Tag Archives: obamacare

The Kochs are cooking up a new dirty-energy political scheme

by LorrieThomson Posted on June 17, 2014

Kochs in the kitchen again

The Kochs are cooking up a new dirty-energy political scheme

By

Gus Ruelas / Greenpeace

The Koch brothers have seen Tom Steyer’s $100 million bet and they’re raising it by almost $200 million more.

Steyer, billionaire hedge-fund manager turned climate activist, set a goal earlier this year of spending $100 million in the 2014 midterm elections to support candidates who care about climate change. So far fundraising for his super PAC has been weak, but the Kochs aren’t taking any chances.

The Daily Beast reports that “the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups – including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin.” Here’s more:

A few Koch network-backed nonprofit groups including [Americans for Prosperity] have long fought against climate change regulations, a carbon tax, and subsidies for renewable energy. But lately, the Koch universe seem to be facing bigger energy threats stemming from Washington, state governments and big liberal checkbooks.

The new energy initiative is the handiwork of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the Koch network’s central fundraising hub, which was established in late 2011 as a trade group, according to an email to the group’s members from [Koch fundraiser Kevin] Gentry. In 2012, the fledgling group — which claims some 200 members who each kick in at least $100,000 yearly — funneled over $230 million dollars to numerous other non-profits in the Koch ecosystem according to the group’s 2012 tax returns. …

Gentry’s email stressed that liberal donors, led by hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, have plans to spend as much as $100 million on climate change issues and ads to make it a top-tier issue in the election. He noted that environmental groups had recently run a $5 million “clean energy” ad blitz in Iowa, Michigan, and North Carolina, all of which are considered “focus” states for Freedom Partners and among the states where Americans for Prosperity has spent over $35 million on attack ads against Democratic Senate candidates on Obamacare.

It’s not enough that the Kochs and their pals want to condemn you to climatic misery. They also want to prevent you from accessing affordable health care. Those issues are mostly unrelated but, in Gentry’s email, he links them, opining that the “new multi million dollar campaign by environmentalists is arguably an effort to distract from the failures of Obamacare.”

Because with all of the environmental challenges facing the U.S. and the world, what else would environmentalists want to do but “distract” voters from an affordable health-care law?


Source
Koch Brothers Unveil New Strategy at Big Donor Retreat, The Daily Beast

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Latest Gallup Numbers Confirm 10-12 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

by AileenFlanagan Posted on June 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Gallup’s latest poll number for the uninsured is out, and it’s stabilized now that the open enrollment period for Obamacare has ended. It was 13.4 percent in April and it’s 13.4 percent in May:

The fact that the rate stabilized provides some confidence in Gallup’s polling, since that’s what should have happened once open enrollment ended. This is a drop of about 4 percentage points from the 2011-12 baseline, and represents about 10 million newly insured—a figure that’s been confirmed elsewhere and now seems like a pretty good estimate. Add to this the number of children and sub-26ers who are newly insured, and you’re probably up to 12-13 million who are newly insured under Obamacare. Some of this comes from people buying insurance through the exchanges; some comes from Medicaid signups; and some comes from people signing up for insurance at work thanks to the individual mandate.

It’s possible that other estimates will upend this number over the next few months, but I doubt it. This is probably about what we got from Obamacare. It’s up to you to decide if you think it’s worth the price.

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Latest Gallup Numbers Confirm 10-12 Million Newly Insured Under Obamacare

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Mitch McConnell Digs Himself Deeper and Deeper Over Obamacare

by TINStefanpc Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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I don’t usually spend too much time on local horse race stuff, but Kentucky is a little different. After all, Mitch McConnell is the minority leader in the Senate, and his Democratic challenger this year, Alison Lundergan Grimes, is running a surprisingly strong campaign. So perhaps Kentucky deserves some extra special attention. Surprisingly, it turns out that Obamacare, of all things, is causing McConnell some serious heartburn.

You see, unluckily for McConnell, Kentucky has possibly the best, most popular Obamacare exchange in the country—though nobody calls it an Obamacare exchange, of course, since Obamacare is the work of Satan. It’s called Kynect. Everybody loves Kynect. So when McConnell was asked recently if he favored getting rid of Kynect, he had a problem. It’s Obamacare, and he’s on record favoring the root-and-branch repeal of Obamacare. But Kynect is popular. Nobody wants to see a root-and-branch repeal of Kynect. What to do?

So far, McConnell has taken a creative approach to this dilemma: He basically denies that Kynect has anything to do with Obamacare. McConnell remains in favor of total repeal of Obamacare, but says this wouldn’t cause any problems with Kynect. It would just keep motoring along without missing a beat.

