How Senator Rubio And The Republicans In Congress Rigged Your Healthcare Premiums To Go Up

"RISK CORRIDOR": THE REAL REASON OBAMA-CARE PREMIUMS ARE GOING UP IN 2017 -- THAT NO ONE IS TELLING YOU ABOUT

Hot off Wednesday's Thom Hartmann Show:

This is why the insurance companies participating in the Affordable Care Act are raising their premiums next year. As we know, the ACA ended the practice of denying coverage to people with previous conditions (which was causing people who were very ill to go without health care, and others to die). Even though the insurance companies would profit in long-term from overall increased number of enrollees, they screamed because of the short-term losses due to mandatory coverage of people who were already chronically ill. This period of short-term loss due to the addition of high-risk enrollees was dubbed "the risk corridor."

So to sweeten the deal, Obama then added extra subsidies for any losses incurred in the risk corridor. (Poor insurance companies! After all, CEO Helmsley must not be allowed to lose 1 cent of the one billion dollars+ he takes yearly in personal income from United Health Care.) The risk corridor subsidies were of course dependent on Congress passing budget bills that provided the funds for them.

This year, Senator Marco Rubio stripped out funds for the risk corridor subsidies, not as part of a budget bill (which is the honest way to do it), but as a rider to an unrelated bill, which Obama was compelled to sign, for whatever reasons pertinent to the purposes of the actual bill. As a result, the strip-out, and who did it, never got covered in the news. (Which is just how the Republicans wanted it.) And, as a result, the insurance companies will not get the subsidies that provide their short-term profits next year. Instead of "manning up," as the Conservatives like to say, and taking the losses next year in stride (which is what corporations used to do, and found acceptable as part of doing business, when we baby-boomers were kids), and disregarding that these losses will eventually be made up by long-term increased enrollments, the insurance companies are raising their premiums. A lot. Who knows... They may even end up making more money than they would have with the government subsidies.

Meanwhile, the enrollees are screaming bloody murder, as they should, and getting massively ripped off so Helmsley can buy another villa ala vineyard on the South Italy coast. Or whatever he and his CEO cronies do with all that money. And because MSmedia is owned and run by essentially the same people who own and run the insurance companies, and is therefore keeping its collective mouth shut, Republicans get to scream some more that "Obama-care doesn't work!" without revealing the real reason why, and that they're the ones responsible for it. Conveniently during the election.

This is how the Republicans do it. Remember this. Remember the name Marco Rubio and Republicans when your premiums go up. This is why we need single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All). Health care cannot work as long as it's conducted as a for-profit enterprise. And as it is essential to life, it should not be for profit, any more than water, or fire departments should be for profit. I'm not saying we shouldn't all pay for these services, nor that people should not make a decent living from helping to provide them. I'm saying that particular individuals should not be allowed to take ridiculous profits from doing work that is necessary to human beings' basic survival. Certainly people who simply shuffle the money around for these services, or coordinate the processes involved, should not be taking huge profits, adding to everyone's costs. Given that people die without them, that is extortion, and abuse of power. (We actually used to understand these principles in America. These things went without saying.)

Yeah. Obama-care: The only health care solution Republicans would even marginally accept. A system modeled after Republican plans (specifically, as I recall, Mitt Romney's). A system that doesn't work, because the Republicans won't allow it to work... Nice.

A Carefully Planned Train Wreck

Why do trains crash here but not in Europe or China or Japan? It's all about the privatizers.

That which the Republicans and their clients want to privatize (so they can jack up prices) they first conspire to break down. First they need to cause its failure. Cheaper to buy up that way. It's an old Mafia trick.

Here's a deep dig into the problems of Amtrak by the National Journal.

Common Dreams reports on the Republican Congress's immediate slashing of Amtrak budgets after the Philly crash.

And the reporting from the New York Times.

Does anyone see a pattern? It’s going on every day, every week, all over. Everything owned by the public and run for the public, anything the public really needs, is seen as an opportunity to privatize, to re-engineer to suit narrower interests. The purpose, as they see it, isn’t to deliver goods and services safely for a reasonable price. They see the purpose as delivering maximum profits with minimal concern for the customer or the employee. Ordinary people are hostages to the necessity of certain services, which makes the venture capitalists’ mouths water. Need is a killer business model, ripe for maximum exploitation.

PrivatizationWatch tracks the march of privatization all across the public sector.

Privatization is a shrewd and deeply heartless process and it’s been going on since Reagan took the public interest out of the equation. Look at what Mitt Romney got rich doing and see if you can do the same thing to the systems we all rely on every day. The transportation grid, the energy grid, the food and water supply. Maximum profit, minimum upkeep, short term wins and a guaranteed public need, a guaranteed demand to be squeezed and milked.

