[Mb-civic] Where's the Budget Outrage? - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Where's the Budget Outrage?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006; A17

This week the Republican Party hopes to escape its immediate past. House 
Republicans will elect new leaders. They hope that the party's 
corruption scandal will be forgotten and that the names Tom DeLay and 
Jack Abramoff will become as unmentionable in their world as Lord 
Voldemort's is in Harry Potter's.

President Bush hopes for a new start with his State of the Union 
address. The words from last year he wants to wipe out of the political 
lexicon include "Brownie," "Katrina," "heck of a job" and "Social 
Security privatization."

But there is an uncomfortable bit of business left over from the 
Republican disaster year of 2005 that will test the seriousness of the 
party's supposed commitment to change. The cut-the-poor, 
help-the-big-interests federal budget passed last year needs final 
ratification in the House. The vote could take place as soon as tomorrow.

Let's be clear: Anyone who votes for this fiscal mess will be standing 
for the bad old ways of doing business in Washington. Those who do so 
will have no claim to being "reformers."

At least one Republican, Rep. Rob Simmons of Connecticut, has had a 
change of heart, thanks to laudable grass-roots pressure -- which, to 
his credit, Simmons acknowledged.

"I voted for it in December," Simmons said of the budget in a statement 
released last week. But after consulting with constituency groups, 
Simmons decided that the bill "remains unsatisfactory" and that "the 
budget, as it stands, falls short." Moderate Republicans who had no 
business voting for this bill in the first place should be challenged to 
join Simmons.

What was known when the budget was last approved was bad enough: that in 
merging the fiscal plans passed by the House and Senate, Republican 
leaders dropped Senate provisions that would have sought savings from 
drug companies and preferred-provider organizations and instead imposed 
new burdens on lower-income Americans who rely on Medicaid. The theme of 
this budget was: Protect the well-connected, bash the poor.

But since the last vote, new information has emerged that would more 
than justify a change of heart by Republicans who voted "yes."

It's worth citing in full the first paragraph of an important piece of 
investigative reporting last week by The Post's Jonathan Weisman: "House 
and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to 
complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to 
Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance 
industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan 
Congressional Budget Office."

What's wrong with this picture? First, a group of legislators who claim 
to want to reduce the deficit gutted a provision designed to save 
taxpayers money, after heavy lobbying by the health insurance industry.

Second, a Congress saying that it really, really wants to change the way 
it does business ratified a backroom deal in the wee hours of the 
morning that almost nobody who voted on it knew anything about. Many on 
the right have been waging war on "earmarks," those special projects 
that members of Congress insert into bills, often at the last minute -- 
and that have proliferated since the Republicans took over the House. 
But secret special-interest deals can be at least as costly, often more 
so, than many of those earmarks.

And yesterday the New York Times reported on a Congressional Budget 
Office study of the impact of this budget on the health coverage of 
poorer Americans. As the Times's Robert Pear reported, the study found 
that "millions of low-income people would have to pay more for health 
care under a bill worked out by Congress, and some of them would forgo 
care or drop out of Medicaid because of the higher co-payments and 
premiums."

How strange it is that while the president claims he wants to help 
people get health coverage, he and his party would support a budget that 
could force some poor Americans to walk away from care.

It's hard these days to get the media to pay attention to budgets and 
their impact on the lives of citizens. Budgets are complicated and easy 
to spin. It's much easier to generate immense moral outrage over a 
memoir writer who tells lies.

But long after we've forgotten the name of that writer, a mother on 
Medicaid will be deciding whether she can afford to take her sick child 
to see the doctor. Can we please spend at least a tiny bit of our moral 
outrage on her behalf?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/30/AR2006013001161.html
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