That’s because the president did exactly what needs to be done: take steps to address Medicare’s fiscal problems. Everyone knows spending in the program is unsustainable. There are two ways to tackle that reality: spend less money or find more money to spend. The reform law does both.

It will lower reimbursements to hospitals and nursing homes. It creates an independent advisory board, a panel of health experts, charged with making recommendations to slow spending in the huge program. What the panel proposes will be enacted unless Congress intervenes. That is exactly what was needed, since Congress has proven itself unable to stand up to special interests and make necessary reductions by itself.

The law also raises taxes on wealthy Americans to help shore up the hospital insurance funded by payroll taxes. The government has estimated “Part A” of Medicare will be depleted within a decade. Yet as the cost of care has grown and more people signed up for coverage, Congress has refused to increase the payroll tax rate to cover the expense.

Our elected officials have starved Medicare. They add costly benefits, such as prescription coverage, without increasing the revenue to pay for such changes. People like Romney insist the program is structurally and fundamentally flawed. It’s not. But in choosing Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, it’s clear how Romney wants to “fix” Medicare.

It doesn’t get much worse than the congressman’s plan.

In a nutshell, Ryan proposes providing subsidies so seniors can sign up for commercial insurance. Instead of Medicare directly paying your doctor, the government would send a check to the private insurer who is supposed to be managing your care. Such an arrangement has been a proven fiscal failure in “Medicare+Choice” plans in the 1990s and in Medicare Advantage plans today. It costs taxpayer more than basic Medicare, and it creates confusion for seniors. Some health providers would not accept these plans.

But some politicians just keep pushing the idea. They keep saying that the private sector is better than the government at delivering health care. They keep hoping Americans will believe it’s true. Fortunately, Americans didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.

Who owns the most luxurious buildings in town, pays sky-high CEO salaries and spends a fortune on “administrative expenses”? Private insurance companies. Where do they get their money? From the increasingly expensive premiums their customers pay. That money spent on board member salaries and country club memberships for executives is money not spent on health care.

The American public is supposed to believe that if we hand these same companies billions of dollars from citizens and tell them to take over the care of millions of seniors, they are going to make better use of the money than the government-run Medicare program?

Romney and Ryan want Americans to think government can’t be trusted. Instead, we are supposed to trust — and give more tax money — to private insurers. Miraculously, that will cure what ails Medicare. It should be hard for seniors, or any American who plans on growing old, to get excited about that idea.

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The Gazette. Aug. 17, 2012.

Voter fraud hunt not Lone Ranger task

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz is hunting for evidence of voter fraud in Iowa. As commissioner of elections, that’s his prerogative. And if he uncovers problems in need of fixing, all the better.

But we don’t believe Schultz should be playing Lone Ranger with an issue as important as voting rights.

Schultz is cross-matching records of foreigners who have Iowa driving permits with voter registration data to see if any noncitizens are unlawfully registered to vote. He’s identified about 1,000 names that will now be checked against a federal list of naturalized citizens. Red-flagged names will be removed from voter rolls.

We support efforts to keep noncitizens from voting, although we doubt the problem is widespread. What we don’t support is Schultz’s unilateral decision to make “emergency” rule changes to accommodate this digging, sidestepping legislative oversight and public input. That action has resulted in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of United Latin American Citizens. And when the Legislature’s Administrative Rules Review Committee asked Schultz to appear and explain his actions, he was a no-show.

It’s not only legislators left in the dark. County auditors from both parties have complained that Schultz’s office hasn’t informed them of these changes, or that a Division of Criminal Investigation agent has been assigned to investigate potential fraud. Elected local officials on the voting front lines should know about rule changes and investigations that will impact their offices.

We’ve been supportive of Schutz’s efforts to safeguard voting and to require voters to show a photo ID at the polls, so long as that ID is free of charge and easy to get. But we do not support his rush to make significant rules changes ahead of the fall election or his refusal to explain his objectives to lawmakers. He is the commissioner of elections, but that does not excuse him from reasonable scrutiny.

Removing names from voter rolls is no small matter. Any changes to that process should be made through the formal rule-making process, which includes a public hearing and legislative oversight. We see no emergency that should short circuit that process.

If unlawful voting exists, we want it discovered. Hopefully, the DCI expertise will provide an answer not tainted by partisan politics.

We’re also concerned that too few Iowans show up to cast votes in elections with huge consequences for their communities. We’d like to see Schultz address that issue with as much zeal as he chases fraud.

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Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. Aug. 19, 2012.

Campaign stop has familiar ring

We hear a lot these days about how the country is so divided politically.

Words like “polarization,” ”gridlock,” super-heated rhetoric and an us-versus-them attitude seem to be the order of the day.

Candidates throw out barbs known as “red meat” to motivate their followers.

Amid all that gamesmanship, people in the middle wonder what’s happened to the country, whether democracy works and if anything of substance will ever be accomplished again.

Relax. Political rhetoric has always been part and parcel of American politics.

