Tag Archives: government

America’s Addiction to Prescription Pills Is Way Deadlier Than You Thought

by VirgilioBuckner Posted on November 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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A troubling poll published Tuesday shows the extent of America’s addiction to prescription painkillers. More than half of Americans now report a personal connection to painkiller abuse, 16 percent know someone who has died from an overdose, and 9 percent have seen a family member or close friend die.

“It shows that the issue affects a large share of people, over half the population,” says Bianca DiJulio, associate director for public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which conducted the survey. “And half say that it should be a top priority for their lawmakers.”

Researchers spoke by phone this month with more than 1,300 people aged 18 years and older across the United States, who were selected to match the demographic makeup of the country. White Americans were the most likely to report personal experience with the abuse of prescription painkillers, which include opioids such as Vicodin and OxyContin and benzodiazepines such as Xanax. Sixty-three percent of white respondents, 44 percent of black respondents, and 37 percent of Hispanics said they had either personally abused painkillers or knew someone who had taken painkillers without a prescription, been addicted to painkillers, or died of an overdose.

Overall, 56 percent of respondents reported a personal connection to painkiller abuse, with young and middle-aged Americans more likely to report familiarity with painkiller abuse than Americans aged 65 and older.

Kaiser Family Foundation

The United States is caught in “a prescription painkiller overdose epidemic,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 2 million Americans abused prescription painkillers in 2013, with 44 people dying from an overdose each day.

Drug overdoses, including deaths from prescription drug use, were the leading cause of accidental death in the United States in 2013. Among the respondents, “half thought the leading cause of accidental deaths was car accidents,” DiJulio says.

The issue, along with rampant heroin addiction, has reached such proportions that President Barack Obama last month announced steps to increase training for doctors who prescribe painkillers and expand access to treatment for drug addicts.

But Kaiser’s survey shows that, even as many Americans agree the government should act, there is no agreement as to how. Republicans in the survey were significantly more likely to say state governments should be in charge of responding to the epidemic, while Democrats saw this as the responsibility of the federal government.

Kaiser Family Foundation

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America’s Addiction to Prescription Pills Is Way Deadlier Than You Thought

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Americans Both Love and Hate Government

by PamCarstensen83 Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pew Research once again shows us that Americans are hopelessly confused. Do they distrust government? You bet! Only 19 percent say they trust the government most or all of the time.

Does the government do a good job? Hell n—wait, what? Majorities think the government is doing a pretty good job in almost all areas—including keeping the country safe from terrorism. In fact, the only two areas that get a low score are immigration and poverty.

So why all the distrust? I haven’t read the whole report yet, so I don’t know what ideas they have. Maybe I’ll do that later tonight. Basically, I just think this shows once again that Americans are schizophrenic. They hate education but love their local schools. They hate Congress but love their local member. The hate the government but….yeah, it’s actually doing a decent job. The French may have a problem governing a country with 246 kinds of cheese, but what do you about Americans? You could always just ban a couple hundred kinds of cheese if you really wanted to, but how do you get Americans do adopt some kind of coherent view of how they want to be governed?

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Americans Both Love and Hate Government

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Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case

by MorganTobin Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Kansas Republicans believe they have created a law that their own high court cannot review.

In the latest twist of the topsy-turvy constitutional showdown between the GOP-controlled state legislature and the state Supreme Court, the Kansas attorney general has asked the entire Kansas Supreme Court to recuse itself from hearing a key case.

The power struggle between Kansas Republicans and the state’s highest court goes back to a years-long battle over education funding. The state Supreme Court has repeatedly ordered the legislature to spend more money on public education, a request that conflicts with Republicans’ desire to cut taxes. In 2014, the legislature passed a bill stripping the Supreme Court of the administrative authority to appoint chief judges in Kansas’ 31 judicial districts, a move Democrats saw as a power play by the legislature to intimidate the top court during the ongoing fight over school spending. Chief District Court Judge Larry Solomon challenged the constitutionality of the judicial administration law, arguing that it violates the state’s separation of powers.

