You’ll all remember that Mitch Daniels quietly signed draconian legislation limiting access to certain health care providers for certain women, despite his national (and, turns out, completely phony) public call for a “truce” on social issues.
The timing was amusing for those of us out here in the cheap seats, because Mitch signed the law right about the time national media informed us he was a wonky and rational conservative simply seeking solutions to tough problems, because that’s what he told them he was and he’s an honorable guy. What happens in Indiana stays in Indiana, apparently.
Federal officials said Wednesday that the new Indiana law cutting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood violates Medicaid rules — a determination that could cost the state millions and possibly even billions of dollars.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services informed state officials by letter that it was denying Indiana’s new Medicaid plan because states can’t pick and choose where recipients receive health-care services.
It’s amazing to me that conservatives are shutting down access to the few affordable clinics that exist in a country where millions of people are already going without access to medical care. That’s just crazy. Commonsense conservatism in action.
Dollared
Right as rain on the policy, Kay.
Except, if you get 80% of the middle class white vote, you don’t need anyone else. Especially after you tightened the voting registration rules. So – who cares about those other people?
Violet
I said this before in a thread about those Remote Area Medical clinics should set up a clinic in an office building. And former middle-class people who used to work a white collar job should show up and stand in line. The line could snake around city blocks, through the building lobby and up the elevator.
It would bring it home a lot more if it was held in a place people actually go instead of being held in a stadium (who goes to a sports stadium when there isn’t a game or concert?) or conference center (who goes when there isn’t a conference?).
The lack of health care needs to be brought home to middle class people. Just how close we all are to being in that same position.
Gregory
Which action was excused at the time by some pundits on the grounds that, while it did violate his call for a truce in the culture wars, of course he needed to make the gesture to social conservatives for his presidential run.
Of course, now that he isn’t running for president, he signed that law for no good reason.
Judas Escargot
Real Producer-Merkins just buy their own cancer research centers.
As for the rest? Let the Parasites perish, as they should.
kay
@Violet:
I don’t know if I’m hanging with the wrong crowd or what, but I talk about this with people in the my day to day life and a LOT of them have this incredibly complicated health insurance history.
They’re in, they’re out, there’s the years they went without. Job loss, divorce, denials, all kinds of things. I don’t know too many smug health insurance holders, personally. There’s a lot of anxiety.
I’m not sure the national media narrative reflects reality.
Bulworth
I’m sure that it’s all about the deficit and that it’s all Very Serious.
Zifnab
I bet it’ll help prove how the ACA was a total failure.
Violet
@kay:
I live in a red state and in my experience, middle class suburbanites don’t have a clue. Some do, but most don’t. Particularly middle class white folks. They think it’s not something that is going to affect them.
Maybe the clinics need to come to red states only for awhile and show what’s going on. And yeah, put them right smack in the middle of a busy commercial area, preferably where a lot of white collar workers are working. Or find the local TV stations and set up across the street from them so it can’t help but make the news.
Or, if a company has closed up shop, see if the clinic can be held in their old location and make sure former employees are in the line. And get them interviewed.
I realize that a lot of this sounds like a PR stunt and not helping people, but showing poor people who need help doesn’t motivate people who aren’t poor. Seeing your neighbor in the line to get help may. Seeing the lines of people out your office window may.
LittlePig
It features two key Republican platform planks: Hate and Spite.
Needless to say, the evangelicals will adore it.
bleh
At heart, most self-styled “conservatives” are nasty, clannish hypocrites. They’re generous within their “tribe” — that is, with their relatives and close friends and the people who look like them — and they expect the government to move mountains to support them and their tribe, but when it comes to people outside the tribe, they’re hateful, stingy, and resentful.
So I’m afraid it’s not at all amazing to me.
Roger Moore
It’s almost as if they don’t give a damn about
black peoplepoor peopleanyone but the filthy richanyone but themselves. But it would be shrill to point out that the Republican Party is run by a bunch of sociopaths.Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@kay:
if you ever have to waste meeting time, in any cube farm, just mention a health care/insurance related nightmare and let people carry the conversation off.
its a passive-aggressive icebreaker.
