The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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The Remarkable Slowdown In Health Care Costs Since The Passage Of Obamacare

"A new survey of health care premiums for employer-sponsored health care coverage shows that health care inflation is slowing, further undermining critics’ predictions that costs would skyrocket in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act.
The report, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, estimates that the average annual premium in 2013 is $16,351 for family coverage — an average increase of 4 percent from last year. The rate is the latest indication that growth in health care costs is abetting, though premiums are still increasing faster than workers’ wages (1.8 percent from 2012 to 2013) and general inflation (1.1 percent from 2012 to 2013). Employees are now contributing $4,565 on average toward the cost of their coverage."

Link

$16k. That's an astonishing number.

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North Carolina Just Made It A Lot Easier To Figure Out If Your Hospital Is Ripping You Off

"Rampant price opacity is one of the biggest problems contributing to America’s broken health care system. Unlike pretty much any other commodity, Americans can’t just look up the cost of a surgery, test, or other medical procedures because most of that information isn’t in the public database. Consequently, patients are often left with a hefty, non-itemized bill at the end of a hospital visit with minimal knowledge of why they’re being charged what they are.
The federal government took a small step towards addressing this lack of transparency by releasing charge records for the most common inpatient procedures at more than 3,300 hospitals across 306 locales in May. The numbers confirmed health care experts’ suspicions: the cost of U.S. medical care is essentially arbitrary, with even hospitals in the same county charging anywhere from $7,000 to $99,700 for the same procedure. And the hospitals charging the most money don’t even offer much better services."

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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More Good News on Health Care: Medicare Costs Are Down, Down, Down

"Michael Levine and Melinda Buntin took a look at Medicare spending per beneficiary over the past three decades and came to a very similar conclusion: "Growth in spending per beneficiary in the fee-for-service portion of Medicare has slowed substantially in recent years. The slowdown has been widespread, extending across all of the major service categories, groups of beneficiaries that receive very different amounts of medical care, and all major regions."

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Note, "slowdown in growth."

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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ObamaCare: Myths About Health Care Reform

"Separating the ObamaCare Facts from the ObamaCare Myths 2013 and Beyond

The ObamaCare Myths about health care aren't just confusing, they are wrong. ObamaCare myths range from premium increases to ObamaCare planting chips in all Americans. ObamaCare Facts aims find out the truth behind the myths about ObamaCare. When it comes to the well being of Americans, there is no room for opinions and rhetoric."

They smack about 17 examples: http://obamacarefacts.com/obamacare-myths.php

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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More on lower healthcare premiums:

"...today, we’re going to use a brand new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation to explain how the subsidies work. Get. Excited.

Kaiser’s report is arguably the most in-depth look we have at how much health insurance will cost under Obamacare, using actual rates that insurers will charge in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

“Our aim here was to really start making it tangible for people,” says Larry Levitt, one of the report authors. “So much until now has been hypothetical, with simulations and models. Now that we have real premiums in 17 states and D.C., we could start looking at what consumers in real circumstances would pay.”
Wa Post

Another analysis of the Kaiser study: "Major New Study On Obamacare Premiums Should End The ‘Rate Shock’ Hysteria Once And For All"

"Strikingly, in every city analyzed, a family of four with two 40-year-old adults and a household income of $60,000 per year would pay $409 per month for the second-cheapest Silver plan after receiving subsidies. That’s more or less in line with the average $4,565 per year that workers currently contribute towards their employer-sponsored health insurance plans.
While the KFF researchers emphasized that there will be significant variation in Obamacare premiums depending on geographic location, they concluded that premiums would be lower than what the government expected, writing, “the latest projections from the Congressional Budget Office imply that the premium for a 40-year-old in the second lowest cost silver plan would average $320 per month nationally. Fifteen of the eighteen rating areas we examined have premiums below this level, suggesting that the cost of coverage for consumers and the federal budgetary cost for tax credits will be lower than anticipated.”
Plans purchased through the Obamacare marketplaces will be significantly more robust than current individual policies, which often skimp on essential coverage to bring down their prices and have been dismissed by consumer advocates as “junk insurance.” Obamacare marketplace plans must cover 10 broad categories of “essential health benefits,” including for prescription drug coverage, mental health services, and maternity care."
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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Hillbilly49 (Huff Post comment)