Now, this is a little peculiar. Politicians tell whoppers all the time, but usually they do it cleverly enough that they can somehow defend themselves. This, on the other hand, is just a flat-out fantasy. Without Obamacare, there’s no exchange; there’s no federal funding; there are no subsidies; there’s no community rating; and there’s no mandatory coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. Kynect is dead, and everyone knows it. It’s hard to imagine even Fox News somehow twisting this to claim that McConnell is staking out a defensible position.

So far, Grimes has been a little tentative about attacking McConnell over this. After all, she has exactly the mirror-image problem: She wants to express her undying support for Kynect but without ever mentioning the dreaded word “Obamacare.” Greg Sargent says he feels her pain, but nonetheless thinks this is a good opportunity to tighten the screws on McConnell further:

As Joe Sonka points out in a good piece, McConnell is betting that press coverage won’t clearly explain to voters just how absurd his position really is. But perhaps now that Grimes is engaging on the issue — to some degree, at least — that could serve as a hook for top shelf reporter and commentator types to take a peek at what’s really going on here.

It should be self evidently newsworthy that the leader of Senate Republicans, who have based their entire 2014 strategy on the idea that Obamacare is a long term political disaster and massive repudiation of liberal governance, refuses to take a clear position of his own on the law’s future in the state he would represent, and on whether hundreds of thousands of his own constituents should continue to enjoy its benefits.

Well, we’ll see. McConnell is a crafty old survivor, and the odds remain pretty strongly in his favor even if he isn’t making any sense about Kynect. Still, stuff like this makes me wonder if Grimes has a better chance of beating him than I would have thought. There’s some real opportunity here if she can figure out how best to keep McConnell twisted into knots over this.

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Mitch McConnell Digs Himself Deeper and Deeper Over Obamacare

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Meet the Sex Hypnotherapist Helping the GOP Retake the Senate

by RobBrackctapyct Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

As Democrats and Republicans jostle for control of the Senate in 2014, the Senate race in Oregon—where the incumbent is Democrat Jeffery Merkley—is not considered much of a pickup opportunity for the GOP. But several Republican superdonors are trying to change that, including a multimillionaire vintner, one of the wealthiest conservative families in the country, and a sex hypnotist who has warned rape victims not to try to get “mileage” out of their stories.

These donors are opening their checkbooks for Monica Wehby, a political novice and Portland pediatric surgeon. A moderate, Wehby is touting her opposition to Obamacare. But Wehby is skipping the primary’s only televised debate on May 16 and avoiding excess face time with the press. So she can use plenty of money on her side—and the donors’ five- and six-figure contributions to super-PACs supporting Wehby have helped make her the leading candidate in the May 20 primary.

Wehby’s most controversial benefactor is Loren Parks of Nevada, a medical-device retailer and a hypnotherapy hobbyist. Parks has donated $75,000 to a super-PAC with the awkward name If He Votes Like That in Salem Imagine What He Will Do in Congress, which has pelted Wehby’s main opponent, state Rep. Jason Conger, with negative television ads. On Tuesday, a state PAC to which Parks gave $50,000, the Taxpayers Association of Oregon PAC, released a poll showing Wehby had a 21-point lead over Conger—a figure the Oregonian called “questionable.”

A prolific contributor to state and federal candidates in Oregon, Parks is frequently described as the largest political donor in the state’s history. He made his fortune selling medical equipment but gained notoriety in the past few years for starring in a YouTube series on treating sexual afflictions through hypnosis. In one of his dozens of video, Parks says some women grow fat so they won’t be tempted to cheat on their husbands. In another, he claims he can help heal the trauma of rape and incest victims, but not “if you’re getting mileage out of it, if you’re getting status, satisfaction from telling your story again and again.” In that video, Parks sounds a buzzer and shouts “Disconnect! Disconnect!” over and over.

On his website, Parks notes, “I am not a doctor.” Yet he says he used his methods to relieve a woman of multiple sclerosis symptoms, adding, “this woman probably got her MS because she had left her husband, gone off with another man.” On a now-defunct personal website, he once bragged that he could hypnotize women into becoming “sex machines.”

Parks has become infamous in Oregon for these remarks. This caused one Republican running for state office this year to return $30,000 that Parks had given directly to his campaign. Parks has also settled out of court two civil lawsuits accusing him of sexual misconduct. One involved a mentally impaired woman whom Parks slept with after she approached him about his therapy. The other settlement resolved a case filed by a former employee who accused Parks of sending her extremely lewd emails and “trying to brainwash her into being his sexual and travel companion.”

Parks and Wehby’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

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Meet the Sex Hypnotherapist Helping the GOP Retake the Senate

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Surprise! Better Health Insurance Saves Lives.

by TrinidadMcCourt Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Does health insurance save lives? Since death is the least frequent outcome of poor medical care, I’ve never believed that mortality is an especially good way of measuring the value of different interventions. Even if an intervention is high value, the odds are good that it will have only a small effect on mortality.