LittlePig
@kay:
It reflects corporate reality. Lots of sex and sleaze for the tabloid set, with plenty of “oh, those poor bankers! Pity the poor millionaires” thrown in to justify the new Guilded Age.
Chris
@bleh:
This, + they think their tribe is or should be the entire country, which is why they expect (with some honesty) that the government should move mountains to take care of them and are sincerely bewildered when it tries to do anything of the kind for “those people” in Southeast DC.
It’s also why politics have gotten so bloody polarized in recent decades. Whether they see things in terms of race, class, religion, national origin, party affiliation or just vague clichés overheard on Fox News, Democratic constituencies are a cancer on the body of “their” pristine America, and fighting it takes precedence on everything else. To them, it really is a war.
Violet
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
In my neck of the woods it immediately turns to how it’s Obama’s fault and if not that, Hillary’s fault. I’m not kidding there, I have a doctor I see who has a signed photo of George W. Bush on the wall who says that everything wrong with the medical system is Hillary Clinton’s fault. I’m not making that up. But outside of blaming the health insurance companies, the entire reason there are problems is that it’s Obama’s fault.
Mark
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: As a Canadian, I can’t accept paying one goddamn extra cent to them. If I used their shitty HMO network and they screwed up the billing, there’s no way in hell that I am responsible for that. What surprises me is how willing my coworkers are to accept the hell that the insurance companies put them through and actually pay out-of-pocket for the insurance companies’ mistakes.
kay
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
Hah! So true. I’m going to stop doing that, because it gets too specific and my head hurts before it’s all over. ” I’m lost. Was this BEFORE the diabetes diagnosis, or after?”
Make it stop, I’m thinking. Them too, probably.
gex
We have a war on everyone who isn’t a straight white Christian male. Women, minorities, gays – any deviation from the perfect form that God made in his image is subject to becoming the enemy. And none of us (holy shit, I’m all three!) have the decency to stay in our places anymore.
Prime example is how drugs are practically legal for white people while we fill our prisons with brown people for drug possession.
Mary
Why assume that it wasn’t intentional? Why would Mitch Daniels give a rat’s ass whether his state got any Medicaid funding?
Martin
@Violet:
Of course. Vince Foster was the Albert Schweitzer of US health care administration, and she killed him with the gun she keeps stashed in her cooter. Duh.
Elliecat
But I heard on the radio that Moderate Mitch said there were HUNDREDS of clinics in Indiana where poor women could get the same services as they get from Planned Parenthood! So there’s no problem, right?
This is what many people will hear and think. Some of us would ask for more details about these HUNDREDS of clinics that serve low-income women so well, but NPR and other reporters? Not so much interested.
Albert Mond
C’mon these are compassionate conservatives, very serious people … how could they be wrong?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/01/980637/-GOProducts?detail=hide&via=blog_1
Hungry Joe
It is not amazing to me that conservatives are shutting down access to the few affordable clinics that exist in a country where millions of people are already going without access to medical care.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Mark:
the pisser for me, was hearing people in hmo’s talk about raising co-pays on themselves because their stock options were vesting soon, and they were also shareholders, dammit!
@Violet:
denial is a hell of a drug. its like blaming barney frank for the banking mess and derivative r/o/u/l/e/t/t/e. its amazing what the will to believe can accomplish.
Matt
Why is that amazing? Conservatives hate poor people, and believe that they should probably die if they get sick – ’cause Jeebus made them poor for something they did. This isn’t exactly a new thing…
Dennis SGMM
The plan is to fill the streets with cripples and diseased beggars panhandling for spare change. That way everyone else will be able to feel that they’re doing all right with their three part-time jobs.
Elliecat
@bleh:
I wouldn’t say generous. They’re just less stingy, and sometimes they’ll put out when they think it will help their image or reputation, but I’ve seen plenty throw family or relatives (and certainly neighbors) under the bus when a problem was going to cost them much money or time. Think how eagerly so many people embrace “tough love.”
Elliecat
@Dennis SGMM:
First they’d have to repeal all the local ordinances against panhandling, loitering, vagrancy, etc., that have been enacted to hide these folks from us for the last couple decades.
