“Are Americans “Stupid” Or Uninformed?”: The Purpose Of The Media Is To Produce ‘Eyeballs’…For Advertisers
Republicans are making hay out of Jonathan Gruber’s suggestion that those who crafted Obamacare thought the American public was stupid. While that was a politically incorrect (and stupid) thing to say, we’ve all seen enough “man on the street” interviews where too many people don’t know which party controls Congress or who the current Vice President is to simply dismiss it as untrue.
But a more relevant question would be to ask whether or not the American public is “stupid” (inferring a lack of intelligence) or uninformed. That is the question sparked by this recent Gallup poll. They found that – while the violent crime rate has dropped dramatically since the early 1990’s (from 80 incidents of violent crime/1000 people to 23/1000), 63% of Americans think that violent crime is increasing.
Back in the 1990’s I attended a workshop on the effects of television on young people. The presenter asked the audience, “What is the purpose of television?” After a lot of responses that focused on entertainment, the presenter said that the purpose was to produce eyeballs…for advertisers. I would suggest that the same thing is now true of our news media. The perception of an increase in violent crime is likely a direct result of the old adage: “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Media Matters recently produced a report showing that both cable and network news reporting on Ebola spiked in the days leading up to the 2014 midterms and then simply went to almost nothing afterwards. I don’t buy the idea that this was some collusion between the media and Republicans. I suspect it had more to do with the way that fear of the disease spreading grabbed everyone’s attention, and then a total elimination of coverage once it was clear that wasn’t going to happen (at least not in this country). In other words, success at containing the spread of Ebola doesn’t produce eyeballs.
Circling back to the subject of Obamacare, its interesting to note the effect all this has on the perceptions of the public.
Jon Krosnick, Wendy Gross, and colleagues at Stanford and Kaiser ran large surveys to measure public understanding of the ACA and how it was associated with approval of the law. They found that accurate knowledge about what’s in the bill varied with party identification: Democrats understood the most and liked the law the most, independents less, and Republicans understood still less and liked the law the least. However, attitudes were not just tribal. Within each party, the more accurate your knowledge of the law, the more you liked it.
These researchers found that in the unlikely event that the public had a perfect understanding of the law, approval of it would go from 32% to 70%. That’s the price we pay for an uninformed public.
Its true that technology has allowed partisans and ideologues to choose media sources that confirm their beliefs. But those who simply want “the news” are pretty regularly fed a diet that inflames more than it informs. If you doubt that, take a look at one retired anchorman’s reaction to the movie “Anchorman.”
If we want this to change, we’ll need everyone to think twice about what they do with their eyeballs.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, November 23, 2014
“When Will They Ever Learn?”: Republicans Finally File Lawsuit Against Obama – And Stand To Gain Almost Nothing
Back in June, House Republicans announced, with deep regret yet great fanfare, that they were going to sue Barack Obama over his tyrannical usurpation of power. The suit was never actually filed; two lawyers the House had hired ended up quitting, and it looked as if it would fade away.
Then this week Republicans announced that they had found another lawyer to take the case, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who says he’s a liberal but has become an intense critic of the Obama administration. Just four days later, the lawsuit has finally been filed:
House Republicans filed a long-threatened lawsuit Friday against the Obama administration over unilateral actions on the health care law that they say are abuses of the president’s executive authority.
The lawsuit — filed against the secretaries of the Health and Human Services and Treasury Departments — focuses on two crucial aspects of the way the administration has put the Affordable Care Act into effect.
The suit accuses the Obama administration of unlawfully postponing a requirement that larger employers offer health coverage to their full-time employees or pay penalties. (Larger companies are defined as those with 50 or more employees.)
In July 2013, the administration deferred that requirement until 2015. Seven months later,the administration announced a further delay, until 2016, for employers with 50 to 99 employees.
The suit also challenges what it says is President Obama‘s unlawful giveaway of roughly $175 billion to insurance companies under the law. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration will pay that amount to the companies over the next 10 years, though the funds have not been appropriated by Congress. The lawsuit argues that it is an unlawful transfer of funds.
