Wondering on Wednesday 3/9/22

 

Ready... Set... Wonder!

It's been a while since we've wondered together on a Wednesday; ready to give it a whirl?

Let's start with something silly - laughter is the best medicine, right? It seems that former Trump immigration guru Stephen Miller has had his phone records subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee. Miller has sued to block their release; among other things, he says private family conversations would be exposed. Now, if someone subpoenaed my phone records, they'd find that I cover my elderly mom and my husband on my family plan. But here's the thing with Miller - he's covered under his parents' plan. I guess that's better than it would be if, you know, he still lived in their basement. But here's what I'm wondering: does he even appreciate the irony of this? The king of family separation has his phone bill covered by Mom & Dad? 

You may have heard about discussions on how friendly European countries could get their Russian-made fighter jets into Ukrainian hands. There was some talk that the US would try and 'backfill' American-made jets to our allies who gave their jets to Ukraine. All of this is fraught with risk, including the risk of an all-out war across Europe. So, it was kind of surprising to learn today that Poland had offered to deliver MiG fighter jets to the US base in Ramstein, Germany, for deployment to Ukraine. Surprising, that is, because it's been reported that the Poles hadn't discussed this with us first. And I'm wondering, how on earth could that be true?

This one's from the "I wonder, will these people ever learn?" file: Wisconsin's Sen. Ron Johnson wants to obstruct the president's agenda until the Rs take control in the midterms, and then when they take back the White House in 2024,  he wants to see the GOP repeal the Affordable Care Act.  You know, the same thing they tried to stop from getting passed in the first place, threatened repeatedly to repeal and replace, and failed, repeatedly - even when they had the majority the Senate, the House, and the Oval Office? I also wonder, how many people wish that Johnson had kept his promise not to run again? 

Turning to wonder-full things in my neck of the woods, my state senator Rachel May somehow managed to have her picture taken with climate activists holding a banner that pretty much everyone thinks is highly offensive - see for yourself. 

She's apologized for the "unacceptable" image, and said she had her picture taking with lots of people and didn't see the what the banner said.

So, what's the wondering on this one? These people have staff - they have aides, and assistants, and interns, and who knows how many hangers-on who follow them throughout the day. Is there not a single person on her team who could have pulled her away from this? Do any of your elected officials get caught up in stuff like this? I can't imagine it's just a New York thing...

And finally, tonight, we turn to my county's District Attorney for life William Fitzpatrick. Fitz is in the middle of a high-profile murder trial - the second one for the defendant, a local physician who's accused of murdering his wife. The doc was found guilty in the first trial, but the verdict was tossed due to juror misconduct; a juror had received numerous texts from her father about the trial, during the trial. Keep that in mind... and follow along with today's events. 

Fitz is a big Syracuse University basketball fan; the team was playing in the ACC tournament today, with a noon start. Fitz talks with the judge and the doc's defense team just before 11:30AM, which leads the judge to pose a question to the jury: do you want to continue testimony, or watch the basketball game? The jurors decided to continue with the trial - so I'm not wondering about them. I am wondering about Fitz, though - he actually thought it was appropriate to ask the jury if they wanted to watch a basketball game in the middle of the day's testimony? 

What's on your wondering mind tonight?

Sunday School 7/19/20: The Final Chapter

Yes, it does take three volumes to cover a Donald Trump/Chris Wallace interview.  Parts one and two are in the books; here's the last of it.

After Wallace pointed out that in the latest Fox News poll, Joe Biden beats Trump even on the competency question, there was some back and forth on that test that Trump aced, shocking all of the doctors, no one had ever done so well on it, and, oh by the way, Trump said there was no way Wallace could pass it. And then,

If Joe Biden got in, first of all, he won't call the shots. The people - the radical left people that surround him will call. Religion will be gone, OK? Life, you could forget about that, the whole question of life. Supreme Court - (Wallace confirmed he was talking about abortion) Absolutely. A hundred percent. That whole question, which is a very - you know, it's always been a 50-50 thing... it's actually trending a little bit more towards one side now. 

On religion:

Well, look at what they're doing to the churches. They won't let the churches even open if they want to stand in a field six feet apart. We've had churches that wanted to stand in fields six feet apart. There has never been an administration that's done so much as I have. From tax cuts, to regulation cuts, to rebuilding the military, to getting choice for the vets. Nobody's done the things I've done. Nobody. In three and a half years, no other president's been able to do what I've done.