How is it done?

First they target something they’d like to hand over to their venture capitalist friends. (The way the entire public sector in the former Soviet Union was handed over to the Russian mafia, only here there needs to be a rationale.)

Find the target.

Make it fail. (There’s your rationale. Failure implies the public sector is inept, which it isn’t.)

Defund it. Break it down. Throw sand in the works. (Republicans have been doing this sand-in-the-machinery routine with Congress, with our democratic system, for the entire Obama presidency.)

Load the public sector system up with pointless burdens. See how the Republicans loaded the Postal Service up with 100 years of pension obligations to be fully funded in a couple of years? That sort of cynical trick will bust the budget and force unworkable cuts in service.

Take the system you want to take over for scrap, and get it to stop working smoothly. Destroy morale. Cut the workforce so the customers start complaining. Make everybody hate the system that used to work well for everybody and served everyone. Blame the people who are trying their best to make the system function. Foist dysfunction on them. Shoot them in the leg and laugh at them for limping.

Then BOOM. Shut ‘er down. Sell ‘er off, cheap, to their private enterprise pals.

This is what the flag-wearing anthem-singing hands-on-hearts Republicans have been planning for the Postal Service, a well-run public institution–– founded by Benjamin Franklin forgodssakes.

John Nichols at The Nation has been writing about the efforts to shut down the Post Office and privatize its parts for several years.

Want to know how privatization works out for the average American? Ask your UPS or FedEx guy how much they’ll charge to send a birthday card to your nephew in Nebraska. Will they say “48¢? No. I’m guessing they’ll say around $23.

And this, folks, is what they’re planning to do with Amtrak. Amtrak, as defunded as it is, still is the preferred transportation method for 80% of the people traveling in the northeast corridor, the busiest travel corridor in the Western Hemisphere. It could be busier if Republicans weren’t working so hard to make it not work.

Besides the passenger rail failures in the news there are almost weekly news stories about another high plains town evacuation because of a derailed oil train.

Salon has been reporting on the reason for the oil train crashes while the networks have just been broadcasting the explosions.

The private rail business isn’t interested in making their rail lines safe. They’re happy to handle a weekly train explosion. Better than fixing their rail lines. They’re misers on the classic Scrooge model: starve the system, impoverish the employees, and pay every saved dollar to the executive suite and to the handful of wealthy shareholders, who (coincidence!) don’t live along or anywhere near a rail line much less work on one.

Here's Paul Ryan's interview about the Amtrak safety fixes that have been delayed by Congressional budget cutting. Even FoxNews can't save him.

Europe’s trains run well and on time. Asia’s trains are a marvel. But we’re a dying empire. Why? Because we’re owned by a 1% crowd who don’t care if the system falls apart. They’ve already moved all the cash out of the country, the way mobsters used to loot legitimate businesses. Who needs mobsters anymore when you have a 1% who steal much bigger and much more efficiently?

The privatizers and their determined effort to break down public systems and institutions also resemble the barbarian hordes who broke down the Roman Empire. One of those tribes gave a name to what they did. They were the Vandals.

A Cunning Plan To Make America Fail

The GOP Plan Looks Like A Conspiracy To Make America Fail

97 of the 100 poorest counties in the US are in Red States. True? Certainly factual. (PolitiFact) The interpretation might depend on your politics. Rural tends to mean poor. It also tends to mean Republican. Why? That is very hard to understand. Which doesn’t make it untrue nor does it make the voting habits of those poor counties seem rational. But it does supply a rationale for the leaders who like to have stupid people under their supervision, in their electorate.

Republican hero Scott Walker has led Wisconsin toward the worst end of the economic spectrum (National Memo). Why do Republicans admire that? The money men admire it because it means they’re sucking the maximum amount of wealth and income away from the majority who work for a living. Their spare change can persuade the victims that it’s a great thing for them.

This kind of outright stupidity and greed and bad planning may explain why America’s worst enemy is America itself. (New Yorker article)

The Republicans’ (and their rich clients’) uniting principals are 1. kicking the working poor off healthcare and 2. keeping unregistered immigrants outside the law so they can go on hiring them for slave wages. There is an really cruel, greedy, heartless beauty to this. (New York magazine article explaining the GOP plan to replace Obamacare.)

This is only a winning strategy because they have all the money and money buys advertising and advertising creates fear.

Lincoln Was Hated Too

...Until they killed him.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican leaders met in private and swore to oppose everything, EVERYTHING, the new president tried to accomplish. This article in Tikkun summarizes it well. So do these articles: Washington Post, the Guardian, and DailyKos.

In at least one press interview these Republican conspirators compared their opposition to the Taliban. An interesting choice, considering they spent a lot of the first year screaming that Obama wasn’t killing enough Taliban in Afghanistan.

