program liberals specifically wanted to be exempt because it helps low-income seniors and people with disabilities.

So basically, in true neoliberal fashion, a complex maze of subsidies and cuts that directly harm the middle class and the poor as well, but attempt to protect the most destitute through an arcane set of strictures that only a government technocrat or insurance adjuster could love. Much like the Affordable Care Act, really, except where the Affordable Care Act seeks to expand benefits, the Social Security cut seeks to remove them.

And the political consequences?

Administration officials spent most of Wednesday insisting that chained CPI was the Republicans’ idea, not Obama’s, and that he’d only agree to it if it had these protections and was included in a broader deficit reduction package. “The offer that is there for Speaker [John Boehner] is not an a la carte menu,” National Economic Council director Gene Sperling told reporters Wednesday.
But now that it’s in Obama’s budget, he owns the details – including who’s protected and who’s not.

And thus is destroyed the notion that the Democratic Party will protect Social Security.

This isn’t just a failure of an overly conservative Administration that has somehow bought into the austerity line. It’s not just the failure of a Washington culture dominated by corruption and neoliberal economic theory.

It’s also the failure of a crew of Ivy League technocratic wonks in love with their ability to design complicated legislative contraptions designed to cut costs by using abstruse measures to slice away fat from people they think can take it, while leaving just enough meat on the bone so no one completely starves.

The complexities of this Social Security “solution” remind one of the Affordable Care Act. The answer to the healthcare crisis should have been Medicare for All from the very beginning. Politically feasible? Perhaps not. But that should have been the starting point for negotiations.

And the answer to the Social Security non-crisis, such as it is, should be to raise the payroll cap. It’s that simple. Politically feasible? Perhaps not. But that should be the starting point.

It’s impossible to prove, of course, but one gets the sense that these arcane machinations are being pursued not so much out of necessity, as out of a wonkish belief that the new crew of preppy budget wonks can rightsize the government to behave with greater efficiency and lower cost without real damage to the system. It’s as though the lean company craze that overtook corporate America in the 1990s has finally hit the government as well, with predictable results.

The Obama Administration promised a bloodless government that abandoned ideology in order to reach across the aisle to do what is “practical.” The only problem is that trend-seeking Ivy League wonks vastly overestimate their ability to cut efficiently and bloodlessly without nicking an artery. “Practical” is usually in the eye of the beholder. When all the beholders went to Harvard and make six figures, their eyes tend to shaded.

There is a reason that most voters make their political decisions based on values, not on specific policies. It’s not because they’re ignorant rubes. It’s because values are meaningful, and worldviews inform good decision-making. Voters support political parties not because they’re blind followers of their “team” (though there is some of that), but because they trust that a politician who belongs to one of those parties will share their values. Voters don’t want to have to evaluate every politician’s individual stand on every issue. They just want to know that the politician would do as they would do if it were their job to make laws.

If one believes that government benefits are bad, and that lazy people become too dependent on them while starving Wall Street of the potential investment income from that luscious cash pension, then slashing Social Security makes a lot of sense. But if that’s true, the answer isn’t to slice away at it gently. The answer is to eliminate it entirely and shove everyone into a 401K.

If, on the other hand, one believes that the market is cruel, predatory and unstable, and that working people deserve a decent, secure and sizable income on which to retire, then the answer is to expand Social Security while raising the payroll cap.

One of those two sides is right and the other is wrong. We have elections to determine which direction the people want to go. That’s what politics is all about. Trying to split them down the middle isn’t just moral cowardice and lack of clarity. It’s also amazingly incompetent as a matter of policy.

Slicing away and rejiggering social security for various age groups is stupid. It’s short-sighted policy, meaningless in terms of cutting earned benefit shortfalls, and damaging to seniors and working people of all ages. There’s no philosophical or ideological grounding for it. It just looks like an experiment for wonks who think they’re far smarter than they are.

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Rand Paul makes a pilgrimage

by digby

I missed this earlier today. I can hardly believe it:

Rand Paul going to one of the top historically black colleges in the U.S. and trying to school students on who founded the NAACP?

Priceless.

Rand Paul going to one of the top historically black colleges in the U.S. and trying to make a case for his Republican Party as a historic and continuing defender of the civil rights of African-Americans?

