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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

by LuciaUmbagai Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Need some more good news on Obamacare? How about some mixed news instead? Here it is:

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates released last week show that health reform’s Medicaid expansion, which many opponents wrongly claim will cripple state budgets, is an even better deal for states than previously thought….CBO now estimates that the federal government will, on average, pick up more than 95 percent of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion and other health reform-related costs in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next ten years (2015-2024).

The good news is obvious: the Medicaid expansion is an even better deal for states than we thought. The federal government will pick up nearly the entire cost of expansion, and when you account for money that states will save from reduced amounts of indigent care and greater help with mental health costs, the net cost of expansion gets very close to zero.

The mixed nature of this seemingly good news comes from the reason for CBO’s more optimistic budget projection: it’s because they think the program will cover fewer people than they previously projected. There had always been a fear among states that lots of people who were already eligible for Medicaid—but had never bothered applying for it—would hear the Obamacare hoopla and “come out of the woodwork” to claim benefits. Since these folks weren’t technically part of the expansion, states would be on the hook to cover the bulk of their costs.

CBO now believes this fear was overblown. Apparently most people who didn’t bother with Medicaid before Obamacare took effect aren’t going to bother with it now either. That’s good for state budgets, but obviously not so good for all the people who could be getting medical care but aren’t.

For what it’s worth, this is a tradeoff we’re going to see a lot of. Unless the actual cost of medical care comes down, the budget impact of Obamacare is always going to depend on how many people benefit from it. If lots of people sign up, that’s good for public health but costly for taxpayers. If fewer people sign up, then government spending goes down but fewer people receive medical care. There aren’t very many ways around this iron law.

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

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Running Away From Obamacare Is a Fool’s Errand

by Cheryle07G Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Are red-state Democrat senators certain losers to Republican challengers in this year’s midterm election? According to recent polling, no. The races are all pretty close. But Greg Sargent points out that these Democrats do indeed have an Obamacare problem:

In Arkansas, 52 percent would not vote for a candidate who disagrees on Obamacare, versus 35 percent who are open to doing that. In Louisiana: 58-28. In North Carolina: 53-35. It seems plausible the intensity remains on the side of those who oppose the law. This would again suggest that the real problem Dems face with Obamacare is that it revs up GOP partisans far more than Dem ones — exacerbating the Dems’ already existing “midterm dropoff” problem.

However, in Kentucky, the numbers are a bit different: 46 percent would not vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on the law, while 39 percent say the opposite — much closer than in other states. Meanwhile, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear — the most outspoken defender of Obamacare in the south — has an approval rating of 56-29.

I’m keenly aware that I’ve never run for dogcatcher, let alone had any experience in a big-time Senate race. So my political advice is worth zero. And yet, polls like this make me more, not less, invested in the idea that running away from Obamacare is a losing proposition. Electorates in red states know that these Democrats voted for Obamacare. Their opponents are going to hammer away at it relentlessly. It’s just impossible to run away away from it, and doing so only makes them look craven and unprincipled.

The only way to turn this around is not to distance yourself from Obamacare, but to try and convince a piece of the electorate that Obamacare isn’t such a bad deal after all. You won’t convince everyone, but you don’t need to. You just need to persuade the 5 or 10 percent who are mildly opposed to Obamacare that it’s working better than they think. That might get the number of voters who would “never” vote for an Obamacare supporter down from the low 50s (Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina) to the mid 40s (Kentucky). And that might be enough to eke out a victory.

Needless to say, this works best if everyone is pitching in. And surely this is the time to start. The early website problems have been resolved and the initial signup period has been a success. Conservative kvetching has taken on something of a desperate truther tone, endlessly trying to “deskew” the facts and figures that increasingly make Obamacare look like a pretty successful program. There are lots of feel-good stories to tout, and there are going to be more as time goes by. What’s more, the economy is improving a bit, which always makes people a little more sympathetic toward programs that help others.

Obamacare isn’t likely to be a net positive in red states anytime soon. But it’s not necessarily a deal breaker either. It just has to be sold—and the sellers need to show some real passion about it. After all, if they don’t believe in it, why should anyone else?

