Small Business Majority is an advocacy group for small business. They’re not partisan Republicans, Koch-funded libertarians or far-Right billionaires, so you’ve probably never heard of them. I went to one of their health care presentations a while back in Toledo and it was very informative. No one was screaming or crying or heckling so it didn’t merit any media attention, but it was worthwhile. I think the woman who presented was up there longer than 50 minutes, too, and that’s like unbearable torture that no one in their right mind would ever willingly endure.
Small Business Majority do a lot of research and advocacy, and they recently polled small business people on the health care law:
Only a third of small business owners want the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act; a plurality of 50% would like it upheld, with minor or no changes. This support grows after learning more details about the law’s key provisions:
Only 34% of small businesses want to see the healthcare law overturned, while 50% want it to remain intact with, at most, minor changes.
After learning more about its specifics, only 28% want to see it repealed and a 56% majority want it to be kept, as is or with minor changes. A 55% majority say they want it upheld because we need to make sure everyone has health coverage.
Isn’t that amazing? 55% think we need to make sure everyone has health coverage. We! Together? All of us? Clearly these crazy Leftists have been spending way too much time running their small businesses and not enough time at roundtables discussing the never-ending search for the conservative soul.
If the law is struck down in whole or in part by the Supreme Court, I think we can expect a lot of high-fiving and crowing among conservatives and media personalities. We’ll skip any real life discussion of the law’s demise, and focus instead on the benefit to one Very Important Person: Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney, like President Obama, like me, and like every single pundit or expert that will appear on television, has health insurance.
Hunter Gathers
Of course small business owners want everyone to have health coverage. Dead people don’t spend money on goods and services.
Kay
@efgoldman:
That made me laugh.
I don’t know if I’m going to be here/available for the repeal/uphold announcement. I think they should tell us the day so we’d know. I hate surprises.
Skippy-san
The 27% rule would appear to apply to small business as well.
It seems to me that small business understand better than their Galtian betters do- lack of universal care screws them worse than others.
Plus, it would be nice if just once, the dickheads in Congress realized that every other industrialized nation in the free world makes this work. Singapore , which hardly qualifies as Socialist ( albeit a one party dictatorship) requires ALL employers to provide health insurance for their employees – regardless of size. If they can do it we sure as hell can.
I voted GOP for 26 years, but now I despise them.
Kay
@Hunter Gathers:
That was brought up. “Every dollar they’re spending on health care, they’re not spending on something else”.
It’s an interesting take.
jl
The small group coverage market is almost a brutal as individual, and also in danger of going into a premium death spiral.
And in many small businesses, individual employees are more than replaceable cogs, for both purely business and personal reasons.
I can see why many small business owners might have a different perspective than a certain sociopathic segment of US corporate leadership and lunatic tycoons.
Trentrunner
If any/all of ACA is overturned, the tragic theme of the first/only Obama administration will be:
SiubhanDuinne
We? Oui!
Mino
I read somewhere that in the last twenty-five years, every dollar in wage appreciation was eaten by healthcare appreciation. Now that wages have been kicked in the teeth, insurance is going to be priced out of reach.
JPL
When they overrule ACA, it will be because they hate broccoli.
MattF
It’s almost as though… all those people yelling about the needs of small businesses don’t actually know a damn thing about the needs of small businesses. Imagine that. Hmm.
Added: I was going to get the phrase “righteous indignation” in the comment but just forgot. So, here it is: “righteous indignation.”
Davis X. Machina
It’s interesting to watch a general election fought on the slogan: “Help us get That Awful Negro out of the White House, then we’ll talk, o.k?”
Health care? Jobs? Immigration reform?
“Help us get That Awful Negro out of the White House, then we’ll talk, o.k?”
Mino
@jl: That is right. Smalll business employ a preponderance of trained employees. They are not widgets.
Mino
@Davis X. Machina: That is Romney’s platform it appears. No specifics until I’m elected.
jl
@Trentrunner:
IMHO, ACA is not a good reform in the sense that it will not result in a stable system for any length of time. It will start falling apart as soon as it is implemented. So, in that sense, it is not an adequate reform effort.
But, if you added either a public option, or a regulated basic comprehensive minimum policy that every insurance company or self insured business had to provide, it might have a chance.
So, it is close.
Given the record of (Edit: miserable and civicidal) failure (Edit on healthcare reform) in the US, Obama should be given credit for getting something done, as a good start.