BO_Bill
Perhaps a good place to start would be turning illegal aliens away from free health care. And move on to restrict the drug selections for people who contracted diabetes through their own eating habits and now expect the public to pay for their treatment to the older drugs, which cost less than 10% of the newer versions.
These two fair actions would yield a savings of around 25% which could be made available for American Citizens who have non-gluttony related health problems.
A photo of a fat person eating a big cheeseburger who will surely contract diabetes.
Nutella
@Dennis SGMM:
their three part-time jobs as servants to the super-rich, that is.
shortstop
@kay: Maybe not, but I tend to agree with Violet that a whole lot of people are in denial about how tenuous their hold on affordable healthcare is. I simply don’t see how there could be as much past and continuing opposition to the ACA among voters if people really got that the next lost job, preexisting condition, rescission, medical bankruptcy, etc. could be their own, the way they seem to be getting that Ryan’s voucher plan is a monstrosity.
We know that these things have to become personal before most people understand. At some stage, we’ll have to reach a tipping point at which too many Americans love, are close to or know someone just like them who’s now without insurance to deny reality–and only at that point will the majority get it and demand change. It can’t come soon enough.
Cris (without an H)
If you’re an actual federalist — the kind of principled “conservative” who believes in balancing power between the centralized federal government and the several states — you should be concerned about the way Washington uses purse strings to passively impose its policies. The federal government often doesn’t have the legal authority to tell the states to do something (for example, education), so instead they extend funding to states who will follow the policy, which in effect means they withhold it from states who don’t.
You could argue that Daniels did this to highlight the fact that the feds aren’t letting the states do what they want with their money. I doubt it though.
shortstop
@Violet: Okay, I’m not sure of the demographics of your area or the special qualifications of this person, but do you have to see this doctor? I’m lucky enough to live in a large blue city with good medicos popping out at the seams, so I have choices that others don’t have…but if that were my doctor, I’d walk. Can you?
Nemesis
Psst. Dont tell anyone but closing down clinics is a feature, not a bug.
Frankensteinbeck
@Cris (without an H):
Except it’s not the state’s money. It’s the federal government’s money distributed to the states to be spent on the federal government’s terms. Legal, thoroughly constitutional, and downright obvious.
But even that argument assumes that the GOP is actually concerned with balancing state and federal power. Given that States’ Rights is an issue they only push when Democrats are in power, the evidence suggests they’re not actual federalists at all, but are merely grasping at any argument that sounds like it delegitimizes the Democratic government’s power.
Something they do even when, like in this situation, they screw over their constituents and ruin, even end people’s lives to do it.
Violet
@shortstop:
He’s a really good doctor for what I need him for. And he’s a weird combination of Eastern Medicine and alternative health stuff (diet, supplements, etc.) and this conservative mindset. I just ignored his politics. If you ignore that, you’d swear he was a DFH from all the other stuff.
He diagnosed me with an issue I’d been struggling with for years and I’m extremely grateful. He’s also the only one who treats me for it in the way I clearly need so I feel better. I don’t really want to go to another doctor because I don’t think I’d find one like him. In doctoring, he’s years if not decades ahead of his peers. His politics is just bizarre, though. I choose to ignore it.
Citizen Alan
Why is this remotely surprising to anyone? Republicans are good at exactly two things: stealing money from the middle class to funnel to the super-rich and ensuring that innocent people die for no reason, whether in pointless wars or through the destruction of the social safety net. I feel nothing but hate now for all Republicans, and I am baffled at the naivete of any decent person who feels differently.
alhutch
@Martin: Is it wrong that this made me laugh because I can actually imagine some wingnut saying this with a straight face?
gex
@Elliecat: We have a plan for that. Leave those ordinances in place. Just throw the lot into prison. That’s the whole point of for-profit prisons. You get to lock up the undesirables, prevent them from voting, and raise taxes on the bottom 90% to fund this lucrative cash cow.
kay
@Cris (without an H):
Conservatives don’t have a shred of credibility on federalism. Not a shred.
Within Paul Ryan’s plan is a provision for federal tort reform. Direct interference in a state court, by the fake-federalists, with a big fat federal law that was written by lobbyists and favors GOP donors.
They’ve never had any credibility there. It’s ALL TALK, and a crock of shit.
