Yes, Matt Drudge is the same conservative hero responsible for much of the daily Republican talking points. If he wants to, Drudge, the owner of the omline conservative’s bible called The Drudge Report, could afford to pay for his healthcare out of pocket.
Pocket change.
Today, Matt took to Twitter and tweeted that he has chosen to opt-out of Obamacare for life. And he was advising his less fortunate followers to do the same.
The tweet caught the eyes of Ezra Klein. Klein tweeted a question to Drudge: “Are you going to be uninsured? Or are you just buying qualifying insurance (in which case you’re not opting oyt)?”
Ezra point? That any policy sold in America must meet certain standards as laid out in Obamacare. So if Drudge is buying a policy on his own, it will still be governed under Obamacare rules.
Far be it from me to argue with one of the greatest historical minds of the 20th century, but we essentially have an executive that serves a six year term, even if we get two extra bonus lame duck years for our efforts. So it has been with most other presidents, and so it probably shall be with Barack Obama. This is his sixth year; if it doesn’t happen this year, chances are that none of his high priority agenda items will become law in 2015 or 2016.
That’s why 2014 represents the final push for immigration, tax reform, a higher minimum wage, climate policy and every other item on the left-wing wish list. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. History has taught us that the first push rarely results in success when it comes to big change. Look how long it took to get healthcare reform. Sometimes the push is necessary if for no other reason than to get an idea in the public’s mind and to prepare them, or to follow their lead, when it comes to legislation.
Like marriage equality, which coalesced into a major civil rights issue in a short amount of time, the push for rights for all people goes as far back as Stonewall in 1969 and the Supreme Court’s ruling for and then reversal on, anti-sodomy laws in 1986 and 2003. Progressives have been highlighting income inequality and the rising gap between wealthy and not for decades. Now that cry is becoming a major force in calling for a higher, livable minimum wage that just could pass this year. After all, most people, even Republicans, support it.
The same will most likely be true of climate legislation, immigration, privacy and energy. More and more younger people realize that their world is changing and that the United States either has to catch up to other countries who are already addressing the problems or fall behind to our economic and social detriment. The far right is beginning to lose its grip on the Republican Party, and while I don’t see a more moderate wing surging anytime soon, I do see a less strident GOP in our future. That’s good news.
This year will see one or two major pieces of legislation, with the rest of Obama’s agenda left to the next Democratic president and a more willing population. I think we are moving in the right direction, but like anything done well, this will take time.
Did you see what happened when everyone was complaining about a website?
Single-payer got started in America!!!
Vermont is using authority granted in a provision under the Affordable Care Act to start a single-payer system. Most Americans still don’t know what the phrase “single-payer” even means. It had little support in Congress in 2009 and Senate “Democrats” like Nelson and Lieberman even killed the public option. But, the ACA had this sweet little provision that allowed states to set up a single-payer system and now people will see it in action. You know what that means.
As Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) opines, “The quickest route toward a national health care program will be when individual states go forward and demonstrate that universal and non-profit health care works, and that it is the cost-effective and moral thing to do.”
As many predicted, ACA is already leading to the kind of transformative progressive change Obama promised. The progressive movement will be responsible for showing the nation how well single-payer works after the Vermont system goes into effect. When public and non-profit insurance becomes the national norm, we’ll know where it began.
The President’s poll numbers hit a low of 39% approval and 54% disapproval when this poll was taken during the December 21st to 23rd period. Around that same time, Americans were storming the healthcare.gov website signing up for policies that went into effect January 1st. But since the 39% lows, Americans are beginning to see President Obama in a whole new light and Obamacare-love seems to be the only reason, considering the President has not done anything tremendous since those lows. In fact, he is on vacation with his family.
According to the new poll taken between December 27 and December 29th, President Obama’s approval shot up to 44% and his disapproval fell to 49%. Just another small piece of evidence to prove that, unlike the Republican lie claiming that people don’t want Obamacare, they do want Obamacare and they’re loving it!
WASHINGTON – States with their own well-running health insurance exchanges reported Wednesday an increase of 30 percent to 40 percent in enrollments from last week to this week.
“We’re seeing huge interest,” said Peter Lee, director of California’s exchange, during a conference call sponsored by Families USA, a health care advocacy group that supports the Affordable Care Act.
Six months ago, “no American knew about” the state exchanges.
In the first week of December, 50,000 people signed up for insurance in California.
Last week, 15,000 people were signing up every day, Lee said. He expects the interest to increase as local organizations, such as libraries or even cities, launch their own campaigns to encourage people to buy health insurance.
Lee and other officials in states that have expanded Medicaid coverage and spent millions promoting their exchanges said they are seeing an increasing diversity among the people buying insurance and the types they are purchasing.
The numbers show interest in buying insurance is increasing after the initial problems that hurt the site when it launched Oct. 1, said Ron Pollack, the founding executive director of Families USA. States that are doing well, he said, can share how they succeeded with other states and the federal government.
And you probably thought that Republicans didn’t believe in warming.
