“Accidental Disclosure”: Aetna Shareholders “Dismayed” Over Company Donations To Anti-Obamacare Campaigns
A group of Aetna shareholders is challenging the health insurer for donating to the American Action Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — two organizations dedicated to undermining Obamacare.
Aetna donated over $7 million to the two groups during the Democrats’ effort to enact health care reform, though the contributions did not become public until this year, when the company accidentally “made the disclosure in a year-end regulatory filing with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.”
In a letter to Aetna on Monday, the shareholders claim that the company did not comply with disclosure policies or inform its investors about the donations:
“We believe Aetna is not in compliance with its corporate political and lobbying disclosure policy, a policy which we negotiated and expected would be met in spirit and in letter,” read the Monday letter to Aetna CEO and President Mark Bertolini from Mercy Investment Services Inc. and the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, two Catholic groups with investments in Aetna. […]
But in their recent complaint to Aetna, the Catholic investors point to a 2007 letter of agreement in which Aetna promised shareholders that it would disclose all expenditures for lobbying and political purposes, as well as trade association payments and grass-roots spending. The Aetna policy followed a 2006 shareholder resolution calling for the company to disclose its political spending.
“We, investors, withdrew the resolution in good faith expecting that the resolution establishing oversight and transparency would be followed, revised as best practices evolved and in place for reference by the members of the committee preparing the annual reports,” read the letter. In an interview, Sister Valerie Heinonen, one of the letter’s authors, said investors were “dismayed” that the agreed-on policy had not been followed.
Aetna maintains that it intended the funds to be used for educational purposes, yet both the American Action Network and the Chamber are still fighting reform. Just days after the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the law, AAN announced a $1.2 million advertising campaign urging Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, July 14, 2012
“Ignore The Republican Hysteria”: Understanding The Health Care Law Is A Public Responsibility
In a sane climate, Mitt Romney would be running for president on his one big success as a politician: achieving something close to universal private health insurance coverage as governor of Massachusetts. Romneycare cut costs, improved health care outcomes and is quite popular there.
Alas, President Obama’s election has driven many Republicans so crazy that the putative nominee makes an unconvincing show of despising his own brainchild.
Has there ever been a more unconvincing faker in American politics? Romney acts as if he thinks voters are morons. But then, right-wing hysteria over the Supreme Court’s upholding “Obamacare” shows he could be correct.
Mandating health insurance wasn’t Romney’s own idea. The conservative Heritage Foundation saw it as a way to realize the practical and moral benefits of a socialized, government-run health care system like Canada’s through private, for-profit insurance companies — the best of both worlds.
Romney even wrote a 2009 USA Today column advising President Obama about the mandate’s advantages: “Using tax penalties, as we did [in Massachusetts], or tax credits, as others have proposed,” he wrote, “encourages ‘free riders’ to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.”
The president put it this way in reacting to the Supreme Court’s validating Obamacare: “People who can afford to buy health insurance should take the responsibility to do so.”
So is it a tax, or is it a penalty?
The correct answer is “who cares?” Provide your family with the security of a decent health insurance policy and you don’t need to pay it.
Tyranny? Oh, grow up. The government can already make you sign up for Social Security, educate your children, vaccinate your dog, send you to fight a war in Afghanistan, limit how many fish you can catch, and put you in prison and seize your property for growing pot.
Furthermore, Justice Roberts is right. The U.S. government encourages all kinds of virtuous behavior through the tax code. You can get married, or pay higher taxes. Buy a house, have children, invest in a retirement account, even raise cattle (my personal favorite) or pay higher taxes.
And buying health insurance is an intolerable offense against liberty?
Ask Rush Limbaugh who pays for his Viagra. Answer: his employer-provided health insurance company. Only impoverished people, deadbeats and fools go without it.
And guess what? You’re already paying for their medical expenses when time and chance happens to them. As it happens to everybody, even right-wing Supreme Court justices who think it’s clever to compare an inessential food like broccoli to a universal human need like health care.
You can eat your vegetables or not; it’s entirely up to you.
But you can’t not get sick or hurt. And moral considerations aside, the rest of us can’t risk letting you lie down and die on the road. After all, it might be communicable. So there’s no non-participation in the health care system. Even if they drag you in feet-first, there you are.
And somebody’s got to pay for it.
It follows that the minority’s distinction between “activity” and “inactivity” with regard to health insurance is not merely specious legalistic jargon. Frankly, it’s downright adolescent.