Call me cynical, but I can’t help but think that the newfound urgency to move ahead with the suit has something to do with President Obama’s immigration order. If conservative Republicans aren’t satisfied with whatever confrontation their leaders manage to create with Obama over immigration, John Boehner can say, “Don’t forget, we’re suing him!”
But what do Republicans get if they win this suit? Not much more than a symbolic victory. The actual complaints in the suit were always strange — they’re suing Obama for delaying the employer mandate, a provision they despise. If they won, he’d be forced to speed up implementation of the mandate, even as Republicans are pressing to eliminate it altogether. And by the time the suit winds its way through the courts, the issue will probably be moot. The mandate for employers with over 100 workers goes into effect in January (though they are only required to cover 70 percent of their employees, and almost all companies of that size already provided coverage even before the law was passed). And the mandate for the mid-size companies goes into effect in a year. By the time the case is heard by a high court, the remedy it’s seeking will probably have already taken place.
As for the other of the suit’s complaints, on cost-sharing subsidies, if Republicans are successful in killing them it would mean that poor people would have to pay more in copays and deductibles. But unlike the subsidies in three dozen states that are at issue in the King v. Burwell lawsuit, which the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear, this provision isn’t critical to the law’s basic functioning. So apart from the satisfaction some Republicans might receive from making life harder for the working poor, even if they win this lawsuit they won’t have dealt the ACA a serious blow.
Legal experts who have looked at this suit haven’t found much merit in it, particularly on the claim about the employer mandate. Federal agencies frequently delay the implementation of far-reaching regulations while practical problems are worked out. But even if they prevail, all Republicans stand to gain is the ability to say that they beat Barack Obama in court. Which may be more than nothing, but it isn’t much more than that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, November 21, 2014
“When Government Succeeds”: Surrounded By Examples Of Government Success, Which Republicans Don’t Want You To Notice
The great American Ebola freakout of 2014 seems to be over. The disease is still ravaging Africa, and as with any epidemic, there’s always a risk of a renewed outbreak. But there haven’t been any new U.S. cases for a while, and popular anxiety is fading fast.
Before we move on, however, let’s try to learn something from the panic.
When the freakout was at its peak, Ebola wasn’t just a disease — it was a political metaphor. It was, specifically, held up by America’s right wing as a symbol of government failure. The usual suspects claimed that the Obama administration was falling down on the job, but more than that, they insisted that conventional policy was incapable of dealing with the situation. Leading Republicans suggested ignoring everything we know about disease control and resorting to extreme measures like travel bans, while mocking claims that health officials knew what they were doing.
Guess what: Those officials actually did know what they were doing. The real lesson of the Ebola story is that sometimes public policy is succeeding even while partisans are screaming about failure. And it’s not the only recent story along those lines.
Here’s another: Remember Solyndra? It was a renewable-energy firm that borrowed money using Department of Energy guarantees, then went bust, costing the Treasury $528 million. And conservatives have pounded on that loss relentlessly, turning it into a symbol of what they claim is rampant crony capitalism and a huge waste of taxpayer money.
Defenders of the energy program tried in vain to point out that anyone who makes a lot of investments, whether it’s the government or a private venture capitalist, is going to see some of those investments go bad. For example, Warren Buffett is an investing legend, with good reason — but even he has had his share of lemons, like the $873 million loss he announced earlier this year on his investment in a Texas energy company. Yes, that’s half again as big as the federal loss on Solyndra.
The question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in fact, on track to return profits of $5 billion or more.
Then there’s health reform. As usual, much of the national dialogue over the Affordable Care Act is being dominated by fake scandals drummed up by the enemies of reform. But if you look at the actual results so far, they’re remarkably good. The number of Americans without health insurance has dropped sharply, with around 10 million of the previously uninsured now covered; the program’s costs remain below expectations, with average premium rises for next year well below historical rates of increase; and a new Gallup survey finds that the newly insured are very satisfied with their coverage. By any normal standards, this is a dramatic example of policy success, verging on policy triumph.
