In Voting Rights, Scalia Sees a Racial Entitlement : The New Yorker.
Justice Antonin Scalia, during oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, said that the Court had to rescue Congress from the trap of being afraid to vote against a “racial entitlement”—the “entitlement” in question being the Voting Rights Act.
Anyone else mad yet?
Most of the news reports I’ve read and seen on television reporting the US Postal Service’s decision to stop Saturday letter delivery have one common theme – that the USPS’s “red ink” is correlated to dwindling first class mail revenue and changing times, as people use e-mail and pay bills online.
This is wrong – this isn’t why the Postal Service has lost billions. It’s because of a 2006 law passed by Congress that required the Postal Service to prefund health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years within 10 years.
This required the USPS to set aside billions of dollars to pay health care benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet and won’t for DECADES. This legislation is unprecedented – never before has the government mandated that any business or government agency fund such payments for such a period.
In other words, this is a problem that Congress created. an American institution is suffering, and American citizens are seeing a service they’ve counted on for generations get unnecessarily diminished.
“l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier” – Jacques Necker
“Treppenwitz.” – Germans
Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS – NYTimes.com.
“CBS has nothing but the highest regard for the editors and writers at CNET, and has managed that business with respect as part of its CBS Interactive division since it was acquired in 2008. This has been an isolated and unique incident in which a product that has been challenged as illegal, was removed from consideration for an award. The product in question is not only the subject of a lawsuit between Dish and CBS, but between Dish and nearly every other major media company as well. CBS has been consistent on this situation from the beginning, and, in terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100% editorial independence, and always will. We look forward to the site building on its reputation of good journalism in the years to come.”
If this isn’t yet another screaming condemnation against corporate media control, I don’t know what is.
I’m very disappointed but not surprised that the corporate media has reported Hostess’ demise as an uncooperative union refusing to budge rather than vulture capitalists intent on wringing as much money as they could out of a company already in trouble when they took it over.
The leveraged buyout firm that bought Hostess had already pilfered the pension fund and had previously gotten huge wage concessions out of the baker’s union. To position this now as the fault of the union is a bit like saying that a woman shouldn’t have let her throat be cut after refusing to be raped again.
Not to mention that Hostess’ top management, fully aware of what was coming, did its best to line its own pockets by dramatically changing its compensation structure in the year before the shutdown.
It sickens me almost as much as binging on a box of Twinkies would.
Some Republicans like to imagine there are people who want an easily life of living on the dole. Anyone who’s ever actually *needed* public assistance will tell you that it’s not easy.
Simply qualifying for basic assistance is an endless slog, a miasma of paperwork and bureaucracy that’s gotten gradually more complicated as more disparate services are offered. Coordination of care and service requires very advanced logistical skills, and you need to constantly renew your credentials whenever you’re asked in order to continue to qualify for help.
You’re also advised repeatedly that if you get gainful employment or any sort of windfall, you risk the services and assistance that you’ve spent in some cases weeks or months getting to begin with. And if you do lose services, you’ll have to start over at square one.
So is it any wonder that once people are in the system, they’re very reluctant to get out?
Last week I wrote about my experience with state-mandated health insurance – how it probably saved my life and without question saved my family from bankruptcy. Making health insurance affordable solves one problem faced by many Americans today – it keeps them from suffering catastrophic financial ruin in the event of a major medical crisis. But it doesn’t do a thing to actually reduce the cost of that care, which has spiraled out of control over the past few decades.
A recent article in The Boston Globe certainly drives this home.
“Of more than 3,000 Massachusetts adults surveyed in fall 2010 — the most recent survey data available — 17.5 percent reported having problems paying medical bills in the previous year. Twenty percent said they were carrying medical debt and paying it over time. Those figures changed slightly from 2006, but researchers said the difference was not statistically significant.”
Contributing factors include medical insurance plans with high deductibles and lapses in coverage.
Certainly having insurance coverage helps reduce the financial strain on families who undergo unexpected and catastrophic medical expenses, but if your budget is already stretched to the limit just trying to meet your family’s basic needs, it doesn’t take many high deductibles or hidden expenses to push you over the edge.