Justice Scalia may increasingly resemble a small, volcanic Caribbean nation — eat your vegetables, Tony — but even he is not an island. We’re all in this together.
Previous to Obamacare, the United States has had the most inefficient health care finance in the advanced world, spending by far the highest percentage of its GDP on health care while getting worse results. Most western countries spend a fraction of what we do on health care and their citizens are demonstrably healthier.
Ending the perennial war between hospital bureaucrats and number crunchers at insurance companies and government agencies over who’s going to pay for indigent care should begin to change that.
Meanwhile, now that Obamacare has passed constitutional muster, it’s time for the wise and judicious American public to get off their lazy keisters, ignore the hysteria and learn what’s in the law and what’s not.
I recently took a brief online quiz sponsored by the Kaiser Foundation. I hope you won’t think I’m bragging by saying I got a perfect score. It’s my job to know the basics. Apparently, most Americans don’t. The percentage of citizens ignorant of even the new law’s most basic provisions was shocking.
Granted, the White House has done a terrible marketing job. But no, there’s no new government-run insurance company. If you’ve already got a policy you like, keep it. No, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees need not provide insurance; but, yes, they get tax credits if they do. No, undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible for help.
Many of you have mistakenly trusted carnival barkers like Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Now that Obamacare’s the law, ignorance is no longer an excuse.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 4, 2012
“Call It A Penalty, Call It A Fine, Don’t Call It A Tax”: Debunking The Individual Mandate “Tax”
Having lost their Supreme Court fight against the Affordable Care Act, opponents of health care reform have in recent days been attacking the individual mandate provision of the law as a “tax” on the middle class. This line of reasoning only makes sense if you think penalties for littering, speeding, or engaging in other irresponsible behavior are also “taxes.”
Yes, it’s true that conservative Chief Justice John Roberts used a tax rationale when upholding the constitutionality of the individual mandate—and the entire law—last week. But Roberts was making a technical argument and using the word “tax” in a way that really only makes sense in an arcane legal context.
First, some background: The health care law’s so-called “individual mandate” provision requires people who can afford to buy health insurance to do so, and when it’s phased in, it will assess a penalty of up to 2.5 percent of household income on those who don’t. That’s only fair, since the health care costs of the uninsured are borne by the rest of us.
You don’t need a law degree to understand the difference between a fine and a tax, and this one falls pretty neatly into the former category, as we explain below. Moreover, the vast majority of Americans—rich, poor, or middle class—will never be assessed what’s more rightly understood as the “freeloader penalty” at the center of this debate.
Still, while the tax-themed attack on the individual mandate is incoherent, it remains dangerous. Opponents of health reform well understand the power of the T-word to fire popular resentment, and will try to confuse the public about what the individual mandate is and how it works. Here are some facts to keep in mind.
Unlike taxes, this penalty is avoidable
Taxes are, for the most part, involuntary. We pay taxes on our income and when we buy things. The only way to avoid taxes is to earn less money and consume less. Penalties and fines, however, are quite different. We can avoid fines by avoiding bad behavior.
The individual mandate presents people with a choice: Either have health insurance or pay an annual penalty. The only people who will pay this penalty are those who willfully neglect to take responsibility for getting health insurance—and then stick the rest of us with the bill when they get sick or injured.
People who have health insurance will never pay the penalty
More than 80 percent of Americans today have health insurance, and the health reform law will dramatically expand coverage. When the law is fully phased in, only 6 percent of Americans will face the choice of either buying private insurance they can afford or paying a penalty, according to the Urban Institute. And only 1.2 percent of Americans will actually pay the penalty, according to congressional estimates.
Americans who can’t afford insurance will have it provided for them
Under the law, people who can’t afford to buy insurance will receive Medicaid coverage or the government will split with them the cost of buying private health insurance. Therefore, the penalty will only apply to people who can afford health insurance but would rather have taxpayers—you and me—bail them out when they need medical attention.
The individual mandate is grounded in conservative principles of individual responsibility
The idea that people should be required to purchase health insurance if they can afford to do so was first popularized by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 1989 and first implemented in law by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—a Republican. The idea then and today is to promote individual responsibility and to prevent self-sufficient people from relying on public assistance. “[E]ach household has the obligation, to the extent it is able, to avoid placing demands on society by protecting itself,” Heritage wrote in defense of the individual mandate.
Happily, the evidence suggests that the individual mandate penalty will apply nationwide to a small fraction of the population. Less than 1 percent of residents of Massachusetts, the only state with an individual mandate in place, were assessed the penalty in 2009.
