Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

T R E 4 5 O N

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

In my day, never was longer.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

No one could have predicted…

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

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

Republicans do not pay their debts.

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Good News Everybody

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Via Charles Gaba:

Gallup’s new polling shows 5% of the country has gone from uninsured to insured over the past six months:

So, let’s see here. The Gallup poll only includes adults over 18, so…

By an amazing coincidence, back on May 5th Gallup issued similar survey results which showed a reduction in the overall national uninsured rate of at least 11 million, so this survey, using slightly different wording and a different approach, simply reinforces that one…although the earlier one included Medicaid as well, so there’s obviously some overlap/churn going on here.

This thing is working and it is working well within design parameters.  There are a couple more positive shocks to the system that we should anticipate as Pennsylvania, Virginia and Indiana are highly likely to expand Medicaid through the waiver process sometime this year with a 1/1/15 effective date.  The second round of open enrollment looks like it will have more plans, more competition and mostly functioning websites.  People are getting the “gay marriage in Massachusetts” learning by observing experience right now.  The teabaggers won’t learn, but quite a few people who are leery of Obamacare are seeing that not much is changing in a bad way.  Premiums are going up a little, deductibles and co-pays are going up a little, but hey, that has been the case for my entire life. 

This thing is going to work ( and soon enough I can breathe long enough to wonk out again).

 

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Bending the curve

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The Aaron Carrol at the  Incidental Economist did some window shopping on the Indiana Exchange and discovered significant system wide curve bending:

Silver plans for an individual range from $278 to $301 a month (before subsidies). This is far less than what the state released a while ago. For a family like mine, silver plans range from $938 to $1018 a month (before subsidies). What’s more, even the gold plans range from only $1175 to $1329 a month.

Since we know that the average employer sponsored health insurance plan for a family in the US is $16,351, that means the most expensive gold plan on the exchange, at $15,948, is cheaper. Let me say that again: The most expensive plan I could find for a family line mine on the Indiana Health Insurance Exchange is less expensive than the average employer sponsored health insurance plan in the US.

Given Dr. Carrol’s life situation ( high end researcher with an M.D.) odds are that he would get little to no subsidies on the Exchange AND his current employer picks up a very high percentage of his employer sponsored health insurance, so he would be individually worse off going to the Exchange.  However most employer coverage ranges from high Bronze to high Silver, so if Gold plans total costs are coming in at or under average high Silver commercially provided costs, this is a massive cost savings.

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Good News, Everybody

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Good news, there is no need this year for the Independent Payment Advisory Board to meet. IPAB is an entity created by Obamacare that is designated to make payment reforms to Medicare to bring down the rate of Medicare spending inflation to the general rate of growth in the economy. Congress can overrule IPAB’s recommendations if they come up with a seperate plan that saves as much or more than IPAB’s plan. 

However IPAB is not needed when medical inflation for Medicare is beneath the rate of economic growth. And that is what is happening.

The White House brags:

Prices for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) on health care goods and services rose just 1.1 percent over the twelve months ending in May 2013, the slowest rate of increase in nearly 50 years. The slowdown in PCE health care inflation has been widespread…

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey indicate that for private sector employers offering health insurance, the annualized growth rate of real (inflation-adjusted) costs for workers’ health insurance has slowed from 2.2 percent a year from 2006:Q4 to 2009:Q4 to 1.8 percent a year from 2009:Q4 to 2012:Q4

What this means, if it is a sustainable trend, is systemically, health care is going from a red alert, going to destroy the federal budget, apple pie and day/night doubleheaders to a medium size problem that needs consistent monitoring, tinkering and experimentation. CBO is figuring federal Medicare/Medicaid committments in 2020 are $200 billion less than what they projected a few years ago. As the saying goes, a few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there, and sooner or later we’re talking about real money.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Scandalmania Among the Professionally Manic

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i am not a kook morin
(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)

Spring may have come late to much of the country, but the summer Silly Season is starting early. Frank Rich, NYMag, May 15th:

… Wasn’t the BP spill supposed to end the Obama presidency? Or was it the revolt against Obamacare? Not for the first time, the GOP could overplay its hand. In the accounting of Chuck Todd of NBC News, fully a third of House committees are now devoted to investigating the Obama administration. The Republicans see a golden opportunity to rev up their base in anticipation of the 2014 election. If scandal fever keeps escalating and we get anywhere near the frenzy of the impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton (perhaps unlikely, since the key ingredient of sex is missing), it could backfire. That’s what happened in the second-term Clinton midterms of 1998, when Gingrich’s revolutionaries actually lost seats in the House because of their incessant fixation on scandal. In 2014, the Democratic base could well be moved to turn out, too, including Latino voters who will be reminded daily that Congress was too busy investigating the Obama White House to deliver immigration reform.