For two years the blockade leaked. Democrats got bills passed. The economy began to recover. The Affordable Care Act passed against a fierce fire from Republicans, never mind that the plan was designed around mandates and a healthcare marketplace first proposed by the Heritage Foundation. When Democrats found Republican points they could agree on Republicans hated them for it. They didn’t want compromise. They wanted dysfunction. They wanted war.

In 2010, corporations (whom the Supreme Court had reclassified as people) poured hundreds of millions of dollars (which the Supreme Court had reclassified as protected speech) to Republican candidates. Most of these candidates didn’t hide their anarchist fervor on the stump, and the wave of Republicans who retook the House of Representatives were the most radical the institution had ever seen. Radicals who scorned the rules and traditions of the House itself. They were anarchists. Their sole wish was to make the Congress cease to function. Their goal being to make Obama’s presidency a failure.

Now the opposition was total because they had the numbers. They refused to compromise on anything and could block everything. They used procedural maneuvers to prevent majority measures from passing. They used procedure to slow up ordinary congressional business. Routine stuff like departmental appointments which the opposition party generally allowed because departments needed people doing the work.

Not this time. No judges. No heads of various departments. Bush appointees were therefore left in place, which pleased the Republicans. Understaffed government agencies began to function less efficiently. Brilliant! This was exactly what the Republicans wanted. They wanted the government that did things to cease doing things like helping the unemployed, like treating veterans, like helping veterans of their wars find jobs. Maximum pain was the goal.

Then there was the debt limit. Bush had started two wars and kept their trillion dollar cost off the books. Obama put them back on the books, in a refreshing act of accounting honesty. But Republicans decided they didn't want to pay this debt. Just as they didn't want to pay unemployment benefits to vets. Or the upkeep of the nation's highways. Or relief to people suffering from the economic collapse. They didn't want to spend any money unless they could cut the taxes owed by their wealthy clients. International markets downgraded U.S. Treasury Bills, our sovereign debt. Republicans cheered. Something they wanted to happen couldn't possibly be their fault. It was the president's fault.

Republicans in the House voted more than 50 times to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They wanted to undo Obama’s signature achievement. Republicans who controlled red states refused to enact the ACA in their states, refusing federal money to assist their citizens who didn’t have healthcare coverage. A Scroogelike opposition.

Nice guys, these Republicans. Millions cheered them on. Why?

What was different? Was it because the president was….(black)? Perish the thought. Apparently it was because he was a foreign born Muslim, a silly falsehood Republicans raised again and again. Why did they raise it again and again? Because their constituents believed it. They believed it because their political masters told them to.

They hated Obama. They have hated him ever since he was elected. They hated him the moment he became black, which they prefer to believe was not in Hawaii.

People hated Lincoln too. People North and South, but mostly in the South. Until they killed him.

Lincoln had one advantage. He tried to solve serious problems that Americans had kicked down the road for generations, but he didn’t have to deal with a Confederacy that controlled the Congress and the Supreme Court. Today the Confederacy, the Lost Cause of sacred memory, lives in the Republican Party.

It didn’t die in 1865. The Confederacy lived on in Jim Crow all across the South where blacks could be lynched for registering to vote or for looking at a white person the wrong way, and there were a lot of wrong ways, whole etiquette books of them (the South was and is famously courteous.)

After LBJ passed civil rights and voting rights Southerners blamed the Democratic Party and became Republicans overnight. Nixon devised a whole program to welcome the racists and the anti-unionists and the male supremacists into the Republican fold. It was called the Southern Strategy. It was carefully written to enable white folks to hate and oppress black folks without calling them n*****s. So the Confederacy lives again. No white hoods required, just stubborn willingness to pour sand in the works of our democracy. Why? Racist spite seems extremely probable. You need to work very hard not to think so.

And it’s working brilliantly. Oppose everything, block everything Obama tries to do––even those proposals first made by Republicans––show willingness to make the nation default. The Republicans’ plan contained an explicit desire to make Americans suffer. They’ve laughingly admitted this. They know Americans will blame the president for all of their pain and frustration even if its caused by his enemies. Which is the purest, sickest, most unAmerican kind of cynicism. They've willed his exclusion from the public conversation, hogtied his economic recovery and carefully orchestrated hatred and blame from half of the country. They've gagged him and criticize him for not talking. When he does speak they damn him for poisoning the air––because they disagree. It is hard to be a black leader in a country with a history of racism. It's gotten so bad the news media feel compelled to minimize Obama's achievements. He has achieved a great deal, but who remembers? We've come a long way back since the previous president drove us into the ditch. How could a successful president be this unpopular? It is hard to explain.