This makes the results of a recent study in Massachusetts all the more impressive. Three researchers studied the effect of Mitt Romney’s universal health care plan and concluded that it’s saved a lot of lives so far. Adrianna McIntyre provides the summary:

Benjamin Sommers, Sharon Long, and Katherine Baicker estimate that overall mortality in Massachusetts declined 2.9 percent relative to control counties between 2007 and 2010; mortality amenable to health care declined 4.5 percent. This translates to one death prevented for every 830 people who gain insurance, and the effects were larger in counties with low income and low pre-reform insurance rates—the counties we would expect to be most favorably impacted by reform.

….If you think the study’s primary findings are impressive, consider their implications: “mortality amenable to health care” does not just magically decline. If fewer people are dying, that is almost certainly because diseases are being better treated, managed, or prevented—because of improved health. It’s hard to come by data on objective measures of health at the state level, but the “improved health” story is consistent with other findings in the paper: individuals had better self-reported health, were more likely to have a usual source of care, received more preventive services, and had fewer cost-related delays in care.

What makes this even more impressive is that the elderly in Massachusetts were already covered by Medicare. These results are strictly for those under the age of 65, who don’t die very often to begin with. Within this group, a reduction of 4.5 percent in mortality amenable to health care (the only kind we care about in this context) is a lot.

The implications for Obamacare are obvious since Obamacare was explicitly modeled on the Massachusetts program—though it’s unlikely that it will produce quite such dramatic mortality improvements since its coverage isn’t as universal as the Massachusetts plan. Still, Obamacare has so far shown that it has a lot in common with Romneycare, so there’s good reason to hope that it will demonstrate mortality improvements as well.

But don’t hold your breath for study results. Given the way research like this works, we probably won’t get them until 2020 or so.

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Surprise! Better Health Insurance Saves Lives.

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For Republicans, Fear and Confusion Are All They Have Left

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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We know that 8 million people have signed up for Obamacare on the exchanges. But how many of them have actually paid their premiums? Yesterday, as part of their long, twilight effort to convince everyone that the Obama administration is lying about the enrollment numbers, Republicans issued a laughable report saying the number was only 67 percent. A third of the enrollees are phantoms!

As it happens, I didn’t bother writing about this because, as political deceptions go, it was about as sophisticated as a kindergartner throwing a mud pie. The Republican numbers only went through April 15, even though a ton of people signed up at the end of March and don’t even owe their first premium payment until the end of April. Of course there are lots of people who haven’t sent in their checks yet. So how do Republicans justify this dumb talking point? Michael Tomasky asked:

Talking Points Memo’s Dylan Scott got hold of the questionnaire the committee sent to insurers, and it’s a joke. One industry source—not a Democratic operative—told Scott: “Everyone who saw it knew exactly what the goal was.”

I asked the GOP staff at the committee if they had a counter to the argument that their numbers were incomplete and in essence rigged. On background, one staffer there basically told me that they didn’t have a counter. The committee press release makes it clear, I was told, that these data represent payments only through April 15, and the committee will seek another report May 20.

In other words, this staffer is saying: Yep. Which makes it rather hard to avoid the conclusion that the committee knowingly put out a bad number. Why would a committee of the House of Representatives do something like that? Well, what am I saying? We know why.

Republicans got what they wanted: some headlines suggesting that Obamacare enrollment rates were lower than the White House says. And of course, it became a routine talking point on Fox News. Mud has been thrown on the walls, and by the time the final numbers come out, plenty of people will remain confused.

And that’s all Republicans care about right now: manufacturing doubt. They know perfectly well that by next month, when the final numbers come out, something like 90 percent of enrollees will have paid their premiums and total signups will be over 7 million. But they don’t care. As long as people are confused, life is good for Republicans. So confusion is what they’re selling.

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For Republicans, Fear and Confusion Are All They Have Left

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Anti-Obamacare Hysteria Almost Killed Dean Angstadt

by CatharineKoerst Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Robert Calandra of the Philadelphia Inquirer tells the story today of Dean Angstadt, a guy who listened to Republican hysteria about Obamacare and almost paid for it with his life:

“I don’t read what the Democrats have to say about it because I think they’re full of it,” he told his friend Bob Leinhauser, who suggested he sign up….From time to time, Leinhauser would urge Angstadt to buy a plan through the ACA marketplace. And each time, Angstadt refused. “We argued about it for months,” Angstadt said. “I didn’t trust this Obamacare. One of the big reasons is it sounded too good to be true.”

January came, and Angstadt’s health continued to decline. His doctor made it clear he urgently needed valve-replacement surgery. Leinhauser had seen enough and insisted his friend get insured….Leinhauser went to Angstadt’s house, and in less than an hour, the duo had done the application. A day later, Angstadt signed up for the Highmark Blue Cross silver PPO plan and paid his first monthly premium: $26.11.

