In honor of the ACA going live yesterday, which you all helped to make happen, one more round as sung by HAL 9000’s passive-aggressive cousin single payer:
If you have any experiences with the new law, share them here. Or chat about whatever.
Reader Interactions
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Violet
Posted this last night, but it applies here:
“A friend has a friend who works at a Koch Industries company. They got a letter today telling them they would not have health insurance through the company beginning in 2014 “because of Obamacare.”
Obviously they’re just being dicks. They waited until the day the ACA went in effect to send the letter and put “because of Obamacare” in it as the reason. I do find it interesting that they’ve chosen to go with the penalty route rather than offer health coverage. I’m sure there’s no corresponding salary increase to offset the loss in benefits.
jl
Read in a news piece that the teabagger GOPers in the House were unhappy with the results when Boehner negotiated with Obama. So they made him promise not to do face to face private negotiations with Obama. And Boehner hasn’t negotiated with Obama since.
Can’t find link now. Anyone know if that’s true?
If so, Johnny Bones is even a more pathetic nothing than I imagined.
The Red Pen
Complete fucking assholes.
(Warning: Freepers)
The Red Pen
@Violet:
I hope they suffer a crippling loss of staff.
PaulW
@Violet:
I wonder if the people working at Koch Industries are taking the effort to find employment at companies that will provide health care packages the way most companies have been doing for, oh, decades now and will continue to do even with Obamacare in place.
A mass exodus of the company’s best employees would be a free-market response to such a partisan stance.
IowaOldLady
Someone gave me a ticket to go hear Doris Kearns Goodwin speak tonight. That should be fun compared to staring in wonder at the fools in the R caucus.
Seanly
RE: Koch Industries ending employer coverage as well as the “cutting hours to less than 40 to avoid providing healthcare” – My employer is eliminating their flex positions (mostly used by semi-retired folks) and part-time positions. Their take on the law is that they would have to provide health benefits to all employees regardless of their position. The accounting shows there’s not enough profit in someone working low hours to compensate for the company match. We’re a big company (around 25k employees, maybe 1/2 in USA) but the number affected is pretty low.
Ash Can
@The Red Pen:
Not to mention losing a shitload of emloyees, too.
kindness
@Violet: Karma works. Koch’s companies that do this will lose their best people and keep the slackers.
Sorry 90’s folks, I wasn’t talking about you.
Schlemizel
Had a marvelous chat on line with some inflamed asshole form Wisconsin who didn’t realize that Willard had gotten the bill passed in MA when Gov or that it had reduced the rate of inflation. He did know that Wisc rates had sky rocketed but was terminally unhappy to learn that his neighbors in MN have the lowest ACA rates in the country because the government made that happen while Walker’s destructo squad had refused to cooperated & gotten bad results.
Its tough to win when your opponent is too stupid to grasp basic principles.
WereBear
At work, we got new insurance first of the year, which I’m sure was because of Obamacare. (As I will forever call it.)
Yes, it has a higher deductible, but after that, it’s 100% covered.
Which is huge.
Suffern ACE
Watched the shouty CNBC folks on “What they want to hear from Obama.” I love these eight people panels. Little talking heads apparently on the stock floor so they have to shout.
“Leadership! I want to hear Leadership. I want to know what direction he wants us to go in.”
“I want to hear that he’s made a deal”
“I want surrender”
Please explain to us why it is rational to think that the “Wall Street” wing of the party is bright enough to outsmart the Teahadies.
Chris
@kindness:
I wonder if they’re not also shooting themselves in the foot in another way – the advantage of the ACA is the possibility of health care not controlled by your employer, isn’t it? If Koch’s health insurance policy is now to shove its employees out the door, that means even more people will end up “emancipated” that way than otherwise would’ve been, and will remember that “Obamacare” helped them when their employer kicked them to the curb.
Or is that too optimistic?
Violet
@PaulW: People don’t really understand how the health insurance thing works. My friend was freaking out and went to her company’s HR rep to find out if they would still have coverage–they will. So now she understands that it’s not every company–just her friend’s company being dicks.
What her friend understands, I don’t know. Her friend has a health condition and needs health insurance, so it’s going to be interesting to see what she does. I guess she could COBRA? Not sure.
Trollhattan
@Ash Can:
Icy what you did dere.
Belafon
@Schlemizel: I can’t tell from your description, but who is he most pissed at now?
KorbenDallasBathroomPass
Hey All – if anyone wants a cat in the SoCal area, these two kitties are up for adoption.
jl
How awful and miserable of a cowardly slob is Boehner, anyway?
Is the country being put through all this mess because the Speaker is panicky spineless ch*ck*nshit?
Just Where Is The Center of Gravity Here?
