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6 Most Brazen Right-Wing Lies About Obamacare

The campaign to recast a program that makes health insurance accessible to millions of Americans as a plague of locusts has risen to fever pitch.

2013-10-242013-10-24 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

(N.B.: The greatest fear that the detractors of the ACA have is that it will succeed!)

Author: Mark Howard

“Halloween is approaching and the hobgoblins of conservative media are already spinning nightmarish tales of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). Actually, they have been doing it for quite some time, dating back to at least March 2010 when Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller published an article headlined “IRS looking to hire thousands of armed tax agents to enforce healthcare laws.” Fox News reposted the article on its community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation despite the fact that it was a complete fabrication and was debunked by the Annenberg Center’s FactCheck.org

This year the campaign to recast a program that makes health insurance accessible to millions of Americans as a plague of locusts has risen to fever pitch. The Republican Party and conservative media has pulled out all the stops in a strategy aimed at scaring people from signing up with the hope that low enrollment will collapse the system. President Obama had the same concerns last month when he said…

“What you’ve had is an unprecedented effort that you’ve seen ramp up in the past month or so that those who have opposed the idea of universal health care in the first place — and have fought this thing tooth and nail through Congress and through the courts — trying to scare and discourage people from getting a good deal.”

These are not the hackneyed GOP talking points about death panels, job killers and government bureaucrats coming between patients and doctors. These are far more fanciful efforts that stretch the limits of credulity and appear to have more in common with satire than actual news reporting. But this is what it has come to as Obamacare has finally reached the consumer stage and conservatives are desperate to keep people from discovering its benefits.

1) Fox News Warns That If You Sign Up For ObamaCare Hackers Will Steal Your Life Savings
On an episode of “The Real Story” on Fox News, host Gretchen Carlson introduced an ominous new strain of fear-mongering to demonize Obamacare. She interviewed John McAfee, the anti-virus software developer who is presently a fugitive from a murder investigation in Belize. He made a wild accusation that visitors to Healthcare.gov are going to be victimized by hackers who will steal their identities and/or drain their bank accounts.

Neither Carlson nor McAfee actually provided any evidence of such a threat. In fact, when directly asked about it, McAfee diverts from the question and lays out a completely different threat that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Obamacare website. He alleges that nefarious individuals could set up their own unaffiliated websites in the hopes of luring naive people to take advantage of. Of course, that is a threat that exists for every website, and has since the Internet began. Visiting Healthcare.gov does not expose anyone to these phony sites as implied by the fear-mongers at Fox.

2) WorldNetDaily Reports “Obama ‘Crashing Health-Care Site On Purpose’”
This article asserts that the President is so afraid that insurance shoppers will learn that Obamacare is really more expensive than the old system that he deliberately caused the website to crash to keep people from seeing the rates. No one is defending the botched launch of the insurance exchanges. However, the notion that the technical glitches were intentionally caused by Obama is delusional.

WND’s argument (supported by links to Rush Limbaugh) that rates will increase leaves out the subsidies and tax credits that are available for many applicants. With these adjustments, premiums for most people will be substantially lower. The administration would, therefore, be anxious for consumers to have access to that information and would not be putting obstacles in their path.

3) Rand Paul: Take Obamacare Or Go To Jail
Tea Party darling Rand Paul has made innumerable false statements about virtually every policy that has emanated from the White House. But none are more surreal than his comment, “They say take [Obamacare] or we will put people in jail. People say we aren’t going to put anybody in jail. The heck they won’t. You will get fined first. If you don’t pay your fines, you will go to jail.”

That’s interesting coming from someone who has frequently complained that no one in Congress has read the Affordable Care Act. If he had read it himself he would have known that the law explicitly prohibits criminal consequences for non-payment of fines. It states “In the case of any failure by a taxpayer to timely pay any penalty imposed by this section, such taxpayer shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure.” It rarely gets more clear than that, but the mission to frighten the public exceeds the motivation for truth on the part of GOP scare-meisters.

4) Right-Wing Think Tank Mortified That Obamacare Website Links To Voter Registration Form
This is a particularly curious horror story as it seeks to raise an alarm over something that ought to be regarded as a civic duty. Nevertheless, the conservative MacIver Institute (a Koch brothers-funded operation) published an article that implied there was some sort of heinous objective on the part of the Obama administration for having included a link to a voter registration form on the Obamacare website. This startling revelation is met with foreboding by MacIver and a flurry of right-wing media outlets that disseminated MacIver’s story, including National Review, Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, Breitbart News, the Daily Caller, and Fox News. All of their reports agreed that this was a clandestine attempt to register only Democratic voters despite the absence of any partisan framing. MacIver even asks specifically “[W]hat does registering to vote have to do with signing up for Obamacare?”