But the legislature doubled down. Earlier this year, it passed a judicial budget that would cut off funding for the entire Kansas court system if the courts struck down the judicial administration bill—a situation that would seize critical state functions such as criminal prosecutions, civil disputes, real estate sales, and adoptions. That led to the bizarre moment in September when a district court ruled the administrative bill unconstitutional, putting all the funding for the state courts in sudden jeopardy. The situation threatened to devolve into a judicial catch-22, in which no court could rule on the legality of the laws because those laws had defunded them. To avoid that situation, the judge put a hold on his ruling invalidating the law until the state Supreme Court could hear the case—except that the state of Kansas is now arguing that the Supreme Court shouldn’t have its say.

Rather than let the case proceed to the Supreme Court, Attorney General Derek Schmidt argued in a brief last week that the justices should not hear the case because the law involves the court’s authority. Schmidt’s brief also notes that the chief justice of the Supreme Court criticized the law when it passed, betraying his bias against the law.

Under Kansas law, Supreme Court justices can appoint district court judges to sit in their place when they recuse themselves. But Schmidt argues that a district court judge shouldn’t be involved either, because the law involves appointing chief judges at the district court level. Instead, Schmidt proposes that judges on the Kansas Court of Appeals—just below the level of the Supreme Court and above the district courts—review the case. (Perhaps not coincidentally, in 2013, the Republican-controlled legislature changed the selection process for appeals court judges. Before then, a commission nominated potential judges for the governor to choose from; now the judges are appointed directly by the governor, currently Republican Sam Brownback. The judges most sympathetic to the Republican legislature may be those at the appeals court level.)

Lawyers fighting the judicial administration bill believe the recusal request is frivolous. As they wrote in a brief this week, “centuries of precedent make clear that it is the province and duty of this Court to decide cases that involve the scope of the Court’s authority, jurisdiction, and duties vis-à-vis the other branches of government.” In a response filed Thursday, the state held firm that the highest court should not hear the case.

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Kansas Asks Its Entire Supreme Court to Step Aside in Key Case

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Supreme Court Stays Out of Planned Parenthood Fight

by CodyTullpqfu Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Since this summer’s release of doctored sting videos targeting Planned Parenthood, Congress has been embroiled in a fiery debate over funding for the women’s health care provider. On Monday, the Supreme Court made clear that it wants nothing to do with this fight. The court declined to hear a case involving federal funds for Planned Parenthood and the organization’s privacy in the face of continued probes by anti-abortion activists.

The case, New Hampshire Right to Life v. Department of Health and Human Services, centered on a 2011 public records request filed by New Hampshire Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, with the US Department of Health and Human Services, asking for documents filed by Planned Parenthood when applying for federal funding. The women’s health provider had historically received federal funds for family planning services through New Hampshire’s state government. But in 2011, the state administration decided to stop accepting and distributing this federal money, concerned that it was being used to “subsidize abortions.”

To fill the gap in Planned Parenthood’s funding, HHS decided to provide funds to the group directly for 16 months. It required the group to file documentation about its internal policies—including its medical standards manual and its fee schedule—in order to receive the funds, which Planned Parenthood did.

New Hampshire Right to Life filed its request to HHS under the Freedom of Information Act, asking for access to these Planned Parenthood filings and to internal HHS memos tied to the department’s decision to provide the reproductive health provider with a federal grant. When HHS refused, New Hampshire Right to Life sued the agency for the documents. HHS ultimately turned over about 2,500 pages of internal agency records. But it withheld most of the Planned Parenthood filings and some internal documents, primarily citing FOIA’s Exemption 4, a portion of the law that exempts certain types of commercial information filed by private groups from disclosure.

A federal district court and circuit court both upheld HHS’ refusal. Now that the Supreme Court has refused to wade into the disclosure debate, it’s cemented that refusal as final.

