A statement by the President: pic.twitter.com/liWE4rlleF
— Real Press Sec. (@RealPressSecBot) August 16, 2017
Update Thank you to Adam for finding live footage of Trump’s current Cabinet meeting:
by David Anderson| 229 Comments
This post is in: Hail to the Hairpiece, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bring on the Brawndo!, Fucked-up-edness, Go Fuck Yourself, Good News For Conservatives
A statement by the President: pic.twitter.com/liWE4rlleF
— Real Press Sec. (@RealPressSecBot) August 16, 2017
Update Thank you to Adam for finding live footage of Trump’s current Cabinet meeting:
by DougJ| 158 Comments
This post is in: Assholes
The people bankrolling the alt right aren’t guys named Bobby Joe who made their millions on Powerball tickets they picked up at Winn-Dixie. They’re a computer science PhD turned billionaire hedge funder from New Mexico and his daughter from suburban New York:
Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.
That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table.
We’ve said it once (or more) before but it bears repeating: the Republican base is well-to-do white people. Plenty of the Neo-Nazis who marched in Charlotte were college students or college graduates. Robert Ritchie isn’t straight out the trailer, he’s straight out the mansion.
If you think all those nice white college-educated upper-middle class people who voted for Trump are going to desert him now, think again.
This post is in: Post-racial America, Assholes, Sociopaths
I know it’s great hearing so many people trash Trump, but we need to be realistic here. They’ll condemn, condemn, condemn, they’ll issue statements, they’ll make serious faces and muster their “gravitas” voice and mouth platitudes about no place for racism in society, but none of them will do a fucking thing about Trump. Not one Republican in the House or Senate will do a GOD DAMNED thing about it. They won’t refuse to do business until he fires Bannon, Miller, Gorka, and his wife. They won’t refuse to legislate until the funding to study white supremacist groups that Gorka’s wife had removed is reinstated.
They’ll hoocoodanode like crazy:
And they’ll make serious statements:
We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.
— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) August 15, 2017
But they won’t even mention Herr Gropenfuhrer by name.
And they never will, because this is who they are. They knew his true colors last year- EVERYONE KNEW- and they rallied round him because winning is the only thing that matters to them.
Gary Cohn is so disgusted by Trump's behavior that he will get up today, go to work at the White House and hope to be appointed to the Fed
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) August 16, 2017
The only thing that motivates them is their hatred of you. We’ve been over this before. That’s why they love this “both sides” shit. They know that white supremacist and Nazi associations make them look bad, but they will court their votes because they hate you more. They’ll keep running guys like this:
Virginia gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart, a Republican, embraced the Confederate flag and Virginia’s history of defending slavery on Saturday, using multiple phrases that indicate his appeal to white supremacist voters.
Stewart championed Confederate leaders Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and repeatedly emphasized Virginia’s “heritage.”
“It’s the state of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That is our heritage. It is what makes us Virginia,” Stewart said, speaking at the “Old South Ball” in Danville, Virginia, in a video posted by Blue Virginia. “If you take that away, we lose our identity.”
Maintaining white identity has been a theme of white supremacist movements.
He barely lost the primary a couple months ago, and just the other day the Virginia Chairman of the GOP had this to say:
“You can’t emphatically enough denounce these groups,” Whitbeck remarked. “I mean, you have to be as unequivocal as you can be. Our party has always stood for equal justice. And our Republican elected officials and our party leaders have been saying this message all along as Americans, as Virginians.”
Blitzer reminded the state GOP chair that the hate groups have been drawn to Charlottesville due to the pending removal of the Robert E. Lee statue.
“That has become a big issue. Where do you stand?” Blitzer asked. “Where does the Republican Party of Virginia stand on that Robert E. Lee statue?”
“I think our nominee for governor, Ed Gillespie, has spoken about this,” Whitbeck stuttered. “And we stand will our nominee 100 percent.”
“What is he saying?” Blitzer wondered.
“He has said he supports the history of Virginia in all its forms,” Whitbeck admitted. “You can’t just eradicate the bad parts of our history by just taking down statues. I think he’s right.”
Apparently he has never met Corey Stewart.
Hell, they just spent the last nine years riding the racist rump of the tea party to victory as they barely were able to control themselves from yelling N*GGER at President Obama at every step. So if you think this means anything, or that the Republican party will change after seven decades of the southern strategy and giving reach-arounds to the klan, fuhgeddaboudit. This was obvious to me when I left the Republicans a decade or more ago, it’s obvious now. It’s who they fucking are.
Hell, anyone want to bet that Trump’s approval rating with Republicans won’t increase in the next few days? It’s who they are, for fuck’s sake. There will be no mass resignations. There will be no mass defections from the party. There will be no direct action or consequences for Trump. They know that a racist tide lifts all GOP boats, so they’ll talk a good game while publicly distancing themselves so they can keep going to the fancy parties in polite society.
The only questions are whether the media will let them get away with this and the Democrats can stop squabbling internally and stop them in 2018. I’m not hopeful on either account.
Just a Reminder- They Won’t Do a Fucking Thing About HimPost + Comments (144)
This post is in: Dolt 45, domestic terrorists, Open Threads, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Outrage, Rare Sincerity
‘Neither the extreme left nor the extreme right is representative of any significant constituency in American politics.’ pic.twitter.com/lsJdWqVNl4
— Lars Olsson (@larsolsson) August 15, 2017
1939, Madison Square Garden Nazi rally. Saying the far right doesn't represent a significant constituency is just wrong. It always has.
— Lars Olsson (@larsolsson) August 16, 2017
I know, I know — overkill. But this is 2017, and we’re trying to explain to the guy currently squatting in the Oval Office, in this very timeline, that Nazis are wrong. It feels like we have to make some kind of record…
?? Top lookups right now: fascism, bigot, racism, complicit, neo-Nazi, nationalism.
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) August 16, 2017
One suspects most of the searches are coming from the president's press team.
— Mark Doyle (@frenchtoastpie) August 16, 2017
If 10 guys thinks it's ok to hang with 1 Nazi then they just became 11 Nazis. Alt right / white supremacist it's just nazis. Fuck Nazis.
— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) August 15, 2017
I've interviewed a lot of alt-right leaders recently. Trump just defended Charlottesville harder than many *actual white nationalists* did.
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) August 15, 2017
Presidents come to office with a sum of credibility, some lower than others. They spend it over it time. DJT just zeroed out his account. /4
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 15, 2017
IMO, that's a good thing. "Getting back on track" was a binky that GOPers sucked on to alleviate their anxiety. Wasn't going to happen. /9
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 15, 2017
President @realDonaldTrump once again denounced hate today. The GOP stands behind his message of love and inclusiveness!
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) August 15, 2017
The new RNC National Spokeswoman https://t.co/AYHyyC0HOW
— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 15, 2017
Horrifying scene from CASABLANCA, where alt-left agitator Rick Blaine shoots Heinrich Strasser, a Nazi with a permit. pic.twitter.com/ksQaHksqYM
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 15, 2017
FYI, if you're wondering how Germany commemorates Hitler, this is the spot where he died: pic.twitter.com/bxCRNSbfDi
— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) August 15, 2017
Flat Rejection Open Thread: There Are *NOT* Two Sides to This ArgumentPost + Comments (108)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 174 Comments
This post is in: Post-racial America
The president of Congregation Beth Israel, Charlottesville:
On Saturday morning, I stood outside our synagogue with the armed security guard we hired after the police department refused to provide us with an officer during morning services. (Even the police department’s limited promise of an observer near our building was not kept — and note, we did not ask for protection of our property, only our people as they worshipped).
Forty congregants were inside. Here’s what I witnessed during that time.
For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple. Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either. Perhaps the presence of our armed guard deterred them. Perhaps their presence was just a coincidence, and I’m paranoid. I don’t know.
Several times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, “There’s the synagogue!” followed by chants of “Seig Heil” and other anti-Semitic language. Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.
[…] When services ended, my heart broke as I advised congregants that it would be safer to leave the temple through the back entrance rather than through the front, and to please go in groups.
[…] Soon, we learned that Nazi websites had posted a call to burn our synagogue. I sat with one of our rabbis and wondered whether we should go back to the temple to protect the building. What could I do if I were there? Fortunately, it was just talk – but we had already deemed such an attack within the realm of possibilities, taking the precautionary step of removing our Torahs, including a Holocaust scroll, from the premises.
