Refusing to allow entire groups of people to participate freely in our economy is bad for everyone, and it's a worse crime than punching someone in the face and taking their money.
Rand Paul and his Tea Bagger friends seem not to understand that a civilized society must rein in the most base human behavior. Or perhaps they just have an odd definition of what base behavior is. How about subjecting people to abusive treatment based on the color of their skin? That's a formula for degraded human interaction if there ever was one. I would rather be punched in the face (which is obviously a crime) than to be exposed every day of my life to the possibility that I might be locked out from ordinary experiences that people with a different color of skin take for granted. I think refusing to serve people of a given race is a serious offense to basic human decency, and should continue to be a crime.
Perhaps more to the point, it would be a burden on our economy--and protecting the economy is another obligation of government.
And then we have arbitrary laws which have nothing to do with baseness. For example, the President of the US must be native born. That seems like a reasonable law to me. The problem is that Tea Partiers believe that their own arbitrary beliefs should have the same power as law(such as their irrational idea that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii despite newspaper announcements at the time of his birth and his often-produced birth certificate). This belief is plain nuts and is based on simple racism.
Republican candidate Rand Paul's controversial remarks on the 1964 Civil Rights Act unsettled GOP leaders this week, but they reflect deeply held iconoclastic beliefs held by some in his party, and many in the tea-party movement, that the U.S. government shook its constitutional moorings more than 70 years ago.
Mr. Paul and his supporters rushed to emphasize that his remarks did not reflect racism but a sincerely held, libertarian belief that the federal government, starting in the Roosevelt era, gained powers that set the stage for decades of improper intrusions on private businesses.
Mr. Paul, the newly elected GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, again made headlines Friday when he told ABC's "Good Morning America" that President Barack Obama's criticism of energy giant BP and of its oil-spill response was "really un-American."
That followed a tussle over the landmark civil-rights law, which Mr. Paul embraced after suggesting Wednesday that the act may have gone too far in mandating the desegregation of private businesses...
..."[W]e've never done it before" by itself is never a good argument that something is unconstitutional.
Today, almost no one can imagine the United States without the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- not even "little" Dr. Paul, who has disowned his theoretical musings. The Civil Rights Act completed the creation of a continental economy, where any citizen can go anywhere. Without it, America would be a different country, one that is missed only by those who write for websites named "Stormfront" or "Whitehonor.com."
A generation hence, I suspect, we are likely to be bemused that people ever thought the Constitution would block a modern nation from creating a modern health-care system.
The White House issued rules on Monday allowing young adults to remain covered by their parents’ health insurance policies up to age 26.
The promise of such coverage has attracted great interest. Employers and insurers say they have been flooded with inquiries.
Under the rules, an employer-sponsored health plan or a company selling individual insurance policies must offer coverage to subscribers’ children up to the age of 26, regardless of whether a child lives with his or her parents, attends college, is a dependent for income-tax purposes or receives financial support from the parents...
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has called on health insurer WellPoint to stop dropping coverage for patients recently diagnosed with breast cancer, calling the practice "deplorable."
In a letter dated April 22 to Angela Braly, WellPoint's chief executive, Sebelius said she was "surprised and disappointed" to learn from a Reuters report that the company had targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with intent to cancel their policies.
"As you know, the practice described in this article will soon be illegal," Sebelius wrote. "The Affordable Care Act specifically prohibits insurance companies from rescinding policies, except in cases of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of material fact."
Reuters reported on Thursday that WellPoint, the largest U.S. health insurer by enrollment, was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted patients recently diagnosed with breast cancer, among other conditions.
The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation by the company as it searched for excuses to drop coverage, according to government regulators and investigators...
The lawsuit against the health care overhaul filed Tuesday by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is focused on a provision that has long been advocated by conservatives, big business and the insurance industry.
The lawsuit by McCollum, a candidate for governor, and 12 other attorneys general, focuses on the provision that virtually all Americans will need to have health insurance by 2014 or face penalties.
The lawsuit calls this an "unprecedented encroachment on the liberty of individuals." It states the Constitution doesn't authorize such a mandate, the proposed tax penalty is unlawful and is an "unprecedented encroachment on the sovereignty of the states."
"The truth is this is a Republican idea," said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said she first heard the concept of the "individual mandate" in a Miami speech in the early 1990s by Sen. John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, to counter the "Hillarycare" the Clintons were proposing...
Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,005 adults Monday. Margin of error: +/-4 percentage points.
More Americans now favor than oppose the health care overhaul that President Obama signed into law Tuesday, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds — a notable turnaround from surveys before the vote that showed a plurality against the legislation.
By 49%-40%, those polled say it was "a good thing" rather than a bad one that Congress passed the bill. Half describe their reaction in positive terms — as "enthusiastic" or "pleased" — while about four in 10 describe it in negative ways, as "disappointed" or "angry."