The core of the right’s trepidation is rooted in a more fundamental aversion to the act of voting itself. It is why they are continually erecting new barriers to voting. Democrats, on the other hand, have sought to expand voter turnout with bills like the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (aka Motor Voter) that mandates certain government agencies provide people with access to voter registration. In fact, that 20-year-old law requires that Obamacare administrators make voter registration available. MacIver, and similarly mortified conservative comrades, are either unaware of this, or are deliberately feigning ignorance in order to rile up their conspiracy-prone base.

5) Weekly Standard Finds Imaginary Threat On Obamacare Website
The ultra-conservative Weekly Standard dispatched its crack reporters to ferret out what it portrayed as an ominous security threat on the Healthcare.gov website. What it found were comments in the site’s source code that said that “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication or data transiting or stored on this information system.” The Standard notes that these comments were not visible to users and were not part of the site’s terms and conditions. But that didn’t stop them from implying that users would be still be bound by it because “the language is nevertheless a part of the underlying code.” Not really. It’s only a part of some inoperative text that carries no more obligation than some discarded notes.

This is another situation where you have to wonder whether these people are embarrassingly stupid or brazenly dishonest. There is a reason this language was not visible. It was deliberately removed with the use of HTML comment tags by the site’s programmers. It was undoubtedly edited out because it was not an accurate expression of the site’s privacy policy. It does not mean that users are agreeing to a secret clause permitting the government to spy on them as the Standard implied. If any of these “reporters” had a 14-year-old at home they could have learned what this is about. But that would have interfered with their goal, which is to leave Americans with the false impression that some hidden danger lurks beneath the surface of Obamacare.

6) Fox News Fears ACORN Is Back To Push ObamaCare
The Curvy Couch Potatoes over at Fox & Friends had a jolly old time resurrecting their fear of a community organizing enterprise that no longer exists. ACORN was wrongly hounded out of business by right-wing opponents after pseudo-journalist and convicted criminal James O’Keefe distributed some deceitfully edited and libelous videos. But that hasn’t stopped conservative media from exhuming the corpse whenever they are in need of a sensationalist story, as demonstrated by Fox co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who announced that “We’re getting information that ACORN operatives are trying to sign people up for the Affordable Care Act.”

While ACORN was never found to have engaged in any unlawful activity, there was a bill passed that prohibited them from receiving federal funds. However, there is nothing in the law that prevents organizations with former ACORN staff from getting federal grants. In fact, there isn’t even any current law that prevents ACORN from getting grants as the previous ban was not included in the latest Continuing Resolution. Fox is brazenly misrepresenting the facts in an attempt to reignite fears of the old ACORN bogeyman. They upped the terror ante by further alleging that ACORN would use your personal medical and financial information against you politically. They never revealed how that would occur, or to what end, but that isn’t the point. Their only interest is spreading fear, no matter how irrational and unsupported.

Conclusion

The zealousness with which these right-wing propagandists pursue their disinformation campaign is evidence of their own fear that Americans will come to appreciate having access to affordable healthcare. Therefore, they see their mission as derailing the program before that eventuality unfolds. Their tactics get more extreme and absurd the closer the program gets to gaining acceptance. A particular target of their attack is young people whose participation is important for the program to succeed. Consequently, opponents have launched a well-funded campaign (thanks to the Koch brothers) to scare off young consumers. Generation Opportunity has already released the now notorious “Creepy Uncle Sam” videos that make false implications of government intrusion into medical care. Next they are embarking on a 20-city college tour to mislead students.”

PolitiFact has reviewed 16 claims made by Obamacare detractors and found all of them false. Twelve of those were designated “Pants On Fire” lies. If there is one question that begs to be asked, it is this: If Obamacare is so terrible, why do opponents have to tell so many lies about it?

Mark Howard is an artist and the founder of the media analysis website News Corpse. He is the author of Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault On Truth.”

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.alternet.org/media/6-most-brazen-right-wing-lies-about-obamacare?akid=11074.123424.m5-LEx&rd=1&src=newsletter914168&t=5

Obamacare’s real danger for the GOP is that it will succeed

2013-09-26 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Washington Post

Author: Eugene Robinson

” To understand the crisis in Washington, tune out the histrionics and look at the big picture: Republicans are threatening to shut down the federal government — and perhaps even refuse to let the Treasury pay its creditors — in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to keep millions of Americans from getting health insurance.

Seriously. That’s what all the yelling and screaming is about. As my grandmother used to say, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

The GOP has tried its best to make Obamacare a synonym for bogeyman and convince people that it’s coming in the night to snatch the children. In fact, and I know this comes as a shock to some, Obamacare is not a mythical creature. It is a law, incorporating what were originally Republican ideas, that will make it possible for up to 30 million people now lacking health insurance to obtain it.Officially, the law in question is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Republicans intended the term “Obamacare” to be mocking, which is perhaps why President Obama started using it with pride.It is, indeed, an achievement of which the nation can be proud. About 48 million individuals in this country lacked health insurance in 2012, according to the Census Bureau, representing about 15 percent of the population. Other industrialized nations provide universal health care — and wonder if this is what we mean when we talk about American exceptionalism.

About 25 percent of people in households with annual incomes below $25,000 are uninsured, compared with just 8 percent in households earning more than $75,000. Do the working poor not deserve to have their chronic medical conditions treated as punishment for not making enough money?

Other rich countries provide truly universal care through single-payer systems of various kinds. Obama chose instead to model the Affordable Care Act after a program implemented on the state level by the Republican governor who became Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election. Yes, before Obamacare there was Romneycare, a private-sector, free-market solution designed to be in accord with the GOP’s most hallowed principles.

But in the years between Mitt Romney’s tenure in Massachusetts and his presidential run, the Republican Party lost its way, or perhaps its mind.

The party shows no serious interest in finding a GOP-friendly way to provide the uninsured with access to health care. Rather, it pursues two goals at any cost: opposing Obama no matter what he does, and making people see Obamacare as a failure.

For the radical far right, making health care more widely available through the existing network of insurers, most of them for-profit companies, is a giant leap toward godless socialism. These extremists hold outsize power in the GOP — enough to make sane Republican officials fear, with some reason, that anything short of massive resistance to Obamacare could lead to a primary challenge and a shortened career.

Some of Obamacare’s provisions are already in force and seem to be having the intended effect. For example, young adults are now allowed to stay on their parents’ health insurancepolicies until age 26. In 2009, 29.8 percent of those 19 through 25 were uninsured; in 2012, 27.2 percent lacked insurance, a modest but significant decline.

Now the central provisions of the Affordable Care Act are set to come into effect — the individual mandate, the insurance exchanges, the guarantee of coverage for those with preexisting conditions. Republicans scream that Obamacare is sure to fail. But what they really fear is that it will succeed.

That’s the reason for all the desperation. Republicans are afraid that Obamacare will not prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare — that Americans, in fact, will find they actually like it. The GOP fears that Obamacare will even be credited with slowing the rise of health-care costs to a more manageable rate. There are signs, in fact, that this “bending of the curve” is already taking place: Medical costs are still rising much faster than inflation but at the slowest rate in decades.

Keeping premiums under control will require persuading lots of young, healthy people to buy insurance — and thus, in effect, subsidize those who are older and sicker. That is why a group called Generation Opportunity, funded by the ultraconservative Koch brothers, plans to tour college campuses with disgusting ads in which a creepy Uncle Sam subjects a young woman to a pelvic examination.

The GOP message: Whatever you do, don’t buy health insurance. It may be — shudder — good for you.”

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-obamacare-the-gop-nightmare/2013/09/23/fd29187a-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Ranks of part-time workers still high. Obamacare not to blame, experts say

2013-09-02 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: http://www.cleveland.com

Author: Oliveria Perkins

“Megan Conway’s part-time waitressing job was great for extra money when she was a college student, but now with a degree and $40,000 in student loans, she thought she would have a full-time, professional job by now.

Conway is considered an involuntary part-time worker, or someone who really wants full-time work.

Recessions often give rise to more involuntary part-timers as employers cut back workers’ hours and on hiring of full-timers. But during recoveries, the ranks of such workers usually drop. However, during this recovery, their numbers have remained stubbornly high, though the unemployment rate has dropped.

“It has definitely made me a little angry,” Conway said of being unable to land a full-time professional job. “I feel that I did everything right. I networked. I even took an unpaid internship to get experience. I am a hard worker.”

At least two issues have pushed the plight of part-timers into the foreground. One is the discussion about whether the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, also know as Obamacare, is leading to more part-time workers. The act requires employers to provide health care to many employees averaging at least 30 hours a week. Critics of ACA say employers are only hiring part-timers as well as reducing the hours of an increasing number already on their payrolls to avoid providing medical insurance.

The second issue has to do with the proliferation of part-time jobs. Three out of four jobs created between December 2012 and July 2013 were part time, according to the federal Current Population Survey. The Labor Department defines part-time as working fewer than 35 hours per week. Some of these part-timers, like Conway, are recent college graduates who have had to resort to working menial jobs. She has been looking to work in the nonprofit sector since graduating in 2009 with a degree in that field. However, Conway is happy to have her job at a chain restaurant. Since she has been there several years, Conway makes more than minimum wage, and she has benefits.

Even more of these involuntary part-timers are those who once held full-time jobs, said Rebecca Glauber, a University of New Hampshire professor who recently published a paper on the topic.

“A lot of people lost their jobs during the recession, and if they were finding jobs, they were only finding part-time jobs,” she said.

