Politico:
GOP lawmakers square off against Trump
Senate Republicans spent the past week boxing in the president on Russia, health care and Robert Mueller
Senate Republicans spent their last week before a four-week August recess on a series of moves with one main goal: Reining in Donald Trump.
The GOP delivered an unstated declaration of independence from their own Republican president by passing a Russia sanctions bill he resisted, rebuffing his demands they try again on health care after the spectacular implosion of Obamacare repeal, even taking steps to head off any attempt by Trump to fire the special counsel investigating him, Robert Mueller.
McClatchy:
Senators move to protect Mueller inquiry from Trump interference
News of Mueller’s decision to impanel a grand jury, combined with the actions in the Senate to try and shield him, came just as most senators were fleeing the capital until after Labor Day, further increasing the drama that has marked the Trump-Russia story since the election.
Whether or not collusion ever occurred, the story has unfolded in a headline-a-day fashion through a torrent of leaks of information and constantly shifting explanations from White House officials and others around Trump, as well as outright lies.
Nicholas Bagley/Vox:
In April, Nicholas Bagley explained how President Trump possesses the power “to blow up insurance markets across the country.” Trump recently renewed his threats to do just that.
Unless and until Congress enacts a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, President Trump will be stuck implementing a law he detests. He has predicted that “ObamaCare will explode,” and in his frustration he will be sorely tempted to do everything in his power to make that prediction come true.
He may still have his chance. A pending court case, House v. Price (née House v. Burwell — and much turns on the name change), has given the administration a bomb it could use to blow up insurance markets across the country. At stake is the legality of the payments the federal government makes to insurance companies to help cover the medical expenses of low-income people.
Joshua Holland/Nation:
Medicare-for-All Isn’t the Solution for Universal Health Care
The health-care debate is moving to the left. But if progressives don’t start sweating the details, we’re going to fail yet again.
But that momentum is tempered by the fact that the activist left, which has a ton of energy at the moment, has for the most part failed to grapple with the difficulties of transitioning to a single-payer system. A common view is that since every other advanced country has a single-payer system, and the advantages of these schemes are pretty clear, the only real obstacles are a lack of imagination, or feckless Democrats and their donors. But the reality is more complicated.
For one thing, a near-consensus has developed around using Medicare to achieve single-payer health care, but Medicare isn’t a single-payer system in the sense that people usually think of it. This year, around a third of all enrollees purchased a private plan under the Medicare Advantage program. These private policies have grown in popularity every year, in part because the field has been tilted against the traditional, government-run program. Medicare Advantage plans must have a cap on out-of-pocket costs, for example, while the public program does not. Around one-in-four Medicare enrollees also purchase some sort of “Medigap” policy to cover out-of-pocket costs and stuff that the program doesn’t cover, and then there are both public and private prescription drug plans.
Axios:
Why 2018 could lead to more Medicaid expansion
It's never too early to start thinking about the upcoming 2018 elections. And while a lot of the focus so far has been on the House, a handful of hotly contested gubernatorial races could have higher stakes for health care — specifically, for the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion.
A raft of open governors' races next year will give Democrats a chance to replace some of the most stridently anti-expansion governors in the country — and, if they win even a few of those races, the chance to cover millions of currently uninsured people even as the Trump administration drags its heels on so much of the ACA.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Why Every House Race Will Be a National Battle
It was once unthinkable for candidates to advertise outside their districts. In 2017, it makes perfect sense.
For a sense of the enormous potential power of these forces, consider how quickly Bernie Sanders was able to rival Hillary Clinton's fundraising operation despite not spending years recruiting big donors nor having a former president standing at his side. It was mostly small donations from across the country. At the presidential level, with intense media attention, those donations can be activated by campaigns themselves. But for lower offices, especially little-covered House elections, it matters a lot that party networks can amplify anything even more rapidly than the old broadcast networks used to do with their nightly news shows.
How? In this case, the ad was made by Mark Putnam, a big-name Democratic campaign consultant who has helped win dozens of elections. It was boosted by Politico's "Playbook," one of the most influential email newsletters in politics, on Tuesday morning. 2 By Wednesday afternoon, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, announced herself as a supporter and a donor:
This didn't just happen. It was by design, and the design was possible because of the national institutions of our parties and how they can exploit both new and older media.
WaPo:
The Health 202: Here's why John McCain voted 'no' on health care
John McCain’s surprise, middle-of-the-night thumb down that sunk his party’s Obamacare repeal bill last week made for perfect political showbiz. But signals the Arizona Republican would be the final GOP defector were there all along. After all, McCain’s a mostly free spirit from a state that deeply benefited from the Affordable Care Act. And he likes some drama now and again.
McCain’s never really belonged to the brand of tea party-style Republicans who loved to rail against Obamacare. He criticized the ACA when he needed to, like when he was running for reelection in 2010 and again last year. But McCain didn’t share many of his colleagues’ perspective that virtually anything would be better than President Obama’s health-care law.
Besides, McCain is used to ducking the party line on other issues, too, like campaign finance reform and climate change.
“There’s a certain impulsiveness about McCain, and every once in a while he tends to stray from orthodoxy,” David Berman, a political science professor at Arizona State University, told me.
Binyamin Applebaum/NY Times:
Fewer Immigrants Mean More Jobs? Not So, Economists Say
When the federal government banned the use of farmworkers from Mexico in 1964, California’s tomato growers did not enlist Americans to harvest the fragile crop. They replaced the lost workers with tomato-picking machines.
The Trump administration on Wednesday embraced a proposal to sharply reduce legal immigration, which it said would preserve jobs and lead to higher wages — the same argument advanced by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations half a century ago.
But economists say the tomato story and a host of related evidence show that there is no clear connection between less immigration and more jobs for Americans. Rather, the prevailing view among economists is that immigration increases economic growth, improving the lives of the immigrants and the lives of the people who are already here.
“The average American worker is more likely to lose than to gain from immigration restrictions,” said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis.