COVID-19 & Healthcare

Obama campaign ad: ‘Only Choice’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have posted about the Romney plan for Medicaid that President Bill Clinton addressed in his DNC convention speech. Romney's Medicaid cuts would be devastating to nursing home care and the disabled. Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities. (The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 63.5 percent –
or $148 billion – of federal Medicaid spending ($251 billion in total)
goes towards the elderly, blind and disabled.)

The Romney plan for Medicaid affects "dual eligibles," and would be devastating to nursing home care for the elderly, which many families simply cannot afford without Medicare and Medicaid. Bloomberg News reported Medicaid to Lose $1.26 Trillion Under Romney Block Grant – Bloomberg.

The Obama campaign is up with a new ad on this issue, entitled "Only Choice." From the ad description:

"It's one of the hardest decisions a family can make …realizing a
nursing home is the only choice. For many middle class families,
Medicaid is the only way to afford the care. But as a governor, Mitt
Romney raised nursing home fees eight times. And as President, his
budget cuts Medicaid by one-third. And Burdens families with the cost of
nursing home care. We have a president who won't let that happen."

Video below the fold.

Why Obama Now (video)

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by Pamela Powers Hannley

After the jump, watch a 3:44 minute video on why anyone who makes less than $1 million per year should vote to re-elect President Barack Obama. 

This is not rocket science, people. If you're undecided, you haven't been paying attention for the past 30 years. Vive la 99%.

The trouble with ‘E.Orr’

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

EeyoreI have told you about The troubling Tyler Mott, the Tea-Publican running for state senate in LD 9, but what about his running mate for the LD 9 House, the equally troubling Tea-Publican Ethan Orr aka "E.Orr," the former Young Democrat?

The Arizona Capitol Times (subscription required) reports House contest in Tucson pits 2 Democrats against a former Democrat:

Republican Ethan Orr spent the first half of his life as a Democrat, volunteering for the party on political campaigns, including Bill Clinton’s first presidential run in 1992 and Eddie Basha’s run for Arizona governor in 1994.

So it’s no surprise that when he’s on the campaign trail for a House seat in north Tucson’s new Legislative District 9, one of the state’s most competitive districts, he can talk the talk that the moderate voters there want to hear.

* * *

Orr says he fashions himself after moderate Tucson Republicans like former Reps. Pete Hershberger and Toni Hellon, and he hopes to work with the southern Arizona Democratic delegation to pass legislation that can help the people and Tucson.

Yeah, not hardly. Hellon and Hershberger were not culture warriors for the far-right social agenda. And aren't they dismissed today as RINOs by the Tea-Publican Party?

Orr’s Democratic opponents, Victoria Steele and Mohur Sidhwa, say Orr’s moderate rhetoric is false advertising.

Orr takes a strong stance on several social issues, including abortion, saying it should be illegal in all cases except when the mother’s life is at risk. He said he doesn’t support making gay marriage legal, but doesn’t support a constitutional amendment against it either.

[Note: Arizona voters already enacted a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman, Prop. 102 in 2008. Someone should ask him in upcoming debates how he voted on Prop. 102.]

Though he said he wouldn’t sponsor social bills himself, he said when it comes time to vote, he would vote with his party and his conscience.

E.Orr's stance on abortion means that he supports requiring forced birth for victims of rape and incest — the life of the mother is his only exception. Someone should ask him in upcoming debates whether he believes in Rep. Todd Akin's (R-MO) "legitimate rape" theory which is prevalent among the anti-choice Christian right.

E.Orr says he will vote with his party on social issues. Well, the 20 week restrictions on abortion, waiting periods and forced ultra-sound, the defunding of Planned Parenthood, and permitting employers religious institutions to opt-out of contraceptive coverage in employer-sponsored health insurance plans — all bills advanced by Cathi Herrod and her Center for Arizona Policy — were passed with near unanimous Tea-Publican support in the past legislature.

Abortion: What happens when a ‘pro-choice’ blogger debates a ‘pro-life’ protester? (video)

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by Pamela Powers Hannley

With the Republican Congress and the state legislatures (including Arizona's) passing anti-woman laws that ranged from the absurd to the vindictive, I can't understand why any woman in the US would vote Republican in this election. 

