Tag Archives: affordable

Republican Congresswoman Discovers Her Followers Love Obamacare

by SallySteele079 Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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With Republicans convinced they need to repeal Obamacare ASAP but unsure of how they want to replace it, Rep. Marsha Blackburn issued a public plea for help on Tuesday. The Tennessee Republican—and member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team—asked the Twitter masses to take a poll on whether they like the law. Turns out Blackburn’s followers are pretty big fans of the Affordable Care Act, with 84 percent of the 7,968 votes opposing a repeal of Obamacare.

Online polls are hardly scientific. But the GOP’s hopes to make Obamacare magically disappear without having to offer a replacement took a serious hit on Tuesday, when the American Medical Association—the country’s largest organization of doctors—wrote a letter to congressional leaders demanding that any tweaks to the health care law ensure that the 20 million people who gained insurance under Obamacare don’t lose coverage. That request would be impossible to meet under the various proposals floated by Republican politicians so far.

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Republican Congresswoman Discovers Her Followers Love Obamacare

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Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

by LucilleMickle Posted on May 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Harold Pollack says that Bernie Sanders has started a political revolution:

Not enough of one to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but enough to put the dream of single-payer health care back on the national political agenda in a way few would have expected five years ago….Just this week, Gallup released a poll indicating that “58% of U.S. adults favor the idea of replacing the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded healthcare system that provides insurance for all Americans.” Politico Magazine reports that Sanders’s health plan “is the most popular of the three remaining candidates.”

I’d be thrilled about this if it were true, but I have my doubts. The problem is that Americans have a long history of supporting things in the abstract but not so much when they become concrete partisan proposals. Take Obamacare. In 2013, a CNBC poll showed 37 percent unfavorability toward the “Affordable Care Act,” but 46 percent toward “Obamacare.” In 2014, a Morning Consult poll showed 71 percent support for offering Medicaid to all adults under the poverty line, but only 62 percent support for expanding Medicaid “as encouraged under the Affordable Care Act.” A Marist poll in Kentucky showed 57 percent disapproval of Obamacare but only 22 percent disapproval of kynect—Kentucky’s version of Obamacare. And of course, we have years of polling showing that lots of people like nearly all the individual elements of Obamacare, but then turn around and insist that they hate Obamacare itself.

As for universal health care, a Harris poll last September found 63 percent approval. A Kaiser poll in December found 58 percent support for Medicare-for-all. Gallup polls going back 15 years show higher support for government guarantees of health care during the Bush years than they do now.

So color me skeptical that Bernie Sanders has really had much effect on the health care debate. Gallup’s poll last week didn’t so much as breathe the word “taxes,” and if it did, support for the universal health care option would sink like a stone. Americans have long had mixed feeling about universal health care, and those feelings are deeply tied up in partisan attitudes and willingness to pay. Unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t seem to have moved the needle on this at all.

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Universal Health Care Is Probably No More Popular Now Than It’s Ever Been

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Supreme Court Seeks Compromise in Contraceptive Showdown

by CarmelBignold Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday afternoon, the US Supreme Court issued an order in Zubik v. Burwell, one of two critical reproductive rights cases currently before the court. In this case, several religious groups—including the Little Sisters of the Poor—contend that the Affordable Care Act’s current protocol for religious groups seeking to opt out of covering contraceptives for their employees still violates their religious beliefs.

In their order, the justices asked both sides to present ideas for how contraceptive coverage can be provided for employees without any direct involvement by the religious employer. That’s because the plaintiffs—which also include groups of priests, bishops, and several religious universities—take issue with even tangential involvement in facilitating birth control coverage, saying that the form they must complete to opt out of Obamacare’s birth control mandate violates their beliefs because it requires them to help employees get birth control elsewhere.

The order suggests one workaround: The employer could voice their opposition to birth control in its initial contracts with insurance companies, and then leave the rest to the insurer. The insurance company would then be responsible for facilitating alternative birth control coverage, eliminating the need for groups to file any additional forms opting out of birth control coverage on religious grounds.

