Tag: support
Obama Health Nominee Wins Bipartisan Support

Obama Health Nominee Wins Bipartisan Support

Noam N. Levey, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s pick to assume oversight of his signature health law received added bipartisan support Wednesday as more Republicans joined Democrats backing her nomination for secretary of health and human services.

The growing support all but guarantees that Sylvia Mathews Burwell will be confirmed easily by the Senate to succeed Kathleen Sebelius, who has guided implementation of the Affordable Care Act for the past four years.

On Wednesday one of the Senate’s most conservative members, Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, introduced Burwell before her testimony in front of the Senate Finance Committee, praising her as a competent, common-sense leader whom he said he would vote for on the Senate floor.

Last week, Burwell garnered support from Republican senators John McCain of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina.

Burwell’s hearing also signaled an unusual reserve by GOP lawmakers, who in recent years have used almost every opportunity to attack the health law and push for its repeal.

Though committee Republicans kept up criticism of the law, several asked more measured questions about specific fixes for the legislation, rather than renewing their calls for full-scale repeal.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the senior Republican on the committee, called on Burwell to strengthen state insurance marketplaces created by the health law, several of which struggled in their first year.

Sen. Michael Crapo, R-Idaho, expressed interest in working with Burwell to protect seniors’ access to private Medicare plans, which the law aims to streamline by reducing government subsidies for the insurance companies that offer them.

Burwell, a West Virginia native and the daughter of an optometrist, currently serves as head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, one of the most powerful positions in most administrations.

Burwell is a veteran of the Clinton White House, where she was deputy director of the budget office.

After leaving the federal government, she worked for a decade at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, part of the time as its chief operating officer. Most recently, she headed the Walmart Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Lauded by Democrats and Republicans for her experience in and out of Washington, she was unanimously confirmed last year for the budget post.

Few believe Burwell’s confirmation as health secretary will end the political fighting over the Affordable Care Act. While the Finance Committee was considering her nomination, other GOP lawmakers kept up their attacks on the law on the Senate floor.

And at the Finance Committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, delivered a warning to Burwell that congressional Republicans remained very concerned about how the Obama administration had implemented the law.

“You are going to have to be willing to break the whatever-means-necessary mind-set,” he said.

The committee must vote on Burwell’s nomination before it reaches the floor. Changes in the filibuster rules will allow Democrats to confirm her with a simple majority, eliminating the need for Republican votes.

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier

Support Wanes For Repeal Of Obamacare, Surveys Suggest

Support Wanes For Repeal Of Obamacare, Surveys Suggest

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — By a substantial margin, Americans disagree with the Republican argument that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law should be repealed and replaced, but several weeks of relatively good news about the law have done little to change entrenched, partisan views of it.

Those are the conclusions of two newly released public opinion surveys, one by a nonpartisan organization, the other by a leading Democratic polling firm. They suggest that the potency of GOP arguments against the law have waned, but that it continues to be a risk for Democrats in key congressional races, particularly in the South.

Nearly 3 in 5 Americans said they would prefer to see their representatives in Congress “work to improve” the healthcare law rather than “work to repeal the law and replace it with something else,” according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation healthcare poll.

Kaiser, which has surveyed public opinion about the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, each month, found impressions of it warming slightly from the low points of November through January. Overall, however, opinions of the law remain negative, with 46 percent now having a generally unfavorable view of it and 38 percent generally positive, the poll found. Those views are sharply divided by party, as has been the case since the law passed.

A survey by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg found a similar division on the question of fixing the law versus repealing it. Among likely voters in competitive congressional districts, 52 percent say the country should “implement and fix the healthcare reform law” while 42 percent say they want to “repeal and replace” it, he found.

Compared with December, support for the “implement and fix” position has grown and sentiment for repeal has shrunk in the roughly 80 congressional districts that Greenberg surveys to analyze the battleground for this fall’s midterm election.

Independent voters in those districts, who favored repeal in December, now favor going ahead with the law, his polling indicated. Key Democratic constituency groups, such as college-educated women, have become more ardent in their support.

But one group stands out as bucking the trend: Voters in battleground districts in the South now support repeal by a bigger margin than they did in December, Greenberg found.

Southern opposition to the law could pose a significant problem for Democrats because three of the most competitive races in the battle for control of the Senate are taking place in Southern states: North Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The battleground districts that were surveyed include very few from those three states, so the poll doesn’t shed direct light on the Senate contests. But it does reinforce what other polling has shown about the intensity of Southern opposition to Obamacare.