There’s a huge problem with a lack of transparency when it comes to the cost of coverage. Patients can run up huge bills without realizing it, even if they’re insured.
But a bigger problem – and one that Massachusetts has yet to solve in any substantive way – is what happens to a lot of lower-income families like ours:
“Low-income people commonly lose insurance for brief periods when they move from one state assistance program to another. Others can get lost in a maze of eligibility requirements.
“The state is developing a website meant to streamline the enrollment process. Meanwhile, bills can add up during those gaps in coverage.”
There’s a huge problem with a lack of transparency when it comes to the cost of coverage. Patients can run up huge bills without realizing it, even if they’re insured. That’s precisely what happened to us last December when my daughter was hospitalized. She had insurance, but the insurance wasn’t good enough to cover non-emergency ambulance transportation from one hospital to another – required because the hospital she was brought to didn’t have the inpatient services needed to treat her effectively. We ended up getting a bill for the ambulance that drove her, to the tune of almost $2,700.
We’re still fighting that one. But it’s not like we were given the choice between taking her to the other hospital ourselves or footing the bill for the ambulance. It wasn’t until months after the incident that the issue of the bill even came up.
The bottom line is that insurance improvements in Massachusetts and the Affordable Care Act both help to make sure that catastrophic illness won’t be a death sentence for the financial stability of families living at the edge or below the poverty line. But both services stop dramatically short of actually correcting many of the cost problems that make health care in the United States such a big problem for so many people. For that, we’re going to need much more dramatic changes to the way that hospitals, pharma companies and others do business.
Greg Knauss’ recent blog posting “Bugged” describes his experience in the hospital when his son’s bug bite turned into something much worse. As it turns out, without insurance, he would have been expected to fork over almost $24,000 in medical expenses. Knauss’ comments have encouraged me to write more about my recent hospitalization, because I was in a different place all together: If it weren’t for government-mandated affordable care, I would be dead or bankrupt.
Knauss makes the point that the Affordable Care Act – “ObamaCare” as it’s known in political vernacular – will provide a safety net to many Americans who don’t have health insurance. If you’re insured, or if you can afford a lengthy hospital stay, it’s easy to poo-poo this as yet another government “entitlement.” But until you’re staring this situation in the face, you cannot possibly understand how terrifying the prospect of going without insurance really is.
As some of you know, I spent the last part of June and the first week of July in the hospital because of a foot infection. I had stepped on a sharp piece of plastic that punctured the bottom of my foot. I went to the doctor shortly after noticing swelling in my foot, but an infection had already set in. Bonnie brought me to the ER at the local hospital two days later; I was admitted and surgery was performed immediately. I ended up spending a week and a half in the hospital recovering from that.
Unlike Knauss, I didn’t have COBRA coverage. Anymore.
For the uninitiated, COBRA enables workers in the United States who lose health benefits to continue them temporarily. It isn’t an “entitlement” – you pay the entire premium for the insurance, up to 102 percent, actually.
For a family like us, COBRA was absolutely vital: my daughter’s been hospitalized several times, some of us take expensive prescription medications, and I suffer from chronic health problems that require drugs and regular monitoring from doctors. I’m an insurance risk, just the sort of risk that companies love to reject, similar to how Greg describes himself. But going without insurance would quite literally be a death sentence for me, and possibly for other family members too.
I paid out of pocket for COBRA every month I could after I lost my job. I was happy to. It was the continuation of services that kept us healthy and alive during my ten-year tenure at my previous employer.
It was only when the eligibility period ran out that I was finally forced to go without.
Fortunately, I live in a place where there is a safety net. I live in Massachusetts. In 2006, our governor signed a health care insurance revision bill into law. The law mandates that Mass residents can obtain a minimum level of healthcare insurance coverage, and makes sure that you can get free health care insurance if you earn less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level.
That governor was Mitt Romney, and the law I’m referring to is colloquially known as “RomneyCare.” It’s also been widely described as inspiring large parts of the Affordable Care Act.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of the residents of Massachusetts – an estimated 98 percent – have some sort of health care coverage, even if it’s the bare minimum needed to cover catastrophic events like hospitalization. Thanks to RomneyCare.