Obviously, I do not buy into the Greenwald idea that Obama plotted to do it without a public option from the beginning because he is pure evile. Though think maybe Obama thought getting something passed was more important than getting a viable long run system.
Maybe it will be remembered like Truman on civil rights? Big permanent reforms happened later, but Truman made some first big dents in the problem to pave the way? That is just a tentative guess at how history will look at the ACA.
rikyrah
you are on point Kay.
thank you for telling us the pulse on the ground.
Kay
I’m just going to add this before I have to go, because this came up at the SBM thing:
Preventive Services Covered Under the Affordable Care Act
If you have a new health insurance plan or insurance policy beginning on or after September 23, 2010, the following preventive services must be covered without your having to pay a copayment or co-insurance or meet your deductible.
There was a lot of confusion about what’s covered w/out a co-pay or deductible. They were looking for the “wellness” part of the law, and that’s it. It’s pretty amazing that people still don’t know this, because that’s what the whole contraceptive battle was about: preventive services w/out co pay or meeting a deductible.
Metrosexual Black AbeJ
Liberal elites!
Baud
@Kay:
Kay, the decision will be announced on June 25. Last day of the term.
Spaghetti Lee
I think it’s part of the Randian mythology that words like “I” and “my” have been outlawed. If the Randians themselves had their way, they’d wipe “we” clear out of the dictionary.
dcdl
My dad has a small business (landscaper), one employee year round and seasonal during the summer (close to retirement). He finds buying insurance as a small business owner to expensive so he buys his employee individual insurance. At the height of his business he still found it cheaper to buy individual then small business insurance for his employees.
jl
@Kay:
Thanks, that is a nice list of preventive services. I see it includes services for
Alcohol abuse, Depression, cholesterol, diet, HIV, Obesity, STD, Tobacco use, syphilis, well women visits.
Edit: oops, I forgot contraception and prenatal preventive care.
I did not know that small business owners were a bunch of nanny state, morally depraved, totalitarian life style dictators and sexual degenerates.
Who wudda thunk?
Davis X. Machina
@efgoldman:
Welcome to the new jurisprudence, where necessity is the mother of invention. Decision first, and doctrine later. If you even bother with doctrine — cf. Bush v. Gore — that is. The lawlessness of the present Court will take a generation to absorb and adapt to. People who argue before it, write legislation that passes before it, cover it in the press, are all like the walking dead.
Kay
@jl:
That was hotly contested, substance abuse and depression, as you may know, “parity” is a big issue there, but NOTHING approaching the insanity surrounding one of the most widely prescribed drugs on the planet, birth control pills.
Figure that one out :)
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Trentrunner: Well, you know, I wouldn’t normally expect people to act treasonous just because I’m a Democrat and black. Not something I would prepare for.
jl
The GOP is flailing and failing at getting any consensus on a proposal for health care policy, at least anything that they can discuss honestly in public without losing a lot votes in November.
So, not clear to me that the effects of the decision are easy to predict, no matter how it goes.
Mino
@Davis X. Machina: I think this court may have had a chilling effect on DOJ enforcement, too. That is the most charitable interpretation I can give this DOJ. Jamie Dimon as Ollie North, perhaps.
James E. Powell
@Trentrunner:
Or it could be Obama knew what he was up against, but he took his best shot anyway.
jl
@Kay:
Well, I am impressed that they could get together and ask for a package like that.
I know well what bigshot insurance execs and medical directors would say about a package like that: No way no how. Even if something like that would save money in the long run, it cannot survive in an environment with annual open enrollment competition and capital markets (without a required basic uniform minimum plan).
So, best that they can manage is to make it look like they are doing all that on paper but not shelling out to provide real services, or quietly drop the coverage of whatever is low on public and political radar, to get the premium per member per month down to match the cheapest BS policies that will be offered on the market.
Edit: the problem with annual open enrollment competition is not what the employees would pick, BTW, but in getting the company to keep the policy for employees to choose in the first place. Getting, and staying on a companies menu of choices was a constant worry for comprehensive healthcare plans of all kinds that competed in large employer market.
BGinCHI
If small businesses think Romney is going to help them more than Obama, that supply-side econ is beneficial to the smaller concerns, then they are fucking stupid.
Romney would liquidate their asses in a heartbeat.
