“Affordable Care Act For The Wealthy”: The Rest Of You Can Have Vouchers
It’s not uncommon for the über-wealthy to equip their mega-mansions with pricey private home theaters, spa-worthy washrooms, and palatial pools. Now an increasing number of the super-rich are setting aside space in their homes for another purpose: top-notch medical care.
According to Bloomberg, more well-off families are paying up to install at-home emergency rooms, which can cost upwards of $1 million, and forking over as much as $30,000 a year for “concierge care,” which puts the best-of-the-best physicians at their disposal anytime, anywhere.
“Wealthy people want to have a little exclusivity and want better service than they can get at their normal healthcare facility, and they’re willing to pay for it,” Rick Flynn, principal and head of the Family Office Group with Rothstein Kass, told Bloomberg.
Guardian 24/7, a Virginia-based medical care company founded by former White House physician Sean O’Mara, charges as much as $12,000 a month for its ReadyRooms, Bloomberg reported, which feature discreetly installed medical equipment available at the touch of a button.
If a medical emergency arises, homeowners can immediately contact an on-call emergency physician—a much faster response than waiting for an ambulance to arrive and transport the ailing homeowner to the hospital, the company’s website notes.
“Before Guardian, this kind of medical protection was only available to one person,” the company’s website says. “Now, presidential-level care can be yours—on your schedule and your terms.”
And if you thought for a minute the super-rich might have to be without immediate access to medical care outside the confines of their estates, think again. Guardian 24/7 installs any number of medical apparatuses from X-ray machines to CT scanners on yachts, motor coaches, and aircraft.
By: Meg Handley, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, March 16, 2012
“A Lying Candidate Will Be A Lying President”: More On Mitt Romney’s Lies
Is Mitt Romney a guy who tells a bunch of lies, or is he a liar? That the question Jonathan Chait asks, and he winds up sort-of defending Romney, saying that his lies, many of which revolve around his effort to deny his own history, have been practical in nature. “It’s Romney’s bad luck that fate has dictated his only path to the presidency lies in being a huge liar,” Chait says, so those lies don’t tell us much about what’s deep in Romney’s character.
There are two problems here. The first is that Romney lies about President Obama as often as he lies about himself. It’s just that when he does the former, he does it with actual squirming (if he’s sitting down), the phoniest smile you’ve ever seen, and panic in his eyes, so it’s really obvious. The second problem is that Chait’s distinction applies to pretty much every political liar in history. There’s always a reason why a politician lies. The biggest lies come when they get caught doing something they shouldn’t have (Nixon with Watergate, Reagan with Iran-Contra, Clinton with Monica Lewinsky). They might be telling themselves, “Taking responsibility is all well and good, but it’s better for the country if I get out of this scandal and continue with my duties.”
In fact, saving one’s own skin, whether from scandal or the displeasure of the party base, is a near-universal motivation for politicians’ lies. In Romney’s case, what he got caught doing wasn’t trading arms for hostages or getting serviced by a young intern, but supporting abortion rights and health care reform, which to the people whose votes he’s now seeking are sins even more deplorable. I’d argue that Romney’s lies about Obama (see here for some ) are the worse ones, because it wasn’t like some reporter backed him into a corner and he was grasping at straws to keep primary voters from hating him. He could make a critique of Obama that’s just as persuasive without making things up, but he chooses not to, fairly regularly.
So is there a real meaningful difference between a politician who’s a liar, and a politician who tells many lies? No—or, at least, none that will matter to us as citizens. Experience tells us that a guy who lies as a candidate will not only tend to lie just as much as a president, but will probably lie about the same kinds of things. If he’s lying on the campaign trail about whether he has cheated on his wife, it’s a good bet he’ll end up telling us more lies about future cheating. If he’s lying on the campaign trail about what his tax plan contains, it’s a good be he’ll end up lying to us about his tax plan when he tries to pass it, as George W. Bush did.
So the really important thing to watch out for is the guy who tells lies about policy. Which would seem to apply fairly well to Mitt Romney, whatever happens to lie deep within his heart.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, March 15, 2012
“A Window Into The Future”: Mitt Romney Won’t Enroll In Medicare And Doesn’t Want Anybody Else To Either
Mitt Romney hasn’t explained his announcement yesterday that he won’t be enrolling in Medicare despite turning 65, but as Jonathan Cohn points out, Romney is at least practicing what he preaches. Romney supports Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program, a plan that would effectively end Medicare as we know it, and Romney is putting his money where his mouth is by deciding against enrolling.
