COVID-19 & Healthcare

The 39 Squishes

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

My apologies to Alfred Hitchcock for the wordplay on his brilliant adaption of "The 39 Steps."

No apologies are owed, however, to the 39 Democratic "squishes" in the House who voted for Rep. Fred Upton’s “Keep Your Health Plan Act.” Their defections were pointless. This Tea-Publican messaging bill will not get a hearing in the Senate, and even if it did somehow get a vote, President Obama has promised to veto it.

As Steve Benen observed, "[W]hat was the point of all of this effort? It boils down to Republican 'messaging' goals, which some party leaders consider more important than anything else."

So 39 Democratic squishes simply aided and abetted GOP messaging goals. With friends like these . . .

Andrew Rosenthal at the New York Times was unsparing in his criticism of the 39 squishes. Cutting the Heart Out of Health Reform:

It’s easy to be mad at President Obama over health care reform – the broken website, the confusing choices, his false promise that everyone could keep their current plans.

But it’s still hard to fathom why 39 Democrats voted for a bill in the House that would allow people to retain current, substandard individual policies, and renew them next year even if they don’t provide the basic coverage required by the Affordable Care Act. (You have to wonder, to start, whether they actually read the act before they voted for it, the same question I’d like to ask of Mr. Obama and his team. The changed requirements were in that law.)

Perhaps it was just a protest vote, a freebie based on the lawmakers’ certainty that the Senate will never take up or pass this ridiculous bill. But did those Democrats know what they were voting for this time around?

Once again, Barber and Sinema fail a gut check vote

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The recent media hysteria over "if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it" is all about ignoring sound public policy for "gotcha" political gamesmanship. That's all the Beltway media villagers and pundits care about. It's always a political game of meaningless polls and election speculation for these effin' idiots, they are too damned ignorant to comprehend complex public policy. The corporate media is complicit in the failure of effective government, and aids and abets those who seek to undermine government.

Let's be clear: the elimination of substandard health insurance policies that provide no real coverage and leave the insured vulnerable to medical costs in the event of a serious injury or illness that can leave them bankrupt is not a bug but a feature of the ACA. The policy was designed to eliminate these fraudulent insurance policies from predator insurers. The "grandfather" clause for these substandard policies gave these predator insurers until 2015 to sell their fraudulent product, but many of them used the ACA as a ready excuse to cancel these fraudulent policies now, blame it on "ObamaCare," and upsell their policy holders into more expensive policies without advising them that a less expensive policy may be available from that insurer, or available on the Marketplace insurance exchange. Predators do not inform their marks, or send them to their competitors.

All the media hysteria in favor of predatory insurers and the broken health care system status quo that existed prior to the ACA has created so much background noise that it encouraged Tea-Publicans to engage in further sabotage of the ACA, and made Democratic squishes go soft on sound public policy.

David Cay Johnston on seriously flawed reporting on ‘ObamaCare’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

[T]he headline atop the front page of The New York Times Monday morning: “Talk of Penalty is Missing in Ads for Health Care.” I damn near spit out my coffee when I saw that mosleading headline — from a Times reporter no less.

Tax expert David Cay Johnston at the National Memo had the same reaction. Obamacare Penalized By Flawed Reporting In The New York Times:

News flash – there is no penalty for failing to get health insurance under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Reporter Anemona Hartocollis built an entire piece around a faulty premise, stated clearly in her third sentence.  Times editors embraced her flawed reporting with the gusto of prominent placement, giving unwarranted credibility to what is, to be polite, a pile of misinformation.

Had Hartocollis read the law – or had any of the dozen or so Times editors who review every Page One story done so – they would not have published such nonsense anywhere in the paper.

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Had anyone at the Times read the law, they would know that is bunk. Here is what the law says, with statutory numbering removed:

WAIVER OF CRIMINAL PENALTIES. – In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by the section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalties with respect to such failure.

LIMITATIONS ON LIENS AND LEVIES. – The Secretary [read IRS] shall not – file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section, or levy on any such property with respect to such failure.

There is a simple way for the world’s most authoritative newspaper to stop embarrassing itself this way – require reporters to actually read the laws they write about, a policy I suggested when I was a reporter there, obviously to no avail.