Only 364 days until the next State of the Union address. Post your speculations here.
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by Tim F| 46 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by Tim F| 46 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Only 364 days until the next State of the Union address. Post your speculations here.
by Tim F| 161 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
As the cool kids like to say, everything you need to know about your local weather in one graph.
Some types of data correlation are hard, but I am confident that everyone can see the gist of this one. Whenever it gets warm in western Alaska the midwest gets colder. This corresponds to times when attracted by the thriving Alaskan craft beer scene, the warm jet stream takes a northern holiday and pushes the normal arctic weather down to us. This may make it easier to explain climate even to people who struggle with second grade math (a line slanting in the direction of zero means that health care spending and deficit numbers went down, not up).
Charts repurposed from Weather Underground and rearranged for clarity.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 50 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Tomorrow Night, written and directed by Louis C.K. in 1998 is now a $5 download at his site.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 188 Comments
This post is in: Teabagger Stupidity
On floor of house waitin on "Kommandant-In-Chef"… the Socialistic dictator who's been feeding US a line or is it "A-Lying?"
— Randy Weber (@TXRandy14) January 29, 2014
1st Release of Obama speech reads like dictates from a King. All orders he will do to bypass Congress #LawLess
— Cong. Tim Huelskamp (@CongHuelskamp) January 29, 2014
Nutpicking has gotten easy over the last few years–just check out the Twitter feeds of Teanderthal Members of Congress. Randy Weber is Ron Paul’s replacement. Huelskamp is from Kansas and had a little tantrum on Maddow last night. Simple challenge for you in the comments: top those two.
by David Anderson| 27 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
This will be a multi-parter on the P-Care proposal from Republicans. I’m busy today.
Section 101: Repeal Obamacare
Standard Republican boilerplate with a lie in the first sentence as healthcare costs as a proportion of GDP actually decreased last year.
Section 201: Adopt Common-Sense Consumer Protections
Reinstate the popular to the employed middle class parts of Obamacare. Keep kids on parents’ insurance until the end of age 26, disallow life time limits. Tweak the age rating bands from a 3:1 ratio (Obamacare law) to 5:1 (pre-Obamacare usual and customary) despite that change having little acturial impact. The 3:1 ratio is roughly equal to the actual expected cost ratio for 21 to 64 year olds.
Guaranteed renewability is the Republican means of dealing with pre-exisiting conditions. However medical underwriting will now be allowed so the incentive will be for insurance companies to go do a very thorough record review to look for application ommissions such as failure to list acne as a pre-exisiting condition to deny cancer claims. It says there will be strong regulation, but really, how stupid are we to expect strong regulation from a Republican bill?
Section 202: Pre-exisiting conditions covered based on continious coverage
Continious coverage is the key here instead of the banning of medical underwriting. Basically, if someone is able to keep covered themselves insured, a new policy can’t be medically underwritten against them, they get general rates. The problem is people who have significant health problems AND significant income variation are highly likely to have months where they can not keep continous coverage. One bad stretch and a person is priced out of health insurance for life (although that life will be fairly short)
Section 203 – Empowering Small business and individuals
Basically allow for small business to pool resources together to reduce acturial variance and TAX CREDITS. Or we could just use the SHOP exchanges to do the same damn thing.
Refundable tax credits to individuals and families up to 300% Federal Poverty line. Obamacare has refundable tax credits up to 400% of FPL. Don’t allow those tax credits to be used for abortion (which basically would mean the individual health insurance market would offer very few if any policies covering abortion). Value of those credits are significantly reduced compared to Obamacare credits. For intsance a single 64 year old at 200% FPL would get a $3,720 Republican credit while s/he gets a $6,100 Obamacare subsidy. Two 64 year old non-smokers at 200% FPL would get $13,000 in subsidies from Obamacare or $8,800 from this Republican bill.