On the pace of reopening and whether the economy will be an issue in November:

I don't think so. I think the economy is expanding and growing beautifully. Now, the Democrats want to keep it closed as long as possible because they think that's good for election. But I think the economy is doing very well. Now we're coming back and we're coming back at a level that nobody would have thought possible. And we are -- and, by the way, take a look at another -- I mean, a gauge, whether you like it or not, the stock market. The stock market, Nasdaq hit its all-time high two weeks ago and has beaten it 14 different times, OK. The stock market, Dow, et cetera, is a thousand points away from its all-time high, meaning very close. We're going to have a stock market perhaps on November 3rd that's the highest in history.

On having no plan to replace Obamacare:

Well, we haven't had -- excuse me, you heard me yesterday, we're signing a health care plan within two weeks. A full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we're going to solve -- we're going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan, and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I'm doing in the next four weeks. The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had by approving -- by doing what they did, their decision on DACA. And DACA's going to be taken care of also. But we're getting rid of it because we're going to replace it with something much better. But what we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare, the individual mandate. And that I've already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court. But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we've never done before. And you're going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.

On how it would be if he lost in November:

And you know why I won't lose, because the country, in the end, they're not going to have a man who has - who's shot. He's shot. He's mentally shot. Let him come out of his basement, go around, I'll make four or five speeches a day, I'll be interviewed by you, I'll be interviewed by the worst killers that hate my - my guts. They hate my guts. There's nothing they can ask me that I won't give them a proper answer to. Some people will like it. Some people won't like it... But, look, let - Let Biden sit through an interview like this. He'll be underground crying for mommy. He'll say mommy, mommy, please take me home. 

He can't do an interview. He's incompetent. There's a number you don't mention. It's called the enthusiasm number. The enthusiasm for Trump is through the roof, even higher - even higher than last time. The enthusiasm for Biden is non- existent. Everyone knows he's shot. (Wallace notes enthusiasm against Trump is high) Well, that's OK. That's his only shot. And that's his only shot. I agree. And those people know I'm doing a good job. But it's something in my personality that they don't like because, look, nobody's done what I've done. Biden wants to come in and ruin our country, triple your taxes. He wants to do things - he wants to add regulations that I've all cut. And we still have regulation, a lot of regulation, but I've cut it down to a level that nobody's - nobody ever thought possible.

He will destroy this country. But it won't be him. It will be the radical left. The same type ideology that took over Venezuela, one of the richest countries in the world. They now have no water, they have no food, and they have no medicine.  That's going to happen here if he wins.

On how he will regard his years as president, whether it ends in 2021 or 2025: 

I think I was very unfairly treated. From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation. Russia, Russia, Russia. (Wallace asks about the good parts) No, no. I want to go this. I have done more than any president in history in the first three and a half years, and I've done it suffering through investigations where people have been -- General Flynn, where people have been so unfairly treated. The Russia hoax, it was all a hoax. The Mueller scam, it was all a scam. It was all false. I made a bad decision on - one bad decision. Jeff Sessions. And now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama. Here's the bottom line, I've been very unfairly treated. And I don't say that as paranoid. I've been very - everybody says it. It's going to be interesting to see what happens. But there's tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was.

President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It's never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now. That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this - the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail. It would have started two years ago and they'd be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let's see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years. 

I hope you got all of that, from this part and the first two. Remember, there WILL be a quiz on all of this. I don't normally do that, but this is hardly a normal interview.

Stay safe, and I'll see you around the virtual campus.

The Update Desk: The Affordable Care Act

So, there's this court case, Texas vs. United States, that maintained that the Affordable Care Act would be unconstitutional because, as of 2019, the penalty for the individual mandate was $0 under president Trump's Christmas Tax Cut. The thinking of the Texas AG, and the 19 GOP states that joined the lawsuit, is that since the individual mandate penalty no longer exists, and because the tax key to the constitutionality of the ACA according to the Supreme Court, and since the whole shebang is tied up with an inseverability clause, it should be struck down. The lawsuit was filed about a year ago, and in December a conservative judge agreed.

Yesterday, the Justice Department made it officially known that it agrees with the decision of the lower court.

The DOJ said Monday that it agrees the decision should stand as the case works its way through the appeals process in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. 

"The Department of Justice has  determined that the district court's judgment should be affirmed," the department said in a short letter to the appeals court. 

So, while Democrats are getting all riled up, and Republicans are getting all excited that a court may do what they were unable to do, with 60 failed votes and $87,000,000 wasted in the process, I thought I'd remind everyone what this could mean to America.