Still, the distinction here is quite thin: If notifying the government violates a religious group’s beliefs, it’s unclear how shifting the process to one where they notify the insurance company instead will do much to alleviate their concerns.

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Supreme Court Seeks Compromise in Contraceptive Showdown

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This Is Why a $15 Minimum Wage Is Not the Answer

by SJKOnitaxxmhjp Posted on March 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

When presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talks about income inequality, and when other candidates speak about the minimum wage and food stamps, what are they really talking about?

Whether they know it or not, it’s something like this.

My Working Life Then

A few years ago, I wrote about my experience enmeshed in the minimum-wage economy, chronicling the collapse of good people who could not earn enough money, often working 60-plus hours a week at multiple jobs, to feed their families. I saw that, in this country, people trying to make ends meet in such a fashion still had to resort to food benefit programs and charity. I saw an employee fired for stealing lunches from the break room refrigerator to feed himself. I watched as a co-worker secretly brought her two kids into the store and left them to wander alone for hours because she couldn’t afford childcare. (As it happens, 29 percent of low-wage employees are single parents.)

At that point, having worked at the State Department for 24 years, I had been booted out for being a whistleblower. I wasn’t sure what would happen to me next and so took a series of minimum wage jobs. Finding myself plunged into the low-wage economy was a sobering, even frightening, experience that made me realize just how ignorant I had been about the lives of the people who rang me up at stores or served me food in restaurants. Though millions of adults work for minimum wage, until I did it myself I knew nothing about what that involved, which meant I knew next to nothing about twenty-first-century America.

I was lucky. I didn’t become one of those millions of people trapped as the “working poor.” I made it out. But with all the election talk about the economy, I decided it was time to go back and take another look at where I had been, and where too many others still are.

My Working Life Now

I found things were pretty much the same in 2016 as they were in 2012, which meant—because there was no real improvement—that things were actually worse.

This time around, I worked for a month and a half at a national retail chain in New York City. While mine was hardly a scientific experiment, I’d be willing to bet an hour of my minimum-wage salary ($9 before taxes) that what follows is pretty typical of the New Economy.

Just getting hired wasn’t easy for this 56-year-old guy. To become a sales clerk, peddling items that were generally well under $50 a pop, I needed two previous employment references and I had to pass a credit check. Unlike some low-wage jobs, a mandatory drug test wasn’t part of the process, but there was a criminal background check and I was told drug offenses would disqualify me. I was given an exam twice, by two different managers, designed to see how I’d respond to various customer situations. In other words, anyone without some education, good English, a decent work history, and a clean record wouldn’t even qualify for minimum-wage money at this chain.

And believe me, I earned that money. Any shift under six hours involved only a 15-minute break (which cost the company just $2.25). Trust me, at my age, after hours standing, I needed that break and I wasn’t even the oldest or least fit employee. After six hours, you did get a 45-minute break, but were only paid for 15 minutes of it.

The hardest part of the job remained dealing with… well, some of you. Customers felt entitled to raise their voices, use profanity, and commit Trumpian acts of rudeness toward my fellow employees and me. Most of our “valued guests” would never act that way in other public situations or with their own coworkers, no less friends. But inside that store, shoppers seemed to interpret “the customer is always right” to mean that they could do any damn thing they wished. It often felt as if we were penned animals who could be poked with a stick for sport, and without penalty. No matter what was said or done, store management tolerated no response from us other than a smile and a “Yes, sir” (or ma’am).

The store showed no more mercy in its treatment of workers than did the customers. My schedule, for instance, changed constantly. There was simply no way to plan things more than a week in advance. (Forget accepting a party invitation. I’m talking about childcare and medical appointments.) If you were on the closing shift, you stayed until the manager agreed that the store was clean enough for you to go home. You never quite knew when work was going to be over and no cell phone calls were allowed to alert babysitters of any delay.

And keep in mind that I was lucky. I was holding down only one job in one store. Most of my fellow workers were trying to juggle two or three jobs, each with constantly changing schedules, in order to stitch together something like a half-decent paycheck.