SiubhanDuinne
@Davis X. Machina:
@Davis X. Machina:
‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first – verdict afterwards.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’
‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.
‘I won’t!’ said Alice.
‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
(Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Mnemosyne
@jl:
Frankly, the more I read about PPACA, the more it seems that it’s designed to fail to prop up for-profit insurance companies. The only way private insurance companies will be able to survive as primary healthcare providers under PPACA within a decade or so will be for them to become nonprofit or not-for-profit.
That’s one of the reasons I think PPACA is a good first step that will require additional steps sooner rather than later to tackle some of the other major problems of our for-profit healthcare system. It’s a pretty good lesson in how to use government regulation to change an industry … which may also be why it’s in grave danger of being struck down.
MikeJ
@Mino: People aren’t put on trial to get justice, people are put on trial because a prosecutor can point to a law they broke and the prosecutor believes he can prove it. Much of the stuff that happened on Wall Street probably should have been illegal, but almost none of it actually was.
JustAnotherBob
Why would the ACA fall start falling apart as soon as implemented?
The only difference between the ACA approach and single payer is that insurance companies will be the one paying doctors and hospitals as opposed to government employees.
The payment system will be a bit more complicated than simply collecting premiums as part of income taxes, but we’ve been running a combination public/private funding system for many years. That part doesn’t really change, except for now everyone gets included.
That will make health insurance a bit more expensive, but not unstable. (Do remember, insurance company profits are capped.)
Where does the instability come from?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Davis X. Machina: Thats pretty much what you can paraphrase Mittens latest campaign slogan “Things will be getting better after Mitt is elected”
jl
@Mnemosyne: Personally, I think for profit non profit distinction is secondary. I think in comprehensive health care market, the problem of a lack of a competitive equilibrium is very real, and markets likely to either churn chaotically until no real insurance policies are offered anymore, of turn into monopolies or duopolies.
The lack of a competitive equilibrium in insurance markets is a common problem when people fall into different risk classes, and it is difficult to observe which risk class a person is in. In other lines of insurance, the problem is not so bad, or relatively light regulation can fix it, or costs of second best results when standard competitive equilibrium does not exist are not all that high. Not so in health care.
Edit: OR, heavy regulation was injected and maintained in a failing insurance market back in our communist past, like the early 19th century. Life insurance is the example there.
Any system based on a competitive equilibrium will tend to fail if a competitive equilibrium does not exist. Which I think is a simple argument that anyone can understand, unless you are an economist who has chosen to live and die intellectually by that concept, or a cynical businessperson or politician who uses the concept and associated folklore to BS people.
I think similar problems would occur eventually, even if all insurance companies and comprehensive providers were nonprofits.
You need either a public option, or a basic minimum uniform comprehensive plan that everyone has to offer. Preferably both. Then you provide an environment in which a competitive equilibrium can exist. That is how Netherlands and Switzerland maintain their mostly private systems.
Valdivia
@Baud:
is this confirmed, couldn’t be this week instead?
Maude
@Valdivia:
Nobody knows.
Joseph Nobles
@Baud: Friday was the last day to pass dissents between colleagues. Unless there’s individual dissents or assents that need polishing now, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get it tomorrow. In fact, I demand it. It must be so!
I really doubt the whole law falls. Severability was intended all along, and several parts of the law can stand alone. How long is a question open to debate, but the insurance companies say they are keeping some popular parts, i.e., the ones likely to make it into a “replace” bill from the GOP.
So there’s no reason I can see why the SCOTUS can’t just drop the mandate. Saying that, I don’t think they will. Both Kennedy and Roberts were talking up the unique aspects of the healthcare market that would give Congress the authority under the Commerce Clause to pass the mandate as a regulation. I think the entire law is upheld 6-3.
On the public option, it’s coming. Most of the work I see HHS doing right now is sorting out what policies on the exchanges must look like to enter. It would be a contentious bill, but a public option bill would only have to say the government is allowed to enter the exchanges with a plan fitting those same qualifications. Sebelius is basically charting out what a public option would look like while we wait. It could be a second term accomplishment for the President However it might be better politically if it were on the 2016 Democratic platform. That would give the public a year or so to see the exchanges in operation without one.
Valdivia
@SiubhanDuinne:
brilliantly applied here.
