Sure, let's call Obamacare a tax: It's a "freerider tax"

Yep, it's a tax. It's a "freerider tax."Say it with me. Say it often. Spread that phrase until its a household term.

It's a penalty for those who won't get insurance despite the ability to pay for it or, for those with lower incomes, to get it subsidized or free after 2014.

Critics of Obamacare don't like to acknowledge this but the fact is that the uninsured do get lots of medical care, on average. In fact, about two-thirds that of the insured, and it is the insured, the hospitals, and the government that pays for much of that (though not all). And it's not just in terms of unpaid hospital bills that the rest of us suffer: with so many bankruptcies in the United States the result of medical issues, we as consumers are carrying those who are uninsured (as well as those whose insurance coverage falls short when catastrophe hits).

Basically, the two ways to fix this are (1) deny all care — including emergency care — to all people until they pay or show proof of insurance or (2) penalize/tax people who aggregately cost the system lots of money but who don't cover all of their own costs.

Unfortunately, the first method will lead to widespread death and injury, not only to the uninsured, but also to the insured who are delayed when they seek care until they can "show me your papers!"

So of course it's a tax. It's a freerider tax. That's why the Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney saw it as a form of personal responsibility.

I'm all for allowing people to avoid paying the tax and uninsured at the same time, if instead they put up a bond of, say, $100,000, that will be used for their medical care, just in case. But let's stop kidding ourselves that these people are not costing the rest of us loads and loads of money.

Even if they all looked like this, freeriders wouldn't be worth
the hundreds of billions of dollars they cost the rest of us.

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On student loans and public health responsibilities (alternate title: It's things like this that make it impossible for me to vote Republican)

Republicans and Democrats both supposedly agree that it would be a bad idea for interest rates on student loans to suddenly double from the three-percent range to 6.8 percent. But it is the Republicans' plans for how to pay for this that has me scratching my head and wondering what planet they live on:

The Obama administration today threatened to veto the GOP-proposed House version of a student loan bill because it would repeal a fund for preventive health services.

“This is a politically-motivated proposal and not the serious response that the problem facing America’s college students deserves,” the White House said in a statement. “If the president is presented with H.R. 4628, his senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.”

The $5.9 billion bill, which the House is debating today, would prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling July 1. To pay for it, however, the GOP version would cut the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a program created as part of the president’s health care reform act.

“Women, in particular, will benefit from this Prevention Fund, which would provide for hundreds of thousands of screenings for breast and cervical cancer,” according to the White House.

The veto threat comes after the president spent the week publicly campaigning for Congress to extend a 2007 law that cut student loan rates to 3.4 percent. If Congress does not act, interest rates will double to 6.8 percent this summer.

Seriously, this is wrong on so many levels. First of all, after the trillion-dollar-plus war in Iraq, when did the GOP get so picky about a mere $5.9 billion, hardly a drop in the bucket.

Second, how can it possibly help them in the upcoming election if they're trying to look sinister and out of touch. I mean, really, cutting preventive care? Can you get any more evil?

Third, by cutting a component of Obamacare that helps keep health care costs down and provides maximum benefit not just in terms of expenditures but also in quality of life, you're highlighting the positive elements of this plan that so many Americans are on the fence about precisely because they don't know about stuff like this.

At the same time, you're showing that you are more interested in helping oil companies (the subsidies for whom President Obama would want to eliminate in order to pay for the cheap student loan rates). Forcing the American people to choose between affordable college or preventing breast cancer is about the stupidest thing they can do.

It also makes your crusade against Obamacare look wrongheaded, foolish, and petty.

Do I need to go on?

Anyway, to switch gears, the one thing I would like to say is that to truly reform the whole college cost thing, we may actually need a reduction of student loans in favor of grants, scholarships, and other pay packages (divvied out on the basis of need and/or merit at the neighborhood level).