Well, don’t get too excited. After all, 94 House members voted against the bill and it looks like the Senate will manage only four GOP supporters when the bill lands on their desks. And this is a bill that I might have voted against because it basically sacrifices the long-term unemployed on the alter of perceived laziness and blame-the-victim politics that’s the hallmark of the Republican Party (though Patty Murray must be terrific at selling unpopular ideas). The bill does modify and correct some of the most egregious sequestration cuts, but this budget deal was played on the Republican side of the field.
Is this a thaw? Possibly, though there are significant snowstorms ahead. The immigration bill is stalled in the House and it would be a monumental achievement for a law that includes a path to citizenship to pass in that chamber. Then again, Boehner is not a dumb politician and understands that the Republicans need to begin courting the Hispanic vote, so maybe he can shepherd a modified version of the bill through his caucus. Of course, Democrats will jump all over any perceived weakness int he GOP approach and will run with it in 2014 and 2016.
The Senate provides another ice sheet for progress. Although the two sides came to an agreement to pause the confirm-a-thon until Monday, the Republicans are still smarting from having the filibuster rug pulled from under their Gucci-shoed feet. Two of the president’s DC Circuit nominees have been approved at the EPA Chief is up next. I see this as great progress and a future bulwark against Republican mischief via the courts in the years to come. “Young Democratic Judges” is a phrase I love hearing over and over.
So I’m not looking for a grand love-in on the floor of the legislative bodies over the course of the next year, but I do see a grudging push in the direction of getting things done, especially on the right. They can run against the health care law and probably keep the House and make inroads in the Senate in 2014. Their main concern, and a shiver up the spine, has to be the prospect of a Tea Party presidential candidate and the thought of defending 24 Senate seats in 2016. They won’t win the former contest and could do serious damage to themselves in the latter if they persist with the nonsense they’ve been peddling since 2010.
One of Obamacare’s biggest critics is now officially covered under the federal health care exchange: Sen. Marco Rubio.
“Senator Rubio spent time looking at all the options and decided to enroll through the D.C. exchange for coverage for him and his family,” spokeswoman Brooke Sammon told the Buzz.
Rubio took the federal subsidy afforded to lawmakers and staff — a perk worth up to 75 percent of monthly premium costs — that some Republicans wanted to kill off. Some lawmakers who have enrolled in the exchange (The Washington Post is keeping a list) have rejected the taxpayer-funded employer contribution, which is far more generous than most workers get.
Sammon did not say what led Rubio to decide the health care plan was better than what he could have gotten on his own. But those who wanted to keep their employer coverage — and that subsidy — were directed to use the exchange, called DC Health Link. In addition to the subsidy, Rubio and other federal employees also got to pick from far more plans than ordinary people and had access to special customer service to ease their sign ups.
“Senator Rubio is following the law, even though he opposes it,” Sammon said.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has waded into the health care debate with a broad endorsement of the kind of universal health plan found in Europe, Canada and South Korea.
“I am not an expert in health care, or Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, or however you choose to describe it, but I do know this: I have benefited from that kind of universal health care in my 55 years of public life,” Powell said, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, last week at an annual “survivors celebration breakfast” in Seattle for those who, like Powell, have battled prostate cancer. “And I don’t see why we can’t do what Europe is doing, what Canada is doing, what Korea is doing, what all these other places are doing.”
Europe, Canada and Korea all have a “single-payer” system, in which the government pays for the costs of health care.
Some Democrats who strongly advocated for, and failed to get, a single-payer system in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, still believe the current law doesn’t go far enough to reform the US health system.
A retired four-star general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell told the audience about a woman named Anne, who as his firewood supplier, faced a healthcare scare of her own. Anne asked Powell to help pay for her healthcare bills, as her insurance didn’t cover an MRI she needed as a prerequisite to being treated for a growth in her brain. In addition, Powell’s wife Alma recently suffered from three aneurysms and an artery blockage. “After these two events, of Alma and Anne, I’ve been thinking, why is it like this?” said Powell.
“We are a wealthy enough country with the capacity to make sure that every one of our fellow citizens has access to quality health care,” Powell. “(Let’s show) the rest of the world what our democratic system is all about and how we take care of all of our citizens.”
Giving of course my humble opinion, I believe we are at the high water mark of the anti-union, pro-market-force, evaluation-by-testing mania that’s gripped education. Or I could be seriously deluded and education is going through a profound change that will see radically different protocols for years to come.
Monday is the National Day of Action, where schools and community organizations are rallying to focus public attention on how to improve schools and promote social justice. There is a set of principles behind this, and it represents a concerted effort to fight back against the corporitization of schools that started on the far right, but has been moving to the center for a few years. Even President Obama supports the principle of more testing and teacher evaluation models that erroneously support it.
But a larger issue is also part of this debate, and that’s the role of unions and associations in public education. Perhaps it is true that teachers unions are facing a moment of truth and that they will need to adapt to the changing landscape rather that being able to pull the country back to a position that supports the idea of collective rights. Many people who should be supporting unions and what they’ve won for workers are in fact opposing them on the grounds that everyone should suffer in a free-agent world, not that they should demand the rights that unionized workers have. Employers have gained the upper hand in salary negotiations and with the coming of the new health care landscape, will most likely be able to stop offering insurance and tell employees to buy on the exchanges. Teachers generally have better protections because they have representation, but that’s led mostly to resentment, not mobilization by other industries.
