Healthcare Bullshit Mountain

In a recent report, the Congressional Budget Office said the American workforce will shrink gradually, dropping about 2.3 million full-time jobs by 2021.  It's not that employers will be cutting jobs.  This reduction will be largely voluntary -- normal retirements, some early retirements, and some pre-retirement folks deciding to work less because now, finally, they can.  How so?  In part because Obamacare's subsidized premiums are affordable, and full coverage is no longer tied to a full-time job.  

Aha!  Many Republicans seized upon the CBO report as "proof" that Obamacare is just what they said it'd be -- a "jobs-killer".  Well, as is so often the case, they're wrong, and that's not what the CBO said.  Nobody's getting laid off because of Obamacare -- it's no more of a jobs-killer than Baby Boomers retiring is a jobs-killer.

Some say the subsidized premiums, based on income, will be a disincentive to work.  It's slightly possible, I guess, but it would take some pretty sharp figuring by a bunch of low-income, full-time workers who calculate they can actually cut their hours and their income, lose their company health insurance, pick up cheap coverage at HealthCare.gov, and somehow come out ahead.  I just can't see much of that happening.

What I can see is some financially secure people who need health insurance more than they need full-time income, and I can see some of them cutting back or taking early retirement due to the benefits of the ACA.  I'll give you a personal example:

Twenty-six years ago, I took a deep breath and walked into my boss's office to tell him I was quitting and going out on my own.  We worked for a small auto-related insurance company which we both knew was obviously self-destructing.  Being a good boss, he tried to talk me out of it.

I respected my boss.  He was a tough little bastard and also a walking mass of pre-existing health conditions.  At age 60, he was still five years away from Medicare, had already suffered a number of heart attacks and had undergone two open-heart surgeries.  Yet he continued to eat deep-fried chicken gizzards and smoke a couple packs a day.  Stupid, but his choice.

When he asked me to reconsider leaving, I said, "Glenn, this is a sinking ship and I'm getting off now.  The only reason you're staying is because you need the health insurance."  (Back then, had he left the shelter of the company policy, his medical history would have made him totally uninsurable in the individual marketplace.  Today, he could not be denied coverage.)  He just smiled at me and replied, "You're right."

He didn't really need to work at that point, not at that doomed job anyway.  If Obamacare had been available, he'd have jumped at the chance to do something else or retire early.  And that choice would have harmed exactly no one.

And another thing . . .

As a mechanism to expand health care access to the many millions of uninsured, Obamacare mandated that employers of 50 people or more offer health insurance to those workers who put in 30 hours per week or more.  This mandate goes into effect in 2015 for most, 2016 for others.  There's a fear that some employers might cut hours to less than 30 per week just to avoid the coverage requirement.

Most companies offer health benefits to their full-time workers, but until now it was the company who decided what constituted full-time.  White Castle Systems, for example, says full-time for them is 35 hours per week.  And you can bet your ass that most of their 10,000 fry cooks get 34 hours a week max!  Come 2015, it'll be decision time, and what will those poor White Castle execs do?  Oh, the horror!

So in D.C., the Ohio GOP Congressional delegation has come up with a bright idea.  All of our Republican House reps have co-sponsored a bill to re-define full-time work as 40 hours per week or more.  And what will that accomplish?  Nothing good.  It would let more employers off the hook and would reduce access to health care.  It's a step backwards which must not be implemented.

It's time for conservatives to realize that, although the ACA is the law of the land, they're still getting their way in most respects -- for now.  Obamacare is not single-payer, universal coverage, government-run socialized medicine.  It's still an employer-provided, market-based, profit-driven system without cost controls and is still being run by Big Insurance, Big Hospital/Medical, and Big Pharma.  Which is precisely what the GOP seeks to preserve, no matter what.

But within that creaky old capitalistic framework, Obamacare does indeed expand access.  It's a moral imperative, and for starters, we're gonna at least do that.  We'll play in your ballpark for now, but we're not going backwards.  So goddam it, cut the B.S., play ball or shut up!

And one more thing . . . actually, two more things . . .

"Medicine was not meant to be corporatized on a profit-and-loss basis.  Capitalism is right for many fields, but not for medicine."  -- Dr. Howard A. Corwin, Naples, FL, in the NY Times, 2/9/14

"We must open up a debate about whether we consider health care a basic right rather than a commodity.  If so, then we must move toward some sort of universal single-payer system.  If not, we should resign ourselves to further encroachments by the corporations and invite the executives into bedside rounds each morning." -- Dr. Prameet Singh, Bronxville, NY, in the NY Times, 2/9/14

Damn! There Goes The Neighborhood

In a moment of impolitic personal honesty, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently declared that there was no place in New York for "extreme conservatives who are 'right-to-life', pro-assault weapon, or anti-gay."

Extreme conservative standard-bearer and foremost Fox News fearmonger Sean Hannity was so offended by this comment that he threatened to move out of the Empire State.  Although many New Yorkers were pleased at this prospect, nobody took it seriously.  After all, most of what comes out of Hannity's mouth cannot be believed.