Glauber found that the involuntary part-time employment rate more than doubled between 2007 and 2012. For women, it rose from 3.6 percent to 7.8 percent. For men, it went from 2.4 to 5.9 percent.

She found it was the largest five-year increase in involuntary part-time employment since the 1970s.

The share of the employed working part time was about 17 percent in 2007, said Rob Valletta, research advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, who just co-authored an Economic Letter about the increase in part-time work. By 2009, that figure had increased to nearly 20 percent, and has remained at that level. The recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.

While the share has remained constant, the demographics of these workers have changed. Valletta said they — like Conway — are now more apt to be the “prime” working age group of 25-to-54-year-olds. In the past, part-timers were more likely to come from the smaller pool of 16-to-24-year-olds.

“Many in the pool of prime workers, perhaps are very experienced and can only find part-time work,” he said. “Many have families to support, creating a source of hardship. One can argue that this shift can be obscured because the overall amount of part-time work occurring in the economy has been stable.”

Frederick “Rick” King worked about a decade at the family-owned chain of local music stores where he sold software and keyboards until the business closed about five years ago. He now works part-time at a chain drug store, a position he has held about a year.

“Most of the jobs being generated in this economy aren’t for adults like me with a decent work history,” King said. “I’m almost 50 years old, I don’t want to wait tables. That is for someone in high school or college who can survive on a part-time job.”

Most of the jobs created during the economy have either been higher paying ones, like nursing or other professions requiring specialized degrees or training, or they have been lower-paying jobs, like many in food service and retail that often are part-time.

“There has been a hollowing out of the middle,” Glauber said. “Involuntary part-time employment appears to be strongly correlated with economic vulnerability and hardship.”

Glauber found that in 2012, one in four of these workers lived in poverty; while only one in 20 of full-time workers did.

King said he doesn’t make enough to support his family. They are only making it because his check is combined with that of his 23-year-old son, also a part-time worker and a disability check a younger son receives. He said a disability keeps his wife from working.

King’s hopes rose recently when he applied for a full-time position at his company. The job went to someone else.
Structural or short-term changes?

More than 8.2 million people were considered involuntary part-time workers in July, virtually unchanged from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 2.6 million wanted full-time work, but couldn’t find it. The remaining became part-timers after employers cut back their hours.

The combined trends of the ranks of part-time workers not dwindling, 75 percent of the newly created jobs being part-time and the economy creating relatively few mid-level jobs, have caused many to question whether structural changes are occurring to the labor market. Will part-time work supplant a substantial number of full-time jobs?
“There may be a structural component to elevated part-time employment, but it is still too soon to tell,” Valletta said.
He believes lasting changes are unlikely. Valletta said such high rates of part-time workers have occurred before. In 1983, the share of people working part-time was slightly higher than the most recent peak, which fell back then as the economy improved.

“No one would argue that the labor market is anywhere recovered,” he said of the current recovery. “The elevated level of part-time work is just a reflection of this, and will likely get reversed over the next few years.”

Valletta said part-time employment had dropped among some demographic groups, including married women between 25 and 54, with more than a high school diploma. Less educated workers haven’t seen the same decreases.

Glauber also believes an improved economy is essential to lowering involuntary part-time work. But she said that will only happen for many of these workers if the recovery revs up instead of just creeps along as it has been doing.

The case of adjunct faculty may offer a point to ponder about the proliferation of part-time employment. Long before the recession, colleges and universities began hiring adjuncts in lieu of creating tenure track positions. On many campuses they make up a substantial portion of the teaching staff.

David Wilder, an adjunct art history and art professor, is a committee co-chair in the Ohio Part-time Faculty Association, an advocacy group. Since the recession, college enrollment has increased, but he said that hasn’t led to more permanent opportunities for these part-timers. He said reversing the trend of colleges favoring the creation of more part-time positions, has been difficult to reverse. Having even a chance at tenure has become an elusive goal for these instructors.

“It is said that the longer you spend teaching as an adjunct, the less chances you have of full-time employment,” Wilder said.

“A perverse moral system seems to have been fostered that views with suspicion those who’ve gone a long time without being hired on a full-time basis,” he said. “This is despite the fact that a few decades ago, faculty acquiring tenure was fairly common.”

Obamacare appears to be a factor in adjuncts at some institutions getting fewer hours. In April, the University of Akron decided to limit part-time instructors to eight credit hours per semester to avoid increasing health care costs. Officials said about 400 part-time faculty were typically teaching more than eight credit hours, and providing health care to them would be nearly $4 million.

Is Obamacare leading to more part-timers?

Several experts say what happened at the University of Akron doesn’t appear to be the norm.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., analyzed the number of hours people worked for the first half of this year to determine if employers were cutting workers back to under 30 hours to avoid paying health care.