So the harm is done. And we’ve let it be done. Our news media has hidden what has been done because to describe this kind of behavior honestly would appear partisan. So they soften it, disguise it, create phony balance. If the president’s opposition behaves in a racist fashion, well Obama must be a racist too.

It’s like that other case in Ferguson, Missouri, where the black man was wrongfully arrested, beaten, jailed and when the police discovered they’d arrested an innocent man from out of town they charged him with destruction of police property. While they’d been beating him up he’d bled on their uniforms.

A Republican Economy

This is a Republican economy. This is the economy they wanted.

This is where the money is going.

The money that would have hired people and created jobs and got money flowing through this economy to pay the mortgages and the grocery bills and the gas bill and the electricity and the middle class taxes, is instead being fed to the executive suite. This has been the pattern for the past few decades, and that is why the economy is flat.

How the Rich Became the Uber Rich (but no explanation about how we helped them to it.)

How the Middle Class Became the Underclass (but no explanation of how we voted for this to happen.)

The point is it's all driven by public policy, which is driven by money in politics, which was re-legalized by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court, who pushed every single de-regulation they could, which the super-rich demanded and paid for with campaign contributions and extortion tactics, it also got us a free predatory economy which the rich also wanted, which plundered working Americans' savings, which made the economy more unstable, which led to the financial collapse of 2008.

Are you happy now? Reagan's dreams have come true. The Republicans are ecstatic.

If you want evidence that the very very very rich are in control. Look at spending.

And do they have to carry their share of the load? No. Their money gives them license to evade taxes, and the middle class can't continue picking up the slack, which is why we have a deficit, which is why they'd like us to profitize Medicare and Social Security. Which would make things infinitely worse. Is this a solution?

Instead of listening to the attractive, expensively dressed "reporter" on some market-watch program, who probably gets his or her "scoops" by buying lunches for Wall Streeters, listen to a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who's covered this story honestly and aggressively for decades.

Who is Happy With This Economy?

Do you ever wonder if the Republicans actually want the economy to fail? There's been a lot of conversation about it. The signs are pretty clear. But the media are too polite to bring that discussion into the open. Here are a few links. Not much pops up in newspapers or television news.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_05/playing_a_game_of_chicken_with029667.php

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79739/washington-gop-opposition-quantitative-easing

http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-being-grilled-about-muni-debt-because-republicans-want-the-states-to-collapse-2011-1

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/01/the-failure-caucus.html

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/06/24/republicans_want_america_to_fail

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/block-heads-by-digby-so-republicans-are.html

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/02/dire_news.php

http://gawker.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy#!5572444/are-republicans-trying-to-ruin-the-economy

When they are honest Republicans actually say it themselves:

Another economic meltdown would do Republicans a lot of good.

An economy that doesn't recover (except for the very very rich) hurts Obama's chances of re-election.

It would spread the blame for the collapse of 2008 and make the Bush administration look less inept.

Republican clients like having an insecure, underpaid workforce that's grateful to work for less.

Republican clients are doing fine. They were bailed out. Their stocks (which many of them scooped up at the bottom of the market) rebounded. They paid themselves bonuses for this. And the less for us, the more for them. What working people don't earn, the rich get to keep. It's called a Plutonomy.

I love how the Wall Street Journal equates lavish personal spending and heavy lifting. (Some of their spending is lavished on shapers of public opinion.)

A weaker economy makes tax revenues drop. Republican clients want lower revenues because a weaker government can't regulate them.

(Just as an aside, here are some suggestions for the anti-government crowd, to help them avoid hypocrisy. A little list of the things they should do without.)

Thing is, the Republicans want government NOT to work. Democracy is a nuisance. They want to get elected to government... so they can make it NOT work.

They (in the famous words of Grover Norquist) want to drown our form of representative government in the bathtub. Goodbye democracy.

To help kill our government they are happy to run up an enormous debt and not pay for it.

And in the interests of putting fewer, richer people in charge, they'd like it if fewer people voted. They'd like a small elite deciding what a vast uninformed and poorly paid population does.

Are you following this so far?

A government that can't function is less popular with average people. This is the Republican goal. When government doesn't have the funds to function properly it makes people mad, not at the Republicans who made it not work, but at government itself, which has always been reliable. It helps to have a public that doesn't pay attention or is easily misled.

Republicans like it when government doesn't work. They've been saying this for decades. They've finally delivered and this is what we are experiencing every time we hit a pothole, every time class sizes increase, every time our tuition rates go up. Wait till our fire departments can't get to us. Wait till the government can't respond to the next flood or the next wave of violent storms. Wait till the government can't shore up the financial system or starts selling the national parks.

This bad economy can't support a decent, functioning government, and that is exactly what the Republicans want.