Another challenge, and perhaps the biggest, is that the teaching staff population is getting younger. Far younger. Most teachers have been on the job for less than ten years. More importantly, they grew up in a nation that didn’t value unions. Yes, Ronald Reagan did say that he supported unions, but his actions in firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 is a far more potent reminder of the power of the president to shape the national agenda through actions rather than words. Most of the newest teachers were young during the 1980s and 90s when the anti-union rhetoric became louder and there were fewer steel workers, miners, and automobile workers to remind them what unions could do. The technology economy rendered union protections less important when the ethos was that you could create your own wealth. It’s still a powerful message. The problem is that it only applies to a few workers. Evidence is showing that many of these younger teachers are not as committed to unions or at least want them to change in ways that unions might not want to. The NEA and AFT will need to adapt, and at the moment it’s unclear what direction they will take.
The infusion of right wing money into the privatization and testing movement has also undermined effective education because it essentially said that teachers were to blame and that unions were anti-reform because they stood in the way of change. Yes they did, and for good reason; using tests to evaluate teachers and students is a terrible strategy. It saps energy from the system because teachers are tethered even more closely to a curriculum that defines what’s important to learn, what’s on the test, and discards everything else.
My subject, history (not social studies by the way; HISTORY) has been left in the educational dust for years as math and language arts skills have become the de facto national curriculum. Then science was added. I have no problem with this. But we are raising a nation of students who have limited historical knowledge because they have limited access to ideas because history is not a tested subject, therefore it must be less important. The same goes for the practical, industrial, visual and performing arts. This is the legacy of the corporate influence in education. Will the Common Core Standards help? We’ll see, but if they don’t, we’ll have wasted time that could have been better utilized.
Monday’s National Day of Action should be a day that reminds us of what effect the power of people can have when it’s channeled for social justice and education. These are the bedrocks of solid citizenship and point to a return of a society where all people, not just those who can pay for SAT Preparation classes, have access to a quality education and control over their own lives. The promise of corporatization and testing is a false hope that will leave students on the sidelines and teachers in a system that rejects the basic premise of effective schools that have a collegial staff and a collective ethic meant to educate every child.
It’s like a massive push to keep the American people ignorant to the benefits of having healthcare, and this push is happening in Republican governed states.
Take Texas for example. A new Rule in Texas makes it illegal for anyone to advise someone else on what healthcare to get or the benefits of getting healthcare. The new law even ban those who are trained in providing this information, from providing the information.
The counselors tasked with helping uninsured Texans navigate their way through the complicated process of buying health insurance will have to jump through a series of hoops to get licenses under new rules proposed by the Texas Department of Insurance.
The so-called navigators would have to prove their citizenship or employment eligibility, undergo a background check and show evidence of financial responsibility under the new rules, proposed Tuesday by Texas Insurance Commissioner Julia Rathgeber.
They would also have to receive 40 hours of education on Texas-specific Medicaid and privacy standards, then show proof that they have the proper training to guide consumers to the right health plans.
Navigators would be prohibited from charging for their services and from recommending specific health benefit plans to consumers. The proposed rules would also restrict navigators from providing advice on the substantive benefits or comparative benefits of different health plans, the department said.
“In Texas, we are being vigilant about safeguarding privacy and keeping personal information out of the wrong hands,” Rathgeber said in a statement. “These proposed rules address insufficiencies in federal regulations and make the training and qualifications of navigators in our state more readily apparent to consumers and service providers.”
It makes absolutely no sense! To be a Navigator in Texas, the individual must prove their citizenship, go through a background check and show evidence of financial responsibility. And if the get through all that, there is a 40 hour training program they must go through. And at the end of it all, Navigators are still bound by this new rule, and cannot educate people on healthcare.
Earlier today, I tweeted a recent poll by CNN saying that 70% of young Americans believe the problems with the Obamacare website will eventually be fixed.
Needless to say, some Republicans on Twitter couldn’t believe that this poll actually existed, and thought that I was making it up. I don’t blame them for thinking this. Their political leaders are constantly feeding them false information which they readily eat up, so naturally when someone shares the truth, they feel the need to question it as well.
Here is one example of the replies I got to the tweet mentioned above:
So with that said, here is the link to the A CNN/ORC International poll where that tweet came from. And here is a CNN article that mentions this data. Below is an exert of the actual article.
Younger Americans are much less likely to express negative views of the new health care law.
“Only 25% of 18-to-34 year olds say that the new law is a failure, compared to more than four in 10 in any other age bracket. Seven in 10 younger Americans think the current problems faced by Obamacare will eventually be fixed. Senior citizens are split, and most people between 35 and 65 years old think that the system is permanently broken,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.
The poll was conducted November 18-20 for CNN by ORC International, with 843 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
To the doubters: – Where it says “only 25% of 18-34 year olds say that the new law is a failure,” it means that the remainder 75% think the law is NOT a failure. And where it says, “seven in 10 younger Americans think the current problems faced by Obamacare will eventually be fixed,” that “seven in 10” actually mean 70%.
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