“Somebody’s Got To Sell That Platform”: Wingnuts’ New 2016 Hero? Marsha Blackburn Is Perfect!
Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn is having a moment, of sorts. An anonymous aide told Real Clear Politics last week that she was going to New Hampshire to “test the waters” for a 2016 presidential run. And why not? Blackburn would be the only woman in the race (so far), and she’s no worse than the rest of the oft-mentioned male candidates.
She’s no better, either, despite being floated as someone who might help Republicans with skeptical women voters. Blackburn, you’ll recall, became the public face of the House GOP’s 20-week abortion ban last year when Rep. Trent Franks said the bill didn’t exempt cases of rape because “the incidence of pregnancy from rape is very low.” She had earlier become a GOP hero for insisting on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that women “didn’t want” pay equity laws. “I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female, I wanted it because I was the most well-qualified person for the job,” she told David Gregory. “And making certain that companies are going to move forward in that vein, that is what women want.” In fact, women overwhelmingly want pay equity, and they support laws to achieve it, according to public opinion polls.
Now that pay equity is back in the news, thanks to Democrats pushing the Paycheck Fairness Act, Blackburn is in demand again. She told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday that “we’re all for equal pay.” But the GOP supports neither the Paycheck Fairness Act nor the minimum wage, which would hugely help women, who make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers. “I would love for women to be focused on maximum wage,” Blackburn bizarrely explained. She went on to insist “I have fought to be recognized with equality for a long time. A lot of us get tired of guys condescending to us.”
This is what Republicans hope they can reduce this debate to: complaining about “guys condescending to us,” not guys being paid more, or guys paying less for insurance (as they did before the Affordable Care Act) or guys making laws that tell women what they can do with their bodies.
Appearing at the Freedom Summit in New Hampshire, Blackburn tried out the idea that it’s actually Democrats who are condescending to women.
“Women aren’t a cheap date,” she told conservatives there. “Women want a little bit more out of life than contraceptives.” Describing women as any kind of “date,” whether cheap or expensive, seems condescending to me, but I’m not a Republican woman.
You’ve almost got to feel sorry for Republicans, they seem so clueless about what to do about their problem with female voters. The Associated Press has a story today about a new GOP strategy to court women, which comes down to encouraging male politicians to feature their wives and daughters in campaign ads, and something weirdly called “14 in ’14,” to recruit and train women under 40 to spread the GOP message in the last 14 weeks of the 2014 midterm campaign. That’s not recruiting and training women candidates, mind you, just some young women who will hit the campaign trail in the home stretch on behalf of predominantly male candidates.
It’s worth noting that although Blackburn served in Congress when the GOP held the House, the Senate and the White House, the single piece of legislation I could find that she had signed into law was the Wool Suit Fabric Labeling Fairness and International Standards Conforming Act of 2006. She has also successfully sponsored resolutions renaming various Tennessee Post Office buildings as well as (to her credit) one honoring the late Issac Hayes.
None of that would likely hurt her in the GOP primaries, where Rep. Michele Bachmann and pizza magnate Herman Cain briefly held leads back in 2012.
A Blackburn run isn’t a done deal; a communications staffer denied that she was considering it. “She is running to represent the people of the TN 7th Congressional district,” Darcy Anderson told the Daily Caller. It’s also hard for House members of either party or gender to run for the White House, as they mostly lack a fundraising base and must also run for reelection every two years. Still, I wouldn’t count Blackburn out.
The GOP might be well-served by having a woman at the top of the ticket, at a time when their top priority is a massive transfer of income away from women and back to men, by repealing ACA provisions prohibiting charging women more for insurance. Somebody’s got to sell that platform, and it wouldn’t be the first time a terrible, thankless job got foisted on a woman.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 14, 2014
“What Congress Didn’t Say”: Obamacare Outlaws Policies That Are Essentially Worthless
As I watched Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius being grilled by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, it was immediately clear to me just how many of them are in the pockets of the industry I used to work for.
