US Politics Mega-thread - Page 7255

On April 04 2017 14:08 Buckyman wrote:


The "civil rights agreement" represents a past attempt by the Department of Justice to interfere with the local government's police department because it had so many problems.

Despite the agreement, the Baltimore police department still has the problems.

In that light, trying to review this particular agreement seems like a good idea.

"Local control and local accountability are necessary for effective local policing," Sessions wrote in a memo to department officials and U.S. Attorneys late Monday. "It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies."

On April 04 2017 13:28 Introvert wrote:


I'm not sure this hack (and he is, despite the praise he's been getting lately) understands what the filibuster and nuclear option are.

I think this is who we should be thanking:

On April 04 2017 22:31 Danglars wrote:
Opponents call him racist, like always, and he's already used to that kind of slander so things are good.

On April 04 2017 13:06 KwarK wrote:
Wait, receiving the answers? Not the debate questions ahead of time but the debate answers? What? Trump thinks CNN secretly gave Hillary a list of her own policies before the debate?

On April 04 2017 12:37 Plansix wrote:

How many times have the democrats controlled the senate or house since he started introducing that bill? A bill that he can only get 10% of the entire congress, House and Senate, to support? I'll fill in the blank for you, it was 2008-2010. Introducing a bill to the senate floor that you didn't bother to sell to anyone isn't that impressive.



Hindsight is a hell of a drug.

On April 04 2017 22:35 biology]major wrote:


still taking trump's word seriously? Especially on twitter? He clearly meant questions. Both you and dpp jump on him and ignore the content of the tweet. I wonder how many debates she's cheated in.

Would opening the door to cheaper, skimpier marketplace plans with higher deductibles and copays attract consumers and insurers to the exchanges next year? That's what the Trump administration is betting on.

In February, the administration proposed a rule that would take a bit of the shine off bronze, silver, gold and platinum exchange plans by allowing them to provide less generous coverage while keeping the same metal level designation.

But consumer advocates and insurance experts say the proposal, which is subject to finalization later this year, fails on two fronts. It doesn't address key concerns among insurers about plan design, and it might push consumers away from the exchanges because it could increase their out-of-pocket costs and reduce the amount they receive in tax credits for their health plan's premiums.

The proposal is one of several rule changes the administration put forward to help stabilize the insurance marketplaces while Republicans work to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Repeal is at least temporarily off the table, after the failure of the Republicans' replacement bill in late March. But insurers remain skittish about participating in the insurance marketplaces given the continuing uncertainty and mixed signals from the administration and Congress about how they will oversee the ACA.

By lowering the minimum coverage requirements — called a plan's "actuarial value" — the proposed rule would let insurers offer plans with higher consumer out-of-pocket costs than are currently allowed. Right now, for example, if you buy a silver plan, the most popular choice, the plan must be designed to pay 70 percent of covered medical costs for an average consumer, while you pay the other 30 percent through your deductible, copays and coinsurance.

Since it's difficult to design a plan that covers exactly 70 percent of medical costs, insurers have some wiggle room. Plans with actuarial values between 68 and 72 percent are considered silver plans.

The new rule would lower the floor by 2 percentage points, allowing insurers to offer silver plans that cover just 66 percent of medical costs. It would do the same for other metal level plans as well, allowing bronze plans with actuarial values as low as 56 percent instead of the 60 percent standard, gold plans at 76 rather than 80, and platinum plans at 86 rather than 90. (The allowed upper limits wouldn't change.)

How does this affect consumers? For one thing, the premium would likely be lower for plans that offer less generous coverage. But the tradeoff would probably be higher deductibles, copays and coinsurance.

Since all plans must cover the 10 essential health benefits mandated by the ACA, insurers have few options apart from cost-sharing adjustments to alter a plan's coverage to be more or less generous.

Maybe that seems like a decent deal if you're a healthy person who doesn't need much care, but some consumer advocates aren't so sure.

"Young adults really care about overall cost sharing and not just premiums," said Erin Hemlin, director of training and consumer education at Young Invincibles, an advocacy group for this demographic.

According to the group's analysis of 2017 exchange enrollment, 75 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds bought silver plans while just 20 percent bought bronze plans. Cheaper premiums might not be a lure for this group, which is highly sought after by insurers because young people tend to be healthy.

Reducing the minimum actuarial value could also shrink the amount of the subsidies that help people buy insurance, consumer advocates say. Marketplace customers with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty limit (about $48,000 for one person) might qualify for tax credits to use toward the premium.

But the amount of the tax credit would be based in part on the cost of the premium of the second lowest-priced silver plan in the customer's geographic area. If insurers offer some plans with actuarial values of 66 percent, it's likely one of them will become the "benchmark" on which tax credits are based. Since the premium for that plan would generally be lower than that of a more generous policy, consumers' tax credits would be smaller too.

"People have to spend more in premiums to get the same coverage because their tax credit is less," said Aviva Aron-Dine, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who co-authored an analysis of the impact of the proposed change. Alternatively, they could pay the same premium as before for a plan with a higher deductible and other out-of-pocket costs, she said.

Switching from a plan with a 68 percent actuarial value to one at 66 could increase the per-person deductible by $550, according to the CBPP analysis, or to more than $1,000, according to estimates by Families USA.