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
NBER has a fascinating new working paper out by Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendron and Mark Shepherd. They look at the discontinuities in the Massachusetts Health Connector data to estimate willingness to pay for health insurance on the individual market.
As subsidies decline, insurance take-up falls rapidly, dropping about 25% for each $40 increase in monthly enrollee premiums. Marginal enrollees tend to be lower-cost, consistent with adverse selection into insurance. But across the entire distribution we can observe – approximately the bottom 70% of the willingness to pay distribution – enrollee willingness to pay is always less than half of own expected costs. As a result, we estimate that take-up will be highly incomplete even with generous subsidies: if enrollee premiums were 25% of insurers’ average costs, at most half of potential enrollees would buy insurance; even premiums subsidized to 10% of average costs would still leave at least 20% uninsured.
What does this mean?
Most people aren’t willing to pay the average price of care. This makes sense to me on first glance. Most people won’t run up the average claim dollar value. Health care is a concentrated. The bottom 50% of the spending uses 3% of the resources. The top 5% of the population uses half of the medical spend.
Healthy people or people who believe that they will be healthy in the next contract year won’t vlaue health insurance much because the odds of them needing tens of thousands of dollars worth of care are very low. So healthy buyers leave if the post-subsidy price is significantly higher than their expected medical costs plus a small insurance risk aversion function. This makes sense.
So what are the policy implications?
Cutting back subsidies will lead to a sicker risk pool as more marginally healthy people leave the pool. However we can’t say that increasing subsidies to the point where the typical reasonably healthy/marginal buyer is paying nothing in post-subsidy premiums will bring everyone into the pool. We saw strong evidence with the Medicaid woodworker phenomena.
In 2014, people who were Medicaid eligible but not signed up for Medicaid went on the Exchanges for the first time. They went on because they were in an environment where health insurance sign-ups were high salience and there was a lot of help to push these people onto the Exchanges. And instead of being sent to go shop for subsidized plans, the Exchanges identified that the individual was eligible for Legacy Medicaid. Legacy Medicaid has no premiums and nominal cost sharing. Yet it took a massive external force and messaging effort to get people to sign up for free to them health insurance.
In order to get people to sign up for insurance, we need very low monthly premiums, aggressive messaging and most likely a fairly significant and broadly perceived to be frequently enforced and legitimate penalty for not signing up. Or we can go for an auto-enrollment system with an opt-out.
One of my major efforts here at Balloon Juice has been promoting Silver Gap strategies. These are an explicit hack on the subsidy formula. I am advocating for creative strategies that effectively increase the subsidy benchmark which means for healthy families and individuals, their post-subsidy premiums would go down. In some counties in 2017, they could make $38,000 and pay nothing for a Silver plan.
Family of 3 (40,40,10) in 37096 $0 Silver up to $38,600. Same family in 37763 $182 for Silver and $0 Bronze #SilverGap #SilverSpam
— David Anderson (@bjdickmayhew) November 4, 2016
However, the Finkelstein et al paper show that this is a marginal strategy. It helps people get insurance, it helps improve the risk pool. It does not hurt, but it does not get everyone covered.
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
Kevin Drum asked for a blog post instead of a tweet storm regarding my argument that over the long run not paying the Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) subsidies is a massive liberal policy win. So here it goes.
Under current law, there are two sets of subsidies. The first is Premium Tax Credits. These apply to eligible people making between 100% and 400% Federal Poverty Line (FPL). They are based on filling the gap between an individual’s personal contribution and the premium of the second least expensive Silver plan. The Premium Tax Credit is a fixed amount. If a person buys a plan with a lower premium than the benchmark Silver plan, the person pays less in premiums. If a person buys a more expensive plan than the benchmark Silver, they pay the incremental difference.
The second subsidy type is the CSR subsidies. These apply to people earning between 100% and 250% FPL. CSR is a value bump built on top of Silver plans to reduce the out of pocket maximum and increase actuarial value. Actuarial value is shorthand for the percentage of allowed costs the insurance company pays. These bumps are 94%, 87% and 73% for people earning up to 150% FPL, 200% FPL, and 250% FPL respectively.