Josh Marshall, TPM
” York and his interlocutor go on to suggest that there are likely only between 30 and 50 House members who are really committed to the current course – well under a quarter of the House GOP caucus. A high estimate is 80. By process of elimination, they think Boehner just thinks that if he crosses those folks they’ll trigger a Speaker election and unseat him. ”
…
” The fabled GOP moderates never appear. But could it really be that the number of representatives driving this train is, on the high side, between 50 and 80 people? If that’s true, Boehner’s position is dramatically more craven than many of us have imagined. And the dysfunction is greater than at least I had imagined. ”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/just-where-is-the-center-of-gravity-here
Emphasis added
In other news on TPM, the reactionary extremists in the House GOP want to try to keep the CR mess going for another two weeks so that they can roll it up into the debt ceiling crisis. Somehow, they think that will give them some kind of advantage.
Suffern ACE
@jl: Yes. I believe that Boehner announced that he wasn’t going into meetings with Obama before Obama said “fine by me. We aren’t negotiting over a 2 month CR.” But Obama should have showed some kind of leadership and sent Secret Service to pick up Boehner, lock him in a room with the other congressional leaders and knock some heads.
In other countries, that would be considered to be something bad – to arrest and imprison the congressional leaders and beat them until they agree with you. But in our exceptional land, that is what normal leaders apparently are supposed to do.
WereBear
Speaking of money, now that it’s devalued, it’s not too late to join the jolly hordes contributing to:
the Way of Cats fund drive
now going on at an Intertubes near you.
This plucky site forges on, contributing to cat understanding and explaining such tricky concepts as Cat Civilization, the Fist of Friendship, and how to handle That Thing We Can’t Ignore.
raven
OK Woody haters:
John O
According to a FB post from an old ex-colleague I trust, Allstate Ins. Co.’s HR department blamed the increased rates for their employees on Obamacare. They did it gently, “due to recent changes in health care law,” blah blah blah. But that sure was my old pal’s takeaway.
(She would be hard pressed to vote D with a gun to her head, so there’s also that. Predisposed to hating the ACA.)
Belafon
@Suffern ACE: Actually, I think Biden would be a better person for the job. He’s both a part of the Executive and Legislative, and therefore answers to neither, at least according to our last VP. He could knock a few people around.
Ash Can
@raven: Zzzzzz…
? Martin
I know two people that have signed up (or at least started the signup) with the CA exchange. One (surprisingly) is a colleague who has wanted to start her own business for a while but wasn’t willing to risk going without insurance and couldn’t find a decent price on the market before. She signed up yesterday with the intention of burning through her vacation in the next 3 months to set up her business and then resigning in Dec if everything goes well. She will pay about what our employee contribution now is (after subsidy assuming she earns a comparable salary in the new business). She’s really excited and scared, but says that this was key to her trying it. Her mom went through a bout with cancer and it basically bankrupted the family because she had no insurance.
I expected there would be more job mobility due to this, but I didn’t expect a coworker – though I probably should have since the benefits are better than the pay here. Contributing to this is that we haven’t had raises in a while and our employee healthcare contributions have gone up significantly in the last 5 years, so there’s a much greater temptation to jump. Basically we’re all seeing our pay decline each year, so if that opportunity now opens up, I wonder if we won’t actually see a lot of people jump.
So beyond the uninsured benefitting from this law, there might be a lot of insured folks seeing ACA as the needed catalyst out of a shitty job.
jl
@Suffern ACE: Not sure whether Boehner’s teabagger masters forbade him from negotiating with Obama just on CR and debt, or from negotiating on anything at all. Can’t find the link now to check.
Violet
@raven: I hope she told her son first, before telling the world via an interview for a magazine.
Belafon
@John O: They’ll all do that, because most people don’t remember the rates going up the previous years. “It must be due to Obamacare and not the insurance industry’s annual fleecing of your wallet.”
WereBear
@Violet: The young man had already repudiated his “father” and refused contact lo these many years.
If it were me, I’d consider it an upgrade.
beltane
@raven: A $99 spit test would provide a quick answer to this question. But,boy, he really does look like Frank Sinatra.
YellowJournalism
@WereBear: Personally, I love his response to it:
@RonanFarrow: Listen, we’re all *possibly* Frank Sinatra’s son.
Betty Cracker
@raven: The grown kid in question does look an awful lot like Sinatra — very similar nose. Lord knows from a physical attractiveness standpoint, the kid is better off as Dead Frank’s son than Live Woody’s. I liked the kid’s tweet on the issue, which was something like “it’s possible that Frank Sinatra is everyone’s real father.” Heh.
ETA: YJ above has the quote right…
MomSense
Just want to say that even though my life has sucked the last week (I worked until midnight last night) I am still on a sort of ObamaCare high. I know that a lot can happen between now and January 1 but all the critics can suck it.
