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You are here: Home / Politics / An Unexamined Scandal / And now for some depressing news

And now for some depressing news

by David Anderson|  November 29, 20184:26 pm| 33 Comments

This post is in: An Unexamined Scandal, Anderson On Health Insurance, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome

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Two new reports came out. Both are depressing.

First, lifespans in the US continue to decrease. The big drivers are suicides and drug overdoses.

U.S. life expectancy declines again, a dismal trend not seen since World War I – The Washington Post https://t.co/ox8KjH90xD

— Thomas C. Ricketts (@ThomasCRicketts) November 29, 2018

Secondly, fewer kids were insured in 2017 than in 2016.

Today we released our annual report on uninsured kids. Here’s what we found…

For the 1st time in a decade, the # and rate of uninsured kids went up. ?

No state made progress despite the good economy. 276,000 kids lost health insurance in 2017. https://t.co/mKcx5W8f11

— Joan Alker (@JoanAlker1) November 29, 2018

I anticipate that 2018 and 2019 numbers will see fewer kids insured than 2017. Public charge rules and more complicated paperwork barriers to Medicaid and CHIP will lead to enrollment drop-offs from public programs.

These are outcomes of choices that we make.

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Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    elliott.gorelick

    November 29, 2018 at 4:48 pm

    “We” make. I suppose that’s true in the sense that I have made a choice to not go postal and start plotting to assassinate and terrorize the evil people making the choices that have led to this. I don’t think that would serve any useful purpose. But using the pronoun “we” is victim blaming.

  2. 2.

    Cermet

    November 29, 2018 at 4:57 pm

    @elliott.gorelick: Agreed

  3. 3.

    hells littlest angel

    November 29, 2018 at 4:57 pm

    Decreasing life expectancy: another reason the US and Russia are natural allies.

  4. 4.

    Elizabelle

    November 29, 2018 at 4:58 pm

    These are outcomes of choices that we make.

    No. These were forced upon us by people who have been bought and paid to NOT do right by the American public at large.

    And we can change this, but we have to win some more elections as we do. I hope the new Congress can make some headway on both these issues.

    Mostly, I want the gazillionaires’ house of cards to come crashing down on them, so they have less funds to purchase and pervert our government and we can make some progress.

  5. 5.

    Schlemazel

    November 29, 2018 at 5:00 pm

    Republican policy is working as intended

  6. 6.

    laura

    November 29, 2018 at 5:03 pm

    In the new New Deal, I demand confiscatory tax rates to wring the idle capital out of the obscenely wealthy to fund what needs to be done! Healthcare, infrastructure, education, and jobs that pay a living wage for any/all who wants one.

  7. 7.

    hells littlest angel

    November 29, 2018 at 5:06 pm

    So fewer people are living long enough to degenerate into Fox-watching right-wing shit-heads? (You’ve got to take your silver linings where you can find them.)

  8. 8.

    Schlemazel

    November 29, 2018 at 5:07 pm

    @Elizabelle: What I find most distressing is my grandkids might – might – see the recovery. It will take a decade of Dem control just to get legislation passed. Then there will be at least 20 years to get courts that focus on law & not politics so that the legislation can be implemented. Then another 20 years to recovery.

    That all assumes we do not make the planet uninhabitable in that time & that there is never a GOP government that can once again set us on the path to serfdom

  9. 9.

    Yarrow

    November 29, 2018 at 5:08 pm

    Keeping Americans uneducated, addicted, sick, killing each other and dying young is part of Russia’s plan to destabilize the US. They didn’t create these issues but they certainly helped them along. Penetration at all levels, as Adam used to say.

  10. 10.

    Mary G

    November 29, 2018 at 5:11 pm

    The choices some Americans made. I highly doubt any of the jackals, except the troll, voted for Trump. Democrats are acting pretty tough in Congress and getting sassy with the Republicans – Deal to pass farm bill scraps House GOP plan for new food stamp work requirements (WaPo)

    Liberal groups have vehemently opposed the proposed restrictions on food stamps, which they say are needed for people in poverty. Between 800,000 and 1.1 million households would have faced food stamp benefit cuts under one of the House Republican proposals, according to a study by the Mathematica Policy Research, a policy research organization.

    I am pretty sure that not passing the farm bill because they want to screw over poor people won’t endear them to farmers already screwed by Twitler’s tariffs.