The impressive War on Women backlash may be one reason why most campaigning Republicans–except Todd "legitimate rape" Akin–are trying to forget anti-woman maddess that swept through their party in the spring. (After all, they don't want to lose all of the women's vote.)

None the less, the War on Women and the assault on women's reproductive rights continue– at least in the religious right wing of the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party's platform includes strong pro-choice language. Consequently, at the recent Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, a small band of anti-abortion protesters demonstrated in front of the convention center daily. Mostly, the demonstrators were old white men (surprise, surprise), but on one particular day a handful of young women joined them (to lend some credibility?).

You might say that "the devil made me do it," but with video rolling, I engaged one of the protesters in a heated, street-level debate about abortion, choice, access to contraception, sex education, "legitimate rape", fetus personhood, the morning after pill, and forcing underage girls to have a rapist's baby. 

Surprisingly, we found some consensus. We both believe…

– Abortion is a very difficult choice.

– Abortion should be a last resort, not a routine birth control method.

– Rape is rape, and there's no such thing as protection from pregnancy when a woman is raped.

– Abstinence only education is "unrealistic." Contraception and sex education should be provided to young girls in order to prevent unwanted pregnancy. She didn't want the contraception to be free, but she was somewhat more enlightened and reasonable than most Congressmen. 

– Vaginal ultrasound should be an option, if the woman wants one. (On the tape, she seems incredulous when I tell her about some of the legislation that has passed.)

Of course, the big differences between us were that:

– I believe every woman should have the right to choose, and she wants the government to dictate what citizens do;

– She believes that a fetus is a person from the moment of contraception, and I don't. She also believes that "right to life" doesn't apply to "criminals". (So, the death penalty is OK, but not abortion.) 

What I came away with is that much of the anti-woman legislation passed by Arizona and other states is too extreme even for a deeply religious woman who is vehemently opposed to abortion.

Watch the video after the jump.

Romney’s Medicaid cuts would be devastating to nursing home care and the disabled

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Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

During his DNC Convention speech, former president Bill Clinton raised a subject that had been largely ignored by the media until then — the Romney/Ryan proposed cuts to Medicaid that would immeidately affect many seniors on Medicare (the "dual eligibles"). DNC 2012: Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention (Full transcript):

Now, folks, this is serious, because it gets worse. And you won’t be laughing when I finish telling you this. They also want to block grant Medicaid and cut it by a third over the coming 10 years. Of course, that’s going to really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that’s not all. A lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid. It’s going to end Medicare as we know it. And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities, including a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down’s syndrome or autism or other severe conditions. And, honestly, just think about it. If that happens, I don’t know what those families are going to do. So I know what I’m going to do: I’m going to do everything I can to see that it doesn’t happen. We can’t let it happen. We can’t.

As everyone knows by now, Clinton departed from his prepared text and was winging it for much of his speech. Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein's Wonkblog at the Washington Post fact-checked this portion of Clinton's speech, and found that his prepared text on this subject was accurate. Fact-checking Bill Clinton on Medicare:

Lots of folks don’t know this fact… because it’s not true. Clinton here is referring to the 9.1 million seniors who are low-income or disabled, making them eligible for both entitlement programs. In health wonk terminology, they’re referred to as the “dual eligibles.”

Dual eligibles certainly cost more than other Medicaid enrollees, like children and pregnant women. But there’s no evidence to support that these patients eat up two-thirds of the Medicaid budget. Kaiser Family Foundation looked at this issue in an April 2012 brief. It found that, “Although these ‘dual eligibles’ accounted for only 15 percent of Medicaid enrollment in 2008, 39 percent of all Medicaid expenditures for medical services were made on their behalf.”

Clinton’s prepared remarks on this point, however, were quite different. Here’s how those went: “Almost two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for seniors and on people with disabilities, including kids from middle class families, with special needs like, Downs syndrome or Autism.” That checks out: the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 63.5 percent – or $148 billion – of federal Medicaid spending ($251 billion in total) goes towards the elderly, blind and disabled.

Bloomberg News last week looked at this issue and found Medicaid to Lose $1.26 Trillion Under Romney Block Grant – Bloomberg:

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would strip Medicaid of $1.26 trillion over nine years as part of a plan to do away with the open-ended approach to funding the U.S. health-insurance plan for the poor, a Bloomberg Government study found.