He and Helene Jorgensen found that the percentage of workers putting in 25 to 29 hours was up, but so were those putting in 30 or more hours. The only drop was in those working 20 hours or fewer.

“There is some rise in the share of workers working 25 to 29 hours,” Baker said. “The reason is not that they are being cut from longer hours. The reason is there is a gain in the 25 to 29 category at the expense of workers working shorter hours.”

Linda Blumberg, a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., said it is premature for employers to make decisions now about cutting workers’ hours to avoid penalties, since implementation of that provision of the ACA has been put off until 2015.

“There is a lot of complexity to this law, and there is a lot of misinformation,” she said. “A lot of employers don’t understand what is going on.”

Employers who don’t provide health care for employees working an average of 30 hours per week or more could be subject to a $2,000 fine, but only if certain conditions are met.

For example, the law only applies to employers with at least 50 employees. Companies that don’t now offer coverage to these 30-hour-plus workers are the only ones that might be affected. Blumberg said the “vast majority” of larger companies now offer coverage to at least some of their workers, and many already offer coverage to many part-timers. For the most part, a company would only incur penalties for not providing coverage to employees between 138 and 400 percent of poverty. And only if at least one of the employees in that income group gets subsidized coverage through the new insurance marketplaces, or exchanges.

Blumberg said the many media reports and blog posts that have focused on Obamacare leading to more part-time work miss a key issue about running a business.

Tiffani Lanier went to Millennia Cos. in Independence believing that she had only signed on for a temporary assignment helping to reorganize files. Still, she was conscientious.

Cheryl Wszeborowski, the human resources and payroll director at the housing management company, took notice.

“We are a growing company, creating new positions frequently,” she said. “So when I find someone who has a great attitude and who is willing to learn, I will work hard to find a full-time position in our company for them.”

Lanier was permanently hired as an accounting clerk. She wanted full-time work when she took the temporary assignment. Lanier said she is glad she didn’t turn it down.

“Even if it is a part-time or temporary position, there is nothing wrong with trying it,” she said. “If I hadn’t accepted it, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”
Valletta of the San Francisco Fed said high numbers in the part-time pool often point to a skills mismatch between job seekers and available openings.

King, the drug store part-timer, said that after being laid off from the music store he got an Associates degree in graphic arts, but hasn’t been able to get a job in the field because of limited openings. He still holds out hope that he will.

Conway, the part-time waitress, said she still has a passion for nonprofit management. However, after dozens of interviews and no job, it was time to reconsider her career choice. Conway remembers being upbeat when she got an interview for a part-time volunteer coordinator’s position. She was told 400 people had applied.

She didn’t get the job.

“It was kind of getting ridiculous,” she said of the several jobs for which she was a finalist. “I kept being told: ‘You’re a great candidate,’ but I wasn’t getting hired.”

Conway is now studying to become a registered nurse.
“I know only two people my age who have like amazing jobs — and they are in health care,” she said. “Everybody else is struggling.”

Emphasis Mine

see: http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/09/ranks_of_part-time_workers_sti.html

Cui Bono?

The key is messaging; messaging is the key. Listening to conservatives yesterday, their message was that this is a large tax burden. Our first message? That is a Lie: the only people who would pay the fee are those who can afford health care insurance, and choose not to get it. (The best example of a tax on Pure, Utter, Stupidity yet offered!)

2012-06-292012-06-29 chasdarwinLeave a comment

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been protected by the SCOTUS, who judicated that to those for whom health insurance is affordable, they must either purchase same, or pay a fine.

Hooray for Us!

The question is: who benefits?

There are three dimensions to the answer: human, business, and political.

The first two are straight forward. For the first: those under 27, those over 65, those who cannot afford adequate health care, and those who can. The second: private health insurance companies (at least for a decade), and health care providers will benefit from an increase in customers.

Political? “Aye, there’s the rub…”

This decision may well have motivated the conservative base – something their candidate has been incapable of achieving. (To those who find joy in others not being able to obtain adequate health care, there is no hope.)

It also provides a unifying issue for progressives, and defines a clear difference between the parties: The GOP, who want to go back to the past; and the Democrats, who want to move forward.

How do we progressives protect our gains and move forward? By re-electing President Obama, and by electing solid progressive majorities in the House and Senate. How do we achieve that? By organizing, motivating, messaging, and getting out the vote.

We must frame messages to the middle of the political spectrum on why the ACA is good for all, bad for none, and that includes them.

N.B.: cui bono is Latin for Who Benefits: the basis of any homicide case.

