Author Archives: ReneCogburn

Obamacare Is Doing Fine Unless Trump Kills It

by ReneCogburn Posted on April 25, 2017

Mother Jones

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obamacare is in good shape:

Under current law, most subsidized enrollees purchasing health insurance coverage in the nongroup market are largely insulated from increases in premiums because their out-of-pocket payments for premiums are based on a percentage of their income; the government pays the difference. The subsidies to purchase coverage combined with the penalties paid by uninsured people stemming from the individual mandate are anticipated to cause sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures for the market to be stable.

Insurance companies are starting to make money on Obamacare. Nearly 20 million people have health insurance because of Obamacare. Premiums will probably go up next year, but not by a huge amount. And even if they do go up, federal subsidies will shield most people from having to pay any more than this year. Because of all this, CBO believes that Obamacare will stay stable and strong:

President Trump tweeted the opposite today, saying once again that Obamacare was on the verge of failing. This is a lie, one that he’s repeated over and over. Obamacare will fail only if he cuts off its funding.

The reason for this post isn’t so much to mention that Trump lied again today. The sun also rose in the east, and I didn’t write about that. It’s to remind everyone—including me—to stop writing tweets and blog posts that say something like this:

Trump says Obamacare is in a death spiral. He’s wrong.

When we repeat the lie, we just give it more exposure. The end result is that people vaguely know something about Obamacare and death spiral and controversial, and that’s it. They don’t really know who’s right, they just know that they keep seeing stuff about Obamacare being in trouble.

So don’t do it. Instead, just write the truth and then mention that Trump has lied about it.

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Obamacare Is Doing Fine Unless Trump Kills It

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

by ReneCogburn Posted on October 20, 2014

Mother Jones

It’s good to be Elizabeth Warren. The senior senator from Massachusetts spent her weekend campaigning for Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, and Iowa, and by all accounts, she tore it up, and got more than a few calls to run for president. (Breaking: she still insists she isn’t going to.) These were some of her biggest red-meat lines from the campaign trail:

1. “The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it. We can whine, we can whimper or we can fight back, and we’re here to fight back. We know what we’re fighting for and what we’re up against. We’ve got our voices, or votes and our willingness to fight. This is about democracy, about your future, and about the kind of country we want to build.”

2. “Who does this government work for?…Does it work just for the millionaires, just for the billionaires, just for those who have armies of lobbyists and lawyers or does it work for the people? That’s the question in this race.”

3. “Republicans believe this country should work for those who are rich, those who are powerful, those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers.”

4. When conservatives came to power in the 1980s, the first thing they did was “fire the cops on Wall Street. They called it deregulation. But what it really meant was have at ’em boys. They were saying in effect to the biggest financial institutions: Any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits.”

5. “They ought to be wearing a T-shirt that says…’I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.’ We can hang back, we can whine about what the Republicans have done…or we can fight back. Me, I’m fighting back!”

Contrast Warren’s rock star treatment with the President’s reception this weekend: he spoke at a campaign event in Maryland, and attendees filed out as soon as he started speaking. Obama is being kept at arms’ length in close races—Warren, on the other hand, will head to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who’s running against Warren’s old nemesis, Scott Brown.

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Elizabeth Warren Was on Fire This Weekend. Here Were Her 5 Best Lines.

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