COVID-19 & Healthcare

Tea-Publican economic terrorists plot to take Medicare hostage to delay ‘ObamaCare’

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REDRemember when the media villagers and Beltway bloviators told us that the GOP was done with the economic terrorism of taking America hostage to extort the ransom of killing “ObamaCare,” because this is an election year?

Yeah, they’re all idiots. The job of an anti-government terrorist is to terrorize. It’s their nature.

Sahil Kapur at Talking Points Memo reports, GOP Plots New Round Of Hostage-Taking To Stop Obamacare:

House Republicans expect to vote this Friday on legislation that would risk steep, destabilizing Medicare cuts (the Medicare “doc fix,” threatening a 24 percent cut in physician payments)  at the end of the month unless Democrats agree to a five-year delay of Obamacare’s individual mandate.

It mirrors some of the brinkmanship in the government shutdown fight last fall in that the GOP is using a must-pass bill as a vehicle to chop the Affordable Care Act. Democratic leaders have repeatedly rejected proposals to tinker with the mandate to buy insurance and have warned Republicans not to tie a physician payment fix to their partisan quest to unravel Obamacare.

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Conservative women sure get away with being bossy

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Sheryl Sandberg has sparked a healthy debate with the campaign she started aimed at getting people to stop using the word “bossy’ to describe girls. While it may not seem like a big deal at first, when you think about it and look at the evidence, it’s clear that “bossy” is applied to assertive girls far more often than similarly outgoing boys and is really a euphemism for something else. As Amanda Marcotte puts it:

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The ‘Kochtopus’ crushes the soul of a cancer victim for its anti-Obamacare propaganda

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Last month, the Los Angeles Times‘ business reporter Michael Hiltzik, after debunking one “Kochtopus” Americans For Prosperity “ObamaCare” horror story ad after another, opined Maybe there are no genuine Obamacare horror stories:

Kevin Drum wonders whether there’s a single genuine Obamacare horror story out there, given that virtually every yarn promoted by Republicans or conservatives about people hurt by the Affordable Care Act has deflated like a pricked balloon on the merest examination.

KochIt’s a very good question, inspired by the latest horror story bloomer — the tale of one Julie Boonstra of Michigan, wholesaled by the Koch-founded conservative organization Americans for Prosperity. In a political ad being run by AFP against a Democratic senate candidate in Michigan, Boonstra asserts that “Obamacare” has made her leukemia treatment “unaffordable” and “jeopardized” her health.

But when Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post checked out her story, he found it didn’t hold up. The Affordable Care Act provided her with cheaper coverage than she had before, while allowing her to keep her doctor and maintain her treatment. Kessler didn’t mention it, but Boonstra plainly benefits from another provision of the ACA: the ban on exclusions for preexisting conditions. Patients living in the pre-ACA world of individual health insurance with conditions like leukemia were constantly in danger of losing their coverage and becoming uninsurable. That’s not legal anymore.

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Final lecture in The Evolving Brain series

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Last lecture tonight of this six week series at UA Centennial Hall, 1020 E. University Blvd. (east of Park Avenue),  at 7 p.m.evolvingbrain

“More Perfect Than We Think”

William Bialek, PhD, John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics, Princeton University
“From its ability to appreciate beauty, to the reassembly of distant childhood memories, to our almost unthinking ability to respond to the unexpected, is our brain really “doing a good job” at solving the problems we confront as we move through the world? Has evolution granted us a rich inheritance of tools, or saddled us with artifacts of a distant past, limiting our ability to solve new problems? Many other animals, from insects to our fellow primates, do many equally remarkable things, but several examples will be presented allowing us to see how the human brain solves problems in an essentially perfect way — no machine operating under the same physical constraints could do better. Examining what is common among the problems that the brain is good at solving begins to suggest a more general principle that may be at work”.

Martha McSally Wants to Go to Washington to Do… Nothing?

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“Warrior woman”, anti-feminist, and perpetual political candidate Martha McSally wants me to “like” her Facebook page. The only reason someone like me might considering “liking” McSally’s page is to keep tabs on what the stealth candidate with no opinions and no ideas is doing. But I find McSally’s ad featuring an intense, wild-eyed photo of Nancy Pelosi offensive. Let’s face it: … Read more