The One-Sided War Against Obamacare

2012-06-212012-06-21 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: Mother Jones

By: Kevin Drum

“Abby Goodnough of the New York Times explains why misinformation and fear of Obamacare is increasingly widespread. It’s the money, stupid:

In all, about $235 million has been spent on ads attacking the law since its passage in March 2010, according to a recent survey by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group….Here in the suburbs of Philadelphia, which, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group, is one of the top five media markets for ad spending against the health care law, it is apparent how such messaging is playing out. (The other top markets are Orlando, Fla.; Tampa, Fla.; Pittsburgh; and Denver, all in swing states.) In interviews with about two dozen residents who were mostly opposed to the law, certain worries, resentments and dark predictions about it came up time and again.

By contrast, only $69 million has been spent on pro-Obamacare ads, most of it bland public-service spots from HHS. Add to that the fact that most Democrats seem petrified of actually defending the law, and it’s no surprise that the Fox News portrayal of Obamacare has been steadily gaining ground. That’s what happens when you slink into a corner when the other guys declare war.”

Emphasis Mine

see:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/06/one-sided-war-against-obamacare?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed

Any Rand was wrong: humans have evolved to co-operate

The United States health care system, to take one example, has by design been set up around the profit motive, based on the belief that only this narrow motivator of individual action can be counted on to produce anything good. It’s perhaps no surprise that it is among the most expensive in the world, and far from the most effective.

2012-04-13 chasdarwinLeave a comment

from: NY Times

By: Mark Buchanan

“…In a classic experiment of modern behavioral science – one that is now familiar to many people – an experimenter gives one of two people some cash, say $50, and asks them to offer some of it (any amount they choose) to another person, who can either accept or reject the offer. If the second person accepts, the cash is shared out accordingly; if he or she rejects it, no one gets to keep anything.

If we were all self-interested and greedy, then the second person would always accept the offer, as getting something is clearly better than getting nothing. And the first person, knowing this, would offer as little as possible. But that’s most certainly not what happens.

Experiments across many cultures show that people playing this “ultimatum game” typically offer anything from 25 to 50 percent of the money, and reject offers less than around 25 percent, often saying they wanted to punish the person for making an unfair offer.

An important point that people often overlook about these experiments (and others like them) is that they’ve been performed very carefully, with participants remaining completely anonymous, and playing only once. Everything is set up so no one can have any hope of building a good reputation or of getting any kind of payback in the future in kind for their actions today.

So this really does seem to be pure altruism, and we do care about fairness, at least most of us.

That’s not to say, of course, that we’re not often self-interested, or that human kindness isn’t frequently strategic and aimed at currying favor in the future. The point is that it’s not always like that. People give to charity, tip waiters in countries they’ll never again visit, dive into rivers to save other people or even animals – or set aside $1 million to send poor kids to school – not because they hope to get something but, sometimes, out of the goodness of their hearts.

Social researchers have begun referring to this human tendency with the technical term “strong reciprocity,” which refers to a willingness to cooperate, and also to punish those who don’t cooperate, even when no gain is possible. And there’s an interesting theory as to why we’re like this.

In theoretical studies, economists and anthropologists have been exploring how self-interest and cooperation might have played out in our ancestral groups of hunter-gatherers. In interactions among individuals, it’s natural to suppose that purely self-interested people would tend to come out ahead, as they’d never get caught out helping others without getting help in return and would also be able to cheat any naïve altruists that come along.

But it is also natural to suppose that when neighboring groups compete with one another, the group with more altruists would have an advantage, as it would be better able to manage collective tasks – things like farming and hunting, providing for defense or caring for the sick – than a group of more selfish people.

So you can imagine a basic tension in the ancient world between individual interactions that favor self-interest and personal preservation, and group interactions that favor individual altruism. Detailed simulations suggest that if the group competition is strong enough, cooperators will persist because of their intense value to group cohesion. But there’s slightly more to the story, too.

Further work shows that groups really thrive if the altruists are of a special sort – not just people who are willing to cooperate with others, but who are also willing to punish those who they see failing to cooperate.

This work is only suggestive, but it raises the interesting idea that it’s a long history of often brutal competition among groups that has turned most of us into willing cooperators, or, more accurately, strong reciprocators. We’re notHomo economicus, as Herbert Gintis of the University of Amherst puts it, butHomo reciprocans – an organism biologically prone to cooperative actions, and for good historical reasons.

No doubt this is what many people probably thought all along, without the aid of any theory or computer simulations. It just goes to show how theorists can labor for years to re-discover the obvious. Then again, re-discovery often casts the familiar in a not-so-familiar light, and leads us to reconsider what we thought we already knew.

We’ve been so busy over the past half century glorifying the power of markets driven by self-interest that we’ve overlooked how many of our most important institutions depended not on self-interest but on something more akin to a cooperative public spirit. If an impulse toward cooperation rather than self-interest alone is the “natural” human condition, then we’ve been poor stewards of a powerful social resource for the collective good. The United States health care system, to take one example, has by design been set up around the profit motive, based on the belief that only this narrow motivator of individual action can be counted on to produce anything good. It’s perhaps no surprise that it is among the most expensive in the world, and far from the most effective.