"We spend more than any other country in the world.
In 2005, our per capita -- so, per person -- spending was $6,697. The next highest in the study was Canada, at $3,326. And remember -- that's "mean" spending, so it's the amount we spend divided by our population. But unlike in Canada, about 16-25 percent of our population doesn't have insurance, and so often can't use the system.
For profit health care is not sustainable unless everyone is required by law to participate. Obama-Care is a transition system that will evolve into Government Managed Single Payer Health care for all; for profit health care has been failing for decades and will need to be abolished."

http://prospect.org/article/ten-reasons ... are-so-bad
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

Post by David Franks »

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Wall St. Cheat Sheet » Breaking News »
Survey: Part-Time Work Growing More Due to Economy Than Obamacare
By Meghan Foley
September 13, 2013

"In defense of his administration’s decision to postpone the provision of the Affordable Care Act that requires businesses with 50 or more full-time employees to provide those workers with a minimum level of health insurance coverage or face tax penalties, President Barack Obama said more than 96 percent of the affected companies provide employer-sponsored coverage already. That argument was also meant to assuage fears that Obamacare would hurt businesses by burdening them with greater labor costs in a tough economic environment — costs so great that as many full-time workers as possible would be shifted to part-time schedules.

"Both sides of the debate have a wealth of facts, figures, and anecdotal evidence to support their claims. The latest addition to this store of knowledge is the most recent Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey, which polled 530 chief financial officers of United States-based companies....59 percent of the respondents said that they have increased the proportion of temporary and part-time workers in their workforces or shifted toward outside advisers and consultants. Of those, 38 percent attributed the shift to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, while another 44 percent said it was because of extreme economic uncertainty."

The article continues with arguments from both sides regarding the effect of Obamacare, landing somewhat to the against side of neutral.

Key survey results
"Debating with a conservative is like cleaning up your dog's vomit: It is an inevitable consequence of your association, he isn't much help, and it makes very clear the fact that he will swallow anything."
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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Why The Tea Party Really Hates Obamacare

"A narrow Republican majority in the House can’t void the Affordable Care Act any more than 54 Senate Democrats can force everybody in Oklahoma to eat broccoli. Anybody who tells you differently is a flim-flam artist.

Such as Newt Gingrich. The presiding genius of the 1996 GOP government shutdown went on ABC’s This Week to deliver pseudo-historical profundity: “Under our constitutional system going all the way back to Magna Carta in 1215, the people’s house is allowed to say to the king we ain’t giving you money.”

Actually, the U.S. Constitution of 1789 makes no provision for a king. Neither, as former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich has reminded Gingrich, does it “allow a majority of the House of Representatives to repeal the law of the land by defunding it. If that were the case, no law [would be] safe.”

No federal court could rule otherwise. It’s a separation of powers issue. These principles are so fundamental to American governance that even the Wall Street Journal reminds GOP hotheads that for all the three-ring thrills provided by Sen. Cruz and his allies, “the only real way to repeal the law is to win elections.

The irony is that even if House Republicans ended up forcing a government shutdown, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t be much affected. Like Social Security and Medicare, Obamacare has its own dedicated funding stream that Congress can alter only by amending the law—again requiring the cooperation of both the Senate and White House.