Student loans drive up the cost of education (even after adjusting for inflation, college costs are three times what they were three decades ago). Universities charge what the market will bear, and it bears more because students (and their parents) are getting free money now that they will have to pay off in some distant future. Of course they'll take the money and pay the tuition that has shot up 10% from the previous year, itself a rise of 8 percent from the year before that, etc., etc.

If it were up to me, I'd create national service universities, or at least national service scholarships, where the students work twenty hours a week (or more) running the university in various capacities in order to cover tuition. Perhaps room and board could be part of that or on a separate track, but offered at a reasonable cost. Alternatively, contracts that put them in teaching jobs or other socially beneficial work after graduation could be a means of paying for college.

Universities would have incentives to keep costs down, since they can't rely on atrocious tuition increases each year, and they could earn money to pay for professor salaries, buildings, overhead, etc., through government or private grants for research and the selling of services (provided by students) or use of facilities.

This is not terribly unlike what happens in some other countries (including Korea, in some universities), and it would put an end to the absurd notion of having fresh college grads in their early twenties saddled with $100,000 of debt (or more) that prevents them from buying a home or doing other economically productive activities, while forcing themselves to lock into a money-paying job early on rather than exploring other opportunities that might benefit themselves or society at large.

Certainly for some, a college education paid for with student loans is a far better choice than not going to college at all. But they would benefit even further if they were able to go to college and get out on the other end debt free.

Yeah, I'm a dreamer.

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The GOP will stop at nothing when it comes to health care

It's too late to convince anyone on the Supreme Court (yeah, like they read Monster Island), since they already voted on Friday. But I've been thinking a lot about this lately... about free riders and why they necessitate mandatory participation, or twisted incentives that jack up rates, or we the insured footing the bill for the uninsured who walk into emergency rooms and get care that way, or the hundreds of thousands of medical-related bankruptcies that are a drag on the economy.

But all of that is sort of moot, because the Supreme Court has already decided. And they may have decided to scrap the insurance mandate, or the Affordable Care Act altogether. And then the ball would be in the GOP's court.

But here's the problem with the Republicans on health reform: it doesn't exist except in hot air form.

After the GOP killed Hillarycare in 1994 and then took control of the House and Senate, no serious effort was made to reform the system in a way that would rein in soaring costs, insure the tens of millions of people without insurance, or fix the problems (like being dropped or denied coverage) for millions more who had it. The Republicans did not even try seriously to implement their own Heritage Foundation-based reform plan.

They might have said that was impossible with Clinton in the White House (even though he was noted for his willingness to compromise with the GOP on key legislation, like welfare reform). But then in 2000, the Republicans gained control of the White House and both houses of Congress. The perfect opportunity to prove they were serious, yet nothing in six years was done to address those things (I say six, because the Democrats took control of the House and Senate two years before Bush left).

I would rather tweak Obamacare than scrap it, precisely because the GOP will stop at nothing (I mean that literally, as in stopping where nothing has been done). Right now, before us, we have a law passed that has a great many things prescribed by the GOP's Heritage Foundation plan in the mid-1990s and even modeled after the Massachusetts health care plan signed into law by Obama's likely opponent in November.

And that makes the ACA a good starting point.

Another thing about Obamacare is that states can opt out of it as long as they implement a system that achieves the same coverage. Instead of trying to strike down the law, those twenty-six states should be coming up with something better.

Okay, rant over.

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Obama a disaster for civil liberties?

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley writes that "the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties":

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the "just following orders" defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

It's almost a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome, in which a hostage bonds with his captor despite the obvious threat to his existence. Even though many Democrats admit in private that they are shocked by Obama's position on civil liberties, they are incapable of opposing him. Some insist that they are simply motivated by realism: A Republican would be worse.

