The short version is this: CBO estimates that by 2019 the bill will cover 21 million people at a cost of $597 billion. But—and this is important—the HELP Committee’s bill doesn’t include the Medicaid expansion, because Medicaid is under the sole jurisdiction of the Finance Committee. But if Medicaid is expanded to 150 percent, it will cover an additional 20 million at a cost of about $1 trillion. Add in the savings that Finance is expected to get from reforming Medicare and you’re looking at a bill that will cost $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion and cover 42 million people (which would mean 97 percent of the legal population in 2019 would have health insurance) by 2019.
The proposal is able to control costs by imposing an employer mandate - $750 fine per full-time employee per year if you don’t provide health insurance coverage. For part-time employees the cost is $375. (Companies with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt from this.) The bill also provides a public plan option, expands Medicaid, provides subsidies for families making too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford health insurance and prevents insurance companies from disqualifying people with pre-existing conditions or from charging widely disparate rates to people based on age or health history. And I did not see a provision for taxing employer paid health benefits as had been speculated previously. Finally the bill provides many incentives for increasing preventive care and improving the quality of health care provided.
A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Budget Office scored the cost of the bill and came up with figures that indicated it would be much more expensive and cover a lot fewer people (causing certain Repub senators to go ballistic). It has been clarified now that they scored an incomplete version and the new cost estimates are much more accurate.
This bill and the companion bill from the Finance Committee are close enough to the House version that reconciliation shouldn’t be a painful procedure. The key, of course, is to get it passed by the Senate. Here’s where we come in again. Call, e-mail, fax, Tweet or just shout it out to your Senators that they need to step up to the plate and support this very realistic and badly needed legislation! Folks are dying for lack of health care. And many who are not dying are living lives of reduced quality because of lack of access to care and/or medications. Mr. Reid, that is a cause that is well worth flexing your muscles for.
Well, it’s official. The Senate majority leader is not actually a human being; he is the jokes Firedoglake makes about him given flesh. Like The Dark Half if M.U. Timothy Hutton had no charisma and farmed out the killing to insurers.
The new one-minute ad from Our Country Deserves Better PAC (mouthful!) compares Obama to Ahmadinejad and Hitler and still finds time to shiv ACORN (BLACKS WITH CLIPBOARDS!). It’s like the Tang crystals version of the Glenn Beck show. It puts the “dense” back in “condensed”:
One of the most annoying things about being an atheist is the way believers accuse you of that which they themselves are guilty of. Adherence to dogma! Unwillingness to brook dissent! No sense of humor! Martyr complex! Sorry, faith-havers, you’re engaging in a little something we call projec…
A few interesting things to report on, some funny, one, well, we’ll start with that and you can judge for yourselves.
Former CIA person and current crazy person Michael Scheuer, speaking to another crazy person, Glenn Beck, actually expressed his wish to see Obama bin Laden detonate a major weapon in the U.S. JUST TO SHOW EVERYONE!!!
The long article in Vanity Fair (titled “It Came from Wasilla” /snark) about Sarah Palin and the presidential campaign and all the infighting and name calling by staffers about her has sparked some great contemperaneous name callling and fighting, especially between Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt. Here’s an example:
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
Make some popcorn, settle back and read the whole thing at Politico.
My favorite senator is doing what he does best ... making sense:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called on the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress to ensure that party members agree unanimously to support cloture on legislation that would revamp the nation’s health care system. Democratic senators on the fence, he added, could still oppose the bill. But at the very least they should be required to let the legislation come to an up-or-down vote.
“I think that with Al Franken coming on board, you have effectively 60 Democrats in the caucus, 58 and two Independents,” Sanders said in an interview with the Huffington Post. “I think the strategy should be to say, it doesn’t take 60 votes to pass a piece of legislation. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster. And if somebody who votes for that ends up saying, ‘I’m not gonna vote for this bill, it’s too radical, blah, blah, blah, that’s fine.’”