    And Democrats reject new GOP plan to pay for Trump’s wall

    The new Republican plan would deliver $5 billion for Trump’s long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall by dividing the expenditure over two years — $2.5 billion in 2019 and $2.5 billion in 2020.

    But Democrats, who have rejected the idea of spending $5 billion on a wall Trump claimed Mexico would pay for, said splitting the money up over two years did not make it more palatable.

    “No matter how many years you spread it over, $5 billion for President Trump’s wasteful wall is too much money,” said Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. “While we are willing to negotiate on how best to secure our border, we will never support wasting tax dollars on a wall designed to gin up the Republican base.”

    I love some feisty liberals.

  11. 11.

    trollhattan

    November 29, 2018 at 5:12 pm

    We clearly need Free Market Solutions ™ to bend the curve downward. What does Kudlow say?

  12. 12.

    jl

    November 29, 2018 at 5:13 pm

    @Yarrow: Brilliant completely unregulated free market capitalist US economists advised Russia on how to transform their economy from communism hellhole to capitalist paradise. So, maybe the Russians consider it just doing us the favor back.

    Edit: the US economists were not actually ‘free’, they got rich off their advice, some of the goodies corrupt, just not nearly as much as the Russian oligarchs.

    And, the US has been on this path for 30 years, so we pioneered craptastic deterioration in population health while every other comparable economy was busy leaving us in the dust.

  13. 13.

    JPL

    November 29, 2018 at 5:20 pm

    @trollhattan: kudlow says fuckem

  14. 14.

    TenguPhule

    November 29, 2018 at 5:20 pm

    I anticipate that 2018 and 2019 numbers will see fewer kids insured than 2017. Public charge rules and more complicated paperwork barriers to Medicaid and CHIP will lead to enrollment drop-offs from public programs.

    Its even worse then that.

    Trump is trying to fuck up the ACA subisidies by letting individual states determine what the subsidies can and can’t be used for.

  15. 15.

    laura

    November 29, 2018 at 5:20 pm

    @trollhattan: hookers and 8-balls O’coke is what Larry kudlow says.

  16. 16.

    Yarrow

    November 29, 2018 at 5:22 pm

    LOL.

    BREAKING Russia rejects Trump's canceled meeting, Kremlin ready for contact https://t.co/gIcJLUjbHM pic.twitter.com/0uJH2SbGm6— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) November 29, 2018

    What part of “we’re gonna meet” don’t you understand, Donald?

  17. 17.

    TenguPhule

    November 29, 2018 at 5:22 pm

    New insurance guidelines would undermine rules of the Affordable Care Act

    According to advice issued Thursday by federal health officials, states would be free to redefine the use of those subsidies, which began in 2014. They represent the first help the government ever has offered middle-class consumers to afford monthly premiums for private insurance.

    States could allow the subsidies to be used for health plans the administration has been promoting outside the ACA marketplaces that are less expensive because they provide skimpier benefits and fewer consumer protections. In an even more dramatic change, states could let residents with employer-based coverage set up accounts in which they mingle the federal subsidies with health-care funds from their job or personal tax-deferred savings funds to use for premiums or other medical expenses.

    If some states take up the administration’s offer, it would undermine the ACA’s central changes to the nation’s insurance system, including the establishment of nationwide standards for many kinds of health coverage sold in the United States.

    Another goal of the ACA, the sprawling 2010 law that was President Barack Obama’s preeminent domestic accomplishment, was to concentrate help on the individual insurance market serving people who do not have access to affordable health benefits through a job. Prices were often out of control and discrimination against unhealthy people was more prevalent before the ACA imposed required benefits, prohibited insurers from charging more to people with preexisting conditions and created a federal health exchange and similar state-run marketplace in which private insurance companies compete for customers.

    The ACA health plans have been the only ones for which consumers can use the subsidies, designed to help customers with incomes up to the middle class — 400 percent of the federal poverty line — afford the premiums.

    The new advice, called “waiver concepts” because they are ideas for how states could get federal permission to deviate from the law’s basic rules, stray from both of those goals. And it would allow states to set different income limits for the subsidies — higher or lower than the federal one.

  18. 18.

