US Politics Mega-thread - Page 900

On February 25 2014 20:12 SixStrings wrote:
Why are conservative / politically right states in the US elections 'red states', whereas the left / liberal states are portrayed as 'blue states'? Shouldn't it be the other way round, like the rest of the western world does it?

On February 25 2014 20:12 SixStrings wrote:
Why are conservative / politically right states in the US elections 'red states', whereas the left / liberal states are portrayed as 'blue states'? Shouldn't it be the other way round, like the rest of the western world does it?

I’m not sure whether conservatives realize yet that their Plan A on health reform — wait for Obamacare’s inevitable collapse, and reap the political rewards — isn’t working. But it isn’t. Enrollments have recovered strongly from the law’s disastrous start-up; in California, which had a working website from the beginning, enrollment has already exceeded first-year projections. The mix of people signed up so far is older than planners had hoped, but not enough so to cause big premium hikes, let alone the often-predicted “death spiral.”

And conservatives don’t really have a Plan B — in their world, nobody even dares mention the possibility that health reform might actually prove workable. Still, you can already see some on the right groping toward a new strategy, one that relies on highlighting examples of the terrible harm Obamacare does. There’s only one problem: they haven’t managed to come up with any real examples. Consider several recent ventures on the right:

■ In the official G.O.P. response to the State of the Union address, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers alluded to the case of “Bette in Spokane,” who supposedly lost her good health insurance coverage and was forced to pay nearly $700 more a month in premiums. Local reporters located the real Bette, and found that the story was completely misleading: her original policy provided very little protection, and she could get a much better plan for much less than the claimed cost.

■ In Louisiana, the AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) group Americans for Prosperity — the group appears to be largely financed and controlled by the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors — has been running ads targeting Senator Mary Landrieu. In these ads, we see what appear to be ordinary Louisiana residents receiving notices telling them that their insurance policies have been canceled because of Obamacare. But the people in the ads are, in fact, paid actors, and the scenes they play aren’t re-enactments of real events — they’re “emblematic,” says a spokesman for the group.

■ In Michigan, Americans for Prosperity is running an ad that does feature a real person. But is she telling a real story? In the ad, Julia Boonstra, who is suffering from leukemia, declares that her insurance has been canceled, that the new policy will have unaffordable out-of-pocket costs, and that “If I do not receive my medication, I will die.” But Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post tried to check the facts, and learned that thanks to lower premiums she will almost surely save nearly as much if not more than she will be paying in higher out-of-pocket costs. A spokesman for Americans for Prosperity responded to questions about the numbers with bluster and double-talk — this is about “a real person suffering from blood cancer, not some neat and tidy White House PowerPoint.”

Even supporters of health reform are somewhat surprised by the right’s apparent inability to come up with real cases of hardship. Surely there must be some people somewhere actually being hurt by a reform that affects millions of Americans. Why can’t the right find these people and exploit them?

The most likely answer is that the true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.

No, what the right wants are struggling average Americans, preferably women, facing financial devastation from health reform. So those are the tales they’re telling, even though they haven’t been able to come up with any real examples.

The Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity has now released its factual documentation for its misleading ad featuring Julie Boonstra, a Michigan woman stricken with Leukemia who suggests Obamacare forced her to take on a new plan that is now “unaffordable.” The ad has been widely pilloried ever since Glenn Kessler discovered that her premiums had come down, likely making her overall costs a wash or even cheaper. Gary Peters, the Dem candidate for Senate in Michigan, had written to TV stations insisting on documentation.

The documentation provided by AFP, which was passed along from TV stations by the Peters campaign, doesn’t actually back up the ad’s key claim. But it tells us something interesting about how the AFP campaign — and by extension, the broader GOP strategy against Obamacare — really work.

When Americans think about government in the big picture, they can seem like a nation of Ayn Rands. People want to lay waste to the Leviathan. But when Americans consider specific aspects of government, a curious thing happens. People rediscover their love of Washington. On issue after issue, Republicans are winning the argument in general, whereas Democrats are winning the argument in particular.

