Tag Archives: increase

Obamacare Approval Really Has Gone Up, Especially Among Democrats and Independents

by KittyKau60802 Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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A month ago I took a look at Obamacare approval levels and wasn’t too impressed at the spike since Trump’s election. The increase was pretty small, and it was hard to tell if it was sustainable. So let’s take another look:

I don’t usually look at the “Less Smoothing” version of Pollster’s charts, but I’m doing it this time to try and get a sense of what’s been happening recently. This time, it really does look like there’s been a genuine change since Election Day, somewhere in the range of 5-6 points. Both Kaiser and Pew, which have conducted high-quality tracking polls for a long time, show the same thing. Pew breaks down the results by party, and it turns out the increase is due almost entirely to Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents:

In the past year, approval levels have increased 7 points among Democrats and 14 points among independents. Breaking this down further, approval has spiked a whopping 20 points among Democratic-leaning independents. By contrast Republican-leaning independents are up only slightly and Republicans haven’t budged even a single point.

In other words, now that Obamacare is under serious attacks, more lefties are finally deciding it’s worth defending after all. Finally.

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Obamacare Approval Really Has Gone Up, Especially Among Democrats and Independents

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Report: Trump Team Wants to Slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Everything Else Except Defense

by NorrisClunie Posted on January 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest news on squeezing our bloated government down to size:

Donald Trump is ready to take an ax to government spending. Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned….Overall, the blueprint being used by Trump’s team would reduce federal spending by $10.5 trillion over 10 years.

This is terrifying, of course, but it’s also puzzling. $10.5 trillion over ten years? That’s a trillion dollars a year. If you eliminated the domestic discretionary budget entirely, you’d only save half a trillion bucks. So how do they do it?

Well, we’re told that the proposed budget cuts “hew closely” to a recent Heritage Foundation report, so I went and took a look. The answer, of course, is that the only way to cut that kind of money is to take a meat axe to everything, including Social Security and Medicare. Here’s a chart:

Let’s break this down. How does Heritage manage these whopping cuts? According to a modest little footnote in the appendix on page 165, here’s the answer:

Medicaid: No details. There will be a spending cap, and all mandatory spending will somehow be cut to fit.

Medicare: Increase eligibility age, add a “temporary” premium for Part A, increase premiums for Parts B and D, phase out subsidies for seniors with “significant” income, “reform” cost-sharing arrangements, transition to vouchers premium support starting in 2021.

Domestic Discretionary: Magic spending cap.

Social Security: Increase retirement age, index retirement age so it keeps going up, reduce benefits by adopting chained CPI for inflation adjustments, and “transition the payment to a flat, anti-poverty benefit focused on individuals who need it most,” whatever that means.

In fairness, there’s a bit more detail on the domestic discretionary side. Actually, a mountain of detail: over the course of 140 pages, Heritage recommends cuts to over a hundred programs. These include catfish programs, the Ex-Im bank, climate programs, Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc. etc. Cutting all this stuff might be harder than they expect, since some senator somewhere probably thinks very highly of the USDA Catfish Inspection Program, but I guess they can try. In any case, about 80 percent of the savings come from a small number of programs:

Energy subsidies: $28 billion
Land and Water Conservation Fund: $20 billion
Various HHS/HUD jobs program: $10 billion
Davis-Bacon: $9 billion
Federal Transit Administration: $4 billion
Nine climate programs: $4 billion
Military health care: $4 billion

So there you have it. Slash a bunch of hippy-dippy stuff (clean energy, water conservation, transit, climate); some employment stuff (jobs programs, Davis-Bacon); and military health care spending. Then take a meat axe to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and everything else, and you’re done! Piece of cake.

Perhaps someone should start asking our president-elect if he’s on board with this stuff.

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Report: Trump Team Wants to Slash Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Everything Else Except Defense

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Here’s My 11-Word, 1-Chart Plan for Fixing Obamacare

by JeanDoe47424 Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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There’s been a lot of talk about “fixing” Obamacare lately. Here’s my two-step plan:

  1. Increase the subsidy levels.
  2. Increase the penalty for not buying insurance.

That would pretty much do it. I could add lots of other small-bore things that need some tweaking, but why bother? These two things would do most of the job—and Republicans will never agree to them. They won’t agree to any of the small-bore stuff either. So take your pick. You can support a detailed 11-point plan for Obamacare that will never get passed, or you can support my 11-word plan that will also never get passed.

But since we’re all lightweight wonks around here, we should take a guess at how much we need to change the subsidy and penalty levels to make everything work. Basically, Obamacare’s big problem is that not enough young people are ponying up for insurance. To fix this, we need to get to a point where it’s cheaper for young people to buy insurance than it is to pay the penalty. This can be done by either increasing subsidies or increasing the penalty. Here’s my swag at what it would take:

You could increase subsidies by 100 percent and leave the penalty alone, or you could increase the penalty 250 percent and leave the subsidies alone. Or you can pick any point in between.

In reality, you could probably get by with smaller numbers, since nearly everyone will sign up if the penalty is within shouting distance of the net premium cost. You don’t have to literally make the penalty as high as the premium cost. I also assumed silver coverage in this chart, and you can assume lower numbers if you’re happy with kids buying bronze coverage.1

Anyway, that’s it. This chart is my proposed Obamacare reform. It represents something of an upper bound, and I imagine that someone who has actual working knowledge of all this stuff could do a lot better. Call your congressman today and demand that this chart be made into law.

1I’m not, especially, which is why I went with silver.

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Here’s My 11-Word, 1-Chart Plan for Fixing Obamacare

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