Tag Archives: year

Health Care Premiums Have Grown 6% Per Year Since 2013

by CeciliaPlate Posted on October 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve mentioned before that Obamacare premiums started out too low in their first year, which explains (a) why so many insurers have had trouble making money in the exchanges, and (b) why premiums increased so much this year. But maybe a chart will make this clearer.

This is based on data from Health Affairs last year, updated with the big increase in premiums this year. What it shows fairly clearly is that the cost of individual premiums dropped in 2014 when the Obamacare exchanges started up—even though Obamacare policies generally provided better coverage. When you factor in the big increase for next year, average premiums will have risen from $4,500 to $5,600 since 2013.

That’s an annual increase of 6.1 percent, about the same as the average annual increase in employer plans over the past decade.

The usual caveats apply. These are averages: some people do better, some do worse. And for people who qualify for Obamacare subsidies, the actual increase in the amount they have to pay is very small. Overall, though, the point here is clear: if premiums had just risen at a steady 6 percent per year, nobody would be bent out of shape. The reason this is hitting so hard is because insurance companies screwed up their projections when Obamacare started up and now they have to make up for it.

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Health Care Premiums Have Grown 6% Per Year Since 2013

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Tweet of the Day: Most Obamacare Users Won’t Pay Much More For Coverage Than They Did Last Year

by ElizabeFalkiner Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is from a guy who works for a healthcare advocacy group in New Mexico:

I don’t want to minimize the pain that this year’s premium hikes are going to cause for a subset of insurance buyers. But the vast majority of low-to-mid-income Obamacare users are eligible for federal subsidies—and as premiums go up, so do their subsidies. They may end up paying a bit more in 2017 for their health coverage, but probably no more than a few percent.

So yes: headlines matter. Or, at the very least, the first few paragraphs of news stories matter. Coverage of this issue should make it clear that the average price people pay will go up much less than 25 percent, and for low-income folks it probably won’t go up at all.

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Tweet of the Day: Most Obamacare Users Won’t Pay Much More For Coverage Than They Did Last Year

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A Note to Sunday’s Debate Hosts: Focus on Trump’s Actions, Not His Words

by ThanhMulley Posted on October 9, 2016

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Obviously Pussygate has to be addressed at tomorrow’s debate. In theory, all the questions will come from the audience, but I’m assuming the moderators will open things up with a question or two of their own. My recollection—possibly mistaken—is that this is how past town-hall style debates have worked.

I hope so, anyway, because that will give them a chance to ask Trump the right question. They need to ask not about Donald Trump’s lewd comments, but about his actual behavior. On the tape, Trump says “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful â&#128;&#149; I just start kissing them….And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.“

Forget the “locker room bantering.” The question for Trump needs to be: How many times has this happened? How many times have you grabbed women “by the pussy”?

It’s been obvious for a long time that the Republican Party has a big demographic problem: their core base is white voters, but the country is getting less and less white every year. Republicans are well aware of this, and have worked assiduously to overcome this weakness. In the early 90s, they zealously pursued pack-and-crack gerrymandering to create more majority-white congressional districts. A few years later Fox News came along, dedicated to nurturing the GOP’s white base. George Bush and Karl Rove squeezed the last few drops out of the white evangelical community. Finally, in the late aughts, Republican legislatures passed a raft of voter ID laws in a last ditch attempt to suppress the non-white vote by a point or two.

But that was it. What more could they possibly do? The answer, to my surprise, was to nominate a man who was a straight-up bigot, and then run a campaign that was only a hair’s breadth from being openly white nationalist. But it didn’t work. Even in a Republican year against a flawed opponent, Donald Trump has lost as much as he’s gained from his bald-faced appeal to whites. And now that his defeat is all but certain, the question hanging over the GOP is simple: what’s next?

It’s now plain—beyond any doubt—that Republicans can no longer win the presidency with only their white base. But after Hurricane Donald’s performance this year, they’re even further in the hole with minorities than ever. And there’s really no sense that their white base is ready to accept a more minority-friendly party anyway. Past attempts at “post-mortems” and “autopsies” that recommended even bare minimum amounts of outreach to women and minorities were quickly and thoroughly crushed.

So now what?

I’m kind of curious: how do you think the whole “grab ’em by the pussy” affair would have played out if we’d had a transcript but no tape? The same? Or would it have dropped quickly out of sight without some audio and video to play constantly on cable news? I’d guess the latter. The power of sound and images has always been strong, but in the past couple of decades it’s become simply immense. “Photo or it didn’t happen” is a bit of a Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat joke, but it’s not really much of a joke anymore.