An even greater irony, many have pointed out, is that if Republicans really believed the law will prove a terrible failure, these last-minute theatrics wouldn’t be necessary. Their actual fear is that once the notoriously uninformed American public gets firsthand experience with the Affordable Care Act, they’re going to like it just fine."

http://www.nationalmemo.com/why-the-tea ... obamacare/

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"New Report: For 95% Of Americans, Obamacare Will Cost Much Less Than Expected"

"When uninsured Americans begin enrolling in Obamacare’s new health care exchanges on Oct. 1, the overwhelming majority — 95 percent — will face health care premiums that are 16 percent lower, on average, than the government had previously projected,..."
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Text:

1. No lifetime limit on coverage for 105 million people.
2. Up to 17 million children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage by insurers.
3. 6.6 million young adults up to age 26 have taken advantage of the law to obtain health insurance through their parents plan.
4. Free coverage for comprehensive preventive services for millions of women starting in August.
5. 86 million Americans, including 32 million seniors in Medicare, have already received free preventive services.
6. 5.3 million seniors have already saved $3.7 billion on their prescription drugs.
7. Since the health care law was enacted in March 2010, 4.2 million private sector jobs have been created – many of them in the health care industry.
8. The Small Business Health Care Tax Credit has already been used by 360,000 small businesses to help insure 2 million workers.
9. $1.1 billion in rebates from health insurance companies this summer will benefit nearly 13 million Americans.
10. The health care law reduces the deficit by $124 billion over the next 10 years and over $1 trillion over the following decade.

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State-by-State Premiums Under the Health Care Law

NY Times
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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The good president:
"One congressman said that Obamacare is 'the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed' -- ever, in the history of America. This is the most dangerous piece of legislation. Providing, creating a marketplace so people can buy group insurance plan, the most dangerous ever.

"You had a state representative somewhere say that it's 'as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act.' Think about that. Affordable health care is worse than a law that lets slave owners get their runaway slaves back. I mean, these are quotes. I'm not making this stuff up."

"And here's one more that I've heard. I like this one. 'We have to' -- and I'm quoting here -- 'we have to repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.' Now, I have to say, that one was from six months ago. I just want to point out we still have women, we still have children, we still have senior citizens. All this would be funny if it wasn't so crazy." LINK
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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"Exposing and Debunking 5 of the Biggest Republican Lies About “Obamacare”

5) Obamacare is so bad, Obama gave Congress an exemption from it: Again, that’s false. This has been a talking point Ted Cruz has often used–and it’s simply not true. It’s also a lie that Politifact rated 100 percent “false.” In fact, there was an amendment added to the law (by a Republican) before the bill became law that specifically prohibits members of Congress from being exempt from the law.
So there you have it, 5 of the biggest Republican lies about Obamacare exposed. Sadly, I don’t expect many conservatives to change their opinion about the law just from pointing these out. Facts rarely make an impact.
But still, I would encourage everyone who reads this to share it often, especially with conservatives. Because if nothing else, it’s always funny to confront Republicans with a few facts and watch them try to dispute them with their spoon-fed right-wing talking points that often just don’t make any sense.

Link

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Health exchange rates 25% less than first priced

"The premiums for insurance plans sold on Arkansas’ exchange will be about 25 percent less than what the companies had originally proposed and below what independent forecasters predicted, the Arkansas Insurance Department announced Monday." NWA online, subscriber only

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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Top 16 myths about the health care law

PolitiFact has been fact-checking claims about the federal health care law since lawmakers started drafting the legislation in 2009. Long controversial, the law has been no stranger to attacks by detractors. Here are 16 of the biggest falsehoods PolitiFact has rated.

LINK

Seventeen other myths smacked down here.

Factcheck smacks many common myths: http://www.factcheck.org/2013/09/obamacare-myths/

The basics covered here: http://www.webmd.com/health-insurance/d ... sktop_ad4a

Further info here: http://www.obamacarefacts.com/

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Certain people working to sabotage government from within causes lots of problems, but these attacks on the healthcare law are especially pernicious because the lack of access kills about 20,000 Americans per year (that's National Academy of Science, and the lowest estimate available).

Some People Are Making Big Bucks Sabotaging Obamacare
Excerpt:
"The New York Times rightfully notes in an editorial that many other conservative advocacy groups, like the National Liberty Federation, have latched onto the Obamacare fight, viewing the healthcare reform debate as little more than opportunity to raise a few bucks.