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Running Away From Obamacare Is a Fool’s Errand

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Watch Live: Darren Aronofsky Discusses “Noah” and Climate Change

by bfys19 Posted on April 23, 2014

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Watch Live: Darren Aronofsky Discusses “Noah” and Climate Change

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Chart of the Day: Wind Turbines Don’t Kill Very Many Birds

by BookerCovey Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tom Randall is fed up with hysteria over wind turbines being responsible for bird genocide. The numbers just don’t support it:

The estimates above are used in promotional videos by Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s biggest turbine maker. However, they originally came from a study by the U.S. Forest Service and are similar to numbers used by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wildlife Society — earnest defenders of birds and bats.

….It’s nice for wind-farm planners to take migration patterns and endangered habitats into account. But even if wind turbines were to double in size and provide 100 percent of our energy needs (both of which defy the laws of physics as we currently understand them), they still wouldn’t compare to the modern scourges of high-tension power lines or buildings with glass windows. Not even close.

Wind turbines can be noisy and they periodically kill some birds. We should be careful with them. But the damage they do sure strikes me as routinely overblown. It’s bad enough that we have to fight conservatives on this stuff, all of whom seem to believe that America is doomed to decay unless every toaster in the country is powered with virile, manly fossil fuels. But when environmentalists join the cause with trumped-up wildlife fears, it just makes things worse. Enough.

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Chart of the Day: Wind Turbines Don’t Kill Very Many Birds

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America’s Middle Class is Losing Out

by PBIJannieaz Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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First, there was Wonkblog. Then came 538. Then Vox. And now we have The Upshot, a new venture from the New York Times that aims to present wonky subjects in more depth than you normally find them on the front page. Today, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy kick off the wonkiness with an interesting analysis of median income in several rich countries. Their aim is to estimate the gains of the middle class, and their conclusion is that America’s middle class is losing out.

Their basic chart is below. As you can see, in many countries the US showed a sizeable gap in 1990. Our middle class was much richer than most. By 2010, however, that gap had closed completely compared to Canada, and become much smaller in most other countries. Their middle classes are becoming more prosperous, but lately ours hasn’t been:

Germany and France show the same low-growth pattern for the middle class that we see in the United States, but countries like Norway, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Britain have shown much faster growth. What’s going on?

The data suggest that most American families are paying a steep price for high and rising income inequality. Although economic growth in the United States continues to be as strong as in many other countries, or stronger, a small percentage of American households is fully benefiting from it.

….The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.

Note that these figures are for after-tax income. Since middle-income taxes have been flat or a bit down in the United States, this isn’t likely to have had much effect on the numbers.

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America’s Middle Class is Losing Out

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This is how palm oil is made

by ybjtv929 Posted on April 17, 2014

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Palm oil is found in nearly everything, yet have you ever wondered who makes it? how it’s processed? what palm fruit looks like? Take a tour through a Honduran palm oil plantation to learn more.

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This is how palm oil is made

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This is how palm oil is made

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In War, Truth Is the First Casualty

by DenisSuggs Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Herszenhorn reports that Tuesday marked yet another day of “bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies” that have marked the Russian response to the crisis in Ukraine:

It is an extraordinary propaganda campaign that political analysts say reflects a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials. And in recent days, it has largely succeeded — at least for Russia’s domestic audience — in painting a picture of chaos and danger in eastern Ukraine, although it was pro-Russian forces themselves who created it by seizing public buildings and setting up roadblocks.

….To watch the television news in Russia is to be pulled into a swirling, 24-hour vortex of alarmist proclamations of Western aggression, sinister claims of rising fascism and breathless accounts of imminent hostilities by the “illegal” Ukrainian government in Kiev, which has proved itself in recent days to be largely powerless.

The Rossiya 24 news channel, for instance, has been broadcasting virtually nonstop with a small graphic at the bottom corner of the screen that says “Ukrainian Crisis” above the image of a masked fighter, set against the backdrop of the red-and-black flag of the nationalist, World War II-era Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which inflicted tens of thousands of casualties on Soviet forces.