In 2012, the conservative “campaign for religious liberty” looked like a smart and possibly winning strategic gambit. Aimed specifically at the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, nestled in a broader claim of institutional and individual exemptions from complex and sometimes unpopular laws and regulations, the campaign linked the Conference of U.S. Catholic Bishops with conservative evangelicals and both to the Republican politicians (including presidential candidate Mitt Romney) who made it a new front in both their anti-Obamacare and “family values” messaging.

Some leading Catholic Democrats (e.g., E.J. Dionne) feared it would become a crucial wedge issue. And it gave a nice First Amendment gloss to unseemly culturally reactionary impulses, while providing mainstream respectability to the “constitutional conservative” claim that church-state separation was a threat to faith itself.

Two years later, the “religious liberty” crusade shows signs of backfiring. This very day, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer may veto a bill just passed by a legislature controlled by her own party that provides a broad exemption from discrimination laws to businesses and individuals claiming compliance violates their beliefs. And more generally, an argument that once distracted from the extremist nature of conservative Christian objections to gay rights and reproductive rights is drawing attention to them in a dangerous way.

This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”

This is not a terribly common view outside the Right-to-Life movement and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy; it certainly is not in accord with mainstream medical opinion. But the very discussion of angels-dancing-on-a-pin disputes over fertilization versus uterine implantation as the beginning of pregnancy shifted the debate over reproductive policy away from the strongest ground for anti-choicers — rare but controversial late-term abortions and the conditions under which they should be allowed — to the very weakest: “abortions” so early that most Americans don’t consider them abortions at all. So a gambit designed to broaden support for faith-based objections to reproductive rights policies is pulling the discussion in a direction that threatens to isolate anti-choicers and their Republican allies in a small ghetto of extremist opinion.

On February 26 2014 02:42 FallDownMarigold wrote:
Musing on the desperate ObammyCare detractors:




http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/opinion/krugman-health-care-horror-hooey.html




http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/02/25/morning-plum-obamacare-horror-stories-fall-apart-under-scrutiny/

Two-thirds of small businesses to see premiums spike under Obamacare: Report

About two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see health-insurance premiums increase under Obamacare, according to a new federal report.

The higher premiums will affect about 11 million Americans, according to the report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The report also estimated an additional 6 million individuals will see reductions in their premiums. ...

Mass. gets 3-month extension to comply with ACA

BOSTON (AP) — The federal government has granted Massachusetts a three-month extension to meet the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, giving the state more time to correct its troubled health insurance website and deal with tens of thousands of unprocessed applications, state officials said Thursday.

The waiver from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services extends a March 31 deadline until June 30. The state asked CMS for a six-month extension, but had not expected to receive more than three months of extra time. Officials would not rule out the possibility of seeking future extensions while it works on a permanent fix. ...

A Republican-led bill designed to "save American workers" would cause 1 million workers to lose their health care coverage and increase the deficit by $74 billion, according to Congress' official scorekeeper.

The legislation, offered by Rep. Todd Young (R-IN) and 208 co-sponsors as a tweak to Obamacare, would change the definition of a full-time work week under the health care law from 30 hours per week to 40 hours. The aim was to mitigate the effect of the law's employer mandate, which says businesses with 50 or more workers must offer insurance to full-time employees.

An analysis of the bill, released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation, found that it would cause 1 million people to lose their employer-based insurance coverage. The report projected that more than 500,000 of them would end up getting coverage through Medicaid, the Children's Health Care Program or the Obamacare exchanges. The rest, CBO and JCT said, would become uninsured.

The legislation would also lower the amount federal the government collects in penalties from businesses who don't abide by the employer mandate. As a result, the report found, the deficit would go up by $74 billion over 10 years.

Titled the "Save American Workers Act," the bill cleared the House Ways & Means Committee on a party line vote earlier this month and was slated for a full House vote perhaps as early as next week. Of the bill's 208 cosponsors, seven are Democrats.

Earlier this month, nominees for posts in Argentina, Iceland and Norway admitted before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that they had never visited the countries which they may soon call home. Afterward, the Washington Post slammed President Barack Obama for using the elite diplomatic jobs as "political plums."

For generations, presidents have tapped both political allies and professional Foreign Service members to serve as the country's top diplomats abroad. Yet Obama has elevated loyalists and campaign bundlers at a more rapid pace than his predecessors since winning re-election to a second term, as the Center for Public Integrity has previously reported.