The largest single group, 48%, calls the legislation "a good first step" that needs to be followed by more action...
After a year of political upheaval that swung from a triumphant Democratic sweep in Washington to the rise of the Tea Party movement, Congress on Sunday night sent to President Obama the most sweeping social program since Medicare was enacted in 1965.
The vote on the health care overhaul was 219-212, with not a single Republican supporting the measure.
Before the final debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco locked arms with her Democratic lieutenants, including civil rights veteran John Lewis, D-Ga., to enter the Capitol through a phalanx of angry protesters. It was an emphatic show of solidarity after several ugly incidents on Saturday when demonstrators hurled racial slurs at several African American members of Congress and anti-gay insults at Rep. Barney Frank, the openly gay Massachusetts Democrat.
"We will be joining those who established Social Security, Medicare and now, tonight, health care for all Americans," Pelosi told House members as she brought the debate to a close at 10:30 p.m. She invoked the memory of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, whose death so complicated passage of reform, saying health care "is the unfinished business of our society, that is, until today."
The health deal was sealed by early afternoon Sunday when anti-abortion Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., secured an executive order by the White House that would reaffirm the long-standing Hyde Amendment banning taxpayer funding of abortions...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama secured a landmark victory with the House of Representatives giving final approval to a sweeping healthcare overhaul, expanding insurance coverage to nearly all Americans.
...The health insurance industry vigorously opposed the overhaul. Insurance stocks rallied late last week as investors began to realize their worst fears had not materialized.
The overhaul will extend health coverage to 32 million Americans, expand the government health plan for the poor, impose new taxes on the wealthy and bar insurance practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing medical conditions...
Mar 22, 2010 Mitt Romney's healthcare hypocrisy and the GOP base Just four years ago, conservatives saluted him for signing a healthcare law that's very similar to ObamaCare By Steve Kornacki AP/Cliff Owen Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in February.
It’s not news when man bites dog, so why should it be any different when Mitt Romney makes a brash and insincere pronouncement?
And yet there was the one-time Massachusetts governor forcing his way into Monday morning’s headlines with what may have been the most over-the-top of all of the over-the-top Republican reactions to the House’s passage of Barack Obama’s healthcare plan.
“An unconscionable abuse of power,” Romney declared while asserting that the president “has betrayed his oath to the nation.”
When Mitt starts talking like this, it’s usually because he knows his own past record makes him vulnerable on the issue at hand.
And when it comes to healthcare, his hypocrisy is particularly galling. Romney is actually the only governor in American history ever to impose an individual health insurance mandate on his citizens. And an individual mandate, of course, is at the heart of Obama’s reform package.
Nor is the mandate the only common ground between RomneyCare and ObamaCare; the Massachusetts plan that Romney signed into law in 2006 is essentially the blueprint for Obama’s plan. Both rely on the same basic formula: a requirement that everyone purchase insurance and government assistance for those who can’t afford it.
Healthcare Reform Mar 19, 2010 Insurance company to me: Drop dead Blue Shield won't pay for radiation therapy that could save my life. But I'm fighting back, and you can help Video By Cary Tennis
I've been recovering from cancer surgery and waiting for the insurance company to approve the next course of treatment, which is eight weeks of proton beam radiation therapy at Loma Linda Hospital in Southern California.
This treatment is what my surgeon, Dr. Christopher Ames of UCSF, calls the standard of care for sacral chordoma.
Today I learned that the insurance company has denied the request for this treatment...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.
Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.
So he hired an attorney -- not because he wanted to sue anyone; on the contrary, the shy African-American teenager expected his insurance was canceled by mistake and would be reinstated once he set the company straight.
But Fortis, now known as Assurant Health, ignored his attorney's letters, as they had earlier inquiries from a case worker at a local clinic who was helping him. So Mitchell sued.
In 2004, a jury in Florence County, South Carolina, ordered Assurant Health, part of Assurant Inc, to pay Mitchell $15 million for wrongly revoking his heath insurance policy.
In September 2009, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the lower court's verdict, although the court reduced the amount to be paid him to $10 million.
By winning the verdict against Fortis, Mitchell not only obtained a measure of justice for himself; he also helped expose wrongdoing on the part of Fortis that could have repercussions for the entire health insurance industry.
Previously undisclosed records from Mitchell's case reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators...
The amount California workers contributed to their employer-backed health coverage increased 83 percent between 2000 and 2008 while their income stayed the same, according to a report released today.
The study, commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, looked at the impact of rising health costs and found middle-class Americans were particularly hard hit. Three million workers nationwide lost the coverage they had obtained through their employers and many of them earn too much to qualify for government insurance programs...
According to a report released Thursday by a nonprofit consumer group, failure to enact health care reform this year will lead in the next decade to about 1,700 premature deaths of people between 25 and 64 years old in Connecticut.