Attorneys for New Hampshire Right to Life painted the court’s decision not to hear the case as another example of government favoritism in the ongoing battle over public funds for Planned Parenthood. “We had hoped the US Supreme Court would consider this case,” said attorney Michael Tierney in a statement, “which would have addressed whether the government can continue to veil its support for Planned Parenthood.”

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Supreme Court Stays Out of Planned Parenthood Fight

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Tyrant Obama Issues Rule Creating Death Panels, No One Cares

by MarquitPFR Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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This happened last Friday and I completely missed it:

Six years after legislation to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a furor over “death panels,” the Obama administration issued a final rule on Friday that authorizes Medicare to pay doctors for consultations with patients on how they would like to be cared for as they are dying.

The administration proposed the payments in July, touching off none of the rancor that first accompanied the idea during debate on the Affordable Care Act in 2009….“We received overwhelmingly positive comments about the importance of these conversations between physicians and patients,” Dr. Conway said. “We know that many patients and families want to have these discussions.”

Huh. It turns out that Republicans never really had any problem with this at all.1 I guess that whole “death panel” thing was just a big misunderstanding. The Wall Street Journal explains what happened:

Since 2010, legislation that would allow reimbursements to physicians for advance planning discussions has gained bipartisan support….The climate has changed in part because of lobbying and education campaigns by medical groups.

Yeah, that must be it. I’m glad we got that straightened out.

1Except for Sarah Palin, of course, who offered her familiar common-sense take: “Government needs to stay the hell out of our ‘end-of-life’ discussions,” she said in a long, um, commentary on Facebook. “I’m so angry at democrat and republican politicians who just rolled their eyes when I, and many others, rose up with warnings that each step forward taken by champions of this socialist program would jerk back two steps from every free American and our God-given rights.” Etc.

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Tyrant Obama Issues Rule Creating Death Panels, No One Cares

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

by Jamie01L805961 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Congress announced a budget accord on Monday night to keep the government funded for the next two years, Republicans boasted that they scored a victory against the plague of President Obama’s health care reform law by striking a section of the original law. “By eliminating the law’s auto-enrollment mandate that forces workers to automatically enroll into employer-sponsored health care coverage that they may not want or need, we will repeal another major piece of ObamaCare,” soon-departing House Speaker John Boehner crowed in a press release.

But dig into the details, and that supposed victory doesn’t amount to much in terms of policy. “It’s not a big deal,” says Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit focused on health care, noting that it’s “nothing that you’ll ever notice” if the budget deal becomes law.

The provision in question is a small section from the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. It would require companies with over 200 full-time employees that offer insurance to enroll all new employees onto the company’s health plan automatically. Employees would still be able to decline the insurance if they preferred. Currently, employees usually must actively opt into employer-based health care plans.

But the auto-enrollment provision has never gone into effect. The Department of Labor has continually punted on writing the actual regulation, and all the stalling has led experts to doubt whether the policy would be implemented anytime soon—with or without this proposed budget deal. Employers expressed dissatisfaction with the rule after the Affordable Care Act became law, and confusion over auto-enrollment ran the risk of placing workers in plans they didn’t want or enrolling their spouses who already had coverage. “Employers didn’t like it, a lot of labor organizations don’t like it,” Claxton says. “And there are some messy issues associated with it. I don’t think there’s a lot of people clamoring to keep it.”

Much like the budget bill’s supposed cuts to entitlements, which leave beneficiaries largely untouched, this reversal of a portion of Obamacare will have little impact in practical terms, even if it’s likely to be used for political ends. Republicans gain a rhetorical victory they can sell to the conservative base, while Democrats don’t lose anything on the substance of the policies.

The change will help offset the costs that the budget deal added by lifting earlier caps on government spending. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that 750,000 more people would end up with insurance each year thanks to auto-enrollment. Because expenditures on employer-provided health care are exempt from taxes, auto-enrollment reduces federal tax revenue. Eliminating auto-enrollment is estimated to raise an additional $8 billion over the next decade.