In New York City, that store was required to give us sick leave only after we’d worked there for a full year—and that was generous compared to practices in many other locales. Until then, you either went to work sick or stayed home unpaid. Unlike New York, most states do not require such a store to offer any sick leave, ever, to employees who work less than 40 hours a week. Think about that the next time your waitress coughs.

Minimum Wages and Minimum Hours

Much is said these days about raising the minimum wage (and it should be raised), and indeed, on January 1, 2016, 13 states did raise theirs. But what sounds like good news is unlikely to have much effect on the working poor.

In New York, for instance, the minimum went from $8.75 an hour to the $9.00 I was making. New York is relatively generous. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and 21 states require only that federal standard. Presumably to prove some grim point or other, Georgia and Wyoming officially mandate an even lower minimum wage and then unofficially require the payment of $7.25 to avoid Department of Labor penalties. Some Southern states set no basement figure, presumably for similar reasons.

Don’t forget: any minimum wage figure mentioned is before taxes. Brackets vary, but let’s knock an even 10 percent off that hourly wage just as a reasonable guess about what is taken out of a minimum-wage worker’s salary. And there are expenses to consider, too. My round-trip bus fare every day, for instance, was $5.50. That meant I worked most of my first hour for bus fare and taxes. Keep in mind that some workers have to pay for childcare as well, which means that it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in which someone could actually come close to losing money by going to work for short shifts at minimum wage.

In addition to the fundamental problem of simply not paying people enough, there’s the additional problem of not giving them enough hours to work. The two unfortunately go together, which means that raising the minimum rate is only part of any solution to improving life in the low-wage world.

At the store where I worked for minimum wage a few years ago, for instance, hours were capped at 39 a week. The company did that as a way to avoid providing the benefits that would kick in once one became a “full time” employee. Things have changed since 2012—and not for the better.

Four years later, the hours of most minimum-wage workers are capped at 29. That’s the threshold after which most companies with 50 or more employees are required to pay into the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) fund on behalf of their workers. Of course, some minimum wage workers get fewer than 29 hours for reasons specific to the businesses they work for.

It’s Math Time

While a lot of numbers follow, remember that they all add up to a picture of how people around us are living every day.

In New York, under the old minimum wage system, $8.75 multiplied by 39 hours equaled $341.25 a week before taxes. Under the new minimum wage, $9.00 times 29 hours equals $261 a week. At a cap of 29 hours, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $11.77 just to get many workers back to the same level of take-home pay that I got in 2012, given the drop in hours due to the Affordable Care Act. Health insurance is important, but so is food.

In other words, a rise in the minimum wage is only half the battle; employees need enough hours of work to make a living.

About food: if a minimum wage worker in New York manages to work two jobs (to reach 40 hours a week) without missing any days due to illness, his or her yearly salary would be $18,720. In other words, it would fall well below the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. That’s food stamp territory. To get above the poverty line with a 40-hour week, the minimum wage would need to go above $10. At 29 hours a week, it would need to make it to $15 an hour. Right now, the highest minimum wage at a state level is in the District of Columbia at $11.50. As of now, no state is slated to go higher than that before 2018. (Some cities do set their own higher minimum wages.)

So add it up: The idea of raising the minimum wage (“the fight for $15“) is great, but even with that $15 in such hours-restrictive circumstances, you can’t make a loaf of bread out of a small handful of crumbs. In short, no matter how you do the math, it’s nearly impossible to feed yourself, never mind a family, on the minimum wage. It’s like being trapped on an M.C. Escher staircase.

The federal minimum wage hit its high point in 1968 at $8.54 in today’s dollars and while this country has been a paradise in the ensuing decades for what we now call the “One Percent,” it’s been downhill for low-wage workers ever since. In fact, since it was last raised in 2009 at the federal level to $7.25 per hour, the minimum has lost about 8.1 percent of its purchasing power to inflation. In other words, minimum-wage workers actually make less now than they did in 1968, when most of them were probably kids earning pocket money and not adults feeding their own children.