The second and less noticed benefactor of some of the more malicious attacks upon healthcare reform are health insurance brokers. Health insurance brokers make a living by selling health insurance and collecting a commission for every person or group they enroll. With healthcare reform set to provide easy access to health insurance options, free of charge, many in the health insurance agent industry view the Obamacare rollout as a death sentence. In recent months, the broker industry has mobilized to erect obstacles for the dozens of community group “navigators,” organizations tapped to spread the word about how to enroll in the exchanges.

In Georgia, under influence from health insurance agent lobbyists, the state passed a law that prohibits navigators from providing advice “concerning the benefits, terms, and features of a particular health benefit plan.” Other states have thrown up licensing laws in an effort to curtail navigators from being able to do, well, anything."

Some People Are Making Big Bucks Sabotaging Obamacare
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

Post by Dardedar »

Excellent unpack of latest conservative lies about the ACA:

Let’s Stop Using Bogus Comparisons of Health Insurance Premiums to Throw Darts at Health Reform

"Avik Roy, repeating his claim that health reform will make insurance less affordable, criticizes the Obama administration for announcing various premiums that people will pay next year for coverage in the new insurance exchanges without comparing them to what people now pay. He quotes the charge by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, head of American Action Forum, that, “Instead they try to distract with a comparison to a hypothetical number that has nothing to do with the actual experience of real people.”

Then Roy proceeds to do just that.

Roy compares premiums for the cheapest individual market plans available in 2013 with the cheapest “Bronze” plans for people ages 27 and 40 available next year in the exchanges. This comparison isn’t apples-to-apples; it’s more like apples-to-avocados. It:

--Downplays the premium tax credits that many people in the individual market, particularly young adults, will receive under health reform. Once you factor in those tax credits, many people who buy their own insurance today will pay less next year.

--Ignores the fact that many people can’t get coverage in today’s individual market but will be able to under health reform. Many people are denied coverage or quoted unaffordable premium rates because they have a pre-existing health condition. That means premiums in the individual market are lower than they would be if insurers were barred from excluding people in poorer health, as they will be starting next year.
Under health reform, people who haven’t had access to the individual market will finally be able to obtain coverage, without being penalized or excluded because of their health problems.

--Ignores the fact that today’s lowest cost plans often don’t cover essential benefits, but plans offered in the exchanges will. In comparing current premiums for cheap health plans in various states with next year’s premiums under health reform, Roy says little about what people’s actual experience would be if they have one of these cheap plans and get sick or injured.

--Take Nebraska, where Roy says 27-year-olds will face the biggest premium increase under health reform. We examined the five cheapest plans in October 2013 in one zip code in Nebraska and found that none covered mental health services or substance abuse treatment, and two didn’t even cover prescription drugs, visits to primary-care doctors, or visits to specialists such as oncologists. Only one provided maternity coverage. And, two of these plans had a $10,000 deductible, meaning that enrollees must pay that much of their own money on covered benefits before the plan starts contributing.

--In comparison, plans offered in the new exchanges will have to provide a comprehensive array of benefits (including all of those just mentioned) and limit what consumers pay out of pocket.

--Pretends the plans with cheapest sticker prices in the market today represent what people buying their own insurance are actually purchasing. In fact, we do not know how popular these particular (and often extremely limited) plans are (for example, whether they enroll large numbers of young adults) or how much people actually pay for them once the insurer takes applicants’ health status and other factors into account."

LINK

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Ted Cruz has a 61% lie ratio. Isn't that something...

"Of his... 13 statements proven to not be true according to Politifact, seven of them related to Obamacare. Meaning that in his time in the Senate, and on his campaign to “defund Obamacare,” Politifact hasn’t found any of his “big statements” about Obamacare to be true.
Let that sink in for just a moment. The leading Republican advocate against Obamacare hasn’t been found to have said one truthful meaningful statement about the health care law, out of seven statements that have been fact-checked. In fact, an analysis of his statements only proves that when speaking about the health care law—he’s lying.

http://www.forwardprogressives.com/a-br ... ated-lies/

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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20 Questions You Have About Obamacare But Are Too Afraid To Ask