In a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, following a screening of his new film “Sicko,” Michael Moore criticized how financial interests play such a foundational role in health care in the United States. “It’s wrong and it’s immoral,” he said. “We have to take the profit motive out of health care. It’s as simple as that.”

But it’s not quite that simple. It’s not that profits shouldn’t play any role, because we are indeed motivated in part by self-interest. It’s just that we have other motivations, too, and helping others is one of those. We need to be just as open to the better parts of human nature as we are protective against the narrowly materialistic ones, whether we’re considering health care or anything else, including education.

You don’t need a new breed of experimental economists to tell you that. Just ask Braylon Edwards.

Emphasis Mine

see:http://buchanan.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/to-thrive-in-the-human-jungle-be-nice/

Healthcare Jujitsu

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the President could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system – Medicare for all. compared to private insurance, Medicare is a great deal. Its administrative costs are only around 3 percent, while the administrative costs of private insurers eat up 30 to 40 percent of premiums. Medicare’s costs are even below the 5 percent to 10 percent administrative costs borne by large companies that self-insure, and under the 11 percent costs of private plans under Medicare Advantage, the current private-insurance option under Medicare.

2012-03-27 chasdarwinLeave a comment

From: Robert Reich’s blog

By: Robert Reich

“Not surprisingly, today’s debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “tax,” and the question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Behind this judicial foreplay is the brute political fact that if the Court decides the individual mandate is an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the entire law starts unraveling.

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the President could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system – Medicare for all.

Here’s how.

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with pre-existing health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every American buy health insurance – including young and healthier people who are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You’ll remember the Administration couldn’t get the votes for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.

But don’t expect the Supreme Court to address this dilemma. It lies buried under an avalanche of constitutional argument.

Those who are defending the law in Court say the federal government has authority to compel Americans to buy health insurance under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Washington the power to regulate interstate commerce. They argue our sprawling health insurance system surely extends beyond an individual state.

Those who are opposing the law say a requirement that individuals contract with private insurance companies isn’t regulation of interstate commerce. It’s coercion of individuals.

Unhappily for Obama and the Democrats, most Americans don’t seem to like the individual mandate very much anyway. Many on the political right believe it a threat to individual liberty. Many on the left object to being required to buy something from a private company.

The President and the Democrats could have avoided this dilemma in the first place if they’d insisted on Medicare for all, or at least a public option.

After all, Social Security and Medicare require every working American to “buy” them. The purchase happens automatically in the form of a deduction from everyone’s paychecks. But because Social Security and Medicare are government programs financed by payroll taxes they don’t feel like mandatory purchases.

Americans don’t mind mandates in the form of payroll taxes for Social Security or Medicare. In fact, both programs are so popular even conservative Republicans were heard to shout “don’t take away my Medicare!” at rallies opposed to the new health care law.

There’s no question payroll taxes are constitutional, because there’s no doubt that the federal government can tax people in order to finance particular public benefits. But requiring citizens to buy something from a private company is different because private companies aren’t directly accountable to the public. They’re accountable to their owners and their purpose is to maximize profits. What if they monopolize the market and charge humongous premiums? (Some already seem to be doing this.)

Even if private health insurers are organized as not-for-profits, there’s still a problem of public accountability. What’s to prevent top executives from being paid small fortunes? (In more than a few cases this is already happening.)

Moreover, compared to private insurance, Medicare is a great deal. Its administrative costs are only around 3 percent, while the administrative costs of private insurers eat up 30 to 40 percent of premiums. Medicare’s costs are even below the 5 percent to 10 percent administrative costs borne by large companies that self-insure, and under the 11 percent costs of private plans under Medicare Advantage, the current private-insurance option under Medicare.

So why not Medicare for all?

Because Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their strategy has been to demonize government and seek to privatize everything that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars (see Paul Ryan’s plan for turning Medicare into vouchers). Then they go to court and argue that any mandatory purchase is unconstitutional because it exceeds the government’s authority.

Obama and the Democrats should do the reverse. If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them – as will the Supreme Court.”

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including “The Work of Nations,” “Locked in the Cabinet,” “Supercapitalism” and his latest book, “AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America’s Future.” His ‘Marketplace’ commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

Emphasis Mine

see: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/272-39/10655-healthcare-jujitsu

No GOP Mandate here!

2010-11-22 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Think the Nov 2 2010 elections were a mandate for the tea party?

Think Again!

Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: November 22, 2010 07:38:06 PM

WASHINGTON — A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether.

Driving support for the law: Voters by margins of 2-1 or greater want to keep some of its best-known benefits, such as barring insurers from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. One thing they don’t like: the mandate that everyone must buy insurance.