Not boring.
[…]
Paul, a libertarian considered a potential 2016 presidential contender, forgot the name of the first popularly elected African-American senator in the U.S., who just happened to be Howard graduate Edward Brooke, a Republican who represented Massachusetts in the 1960s and ’70s.

And he drew groans and guffaws when he asked those in the crowded auditorium if they knew that black Republicans founded the NAACP in the early 1900s.

Oh my dear God. He went to Howard University and spoke to the students as if they were mentally handicapped 6 year olds? He actually thought these college students didn’t know that the NAACP was created by black Republicans? Yikes. It’s lucky he didn’t decide to tell them a nice story about a man named Abraham Lincoln.

He says he isn’t a racist and maybe that’s so. But he sure thinks black people are idiots.

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We’ll call it Nuge’s Law


by digby

Will the (possible) new background check deal announced in the Senate today at least keep this nut from being allowed to have guns?

Ted Nugent, the controversial rocker-turned-gun rights advocate, is quite the fan of violent rhetoric, as was evident again this week during an interview on the NRA News program “Cam & Co.” 

Throughout the course of an interview loosely focused on the latest Congressional gun control efforts, Nugent riffed on several of his common talking points, including his disapproval of President Barack Obama and his distrust of any form of gun control legislation. 

Show host Cam Edwards helped fan the flames, suggesting that the version of universal background checks legislation being debated in the Senate is essentially “the Ban Ted Nugent Act of 2013″ and could lead to felony convictions for using a borrowed gun.
“It’s time to take a side,” Nugent said, referring to moderates. 

Nugent also reminded Edwards of comments he made in April of 2012, when he vowed to “either be dead or in jail by this time next year” if Obama was reelected. 

“The left dominates the public discourse,” Nugent told the host. “And here we are, with the Chicago gangster, ACORN rip-off, scam artist-in-chief because we, who know better, were silent… But when I kick the door down to the enemy’s camp, would you help me shoot somebody? Just help me clear the room.”

The gun proliferation supporters are always saying that they agree the dangerous mentally ill should be kept from having guns.   Just saying … I think we can find common ground.

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No, a thousand times no, this is not a new idea


by digby

I wrote the other day about the inside-the-beltway Democratic insistence that we need to cut Social Security before the Republicans gain total power and throw us all in FEMA camps.  Or something.

Anyway, here it is in black and white:

“We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If he doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years,” said a longtime Obama aide, referring to the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate who proposed a sweeping overhaul of Medicare that would replace some benefits with vouchers.

Except Ryan didn’t propose to cut Social Security did he? No, that’s a Democratic priority these days.

This article also asserts that that the president never really wanted to curb entitlement growth and that he’s only doing this because he has to, blah,blah, blah:

Anxiety, not ideology prodded Obama to push for entitlement savings, people close to the president say. Obama has told people in his orbit that he feels “squeezed” by the rise of entitlement spending and sees it as a threat to getting anything else done, especially his plans for increased education and infrastructure spending.
[…]
The time to pay up is now, Obama’s aides say, and the White House needed to offer something to bring Republicans back to the bargaining table. They insist that he’s opposed to deeply cutting entitlements and is willing to do only the bare minimum needed to get a deal done.

That is ridiculous. He’s been saying he wants to do this since before he was inaugurated, in January of 2009:

I asked the president-elect, “At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?”

“Yes,” Obama said.

“And when will that get done?” I asked.

“Well, right now, I’m focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you described is exactly what we’re going to have to do. What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government? What are we getting for it? And how do we make the system more efficient?”

“And eventually sacrifice from everyone?” I asked.

“Everybody’s going to have give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin the game,” Obama said.

The very first order of business after the stimulus package was the “fiscal responsibility summit” which he characterized (again before the inauguration) this way:

President-elect Barack Obama will convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” in February designed to bring together a variety of voices on solving the long term problems with the economy and with a special focus on entitlements, he said during an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors this afternoon.

“We need to send a signal that we are serious,” said Obama of the summit.

Those invited to attend will include Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.), ranking minority member Judd Gregg (N.H.), the conservative Democratic Blue Dog coalition and a host of outside groups with ideas on the matter, said the president-elect.