Hmm... I didn't vote for Obama (but will do so in 2012 if any but maybe two of the current crop of Republican candidates gets the nomination), but I can see this is a case of selective memory. Let's see, he ended Don't Ask, Don't Tell, effectively ended the executive branch's defense of the Defense of Marriage Act's proscription of same-sex marriage. Indeed, I see some expansion of civil liberties in the Obama universe.

Y'know, the guy's not Superman. He can't do everything and still have political capital to win the other battles. The guy passed a major health care reform bill that, though imperfect and in need of tweaking whether it works well or not, everyone knew would bring out the opposition in full force at midterm elections. If a Republican is elected, we can say bye-bye to the Affordable Care Act and sit back while the Republicans do the same thing to fix the gaping head wound that is our healthcare "system" after they defeated Hillarycare in 1993-94: absolutely nothing.



So, yeah, maybe the civil libertarians will get more of what they want in a second term, but probably not all of it. Wait until the two wars have wound down and see what can be revisited. Like it or not, that's the way it works.

In the meantime, don't even pretend, as Ralph Nader did, that there is no difference between the Dems and the new crop of Republicans* that have taken root since the new millennium. The Iraq War to vanquish al Qaeda (remember that justification?!) — rabidly opposed by the man Ralph Nader helped defeat, Al Gore — is Exhibit A of that.

* The Republican Party has lurched so far to the right you can't see them because of the curvature of the Earth. I want back the fiscally conservative but socially responsible and pragmatist GOP of old. Bring back Nixonian Republicanism so that I don't have to fear for the country's future survivability when/if the Democrats lose!

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Obama's jobs speech: We are tougher than the times we live in

I was going to tweet some of my thoughts, but Twitter seems to be overwhelmed with people trying to do the same.

I'm watching it online at the Los Angeles Times website (which annoyingly refreshes itself every five minutes, forcing me to miss about fifteen seconds of speech). [UPDATE: The Telegraph has the transcript of the speech, which I may put snippets of in the text below.]

I'll tell you, it's essentially State of the Union 2011-1/2. A lot of good points, many of the reiterations of things he's called for in the past (e.g., taxes done in a way where everyone pays their fair share), but the highlight — and the opener — was his America Jobs Act (?) full of such things as building up infrastructure, giving tax breaks to those who hire new people, helping veterans get jobs, etc. It has a lot more in it than I'm laying out here — and he insists it will be paid for — so I'm not doing it justice. Go read up on it.

As I expected him to do, he called for quick passage of the FTA with South Korea, but also with Panama and Colombia (I wasn't so sure he'd include those two). That's a great point, but again he says that if people in America are going to drive Hyundais and Kias, he wants to see people in Korea driving Chryslers and Fords and Chevys (I hope he realizes they already drive Chevrolets!).

His regulation-reducing effort was also highlighted. We need to make sure that regulations are there to protect the health and welfare of the country. At the same time, he says, we should resist the desire to deregulate completely, getting rid of things that provide environmental protections, protections for workers. "We shouldn't be in a race to the bottom, ... but a race to the top." Dismantling protections to make the corporations stronger is not the way to go, he says.

That was, in fact, not his only nationalism-infused statement. American will be #1 again, we'll be top in the world, there's no reason we can't beat China, etc., etc.

Overall, a good and timely speech, one that emphasizes bipartisanship (he emphasized over and over how his proposed jobs bill was a litany of things supported by both Dems and Republicans) and is filled with a bunch of points that I generally agree with. Now just get on it. As you said, the people who elected "us" don't have fourteen months to wait.

Of course, with House Speaker John Boehner not applauding at things one would think Republicans would support — like how the GI Bill helped a whole lot of people go to college who otherwise couldn't have — I expect something of an uphill battle (some Republicans who weren't even going to attend dismissed the speech before it was even made, some even boycotting it).

And why not? If the Republicans want to re-take the White House next year, it's better for them if the unemployment rate remains high, and it seems that gridlock to block Obama's plans to fix the economy in order to keep it high actually is their strategy. But Boehner may have been listening to that speech and thinking, at some point, that maybe his job will be more secure and he can effect more of the changes he wants, if he remains head of the House in a second Obama administration. But that's just a thought; I can't read his mind, nor he mine.