Former colleagues of mine undoubtedly had a hand in writing the members’ comments and questions. Their behavior showed just how much more willing they are to protect the profits of health insurers than protect the health and financial well- being of their constituents.
I got the same treatment from many of those committee members when I provided testimony in March — or tried to. I had been invited to talk about the business practices of insurers — practices that have contributed to the rising number of uninsured and underinsured Americans. Among them: refusing to sell policies to millions of us because of preexisting conditions and charging exorbitant premiums for skimpy coverage to others.
When I tried to tell the tale of a Florida woman who died of cancer last year because she was priced out of the market and was unable to buy coverage at any price, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from my home state of Tennessee, cut me off. She clearly had no interest in hearing about Leslie Elder or anything else I had to say. Instead, Blackburn held forth for more than five minutes and gave me all of 20 seconds to respond.
Throughout that hearing, a former co-worker from my Humana days, who later worked for the industry’s big lobbying group and then the Bush administration, stood a few feet behind Blackburn. That former co-worker now serves as senior policy adviser to the committee. So I was not the least bit surprised that Blackburn was determined to give me as little time to talk as possible.
During the Sebelius hearing, Blackburn and other GOP members talked about letters constituents have received informing them that their policies will not be available next year. How could that be, they asked, when the president assured us four years ago that, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” Blackburn, et al accused the president of being dishonest.
Obama should not have used those exact words. That’s because one reason for the Affordable Care Act in the first place was to protect us from insurers all too willing to lure us into inadequate policies with slick marketing materials. Insurers have made billions in profits from selling such junk insurance, and people like Blackburn clearly want to get rid of the law that makes junk insurance illegal.
As I wrote in Deadly Spin, a years-long industry strategy has been to shift more and more medical expenses to patients. As part of that strategy, big insurance firms bought smaller companies that specialize in limited-benefit plans, which often provide such skimpy coverage that some insurance brokers have refused to sell them.
Cigna, for example, marketed a limited-benefit plan to narrowly targeted prospective customers: mid-sized employers with high employee turnover, such as chain restaurants. The underwriting criteria was specific. The average age of an employer’s workers couldn’t be higher than 40 and no more than 65 percent of the workers could be female. (Insurers have long charged women more than men because in their eyes being born female is a pre-existing condition.) In addition, employers had to have a 70 percent or higher annual employee-turnover rate, meaning that most employees wouldn’t stay on the job long enough to use their benefits. Employees also could not get coverage for care related to any pre-existing condition during their first six months of enrollment.
Limited-benefit plans like that one, blessedly, will not be available next year, and that’s because of the Affordable Care Act. Neither will plans with sky-high deductibles. Another way insurers have shifted costs to patients in order to enhance profits: luring or forcing them into plans with such high deductibles they join the ranks of the underinsured the moment they enroll. When people in these plans get seriously sick or injured, they are on the hook for thousands of dollars in medical bills they’ll have to pay out of their own pockets.
Millions of Americans — including my son, Alex — got letters from their insurers in the years before the ACA was enacted informing them that their plans were being discontinued. Why? To fulfill the industry strategy of moving people out of plans with affordable co-payments and co-insurance obligations and into high-deductible or limited-benefit plans. Such plans are far more profitable.
Keep this in mind the next time you hear a politician railing against Obamacare because people are getting letters from their insurers. The truth these politicians want to obscure is that Obamacare is protecting their constituents from buying coverage that provides little to no shield against financial ruin. And that protection is something the insurance industry wants to get rid of.
By: Wendell Potter, The Center for Public Integrity, November 4, 2013
“Breathtakingly Cynical”: Guess Who Really Wants to Take Away Your Insurance? Republicans!
Republicans are outraged that some Americans must give up their current insurance plans because they don’t satisfy Obamacare’s new regulations for benefits and pricing. Partly they are mad at President Obama, because he repeatedly said people who like their coverage would get to keep it. And that’s fine. As I said yesterday, Obama should have said “most” people, not “all” people. Readers can decide for themselves whether, by the standards of politics, that’s a felony or misdemeanor.