A case in point is The Courier’s own coverage of a presidential visit to Waterloo 60 years ago. It bears many parallels to President Barack Obama’s campaign stop here last week.

On Oct. 29, 1952, an estimated 10,000 people turned out to hear President Harry Truman speak in Waterloo. It was covered by The Courier’s Bill Severin.

Truman spoke from the back of a train on a whistle-stop tour. But this was not his legendary comeback re-election win of 1948. The president, embroiled in the Korean War and lambasted for, among other things, his dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, was hardly the most popular man in America. He had decided not to seek re-election. But he was still, true to his nickname, “Give ‘Em Hell Harry,” doing just that to the Republican establishment.

He said if the “reactionary Republican Old Guard” was put in place it would result in World War III, which he said U.S. and U.N. forces there were trying to prevent by containing the Korean conflict. He also blasted congressional Republicans for opposing farm price supports (a minimum $1.60 bushel for corn) and for passing the Taft-Hartley Act, which he said threatened the gains of organized labor.

As was the case with Obama’s visit, a Republican “truth squad” of Midwestern senators shadowing Truman on his tour, labeled his charges “silly,” ”poor arithmetic,” and said his speech was “disjointed and inaccurate as usual.”

Local politicos also lined up on either side of the fence. Among the local Democrats riding on Truman’s train from Manly to Waterloo were developer Max Guernsey and attorney Ed Gallagher. Among locals joining the Republican “truth squad” were attorney W. Louis Beecher and Congressman H.R. Gross.

Truman apparently took no direct jabs at Republican presidential nominee Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, but did have a barb for Ike’s running mate, Richard Nixon.

Someone in the crowd shouted, “Are you going to talk any more about Nixon?” Truman replied, “No, I’m only talking about the issues. I don’t go down to lower levels.”

Plenty of rhetoric to go around. Yet, in the long view of history, the republic survived. In fact, Truman and Eisenhower are considered two of our greatest post-World War II presidents. They stood for civil rights and forged a foreign policy which, consistently followed, led to the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

This year’s election rhetoric, too, shall pass, and our republic will endure.

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Iowa City Press-Citizen. Aug. 18, 2012.

Gas tax needs to be part of state discussion

Gov. Terry Branstad has been using his bully pulpit lately to renew discussion about raising the state’s gas tax to help pay for needed infrastructure improvements.

Earlier this month, Branstad told about 65 people during a town hall meeting in Onawa that there could be public support for increasing the gas tax between 8 and 10 cents over three years if it’s linked to decreases in property and income taxes.

We’ve said before that, rather than having state and federal governments continue to play shell games with gas taxes on consumers and subsidies to producers, we wish the government would do more to step out of this process altogether and allow Americans to pay the true cost of gasoline.

And because new fuel efficiency technologies are making per gallon gas use a less accurate indicator of actual road use, we wish the state and federal government would come up with more accurate ways of measuring a driver’s wear-and-tear on the public road system. (Perhaps something like the Vehicle Miles Traveled tax, which was studied by the University of Iowa last year, as a way to track the number of miles each vehicle travels and assess tax on a per-mile basis.)

But with neither of those changes likely to happen any time soon — and with 22 percent of Iowa’s bridges having been rated deficient last year, and with Iowa facing a $215 million annual shortfall in revenue needed to maintain the road system — a gas tax increase seems a possible fix in the short term.

At least, that’s what a citizens’ panel appointed by Branstad recommended last year, and that’s what a bipartisan group of legislators supported during the recent legislative session when they proposed a 10 cent per gallon increase in gas taxes over the next two years. (The increase would have been more than sufficient to cover the annual deficit.)

The proposal, however, aroused far more bipartisan opposition than it did bipartisan support. An Iowa Poll commissioned by The Des Moines Register in February showed that 68 percent of respondents opposed such a hike while only 31 percent supported it.

We were disappointed that — for whatever reason — the governor decided against using the full power of his bully pulpit to back an increase during the legislative session. But since the session ended, he has been spreading the word that the state needs to discuss increasing the gas tax for the first time since 1989.

Although the idea of a gas tax remains highly unpopular during these troubled economic times, something does need to be done to address Iowa’s aging infrastructure needs. A report released last fall by Transportation for America found that only two states, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, had a higher percent of deficient bridges than Iowa.

And at 40.4 cents per gallon (with 21 cents coming from state taxes), Iowans pay the lowest gas tax of any of the surrounding states other than Missouri (35.7 cents). Even with a 10 cent per gallon increase, Iowa would rank third among those surrounding states, with Wisconsin (51.3 cents) and Illinois (62.8 cents) still higher.

It’s unclear whether lawmakers would support linking a gas tax increase to decreases in income taxes. But we’re glad the governor has stopped trying to avoid the issue and, at least, has begun floating the idea as a pre-election trial balloon.

And when critics point out the obvious problems with this less-than-perfect solution to finding a sustainable way to maintain Iowa’s aging infrastructure, we hope the governor continues to push them to come up with alternative, sustainable solutions rather than mere campaign rhetoric.