Charlie Dent responds to John Callahan on health care

Rep. Charlie Dent, who represents Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District, held a news conference yesterday for local press. The Morning Call, Northampton blogger Bernie O’Hare and I participated. Dent’s conference was a response to his opponent’s apparent position on health care.

Dent’s news conference was not unusual. It featured a Republican defending his vote against the Nancy Pelosi health care bill. What may make Charlie unusual, however, and what convinced me once again that Charlie should be seeking office someday beyond the Lehigh Valley is that in addition to telling us why he was against Pelosi’s bill, he actually talked about how they could craft a health care reform process that would get bipartisan support. We have heard far too little of that from our national GOP leaders.

Dent’s teleconference was prompted by a rally a week or so ago in front of his office in which MoveOn.org and the SEIU protested Charlie’s vote against the Pelosi lifetime employment for SEIU members health care bill. For those of you outside the area, this is the same SEIU union that got into the national news last week for attacking an Eagle Scout project to clean up a local park since it meant non-union volunteer labor was being used instead of SEIU members.

Dent alluded to that when he said of his likely Democratic opponent “John Callahan may want to do a better job of choosing his allies.” Amazingly, Callahan still will not take a stance supporting the Pelosi bill. He wants to do John Kerry one better and be for it WHILE he is against it.

Dent commented on this and had a word of advice for the Bethlehem mayor. “When you show up at a rally supporting a bill, you are supporting the bill,” Dent said.

Callahan, Dent said, danced around the issue in a Morning Call article. Dent declared “The Chicken Dance isn’t just for Musikfest anymore.”

Callahan supposedly referred to a question about how he would have voted as “hypothetical.” Dent noted “This is not a hypothetical vote. This is a real vote.” He told his opponent “You have to take positions on bills.” Congressmen can vote yes, not or present, he noted. “There is no button for maybe or possibly.”

We know how third party candidate Jake Towne would vote. He tells us on his website. He has told me in e-mails. We don’t know how John Callahan would vote. I welcome Callahan or his campaign to contact me. I’ll publish his views just as I publish Jake’s and Charlie’s but Callahan seems to want to remain safe within Bethlehem and to avoid having to be tied down to a position. In contrast, Pat Toomey, who is running for U.S. Senate but does not currently serve in government, has not only taken positions but has also debated Democratic candidate Joe Sestak on the issues. Should we expect less from Callahan?

Dent needled Callahan a bit more saying that if John needed a copy of the bill to read, he had it in his office and copies were available across the street from Callahan’s office at the public library. When I arrived for a one-on-one interview with Dent after the news conference, sure enough, the bill was on the table in his reception area. More on that interview next week.

Dent suggested that if Callahan had read the bill he’d find he could not support it based on his own rhetoric. Callahan said he would not support any cuts to Medicate. “The bill does cut Medicare by $500 billion over 10 years,” Dent declared. He made it clear that it was not just Medicare Advantage being cut.

Callahan said he would not support a bill that raised taxes or increased the deficit. Dent called it “laughable” that anyone could think the bill did not add to the deficit or raise taxes. “Nobody believes that but John Callahan,” Dent said.

I actually wrote an article on that theme back in late August. Barack Obama has said he would not cut Medicare, add to the deficit or raise taxes. That article pointed out how Obamacare, HR 3200, the leading bill at that time, did exactly that and how Obama could not, in his own words, support it.

Now, before the Democratic talking points respond that the CBO scored the bill as revenue neutral, Dent had a response to that. And, he is 100% correct. The CBO scoring is done over a finite period of time. That allows you to play games with revenue and expense to get neutrality. Often when working bills when I was doing tax policy work, we’d tinker with effective dates or even dates of required estimated tax payments to get the numbers to add up. Here they have done something far more sinister.