The House sued the Obama Administration on whether or not the CSR payments were properly appropriated instead of just authorized but not funded. Currently, CSR is adjudicated to have not been properly appropriated as a mandatory entitlement. This issue is slowly working it way to the DC Circuit. The Trump Administration could drop the appeal and stop payments immediately. Insurers have been working to protect themselves from this possibility in 2018 by raising rates dramatically. This is the baseline of the story.
Right now Silver plans are targeted to be 70% actuarial value which means the insurance company pays roughly 70% of all allowed amount from claims with premium dollars and individuals pay the remaining 30% of allowed amount for the entire group out of their own pocket. Pragmatically, the benchmark Silver plan will tend to have an actuarial value under 70% due to allowed pricing variations. If we make some assumptions that everything is relatively equal, most subsidized buyers will see Bronze plans (60% AV) are less expensive than the Benchmark Silver and one additional Silver plan is less expensive than the Benchmark Silver. Gold (80% AV) and Platinum (90% AV) are, for the same network at the same insurer in the same plan type, more expensive than the Benchmark Silver.
Now let’s assume that insurers and their state regulators either think that CSR won’t be paid or know that it won’t be paid. Insurers are still obligated to increase the actuarial value of the Silver plans bought by people with incomes between 100%-250% FPL. They won’t give that benefit away for free. Instead they will increase premium rates. They can either increase the rates on all plans or only increase the rates on Silver plans. Most will increase the rates only on Silver plans.
So what happens if CSR costs are incorporated into the premiums of Silver plans. Silver plans are now priced as a function of the proportion of people who make between 150% and 200% FPL and thus qualify for an 87% AV plan and the proportion of people who make between 100% and 150% FPL and qualify for a 94% AV plan. Almost no one who makes between 200% and 250% FPL will buy a Silver plan. This means that the typical Silver plan will be priced as if it about 90% AV. This is effectively a platinum plan serving as the benchmark.
Yet it is an artificially inflated Silver plan. The benchmark is now at priced at 90% AV. What happens to buying decisions?
If we assume that the benchmark Silver has cousins at Platinum, Gold and Bronze where all of these plans have the same networks and same basic benefit design, the relative, post subsidy price order will look like the following: Platinum and Silver are roughly equal, Silver is more expensive than Gold by 15% and Silver is more expensive than Bronze by 40% or more. This is a significant inversion of the current scenario where Benchmark Silver has a price advantage over Bronze by a little bit, and is significantly under-priced compared to Gold and Platinum.
Most of the people who earn under 200% FPL will stay in their CSR enhanced Silver plans. They still get good to very good deals. Their behavior won’t change much. Some people, especially those who are healthy and earning between 150% and 200% FPL may shift their purchases from Silver plans to the less expensive but higher deductible Gold plans that still offer some decent protection.
The big changes in behavior are for people earning between 200% and 400% FPL. The Congressional Budget Office in their analysis of the effects of terminating CSR payments has a wonderful illustration of this enhanced Silver Gapping:
Gold becomes cheaper than Silver despite offering, all else being equal, a better value with lower out of pocket costs and lower deductibles. Subsidized Silver buyers who make more than 200% FPL will migrate overwhelmingly to Gold plans. This increases their average AV from roughly 70% to roughly 80% even as post-subsidy premiums decrease.
More importantly, Bronze plans are highly likely to be very low cost or free. This will increase purchases of these plans by people who are currently uninsured. The CBO projects an average of 300,000 additional covered lives per year because of this effect.
I don’t think this is cost effective way to cover more people. Expanding Medicaid and then expanding Basic Health Plans would be much more efficient.
What this does is anchor expectations of what “reasonable” publicly subsidized insurance looks like. Right now the benchmark plan for people making over 200% FPL is a plan that they are paying $140 or more for a plan with a $3,000 or more deductible. This is better than nothing but it is still under-insurance and not particularly helpful for people. In a Silver loaded CSR universe, the typical Gold plan will have lower premiums after the subsidy and a $1,000 deductible with a $1750 out of pocket maximum. That is truly useful insurance for far more people. And people will get used to this being the standard and we can work to improve from there.