It was this insurance that I was able to get. I’m sorry to admit that those Federal poverty guidelines pertain to me, so I got the free coverage. Quite frankly, the economy and the publishing industry have not been kind to me since losing my last full-time job.
Without RomneyCare, I probably would have put off getting to the doctor or the hospital until I’d been much worse. And I’d be footing the bill for that ten day hospital stay. For the surgery, and the anesthesia. For each and every pill I took, every bandage I used, every linen that needed to be washed. For the bags of antibiotic administered intravenously. For the nurses, doctors and technicians who treated me every day. For the months of followup treatment I’ve required – a month and a half of IV antibiotics, more pills, daily visits to a wound care treatment facility for hyperbaric oxygen treatment, a visiting nurse who comes once a week to check on my progress, the specialized bandages and medicines I must use to keep infections at bay.
Two months later, it’s still not over. All this, because a piece of twisted, sharp black plastic less than two centimeters long got stuck in my foot.
I have little doubt that without RomneyCare I’d be declaring bankruptcy at this point, because I have barely the money to keep the lights on right now, let alone pay for a ten-day hospital stay to treat septicemia. Let alone the months of specialized post-surgical treatment I’ve needed to recuperate.
It was a totally unexpected event that I couldn’t have reasonably planned for. And even if I had, it would have required me to be able to afford to pay the expensive insurance premiums which are totally beyond my reach right now. I take no pride in admitting that. And to reiterate: I paid for private insurance as long as I could. I didn’t want to burden the system if I didn’t have to.
The system isn’t perfect. Premiums and service costs continue to rise into the stratosphere. There’s still a serious need for health care reform in Massachusetts and throughout the United States, and the Affordable Care Act doesn’t change that.
Knauss writes:
We can make this work. We have to make this work. A bug bite cannot be the thing that draws the line between a middle-class life and poverty, between opportunity and the stagnant dead-end of could-have-been. Our friends, our neighbors, our children, the future of this country as a cohesive society — as an endeavor where we see each other as more than opponents, as more than comptetitors [sic] — depends on it.
There are millions of Americans who can’t afford routine medical treatment, much less catastrophic care. Many seniors and others on fixed incomes have to decide from month to month whether they pay their utility bills or get the medication that keeps them healthy. Expecting friends, relatives, churches and charities to help them all is ridiculous. Expecting them to barter chickens for doctor visits is insultingly stupid.
And current “entitlement programs” – many of which inadequately cover the needs of these people to begin with – are being eviscerated by legislators who use the guise of reducing government spending to conceal their craven pandering to corporate interests and lobbyists.
I find it inconceivable that we’re still having a national discussion about health care as a privilege only for the wealthy or those lucky enough to work for an employer who offers affordable insurance. We need to recognize it as a fundamental human right if we’re to ever evolve as a compassionate society that actually wants to uplift its population to prosperity. We’ve heard a tremendous amount of lip service from the political right in this country about that, but their actions to dismantle the ACA and Medicare are completely counter to effort.
RomneyCare saved my life. And it kept our family out of bankruptcy.
The system worked.
The following post contains Project Runway season 10 spoilers.
What a bad week for Ven Budhu.
It’s been clear from the start that he’s one of season 10′s strongest contenders – great design skills, wonderful construction, lovely taste. His flat affect and his open disregard for his competitors hasn’t really won as many fans as some of the others, but his skills are formidable.
But this week he really stepped in it. Not only was he shown to be a callous ass to a “real woman” (as he put it) but his Twitter feed after this Thursday’s show demonstrates an appalling lack of PR skills, not to mention an atrocious use of social media.
In this week’s “makeover” challenge, designers were told to create outfits for non-models, complete with new hairdo and makeup. There’s one of these types of challenges almost every season, and they’re always a fan favorite. Some designers, like Gunnar Deatherage, embraced the challenge and really enjoyed it. Others, like Ven, clearly hated it from the start.