“I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster, I think that is a very wrong political strategy,” Sanders added.
President Barack Obama hugs [cancer patient] Debby Smith, 53, from Appalachia, Va., after she asks him about her health care during a town hall meeting at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., Wednesday, July 1, 2009. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Did you hear ATF agents are going house to house confiscating guns? No? That’s because it’s not happening. But you might think so if you get your news from the dishonest hack who “rules the world” of your stupid media:
If you click the link attached to that screaming headline, you’ll find a Houston Chronicle article about a specific program tracking down the US origins of guns used in Mexican drug cartel murders. But somehow I doubt deranged, paranoid gun-hoarders bother to click the links.
Jesus H. Christ. No wonder our media establishment sucks big green gators. This is nothing new, of course, but every now and then it makes me want to pour a half gallon of cheap vodka into a roasting pan with 12 packets of blueberry jello mix and put myself in a coma by doing the world’s biggest jello shot.
Sometimes it seems that every loon with a computer has a video on YouTube, and now I am no exception. This is a small video of some very small artworks. that I made, all at night, which is when I work best. They are scratchboards, done by scraping off a layer of India ink to reveal white clay-coated paper beneath. None is larger than two inches square, the maximum area that I felt safe to allot them.
This fledgling blue jay somehow ended up on the basket of my bicycle in my carport. (Yes, I have a basket on my bicycle. Don’t judge; it allows me to do carbon-free light shopping.) It’s been there for a couple of hours now, and I don’t think it can fly well enough to get back to the nest, wherever that is.
I’ve seen an anxious parent hanging about, but it seems as helpless to act as the little bird. Some of the neighbors have roaming cats, and I’m afraid the little one will come to a bad end. Is there anything I can do? I’m willing to capture worms for it, though I don’t think I’m up to masticating them and spitting them out in its beak. Any bird dilemma advice would be much appreciated.
UPDATE: After being faithfully fed by its parents for nearly a day, the little birdie found the strength to fly out of the carport (and presumably back to its nest). We’ve had a steady rain for quite awhile, and maybe that was what was keeping him or her on the bike basket—it flew off in a lull between storms a short while ago. The only unhappy thing about this episode is that the fledgling and parents shat all over my bike. Oh well.
Runner’s World just published a ridiculously long interview with Sarah Palin. In it we learn that McCain was a mean old man who wouldn’t let her exercise, she normally wears a “trough full of makeup,” and she likes listening to “old” Van Halen, “old” AC/DC and ... Amy Grant (huzzah?) when she’s running. We also learn much too much about how much she enjoys sweating:
If you go a day or a week without running, what do you learn about yourself?
I feel so crappy if I go more than a few days without running. I have to run. No matter how rotten I feel before or during a run, it’s always worth it to me afterwards. Sweat is my sanity. A great frustration I had during the campaign was when the McCain staff wouldn’t carve out time for me to go for a run. The days never went as well if I couldn’t get out there and sweat.
The day you were picked for VP must have been quite world-shaking. Did you feel like running or did you go running that day?
I had gone running earlier that day, and when I got the call from the McCain campaign I was at the Alaska State Fair walking with my kids. And, yeah, those earth-shattering times of life for runners, isn’t it funny that going for a run is one of the first things we think of doing? For me it’s like right on. I like to go celebrate by taking a long, hot run.
What’s your thing with liking heat so much? It’s a little contrary to be such a devoted Alaskan?
I don’t know. I’m always running about 10 degrees colder than everyone around me; I’m always cranking up the heat. I think because we do have so many cold days here, it’s such a luxury and a pleasure to go somewhere warm. I think you guys who get a lot of warm weather take it for granted and you shouldn’t. I thought that was a great part of the campaign—we’d be out there at events or up there on stage just sweatin’ like pigs and I loved it.
UPDATE: I didn’t realize until I accessed the Googles Machine that she used the “sweat is my sanity” line before with Katie Couric. OMG, she thinks it’s catchy. Halp.