In adjusted dollars, the minimum wage peaked when the Beatles were still together and the Vietnam War raged.

Who Pays?

Many of the arguments against raising the minimum wage focus on the possibility that doing so would put small businesses in the red. This is disingenuous indeed, since 20 mega-companies dominate the minimum-wage world. Walmart alone employs 1.4 million minimum-wage workers; Yum Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC) is in second place; and McDonald’s takes third. Overall, 60 percent of minimum-wage workers are employed by businesses not officially considered “small” by government standards, and of course carve-outs for really small businesses are possible, as was done with Obamacare.

Keep in mind that not raising wages costs you money.

Those minimum wage workers who can’t make enough and need to go on food assistance? Well, Walmart isn’t paying for those food stamps (now called SNAP), you are. The annual bill that states and the federal government foot for working families making poverty-level wages is $153 billion. A single Walmart Supercenter costs taxpayers between $904,542 and $1.75 million per year in public assistance money. According to Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, in many states Walmart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients. They are also the single biggest group of food stamp recipients. In other words, those everyday low prices at the chain are, in part, subsidized by your tax money. Meanwhile, an estimated 18 percent of food stamps (SNAP) are spent at Walmart.

If the minimum wage goes up, will spending on food benefits programs go down? Almost certainly. But won’t stores raise prices to compensate for the extra money they will be shelling out for wages? Possibly. But don’t worry—raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would mean a Big Mac would cost all of 17 cents more.

Time Theft

My retail job ended a little earlier than I had planned, because I committed time theft.

You probably don’t even know what time theft is. It may sound like something from a sci-fi novel, but minimum-wage employers take time theft seriously. The basic idea is simple enough: if they’re paying you, you’d better be working. While the concept is not invalid per se, the way it’s used by the mega-companies reveals much about how the lowest wage workers are seen by their employers in 2016.

The problem at my chain store was that its in-store cafe was a lot closer to my work area than the time clock where I had to punch out whenever I was going on a scheduled break. One day, when break time on my shift came around, I only had 15 minutes. So I decided to walk over to that cafe, order a cup of coffee, and then head for the place where I could punch out and sit down (on a different floor at the other end of the store).

We’re talking an extra minute or two, no more, but in such operations every minute is tabulated and accounted for. As it happened, a manager saw me and stepped in to tell the cafe clerk to cancel my order. Then, in front of whoever happened to be around, she accused me of committing time theft —that is, of ordering on the clock. We’re talking about the time it takes to say, “Grande, milk, no sugar, please.” But no matter, and getting chastised on company time was considered part of the job, so the five minutes we stood there counted as paid work.

At $9 an hour, my per-minute pay rate was 15 cents, which meant that I had time-stolen perhaps 30 cents. I was, that is, being nickel and dimed to death.

Economics Is About People

It seems wrong in a society as wealthy as ours that a person working full-time can’t get above the poverty line. It seems no less wrong that someone who is willing to work for the lowest wage legally payable must also give up so much of his or her self-respect and dignity as a kind of tariff. Holding a job should not be a test of how to manage life as one of the working poor.

I didn’t actually get fired for my time theft. Instead, I quit on the spot. Whatever the price is for my sense of self-worth, it isn’t 30 cents. Unlike most of this country’s working poor, I could afford to make such a decision. My life didn’t depend on it. When the manager told a handful of my coworkers watching the scene to get back to work, they did. They couldn’t afford not to.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the “reconstruction” of Iraq in his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about current events at We Meant Well. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent. His next work will be a novel, Hooper’s War. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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This Is Why a $15 Minimum Wage Is Not the Answer

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9 Ways You Can Get Cheap Organic Food

by RosalinaWard49 Posted on February 24, 2016

Organic foods have been shown to have higher nutrient contents and significantly lower amounts of toxic pesticide residues than foods grown using non-organic methods. Unfortunately, fresh and prepared organic foods are often sold at a higher price than their mainstream counterparts.