Obama’s comments came in a wide-ranging, hour-long interview that came just five days before he will be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States and become the first African American to hold that title.

Obama said that he has made clear to his advisers that some of the difficult choices–particularly in regards to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare – should be made on his watch. “We’ve kicked this can down the road and now we are at the end of the road,” he said.

It is simply not debatable that this agenda has been his agenda since the beginning. He specifically said it, it cannot be any clearer. The idea that it’s only in reaction to some new “squeeze” or because the Republicans demand it in order to get a deal is simply not born out by the history. It’s very hard for me to understand how they can say this with a straight face — and how otherwise intelligent people continue to find ways to believe it.

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Seniors get what they deserve for failing to breed enough

by digby

Here’s your last honest Republican:

Those seniors created this mess. They were born into the most affluent and productive society on Earth, they had their fun in the 1960s and 70s, and they didn’t have enough kids to leave a strong work force to support them. But no, we certainly can’t talk about limiting benefits. That’d be unfair and shocking!

Now that’s telling it straight. The dirty hippies of the 60s and 70s (of course we were mostly just kids) failed to breed properly so we deserve to starve when we’re old. That’s actually the first thing anyone’s said that has any real logic behind it all day. Heartless and cruel, but logical.

Unfortunately, it’s also true that the baby boomers like me have been pre-paying into the system for decades (it’s called the Social Security Trust Fund) so that we wouldn’t overly burden the next generation. Not only that we were such foolish youngsters we thought that since we were a big bulge in the population (though no fault of our own — we didn’t ask to be born) we should also delay our retirement until we are 67. I remember it being sold to us at the time as the only fair thing to do for our future children. Apparently, we were fools. Not the first time.

But then so are the kids coming up behind who support these changes. It’s only going to get worse for them. I know. I’ve been there. They’ll screw you too.

*By the way, breeding isn’t the only way you solve a demographic problem. There’s a little thing called immigration that works quite nicely. Unless you’re concerned about “bloodlines” or some other medieval bullshit.

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Who needs history?

by digby

We are doomed:

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Senior Moments

by digby

I realize that Democrats believe they no longer have any need for the senior vote — or even the over 40 vote for that matter. But they do need a few old duffers in order to win elections. Obama did get 45% of them in the last election, and majorities of them in the blue states. Democrats might be just a little bit foolish to write them off completely.

This report by Social Security Works and Lake Partners from a couple of years ago showed how people felt about Social Security, medicare and the deficit prior to the 2012 election. I suppose this could have dramatically changed since then, but for argument’s sake let’s assume the attitudes haven’t even if their partisan alliances have.

Here are some highlights:

It’s also true that the report showed that while Democrats hugely lost their advantage on these issues in 2010, they had regained it by 2012. I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that the Republicans are planning to repeat their 2010 success with seniors and near seniors by demagoguery the holy hell out of this issue. Why wouldn’t they? The Senate is very much in their reach and seniors are a group that votes in large numbers in off year elections.

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Quotes of the Day: Republicans accusing Democrats of balancing the budget on the backs of seniors

by digby

I think we all know that if this thing ever makes it to the floor, it’s going to take some major arm twisting by the Democratic leadership to force their troops to take the heat and pass it.

Here’s what they have to look forward to:

On the eve of President Obama’s budget presentation, a Western New York Republican joined the AARP in criticizing an expected decrease in the amount paid out in Social Security benefits by restructuring cost of living adjustments. Chris Collins says the move would hurt seniors and veterans.

“If you change the calculation of the consumer price index and how you calculate inflation, that’s going to continue to pinch our seniors who, come the end of the month, the stories I hear, are having trouble putting food on the table,” Collins said.

[…]

“I’m frankly very disappointed that he (Obama) is focusing on seniors,” Collins said.

Collins says there are other, more obvious cuts in spending that could be made. Collins expects his GOP colleagues to join him in opposing an expected call from the President for increased tax revenue and spending.

“He doesn’t think we have a spending problem. He thinks we have a revenue problem and the cuts he’s making are on the backs of our seniors,” Collins said.

The AARP recently polled its members in New York and found most oppose benefit decreases. In this case, Collins agrees.