Ron Pollack, executive director of Washington, DC-based Families USA, said 2,100 people have died prematurely between 1995 and 2009 because of a lack of health insurance.
At the national level, the Families USA report, “Lives on the Line: The Deadly Cost of Delaying Health Reform,” warns that the number of deaths would grow from 68 a day in 2010 to 84 a day in 2019...
California insurance regulators asked Anthem Blue Cross to delay controversial rate increases of as much as 39% for individual policies, hikes that have triggered widespread criticism from subscribers and brokers -- and now from the federal government.
In a rare step, the Obama administration called on California's largest for-profit insurer to justify its rate hikes, saying the increases were alarming at a time when subscribers face skyrocketing healthcare costs...
LOS ANGELES -- The Obama administration on Monday asked California's largest for-profit health insurer to justify plans to hike customers' premiums by as much as 39 percent, a move that could affect some 800,000 people.
In a letter to the president of Anthem Blue Cross, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she was disturbed to learn of the planned increases, calling them "extraordinary."...
The Republicans' shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.
Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.
Last year, in a series of "town-hall meetings" across the country, Americans got the chance to debate President Obama's proposed healthcare reforms.
What happened was an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence.
Polling evidence suggests that the numbers who think the reforms go too far are nearly matched by those who think they do not go far enough.
But it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of healthcare reform - the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state - are often the ones it seems designed to help.
In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all, opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.
Instead, to many of those who lose out under the existing system, reform still seems like the ultimate betrayal.
Why are so many American voters enraged by attempts to change a horribly inefficient system that leaves them with premiums they often cannot afford?
Why are they manning the barricades to defend insurance companies that routinely deny claims and cancel policies?
It might be tempting to put the whole thing down to what the historian Richard Hofstadter back in the 1960s called "the paranoid style" of American politics, in which God, guns and race get mixed into a toxic stew of resentment at anything coming out of Washington...
There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.
As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell.
Stories not facts
In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.
He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:
Gore: "Under the governor's plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he's modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries."
Bush: "Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It's fuzzy math. It's trying to scare people in the voting booth."
Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense - but Mr Bush won the debate...
For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: "One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious...
Reverse revolution
Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen. He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.
...The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.
...authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made...
Health insurance companies are exempt from federal antitrust laws — laws that protect commerce from monopolies and unfair business practices in most other types of markets. As a result, health insurers have become highly concentrated and premiums have soared. There is movement on Capitol Hill to remove this exemption, but the best way to quickly infuse competition into health insurance markets across the country is with a strong, national public health insurance plan option.
The U.S. Senate debates insurance company protection
As the Senate Finance Committee moved into its fourth day of deliberations over the health care bill, tensions continued to rise.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), broke new ground defending an amendment he'd proposed that struck language from the bill defining which benefits employers are required to cover -- in this case, basic maternity care. "I don't need maternity care," Kyl said. "So requiring that on my insurance policy is something that I don't need and will make the policy more expensive."
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), interrupted Kyl: "I think your mom probably did."
White House blasts insurance sector report Oct 12, 2009 By Steve Holland and David Alexander
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday blasted a report from the health insurance industry that said Senate healthcare legislation would lead to increases in annual insurance premiums of as much as $4,000 by 2019...
A top goal of Obama in seeking to revamp healthcare is to rein in costs that have soared in recent decades. The report, prepared by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers and posted on the industry group's website over the weekend, said costs would increase for Americans rather than decline...
The report's release comes as the Senate Finance Committee plans to vote on Tuesday on its healthcare bill after budget analysts gave it a rosy report card, saying it would meet Obama's goal of reducing the budget deficit over 10 years.
A Finance Committee aide called the report "blatantly false and misleading."
The finance panel bill calls for sweeping insurance market reforms, requires most individuals to obtain medical policies and provides tax subsidies to help people afford coverage. The bill also would tax high-cost insurance plans and would place a $500,000 limit on the amount of executive pay that health insurance companies could deduct from taxable income. The insurance industry group, which represents Aetna Inc, Cigna Corp, UnitedHealth Group Inc, WellPoint Inc and others, defended the report, saying lawmakers have abandoned any effort to slow healthcare costs.
Instead, the bill looks to raise money from insurance companies and, ultimately consumers and employers, to help pay for healthcare costs that outpace wages each year, the group's president Karen Ignagni told reporters...
Health insurers released two reports this week warning that the reform legislation passed by the Senate Finance Committee would result in soaring premiums.
Both reports -- by PricewaterhouseCoopers for America's Health Insurance Plans and by Oliver Wyman for Blue Cross Blue Shield -- predict premium increases of $3,000 to $4,000 per year for the typical family without employer-based coverage. The finance panel's bill "would have the unintended consequence of increasing premiums and making coverage unaffordable for millions of people," the Blues' chief executive, Scott Serota, wrote in a letter to Congress attached to his group's report.