You dont have to pay a premium to buy organic food. Many options exist to keep healthy, organic food affordable.

1. Plan ahead

This may be tough for some of us, but planning your meals ahead of time can be a big money-saver. When you have a clear shopping list, youll be less likely to impulse buy expensive items you dont need.

Try writing down a list of what meals youll be preparing for the upcoming week. It doesnt have to be perfect, as long as you have an idea of the main ingredients youll need on hand. You can also try to make extra portions and freeze them for later.

This will help to make sure you use all the food you buy. If you buy food you dont have a plan for, its easier to let it sit unused and expire or go to waste.

2. Buy seasonal produce

The best place to find seasonal produce is at your local farmers markets. They typically bring freshly harvested produce, which will be at its nutritional peak. You can often buy in larger amounts for a reduced price. There may also be end of the day clearance sales of remaining products the farmers simply dont want to take home.

Grocery stores can also bring in seasonal, local produce. Sometimes these are available at reduced, bulk prices as well.

Another great option for finding seasonal organic produce is you-pick farms. Depending on where you live, you may be able to pick your own organic vegetables, fruit and berries. You-picks tend to have much lower prices per pound than in-store produce.

3. Find bulk foods where possible

Many communities have stores that specialize in bulk foods. Larger grocery stores also often have bulk foods sections that include organic items.

You can typically find lots of organic staples in bulk at good prices, such as beans, grains, dried fruit, nuts and seeds. If you can buy larger amounts at one time, the cost is usually lower.

Keeping your kitchen well-stocked with foods you use on a regular basis will help make meal preparation easier. You also wont need to buy last-minute items in small amounts, which are more expensive.

4. Look for no-name, in-store organic products

Many grocery stores will have their own lines of organic products. This can include prepared foods, such as condiments, canned foods or juices. Some stores even offer their own brand of organic produce.

These products are often priced very competitively compared to organic name-brands.

5. Make use of technology

We have a lot of different modern options to help out with saving money on food costs.

Websites like Living Rich With Coupons, My Grocery Deals and My Simon can automatically compare prices of foods available in regular and online stores.

Coupons are another good way to keep food costs down. You can use flyers from junk mail sent to your house or there are various websites where you can print coupons online, such as Living Rich With Coupons or Coupons.com.

Another way to save is by signing up for rewards and point programs some stores offer. These typically give you points every time you buy something in the store, which can be collected and used to buy more products later.

6. Broaden your definition of organic

Some farmers are committed to organic growing principles, but are not certified due to various reasons. The official organic certification process can be expensive and time-consuming. There is also the criticism that organically certified farms may still cheat and the regulations are not strict enough.

Getting to know your local farmers is a great way to find out more about their growing practices. Those who grow organically, but are not certified, will often be happy to tell you about their own processes for keeping their crops healthy and controlling pests naturally.

Their prices will also potentially be less than those who are officially certified organic.

7. Join a CSA near you

CSA stands for community supported agriculture. With these programs, you often pay a farmer a yearly or monthly fee and receive a box of produce every week or two for the entire growing season. Some CSAs will also operate year round, providing vegetables stored through the winter.

Some CSAs are certified organic, although smaller operations may simply follow organic practices and be uncertified. Ask your local CSA to find out more about them.

8. Grow your own

If you have an interest in gardening, growing your own produce is likely the cheapest option for eating organic. You also know exactly what products, such as compost, were used to grow your crop.

Seeds are fairly cheap, and many organic seed varieties are available. Most seed packages contain enough seed to last for a few years of crops.

Even if you dont have property of your own, find out if there is a community garden where you could rent a plot. Or check if there are any volunteering opportunities locally where you can share a portion of the harvest.

Exchanging crops with friends can be an efficient way to grow more varieties of food. For instance, you could commit to growing enough lettuce and potatoes to share with a few friends, and they would each grow other types of veggies that would also be shared.

9. Preserve your own produce

Canning, freezing and dehydrating are all excellent and affordable ways to preserve fresh organic foods. This allows you to buy in larger quantities at lower prices and create nutritious, convenient supplies you can use all year.