El Cid
“Affordable” clinics?
More librul talk for my tax money going to keep these lazy unproductive types having abortions every few days.
kay
@Matt:
It’s amazing that this isn’t being portrayed that way. It pisses me off that we never get a practical real-world analysis of anything these clowns do.
I’m sick to death of looking at the world through the mythical prism of the “conservative soul”. These laws they pass are analyzed wholly in the abstract.
I don’t care what it’s in their soul, whether they have a soul, any of it. I don’t want to talk about their inner most thoughts and feelings. God. They’re self-referential ENOUGH, as individuals. Media needs to stop indulging them.
aimai
@shortstop:
I agree with you on the denial thing. We have health insurance, right now, but every time I have to pay the immense co-pays and out of pocket things I am aware of just how absurd and fragile the whole system is. It makes me angry, and it makes me more inclined to vote Democratic than ever before. But I can imagine that it makes some people both angry and helpless with fear.
And you know what? There’s a lot of disinformation out there about why the current system is so bad. I had a screaming fight with a paunchy right wing guy, in his mid thirties, about why we needed the ACA and he actually told me that because of his wife’s pre-existing conditions she would not be eligible for anything on the private market and if he/she lost their jobs it would be all over for them in terms of medical insurance. But he was still opposed to Obama’s plan because…well? Because this stuff is complicated and medical costs keep going up and up and who knows what to do?
People are really frightened and really confused. The most important literary phrase of my youth remains the most important political phrase today: Only Connect. Connect cutting off women’s health clinics to cutting off Grandma and Grandpa’s nursing home money. Connect white guy/white collar to blue collar to pink collar of all colors. Connect babies to old people. But connect.
aimai
WereBear
Something fascinating (and dangerous) happened in the 20th Century. It’s my understanding that previous epochs did not have the unfettered access to one’s own imagination that marked the rise of mass culture. We didn’t have music pouring into our ears 24/7; we weren’t confronted with dramas every single night; our own experience was not overflowed with documentary & theatrical experiences of other cultures and peoples.
I’m not against this turn of events at all; the more art, the better. However, I do wonder how it came to pass that such an enormous chunk of our population fell into the habit of thinking that what they simply believe is actually so.
Over and over again, across all ages and walks of life, I keep getting confronted with people who have absolutely no reality recognition skills. Often, I encounter them when they are mired in some awesomely awful difficulty that this lack of skill has created for them; I go over step by step how this pit opened under their feet, they even agree! But in the next breath they will say something like, “But I don’t want that to be so.”
As though that makes the slightest bit of difference.
jibeaux
Chapping my ass about this is bs like this:
Guess what, Indiana? You sure can run your own ship. You just can’t use FEDERAL MEDICAID MONEY IN A WAY WHICH VIOLATES FEDERAL LAW. This isn’t a difficult concept. If public opinion as you see it is so hell-bent on making sure college women, uninsured women, working women can’t get affordable health care, then you can forego the Medicaid funds and see how the public likes that.
Sweet jeebus, if there were only some way to physically prevent arguments premised on false facts the silence from right wingers would be deafening.
Cris (without an H)
Absolutely. I think one of the things that motivates so much red state resentment of the federal government (besides the fact that it keeps them from owning slaves) is that the fed has SO much more money. Washington is the wealthy patron of the heartland (look at how proudly we embrace federal funds for state highway projects) yet we have this resentment when our patron deigns to put conditions on how the funding is used. Like most of what passes for conservatism, it’s totally incoherent.
kay
@jibeaux:
Exactly. Don’t tread on them with any of your “laws”, Mr. Obama, but hand over the check.
The rules don’t apply to conservatives.
grandpajohn
@kay:
Since when has the MSM attempted to reflect reality, not their job the use of reality and national media in the same sentence is an oxymoron
For the national media their paycheck depends on NOT reflecting reality
Frankensteinbeck
@Cris (without an H):
That reasoning does sound totally incoherent, yes.
Catsy
@Violet:
I would not trust a motherfucker that stupid to prescribe an aspirin for me.