Once the federal law takes full effect in 2014 and Americans see that the individual mandate penalty only applies to a small number of freeloaders, the antitax argument should lose all power.
It already appears to be waning in some very telling quarters. An advisor to Romney on Monday said that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee agrees with President Barack Obama that the individual mandate penalty is not a tax.
By: Gadi Dechter, Center for American Progress, July 3, 2012
“Less Than Forthcoming”: Clarence Thomas’s Wife Continued To Lobby Against Healthcare In 2011
Last week, a meme made its way around the Internet asking why Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was planning to rule on the healthcare law when his wife, a conservative lobbyist, has made so much money challenging the law.
Now, just days after healthcare law was upheld (with Clarence Thomas dissenting), new financial forms show that Thomas’s wife, Ginni, continued to rake in a profit from opposing healthcare reforms in 2011—even after she previously came under fire for doing so.
According to Thomas’s 2011 financial disclosure report form, filed on May 15 and obtained Friday by Whispers, Ginni Thomas made up to $15,000 working for political lobbying firm Liberty Consulting. The firm lobbied actively against the healthcare law, according to liberal news magazine Mother Jones.
Ginni formed Liberty Consulting after she was criticized for her work at Liberty Central, a non-profit tea party organization that also lobbied against the health care law.
In March of this year, Liberty Central was the subject of a letter sent to the IRS by Common Cause, a nonprofit that works for government accountability. The letter argued that Liberty Central violated the proportionality rule for non-profits because the majority of its activities were designed to help Republican candidates.
Ginni later stepped down from Liberty Central, but her involvement in conservative politics extends beyond these two groups. Among Ginni’s former employers is the Heritage Foundation, another vocal critic of the healthcare law. She also currently works as a “special correspondent” for the conservative website The Daily Caller.
In January 2011, Justice Thomas “inadvertently” left out information about his wife’s employment, including earnings over the past 13 years that added up to as much as $1.6 million.
Thomas himself has also been criticized for his links to the Republican party, most notably in a October 2010 New York Times story about a Republican donors event bankrolled by the conservative Koch brothers, which listed the Supreme Court justice as an attendee.
As a result of these “questions of candor, accountability, and ethics,” a new Change.org petiton, started by Garrett Troy, a recent graduate of the University of Washington, is calling for Thomas to resign. A similar petition created earlier on CredoAction.com has nearly 225,000 signatures.
“You have been less-than-forthcoming on matters concerning household fiduciary interests,” states the petition. “Justice Thomas, do you think you belong here?”
A request for comment from the Thomas’s office was not immediately returned.
By: Elizabeth Flock, Washington Whispers, U. S. and World Report, July 2, 2012
“Assuming Voters Are Fools”: GOP Tax Talk Takes A Trivial Turn
For more than three years, Republican critics of President Obama’s health care reform law have come up with all kinds of reasons to hate the law, most of which fall apart rather quickly under scrutiny. Thanks to last week’s Supreme Court ruling, however, the right has a new talking point they’ve largely ignored up until now: Obamacare raises taxes.
For Republicans, this should effectively end the conversation. The individual mandate counts as a “tax”; taxes are inherently evil; ergo the law is awful and anyone who supported it deserves to be publicly flogged. What’s more, conservatives are arguing that this wasn’t just any ol’ tax increase — it was the Largest Tax Increase Ever.
On Fox News, Jim Pinkerton characterized the mandate as “the biggest tax increase in the history of the universe.”
I hope most objective observers can agree this is, for lack of a better word, dumb. As Josh Marshall explained, “The Congressional Budget Office says the mandate penalty will raise $27 billion between 2012 and 2021. $27 billion over a decade. Anybody who cares to can do the math. But if you want to call it a ‘tax increase’ — which is debatable — it’s clearly one of the tiniest ones in history.”
This one tax penalty raises less than $3 billion a year, and it would affect about 1% of the population. What’s more, even if we’re generous, and assume the right is talking about all of the provisions within the law that raise new revenue, it’s still not even close to being the largest tax increase ever.
And just to top this off, Mitt Romney, the man Republicans want to be president, created and imposed the exact same tax penalty. He is, in fact, the only public official in American history to implement the policy the right is now pretending to find outrageous.
The entire argument is demonstrably ridiculous, apparently crafted under the assumption that voters are fools. We’ll see if the assumption is correct.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2012
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