But last Friday Hannity did indeed put his New York house on the market.  It can be yours for $3.6 million.  The question now becomes, where will he go?  

He can sure as hell stay out of my neighborhood!  But wouldn't it be delightful to send him to a town where he'd be totally out of place and really unhappy?  Here are three good possibilities:

City Hall in San Francisco, the "most liberal city
in America"

Jackson, Mississippi, the "blackest city in America"

Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, Dave Chappelle, and
aging hippies who cover the trees in colorful macrame

Places like that are guaranteed to piss off Sean of the Red (states), and that'd be a lot of fun.  But perhaps we should show a little empathy and send him to a place in "Hannity's America" where he'd fit right in, a place like Enid, Oklahoma.  He and the owner of Gary's Chicaros Bar & Grill could be real BFF's:

A Natural Giant?

"I think you're much more friendly to a nanny state than I am.  I'm more of a self-reliance guy, you're more of a big government-will-solve-your-problems guy."
-- Bill O'Reilly, yammering at President Obama during a recent "interview" 

This was a snippet from the pre-Super Bowl thing.  Can't really call it an interview, since O'Reilly did most of the talking.  Why Obama subjects himself to this Faux News nonsense, I'll never know.  But the "nanny state" insult got people talking.

Many were talking once again about a 2012 Cornell University study on the usage of U.S. government programs, in which 57% of the respondents said they had never, ever used any government program.  No nanny state for these self-reliant stalwarts!  Except almost all of them were flat wrong.

The Cornell study found that 97% of us have used a federal program or benefit at least once.  That's damn near everybody, regardless of political preference.  Government programs are much more than food stamps and WIC cheese.  The GI Bill, FHA home loans, tax deductions for mortgage interest, dependent children, medical expenses -- all government programs/benefits, just to name a few.  Helpful, hugely popular, widely used.  Even by Bill O'Reilly.

So he can stuff that "nanny state" B.S. right back where it came from.  That's just code for the same old right-tard spin and fear mongering:  Big government handouts/entitlements allow millions of (probably non-white) loafers and illegals to do literally nothing and live in the lap of luxury while the rest of the hard-working, self-reliant, conservative (probably white) people bust their ass to pay for it all.

A total crock of shit, of course.  There is no nanny state.  Just try living on unemployment insurance and SNAP payments, and see how luxurious it really is.

A natural giant?

MSNBC's Chris Hayes neatly crystalized the issue last night, saying, "There are two types of people in America -- those who recognize they are standing upon something built to help them, and those who believe they are natural giants."      

   

Conservatives Would Like To Teach The World To Sing -- In English, Goddam It!

Those darn conservatives have such a knack for making the silly seem serious.  The latest thing to put their BVD's in a big right-cheek bunch was the Coca-Cola commercial during the Super Bowl.  The song America The Beautiful was rendered in various languages, only one of which was English.

For reasons known only to themselves, Conservative America went absolutely ape-shit over this sacrilege, this affront to decency, this liberal attack on Mom, Christianity, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and the good ol' U.S. of A.  How dare they sing in a "foreign" language?

Rush Limbaugh did his usual dyspeptic, angry fat man routine, saying that Coke products must now have "labels in ten different languages."  

Glenn Beck rose from the dead to declare the purpose of the ad "is to divide us."

Radio twit Laura Ingraham tweeted, "But illegals will learn English, right?"

Some douchebag on Breitbart.com declared that Coke "used that iconic song, that represents the old E Pluribus Unum view of American integration, to push multiculturalism down our throats."  (Oh, wait.  E Pluribus Unum.  That's friggin' Latin, isn't it?  Oops.)

I liked Stephen Colbert's in-character quip:  "They were singing 'America The Beautiful' in foreign-talk!  Only English can give that song its certain je ne sais quoi."

But I'll give the last word to young son Buster, Jr.  He put it this way:  "Thank god this country is full of intolerant pricks.  We need things to laugh at." 

You tell 'em, Boyo!

The Wisdom Of Morgan Freeman

(Swiped from a friend's FB page.)

Bill Maher's New Rule For Music Award Shows

"New Rule:  Now that liberals have forwarded their agenda by inserting a mass gay wedding at the Grammys, conservatives must match them tit-for-tat with a mass shooting at the Country Music Awards."

David Brooks On 2016

David Brooks is a conservative columnist for the NY Times (which is sort of like being a Rabbi in Mecca).  Today on NPR, Brooks said that with more confirmation that Gov. Chris Christie did in fact know all about the bridge closures before they happened, it would appear that Christie's presidential aspirations are toast.  At this point, according to Brooks, the leading GOP presidential candidate for 2016 seems to be Sen. Rand Paul.

Brooks said that if Sen. Paul is the eventual nominee, "He is well-positioned to win two or three key counties in Mississippi, but that would be about it."

Good one, Davey-Boy!