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1. Will Obamacare end up costing me money?
2. What if I already have health insurance?
3. If I’m keeping my current health insurance, does Obamacare benefit me?
4. Health insurance is so hard to figure out. How can I even tell what’s in my plan?
5. Why did I get a check in the mail from my insurance company?
6. Are dental or vision insurance plans affected by the new law?
7. What are the “exchanges,” and should people like me join them?
8. If I want to sign up for a new government-organized health plan, how can I?
9. Why am I hearing so much about October 1? What does that date mean for me?
10. What if I can’t afford any health coverage?
11. If I don’t want to get insurance, am I going to have to pay?
12. What happens to my insurance if I change jobs?
13. Is Obamacare still at risk of getting repealed or defunded?
14. Is it true that Obamacare keeps getting delayed?
15. Who will wind up benefiting most from the new law?
16. How do gay couples factor into Obamacare?
17. Is it true that Obamacare will force me to switch doctors/ make my company cut my hours/ violate my privacy/ end employer-run health insurance as we know it?
18. Will my spouse lose his or her health coverage under Obamacare?
19. What’s the timeline for rolling out all of these features? What’s already happened and what are we still waiting for?
20. Where do I go to ask more questions?

Answers at: LINK

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Q: who's to blame for government shutdown? A: the Republican party

"There is one party that is solely to blame for the first government shutdown in 17 years. And it's the Republican party.

Indeed, the debate happening in Washington right now is not even between Democrats and Republicans. It's not even about the deficit, or the budget, or government spending priorities. Rather, it is one strictly occurring between Republicans who are trying to find some magic bullet to destroy "Obamacare" – the country's fiscal health be damned.

In the House of Representatives, bills that would allow the government to continue to operate were amended with provisions defunding or delaying Obamacare. This is, for Democrats, a nonstarter. The reason is obvious: the Affordable Care Act is the president's signature achievement and he is not going to sign a bill that undoes or even delays it.

Nor should he. Obamacare is the law of the land. It was passed by Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the US supreme court, and it is already going into effect. There is no reason for President Obama to be cowed by such legislative extortion.

Yet, rather than accept the reality of Obamacare, Republicans are using the prospect of a government shutdown and/or a default on the nation's debt to try to stop it.

In key respects, this dispiriting series of events is the logical conclusion of the Republican party's descent into madness. The GOP has become a party dominated by a group of politicians who are fundamentally nihilistic, contemptuous of democracy and willing (even proud) to operate outside the long-accepted norms of American democracy."

Michael Cohen, The Guardian
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

Post by Dardedar »

Excellent article. Read this article.

Five reasons Americans already love ObamaCare — plus one reason why they’re gonna love it even more, soon

FOX NEWS

Excerpts:
"There’s a reason Republicans have been rushing to try and defund the Affordable Care Act before October 1, when major sections of the law take effect.
Republicans know what polls show — that most Americans don’t know what’s in ObamaCare, but when told what the law actually includes, a strong majority support the law.
Once state health insurance exchanges take effect, and premiums for all Americans go down, Republicans know the law will only become more popular and harder to repeal.
As Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “It's a lot harder to undo something than it is to stop it in the first place.”

Exactly.

Because just like Republicans railed against Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare when they were first proposed, those programs are now highly effective and broadly popular parts of our social safety net — supported even by strong majorities of Republican voters. "

1. ACA allows young Americans to stay on their parents’ insurance plans
2. ACA bans insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions
"This is why the conservative allegation about death panels is so ironic; while the actual ACA law does not contain death panels or anything remotely like them, the fact is that prior to ObamaCare, insurance companies were effectively operating like death panels in denying life-saving coverage to anyone with a pre-existing condition..."
3. ACA offers tax credits to small businesses to buy insurance
4. ACA requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance
Over 96% of companies with more than 50 employees already provide health insurance to their employees. And contrary to Republicans claiming otherwise, studies show the vast majority of those employers do not plan to drop or reduce that coverage because of ObamaCare.
5. ACA provides subsidies to help individuals afford coverage
6. State-based health insurance exchanges
Americans of all political stripes like choice and competition, which is precisely what the ObamaCare health insurance exchanges will create. So it’s no wonder that 80% of Americans — including 72% of Republicans — support the health insurance exchange program in ObamaCare.