But Republicans are also making a substantive argument here. It’s unconscionable, they say, that lawmakers would force people to give up their current coverage. Just a few minutes ago, during congressional testimony by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, an angry Representative Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee practically screamed at the witness: “You’re taking away their choice!”
It’s good politics, I’m sure. It’s also breathtakingly cynical. Republicans have repeatedly endorsed proposals that would take insurance away from many more Americans—and leave them much, much worse off.
Start with the federal budgets crafted by Paul Ryan. You remember those, right? Those proposals passed through the House with unanimous Republican support and were, in 2012, a basis of the Republican presidential platform. Those budgets called for dramatic funding cuts to Medicaid. If Republicans had swept into power and enacted such changes, according to projections prepared by Urban Institute scholars and published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 14 and 20 million Medicaid recipients would lose their insurance. And that doesn’t even include the people who are starting to get Medicaid coverage through Obamacare’s expansions of the program. That’s another 10 to 17 million people.
And it’s not just people on Medicaid who would lose coverage if Republicans got their way. While Republicans in Congress have not unified by a single alternative to Obamacare, a building block of virtually every proposal in circulation is to equalize the tax treatment of employer-sponsored insurance and individual insurance—which, in layman’s terms, means making it much more appealing for somebody who gets coverage on the job to buy coverage on his or her own. Typically these proposals would allow insurers selling individual coverage to continue some of their current practices, like charging higher premiums or refusing to cover certain services for people with pre-existing conditions, or offering coverage with serous gaps in benefits. Most experts believe such reforms would hike the cost of employer plans, as only sicker people remained on them, potentially creating a “death spiral” that would lead to fewer employers offering plans. (Even the more optimistic estimates assume erosion of employer-sponsored insurance.)
Note the difference in scale here. Nobody knows exactly how many people are giving up non-group policies because insurers are reacting to Obamacare regulations. But it’s probably in the millions—and still substantially less than the number of people who would lose insurance if Ryan’s proposal for Medicaid became law.
More important, though, look at the kind of change taking place. Almost everybody giving up a non-group policy today has the option to get new insurance either through Medicaid or one of the new Obamacare marketplaces. Some people will pay more for these policies, some will pay less, but everybody will be getting coverage that includes an array of “essential” benefits, limits out-of-pocket spending, and can never be taken away or limited because the policyholder gets sick. In other words, everybody ends up with comprehensive, stable insurance. It may not be the policy he or she has today. But the vast majority of people with non-group market don’t keep the same policy for more than two years anyway.
Under the Republican plan, by contrast, people losing employer insurance would end up in the dysfunctional, non-reformed individual market—the one full of confusing, junk policies that might not cover basic services like maternity or mental health or have huge gaps in coverage. And the people losing Medicaid? They would end up with … nothing at all.
The real issue here isn’t simply Republican opportunism and hypocrisy—although, please, let’s not ignore that either. The real issue is about the true trade-offs of policy. Both sides offer them. With Obamacare, a small number of people lose their current insurance but they end up with alternative, typically stronger coverage. Under the plans Republicans have endorsed, a larger number of people would lose their current insurance, as people migrated to a more volatile and less secure marketplace. Under Obamacare, the number of Americans without health insurance at all will come down, eventually by 30 or 40 million. Under most of the Republican plans, the number of Americans without insurance would rise.
Honest Republicans would justify their policies by arguing that Medicaid is a wasteful, inefficient program not worth keeping—and their changes, overall, would reduce health care spending while maximizing liberty. In other words, forcing people to give up their coverage is worth it. I don’t agree with those arguments, but they are honest. But they should stop pretending that it’s possible to address the problems of American health care without disrupting at least some people’s insurance arrangements—because, after all, they want to do the very same thing.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, October 30, 2013
“The Right’s Sickest Obamacare Lie Yet”: Republicans Believe People Who Live In Flat Places Shouldn’t Have To Buy Cars With Brakes
During Congressional hearings with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) made an interesting argument that some Americans don’t want quality health insurance. “Some people like to drive a Ford and not a Ferrari,” Blackburn asserted. But that begs the question: What kind of Ford?