Over the course of several hours of coverage on Tuesday, Rossiya 24 reported that four to 11 peaceful, pro-Russian “supporters of federalization” in Ukraine were killed near the town of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine when a mixed force of right-wing Ukrainians and foreign mercenaries strafed an airfield with automatic gunfire from helicopter gunships before landing and seizing control.

In fact, on the ground, a small crowd of residents surrounded a Ukrainian commander who had landed at the airfield in a helicopter, and while there were reports of stones thrown and shots fired in the air, only a few minor injuries were reported with no signs of fatalities.

Thank God we live in America, where this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

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In War, Truth Is the First Casualty

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

by BrandieRitz Posted on April 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at 538, Benjamin Morris asks “Just How Bad Were the Bad Boys?” The bad boys in question are the Detroit Pistons basketball team of the late 80s, who had a reputation for being unusually aggressive on the court. Did they deserve their reputation? To test this, Morris looks at how many technical fouls they racked up, a good measure of unsportsmanlike conduct. In fact, he takes a look at the total number of technical fouls for the entire league, and finds that the number rose steadily until 1995 and then started a long-term decline.

I promise this is just for fun, but I’ve overlaid another line against Morris’s chart. Not a perfect fit, granted, but not too far off, either. I’m sure a few of you can guess what it is, can’t you?

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Unsportsmanlike Conduct in the NBA Follows an Inverted U-Shaped Curve

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Donald Rumsfeld Will Never Overpay His Taxes

by AileenFlanagan Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Steve Benen, I see that Donald Rumsfeld sends the IRS a letter every year when he files his taxes. Here it is:

I have sent in our federal income tax and our gift tax returns for 2013. As in prior years, it is important for you to know that I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate. I say that despite the fact that I am a college graduate and I try hard to make sure our tax returns are accurate.

The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated, that I know I cannot have any confidence that I know what is being requested and therefore I cannot and do not know, as I suspect a great many Americans cannot know, whether or not their tax returns are accurate. As in past years, I have spent more money that I wanted to….

Etc. Two things here:

As a longtime feeder at the public trough, Rumsfeld is surely aware that the IRS isn’t responsible for the complexity of the tax code. Congress is. He needs to write an annual letter to his representative in Congress instead. As a resident of Washington DC, of course, he doesn’t really have one, but that’s a whole different story. However, I’m sure Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton would be delighted to receive his letter anyway.
The big reason taxes are complicated is because people do complicated things with their money—often with the express aim of lowering their taxes. Nobody is forced to do this. If you want, you can just add up all your income and pay the statutory rate without worrying about deductions and loopholes and capital gains rates and so forth. That will make your taxes easy. But if you’re the kind of person who has enough money to hire expensive accountants to manage your carefully tailored investments, then you have enough money to pay those accountants to do your taxes too.

In any case, none of this really matters. No matter how much Rumsfeld pays in taxes, it will never be enough to make up for the damage he’s done to this country over his lifetime. He should stop whining. He owes us.

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Donald Rumsfeld Will Never Overpay His Taxes

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Bloomberg’s Michael Riley reported that the NSA was aware of the Heartbleed bug from nearly the day it was introduced:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said….Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Henry Farrell explains just how bad this is here. But later in the day, the NSA denied everything:

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,” NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told The Post. “Reports that say otherwise are wrong.”

The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence echoed that statement Friday, saying neither the NSA nor any other part of the U.S. government knew about Heartbleed before April 2014….The denials are unusually forceful for an agency that has historically deployed evasive language when referring to its intelligence programs.

You know, I’m honestly not sure which would be worse. That the NSA knew about this massive bug that threatened havoc for millions of Americans and did nothing about it for two years. Or that the NSA’s vaunted—and lavishly funded—cybersecurity team was completely in the dark about a gaping and highly-exploitable hole in the operational security of the internet for two years. It’s frankly hard to see any way the NSA comes out of this episode looking good.

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

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