"Republicans who are throwing temper tantrums over sour grapes need to grow up.
Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, President Obama signed it into law and the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality.
The cost of doing nothing on health care reform was too great and the cost of repeatedly refighting the political battles of the past is obscene."

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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

Post by Dardedar »

Brummet has and excellent article on the shut down. It's behind a pay wall, I'll temporarily put it here:

COMMENTARY After the apocalyse

This stunt that House Republicans have pulled—shutting down government because they don’t like the health-care reform law that will not be affected by the shutdown—puts me in mind of one of their recent former staff aides.

His name is Mike Lofgren. For 28 years he worked as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill, the last 16 as a budget analyst for the House and Senate.

By late 2011 he had endured all he could endure. So he quit and, in September of that year, published a buzzed-about article for a website, truthout.com.

In that article, Lofgren deplored that his party of Eisenhower and pragmatic conservatism had become an “apocalyptic cult” wanting either to tear down the government to take it over, or take over the government to tear it down.

By “apocalyptic” he intended a kind of religious metaphor.

Apocalyptic religion is a fundamentalist one holding that we’re all headed for a dire fate if we don’t believe and behave as the fundamentalist religion dictates.

These new Republicans who came to Congress, principally the U.S. House, with the Tea Party revolt in 2010 are like that in their politics, Lofgren wrote.

Their political theology, he said, worships private business and/or religion, owing to a convenient and cynical political merger of board room and pulpit, and sees government as the vile enemy of both.

A government dictate that everyone must buy health insurance—why, that’s practically the unpardonable sin, they believe. It burdens the private sector and presumes that a moral imperative can be mandated, and a virtuous act performed, by government.

This new shutdown of the government for no reason other than House Republican zeal reveals a prescience in Lofgren’s article, which he parlayed into a recent book, The Party is Over.

After I wrote a laudatory column in September 2011 about the article, while calling it “perhaps a tad overwrought in a sentence or two,” Lofgren sent me a note saying he’d actually restrained himself because things really were worse than I could imagine.

There was another equally profound theme of his article. It was that this new and destructively apocalyptic House Republican politics gets enabled by Democrats, the media and the people.

The Democrats are complicit, Lofgren wrote, because they are politically cowardly and inept and beholden themselves to corporate underwriters.

The news media is complicit, Logren wrote, because of a practice that The Guardian has called American journalism’s addiction to “both side-ism,” meaning a faux attention to supposed fairness by trying to balance reporting.

That, Lofgren wrote, leads people to blame both parties equally in times such as these rather than to distinguish and confront the real fact—which, in this instance, is that Republicans are singularly to blame for acting illogically with cynical obstruction.

The people are complicit, he wrote, because elections are dominated by “low-information voters” who often express their disdain for government by voting for the party most disdainful of government. That means Republicans, even as Republicans were the ones primarily responsible for making government deserving of disdain.

Every time people blame only “Congress” for “this mess,” they are, by their broad generic brush, falling into the Republicans’ trap.

The problem at hand isn’t Congress, but the House Republican subset. The “mess” at hand isn’t vague and pervasive, but narrow and specific to that House Republican subset.

It’s one thing to want to repeal the Affordable Care Act. A bill could be filed to accomplish that and it could be argued vigorously. Then a vote could be taken.

But to refuse to fund the government because you don’t like that act, and to deploy a bully’s tactic that inflicts broad collateral harm without touching that thing you don’t like—because, as it happens, the Affordable Care Act is not affected by this cessation of newly discretionary funding—well, all of that is the handiwork of extremist defenders against the apocalypse.

The wild card in the current affair is that Democrats suddenly have begun to appear less cowardly.

President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have declared simply and plainly that keeping government open is not a matter of negotiation, and that neither is the debt ceiling by which the government pays its bills.

Even the usually obliging U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor said on the Capitol View program Sunday on KARK-TV that Republicans can’t have their way this time because … they lost.

Indeed, they lost the presidency. Indeed, they lost the Senate.