As early as 1972, there were reports that when a Ford Pinto was involved in a low-speed collision, the car would spontaneously burst into flames. According to a 1977 investigation by Mother Jones magazine, Ford was aware of the problem — resulting from a flaw in the gas tank design — but instead of paying to recall and redesign the car, Ford decided it would be cheaper to pay for the lawsuits. Ultimately, at least 27 people and as many as 180 people died as a result of Pinto fires. But it took the government forcing Ford to recall the Pinto for the problem to actually be solved.
In 2009, millions of Americans lacked any health insurance whatsoever and millions more had private health insurance metaphorically designed to explode at the hint of any serious illness or pre-existing conditions or exorbitant medical costs. So, in 2009, 14,000 Americans were losing their health insurance every single day. And medical bills were prompting more than 60% of all bankruptcies in our nation. In other words, many health insurance policies were patently dangerous and unsafe.
Now, Congresswoman Blackburn and her ilk might argue that people should have been free to buy the Pinto if they wanted, without government intrusion into personal choices or private business practice — just like they seem to want to argue that Americans should be free to hold onto their inadequate, costly and reckless insurance policies that throw them off at the slightest sign of illness while forcing costs up for the rest of us. But arguably most Americans want to buy cars that are safe. Auto companies didn’t want to install seat belts and airbags, just like Ford didn’t want to fix the Pinto. That was government regulation at work, making us all more safe — even if, in some cases, it made cars more expensive. We ultimately save, in every way imaginable, when the number of traffic deaths are dramatically cut.
This is, in effect, exactly what the Affordable Care Act does with respect to some currently existing, private insurance policies. If those policies don’t meet a new, higher bar of quality coverage, then the government will no longer allow insurance companies to sell them. Instead, the 5 percent of Americans who rely on the individual insurance market for their coverage will have other options, all that provide better quality coverage and many of which are far less expensive. Plus at least half of folks on the individual market will be eligible for subsidies that further bring costs down.
A great example comes from Deborah Cavallaro, who has been making the rounds on television complaining about her current insurance plan being cancelled. Cavallaro had not looked into her other, new options under Obamacare until a Los Angeles Times reporter called. Together, they looked at Cavallaro’s options — and found a “silver” plan for Cavallaro that would cost slightly more in her monthly premium but save her tons in terms of her annual deductible and out-of-pocket costs as well as doctor visit expenses. Plus, thanks to Obamacare, this plan would not be subject to the annual payment caps or pre-existing condition clauses that have been exploding in the faces of consumers for decades. After all, it’s important to remember that in 2009, most Americans were not very satisfied with their insurance plans. People wanted better options and now, thanks to Obamacare, they’ve got ‘em!
Congresswoman Blackburn and her cohort might fire back something about young healthy men being required to pay for good insurance plans that cover maternity — one of 10 basic coverage requirements mandated under the Affordable Care Act, this one designed to undo the history of insurance plans discriminating against women and families. Perhaps Republicans might also argue that Americans who live in really flat places should be able to buy cars without breaks. But that wouldn’t be safe for drivers or the rest of us. And in the case of health care reform in particular, the point here is to bring down costs and raise the quality of care for all of us. Those young, healthy men are going to grow up and have families one day — and then eventually become elderly — and will benefit from an insurance system that keeps costs manageable throughout and doesn’t kick off the elderly or infirm. Just like we all benefit from seatbelts and airbags, even if we never get in an accident.
Nobody is forcing anyone to buy a Ferrari plan in the individual health insurance exchange. At least 6.4 million Americans will pay less than $100 per month for coverage in the Obamacare exchanges — which means there are plenty of Ford’s available. What the Affordable Care Act simply ensures is that those policies will be safe and reliable — and not catch fire when we least expect it.