The proposed rule change isn't going to help make marketplace participation more attractive to insurers either, said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant and longtime critic of the Affordable Care Act.

The proposed actuarial value changes are just "rounding at the edges," Laszewski said. Insurers are hampered in critical ways by other requirements in the law that limit the types of plans they can offer, he said, citing maximum out-of-pocket spending limits for consumers (currently $7,150 for an individual plan and $14,300 for a family plan), maximum deductibles (the same as the spending limits), and being prohibited from offering plans with even lower actuarial values.

"The biggest obstacles to creating far more flexible plans — and particularly appealing to younger, healthier people — are in the statute that the administration can't change," Laszewski said.

On April 04 2017 22:34 LightSpectra wrote:


In other words, racism's okay so long as you tough it out for a really long time and hope that eventually another racist promotes you for it.

Sessions thinks it's okay for the government to sell your house because your second cousin in another state is a drug dealer. He also thinks cancer patients using medical marijuana should go to prison. Is this really the hill you want to die on Danglars?

On April 04 2017 23:05 LightSpectra wrote:
I would vote for any plan or candidate who supports any plan that makes it illegal to send any medical bills whatsoever to insured people.

Today I got a bill from my dentist for $100~. Almost paid it until I realized that makes no sense since my insurance should cover all dental work up to a certain amount. My employer partially reimburses all my medical bills so long as they're run through my insurance, so I almost just paid $100 out of pocket for nothing because my dentist sent me a bill without any context whatsoever. Totally appalling. Should be illegal.

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.

Also on Monday, Fox News and Bloomberg News, citing multiple sources reported that Rice had requested the intelligence information that was produced in a highly organized operation. Fox said the unmasked names of Trump aides were given to officials at the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense, James Clapper, President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, Obama’s CIA Director.

Joining Rice in the alleged White House operations was her deputy Ben Rhodes, according to Fox.

Critics of the atmosphere prevailing throughout the Obama administration’s last year in office point to former Obama Deputy Defense Secretary Evelyn Farkas who admitted in a March 2 television interview on MSNBC that she “was urging my former colleagues,” to “get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.”

Farkas sought to walk back her comments in the weeks following: “I didn’t give anybody anything except advice.”

Col. (Ret.) James Waurishuk, an NSC veteran and former deputy director for intelligence at the U.S. Central Command, told TheDCNF that many hands had to be involved throughout the Obama administration to launch such a political spying program.

“The surveillance initially is the responsibility of the National Security Agency,” Waurishuk said. “They have to abide by this guidance when one of the other agencies says, ‘we’re looking at this particular person which we would like to unmask.'”

“The lawyers and counsel at the NSA surely would be talking to the lawyers and members of counsel at CIA, or at the National Security Council or at the Director of National Intelligence or at the FBI,” he said. “It’s unbelievable of the level and degree of the administration to look for information on Donald Trump and his associates, his campaign team and his transition team. This is really, really serious stuff.”

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.
Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”
“That’s a felony,” he told TheDCNF. “And you can get 10 years for that. It is a tremendous abuse of the system. We’re not supposed to be monitoring American citizens. Bigger than the crime, is the breach of public trust.”

Waurishuk said he was most dismayed that “this is now using national intelligence assets and capabilities to spy on the elected, yet-to-be-seated president.”

“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting president. That takes on a new precedent.”

On April 04 2017 23:02 Danglars wrote:

Racism's been an empty threat for years and I'm surprised people like you still cling to it.

If you want to bring up other topics of criticism for justice department policies, I suggest you start in with something other than second cousins and prison for cancer victims and his remarks on the matter. So calm down the unwarranted trolling if you're actually into more depth than top 10 things to hate about Sessions.

On April 04 2017 23:11 xDaunt wrote:
There's an outside chance that there's real evidence that Trump did something wrong buried somewhere, but I'm not counting on it at this point.

On April 04 2017 22:35 biology]major wrote:


still taking trump's word seriously? Especially on twitter? He clearly meant questions. Both you and dpp jump on him and ignore the content of the tweet. I wonder how many debates she's cheated in.

On April 04 2017 23:11 xDaunt wrote:


Source.

We'll see where this goes, but I suspect that the overall narrative above is fairly on point. It's the first one that I've seen on this Trump/Russia business that makes any sense. It accounts for the constant leaks of the Trump administration's contacts with the Russians and other foreigners despite the fact that no one has leaked any specific illegal conduct done by Trump. By design, everyone heard all of this "chatter" about Trump's ties with Russia and started leaking that to the press without really knowing what was going on. There's an outside chance that there's real evidence that Trump did something wrong buried somewhere, but I'm not counting on it at this point. I think that this story is about to boomerang badly for Obama and the democrats.

And don't forget that bolded quote above. I think that people are about to start looking at that one very carefully.

On April 04 2017 19:11 Biff The Understudy wrote:

Except that it's a version of House of Cards where everybody involved is stupid. Removes a bit of the dramatic tension somewhat.

On April 04 2017 23:20 LegalLord wrote:
The one comment from the whole Susan Rice business that bothered me the most was the note that this information could have leaked to the press. Surveillance of a president now being public knowledge because leaking is now acceptable? Good job.