Romney’s decision is a window into the future that he promises to deliver. Instead of a Medicare program that directly provides coverage, Romney wants seniors to obtain coverage from private insurers. Depending on their income and personal wealth, a portion of that coverage would be subsidized, but the guaranteed coverage of Medicare would be eliminated.
The fact that Romney was able to forego the Medicare system without penalty or punishment puts the lie to the notion that government health care programs are tyrannical. That’s an important fact to point out, because even though any senior who doesn’t want Medicare coverage could walk away from the system, just like Mitt Romney did, the overwhelming majority of them don’t—and that’s a testament to the effectiveness of Medicare.
But even though Medicare works, Mitt Romney wants to end the program as we know it. He wants Medicare to be transformed into a voucher provider, subsidizing private insurance plans instead of directly covering medical care. For 99 percent of Americans, it would be a radical overhaul, raising costs and making it difficult if not impossible to find insurance. Given his means, Romney would do fine in such a system. That’s basically the system he’s living in now, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize most people can’t afford what he can afford. And if Medicare were privatized as he proposes, that’s exactly what he would force every American senior to do.
If you’re only concerned about personal benefit, Medicare might not turn out to be the best deal in the world for someone like Mitt Romney, who is fabulously wealthy and doesn’t need the coverage. But even the Mitt Romneys of the world are better off living in a society where senior citizens have the security of health care coverage that Medicare provides. If we were to adopt Mitt Romney’s proposal to turn it into a voucher system, Medicare would no longer provide it’s greatest benefit of all: the peace of mind that comes with knowing that every single senior citizen has the health care coverage they need.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, March 13, 2012
“A Platform To Revitalize America”: An Idiotic Wish List Of Conservative Senate Tea Party Caucus Policies
When Bill Clinton left the White House just 12 years ago, the federal budget deficit was quite literally gone, and the nation was running a surplus for the first time in a generation. After Republicans approved two massive tax breaks, expanded Medicare, put two wars on the national credit card, and crashed the economy, the fiscal mess Clinton had cleaned up was back.
We’ve seen some modest progress on this front, but even under the most optimistic of scenarios, a balanced budget is nowhere in sight.
That is, unless we adopt a new plan from three far-right senators, who’ve mapped out a way to get us back to 2001 figures in a hurry.
Members of the Senate Tea Party Caucus on Thursday announced a plan to balance the budget in five years, cutting spending by nearly $11 trillion compared to President Obama’s budget.
The plan, dubbed “A Platform to Revitalize America,” is a wish list of conservative policies, none of which have any chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate or being signed into law by a liberal Democratic president.
The ambitious blueprint would achieve a $111 billion surplus in fiscal year 2017.
“The whole point here is to show we can reasonably balance the budget within a five-year period,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), one of the sponsors of the plan.
Well, “reasonably” is a subjective term.
The plan, also endorsed by Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), would produce a surplus by 2017 by effectively repealing most of the 20th century.
The “Platform to Revitalize America” has it all figured out: Medicare would be privatized out of existence; Social Security eligibility would be restricted; while Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps, and child nutrition programs would all be gutted through state block grants.
The federal departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development would also all be eliminated. Pentagon spending, by the way, would not be touched.
See how easy it is to balance the federal budget in hardly any time at all?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 9, 2012
A “Special Kind Of Human Being”: Rick Santorum’s Despicable And Hurtful Health Care Lie
You have to want to be President awfully badly to purposely scare the hell out of parents whose children face illness and disability in their lives. You also have to be a perfectly despicable human being.
Appearing yesterday with his wife, Karen, on the Glenn Beck program, Rick Santorum joined his wife in ‘revealing’ that it was the passage of Obamacare that motivated them to enter into the presidential race.
According to Karen Santorum, “Because we have as you know a little angel, little Bella, special needs little girl, and when Obamacare passed, that was it, that put the fire in my belly.”
Had that been the end of it, I’d have no problem whatsoever with Mrs. Santorum’s comment. If Karen Santorum feels that there is a better way to protect the health and wellbeing of her child, it is not only her right but her responsibility to do everything she can on behalf of her little girl and every child out there in similar circumstances. I would fully respect her for the same even if I disagree with her assessment of what the law means to her daughter and others who suffer illness.
But it did not end there—not by a long shot. Instead, Rick Santorum chimed in his agreement by arguing that the health care law would ration care based on the ‘usefulness’ of an individual.
It’s all about utilization, right? It’s all about how do we best allocate resources where they are most effectively used? […] Government allocating resources best on how to get the best bang for your dollars and it’s all about utility. It’s all about the usefulness of the person to society, instead of the dignity of every human life and the opportunity for people who love and care for people to give them the best possibility to have the best possible life.