Canning supplies can be easily found secondhand, and canning jars can be consistently re-used. The only expense for freezing is buying freezer bags. A dehydrator can also be found secondhand or if you get a new one, it will be a one-time investment.

Hosting preserving parties can be a fun way to share a harvest with your friends and family. You can also get together and buy bulk quantities of produce together to lower everyones costs.

Related
6 Hearty Vegan Chili Recipes For Any Season
15 Reasons to Eat Organic Food
Top 10 Eco-Friendly Reasons to Buy Organic Meat & Diary

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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9 Ways You Can Get Cheap Organic Food

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Clinton Once Said Democrats Should Never Attack Each Other Over Universal Health Care

by LyndaSifford Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton is going after Bernie Sanders on health care reform. On Monday, she warned that his proposal for universal single-payer health care was a “risky deal” that would tear apart the Affordable Care Act and “start over.” On Tuesday, her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, followed suit. It’s an abrupt shift one month before the Iowa caucuses, but perhaps an inevitable one given Sanders’ rising poll numbers.

It’s also reverses the tactic her campaign embraced eight years ago. In the 2008 Democratic primary, it was Clinton who found herself on the defensive after then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign sent mailers to Ohio voters warning that her plan would force every citizen to buy health insurance. In a now-famous moment, Clinton held a press conference to trash the mailer and tell her opponent, “Shame on you”:

The Obama mailer was “not only wrong, but it is undermining core Democratic principles,” Clinton said at the time. “Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal health care? I thought we were trying to realize Harry Truman’s dream. I thought this campaign finally gave us an opportunity to put together a coalition to achieve universal health care.”

“This is wrong and every Democratic should be outraged because this is the kind of attack that not only undermines core Democratic values, but gives aid and comfort to the very special interests and their allies in the Republican Party who are against doing what we want to do for America,” she continued. “So shame on you, Barack Obama. It is time you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public. That’s what I expect from you. Meet me in Ohio. Let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign.”

Then again, Obama’s tactics worked—and his campaign promises didn’t stop him from making the individual mandate, floated by Clinton, a critical part of his health care plan as president.

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Clinton Once Said Democrats Should Never Attack Each Other Over Universal Health Care

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The Supreme Court Will Take Up Affordable Care Act Contraceptive Cases

by StellaPoe56 Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court announced today it will hear more appeals from religious groups that seek exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception requirements, marking the fourth challenge to President Obama’s health care law that has made it to the nation’s highest court.

The court has decided to review seven appeals total from religious nonprofits challenging the requirement for contraception coverage— but instead of addressing each case separately, the court has decided to consolidate them. The plaintiffs range from a nursing home chain, Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged, to religious universities.

This appeal is different from the Hobby Lobby v. Burwell case, which provided protection for a for-profit company under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Nonprofits with religious affiliations were not addressed in the ruling, which was a 5-4 decision by the court.

The ACA requires employers with at least 50 full-time employees to provide insurance plans with “minimum essential coverage,” including access to contraception for women that does not require them to pay copayments or deductibles.

The case will likely be decided by June.

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The Supreme Court Will Take Up Affordable Care Act Contraceptive Cases

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With Matt Bevin’s Victory, Health Insurance for 400,000 Kentuckians Now At Risk

by ChristiDkb Posted on November 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican businessman Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky on Tuesday. This is good news if you’re Matt Bevin. It’s potentially very bad news if you’re one of the 521,000 formerly uninsured Kentuckians who have received health insurance through the Affordable Cart Act.

Over the last five years, term-limited Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear cut the state’s uninsured rate by more than half by accepting federal funding to expand Medicaid, and by setting up a state-run health-insurance exchange called Kynect. Today, approximately 400,000 Kentuckians have received health insurance via Medicaid expansion.

