Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You cannot shame the shameless.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Not all heroes wear capes.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

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

And now for some depressing news

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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.

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

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.

Reader Interactions

33Comments

  1. 1.

    elliott.gorelick

    “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.

  4. 4.

    Elizabelle

    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.

  6. 6.

    laura

    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

    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

    @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

    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

    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.

  12. 12.

    jl

    @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.

  14. 14.

    TenguPhule

    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.

  17. 17.

    TenguPhule

    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

    @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

    @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.

  21. 21.

    TenguPhule

    @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.

  23. 23.

    What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @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

    @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.

  26. 26.

    WaterGirl

    @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

    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

    @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.

  31. 31.

    TriassicSands

    @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

    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

    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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