Oh yeah, since the Republicans have re-instated medical underwriting, those 64 year olds have the pre-exisiting condition of being OLD. They won’t get Obamacare rates, their rates for anything that provides decent coverage will destroy their subsidy in three or four months.
The idea behind the Republican bill’s smaller subsidy is that people have too much good insurance as it is, so a smaller subsidy will force more people to get catastrophic coverage only and then pay for day to day expenses out of pocket. The threat of destitution will make people extremely cost sensitive and thus extremely efficient shoppers.
Section 204 — More power to states
States can automatically enroll people into coverage equal to their subsidy value. I don’t have a problem with this. Given subsidy levels, these default plans will have deductibles in the $15,000 to $20,000 range. High risk pools will be formed again and be chronically underfunded. Interstate compacts are allowed (as they are now for regulation and selling of insurance, but the Georgia and Maine examples show that few companies really want to sell across state lines)
Section 205 Expand HSAs and Consumer Directed healthcare
Allow pre-tax dollars to pay for non-prescription and over the counter goods and services. Expand allowable uses of HSA dollars. Either of these proposals is worth talking about as they are fairly small bore.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 68 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
Michael Grimm, a Republican representing Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, won the State of the Union Republican Asshole of the Day Contest after an interview with a home-town cable news reporter:
“So Congressman Michael Grimm does not want to talk about some of the allegations concerning his campaign finances,” Scotto said before tossing back to the station. But as the camera continued to roll, Grimm walked back up to Scotto and began speaking to him in a low voice.
“What?” Scotto responded. “I just wanted to ask you…”
Grimm: “Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this f—–g balcony.”
Scotto: “Why? I just wanted to ask you…”
[[cross talk]]Grimm: “If you ever do that to me again…”
Scotto: “Why? Why? It’s a valid question.”
[[cross talk]]Grimm: “No, no, you’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.”
There’s video at the link.
Woke Up This Morning, Got a Blue Moon in Your EyesPost + Comments (68)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat
“the son of a barkeep is Speaker of the House”.
Best critique of last night’s SotU address that I’ve seen so far comes from Mr. Charles P. Pierce:
… Once again, he was the only obvious president in the room, much good may that do him. He did not rile up the base. He was not combative. He did not dwell on issues that his base wanted to hear. (If you had “Keystone XL,” or “NSA,” or “TPP” in your State of the Union drinking game, you probably wound up as the designated driver.) But he was firm on one thing. He is not going to be a lame duck as long as he can still walk. There were a lot of sentences that began with some variation of, “If Congress won’t act…”
This promise to use the powers of his office is what likely is going to raise all those hackles that were going to be raised in any case unless he got up there and abdicated in favor of Mitt Romney but, really, he couched these assertions in the mildest fashion, making of himself just a guy who was just trying to do the job to which he had been elected. He would like to have done it a different way but, darned it the regular way just didn’t work, and now it’s time to take out the tire iron and give the old machine a good bash. There wasn’t a scintilla of anger in his voice all night. There was just a rueful tone to it, as though he had finally gotten the joke that history had played on him with the election in 2010 of the opera boufee that is our current House of Representatives…
He was extraordinarily strong in spots, particularly on voting rights, where he plainly had a lot to say, and said it all, and on the process of getting the country off what he rather daringly described as the “permanent war footing” it had been on since 2001. Some of the economic ideas, particularly the expansion and strengthening of the Earned Income Tax Credit, were sound and worthy of immediate action, which they won’t get. I’m still a little vague on the MyRA thing, which smacked a little bit of the gimmick, and which, in any case, is just another stop-gap by which the country can forget that, once, everybody had a guaranteed pension, before the unions broke down and the sharpers on Wall Street looted what was left.
But, if this speech burned no barns, it didn’t sound anything like a last chance, either. The president seemed to have a pen in one hand, and that well-worn olive branch still in the other. He is what he always has been, the coolest head in the room. You can never say he isn’t that.
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What’s on the agenda for the start of another day?