As John Oliver masterfully explained, Bevin has promised to eliminate Kynect—a bright spot at the state level amid the chaotic HealthCare.gov rollout—and he’s been cagey about his plans for Medicaid. After campaigning on repealing Obamacare wholsesale during his unsuccessful 2014 Senate primary, he changed tune toward the end of his race this fall, suggesting that he would ask the administration for a waiver to restructure Medicaid but not kick anyone “to the curb.”

Up until this point, Kentucky has been one of the most compelling arguments not just for why the law was needed, but also that it can work. Just check out this map, compiled by the lone Democrat in the state’s Congressional delegation, Rep. John Yarmuth:

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With Matt Bevin’s Victory, Health Insurance for 400,000 Kentuckians Now At Risk

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Hillary Clinton Challenges Big Pharma

by RhondaPWQR Posted on September 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton rolled out her latest policy plank in Des Moines, Iowa, on Tuesday afternoon. The Democratic front-runner described how, if elected president next year, she would try to rein in the spiraling costs of prescription medications.

Clinton is spending this week of her campaign touring the country explaining her proposals for health care and touting the benefits of the Affordable Care Act. Obama’s success in passing health care reform poses a tricky problem for Clinton: championing health care expansion has long been one of her signature causes going back to Bill Clinton’s first term as president. But the current Democratic president has already passed the overall infrastructure for covering the uninsured across the country. Now Clinton will need to run on protecting that legacy, while tinkering with the ACA around the margins to bolster its weak points.

“As president I want to go further,” she said Tuesday. “I want to strengthen the Affordable Care Act.”

Her drug plan would start by capping the amount of out-of-pocket expenses consumers can be charged under insurance plans at $250 per month. Of course, transferring the extra costs onto the insurance companies wouldn’t solve the all of the problems, since insurers would likely make up for their expenses through higher premiums.

She said earlier this week that her goal is to implement policies that would reduce spending on prescription medications by $100 billion over the next 10 years and proposed a number of strategies reach that goal. For example:

Speeding up approval of generic drugs to clear any backlog.
Allowing consumers to buy their medications from countries where American pharma companies sell them at cheaper rates. (This would require the FDA to ensure that the drugs being sold in other countries are the same medications as the ones sold here.)
Grant Medicare the power to negotiate with drug companies on the prices they charge. This has long been a standard proposal pushed by Democrats who argue that the 40 million Medicare recipients would have a system-wide effect on the price of drugs.
Add requirements to drug companies who receive federal support, forcing them to redirect more of their profits back into R&D.

You can read a full explanation of her suggestions on Clinton’s website.

Pharma was already gunning for Clinton even before her speech announcing the policy proposal. As The Hill reported, the head of the pharmaceutical lobby preempted her statement with its own that blasted the plan, saying it “would turn back the clock on medical innovation and halt progress against the diseases that patients fear most.” Pharma might have good reason to be worried. On Monday, Bloomberg attributed a quick, steep drop in Nasdaq’s listing of biotech stocks to a Clinton tweet in which she linked to a New York Times article on a company that had jacked up the price of an old drug, saying, “Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous.”

Original article:  

Hillary Clinton Challenges Big Pharma

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The Wit and Wisdom of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s Lovable Curmudgeon

by KatherineUbc Posted on June 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the Obamacare case. Although Scalia would not approve, I have arranged the excerpts out of order so they make more sense and are more amusing. I have also eliminated all the legal arguments and other boring parts. You can always read the full opinion here if you want. For now, though, tell us what you really think, Mr Scalia:

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State.”

Yet the opinion continues, with no semblance of shame, that “it is also possible that the phrase refers to all Exchanges—both State and Federal.”

But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved. Scalia makes it clear throughout that he’s still really pissed about losing the original Obamacare case in 2012. –ed.

Contrivance, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!

Faced with overwhelming confirmation that “Exchange established by the State” means what it looks like it means, the Court comes up with argument after feeble argument to support its contrary interpretation.

The Court’s next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery involves other parts of the Act that purportedly presuppose the availability of tax credits on both federal and state Exchanges….Pure applesauce.

The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed…will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s Lovable Curmudgeon

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