The White House and congressional Democrats have dismissed both reports as slanted, last-minute attempts to block the legislation. "How many fatally flawed insurance company 'reports' do insurance companies need before their credibility is entirely shot?" said Finance Committee spokesman Scott Mulhauser.
Here is a summary of the insurance industry claims, coupled with a vetting of them by Washington Post staff writer Alec MacGillis:
1. The Individual Mandate Both reports argue that, because the bill weakened the annual penalty for people who do not obtain health insurance, many young, healthy people would opt to pay rather than get covered. This would result in a concentration of older and sicker people without employer-based coverage buying plans, thus driving up premiums for those people.
Analysis: There is a lively debate about whether the penalty would goad healthier people to get coverage. But the reports are probably too pessimistic. Massachusetts has gotten all but 3 percent of residents into coverage with a penalty of roughly the same size. The reports also do not take into account the draw of the low-cost "young invincibles" policy included in the bill. And the Congressional Budget Office estimates coverage levels would rise to 94 percent of Americans, from 83 percent.
2. New Regulations on Insurance Plans Both reports argue that new insurance requirements would also push up premiums. Insurers would no longer be able to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions, would have to limit how much they charge based on age, and would have to meet minimum standards for the quality of the coverage offered.
Analysis: There is no question that consumers in loosely regulated states now buy bare-bones policies that would not meet the new standards. But the reports underestimate the pricing power that individuals without employer-based coverage and small businesses would enjoy as a result of being pooled together for coverage, instead of buying on their own in highly uncompetitive markets, as they do today. In addition, small businesses already enjoy protection against denial of coverage, so that rule would not represent a change for them.
3. Soaring Cost in Particular States The Blues report argues that premiums for those without employer-based coverage would soar most in certain parts of the country, where states loosely regulate the kind of plans that insurers can offer different sorts of consumers. Premiums, it predicts, would increase the least in the Northeast and the most in the South, Mountain West and Southwest.
Analysis: The bill would affect some states more than others, but consumers in those states could find that, as premiums for some go up, many others' would decline. The reason: Lightly regulated states also tend to have higher rates of uninsured and underinsured people, which leads to more people going to the emergency room and higher premiums for those who are insured. Requiring insurance for all may reduce those costs, creating a downward pressure on premiums.
4. New Tax on Costly Employer-Based Plans The AHIP report argues that a proposed tax on high-cost insurance plans -- the main new revenue source in the Finance Committee bill -- would eventually hit many more plans than expected, making more and more people subject to the tax. The report also argues that, while the tax is to be assessed on insurers and employers, it would be passed on to customers through higher premiums.
Analysis: The report overlooks the likelihood that insurers, employers and employees would shift to less costly plans to avoid the tax. This would happen to such an extent, congressional auditors predict, that much of the new tax revenue would actually come in the form of income taxes -- on the higher wages that employers would give in the place of top-shelf health benefits. The report's authors themselves note that a shift to less costly plans would likely occur, but say that they would nonetheless base their estimate on the tax being fully applied.
5. Medicare and Medicaid Cost Shift The AHIP report predicts that premiums would rise further as a result of proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid spending, which the report says hospitals and doctors would make up by passing on all of the cuts in the form of higher rates for private insurers.
Analysis: The report probably overstates the cost shift. The commission that advised Congress on Medicare reported in March that hospitals that rely most on Medicare and Medicaid report costs closer in line with Medicare payments than do hospitals with a big private payer base. That suggests the former has found ways to make do with the public program's rates. Even the Lewin Group, a consulting firm owned by an insurance company, estimates that, at most, 40 percent of underpayment by public programs is passed on to private insurers.
6. Subsidies for Buying Insurance and Cost Controls The AHIP report did not take into account the impact of government subsidies for buying coverage -- the heart of the legislation -- on insurance affordability, nor did it account for provisions in the bill that aim to slow the growth of health-care spending. PricewaterhouseCoopers has distanced itself from the report by saying that the AHIP had instructed the firm to focus on only some features of the bill. The Blues report also left aside the cost-control reforms, but it took the subsidies into account in cursory form, finding that they would mostly offset the predicted increase in premiums for about 15 million buying insurance but not for another 5 million.
Analysis: Even reform supporters concede that provisions in the bill to control the growth in health-care costs are limited and hard to assess. But it is dubious to predict the affordability of insurance under the bill without taking into full account the impact of subsidies, which would apply to families earning as much as $88,000. Jonathan Gruber, an MIT health-care economist who has advised the Finance Committee, has done his own estimates that take the subsidies into account. He predicts that savings would be biggest for older people and for those who qualify for subsidies -- as much as several thousands of dollars per year -- but even a young person who does not qualify for subsidies would save several hundred dollars a year.