Forty-eight of the 85 ambassadors Obama has nominated since January 2013 have been political appointees, not career diplomats, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

That's 56 percent, compared to about 30 percent under presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Of these four-dozen men and women, 24 political nominees have played pivotal roles in the president's campaign fundraising machine and have collectively raised more than $16.9 million for his committees since 2007 — a figure that almost certainly understates their financial support as campaigns are not legally required to provide details about the sums bundlers raise from their friends, family and associates. (The Obama campaign voluntarily did so but only provided broad ranges, the highest of which was "more than $500,000.")

President Obama does a disservice to Norwegians, to himself and, above all, to the people of the United States by sending such an unqualified person to represent him and us in the capital of a long-standing NATO ally. (I wonder if Tsunis knows that Norway is a member of NATO and not the European Union.) Instead of goodwill, he is engendering anti-American sentiment. Norwegians are likely to conclude that all they are worth to Obama is about $1.3 million — the sum Tsunis bundled or contributed to Obama’s reelection campaign and other Democratic efforts in 2012.

The United States claims to value the efforts of diplomats — a point the president reiterated in his State of the Union speech last week. So why do so many seem to think that diplomacy is a profession that anyone can engage in? If you had a plumbing problem, would you call your friendly ambassador to fix it? What message is the president sending to Foreign Service officers and to former and current ambassadors of distinction?

The Obama administration’s appointments suggest that the president isn’t being honest when he says that diplomacy is important to him. Yet the administration clearly values diplomacy — officials, including the president, have emphasized that the ongoing negotiations with Iran are the way to resolve the nuclear impasse. Would Obama consider making Tsunis our negotiator? Of course not. Yet it’s illogical, and insulting, to presume that Norwegians are such wonderful and civilized people — and hence unlikely to cause any problems with Washington — that we can afford to send someone on a taxpayer-funded three-year junket to enjoy the fjords.

WASHINGTON -- Approximately 4 million individuals how now signed up for health care plans under the newly created Obamacare insurance exchanges, a senior administration official told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

The numbers mean that roughly 700,000 people have signed up for health care plans since the end of January. And with five weeks before the enrollment period deadline at the end of March, they put the administration on pace to come close to the Congressional Budget Office's initial projection that 7 million individuals would sign up for insurance coverage during the period.

"With individuals and families enrolling in coverage every day, we continue to see strong demand nationwide from consumers who want access to quality, affordable coverage," reads a statement from the administration, passed in advance to The Huffington Post. "Consumers are shopping and enrolling in plans on HealthCare.gov every day; system error rates are low and response times are consistently less than half a second. Our call center has handled more than 12 million calls so far and is open 24/7 to assist consumers in English, Spanish and more than 150 languages."

But with the good news remain some questions. The number of people who have signed up for plans and paid their first month's premium remains unknown, though insurers have suggested about 20 percent of individuals have not paid. Moreover, it is unclear how many of those individuals who signed up in February were young and healthy -- the population demographic that the administration needs to ensure that the exchanges have a stable balance of healthy and sick consumers. A senior administration official said that a more detailed report about the enrollees would be released in mid-March.

On February 26 2014 08:22 Wolfstan wrote:
Man, the ACA seems like an illogical and wasteful bill to the rest of world. Terrible leadership on the nations health file that practically no one else on this earth wants to follow suit on.

On February 26 2014 03:44 RCMDVA wrote:
Covered Califonia... has 86% of their 720k enrollment subsidized.

Covered California enrollment as of 1/31/2014

The problem is... they have actually done a bad job signing up Latinos. So when they get around to sigining them up...that isn't going to lower the subsidized ratio. It's going to increase it.

On February 26 2014 09:05 SnipedSoul wrote:


What does that tell you about health care in the state if 86% of people need help paying for it?

On February 26 2014 09:45 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

umm... little to nothing?

On February 26 2014 09:05 SnipedSoul wrote:


What does that tell you about health care in the state if 86% of people need help paying for it?

On February 26 2014 09:50 IgnE wrote:


What if we changed it to 86% of people need help paying for basic foodstuffs? Would that tell you anything?