Dana Milbank, Friday, on the “Conspiracy of the Unproductive“:

President Obama remains lucky in one crucial category: his opposition… Consider Thursday morning’s circus on the east lawn of the Capitol, where Republican lawmakers gathered with tea party leaders to declare their thoughts on the IRS scandal.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), mother of the House Tea Party Caucus, said her constituents are demanding, “Why aren’t you impeaching the president?”….

… And the head of Heritage Action for America, the influential lobbying arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, wrote to congressional Republicans on Thursday urging them to concentrate on the administration scandals and avoid policy issues that could distract from this singular focus.

“[I]t would be imprudent to do anything that shifts the focus from the Obama administration to the ideological differences within the House Republican Conference,” warned Heritage Action chief executive Michael Needham. “To that end, we urge you to avoid bringing any legislation to the House Floor that could expose or highlight major schisms within the conference.” …

Jon Chait at NYMag examines the Repubs’ playbook:

… You may think that screaming bloody murder over a non-scandal will utterly backfire. I invite you study volumes I to V of the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s collection of wild denunciations of massive, unprecedented criminality in the “Whitewater scandal.” The scandal, in fact, amounted to nothing in the end. But it did successfully implant an aura of sleaze and wrongdoing. If you’re looking to foment a scandal, having the facts on your side is obviously helpful, but it’s not necessary. (Republicans should probably stay away from actual impeachment — that part of the lesson of 1998 seems clear enough.)

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Our Big Fat Gay Election

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I thought witnessing the Great PUMA Tantrum of Aught-Eight in real time was fun, but it turns out that was just the bagged crudité tray before the grand schadenfreude banquet that is the Colossal Wingnut Bed-Shitting of 2012. Good times!

But among all the very many reasons to be happy today, one of my favorite things is the stunning progress we’ve made on LGBT equality, symbolized by a few of last night’s election results. NOM has a sad today, and that’s a Good Thing. They used to crow about their “36-0” record, and to give the devil their due, they were remarkably successful in advancing the cause of bigotry and defacing various state constitutions with anti-gay graffiti.

That streak is broken. Marriage equality won in Maine, Maryland and Minnesota (and maybe Washington state too). Tammy Baldwin is the first openly gay senator elected in US history.

This particular moral arc of the universe has been bending toward justice for a long time, thanks to the brave and tireless efforts of millions of people over decades. And although it has bent more sharply recently, we still have a long way to go.

But is there any doubt that having a sitting president come out in favor of marriage equality made a difference? Is there any doubt that President Obama’s successful drive to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell changed things?

Thank you, President Barack Obama. Well done, sir.

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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So soon you learn to forget, bad times, the rules, and regrets

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This time seven years ago, people were dying in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth ward was flooded out, Plaqamines Parish was essentially destroyed, and government had ceased to function in southern Louisiana and Mississippi.

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Don’t (Diss) Party Like It’s 1999….

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The other day I posted on Mann and Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. I’m just about through that book, and I’ll do a direct follow-up in a day or so.  But here I want to take issue for a moment with a really powerful work that I finished reading on Saturday, Chris Hedges’ and  Joe Sacco’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

That’s a riveting book, an important one, and I commend it to you all.  You can’t read it without being radicalized, in a good way.  Hedges and Sacco travel to the most destroyed, exploited, misery-infused places in the United States and document both wrecked lives and those lived in opposition to the various arrangements of power that have extracted the last scrap of cash out of their communities.  If ever there were a document that drove home the need for a true transformation in the relationship of our government to private capital, this is it.

There’s a corollary to the stories Hedges and Sacco deliver:  in their telling it becomes clear that the government we have is complicit with the particular individuals and/or corporations that have wrought and continue to wreak havoc on the people they encounter.  And so, near the end of his text, Hedges writes this:

We must stop being afraid.  We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for President. All the public disputes between candidates in the election cycle are a carnival act.  On the issues that matter there is no disagreement among the Republicans and the Democrats.

Bullshit.  Pure and deadly dangerous nonsense.

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