Chris
@WereBear:
I know what you mean. I have at least one conservative friend that I’ve literally watched think her way to liberal conclusions, hold liberal opinions, only to have her brain hit RESET the minute she finds out that they are, in fact, liberal opinions. Critical thinking and reality recognition aren’t really prized on their side of the aisle.
I don’t think I’d attribute it to information or mass culture, though. For my money, the biggest change in the last century was the creation of a middle class nation (thank the New Deal for that) that shields most of the people from the uglier side of life (regulations, unions and various government services prevent the poverty of the Gilded Age and the times before it). Because of that, we have entire generations who’ve lived relatively sheltered lives, have no idea what the consequences of their ideals would be, and thus are more likely to embrace them.
As far as we’ve fallen in the last thirty years, an enormous amount of the New Deal legacy is so woven into our fabric that people don’t even know it’s there. To quite an extent, we’re still shielded from our own and our leaders’ stupidity.
kay
@grandpajohn:
I’ve been looking into this (and you may know it) but most the health care discussion has revolved around college educated people who have jobs with health insurance.
It’s a very narrow debate.
Kyle
Not when you realize that their entire motive is to generate profits. Maybe not for themselves or even for their cronies, but out of a fixed ideology that if something doesn’t generate private profits it must be evil and soshulist.
In this light, “government health care”, non-profits, charity and “affordable clinics” are sinister commie entities. Efficacy and efficiency don’t even matter and international comparisons of health systems are for unMurkan traitor cosmopolitans.
As we saw so clearly in the Cheney/Bush years, their motivation with all government activities is to setup scams to generate profits. The Fox/Rush/teatard sheep stupidly think they’re in on the con.
grandpajohn
@gex:
As a straight white christian male who lives in a red state and votes democratic, I am attacked also, you need to add the word Republican to that description
WereBear
I agree; people have no clue that stuff like paid vacations, the forty hour work week, and no six year olds losing fingers in the mills didn’t just happen.
Chris
@WereBear:
Some do, and then you hear the even more idiotic assertion that “yeah, but that was in the past, unions/regulations/welfare states have served their purpose and they need to go now.”
Which is the logical equivalent of saying that the military should have been dismantled after World War Two, or the police disbanded after crime rates fell in the 1990s. And sort of reinforces your original point about how many stupid people there are out there.
grandpajohn
@Cris (without an H): Federal money always comes with strings attached and regulalltions about how it can be spent, if the Governers are too stupid or too ideologically blinded to understand this , then they deserve to lose the money
rikyrah
this was the right thing to do for the FEDS
Cris (without an H)
@grandpajohn: The missing piece of the puzzle here is the conservative mantra that federal money is “your money.” They may be using the word as a slur right now, but they see federal funds as an entitlement. Since you paid the taxes, it was never really the government’s money to begin with, so you get to do with it whatever you want.
Again, totally incoherent. It doesn’t matter. Conservatives always want it both ways.
grandpajohn
@BO_Bill: Speaking of reality, you are aware that for many people, diabetes is genetic and has little to do with diet. Many of the diabetics I know and attend support meetings with are not over weight and eat proper diets. You ever hear of type I juvenile diabetics some born that way?
grandpajohn
@aimai:
based on the person you described to me there is a fair amount of ignorance throwmn into the mix as well
Nutella
@grandpajohn:
And illegal aliens don’t get free health care. They have to pay through the nose for it just like everybody else. Unless there’s some secret source of free health care that nobody told me about.
Brachiator
Conservatives used to pooh-pooh concerns about privacy with “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.”
Along with this now goes “You don’t need health insurance if you never get sick.” And apparently some conservatives view themselves as Galtian Supermen, impervious to illness.
Andrey
@WereBear: I recognize the phenomenon you are talking about – but I think you err in believing that this is a historically new phenomenon. People have held unquestioned beliefs, and been shocked (and failed to learn from it) when those beliefs collide with reality, for millenia. The only significant change has been the increase in cultural collision, leading to such cases being more obvious. If your whole village believes a ridiculous thing, the ridiculousness is unlikely to come up; a city full of immigrants is a lot more likely to force those beliefs into question – unfortunately, while that sometimes leads to ridiculous beliefs being abandoned, it just as often leads to a person bunkering down in their perception of reality, seeing other beliefs as threats to their existence.