By: Sally Kohn, Salon, October 31, 2013
“Defiant Obamacare Defense”: A New World Where Insurers Have To Cover Categories Of Treatments They Never Had To Before
President Obama’s speech at Faneuil Hall was probably his most passionate and unapologetic defense of the health-care law in ages, maybe since its passage. At times like this in the past, Old Mr. Reasonable has hemmed and hawed, ceding that his opponents had a point, but insisting—reasonably, of course—that he had a better one if you just stopped and thought about it. But Wednesday afternoon in Boston gave us a different Obama. He took a page out of the Bush playbook or, dare I say it, even the Cheney one. If things are going a little rocky at the moment, it doesn’t matter; cede nothing. Stick to plan. No matter the merits or facts, it’s the only approach that our political culture respects.
The money moment of the speech, of course, came when he answered the questions raised by the NBC report Tuesday. According to NBC, people who had bought insurance on the private market who don’t have either employer or government coverage were getting hammered by Obamacare. They were getting letters telling them their coverage had expired and then finding that the new coverage available to them was going to cost more. It flew in the face, said NBC’s Lisa Myers, of Obama’s promise that if you had coverage now and liked it, nothing would happen to you.
She was right. He shouldn’t have said it. And in Boston he didn’t exactly say, “I shouldn’t have said it.” But he did turn it around and say for that small percentage of people, the coverage they’re going to end up with is better! It also just might be cheaper, he said, and they are going to have peace of mind: “They can’t use allergies or pregnancy or sports injury or the fact that you’re a woman to charge you more. They can’t do that anymore!”
It’s an interesting, by which I mean preposterous, meme that’s developing on the Republican side. On Wednesday morning, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the issue. Some people, Blackburn said, “would rather drive a Ford than a Ferrari.” No denying that; in my younger and single and childless days, I certainly would have opted for a Ford plan instead of a Ferrari plan, so up to a point, Blackburn is making sense.
But Obamacare creates a world where insurers have to cover several categories of treatments that they never had to cover before, and since people with those conditions are now going to sign up and use those services, it’s going to cost more in some cases. And it’s understandable if people are upset about that. But Blackburn’s analogy, of course, breaks down because any citizen, at some unknowable future point, may be hit with one of those conditions. A person might develop mental illness. Or their child might. No imaginable circumstance could make a reasonable Ford-owner think, “Damn, I should have bought that Ferrari.” But numerous circumstances could make the self-employed citizen or parent think, “Damn, I’m glad I bought that Ferrari plan.”
What’s most fascinating to me about the whole thing is that the experience is training, or is going to train, Americans to rethink the really fundamental questions about how life and society are organized in a way politics rarely does. One of the major differences between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives believe in the primacy of the individual, while liberals want people to think about the community. Another difference, related, has to do with the two creeds’ opposing conceptions of individualism. Conservatives go for the whole rugged individualism thing, whereas the liberal view of the individual is closer to “there but for the grace of God go I.”
Well, the nature of health-care coverage is it has the power to bring consideration of these questions to the fore. A country where people have to sit down and choose how best to protect themselves and their loved ones against pain and death, and where they have to think about the trade-offs between paying more and having better coverage, is a country where people are being forced, in a way, to think about the most profound questions of community and the individual—of how much responsibility we ought to be forced to shoulder for each other.
I used to think, “This is just like auto insurance; you’re a safe driver, but you insure yourself against the unsafe drivers, and everybody understands that, so why should this be different?” But it is, somehow. It’s so much more personal. It’s about our frailty as human beings, and contemplation of our frailty makes us both obstinate and individualistic (“I can take of myself, Jack!”) and, in our more honest moments, vulnerable and communitarian (“What will I do if I really get sick?”). Forcing people to think about their coverage forces them to think about all that.
How will it turn out? Who knows. It has the positive potential of making people, a majority of people, see that this all makes a kind of sense, that they are not, whether they like it or not, autonomous actors. That, come to think of it, is what terrifies conservatives. Since 1980, they have trained people to think chiefly about themselves, unburdened of the context of society. Obamacare will force them to think of society. And most people, not being selfish asses (and most people aren’t), will, once the kinks are worked out, accept it. Polls are already indicating that. No wonder Ted Cruz is losing it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 30, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 