Last month, after Donald Trump Jr. decided to compare refugees to a bowl of Skittles, the Mars Corporation felt obligated to tweet a response. So naturally, now that Tic Tacs are on a 24/7 cable loop as Donald Trump’s favored breath mint before assaulting women, they too feel the need to put out a statement:

Which colorful pellet-shaped food item will be next?

From a purely political perspective, should Democrats root for Trump to drop out of the race? On the one hand, it would throw the Republican Party into total chaos. That has to be good for Team D. On the other hand, it would allow Republicans to start fresh with a new candidate who wasn’t a huge albatross around their necks. On the third hand, it would demoralize Trump’s core supporters, who might stay home entirely and leave the field wide open for downballot Democrats to win a landslide victory. On the fourth hand, Hillary Clinton is none too popular, and a Trumpless GOP might very well re-attract a lot of moderate voters who have steadily defected thanks to Khan-Curiel-Machado-$916-Million-gate

Thoughts?

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A Note to Sunday’s Debate Hosts: Focus on Trump’s Actions, Not His Words

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2016 Is the Most Policy-Heavy Election in Decades

by AutumnSidwell69 Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s conventional wisdom that this year’s presidential campaign is one of the most policy-free of all time. The reason is obvious: Donald Trump is a policy void. He knows nothing, doesn’t want to know anything, and brags frequently about how everything you need to know to be president can be learned in an hour or two. His milieu is entertainment and insults, not policy wonkery.

I think this view is wrong, and I’d like to present a thoughtful, nuanced argument against it. Unfortunately, I don’t have that in me at the moment. Instead, here’s a quickie blog-length micro-essay making my case.

Among political junkies, “policy” means white papers. It means understanding the details of how government programs work. It means charts and tables. It means historical context. It means stuff generally written by folks with PhDs who have deep subject matter expertise.

This is my meat and drink. If this blog had a mission statement, it would be something like this: Bringing policy lite to the masses. I like reading academic papers and trying to explain them in plain English that any ordinary educated person can understand. I like historical context. I respect folks with deep subject matter expertise. I adore charts and tables. And I want to spread all this stuff to more people.

But we live in a country where a third of the population can’t name the three branches of government and something like 95 percent probably have no idea how Social Security works. Feel free to sneer if you must, but most people just aren’t interested in policy deep dives. And why should they be? Being a political junkie is basically a hobby, like collecting stamps or writing bad poetry. You probably aren’t interested in that stuff, and there’s no reason lots of people should be interested in your hobby.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t care about political issues. Many of them care more than you do. They just don’t have much a jones for white papers. Nonetheless, all of these things are policy:

Building a wall to reduce illegal immigration from Mexico.
Keeping troops in Afghanistan.
Changing our strategy for destroying ISIS.
Improving relations with Russia.
Toughening visa requirements to keep potential terrorists out of the country.
Expanding or repealing Obamacare.
Signing an agreement with Iran to halt their nuclear program.
Making college free.
Halting new trade agreements until they’re made better for American workers.
Spending more on the military.
Insisting that treaty allies pay a higher share of defense costs.
Creating a federal maternity leave and child care program.
Tackling climate change.
Whether we should make America more energy independent via more clean power or more extraction of fossil fuels.
Profiling Muslims and surveilling mosques to stay ahead of Islamic terrorism.
Appointing liberal vs. conservative Supreme Court justices.
Routine stop-and-frisk as a way of combating crime.
Raising the minimum wage.
Rebuilding infrastructure.

This is a long list, and it doesn’t even include the usual evergreens (abortion, guns, tax cuts) or stuff that hasn’t broken through enough to really affect things (vets, charter schools, NSA spying). In a nutshell, then, I’d argue not only that 2016 is a policy-heavy year, but that thanks to Donald Trump’s, um, earthy approach to things, the differences in policy between the two candidates are sharper than in nearly any election during my adult life. Lack of detail is irrelevant. Nor does it matter if you don’t like Trump’s earthiness. For the average Joe and Jane, Trump’s coarse approach makes his positions more policy-centric than arguments over whether we should use chained CPI for Social Security COLAs or support a public option for Obamacare.

There is, obviously, a vast rhetorical gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but their policy gap is equally far-reaching. And my guess is that more people know about their policy differences than in any year in recent memory. If anything, 2016 has featured more policy topics making it into the spotlight than usual. It’s the year that policy truly took over an American presidential election.