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Was Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona assassinated over health care vote?

UPDATE: 
The earlier reports that she had died were inaccurate, and CNN is saying she is instead undergoing surgery for a gunshot wound to the head. No word on the other dozen who were also shot. Let's pray for the best. I'm leaving the original post intact. (Further updates will be below original post.)

ORIGINAL POST:
Far be it from me to believe in (or promote) conspiracy theories, but when you have a Congresswoman shot at point blank at an event for the public to come meet her, and there have been other incidents where someone was removed after discovered to have brought a firearm to such an event, and her home-state office was vandalized after she voted for the contentious Obamacare health care overhaul, it's not hard to connect the dots and see that as at least possible. (And her immigration reform positions may be another possibility.)

That Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and half a dozen other people were killed (and half a dozen more injured) is tragic enough. But if she were killed for her politic stance, that is utterly sickening.

In a country where both sides of the political spectrum increasingly see the other as an un- or anti-American, enemies who deserve violence delivered upon them (according to some of the more extreme voices on-line and even on-air), it would not be a surprising turn of events. Extremely disturbing, but unsurprising.

Requiescant in pace, Representative Giffords and the others.

UPDATE 2:

Representative Giffords is out of surgery and in stable condition, but her aide was killed. Also killed was Judge John Roll, who earned the ire of local talk show hosts when he allowed a $32 million lawsuit against an area rancher to go forward.

In 2009, The Arizona Republic talks about the subsequent threats:

In February, when U.S. District Judge John Roll presided over a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit filed by illegal immigrants against an Arizona rancher, the Marshals Service was anticipating the fallout.

When Roll ruled the case could go forward, Gonzales said talk-radio shows cranked up the controversy and spurred audiences into making threats.

In one afternoon, Roll logged more than 200 phone calls. Callers threatened the judge and his family. They posted personal information about Roll online.

"They said, 'We should kill him. He should be dead,' " Gonzales said.

Roll, who is the chief federal judge in Arizona, said both he and his wife were given a protection detail for about a month.

"It was unnerving and invasive. . . . By its nature it has to be," Roll said, adding that they were encouraged to live their lives as normally as possible. "It was handled very professionally by the Marshals Service."

At the end of the month, Roll said four key men had been identified as threat makers.

That, sadly, is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about earlier.

And we're reading now that apparently Sarah Palin was targeting Congresswoman Giffords last year, complete with "gunsights," according to this Huffington Post story from last year:

And Sarah Palin is now officially radioactive. While this is not evidence that she herself sought to have people literally target the Democrats on the above list, her choice of imagery was poorly thought-out, even before someone shot one of the people on the list point blank and killed a judge and a child in the same attack. This may indeed be enough to shift moderate Republicans and other non-Tea Party GOPers away from her.

Oh, and this is apparently the YouTube channel of the alleged shooter, Jared Laughner (or Loughner).

UPDATE3:
Well, not so much of an update as a comment, on others' comments. I think some might come along and think I've joined (or started) some sort of Tea Party- or conservative-bashing bandwagon, but a careful read of what I've written demonstrates otherwise. I specifically wrote (and even italicized) dangerous rhetoric on both sides of the spectrum, and this comment at The Marmot's Hole about the shooting demonstrates what I'm talking about:

Normally, I wouldn’t try to attribute blame between shooter and media influence. But Republicans tend to have low IQ so I think it’s likely the shooter was another one of those right-wing psychos inundated by diatribes by Palin, Fox, et al.. But we’ll see…

I think Palin should be shot. America’s political dialogue deserves to be better than whatever that bimbo has contributed.

