The Oligarchs have assumed control of our central government. No
longer satisfied with simply pulling the strings, the Trumpster and
his happy gaggle of Oligarchs have stepped up and taken over from
their puppets, thus making themselves the Ruling Dummies.
And now we will witness the rise of neoMcCarthyism.
As during the late 40's and early 50's, good, honest, men and women
will be ridiculed for their efforts to protect our Land. There will
be brought forth a new oath of allegiance: I do hereby affirm that I
am not now, nor have I ever been a Terrorist, and, I further swear
that I have never thought evil or naughty stuff, wishing harm to my
beautiful...I mean like, really beautiful Land of Freedom, and, I
further swear that I will never mock my President in public, or
disagree with his wisdom, or point and smirk at his bad comb over.
As for such channels as RT TV, and the independent public radio
channels, and the tons of material accessible via the internet, those
will all become targets of suspicion and ridicule, and later on they
will become the victims of hate crimes.
And there will be great weeping and gnashing of teeth throughout the
Land...but there will be no reporters or journalists left to report on
it.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/8/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
Most of the podcasts are radio programs. The advantage is that you can
listen to them when you please, and you can pause them, or turn them off
and on again. But they are taking time away from my books. It's interesting
how many wonderful Americans are on RT which is being characterized as a
Russian propaganda outlet. But then, Truthdig was also listed.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2017 12:42 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The GOP Fix for Obamacare: Rich Get Tax
Breaks While Millions of Others Lose Health Care
Miriam,
I've never taken the time to explore podcasts. With all I read, I don't
even belong to Book Share. But I squeeze in some good radio broadcasts,
like KSER FM in Everett, Washington, where I hear democracy now and Flash
Point and Thom Hartman. Also there is KBCS(I
think) with programs such as Alternative Radio. KEXP is a second broadcast
of KUOW, from the University of Washington. On weekends KEXP has a couple
of hours of good progressive programming in the mornings. KPTZ fFM in Port
Townsend also has scattered programs among its strange music selections.
And of course, all of them are now into their Spring Fund Drive. I pick up
some talks by many of my favorites, on You Tube.
And when I have a moment or two, I exercise my flabby brain by writing my
current thoughts on the crazy events crashing around me. But I do think
I'll look into how to get Pacifica News. I am getting really fed up with
NPR and their supposed unbiased reporting. When they have some
controversial issue, they check in with the Republicans and then with some
Democrat, but never ever do they go to folks like Greenwald, Hedges, or
Nader, or Naomi Klein.
Oh yes, then there is RT television, where I listen to Thom Hartman.
I'm doing more and more one man debates with Thom. Still, he makes good
points from his Liberal Democratic corner.
Local news is almost invisible to me. I simply can't wade through the tons
of commercials and the simpering, posturing of the TV newscasters. We no
longer take any newspapers, but do catch some local programming on the
radio.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/7/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
You know that I've become intrigued with podcasts. Pacifica Network,
which is where Democracy Now started, has good broadcasts. The best
station is KPFK which, I think, is in Berkley. But there are 3 stations in
California.
New York has WBAI which has deteriorated and that has something to do
with lack of funds and a war over control, a few years ago. But
anyway, Marsha told me about Flash Points which is run by Richard
Bernstein. I've posted a few of his articles for the list from time to
time. He interviews really good people. The Pacifica Evening News is
an excellent, hour long traditional news show. It covers a lot of
stories with some depth. I download it when it goes up on the web at
night, and I listen to it the next morning. The Real News Network is a
Baltimore on line video news channel that was started by two young men
in order to inform young people in the Baltimore area. Occasionally, I
saw some of their clips on line. They have excellent, informative, 15
minute long podcasts covering all sorts of things. I heard two about
how Britain's National Health Service is being privatized and
consequently, quality of care is decreasing and costs increasing. I
mentioned that they're doing several podcasts with Michael Hudson
about his book. I have no idea where their money comes from, but they
do wonderfully informative, progressive programming. Some of the
podcasts ask for money. Some seem to have some sort of commercial
arrangement that I can't figure out. Jeremy Scahill at Intercepted,
plugs other podcasts but I tried one and it was a totally different
kind of podcast with a different political orientation so I think that
somehow, Intercepted benefits if people subscribe to these other
recommended podcasts, but I don't know why.