“If you look at what you would call the Ryan Budget; that budget was balanced without taking things away from seniors,” Collins added.

Meanwhile, about that backdoor tax increase on the middle class, Norquist predictably has something to say:

President Barack Obama unveiled a budget proposal on Wednesday morning that would switch tax brackets and Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, which are indexed for inflation, from the current version of the Consumer Price Index to a “chained CPI,” which says inflation rises more slowly. The change would reduce future benefit increases and push more taxpayers into higher brackets, a phenomenon known as “bracket creep.”

Americans for Tax Reform, the advocacy group that asks lawmakers to sign a formal “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” said Tuesday that chained CPI violates the pledge.

“Chained CPI as a stand-alone measure (that is, not paired with tax relief of equal or greater size) is a tax increase and a Taxpayer Protection Pledge violation,” the group said in a blog post.

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, leader of the organization, criticized the policy via Twitter on Wednesday. “Chained CPI is a very large tax hike over time,” Norquist wrote. “Hence Democrat interest in same.”

As I wrote yesterday, I don’t know that Americans would even object to those tax hikes if it was going to shore up Social Security, especially if it was rationally combined by lifting the cap on what wealthy earners have to contribute. But it isn’t. The money raised from the Chained-CPI will go toward paying for George W. Bush’s wars and recessions, while the cuts will be born by the elderly the sick and the veterans.

I doubt that most congressional Democrats even know that these taxes won’t go to Social Security. Who would expect such an absurd proposal? But perhaps now that this is out in the open they will realize what they’re asking the poor, the sick and the veterans to do in the quixotic pursuit of a Grand Bargain. One hopes they will anyway. Because if they don’t, I’m fairly sure the Republicans have figured it out.

Update: Oh, and in case the Democrats are still thinking this won’t blow back on them, here’s the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee on CNN this morning:

BLITZER: Let’s get some Republican reaction to what we just heard from the President of the United States. Representative Greg Walden of Oregon is joining us right now. He’s the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Congressman, what did you think of the president’s remarks?

REP. GREG WALDEN (R-OR), CHAIRMAN, NRCC: Well, I thought it very intriguing in that the budget really lays out kind of a shocking attack on seniors, if you will. And we haven’t seen all the detail yet, and we’ll look at it, but I’ll tell you, when you’re going after seniors the way he’s already done on Obamacare, taking $700 billion out of Medicare to put into Obamacare, and now coming back at seniors again, I think you’re crossing that line very quickly here in terms of denying access to seniors for health care in districts like mine, certainly, and around the country. I think he’s going to have a lot of pushback from some of the major senior organizations on this and Republicans, as well.

And this is a budget that doesn’t balance. At the end of the day, you can have all the flowery rhetoric, but I’m a numbers guy and this doesn’t add up. It does not balance. We’ve passed the Ryan budget. It does balance in ten years; it will put us on a path to grow the economy and jobs. And, again, gets us to where we have a balanced budget. This is 65 days late and it doesn’t add up.

BLITZER: Well, let’s talk about these proposed changes that the president is putting forward when it comes to Social Security and Medicare, the shocking proposals that you say the president’s putting forward that could affect seniors. What’s so shocking about changing that CPI, that consumer price index the way that you would determine how much inflation would go ahead with increases for Social Security recipients, for example?

WALDEN: Well, once again, you’re trying to balance this budget on the backs of seniors and I just think it’s not the right way to go.

BLITZER: But doesn’t the — doesn’t Paul Ryan’s budget have major changes as far as Social Security and Medicare concerned, as well?

WALDEN: Look, it doesn’t — yes, but it doesn’t do that. And so I just think there’s some — you know, it’s all about when you get to the specifics. And what does that really mean down on the ground? You know, the president just said that his proposals will reduce the cost of health care. Where did we hear that before? We heard that premiums for a family on — for health insurance would go down $2,500 if his plan was adopted and we now see them going up $2,000 in my state to $3,000.

So you’ve got to cut through the rhetoric, Wolf, which, of course, you all and your team will do and get into the real facts and figures and so will we. But I don’t see this budget as either on time, adding up, balancing, and, further, I think it really does go right at seniors in a way they’re going to be shocked, coming out of the administration.

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