I don’t believe that Rick Santorum knows the first thing about dignity in a human life. He couldn’t. If he did he could not possibly have made such a statement knowing how this would cause fear for so many when it is a complete lie.
Never mind that the ACA has made it possible for children like Bella Santorum to always access health insurance, without lifetime caps and without the possibility for exclusion because of being born with a tragic illness or disability. Never mind that, because of the ACA, children born into a lifetime of medical challenges will never again face a time when they are denied the health insurance necessary to pay for their expensive healthcare needs.
And never mind that we are left to scratch our heads in wonderment that leading organizations such as the American Association of People with Disabilities, National Organization For Rare Disorders, The Arc of the United States, and numerous additional widely recognized and respected groups whose sole purpose is to represent the needs of those Santorum tells us will be deemed disposable, have not only registered their support for the ACA, but have gone to the trouble and expense to actually file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to defend the law.
Apparently, Santorum either believes that these organizations are led by the dumbest people alive; that they have entered into some sort of deal with the devil to sell out the very people they exist to defend for reasons that escape the rational mind; or he simply could not care less that his statements will be heard by people who are the parents of special children and that they will be terrified.
Let’s take a look at the what law actually does and who it affects.
The government board that Santorum pretends to fear is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) which is authorized to make changes to Medicare—and only Medicare. Accordingly, while some children with challenges like little Bella Santorum could find themselves qualified for coverage in Medicare, young Bella would not be affected by any decisions of the IPAB as the Santorum family has their own insurance coverage. Further, the legislative record makes clear that the IPAB is not to offer any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or increase Medicare beneficiary premiums, increase Medicare beneficiary cost sharing (deductibles, coinsurance, or co-payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.
And if, by some evil act, the IPAB does attempt to ration healthcare, Congress has the specific authority under the law to shoot it right down.
If Rick Santorum doesn’t understand the law, he should. And if he is too lazy or finds it too inconvenient to correctly cite the law when lying is so much better for political purposes, then he could,at least, show sufficient humanity to avoid targeting his political potshots in a way designed to frighten those with challenged children.
You see, should the ACA continue to be the law of the land and Rick Santorum is not president, Santorum gets to return to his cushy lobbying gig. But all of these parents with special needs children—the people Santorum has so needlessly frightened—will be left to worry forever because Rick Santorum thought this all made for a nifty campaign pitch.
I guess when your ambition is as big as Senator Santorum’s, you can’t be worried about the damage to you do to those who are the most vulnerable.
I understand very well that many people object to the Affordable Care Act for a variety of reasons. And while I am convinced that if people better understood the law the result would be greater support for the law, this is wholly beside the point.
If your own judgment is that Obamacare is not the best way to address our healthcare problems, fine. That’s what America is all about. If you have a better idea as to how to deal with the issue then, by all means, vote for those who share your approach and work hard to make any change you believe is necessary, even if that includes repealing the Act.
However, when Rick Santorum tells us that the law would deny the right to life and the care needed to sustain that life to children like his own daughter, because such a child would be deemed to not be of ‘sufficient use to society’, he accuses the President, every member of Congress who supported the law, and every other supporter, such as myself, of being unfit to walk to this earth.
Anyone is welcomed to disagree with my judgment as to whether the Affordable Care Act is a good or a bad law. If my opinion is wrong, it won’t be the first time or the last that this will prove to be the case. But if you are going to accuse me of being willing to allow a child—or anyone else— to die because I would somehow deem her to be inconsequential to society, you’d really better be prepared to not only say that to my face but take the punishment that I promise you will follow.
What’s all the more amazing is that Santorum’s statement doesn’t even make sense.
In point of fact, the elements of the law that allegedly so concern Santorum do not even begin to ‘kick in’ until 2014. Thus, President Obama would only preside over its implementation for a very few years. And yet, Rick Santorum suggests that he is of the belief that Congresses and presidents in the years to come—some of whom will no doubt be Republican—would stand idly by while people are allowed to die because they are no longer deemed useful to society.
It is precisely because Santorum’s statement makes no sense, and precisely because he so badly cites the reality of the law, that we know that it is nothing but pure politics. And playing politics with the hearts of people whose lives are already tough enough takes a very special kind of human being—the kind that would never be welcomed at my dinner table.
American politics is a contact sport to be sure. But when the front-runner for his party’s nomination is willing to level charges such as this just to score some cheap political points while giving every parent with a challenged child a false reason to lie awake at night with worry, it is Rick Santorum’s usefulness to our society —not the value of the sick and disabled—that remains very much in question.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, February 25, 2012
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