Back in 2017, I talked about what "repeal and replace later" would mean, beyond the elimination of protections for pre-existing conditions, which the DOJ also did not defend in the early days of the Texas suit.  Here are some of the things I thought of pretty quickly, back then:

1. Immediately shut down Healthcare.gov and the 28 federally facilitated marketplaces and the five state-based marketplaces using the federal platform. 
2. Cancel the coverage for individuals and families who were covered under the now-defunct marketplaces.
3. Return any unused premium to them.
4. Immediately repeal the voluminous taxes required under the Affordable Care Act, whether charged to a business, a health insurer, any medical facilities, and so on. This will of course require an immediate rewriting of the tax code just to get us back to where we were before the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
5. Immediately repeal the individual mandate.
6. Immediately kick over-aged dependents off their parents' policies in any location such coverage is not mandated under any other jurisdiction.
7. Immediately remove the Medical Loss Ration (MLR) requirements, which dictate the percentage of health care premium dollars insurers must pay for benefits (base around 80%) and requires insurers to rebate premiums to insureds when they don't meet the MLR percentage.
8. Immediately eliminate the full coverage for pre-existing conditions at no additional premium - let the games begin.
9. Remove no-cost-sharing coverage for preventative care, including things like lead screening, mammograms and paps, prostate screenings, annual physicals, a whole host of lab tests, and countless other benefits - those can all go back to whatever pricing structure was in place before.
10. Remove all subsidies which currently help people pay for coverage - all of them.  
11. Similarly, remove all supports that are paid to insurance companies to help cover the costs of  insuring the people who got coverage under the ACA. 
12. Eliminate requirements for 'essential benefits' including outpatient services; emergency services; hospitalization; pregnancy, maternity and newborn care; mental health and substance abuse, prescription drugs, and more.
13. Immediately end all funding for Medicaid expansion.
14. Immediately reintroduce annual and lifetime limits on benefits.
15. Immediately increase the population of uninsured by the number of people covered under a marketplace (~10 million or so as of February 2017) and the number covered under Medicaid expansion, ~14 million)

And that's not an exhaustive list -- I forgot mental health parity regs which were enfolded into updates of the ACA along the way, for example. 

Now, some of those numbers have likely changed but the gist of this is that the Affordable Care Act was much, much more than just the individual mandate and protections for people with pre-existing conditions.  Sadly, that's something that politicians from both parties have been unwilling or unable to communicate well, and of course they continue to ignore lots of the other provisions, if for different purposes. 

The formal move by the DOJ this week to not defend the law of the land will embolden progressives on the Medicare-for-All bandwagon; sadly, it won't likely embolden anyone else to work to defend the other key provisions that also protected patients.  

As the president would say, SAD.

Killing the Affordable Care Act

A federal judge in Texas ruled yesterday that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, since the Republicans removed the penalty associated with the 'individual mandate' requiring people to have insurance. Since the penalty is now $0, that means the 'tax' for not having insurance is no longer in effect, and that 'right to tax' was the lynchpin that held the whole thing together in previous court cases.

Clearly, this will go back to the Supreme Court for decision, and for now, nothing will happen to people who are now on the last day to sign up for ACA policies on healthcare.gov.  Nothing, that is, except for mass confusion (will there be a policy for me?) and fear (will I lose my coverage?).  It will be interesting to see what the Justice Department does when it goes to the Supremes, since

The Justice Department's response to the case was highly unusual: thought it disagreed with the plaintiffs that the entire law should be struck down, it declined this year to defend not just the individual mandate, but the law's provisions that protect people with pre-existing conditions. 

The thing that's so important about pre-existing conditions, of course, is that over 100 million Americans have one or more of the darn things, and also that, most of the time, it seems that's the only provision anyone in Congress knows is in the ACA. Seriously:

• when was the last time you heard a elected official talking about annual and lifetime benefit maximums, which can bankrupt their constituents?  
• when was the last time you heard them talking about maintaining coverage for kids 26 years old on their parents' policy?
• or, when was the last time they talked to you about fully-covered preventative care, free of deductibles and coinsurance?
• or may favorite one, the part of the ACA that requires insurance carriers to spend a specific percentage of the premiums they collect on paying benefits, otherwise they have to refund the money to their subscribers? 

See, while those dreaded Republican death panels we heard so much about are NOT in the ACA, the items above, and many others, above ARE in the ACA. Think about that, especially that last one, and think about all of your free-market proponents in Congress and statehouses across the country, and all of their large, for-profit donors, and think about what's not going to make it into a Republican replacement plan.