One last item: Remember all the mockery of Obama administration assertions that budget deficits, which soared during the financial crisis, would come down as the economy recovered? Surely the exploding costs of Obamacare, combined with a stimulus program that would become a perpetual boondoggle, would lead to vast amounts of red ink, right? Well, no — the deficit has indeed come down rapidly, and as a share of G.D.P. it’s back down to pre-crisis levels.
The moral of these stories is not that the government is always right and always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs. But modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified. It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders want to make government work, they can.
And let’s be clear: The government policies we’re talking about here are hugely important. We need serious public health policy, not fear-mongering, to contain infectious disease. We need government action to promote renewable energy and fight climate change. Government programs are the only realistic answer for tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise be denied essential health care.
Conservatives want you to believe that while the goals of public programs on health, energy and more may be laudable, experience shows that such programs are doomed to failure. Don’t believe them. Yes, sometimes government officials, being human, get things wrong. But we’re actually surrounded by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 16, 2014
“A Cardinal Reality Facing The Justices”: The Supreme Court Is Now A Death Panel
Back in March 2011, when the biggest threats facing Obamacare were the Supreme Court and the 2012 elections, I argued that the demise of the Affordable Care Act would put people’s lives in immediate danger.
At the time, the law had relatively few beneficiaries—people under 26 covered by their parents’ health plans, a small population of people with pre-existing medical conditions. But some of them had already used their new coverage to finance the kinds of life-saving treatments that would leave them in need of chronic care for the rest of their lives. Take away the health law, and most of these organ transplant recipients and other patients would have become unable to afford their medications, and some of them would die.
Since then, millions of people have gained coverage under the law, and that group of chronic care patients has grown much larger. But despite the fact that the Court upheld the law, and President Obama won reelection, the ACA isn’t out of danger.
On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that will determine whether the federal government can continue to subsidize private ACA coverage in states that didn’t set up their own insurance exchanges.
That case is King v. Burwell, but the issue at stake has come to be defined by a comparable case called Halbig v. Burwell.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the challengers in King, but the Supreme Court agreed to grant cert to those challengers anyhow, despite the absence of a Circuit Court split. If the five conservative Supreme Court justices are so inclined, they can void ACA subsidies for millions of beneficiaries, and cripple the insurance markets in about three dozen states.
Some of those beneficiaries will be the kinds of transplant recipients and other patients I wrote about three and a half years ago. Except today there are many more of them. Several of these patients explained the risk to their lives in an amicus brief, urging a different circuit court to reject the challenge to the subsidies, and thus to the viability of the insurance markets their lives depend on.
“Without insurance, Jennifer [Causor’s] treatments would be completely unaffordable. Her transplant cost nearly $280,000. She takes three anti-rejection drugs, one of which has a sticker price of $2,400 per month…. Should she become uninsured, Jennifer would face bankruptcy and even death.”
You can read the whole brief below. Conservatives are brimming with excitement over the Court’s decision to hear the challenge. Should the five conservatives rule that the text of the law doesn’t provide for federal subsidies in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, they’ll place the onus on Congress or state governments to address the consequences for constituents who lose their benefits. The contested text could be fixed with a comically simple technical corrections bill, which Democrats would happily support. If Republicans were to sit on their hands, or use the ensuing chaos as leverage to extract unrelated concessions, it will cost people their lives. That is a cardinal reality facing justices, and the people soliciting their conservative activism.
There’s an ironic post-script to this article. The Supreme Court is likely to resolve this case with a 5-4 decision, one way or another. Either a single conservative will side with the Court’s four liberals as in 2012, and leave the law unscathed, or the five conservatives will align to void the subsidies.