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2016 Is the Most Policy-Heavy Election in Decades

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Being Reminded of Racism Is Destroying Pro Football for Whites

by KayleighABG Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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National Review’s Jim Geraghty passes along the news from SI’s Richard Deitsch that ratings for NFL football are down this season. Deitsch suggests several possible explanations: a crazy election season sucking away attention; a smaller group of star quarterbacks (no Peyton Manning or Tom Brady); bad Monday night games; a slowdown in fantasy football; fatigue from too many days of football; and just generally the fact that this season has featured an awful lot of lousy play. However, Geraghty has his own theory:

There’s probably more than one reason, which means it’s oversimplifying it to say Colin Kaepernick and kneeling NFL players are driving way football fans. But it’s a factor, and maybe the biggest factor.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that nearly one-third (32%) of American adults say they are less likely to watch an NFL game because of the growing number of Black Lives Matter protests by players on the field. Only 13% say they are more likely to watch a game because of the protests. Just over half (52%) say the protests have no impact on their viewing decisions.

Looks like I’m not the only one who just wants to enjoy watching the game.

I don’t watch much pro football, so someone help me out: do the TV nets actually show much kneeling at the start of the game? Do they talk about it? Is it something that intrudes on the game, or would you barely even know it’s happening unless you read about it elsewhere? In other words, is there any plausible reason that Geraghty can’t just enjoy the game anymore without having his beautiful mind reminded that racism still exists in the US?

Speaking of which, you will be unsurprised at just who finds all this kneeling so unpleasant: “Whites are twice as likely as blacks — 36% to 18% — to say they are less likely to watch this year.” Surprise!

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Being Reminded of Racism Is Destroying Pro Football for Whites

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Almonds Are Still Sucking Up Lots of California’s Water

by LupeWhitelegge Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two new data points on the ongoing California drought and its impact on the state’s booming and thirsty farms:

• In California’s agriculture-rich, water-poor San Joaquin Valley, H2O from the state’s big irrigation projects has been especially scarce in recent years. As a result, farmers have had to rely heavily on water pumped from underground aquifers—and they’ve extracted so much of it that since 2013, land has been sinking in large swaths of the region, fouling up canals, bridges, roads, and other vital infrastructure and racking up billions of dollars in damage.

This year? Here’s an eye-popping report from the Sacramento Bee:

New wells are going in faster and deeper than ever. Farmers dug about 2,500 wells in the San Joaquin Valley last year alone, the highest number on record. That was five times the annual average for the previous 30 years, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis of state and local data

Back in 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown reversed a long tradition of Wild West groundwater management in California by signing a new law requiring the state’s most stressed watersheds to stop drawing down aquifers faster than they’re naturally replenished. The catch: The guidelines don’t kick in until 2040. In the meantime, San Joaquin Valley growers are embroiled in a “kind of groundwater arms race,” the Bee reports.

Aquifers don’t respect property lines, and in many cases, farmers with older, shallower wells are afraid of losing water to neighbors who are digging deeper wells and lowering the groundwater table. So they invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to drill new wells of their own. All told, farmers are expected to spend $303 million this year alone to pump groundwater, according to UC Davis researchers.

• In a new study presented last Wednesday at the Geological Society of America, Eastern Kentucky University’s Kelly Watson drills down into one of the destinations of all that water extraction: the state’s massive and growing base of almond groves.

Using satellite imagery, Watson looked at land conversions in California’s Central Valley (made up of two valleys, the San Joaquin and the Sacramento) between 2007 and 2014. She found that land devoted to the delicious (but water-intensive) nut had expanded 14 percent over that period—not surprising, given the ongoing almond boom.

The interesting finding, though, is that a huge chunk of the new almond territory was converted from fallow, completely un-irrigated land, including grasslands, wetlands, and forests. As for the rest, some of it switched over from less water-intensive crops like corn, cotton, wheat, and tomatoes; and some had been used for even thirstier crops like sugar beets, alfalfa, and clover. The bottom line: Watson calculates the net impact of the expansion was a 27 percent increase in annual irrigation needs for the converted land, putting massive new pressure on those struggling aquifers.

Over on Forbes, science writer Mallory Pickett notes that the study has yet to be published—it’s currently in peer review—and that “aerial images can only paint broad brush pictures” of the situation on the ground. But it’s not a pretty picture.

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Almonds Are Still Sucking Up Lots of California’s Water

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Greenland has lost more ice in the last few years than we thought.

by DawnS03jvnrbqwnx Posted on September 21, 2016

This weekend, Máxima Acuña, winner of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assaulted on her property in Peru. Since 2011, Acuña has resisted the development of the Conga gold mine by U.S.-based Newmont Mining by refusing to vacate her home — and, for that, has faced both legal prosecution and physical intimidation.

