A short-term deal won’t be final fiscal answer
A short-term deal won’t be final fiscal answer
WASHINGTON — Hold the champagne.
While lawmakers have completed their deal to avert a federal default and fully reopen the government, they are likely to return to their grinding brand of brinkmanship — perhaps repeatedly.
Wednesday’s self-congratulations notwithstanding, congressional talks are barely touching the underlying causes of debt-and-spending stalemates that pushed the country close to economic crises in 2011, last December and again this month.
At best, lawmakers and the White House will agree to fund the government and raise the debt limit for only a few months.
They also will call for yet another bipartisan effort to address the federal debt’s major causes, including restricted revenue growth and entitlement benefits that rise automatically.
And yet, top advocates say they’ve seen virtually no change in the political dynamics that stymied past efforts for a compromise to end the cycle of brinksmanship and threats to harm the economy.
Glitches slow
health care signups
WASHINGTON — For the first month alone, the Obama administration projected that nearly a half million people would sign up for the new health insurance markets, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press. But that was before the markets opened to a cascade of computer problems.
If the glitches persist and frustrated consumers give up trying, that initial goal, described as modest in the memo, could slip out of reach.
The Sept. 5 memo, for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, lists monthly enrollment targets for each state and Washington, D.C., through March 31, the last day of the initial open enrollment period under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
The new online insurance markets, called exchanges in some states, are supposed to be the portals to coverage for most of the nation’s nearly 50 million uninsured people.
Middle-class people without job-based coverage can shop for subsidized private plans, while low-income people are steered to an expanded version of Medicaid in states that have agreed to expand that safety net program.
Although the Oct. 1 launch of the markets was a top priority for the White House, the rollout was quickly overwhelmed by computer problems, and many potential customers still have not been able to enroll.
Insurers say signups are coming through, but slowly.
The administration has refused to release enrollment numbers.
Dozens of Syrian fighting groups break ties with main opposition, says rebel commander
BEIRUT — Several dozen rebel groups in southern Syria have broken with the main political opposition group in exile, a local commander said in a video posted Wednesday, dealing a potential new setback to Western efforts to unify moderates battling President Bashar Assad’s regime.
The Turkey-based Syrian National Coalition, the political arm of the Free Syrian Army rebel group, has long struggled to win respect and recognition from the fighters.
It is widely seen as cut off from events on the ground and ineffective in funneling aid and weapons to the rebels.
In the video, a rebel in military fatigues read a statement with about two dozen fighters standing behind him, some holding a banner with FSA emblems.
FSA spokesman Louay Mikdad told The Associated Press that the video is authentic and identified the man speaking as a captain in one of the rebel groups, Anwar al-Sunna, which posted the video.
The rebel in the video said political opposition leaders have failed to represent those trying to bring down Assad.
By wire sources