Under the circumstances, supporters of the law might be nervous about the potential loss of a liberal justice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health and advanced age make many liberals very uneasy, especially now that Obama’s ability to fill Supreme Court vacancies has come into doubt. But for the purposes of King, this issue is immaterial.
If Ginsburg’s seat were to become vacant, then the fate of the law would remain in the hands of a conservative swing justice. A 4-4 split effectively upholds the lower court’s ruling—and since the Fourth Circuit upheld the subsidies, the subsidies would stand. If the Fourth Circuit had ruled the other way, her health would be much more material.
When I mentioned this admittedly morbid but nevertheless important curiosity on Twitter, a large number of dimwitted (or in some cases persistently dishonest) conservatives flooded my mentions column in outrage. Most of them missed the meaning altogether, and accused me of wishing death upon a conservative Supreme Court justice. But even the ones who didn’t managed to contain their enthusiasm over the possibility of millions of people losing insurance for a moment, to reprimand me for being so cavalier about people’s lives.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, November 7, 2014
“Don’t Be Fooled, GOP Not Trying To Help Hourly Workers”: The Next Attempt By Republicans To Mislead On The Affordable Care Act
If you were paying close attention, you would have heard a new phrase being repeated by Republicans, particularly Mitch McConnell, over the last few days: “restore the 40-hour workweek.” You may have said, “Wait, is the workweek not 40 hours anymore?” If you had no idea what McConnell is talking about—and I’m pretty sure he’s hoping very few people do—it sounds like he’s advocating some kind of pro-worker initiative. And indeed, that’s how he and John Boehner put it in their op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, saying that one of the top items on their agenda is to “restore the traditional 40-hour definition of full-time employment, removing an arbitrary and destructive government barrier to more hours and better pay created by the Affordable Care Act of 2010.”
Now we’re getting closer. The government, with that damn Obamacare, is cutting your hours and pay! As Boehner put it, we have to “restore the 40-hour workweek for American workers that was undone by Obamacare.” Since we’re probably going to be hearing this from a lot of Republicans in the coming days as they wax rhapsodic about their deep concern for America’s hourly workers, it would be good to clarify just what it is they’re talking about here.
So let’s be absolutely clear: what they’re proposing is to make it easier for large employers to have full-time employees to whom they don’t provide health insurance. That’s it.
This is about the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act. It required that companies with 50 or more employees provide health coverage to full-time workers. The mandate has been delayed—for companies with 100 or more workers it takes effect in January, while those with between 50 and 99 will have to comply in 2016. The law’s authors had to define “full-time” somehow, and they knew that if they defined it as someone working 40 hours, then employers could just cut people to 39 and deny them coverage. So they set the line at 30 hours, partly on the assumption that if an employer has a full-time employee, it would be difficult to cut them all the way down to 29 hours to declare them part time and avoid offering the coverage.
One really important thing to understand for context: almost all large employers already offer health coverage. In fact, 96 percent of firms with 50 or more workers do so, even before the mandate kicks in. Among larger firms the number is even higher. For all but a small number of firms, this provision doesn’t matter.
Republicans have always objected to the employer mandate, and they’d like to repeal it entirely. The fact that now McConnell and Boehner are suddenly talking about the question of where the line between part-time and full-time work is suggests strongly that they’re going to be introducing legislation to move that line. It takes a lot of gall to present it as some kind of pro-worker initiative, since what it actually means is, “We want to let your boss cut your hours from 40 to 39, then he’ll be able to take away your health coverage.” But they’re surely hoping that the debate will sound to the public like Republicans want to mitigate the job-killing effects of Obamacare and stand up for workers, while the President just wants government sticking its hand in everybody’s business. And who knows, they might be right.
For the record, there are strong arguments that the employer mandate should indeed be repealed—provided it’s replaced with new provisions that protect people whose employers drop coverage. And I’ve advocated de-coupling health insurance from employment for years. But don’t let Mitch McConnell fool you into thinking he’s trying to help hourly workers.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor,The American Prospect, November 7 2014
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