But Claxton doubts the figure is that high. The CBO used acceptance rates for auto-enrollment of 401(k) plans as the baseline for its projections, he says, and decisions about health insurance are far more complicated than those about setting money aside for retirement. “Maybe it’s estimated too high,” he says. “I don’t think people should give CBO too much of a hard time about things like this, because there’s just no data to do a decent job of estimating this.”

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GOP’s Budget-Deal Win Over Obamacare Is an Empty One

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Reports of Entitlements’ Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

by RaymundHuggins Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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When news of a bipartisan budget deal began to emerge Monday night, progressives immediately worried that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress would allow cuts to entitlement programs in order to strike a deal with Republicans. “The White House, every Democrat running for president, and every Democrat in Congress should make clear that any deal that cuts Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits would be unacceptable policy—and politically, would be wildly unpopular with voters,” the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said in a statement. House Speaker John Boehner didn’t do much to allay their fears, saying on Tuesday that the deal “is the first significant reform to Social Security since 1983.”

But budget experts say these concerns are unfounded. In fact, the deal actually shores up the finances of an important entitlement program without hurting people who have already earned their benefits.

Released Monday night, the 144-page budget deal would fund the government and raise the debt ceiling for two years, punting any showdown to 2017, after Obama has left the White House. The bill also lifts the tight federal spending caps imposed by the 2011 sequestration law.

Even though the deal saves money by making small cuts to Medicare and Social Security disability insurance (the main part of the program beyond the standard retirement benefits), the budget mostly tinkers around the edges. “The agreement doesn’t have any changes in disability eligibility standards,” says Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It doesn’t change the level of benefits. The small amount of savings are achieved through program integrity measures, which are just efforts to make sure the Social Security Administration is doing the best possible job of who’s actually eligible for benefits.” These sorts of technocratic tinkers are simple measures to ensure the integrity of the programs’ goals, something pushed by both conservatives and progressives.

Primarily, the deal shuts down a pilot program that allows 20 states to dish out benefits without requiring a prior medical sign-off. “To a very small degree, that would reduce the number of people awarded benefits, well less than a percent of the number of people getting benefits,” Van de Water says. “This is designed to produce better decisions, not to make the program more restrictive or less generous.” By awarding benefits slightly less frequently, the deal lengthens the solvency of the disability benefits program.

For Medicare, the deal cuts costs by reducing the amount the government spends on payment rates for providers. When it comes to recipients, the deal stabilizes premiums for a group of seniors who were due for a large rate spike in 2016. Because Social Security isn’t scheduled to get a cost-of-living bump this year, premium rates won’t rise for most people who receive Medicare. For the 30 percent of Medicare Part B recipients for whom rates would have jumped 52 percent next year, the budget deal keeps the current rates in place. But everything evens out for beneficiaries in the end, as the people who benefit this year will have to pay higher premiums down the road. “It’s a good way of spreading out the costs and meaning people aren’t hit by a huge increase this year, and they can budget for it,” Van der Water says. “But it’s not a net benefit over time. It’s simply smoothing things out.”

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Reports of Entitlements’ Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

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New Dietary Guidelines Won’t Include Sustainability

by TahliaCJVchx Posted on October 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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When the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines are released later this year, they’re sure to make waves in the nation’s food economy. Updated every five years, the rules—the government’s official line on what Americans should eat to stay healthy—inform decisions on everything from agricultural subsidies to government food assistance programs to school lunch.

But there’s one thing the new guidelines won’t touch: the health of our environment.

In a statement posted Tuesday on the USDA website, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwel announced that the guidelines will not include recommendations about how to choose foods with the lightest impact on the planet. The dietary guidelines, they wrote, are not “the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation.”

The decision came despite the fact that in its February report, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee—the team that reviews scientific and medical evidence and offers advise on what should be included—highlighted the ties between environmental impact and healthy eating. “Access to sufficient, nutritious, and safe food is an essential element of food security for the US,” the report stated. “A sustainable diet ensures this access for both the current population and future generations.”

