"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine. Ovaltine? A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!"posted by ericb at 12:12 PM on October 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
So who are those 24 million who would be left uninsured?Boehner's plan, on the other hand, would have left 31 million uninsured.
About a third of them are illegal immigrants, the CBO report states.
So who are the other two-thirds (16 million) left uninsured?
We asked three health care experts: John Holahan at the Urban Institute; Leighton Ku, a professor of health policy at George Washington University; and Kathleen D. Stoll, director of Health Policy at Families USA. They said those people mostly fall into several main categories:
• People who are deemed able to afford health insurance but simply decide the tax penalties are not high enough to persuade them to buy it. Some young, healthy people, for example, may decide it's cheaper to simply pay the tax penalty rather than purchase insurance, Stoll said. The same is true for some wealthy people who are self-insured.
"These are basically people who say, 'It's not worth it to me,' " Ku said.
• People exempt from tax penalties because the cost of health insurance comes to more than 8 percent of their income, even if they are getting federal subsidies. These are generally people with a lower income, but not so low as to qualify for Medicaid. Without a penalty, many of those people may decide to continue not to buy insurance.
"These are people on the lower end of the income scale, but not the poorest of the poor," Ku said, generally people who make anywhere from 133 percent to 300 percent of the poverty level.
• People who are eligible for Medicaid, but simply don't sign up. Some people just think it's a hassle to sign up for insurance, even when it's free, Ku said.
About 60 percent of people eligible for Medicaid today simply don't sign up, Holahan said. "People with very low incomes don't always know how to navigate a lot of things in life. People don't necessarily value health care, and they don't take the time to fill out the necessary paperwork."
• Then there are those who are in transitional stages of life -- perhaps a job change -- and don't take steps to close the insurance gaps between jobs.
The CBO report found that the Senate bill was less effective in reducing the number of uninsured compared to the version of the health care bill that passed the House. While the Senate version was estimated to reduce the number of uninsured by 31 million (leaving 24 million uninsured), the House plan was estimated to reduce the number of uninsured by about 36 million, leaving about 18 million uninsured.
That's largely because the House tax penalty for not getting insurance is a lot harsher. Under the House bill, people who refuse to purchase health insurance will be hit with a tax penalty equivalent to 2.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. The Senate plan calls for a tax penalty of $95 in 2014, going up to $350 in 2015, $750 in 2016, and graduated up in ensuing years based on inflation adjustments.
[W]e could find no instance of anyone in the administration directly making such a public pledge. Rather, it comes via a Jan. 9, 2009, report called "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" from Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, the vice president's top economic adviser.And so a heavily-disclaimered projection in a single economic report has been transformed into an ironclad promise that has been brazenly broken.
Their report projected that the stimulus plan proposed by Obama would create 3 million to 4 million jobs by the end of 2010. The report also included a chart predicting unemployment rates with and without the stimulus. Without the stimulus (the baseline), unemployment was projected to hit about 8.5 percent in 2009 and then continue rising to a peak of about 9 percent in 2010. With the stimulus, they predicted the unemployment rate would peak at just under 8 percent in 2009.
[...]
But what we saw from the administration in January 2009 was a projection, not a promise. And it was a projection that came with heavy disclaimers.
"It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error," the report states. "There is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity."
There's also a footnote that goes along with the chart that states: "Forecasts of the unemployment rate without the recovery plan vary substantially. Some private forecasters anticipate unemployment rates as high as 11% in the absence of action."
True, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. has announced that the Justice Department will not prosecute people who are selling medical marijuana in compliance with California's law. But that's an entirely different matter. The attorney general could cite good legal and constitutional reasons for that policy, because the regulation of medical practice is a state and not a federal responsibility. And if the medical justification for most of the pot sold through dispensaries is sketchy at best? Well, that too is a state problem. The international treaties that require their signatories, including the United States, to ban the production and sale of cannabis have an exception for medical use.posted by UrineSoakedRube at 3:47 PM on October 15, 2010 [1 favorite]
Most important, the feds can afford to take a laid-back attitude toward California's medical marijuana trade because it's unlikely to cause much of a trafficking problem in the rest of the country. Because dispensaries' prices are just as high as those for black-market marijuana, there's not much temptation to buy the "medical" sort in California and resell it out of state.
U.S. military officials racing to make progress in Afghanistan are pressing new tactics to choke off the flow of Taliban fighters and bomb-making materials from Pakistan into key battlefields of the south, with some even advocating cross-border attacks, according to several U.S. civilian and military officials.First, of course, there will be the usual push to make the Pakistani military kill massive amounts of their own people. This will, as always, inflame the situation, exacerbate extremism and violent reaction, thus nicely setting the stage for American troops to step in -- oh, as a last resort, of course! -- and take control of the "deteriorating situation."
The international [emphasis mine] treaties that require their signatories, including the United States, to ban the production and sale of cannabis have an exception for medical use.And this is the other distinction between medical marijuana and non-medical decriminalization as far as Holder and the Department of Justice is concerned, and one that you did not address, despite the claim that it was your "whole point", and still haven't even after I pointed it out to you.
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posted by furiousxgeorge at 11:34 AM on October 15, 2010 [4 favorites]