And remember, The Intercept is funded by the owner of EBay who is
incredibly rich.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2017 6:48 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The GOP Fix for Obamacare: Rich Get Tax
Breaks While Millions of Others Lose Health Care
My one fervent hope is that enough of us continue funding those
Listener Supported radio channels, so some of the programs like
Democracy Now and Richard Wolff can continue. Under the commercial
media barrage, it is an uphill struggle at best.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/7/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I heard this on Democracy Now today and I'm posting the transcript
because I think the interview was extremely informative.
Miriam
The GOP Fix for Obamacare: Rich Get Tax Breaks While Millions of
Others Lose Health Care Tuesday, March 07, 2017 By Amy Goodman and
Juan González, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
House Republicans have unveiled long-awaited legislation to repeal
much of the Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare --
including its expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor. The
proposal includes a large tax break for insurance companies that pay
their CEOs over $500,000 per year. It also defunds Planned Parenthood
and eliminates abortion coverage. The Republican proposal does retain
Obamacare's requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing
conditions. However, it scraps the revenue-generating mechanism that
makes this possible: the individual mandate, which required all
Americans to sign up for health insurance or pay a fee. President
Donald Trump and fellow Republicans have repeatedly promised to
repeal and replace Obamacare, but their efforts have faced internal
divisions as well as sustained outcry from constituents at town hall
meetings across the country. For more, we speak with John McDonough,
professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is the
former executive director of Health Care for All in Massachusetts,
which played a key role in the passage of the 2006 Massachusetts
health reform law.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: House Republicans have unveiled long-awaited
legislation to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act, also known as
Obamacare, including its expansion of the Medicaid program for the
poor. The proposal includes a large tax break for insurance companies
that pay their CEOs over $500,000 per year. It also defunds Planned
Parenthood and eliminates abortion coverage. The Republican proposal
does retain Obamacare's requirement that insurers cover people with
pre-existing conditions. However, it scraps the revenue-generating
mechanism that makes this possible: the individual mandate, which
required all Americans to sign up for health insurance or pay a fee.
It is unclear if the bill has enough support to pass the
Republican-led Congress. It now goes to two House committees for
review. During a speech last week, President Trump urged Congress to
repeal Obamacare.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Tonight I am also calling on this Congress to
repeal and replace Obamacare with reforms that expand choice,
increase access, lower costs and at the same time provide better
healthcare. Mandating every American to buy government-approved
health insurance was never the right solution for our country.
AMY GOODMAN: President Trump and fellow Republicans have repeatedly
promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, but their efforts have
faced internal divisions as well as sustained outcry from
constituents at town hall meetings across the country.
For more on the future of healthcare, we go to Boston, where we're
joined by John McDonough, professor at the Harvard School of Public
Health. He is the former executive director of Health Care for All in
Massachusetts, which played a key role in the passage of the 2006
Massachusetts health reform bill, which was known as Romneycare. He
later became a top aide to the late Senator Ted Kennedy and worked on
the development and passage of the Affordable Care Act. He's also
author of the book Inside National Health Reform.
Professor John McDonough, welcome to Democracy Now! Your assessment
of what has been released so far?
JOHN McDONOUGH: What we see so far is not a surprise, and it's been
revealed in bits and pieces along the way. The Republican plan
represents a massive tax cut to benefit wealthy households and
powerful corporations in America.
And in exchange, a significant number of millions of Americans,
lower-income and lower-middle-income, are going to lose their health
insurance coverage to make up for the lost revenue from these tax
cuts.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in what way do you say it's a tax cut for the
wealthy?
JOHN McDONOUGH: So, the Affordable Care Act is significantly financed
-- and most people don't know this -- by a major tax increase on
wealthy households, both on earned income and on unearned income. And
it has been a major target, although they don't talk about it a lot,
of Republicans to repeal these tax cuts. And just to give you some
perspective on this, the bill that the Republicans put out would
repeal these taxes. The 400 wealthiest households in America, because
of this tax cut, will see annual tax cuts of $7 million per
household. The 160 million households with incomes below $200,000
will get zero from this, except some 10 [million] to
20 million will lose health insurance coverage because of this law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, another feature of the proposal appears to be
dealing, clearly, with Medicaid and turning the expansion of Medicaid
under Obamacare for a greater number of low-income individuals into
block grants that then would be capped. So, in essence, the states
would, at one point or another, then face a cap on federal aid under
Medicaid.
