Author Danny Vinik

How Do You Measure Presidential Leadership?

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You hear all the time that President Obama cannot lead. He doesn’t reach across the aisle. He has a poor relationship with Congress.

That seems to be a widely assumed fact throughout D.C. Many people (including myself) doubt that the President would accomplish anything more even if he was a better leader. But most people seem to assume that this president just isn’t a very good leader.

But is this true? It’s tough to be a good leader when half your followers are committed to undermining your every move. Is there anything the President could’ve done to convince Republicans to work with him? I’m doubtful, but I’m also new to politics and new to D.C. so I have trouble putting President Obama’s leadership skills in context. Did former presidents work better with Congress? Did they show more deference to the institution?

At the National Journal’s policy summit yesterday on America’s fiscal condition, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) offered a clue when he spoke about a dinner he had with the President:

We had supper in the family dining room – it was the first time in my 37 years that I was ever in the family dining room.

Senator Hatch is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and during all his time there throughout a number of different administrations, he had never been invited to dine in the family dining room. Based on a bit of googling, the dinner Hatch is referring seems to have taken place on April 10 of this year with a dozen different Senators.

This is one tiny little data point, but it puts things in a bit of context for me. I don’t know how to judge the President’s leadership skills. I don’t think there is a simple metric for doing so. But for those that say the President doesn’t lead, what do they think dining with a dozen Republican senators in the family dining room is? I’m sure they’ll respond that it’s one moment of leadership amidst a sea of disdain towards Congressional Republicans and that it took until Obama’s second term for him to host the dinner. But this a moment of leadership that Hatch never saw from a previous President. I don’t know if any of the other Senators had dined in the family dining room before. I’m sure at least some others had not.

Not surprisingly, the dinner didn’t seem to help the budget negotiations, but it still puts those criticisms of the President in a bit of context for me. I’d love to hear more. In the meantime though, I’m taking the “Obama can’t lead” complaint with a grain of salt.

Delaying the Individual Mandate Isn’t A Real Possibility

Danny Vinik 1 Comment

One thing that Republicans have been clamoring about recently is for a one-year delay in the individual mandate in response to the Administration’s (unlawful) decision to delay the employer mandate a year. This morning, National Journal and Public Notice hosted an event at the Newseum titled “Fiscal Fallout: What is ‘Responsible’ in Today’s Fiscal Reality” with keynote addresses from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’s Robert Greenstein as well as a panel discussion on our fiscal situation. Near the end of the panel,  Bill Hoagland, the Senior Vice President at the Bipartisan Policy Center, discussed the possibility of delaying the individual mandate for a year:

You can’t defund Obamacare on a continuing resolution because 90% of Obamacare is entitlements so it doesn’t make any sense, but I do think Bob [CBPP’s Robert Greenstein] passed over one small thing. He mentioned that a delay would increase the number of uninsured by 11 million. Yet he did not mention that the CBO’s cost estimate on that was that it would save $35 billion too. I’m not here to propose a delay, but for the average person listening to this debate outside, [they may say,] ‘Wait a minute. You delayed the employer mandate. Why can’t we delay the individual mandate?” And I worked with some insurance companies also so I know that the argument will be that this will drive up premiums immediately. Quite frankly, premiums have been set here for the exchanges starting in a few weeks and the companies don’t know what the experience is going to be anyway. So I don’t find a delay necessarily to be bad. In fact, I would almost think the Administration would want a delay to get the exchanges ready [while] other provisions of the law remain in effect – no [rejecting people with] pre-existing conditions, [allowing young people to stay on their parents’ insurance] up until age 26. So I think one of the outcomes here will be that you hear more about a delay. And I’m not proposing it. I’m just suggesting you’ll hear more about a delay.

First of all, under no circumstance is the Obama Administration going to delay the individual mandate for a year. They’ve fought off challenge after challenge for the law to get to this point and they believe (as I do) that once it officially begins, it will be here to stay. Based on their desperate, stubborn refusal of House Republicans to fund the government unless the Administration agrees to defund the law, they seem to agree as well.

Second, just delaying the individual mandate would be a disaster. Hoagland says he understands the counter argument to such a delay, but he doesn’t seem to. The problem is that if you delay the individual mandate, but still require insurance companies to cover everyone with pre-existing conditions then the death spiral ensues. Only unhealthy people sign up for the law while healthy people forego insurance. Without the offset of those healthy people paying into the system, these insurers must raise premiums to cover the unhealthy ones. Hoagland notes this, but uses a bit of hand-waving to say that insurance prices are locked in and thus insurers won’t be able to raise premiums. Well if that’s the case, then insurance companies will go bankrupt. The companies came up with insurance premiums assuming that young, healthy individuals would purchase insurance. Their business model falls apart if those individuals aren’t required to sign up, but the firms are not allowed to revises their premiums.

Thus, if Hoagland wants to delay the individual mandate (which he never says he wants to do – he’s just suggesting it’s going to come up), then we must delay the pre-existing condition requirement as well. This would effectively delay the entire law and give Republicans another year to figure out how to repeal and undermine it. They can even try to delay it until the midterm elections where they will hope to win back the Senate and repeal it altogether (of course, the President would veto such a bill).

So, contrary to Hoagland’s suggestion, this isn’t something you’re going to hear more about. It would be an epic disaster policy-wise and the Administration isn’t going to consider it. Obamacare is the law of the land and that’s not changing.