“All of a sudden, I’m getting notification from Highmark, and I got my card, and it was actually all legitimate,” he said. “I could have done backflips if I was in better shape.” Angstadt’s plan kicked in on March 1. It was just in time. Surgery couldn’t be put off any longer. On March 31, Angstadt had life-saving valve-replacement surgery.

Roger Ailes must be so proud.

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Anti-Obamacare Hysteria Almost Killed Dean Angstadt

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

by RobinLeflore Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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I periodically drone on about the laziness of polls that ask a simple approve/disapprove question about Obamacare. The problem is that a lot of people say they disapprove because Obamacare isn’t liberal enough. These are folks don’t necessarily disapprove of the concept of national healthcare in general or Obamacare in particular, and shouldn’t really be counted among right-wing opponents of the law.

A couple of weeks ago, a Kaiser poll gave us a slightly deeper glimpse into all this. They asked the disapprovers why they disapproved, and it was clear that some of them had lefty criticisms of the law, not conservative criticisms. But the evidence was still a bit fuzzy.

Today, Mark Blumenthal goes further. In a recent HuffPo poll, about 9 percent of the respondents said they opposed Obamacare because it wasn’t liberal enough. Then, in a follow-up question, they were asked, “In your own words, what do you mean when you say the health care law is not liberal enough?”

The results are on the right. There’s still some ambiguity here, but I’d classify several of the responses as likely left-wing criticisms. Adding up the percentages, I get 6 + 4 + 15 + 4 + 4 + 3 = 36 percent. That’s a little less than half of those who had a response.

So, very roughly speaking, in future polls I’d guess that about half of the “not liberal enough” folks are basically supporters of Obamacare but want the law to go further. It might even be more than that, but it remains hard to parse the motivations behind all of these responses with precision. Is “too complex” a liberal or conservative criticism? How about “lack of choice”? Hard to say.

In any case, this adds some context to the whole debate about Obamacare critics who say it’s “not liberal enough.” It’s also an object lesson against assuming too much ideological coherence from survey respondents. A larger survey with a bigger sample size and a little more structure to the questions would be welcome.

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Update: What Do Critics Mean Who Say Obamacare "Isn’t Liberal Enough"?

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Quote of the Day: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obamacare?

by LesterMcGrowdie Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

From a Republican congressional health aide who was “granted anonymity to speak candidly,” on the difficulties of creating a Republican plan to replace Obamacare:

The problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. … To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market.

That’s a problem, all right. If you actually want to cover people, you have to pay for it. End of story. Republicans are steadfastly not willing to pay for it, so they aren’t going to cover anyone with whatever plan they dream up. No matter what kind of smoke and mirrors they throw up to disguise this, that’s the bottom line. No money, no coverage.

Really, though, all this GOP aide is saying is that Obamacare is fundamentally a pretty conservative plan. Liberals nearly all prefer a simpler, cheaper, more comprehensive riff on single-payer of some kind. But that couldn’t pass in 2009—even moderate Democrats wouldn’t have supported it—so instead we had to cobble together a bunch of conservative ideas into a kind of Rube Goldberg edifice that was at least better than nothing. It only works moderately well, but that’s because the conservative take on healthcare is fundamentally incoherent. The more conservative your health care plan, the worse it works.

So Republicans have a choice. They can:

  1. Introduce a more liberal plan that’s cheaper and works better.
  2. Introduce an even more conservative plan that’s more expensive and works even worse than Obamacare
  3. Toss out a few of the usual pet rocks and just pretend it’s a plan.

My money is on Option 3.

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Quote of the Day: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obamacare?

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Here’s a Second Look at Obamacare and the Uninsured

by MarkoGurner Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s a quick follow-up on my guess earlier this week that Obamacare will reduce the ranks of the uninsured by about 10 million when we finally close out 2014. The Urban Institute has released its latest survey results and concludes that Obamacare insured about 5.4 million people through early March. This is a comparison with Fall 2013, so it doesn’t include the sub-26ers who have been covered by their parents’ policies since 2010. It also doesn’t include the March signup surge. If you add those in, we’re probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 million right now, which I think is consistent with a guess of 10 million by the end of the year.

There’s still a lot of guesswork in these numbers, but this is about the best we have right now. It’s less than the 13 million the CBO projected, but it’s a pretty healthy number nonetheless.

UPDATE: It turns out that the CBO uses pro-rated years. If you sign up for coverage on April 1, you count as three-quarters of a year. If you sign up on July 1, you count as half a year. I didn’t know that, and it changes my guess. By normal human terms, I think about 10 million of the previously uninsured will have Obamacare coverage by the end of 2014. By CBO terms, that might come to 9 million or so.

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Here’s a Second Look at Obamacare and the Uninsured

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