As my colleague Maddie Oatman noted when the committee released its recommendations, those ideas didn’t go over well with Big Ag backers. Industry groups sent letters to Secretary Vilsack arguing that environmental impact is outside the scope of the Dietary Guidelines and spent millions of dollars trying to dissuade the USDA from including sustainability in its update.

Director of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs, who is a Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, called Tuesday’s announcement a “shameful abnegation of political responsibility,” after heralding the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report as a key breakthrough.

“For US government officials to suggest that this chapter should be deleted would be to argue for deleting science itself; a shameful abnegation of political responsibility in the face of lobbying pressure,” he said in a press release. “Secretaries Burwell and Vilsack will be remembered for whether they stand up for science or for corporate lobbies.”

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New Dietary Guidelines Won’t Include Sustainability

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Haunting Photos of the Risky Search for Mexico’s Disappeared

by HalleyR55yl Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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In September 2014, 43 students from a teachers’ college were abducted in the town of Iguala, in Mexico’s Guerrero state. What exactly happened to them remains uncertain; so far, the remains of only one student have been found. Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco (below) headed a community effort to scour the countryside around Iguala for the missing students, leading search parties that uncovered grim evidence of dozens of other disappearances and killings. In August, Jimenez was discovered shot to death. “Despite the personal risk he faced in doing the job,” says photographer Chris Gregory, “he felt that somehow it made Mexico a safer place for his children.”

Jimenez stands just steps from the Cocula dump, where the remains of one of the 43 disappeared students was found. In 2013, Miguel Angel Jimenez left his life as a cosmetics salesman to help organize community efforts to identify graves, register disappeared persons, and get government support for victims’ families. Chris Gregory

At a site where 28 people were burned and buried, Jimenez points at a cross etched in a tree trunk that he thought represented a criminal’s attempt at remorse. Chris Gregory

Jimenez and a family member of a missing person search a corn field close to where forensic teams are investigating possible gravesites. Chris Gregory

Family members comb the mountains near Cocula after receiving an anonymous tip that there had been drug cartel activity in the area. Chris Gregory

Searchers received a tip about cartel activity around Butcher’s Hill, an area that’s adjacent to the dump where the 43 students are believed to have been burned. Chris Gregory

Clothing and trash are uncommon sights in the thickly vegetated mountains outside Iguala. Often they are evidence of kidnapping camps. Chris Gregory

This grave was found outside Iguala soon after the 43 students disappeared. DNA confirmed that none of the 28 bodies belonged to the students. Chris Gregory

At a town hall meeting, residents air concerns that the government has not done enough to find their missing family members. The meeting lasted almost eight hours. Chris Gregory

Jimenez holds up a shirt found near the mass grave outside of Iguala. Chris Gregory

Twenty-year-old Jesus Pineda Corona helps with the search effort. His shirt reads, “I will search for you until I find you.” Chris Gregory

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Haunting Photos of the Risky Search for Mexico’s Disappeared

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Here’s How Much Pollution Volkswagen’s Smog Scandal Produced

by RebekahCanipe03 Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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The story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Volkswagen isn’t going to get away with this. You don’t (allegedly!) fake emissions data for a few million cars and just walk away. But what the German automaker’s punishment will be, and how much it’s going to hurt—those are still open questions.

The final decision will be up to lawyers at the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice. That latter agency has opened a criminal probe into the company’s (alleged!) emissions software tampering shenanigans. But based on precedent and the outlines of what Volkswagen actually seems to have done, we can make a few predictions.

If US officials absolutely throw the book at VW, EPA rules stipulate a maximum fine of $37,000 per affected car. At 482,000 cars on American roads, that comes to $18 billion. But according to attorneys who work on these kind of cases, that number is way too high for what’ll actually happen. The biggest fine of this kind to date was $1.2 billion, a criminal penalty that Toyota paid in 2014 for concealing information about faulty ignition switches that triggered sudden accelerations.

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Here’s How Much Pollution Volkswagen’s Smog Scandal Produced

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