Pot, meet kettle. I'm beginning to wonder if The Korean wasn't eerily prescient when he said this:

But now, it looks like an argument can be made that Korean politics is actually more advanced than American politics, since the problems of American politics is appearing to follow the problems of Korean politics a few years ago. How much longer until we see Fight Night in Congress? ("You lie!" sure seems like a great prelude to that.)

The coming end of American civility in the public sphere, I thought, would mean we can't reach necessary compromises on important issues. Now I'm beginning to wonder if the current take-no-prisoners form of American politics is bringing us intractable violence.

Grizzly bears don't have tariffs on berries and salmon, so why should we?

Courtesy of Ben Muse's Korea-US FTA blog (which has produced a flurry of activity lately), here's news that Sarah Palin is pushing new Republican members of Congress to support the KORUS-FTA:

You will also have the opportunity to push job-creating free trade agreements with allies like Colombia and South Korea. You can stand with allies like Israel, not criticize them.

Wait... what the? We're not supposed to criticize Israel? What if they do something wrong? Like continuing to build settlements that further erode what little chance there is for a peaceful two-state solution? What do we do then?

Anyway, she may have a bit of a tough time with this, since Tea Party supporters seem to be anti-free trade, believing it to be a sign of the New World Order   another example of Obama trying to socialize America   I am extremely terrified of Chinese people somehow bad (according to polls).

Oh, and they should also kill Obamacare:

Obamacare is a job-killer, a regulatory nightmare, and an enormous unfunded mandate. The American people don’t want it and we can’t afford it. We ask, with all due respect, that you remember your job will be to work to replace this legislation with real reform that relies on free market principles and patient-centered policies. The first step is, of course, to defund Obamacare.

Replace the legislation, yeah. Replace it with that major health care legislation you pushed during the six years that Republicans controlled the White House, the US Senate, and the House of Representatives. That one.

Anyway, interesting that I can agree with the former Alaska governor on at least something (but that's more because I'm a moderate than any inclinations toward across-the-aisle compromise on her part).

Obamacare reader (March 25, 2010 edition)

• Just moments after President Obama signed the healthcare insurance overhaul, attorneys general from thirteen states filed suit, challenging the law on constitutional grounds. This is part of the three-pronged effort to challenge the Democrats on the issue.

• President Obama's approval ratings saw a slight uptick after the bill passed.

• The healthcare victory is demonstrating that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is one tough and savvy political leader.

Anti-Obamacare violence?

During the Vancouver Olympics, some Korean netizens were so enraged at Jim Hewish, the judge who disqualified the South Korean team women's relay team in 2010 and Kim Dong-sung in 2002, that he got police protection both in Vancouver and in Sydney. Indeed, his address and a picture of his house had been put online by some of those same crazed Netizens, and there were legitimate fears for his safety [above image stolen from Brian's site].

I was reminded of that today when I read in the Los Angeles Times that Democratic supporters of the controversial healthcare that just passed have apparently been targeted. In some cases it's verbal assaults — racist and homophobic comments — but some of it is far more severe:

One of the most serious incidents involves a severed fuel line at the home of the brother of Rep. Tom Perriello of Virginia. The cut line was discovered the day after tea party activists posted the address online. The incident is being investigated by the FBI.

“My No. 1 priority right now is ensuring the safety of my brother’s family, and I am grateful to law enforcement for their excellent work,” Perriello said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“While it is too early to say anything definitive regarding political motivations behind this act, it’s never too early for political leaders to condemn threats of violence, particularly as threats to other members of Congress and their children escalate. And so I ask every member of House and Senate leadership to state unequivocally tonight that it is never OK to harm or threaten elected officials and their families with anything more than political retribution. Here in America, we settle our political differences at the ballot box,” he stated.

This goes beyond the pale, and I don't think it's out of line to blame the pundits — particularly those online or on the air — who use extremist rhetoric to describe their political foes as an un-American, anti-American, Marxist or Stalinist enemy that must be destroyed. Really, what the hell country is this?