JOHN McDONOUGH: Yes, absolutely. And the Republican agenda is to try
and shrink the federal obligation to low-income coverage through
Medicaid as much as they can. This has been a tough balancing act for
them, because
31
states expanded Medicaid to about 10 million low-income Americans, 10
[million] to 11 million. And there's been a real struggle, because
about half of those states are now represented by Republican
governors, who do not want to see the dramatic losses in coverage
that the Republicans would like to achieve if they were able to do
what their instincts were leading them to do. So, there's tension in
the party. The conservatives want to see a much more drastic cut to
Medicaid. The more moderate or less conservative Republicans from
states that expanded are unwilling to see a wholesale throwing off of
hundreds of thousands or millions of people from coverage.
And so, the speaker, Ryan, and his team are really trying to walk a
tightrope between those two sides. But either way, we're looking,
over years, in the significant reduction in the number of Americans
covered through Medicaid.
By the way, we don't have precise numbers on this, because the
Republicans are pushing this forward before the Congressional Budget
Office has put out a score, both in terms of cost and coverage
losses. So, we are a little bit
-- we'll probably learn within the next week to two weeks of what
these numbers are, but right now we're just doing our best
estimating. But the trend is clear: fewer vulnerable Americans with
health insurance and bigger tax cuts for wealthy Americans and for
powerful companies.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor McDonough, can you explain age rating and what
this means?
JOHN McDONOUGH: So, the Affordable Care Act created tax credits --
they're often referred to as subsidies -- to enable people, sort of
lower-middle-income people above Medicaid eligibility, to be able to
get health insurance coverage. Republicans are also proposing tax
credits for Americans who can't get coverage elsewhere. The big
difference is, the ACA has income -- has tax credits that are
income-adjusted, so the lower your income, the more generous the tax
credit. And as you go up the income ladder, it scales out, and at
four times the poverty level, you get no more support from those tax
credits. Republicans are saying, "Let's just create a flat tax
credit, and it varies only by your age, whether you're in your
twenties, in which you get a $2,000 credit, up to your sixties, where
you would get a $4,000 credit." In all of those cases, the support
that you would get would be significantly less than what you would
obtain under the ACA income tax credits for the people who need it
the most, which is the people with less income. So, the new tax
credits are a little bit like giving a six-foot ladder for someone to
get out of a 20-foot hole. Most of the people who are getting
coverage right now through the ACA will not be able to afford to buy
coverage with the Republican-envisioned tax credits that no longer
take account of your income, only your age.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about another section of the
proposal called the continuous coverage provision.
JOHN McDONOUGH: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Apparently, this is a replacement for -- to some
degree, for the mandate. But under the old mandate, people would have
to pay a fine, if they didn't have insurance, to the government. What
happens now under this continuous coverage provision?
JOHN McDONOUGH: You're right. So, the so-called individual mandate in
the ACA is by and far the least popular part, although it is
essential for guaranteed issue and eliminating pre-existing
conditions. But the current ACA mandate basically is a -- it's not a
mandate. You don't have to buy coverage; however, if you don't buy
coverage and you're able to afford it, then you face a tax penalty,
when you pay your taxes, of up to $695 for a full year without
coverage or a percent of your income.
The Republican plan gets rid of that. It reduces all those penalties
to zero. And it puts in place a different kind of a penalty. And the
penalty says that if in the prior year, in the prior 12 months, you
had a gap in health insurance coverage of more than 63 days, then
when you go back to buy health insurance, you will pay a premium on
top of your premium that will represent 30 percent more. So let's say
that I want to -- I had a gap in coverage, and I want to buy health
insurance in the following year, and I want to buy an individual
policy that costs me, let's say, $7,500 in a premium. So I would pay
on top of that a penalty of an additional $2,200.
So the maximum penalty under the ACA is $695. But you're looking at a
penalty here right now, to replace the individual mandate, that is
significantly more punitive and more difficult and will in fact keep
many Americans from being able to get back and buy health insurance
once they've had coverage. And there's no hardship exemption. There
is nothing. This is on everybody, if you had a gap in coverage of
more than 63 days. So it will be a real impediment from people who
say, "OK, I'm ready now. I'm able to afford it, and I want to buy
health insurance coverage." It's not making it easier for people to
get coverage; it's making it harder.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And there's also a difference, isn't there, in that
the penalty under the Affordable Care Act went to the government to
supposedly
--
JOHN McDONOUGH: That's right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: -- help defray the costs of the overall plan? But this
additional premium would go to the insurance companies, not to the
government --
JOHN McDONOUGH: Absolutely.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: -- to basically help their bottom line, right?