And while you're at it, think about 'Medicare for all' - that wacky, socialist universal health care, widely derided by Republicans - and remember that, as a candidate, Donald Trump proposed free healthcare for Americans.

What, you didn't remember that?  Back when his cabal was issuing position papers, the two provisions below were among the ones that were included in his plan for fixing healthcare:

• allowing tax free contributions to a health savings account (HSA); the HSA would become part of the person's estate with no 'death tax' and could be used by anyone in the family, without penalty, and
• allowing people to fully deduct health insurance premiums from their tax returns

As I noted when I looked at his position back in 2016,

Translated: government-sponsored health care. Free health care. Say it either way, doesn't much matter. I mean, say your income tax responsibility is $5,000, and say you pay $6,000 in health insurance premiums. That means that the $5,000 Uncle Sam is counting on getting from you is now $1,000 that Uncle Sam owes you. Which means that someone else is going to be picking up the costs, right? And if someone else is paying for your insurance, it kind of makes your health insurance free, doesn't it?

Now, we know that the Republicans wasted millions of dollars on attempts to repeal the ACA, and they had the fiasco of failure the first time they attempted to get a replacement plan on the table , and they came close to passing a repeal until that "one guy, in the middle of the night, went like this and killed the whole thing," as the president likes to say.  And that was when they had the majority in both the House and the Senate.

I've said many times that the ACA was not perfect, but that repeal and replace was not the answer, anymore than it would have been the answer to completely throw away the entire tax code in order to pass last year's tax cut bill, or throwing away the entire defense budget and starting over (well, maybe that one would...).

In any event, we will have to see whether incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi will prioritize fixing the ACA, or if she's going to go after other legislative priorities. Of course, that sort of assumes she'll have time for legislative priorities, given the full slate of investigations into Trump that we've been told to expect.  And, we'll have to see what the Trump Justice Department decides is worth fighting for.

Fun times, folks. We've got fun times ahead.

PPOD 9/15/09: A Two-fer

Ever wonder why it is that we Dems can’t keep from shooting ourselves in the foot? Two recent examples, one national and one local, make up today’s Pet Peeve of the Day.  

Here in my hometown, our local DPW spent about $1500 in labor and supplies, trying to remove a couple hundred posters that an unknown person hung around town. The posters were critical of our lame-duck mayor, who got a retroactive raise this year, his last in office due to term limits. 

In addition to the time the city workers spent, another set of folks from a downtown-centric group have also been out trying to remove the posters from the city center, which apparently were so well-glued that they defied scrapers, wallpaper paste remover and the strong arms of the DPW. Some that couldn’t be peeled off the poles were painted over to keep us from reading them and perhaps drawing the wrong conclusions about the mayor.

In most opinions (mine included) the former bar owner has not lived up to his promise to help turn our city around. While he’s been a big proponent of Syracuse as a center of ‘green’ at the regional and national level, and bringing green business conferences here, that’s about all he’s done lately. I think his legacy will be more about promises unkept and opportunities missed than about accomplishments, and I'm not surprised that someone resorted to a public display of dismay in protest. 

The problem with removing the posters, of course, is that someone – whether the mayor or a member of his administration – has a thinner skin than the glue used to hold the posters on the poles. There’s nothing wrong with hanging critical posters - they're really no worse than the bazillion garage sale and CD sale posters that litter telephone and streetlight poles all over the city. Or, if there is something wrong, all of the posters should get this kind of attention, not just the ones critical of the mayor. 

On the national level, again it’s too much of too little, and too distracting when there’s too much to do. Is that too confusing? 

The House of Representatives today officially chastised South Carolina’s Joe Wilson, the idiot who yelled ‘You Lie!’ during the President’s address last week to the joint session of Congress. Seven Republicans joined with the majority, while twelve Dems crossed the aisle and voted against the resolution. Kudos to them. 

Within the first few hours of the spectacle last Wednesday, Wilson and his opponent in the 2010 election collectively raised a few hundred thousand dollars; the opponent raised more, which I guess is a good thing, but the real problem is the more the Dems keep this in the national headlines, the less time they’re spending paying attention to the things that matter… like the health care reform debate itself, which was the precursor to Wilson's outburst. It also keeps the crazy right-wingers in the news, allowing them to profit (with very little expenditure of effort) from our inability to get out of our own way. 

Obama’s acceptance of Wilson’s apology should have been the signal for the House leadership to move on; barring that, the official reprimand should have come immediately, not almost a week later. Hopefully now, we'll be able to get back to the business at hand.