COVID-19 & Healthcare

Thomas Mann on the modern GOP

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

As i posted yesterday, one of the high priests of Beltway centrism, political scientist Norman
Ornstein, has been ringing the warning bell about the radicalism of the
modern Republican Party for a couple of years now as well. Ornstein's
latest warning in The Atlantic is The Republican Hardliners Aren’t Conservatives, They’re Radicals.

Ornstein's frequent collaborator and high priest of Beltway centrism, Thomas Mann, writes in a CNN opinion, GOP House can't claim to speak for America:

One talking point frequently used by Republicans to justify shutting
down the government while trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act is
that the House and its Republican majority are more representative of
Americans' views than President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate.

That is preposterous and beside the point.

The ACA is law. End of
story. The House Republicans' attempt to nullify a duly-enacted law
violates the norms of our constitutional system. It is reckless
economically and an egregious affront to our democratic form of
government.

BillHouse Republicans have
every right to press their views in Congress but not to threaten to blow
up the U.S. and global economy by shutting down the government and
threatening public default.

We have elections for all
three key players — the president, the House and the Senate. If
Republicans want to change the law, they must do it the old-fashioned
way: Persuade the others to accept their position or win control of the
White House and Senate.

House Republicans lost
ground in the 2012 elections, lost the national vote for the House by
over a million votes and retained a majority only because of favorable
districting.

Obama won re-election by
3.9 percentage points and got an overwhelming victory in the Electoral
College. Senate Democrats retained their majority despite having to
defend more than twice as many seats as the Republicans.

House Republicans
represent a distinct minority of public sentiment. They carelessly
generalize from the echo chambers of their safe districts to the
national electorate.

Let’s Negotiate!

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Republicans have been demanding negotiations over the government shutdown. A few minutes ago, President Obama gave in to their demand. In a private meeting with House leaders, he said:

Let's negotiate. I understand that you want to repeal Obamacare, or at least delay it for a year. Now let me tell you what I want:

Timothy Egan: GOP on the wrong side of history

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Related to an earlier post, Republicans on the modern GOP: An anti-government, Neo-Confederate insurrectionist party of radicals, Timothy Egan at the New York Times writes today, Wrong Side of History:

Screenshot-9In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a
paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of
Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the
National Institutes of Health.

And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a
“slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as
tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying
to say it’s not their fault.

It’s too late. They flunked hostage-taking. About 30 or so
Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while
breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants
who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. The headline, today
and 50 years from now, will be the same: Republicans closed the
government to keep millions of their fellow Americans from getting
affordable health care.

They are not righteous rebels or principled provocateurs. They are
not constitutionalists, using the ruling framework built by the
founders. Just the opposite: they are a militant fringe of one party in
one house of Congress in one branch of government trying to nullify an
established law by extortion. This is not the design of the
Constitution.

The coverage gap in ‘ObamaCare’ is due to red state sabotage

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The red states continue to vote against their own economic best interests because of "freedom!" to be ignorant and poor.

Non Sequitur

The New York Times breaks down the coverage gap in "ObamaCare" due to red state governors and legislatures sabotaging coverage for their poor citizens (with an assist from the Roberts Supreme Court on making participation in expanded Medicaid optional). Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law:

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of
Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single
mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have
insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to
help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have
declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical
insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million
Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help. The
federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less
than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people
with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on
the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are
poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has
income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

Demographics-map

Interactive map Where Poor and Uninsured Americans Live

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are
home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of
poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers. About 60 percent of the
country’s uninsured working poor are in those states. Among those
excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’
aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion —
many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of
poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H.
Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model. “It is
their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to
the entire health care system.”

The kind of problem any business would like to have

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

It turns out that the biggest problem with the Health Insurance Marketplaces in the first few days of operation is that there is so much public demand that the computer servers are overwhelmed, causing delays and error messages. That is the kind of problem any business would like to have. "Get me IT — add more server capacity, stat!"

Sarah Kliff writes, Obamacare’s biggest problem right now isn’t glitches. It’s traffic.

If you've been trying to buy health insurance coverage on the
Obamacare marketplace, you're probably quite familiar with the screen [below]. It asks potential shoppers to hang on a moment because there are
"a lot of visitors on the site."

This screen has been a big part of the Affordable Care Act's launch
so far: There are lots of people who, in Obamacare's first 36 hours,
have had trouble signing into the new marketplaces. And even if they've
gotten in, they've found it difficult to move past the first few screens
of the application, where drop-down menus for security questions
wouldn't load.

Wait-screen-800x513

The wait times aren't ideal. Some people who wanted to sign up for
Obamacare on launch day couldn't. But though I spent most of Tuesday on
the phone with people who were struggling to use the Web site, I don't
tend to think these initial glitches will have a significant impact on
the law's success.

Everyone I spoke with, even those who couldn't sign up, took nearly
the same attitude: I guess I'll come back and try again later.