Author Archives: LazaroWorley

Question of the Day: With Friends Like This….

by LazaroWorley Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last month, Donald Trump said he didn’t consider John McCain a war hero because “I like people who weren’t captured.” Who said this afterward?

Mr. Trump’s remarks were insulting to me as a veteran and as a person whose family sacrificed for 25 years as I missed anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, Christmases and Easters….I was offended by a man who sought and gained four student deferments to avoid the draft and who has never served this nation a day — not a day — in any fashion or way.

….Why should I not be suspicious of an individual who was pro-choice until he decided to run for president? Why should I not be suspicious of a person who advocates for universal healthcare? Why should I not be suspicious of someone who says he hates lobbyists and yet has spread millions of dollars around to Republicans and Democrats to enrich himself? Why should I not be suspicious of someone who cannot come to say that he believes in God, that he has never asked for forgiveness and that communion is simply wine and a cracker.

….Trump left me with questions about his moral center and his foundational beliefs….His comments reveal no foundation in Christ, which is a big deal.

If you answered Sam Clovis, the conservative Iowan who is now Trump’s national campaign co-chair, give yourself a gold star! The Des Moines Register says dryly that this raises questions about whether Clovis was motivated to join Trump’s campaign “less by ideology and more by the promise of a big paycheck from a business mogul who has said he is willing to spend as much as a billion dollars to get elected.”

Huh. I guess it does. You really think that might have been in the back of Clovis’s mind?

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Question of the Day: With Friends Like This….

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Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It’s Nothing to Panic Over

by LazaroWorley Posted on March 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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The LA Times has a piece today about the next battleground for Obamacare: rate increases for 2015. The warnings are already coming thick and fast:

WellPoint Inc., parent of California’s leading health insurer in the exchange, Anthem Blue Cross, has already predicted “double-digit-plus” rate increases on Obamacare policies across much of the country.

…. Health insurers aren’t wasting any time sizing up what patients are costing them now and what that will mean for 2015 rates. Hunkered down in conference rooms, insurance actuaries are parsing prescriptions, doctor visits and hospital stays for clues about how expensive these new patients may be. By May, insurance companies must file next year’s rates with California’s state-run exchange so negotiations can begin.

I hope everyone manages to restrain their Obamacare hysteria over this. Here in California, we’ve played this game annually for years. Health insurers in the individual market propose wild increases in their premiums—10 percent, 20 percent, sometimes even 30 percent—and then dial them back a bit after consumer outrage blankets the media and the Department of Insurance pushes back. But even then, we routinely end up with double-digit increases. Just for background, here are the average annual rate increases requested by a few of California’s biggest insurers over the last three years:

Anthem Blue Cross: 10.7%
Aetna: 12.1%
Blue Shield: 15.4%
HealthNet: 12.0%

And this doesn’t include changes in deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. Add those in, and the annual proposed increases are probably in the range of 15-20 percent. Obamacare, of course, limits both those things, which means that in the future insurance companies will have to put everything into rate hikes instead of spreading the increases around to make them harder to add up.

Bottom line: if we end up seeing double-digit rate increases, it will be business as usual. Insurance companies will all blame it on Obamacare because that’s a convenient thing to do, but the truth is that we probably would have seen exactly the same thing even if Barack Obama had never been born. So let’s all keep our feet on the ground when the inevitable huge rate increase requests start flowing in. It’s mostly an insurance company thing and a healthcare thing, not an Obamacare thing.

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Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It’s Nothing to Panic Over

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 March 2014

by LazaroWorley Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The sun has been back for two weeks now and Domino has decided it’s probably safe to come outside. Not very far outside, mind you, but she does adore the stiffly-bristled welcome mat we have outside our front door. It’s a great place to scratch an itch, and when you’re done, it catches the afternoon sun and provides a lovely napping spot.

In other news, click here and decide if you think I look like a badass. I think perhaps the headline writer was engaging in a wee flight of fancy. However, I commend to my editors the reporter’s deadpan note about how I feel about blogging: “For him, it’s ‘the perfect job,’ noting he rarely hears from his bosses at Mother Jones.” That, um, didn’t quite turn out right, did it?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 14 March 2014

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