This exchange from earlier in the week reminds us once again what a perfectly awful press secretary Robert Gibbs is:
TAPPER: First of all, just for the record, I’d like to voice my objection to this being off camera, on behalf of the TV people. President Obama has said that it’s –
GIBBS: To be on camera, Jake, you’d have to comb your hair. (Laughter.)
TAPPER: No, I wouldn’t –
GIBBS: — for the record.
TAPPER: — the camera would be on you. The camera would be on you.
Not exactly the model of decorum and charm one would hope for as the voice of the White House.
Now, presumably the president wants a press secretary who belittles reporters (on everything from inquiries about the “bow” to questions about the sequence of events on the AIG bonus debacle). And one supposes that he likes a press secretary who denigrates individual media figures. Otherwise he would put someone else in there, right? But it is harder to figure out what benefit the White House derives from the constant flow of non-answers and incomprehensible explanations on reasonable topics, like why unemployment is going up after we were told the stimulus plan would keep unemployment to 8%.
One school of thought is that no one really pays attention to Gibbs’s briefings since the president himself is constantly on TV. So what difference does it make if Gibbs is hyper-partisan, rude and inept? Another is that the media is so overly-sympathetic to Obama that Gibbs is unlikely to be held up as an example of secrecy and media hostility as Scott McClellan was. And then it might just be that the Obama administration is not really interested in communicating but in deflecting. Gibbs certainly has the part about ”don’t give out too much information” down.
But the test comes for press secretaries as scandals, bad news, and the passage of time erode their president’s popularity and the media’s patience with non-stop spin wears thin. The best press secretaries — Mike McCurry and Tony Snow, to name two — help presidents weather bad times. It is hard to imagine when the going gets tough that Gibbs will be the one to effectively defuse a crisis or lay out a convincing case for the administration. But for now he’s doing his level best not to let anything slip out.
Maybe I’m missing something – and if so, other subsequent comments will surely point it out – but why can’t the federal government not cover wounded vets directly, but simply pay the premiums for competing private plans? The vets would get superior coverage in their choice of hospitals, and taxpayers would save money that would otherwise go to administrative costs and bureaucratic waste.
You to understand where the Obama administration is coming from. They thought this would be an easy one to slip by the veterans. Like John Kerry they think the smart people go to college and the dumb people serve their country in the military.
Brian, as pointed out in the linked article, one big problem is that the costly care for injured veterans would then be part of the “life-time maximum” payout for the private insurance, this putting the veteran AND their family at risk for effective loss of their private insurance. The VA is supposed to offer unlimited care for service-related injuries to the vet no matter what. There isn’t a private insurance that doesn’t have a cap on it. Considering the cost of artificial limbs and rehabilitation for traumatic brain injury, those caps limit the care a Veteran would receive under private insurance, and then they’d be totally bare.
Originally the VA did not charge your insurance for care unrelated to your injuries. You got medical AND dental care for the rest of your life. The dental care has effectively gone bye-bye, and now any “non- service-injury-related” care is billed to the private insurance a vet may have. This would be the last step before totally dismantling the Veteran’s system. Not something that disabled vets, like myself, find particularly attractive.
To add to epador’s comments (in response to Brian), some in Congress would resist paying competitive private insurance premiums for vets because they would be a VERY large expense. Just to take my own case as an example, if my military retirement included enough to pay a monthly premium for competitive private insurance, on the basis Brian suggests, that would add about 20% to it each month. This would be a guaranteed cost per retiree, as opposed to a potential cost like covering medical procedures for service-related injuries.
Because the VA offers medical coverage for service-related injuries, retirees are able to purchase TRICARE insurance that is available only to servicemembers and their families, and has lower than market-competitive premiums. A move has been afoot for some time to increase those premiums, which would impose difficulty on some vets — but even with increases to the proposed levels, the premiums would still be lower than market-competitive rates.
We should not be fooled about the potential consequences of the Democrats’ proposal here. This is the perfect set-up for eventually hauling insurance companies into Congress to rake them over the coals for capping the benefits to wounded veterans. The day has passed when we might have been unjust to suppose that is a deliberate goal. It would be a stepping stone to increasing federal regulation of health insurance, and we cannot doubt that there are Democrats in Congress who have that objective in view.