    Roger Moore

    November 29, 2018 at 5:23 pm

    @TenguPhule:

    Trump is trying to fuck up the ACA subisidies by letting individual states determine what the subsidies can and can’t be used for.

    That isn’t good, but at least it means he’s only fucking up the states dumb enough to put Republicans in charge.

  19. 19.

    TenguPhule

    November 29, 2018 at 5:23 pm

    @trollhattan:

    What does Kudlow say?

    “China deal any day now! Rising Bull Market to reach DOW 30,000! No recession you’re the recession!”

    So the economy is pretty much fucked next year.

  20. 20.

    JPL

    November 29, 2018 at 5:24 pm

    David is probably reading the republican changes to subsidies and will probably write about it. The republicans just don’t want us to have access to comprehensive health care.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-insurance-guidelines-would-undermine-rules-of-the-affordable-care-act/2018/11/29/ff467f46-f357-11e8-aeea-b85fd44449f5_story.html?utm_term=.6cee10f203ae

    or what TenguPhule said

  21. 21.

    TenguPhule

    November 29, 2018 at 5:24 pm

    @Roger Moore:

    That isn’t good, but at least it means he’s only fucking up the states dumb enough to put Republicans in charge.

    Wrecking a national standard into 50 different standards will make everyone’s healthcare coverage worse off.

  22. 22.

    JPL

    November 29, 2018 at 5:29 pm

    @Yarrow: That is funny. What part of Donald is hiding under his covers doesn’t Putin understand?

  23. 23.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    November 29, 2018 at 5:33 pm

    @Mary G: Trump claims to be worth $9 billion, so I think the Dems should just say he can put up the money and follow up with Mexico later on repayment. That still leaves him a nice $4 billion to live off – that should last anyone a lifetime.

  24. 24.

    Schlemazel

    November 29, 2018 at 5:36 pm

    @TenguPhule:
    Remember, David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, said that was the goal all along. Bankrupt and destroy the Federal government so that they can’t do anything and then it will be easy to control the states. He quit because he was ignorant enough to believe in supply side.

    This is exactly what the GOP has been working for for 50 fucking years & they are on the precipice of success.

  25. 25.

    David Anderson

    November 29, 2018 at 5:37 pm

    @JPL: tomorrow morning

  26. 26.

    WaterGirl

    November 29, 2018 at 5:42 pm

    @JPL: I think that’s the most interesting part of the news. Donald says he won’t meet with Putin, and very publicly Putin says “oh yes you will”. Can there be any doubt about their relationship?

    I’m guessing that Trump is afraid to meet with Putin. Which might be evidence of Trump having some intelligence, so I”m really torn about that.

  27. 27.

    ruemara

    November 29, 2018 at 6:01 pm

    Hm. You take away hope and this is what you get. The trouble is, a substantial part of America don’t want anyone else to have hope. So they voted for Trump.

    This is a black time for anyone with depression or for whom life has given you the gift of depression.

  28. 28.

    Elizabelle

    November 29, 2018 at 6:20 pm

    @ruemara: I think about that a lot. The loss of hope.

    Michelle Obama spoke about that, early on. Because she has empathy, and she understands.

  29. 29.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    November 29, 2018 at 6:33 pm

    @TenguPhule: It’s DOW 36,000.

  30. 30.

    joel hanes

    November 29, 2018 at 7:17 pm

    @ruemara:

    This is a black time for anyone with depression

    I’ve been struggling since the night of the 2016 election.

  31. 31.

    TriassicSands

    November 29, 2018 at 7:29 pm

    @TenguPhule:

    Maybe Trump’s supporters will be able to buy MAGA gear with their subsidies. A MAGA hat will provide comparable health care coverage to that provided by the crap policies Trump and other Republicans want people to buy. And the hat (probably made in China) will keep their hair dry.

    There is a constant competition among Republicans to see whether their stupidity is more egregious than their barbarity. Right now, it’s a dead heat.

  32. 32.

    Mike J

    November 29, 2018 at 7:32 pm

    Last drop we had we fell behind Costa Rica. This will move us down 2 more notches behind Cuba and the Czech Republic, but still barely ahead of the Maldives.

  33. 33.

    Bob Hertz

    November 30, 2018 at 7:30 am

    Don’t forget the racial factor in the child insurance issue. Repug-nicans think there are too many dark babies here already, so why insure them and save a few lives?

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