They also lost the combined popular vote for the House, though they held their majority thanks to redistricting that gave them consolidated choirs to which to preach their apocalyptic sermons."
--John Brummet

http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2013/oct/ ... apocalyse/
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

Post by Dardedar »

You know you're too much into public health when... "You're anxious and excited and can't wait for the opening of health insurance marketplaces. And you already have insurance."

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And important article: Obamacare Explained By An Insurance Industry Insider

LINK

Excerpt:

"If voters knew the ugly truth about how “Big Health Insurance” really works, they would be horrified at the attempts of Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare. Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), America’s healthcare delivery system was a gravy train, making every player rich and leaving the putative beneficiaries — patients — deeply unhappy. Pre-ACA healthcare delivery was a cash cow, a gravy train for all the health care providers, including doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and device manufacturers. According to the 2011-2012 Physician Salary Survey, most doctors earned upwards of $200,000 a year. Not bad for a profession where nothing unique is invented and all the techniques are industry-standard practices.
Health insurance is a nasty business. There may be no more complex business on earth. Insurance needs to turn a profit, pay attention to federal and state laws, and stand as middleman between sick people and the bad guys: greedy doctors, hospitals, Big Pharma and medical-device manufacturers. I worked my way through college at a large Midwestern teaching hospital. Then, in my profession as a software architect, I spent nine years working for a variety of health insurance companies programming claim systems. My unique experience taught me a lot about how health care is delivered in the United States. Under the old system, known as “fee for service,” the incentives were lined up to encourage doctors to perform as many procedures as possible. With few exceptions, the more procedures — CPT/HCPCS codes — a doctor performed, the more money they made. In fact, many doctors even figured out how they could get more money by breaking up their procedures into smaller sub-procedures so they could bill for them separately. This practice, known as un-bundling — coupled with the steep increases in the number of procedures performed year over year — led to a situation where health care costs have been skyrocketing year after year. No wonder “Big Insurance” doesn’t like the Affordable Care Act."

http://www.liberalamerica.org/2013/08/2 ... y-insider/

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“The threats may continue, but they are not working. And they will never work,” said Warren. “Because this is a democracy. And in a democracy, hostage tactics are the last resort for those who can’t otherwise win their fights through elections, can’t win their fights in Congress, can’t win their fights for the Presidency, and can’t win their fights in Courts. For this right-wing minority, hostage-taking is all they have left – a last gasp of those who cannot cope with the realities of our democracy.” --Elizabeth Warren

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Where the poor and uninsured live: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013 ... .html?_r=0
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: The Healing of America --Meeting Presentation

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The Shutdown in 10 Infuriating Sentences
—By Kevin Drum| Fri Oct. 4, 2013

At its core, the dispute over the budget and the debt ceiling isn't complicated at all. But it is full of misconceptions and urban myths. Here are the 10 facts worth remembering past all the obfuscation:

1. Democrats have already agreed to fund the government at Republican levels.

2. Despite what you might have heard, there have only been two serious government shutdowns in recent history, and both were the result of Republican ultimatums.

3. Democrats in the Senate have been begging the House to negotiate over the budget for the past six months, but Republicans have refused.

4. That's because Republicans wanted to wait until they had either a government shutdown or a debt ceiling breach as leverage, something they've been very clear about all along.

5. Republicans keep talking about compromise, but they've offered nothing in return for agreeing to their demands—except to keep the government intact if they get their way.

6. The public is very strongly opposed to using a government shutdown to stop Obamacare.

7. Contrary to Republican claims, the deficit is not increasing—it peaked in 2009 and has been dropping ever since, declining by $200 billion last year with another $450 billion drop projected this year.

8. A long government shutdown is likely to seriously hurt economic growth, with a monthlong shutdown projected to slash GDP in the fourth quarter by 1 percentage point and reduce employment by over a million jobs.

9. No, Democrats have not used debt ceiling hostage taking in the past to force presidents to accept their political agenda.

10. This whole dispute is about the Republican Party fighting to make sure the working poor don't have access to affordable health care.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2 ... -explained

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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