As a result of the attack, allegedly perpetrated by agents of Minera Yanacocha (Newmont’s Peruvian subsidiary), Acuña is now in the hospital and her family’s crops are destroyed, according to Amnesty International.

Nor, tragically, is this attack an isolated instance of violence against indigenous women protecting their land. Earlier this year, Berta Cáceres — winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts in blocking hydroelectric developments on Lenca land in Honduras — was murdered at home, allegedly by employees of DESA, the developer behind the proposed dams.

When we spoke to Acuña in April, she told us, with eerie foresight: “Because these businesses are very powerful, I don’t know what awaits me when I get back [home]. But this isn’t a cause of fear for me – it’s not a motive for us to stop fighting, to stop defending.”

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Greenland has lost more ice in the last few years than we thought.

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Voters Sure Are Pissed Off This Year

by JacksonNabors59 Posted on September 1, 2016

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Voters are angry this year. Bernie Sanders proved it on the Democratic side and Donald Trump on the Republican side. People are sick and tired of the old guard that talks and talks but never gets anything done. The establishment has turned politics into a corrupt charnelhouse catering to the rich and powerful instead of regular Americans, and voters are finally fed up. The tea party was a start, Occupy Wall Street was next, and now there’s a volcanic, bipartisan fury erupting all over the country.

So, um, that means incumbents should be in big trouble on both sides of the aisle. It’s probably been a bloodbath in the primaries this year—though of course the lamestream media will never tell you about it. Let’s take a look.

Hah! There’s your evidence right there. In 2014 four incumbents lost their primary contests. This year five have lost. Behold the fury of the American electorate. Truly this year represents the long-awaited revolt of the voters against the entrenched interests that bailed out Wall Street and sent all our jobs overseas.

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Voters Sure Are Pissed Off This Year

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Swift Boat 2.0 Is Now Underway. Where’s the Press?

by GeriSimos937 Posted on August 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the loathsome Swift boating of John Kerry in 2004 worked a treat. So this year Trump supporters are engaging in Swift boat 2.0: a surprisingly overt campaign claiming that Hillary Clinton is seriously ill but covering it up. Sean Hannity has been the ringleader, talking it up almost nightly on his show. Rudy Giuliani joined the fun this weekend, and Katrina Pierson, the Baghdad Bob of spokespeople, suggested that Hillary has “dysphasia.” Even the candidate himself has gotten into the act:

Trump has followed this up with references to Hillary not having the “mental and physical stamina” to be president—wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

This is all literally built on nothing. There’s a video of Hillary slipping on an icy step outside a church a few months ago. There’s a video of her making a funny face while talking to some supporters. That’s it. Unlike Trump himself, Hillary has released a detailed statement from her doctor, and there’s nothing wrong with her.

I know how tiresome it is to wonder how the press would treat something like this if it came from the other side, but, um, how would the press treat this if it were coming from the Hillary Clinton campaign? My guess: it would be like World War III. They would be demanding proof, writing endlessly about how this “once again” raised trust issues, and just generally raising front-page hell over it. Which would be perfectly fair! But when Trump does it, it’s just another boys-will-be-boys moment. Yawn.

Trump has done so many disgusting things that I know it’s hard to keep track sometimes. But this ranks right up there, and he deserves brutal coverage over it. He’s not really getting it, though. All the usual liberal suspects are on this, but the mainstream press has treated it like yet another occasional A14 blurb. Where’s the outrage, folks?

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Swift Boat 2.0 Is Now Underway. Where’s the Press?

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One of Donald Trump’s Top Advisers Just Lost It on CNN—and the Video Is Hilarious

by xaviereger7380 Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is getting smoked in the polls right now because he has run the most inept campaign in the history of campaigns and also he’s a fundamentally unlikable racist who lies a lot.

So with that being the state of the race on this balmy Wednesday, the 17th of August in the year of our Lord 2016, Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s top advisers, went on CNN to talk about how his boss is great and has very pretty eyes and is totally going to win. Anchor Brianna Keilar asked Cohen about these polls that say the exact opposite. Cohen was not having any of it!

Watch what happens when the unstoppable force of stupidity meets the unmovable object of reality.

“All of them.”

What a time to be alive.

UPDATE UPDATE: Oh my God, the full interview is even more insane.

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One of Donald Trump’s Top Advisers Just Lost It on CNN—and the Video Is Hilarious

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