JOHN McDONOUGH: Enough said.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about -- what about reproductive rights,
Professor McDonough?
JOHN McDONOUGH: Yeah, so, in addition, the bill that's being promoted
by the Republican leadership will eliminate funding for Planned
Parenthood very quickly, all funding for all services. There is no
federal funding that goes to Planned Parenthood for abortion, but
this would eliminate all funding for any service to this one
organization called Planned Parenthood, which is a significant
political risk for them, because already there are at least two
Republican senators, Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from
Alaska, who have said they will not vote for a bill that eliminates
funding for Planned Parenthood. And Republicans can only lose three
votes in the Senate. They got a letter the other day from four
senators saying that the House treatment of Medicaid is unacceptable,
and they could not support that bill. So, it's uncertain in the House
politically, and it's highly uncertain what's going to happen to this
plan over in the Senate.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about some of the more bizarre
provisions of this bill. I understand it's a 66-page bill, which the
Republicans are actually touting, compared to the hundreds of pages
of the original Affordable Care Act. But seven pages, or more than 10
percent, of the bill are dedicated to excluding lottery winners from
the health -- from the insurance? Can you explain that?
JOHN McDONOUGH: So, I -- that's one of those little curious tales
that journalists will ferret out in the next couple of days. I am
honestly not sure where that came from, except that, clearly, they
had some advocacy from some lottery winners around this, and so there
is an exclusion of lottery winners in terms of when they can get
Medicaid and when they can't. And it is bizarre to focus that much on
it. But I'm sure there's a tale behind that in terms of how that got
in there.
AMY GOODMAN: In seeing people fan out to talk about this, the
watchword, the buzzword, is "accessibility": People will have access
to healthcare. But that's not the same as people will be able to
afford healthcare. So, overall, what is the takeaway you have right
now? I mean, it was just released yesterday. As you said -- and this
is not a minor point -- it hasn't even been scored. What did it take
-- two years? -- for you guys to figure out how much this was going
to cost? Could it cost actually more, overall, for the country?
JOHN McDONOUGH: Well, it could. But I think that there are other
parts of the ACA that remain untouched that have significant economic
consequences.
So, a big piece of the financing of the ACA represented substantial
reductions in the Medicare program to healthcare providers -- to
hospitals, to home health agencies, to insurance companies in the
Medicare Advantage program. And so, a significant -- it's about half
the cost of the law was through reductions in Medicare payments. And
for the most part, particularly from the hospitals -- hospitals are
giving up about $350 billion in revenue that they would otherwise
collect, because they wanted to make a serious, real contribution to
getting most of America to have health insurance.
The
hospital industry is now deeply alarmed and is ringing a lot of
alarms, saying, "Hey, we gave up an enormous amount of money, $350
billion over
10
years, in order to get America covered with health insurance." And
they are saying, "Listen, if you want to take away that coverage,
then we want our money back." But Republicans are not planning on
giving that money back, so they are going to be taking away the
coverage, and they're going to be leaving the cuts in place for
hospitals, who are going to be on the front line of dealing with the
millions of Americans who will be newly uninsured because of this
law.
So, because they leave that money in place, it will not be
challenging for this bill to in fact be -- will be fiscally neutral
and will not add to the deficit. I don't anticipate that, because
they're leaving that whole other part of the law. So, they're
repealing each and every tax increase in the ACA, including things
that you just wonder what was on their mind.
There's
a
tax on indoor tanning salons, which is a significant cause of skin
cancer and melanoma and other serious skin cancers. But they leave in
place all of the reductions to the medical providers who are on the
sharp end of care.
So, I wouldn't expect this to be a deficit increaser. But, of course,
we'll see when the Congressional Budget Office score comes out in the
next couple of weeks.
AMY GOODMAN: John McDonough, we want to thank you for being with us,
professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. Between 2008
and '10, he served as senior adviser on national health reform to the
US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, was a
top aide to the late Senator Ted Kennedy. This is Democracy Now!
We'll be back in a minute.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It
may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from
the source.
Juan González
Juan González co-hosts Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. González has
been a professional journalist for more than 30 years and a staff
columnist at the New York Daily News since 1987. He is a two-time
recipient of the George Polk Award.
Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a
national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on
more than
1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine
named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's
"Meet the Press."
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