The “taxes on the rich” start in 2010. They start collecting additional tax revenue then. The public option comes into full play in 2014. As a result, when they score the bill, 10 years of revenue support 6 years of the program. It doesn’t take a genius to see that in the following 10 years, the program should cost nearly twice as much as it takes in from taxes. Even worse, it is revenue neutral in 2010-2019 as a whole but the program spends more than it takes in for those years that it operates.

Furthermore, as Dent discussed with me in our follow-up interview in his office, the revenue is being raised in a very dangerous way. In the Senate, they increase the Medicare tax by .5% on those with high incomes. Forget all that talk about lock boxes and accounting and all that. Never before has the FICA tax been used other than to increase the Social Security Trust Fund. Yes, the dollars go into the fund and get loaned out when the government is raising more in FICA than it is spending on Medicare or Social Security but this is the first time that FICA taxes are earmarked for something other than Social Security and Medicare. It is a dangerous precedent, especially when the 800 pound gorilla in the room remains the Social Security crisis.

Long before Pelosicare and Obamacare, for two decades at least, we have been looking at the looming Social Security crisis as baby boomers age. My aches and pains in the morning tell me that day is drawing near. That fix will take trillions! Some of that was always going to come from raising FICA taxes but now we are raising them for something else. Dent is one of the few (if not the only) who is sounding that alarm. If AARP wants a reason to be against the bill, this is it! They are raising the future Social Security cookie jar to fund this bill.

“That’s a big departure,” Dent said. That is an understatement. It is a monumental, game-changing departure. Yet, nobody is talking about it.

Taxing the rich was always another way to pay for Social Security. After the 5.4% surtax on the rich in the House bill, is there anything left to tax.

Even with the 10 years of taxes and 6 years of program, the bill was a revenue loser. So what do you do when that happens? You pull out part of the spending and do that as a separate bill. Sausage making, indeed. According to Dent, they pulled $200 to $300 billion out in the Medicare/Medicaid gap fixes and ran that as a separate bill.

So, with 10 years of taxes and with $200 to $300 billion under the rug, it doesn’t add to the deficit, assuming Congress makes no changes. “That is unrealistic,” Dent said.

The bill also cuts Medicare, Dent asserts, and goes beyond simply capturing cost savings. “Medicare needs to be reformed,” Dent admits. The Pelosi bill, however, he says, cuts Medicare and raises taxes “to create a new entitlement program.”

“There’s a need to reform Medicare,” Dent admits, “but not a need to cut a half trillion dollars out of Medicare.”

Perhaps the shining moment of the conference, however, was when Dent was asked why everything is so partisan. It is hard to think of another time when party-line votes were such deep lines in the sand.

Dent responded that it was due to the attempt to do everything at once which leads to things in the bill that are simply unacceptable. “You have to deal with this health care reform as a process,” he said. “The process has not lent itself to a bipartisan outcome.

Dent suggested that there should be a series of bills dealing with aspects of the issue. One might deal with Medicare and Medicaid reform and the issues associated with it. Another might deal with insurance and the elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions or the alternative of high-risk pools. Another would attack the medical liability issue that adds billions to our medical costs. Tax parity for those who pay for their own coverage and those who get employee coverage might be another bill. Health and wellness programs could be addressed in another.

Dent makes sense. The problem with Pelosicare is that it tries to do too much and frankly spends more time creating a government infrastructure and SEIU employment machine than it does addressing the simple issue of affordable and available health care.

Dent was asked if he was going after Callahan having the news conference. Dent referred back to Callahan and his attending the rally while saying he wasn’t sure how he’d vote and said “It’s beyond hypocrisy. It represents a failure in leadership.” He said of Callahan “He’s trying to have it both ways.”

As Dent said, politicians have only two ways to run “hard or unopposed.” His opponent, he noted took two months to say something on health care “and when he did, he equivocated.”

Dent also addressed Callahan’s record as mayor. I will deal with that elsewhere. Hey, you need to have some reason to buy The Press to read my stories!