The Kaiser survey found that almost 6 in 10 Americans believe that the number of people signing up for coverage under the law fell below expectations, even though enrollments actually beat the forecasts by about 1 million people.

About 4 in 10 people in the survey correctly said that about 8 million people had signed up. Even among that group, however, about half said the result had been below expectations.

Partisan divisions had an effect on people’s beliefs about enrollment numbers. More than 1 in 8 Democrats significantly overestimated sign-ups while about one-third of Republicans significantly underestimated them. The number correctly choosing the 8 million figure was similar in both parties.

Those who correctly identified the number of enrollments were somewhat more likely to say the law was functioning as intended, but even among those who significantly overestimated enrollments, a majority said the law was still not working as planned.

The most reliable predictor of whether a person thought the law was working was not whether he or she could correctly identify the number of enrollments, but partisanship.

Almost 80 percent of Republicans said they believed “it’s clear the law is not working as planned.” By contrast, just more than 60 percent of Democrats took the opposing position, that “there were some early problems that have been fixed, and now the law is basically working as intended.”

Among those who remain uninsured, Kaiser found, about 40 percent said they had not signed up for coverage because of cost. Another 12 percent said they had tried to get coverage but were unable to. Only 7 percent said they would rather pay a fine than buy insurance coverage.

On another controversial aspect of the law, Americans by about 2 to 1 said they supported the requirement that health plans cover the costs of birth control. Support for that requirement was particularly strong among women and Democrats. Americans over 65 and Republicans were less likely to support it.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule later this spring on a challenge to the contraceptive requirement.

LeDawna’s Pics via Flickr

Biden Vows U.S. Will Isolate Russia If Ukraine ‘Provocation’ Not Halted

Biden Vows U.S. Will Isolate Russia If Ukraine ‘Provocation’ Not Halted

Kiev (AFP) – US Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned Russia of isolation if it continues to try to “pull Ukraine apart” and pledged Washington’s strong support for Kiev’s leaders, as a Cold War-style confrontation over the former Soviet republic ratcheted up.

“We call on Russia to stop supporting men hiding behind masks in unmarked uniforms, sowing unrest in eastern Ukraine,” Biden said as he was wrapping up a two-day visit to Kiev.

“We have been clear that more provocative behavior by Russia will lead to more costs and to greater isolation,” said the vice president, who flew back to Washington hours later.

Biden’s warning came as signs on the ground made it clear that diplomacy was failing to calm the crisis — opening the door for more threatened U.S. sanctions on Moscow.

Overnight Monday, pro-Kremlin rebels in Ukraine’s east claimed control of the police station in the town of Kramatorsk, where they already occupied the town hall.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has more than 100 monitors in Ukraine, said the station’s police chief was abducted by the militants and called for his release.

In a statement, the OSCE chief monitor in the country, Ertugrul Apakan, condemned such “provocative actions,” saying they “can only worsen the existing tensions and contribute to further violence.”

Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said in his own statement that the new seizure “puts a cross through all the agreements reached in Geneva.”

He referred to an accord signed last Thursday by Ukraine, Russia, the United States and Europe designed to de-escalate the volatile situation and prevent it spiraling into civil war, or worse.

But the pro-Moscow separatists — who Kiev and Washington say are backed by Russian special forces — are ignoring the accord’s demands that they disarm and cease occupying buildings in a string of eastern towns.

Russia says Kiev’s leaders — whom it regards as illegitimate — are to blame for the collapse of the accord.

It says ultra-nationalists who were involved in months of Kiev protests that ousted pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in February killed rebels in an attack Sunday near the eastern town of Slavyansk.

A funeral for the militants was held on Tuesday. Bells rung loudly from Slavyansk’s Orthodox church and women wept as three coffins were carried out.

Tens of thousands of Russian troops are massed on Ukraine’s eastern border in what NATO believes is a state of readiness to invade.

The United States and NATO have responded by boosting their own forces in eastern Europe.

Biden, after meeting Ukraine’s leaders in Kiev, called on Russia to pull back those forces, and to reverse its annexation last month of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.

“We in the United States stand with you and the Ukrainian people,” Biden said in a joint news conference with Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

“There are some who are trying to pull Ukraine apart,” he said, clearly implying Russia.

Washington is threatening to impose more sanctions on Moscow on top of travel bans and asset freezes already applied to members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

“Time is short to make progress,” Biden warned.

He added that the United States was stepping up to help Ukraine lessen its dependence on Russian gas, fight corruption, and prepare for a May 25 election to choose a new president.

The United States, he said, wants to see Ukraine “hold together as a single state, united and sovereign.”

Yatsenyuk responded that Kiev valued the U.S. support against what he said was a Russia “acting like an armed bandit.”

But in Moscow, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the US threat of new sanctions.

“I am sure we will be able to minimize their consequences,” he said in a televised speech to the Russian parliament.

However he acknowledged that Russia’s economy was facing an “unprecedented challenge.”

Russia’s finance ministry said Monday the energy-rich nation could tip into “technical recession” over the next three months. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov warned last week that Russia was facing the toughest economic conditions since 2009, when it went into a serious slowdown.

Faced with a worsening crisis, Washington and Moscow have urged each other to rein in each side in Ukraine and revive the Geneva accord.

The European Union, meanwhile, is divided on going further with its own sanctions on Moscow, with some member states worried that increased punishment could jeopardize supplies of Russian gas.

As the crisis plays out, the insurgents in Ukraine’s east remain firmly entrenched in public buildings they have occupied for more than a week.

In the town of Lugansk, close to the Russian border, protesters who have been occupying local security buildings staged a fiery mass demonstration Monday and pledged to hold their own local referendum on autonomy on May 11, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

Although highly trained military personnel, whose camouflage uniforms are stripped of all insignia, are helping the rebels secure the some 10 towns they hold, Putin denies they are Russian special forces.

But the U.S. State Department released images Monday it claims proves some of the armed “separatists” in Ukraine are actually Russian military or intelligence officers.

In a separate development, Sweden, which is not a NATO member, announced Tuesday it was increasing defense spending because of the “deeply unsettling development in and around Ukraine.” It plans to boost its fleets of fighter jets and submarines.

AFP Photo/Maxim Shipenkov

Yellen: Slack U.S. Labor Market Still Needs Fed Support

Yellen: Slack U.S. Labor Market Still Needs Fed Support

By Paul Handley

Washington (AFP) – Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen argued Monday that the U.S. labor market remains slack and that Federal Reserve policy needs to stay focused on generating jobs.

In the clearest delineation of her priorities since taking the helm of the central bank in February, Yellen said the steady fall in the official unemployment rate to 6.7 percent masks deep weaknesses in the jobs market.

In a speech in Chicago, she pointed in particular to the high level of people unemployed for a long term, despite the rebound from the Great Recession.

“While there has been steady progress, there is also no doubt that the economy and the job market are not back to normal health,” she said.

“The recovery still feels like a recession to many Americans, and it also looks that way in some economic statistics.”

Yellen emphasized that even though the Fed has begun ratcheting down its huge bond purchase program, the slack in the labor market shows the economy still needs its support in the way of ultra-low interest rates and Fed programs for low-income communities.

She pointed to a woman, Dorine Poole, who lost a job processing medical claims at the outset of the 2008 crash and, despite lengthy work experience, still cannot find a full time position.

“When employers started hiring again, two years of unemployment became a disqualification,” Yellen said, pointing to a common problem of the post-recession period.

She also cited another woman laid off from a printing plant with much experience who now has to work part-time serving food samples in a supermarket.

For people like this, Yellen said, “the job market is tougher now than in any recession.”

“The numbers of people who have been trying to find work for more than six months or more than a year are much higher today than they ever were since records began decades ago.”

Overall, she said, the economy remains “still considerably short” of the Fed’s goals of maximum sustainable employment and stable inflation.

While inflation remains extraordinarily low and not a problem, she said the jobs market is a challenge, and that the Fed’s aim is to bring the unemployment rate down to 5.2-5.6 percent.

Addressing a current debate among economists and policy-makers, Yellen said some of the problem in fighting unemployment is “structural” — that many of the unemployed do not have the right skills for today’s economy.

But if that were the main problem, she argued, there would likely be more of an inflation problem and the Fed’s policy to encourage job creation via ultra-low interest rates would not have been as successful as it has been, pulling the rate down from 10 percent.

Moreover, she said, the evidence of a high level of people in part-time jobs, a very low level of turnover in those employed, a low labor market participation rate and extremely low wage growth, all point to significant cyclical slack in the jobs market.

“Based on the evidence, my own view is that a significant amount of the decline in participation during the recovery is due to slack, another sign that help from the Fed can still be effective.”

©afp.com / Brendan Hoffman