At the same time, the survey showed that a majority of voters side with the Democrats on another hot-button issue, extending the Bush era tax cuts that are set to expire Dec. 31 only for those making less than $250,000.

The poll also showed the country split over ending the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy prohibiting gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, with 47 percent favoring its repeal and 48 percent opposing it.

The results signal a more complicated and challenging political landscape for Republicans in Congress than their sweeping midterm wins suggested. Party leaders call the election a mandate, and vow votes to repeal the health care law and to block an extension of middle-class tax cuts unless tax cuts for the wealthy also are extended.

“The political give and take is very different than public opinion,” said Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., which conducted the poll. “On health care, there is a wide gap between public opinion and the political community.”

Far from the all-or-nothing positions staked out by politicians and pundits, Americans are more divided about the health care law.

On the side favoring it, 16 percent of registered voters want to let it stand as is.

Another 35 percent want to change it to do more. Among groups with pluralities who want to expand it: women, minorities, people younger than 45, Democrats, liberals, Northeasterners and those making less than $50,000 a year.

Lining up against the law, 11 percent want to amend it to rein it in.

Another 33 percent want to repeal it.

Among groups with pluralities favoring repeal: men, whites, those older than 45, those making more than $50,000 annually, conservatives, Republicans and tea party supporters.

Independents, who swung to the Republicans in the Nov. 2 elections, are evenly divided on how to handle the health care law, with 36 percent for repealing it and 12 percent for restraining it — a total of 48 percent negative — while 34 percent want to expand it and 14 percent want to leave it as is — also totaling 48 percent.

Several benefits of the new law are broadly popular.

Registered voters by a margin of 59 percent to 36 percent want to keep the requirement that insurance companies provide coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

Among supporters, Republicans want to keep that part of the law rather than repeal it by a margin of 51-45. Independents want to keep it by a margin of 59-37. Even 46 percent of conservatives and 48 percent of tea party supporters want to keep it.

The section of the law requiring insurance companies to allow young adults to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26 also is popular, with voters saying keep it rather than repeal it by a margin of 68 percent to 29 percent.

Among those who like it, 75 percent of women, 80 percent of independent women, and 54 percent of Republican women.

Voters, by a margin of 57 percent to 32 percent, also want to keep the part of the law that closes the so-called “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage.

They turn a solid thumbs down on the law’s mandate that every American must buy insurance, with 65 percent calling that unconstitutional and 29 percent saying it should be kept.

A majority of every type of American called the mandate wrong, except for Democrats overall and Democratic men in particular. Among critics of the mandate: 50 percent of liberals, 53 percent of Democratic women, 68 percent of independents, and 83 percent of tea party supporters.

As Congress prepares to debate whether to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, the poll showed that 51 percent want to extend the tax cuts only for households making less than $250,000 a year, and 45 percent want to extend the tax cuts for all.

Those who support tax cuts only for those making less than $250,000 a year include minorities, Democrats, liberals and moderates, women, college graduates, Midwesterners and Northeasterners.

Those who want to extend all of the tax cuts, including for the wealthy, include Republicans, tea party supporters, conservatives, Southerners and Westerners,

Independents were closely divided, with 49 percent for extending only the “middle class” tax cuts, and 48 percent for extending all of them.

METHODLOGY

This survey of 1,020 adults was conducted Nov. 15-18. Adults 18 and older residing in the continental U.S. were interviewed by telephone. Telephone numbers were selected based upon a list of telephone exchanges from throughout the nation. The exchanges were selected to ensure that each region was represented in proportion to its population. To increase coverage, this land-line sample was supplemented by respondents reached through random dialing of cell phone numbers. The two samples were then combined. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

There are 810 registered voters. The results for this subset have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. There are 371 Democrats and Democratic leaning independents and 337 Republicans and Republican leaning independents. The results for these subsets have margins of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points and plus or minus 5.5 percentage points, respectively. The error margin increases for cross-tabulations.

Whose Waterloo?

Conservatives and Republicans [on Sunday] suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

2010-03-232010-03-23 chasdarwinLeave a comment

Is the successful passage of Health Care Insurance reform a major GOP defeat?

Conservative columnist David Frum says the Democrats’ passage of health-care reform is the greatest legislative defeat for the GOP in decades.

“After an epic political battle, House Democrats on Sunday won final approval of a historic overhaul of the health-care system without a single Republican vote. David Frum argues in FrumForum.com that by trying everything in their power to block the legislation, instead of making a deal and sharing in the victory, Republicans set themselves up for an “abject and irreversible defeat.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Conservatives and Republicans [on Sunday] suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for [Sunday’s] vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November — by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the health-care bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This health-care bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for [Sunday’s] disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.”

see: http://theweek.com/article/index/201046/Is_health_care_the_GOPs_Waterloo

Emphasis mine