No, the ACA is not perfect but it is a hell of a lot better than just living in fear.
And now I’m turning the Obot dial to eleven and posting this video from Pete Souza about the ACA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GcgHHQ4y0
taylormattd
Ahem.
Except, of course, those in the left blogosphere who literally repeatedly attempted to stop it from happening.
Betty Cracker
News of another overturned church bus with multiple fatalities. A horrible accident, obviously, and I’m not making light of the situation, but does it strike anyone else that church buses are involved in a disproportionate share of horrendous accidents? What is up with that?
NotMax
@beltane
For less than twenty bucks, one could put out one plate of rugelach and halvah and another plate of cannoli and see which he makes a beeline for.
/stereotyping
? Martin
@MomSense:
Moocher.
2AM is my new norm. This is intolerable.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: Too much volunteer driving/maintenance and too high a reliance on providence; to judge from prior experience.
? Martin
@Betty Cracker: Churches tend to not charter. They often buy their own bus, usually a school bus that’s too shitty for even the public schools to still operate, and have a member of the congregation – poorly trained because Tennessee hates that regulation shit – do the driving.
Or Jesus just hates them.
I should write a choose your own adventure book that only gives you a rational/supernatural choice to make on each page. That’d be fun.
John O
@Belafon:
I didn’t even bother pointing that out. This particular woman is not ripe for rationality, when it comes to her politics.
NotMax
@? Martin
Methinks you just described the Bible.
Violet
@Betty Cracker: Lack of maintenance, low paid drivers, etc.
? Martin
@NotMax: Yeah, I may have. But mine would have space aliens and orcs and wizards and shit. Wait, now I’m just writing Scientology.
This might be harder than I thought.
MomSense
@? Martin:
If my misery makes you feel better would it please you to know that it has been 3 weeks without a day off?
NotMax
An increase from 10% of recruits to 15% may not seem like much, but the potential ripple effects are ginormous.
The Other Chuck
“Still Alive” is a pretty good song for Obamacare. As for Republicans, I think the ending theme from Portal 2 is quite appropriate.
Suffern ACE
It could just be that (1) Church’s happen to have busses and vans unlike other businesses and (2) those church people go places that require travel on higher speed roads where there are accidents and (3) we just find out about church bus accidents more because bus accidents get a lot of dead bodies but in reality they crash about as frequently as other types of vehicles driven by humans.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
Mia Farrow must be yanking someone’s chain. Per her Wikipedia bio, Ol’ Blue Eyes divorced her in 1968 because she wouldn’t quit Rosemary’s Baby to come work on his movie instead. Sinatra was a wannabe samseng* and by all accounts behaved like one too. I have trouble believing she would ever go back to him.
*Malay for “gangster”.
WereBear
Uh, just saw a recent photo of wingnut darling Tom Clancy above an obituary.
Man did not look healthy, all I’m sayin’.
Suffern ACE
I’m happy to report that the talking heads are happy with republicans for having “Direction”. That’s always a good sign. The “Direction.” It might not matter where you are going, but if you have Direction at least you want to go somewhere.
Direction. Direction. Direction. Will be the new drinking game of the shutdown.
Frankensteinbeck
@raven:
She’s an actress. She’s a Hollywood actress, even. I assume some of them are chaste and faithful, but no more than the actors are. It’s a profession that attracts folks who get drunk on attention and flattery, forces you to shed your modesty very quickly, and throws in two scoops of corruption on the side. I wouldn’t place money on any Hollywood couple’s kids having the attributed father. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out a Hollywood kid’s nominal mother was a lie (although obviously she’d have to be in on the pretense).
WereBear
@Amir Khalid: I see it like this:
a) the other choice was sleeping with Woody Allen
b) see (a)
C) the famous quip from Ava Gardner, fourth paragraph from the link
gelfling545
@Betty Cracker: Just guessing if it’s part of the cause but I do know that quire a few churches & other NPO’s often buy second hand vehicles and have them driven by volunteers.
Belafon
@Amir Khalid: I have an uncle, that I’m sad to say makes me wonder about a lot of women. He has had four wives, and over 10 kids.
The Other Chuck
@Suffern ACE:
Down is a direction.
raven
@Frankensteinbeck: But Woody is evil! Doesn’t matter that Sinatra was a total scumbag too.
Emma
@Violet: A friend of mine who thinks that because I love movies I must love gossip about movie stars sent me a link to a story about the story. Someone asked Nancy SInatra for a comment and she said something like “he’s a huge part of our lives and we’re blessed to have him.” Sooooo…. it’s one of those secrets.