Ven’s dislike for the challenge boiled over to open contempt for his client. He called her “plus-sized” at size 14 (“right on the cusp,” corrected Tim Gunn), suggesting that she had no sense of style, and even insulting her age (40, he thought, although she’s only in her mid-30s).
His garment was awful, his construction was not up to par, his color choice for her complexion and hair color were atrocious, but none of this mattered: To hear Ven explain it in the footage shown, he felt he had been unfairly handicapped with an ugly, fat woman with no style or taste.
He didn’t say this to her, but his callousness and snipes like telling her “black was slimming” had his client in tears. What’s worse, her friend who advocated for her to be on the show was in tears. Ven’s fellow contestants looked appalled by what he was saying. And the judges made their displeasure clear by keeping him after this week’s loser was eliminated, letting Ven sweat it out and think that he, too, may have been on the chopping block.
It was nauseatingly egotistical and truly vile. And while I suspect Project Runway’s producers edited Ven’s interview and his comments in the workroom to raise dramatic attention and make him even more abrasive, I don’t think they had to work that hard. After all, even after the runway drama in which Ven was kept aside for a stern rebuke by the judges, he insisted that his design wasn’t one of the three worst (it absolutely was).
But this isn’t the worst of it. Starting on Thursday night, Ven Budhu’s Twitter feed lit up with comments he posted during the episode, accusing the producers of not really randomly assigning clients to designers, then defending his cruel comments by saying “the truth hurts sometimes.” He also said that it wasn’t his fault her belts didn’t fit (though he should have known her measurements full well before he fitted her for accessories), and more. Even when he compliments her, he does it backhandedly (“She was pretty but difficult shape to work with.”)
Really, I’m left wondering after this episode why anyone would want to work with Ven Budhu. He just seems like a douchebag.
Terri Herlihy, his client in this episode, wasted no time in countering Ven’s Twitter whining. Her account, created a week ago, quickly filled up with rebukes to Ven’s comments on the show and on Twitter, including this: “You didn’t give a shit about my life & why I was there. You can’t hack it.”
Which was pretty much what Budhu was told by Terri’s friend and the judges, too.
If you check Twitter for mentions of @venbudhu, you’ll find scores of angry, bitter comments from viewers of the show who were disgusted by his comments and his tweets, too. Very few of them are actually sympathetic.
All Budhu had to do at the outset was a short, contrite, genuine apology. Something to the effect of, “I realize in retrospect how hurtful my comments to Terri were, I apologize and wish I had done better.” He undoubtedly still would have gotten some angry comments from other Twitter users, but it would have blown over quickly. Now it’s clear that the worm has turned and Ven is no longer a fan favorite.
How that will effect the judges over the long term remains to be seen. They’ve let some designers with really loathsome personalities win in years past, so Ven’s execrable behavior may not matter for them in the long term.
I, for one, will be very disappointed if he wins.
Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin stepped in it this weekend with his medieval theory that children can’t be conceived in instances of rape, and the GOP is rushing away from his regressive and stupid position in droves. The Romney/Ryan campaign wasted no time in distancing itself as well.
Yet Romney’s own Web site makes it pretty clear that he’s staunchly pro-life:
Mitt believes that life begins at conception and wishes that the laws of our nation reflected that view. But while the nation remains so divided, he believes that the right next step is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade – a case of blatant judicial activism that took a decision that should be left to the people and placed it in the hands of unelected judges. With Roe overturned, states will be empowered through the democratic process to determine their own abortion laws and not have them dictated by judicial mandate.
Well, this week anyway. Back in ’94, in a debate with Ted Kennedy, Romney said:
“I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it, and I sustain and support that law, and the right of a woman to make that choice, and my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.”
Mittens’ flip-flopping hypocritical attempt to pander to social conservatives in his own party aside, one of the things he makes clear is support for the Hyde Amendment, and he says that he’ll end federal funding for Planned Parenthood.
I’m left to wonder: Where the hell are these victims of rape expected to get safe and legal abortions, once we leave it up to each individual state to come up with its own laws on the issue, and once one of the few safe and reliable avenues for the procedure are gone?
I said it before and I’ll say it again, Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a prophecy of life in the 21st century.