NotMax
@SuffernACE
As I invariably respond to anyone claiming having received direction “from above:”
“So do marionettes.”
ericblair
@? Martin:
Try taking harmony and counterpoint courses. At least once you’ll end up writing Happy Birthday before you realize what you’ve done.
@The Other Chuck:
“And we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time!” Cracks me up. Apparently the voice actress who did GLADOS is an opera singer and had a bit of a time dialing it down to the reedy little computer voice for this song.
raven
@Emma: Horrrywoooddddd!
The Red Pen
@The Other Chuck: May I ask if you’ve considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?
NotMax
@The Other Chuck
Always preferred (though it is not unique to them) the Cherokee concept of 7 Directions:
North, South, East, West, Up, Down and Right Here.
schrodinger's cat
Open thread needs thoughtful kitteh, who is somewhat relieved when Friedman figures out the obvious, about the shutdown.
LevelB
I retired from EPA with ~33 years of service Monday. I am worried about my friends and colleagues who are without pay checks until SuperShitStorm GOP blows itself out. My inner cynic tells me that won’t happen until the fundraising gravy train comes to an end.
Joel
@raven: Well, the kid looks like Frank Sinatra, that’s for sure.
Rob in CT
I briefly checked out the Connecticut exchange site today. It seemed to be working fine. As I expected, the deals available aren’t really for me (employer-provided plan is solid, company pays 70% of the premium, and we make good money, so no subsidies).
After I tallied things up, though, it wasn’t as stark a difference as one might expect. In a world without the tax deduction for employer-provided healthcare the comparison might get interesting. As things stand, obviously not (I’m not going to forgo the $7200 my employer pays now towards my premium, plus what they pay toward my wife’s. That would be crazy).
Origuy
What are you all doing for Thanksgivukkah? It will be 70,000 years before Thanksgiving is again the first day of Hanakkah.
fuckwit
@? Martin: There are a huge, HUGE number of talented people trapped in shitty jobs in order to have insurance for themselves and their kids. This is going to jump-start the fucking economy better than the stimulus did.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
She should be able to buy insurance through the exchanges — if her state doesn’t have their own, it defaults to the federal ones.
Belafon
@ericblair: She’s the voice of the mech’s AI in Pacific Rim.
gogol's wife
@raven:
I don’t really get why all these revelations are coming out about Woody Allen right now. Apparently Vanity Fair has an article reviving the molestation accusations too. Interesting, since this past month they were holding up Roman Polanski as a martyred saint.
ranchandsyrup
This guy should just change his name to Godwin.
Jebediah, RBG
@schrodinger’s cat:
He must be getting rides with a smarter bunch of imaginary cabbies.
Schlemizel
@Belafon:
Obama of course
dr. luba
@The Red Pen: Plenty of lobster and steak comments, of course, and snide comments about childhood obesity. Cutting off the WIC is actually doing those folks a favor!!
And read comment number 86. Yes, all those people are horrible, but I’m a patriotic Merkin on WIC and an exception.
So, yes, assholes.
2liberal
levi brown to the Steelers for a pick. LOL as a cardinals fan (NFC) and Patriots fan (AFC) this is great. We drafted this mutt rather than Adrian Peterson. Maybe the steelers can whip him into shape, who knows. He was ranked #60 of 66 of OTs by Pro Football Focus.
JustRuss
“And there’s no us crying over every mistake
You just keep on trying til you run out of cake.”
That stupid Portal song got me through some tough times. Cake helped too.
reality-based
@Amir Khalid:
sinatra may have been a gangster, but he was, by all accounts, a GREAT ex-husband.
-always supported and cared for Eva Gardner –
-stayed on reasonable terms with Nancy, his first wife
and I’m sorry to admit that I actually read Mia Farrow’s autobiography –
hey, it was a long plane flight, I grabbed the first book i saw off the airport newstand carousel –
where she recounts, that after finding the infamous Soon-Yi/Woody pictures, she first called Andre Previn – her ex-husband, and the girl’s adoptive father – who informed her that the whole situation just upset him to much, so he had to hang up.
Then she called Sinatra – who told her to sit tight, do nothing till he called her back. He called back to inform her that
1. one of the best domestic-law attorneys in NY was on his way over to her apartment, and Sinatra was paying his bills
2. he had put his daughter Nancy – who had stayed close friends with MIa – on a plane to NY, she would be there in 6 hours – , and
3. Would she like him to have Woody’s legs broken? Sinatra could easily arrange that. (she declined)
Now THAT is what I call a useful ex-husband
I”ve had a soft spot for ol Blue Eyes ever since reading that – and of course, he had that whole genius of a singer thing going for him –
rikyrah
@reality-based:
I knew that about Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Didn’t know that about him and Mia.
#3 cracked me up.