Mino
@MikeJ: RICO only applies to the rubes, I guess.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
My husband works in healthcare, so I can say that from observation I completely disagree. The incentives that are put in place to make a for-profit system thrive are completely different than the ones in place for a nonprofit or not-for-profit company.
I have no idea what you mean by “competitive equilibrium.” Please define.
gogol's wife
Great post, thank you for that.
I was screamed at by a Republican last night at a young woman’s college graduation party. He affirmed that Obama added more to the deficit in his first year in office than Bush had in his eight years. He was citing facts and figures, and although I knew he just had to be wrong, I had no facts or figures to counter him with. I don’t have a propaganda organ that feeds them to me, and my memory is weak, so I guess I have to spend more time reading Krugman.
jl
@Joseph Nobles: If a well designed public option could de facto set the standard for a minimum uniform basic plan that any private insurer or provider would have to offer, that would add stability to the system.
If not, then I think would see more chaotic churning and cherry picking, and complaints about expensive public welfare boondoggle.
I think it would be better to go Swiss and Dutch and outline a minimum basic plan. And set up formal market for less regulated and more expensive supplementary plans. Aw, hell, I am a no good socialist, since I guess fact is that the 20 or so high income industrial countries have pretty much explored what works, and all of them are deemed socialist or commie by the GOP, and are considered suspect somehow by the centrist pundits.
Mino
@Joseph Nobles: You would not believe the circulating e-mails with horrified imaginings of what those insurance regulators could come up with that nobody would have any recourse about. Csars, I tell you!
Violet
@Kay:
Kay, as usual thanks for your hard work on the ground and your excellent, informative posts.
I have no idea what the Supremes are going to dish out on the ACA. On good days I’m hopeful they’ll uphold it because insurance companies lobbied hard enough to get that much, at lest. On bad days I figure they’re too much stooges of the GOP and they’ll overturn it just because of the black man in the White House.
JPL
@SiubhanDuinne: It sounds like a Romney campaign speech.. I can cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget. Decisions on how to do this will be made later.
wcdude
It’s fabulous when I read about a true small business organization that reflects opinions of real small biz owners. Not the republican shill organization that is the NFIB, who purports itself to be the voice of small business. The NFIB is the group leading Florida’s challenge to the ACA.
Kane
Sure, if the court rules the ACA unconstitutional, Republicans will thump their chest and rejoice in sticking it to President Obama, and the drama-loving Beltway media will love such a story. But after all of the confetti is swept away from their political victory, the more important story will be that tens of millions of Americans will be denied access to healthcare.
And then from here on out, every time there is a story of child who lost a life because the parents couldn’t afford healthcare or a woman’s body is needlessly ravaged by cancer because her insurance provider denied her coverage, the public will be reminded of who attempted to solve the healthcare crisis and who chose to do nothing.
Those ads will write themselves.
JPL
@gogol’s wife: It was the downturn in the economy, the bush tax cuts and the years of passing unfunded mandates like medicare part D.
Next time ask the person how. You know about the 700 billion dollar stimulus but ask what else he added. Turn the tables on the idiot. The other fun fact they like to throw out is that cows are causing global warming..
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: Short answer is that he HAD to do that, and was begged to in order to save the whole financial system the GOP and banksters wrecked.
God the right wingers are fucking stupid.
kay
@gogol’s wife:
Why is he screaming at people at a graduation party, anyway? Jesus. Who raises these people? Wolves?
Was he drunk? I bet he was drunk. I bet you ten thousand dollars…. :)
JPL
@JPL: Bush passed the stimulus but also, too the first year he was in office was Bush’s budget.
jl
@Mnemosyne:
The incentives are different, but the end is the same in an unstable system. I have been in meetings for benefit design with for profit and nonprofit people, and the talk is different about long run incentives. All I am saying is that regardless of the differences between the two systems, the end will be the same: an unstable system with certain kinds of insurance coverage disappearing.
By competitive equilibrium, I mean that companies compete to offer insurance policies with well defined stable benefits at gvien prices. And consumers will agree to pay those prices, and at those prices, supply equals demand. All I am saying is that with comprehensive health insurance, you can start the system with that equilibrium. And then change nothing: don’t change technology, don’t change the demographics, don’t change the legal environment, and the system starts to fall apart all by itself, through the natural operation of price competition and jiggering with the benefit designs.
Who gets shafted first (patients, providers, or owners, or healthcare workers) will be different depending on whether for profit or nonprofit. All I am saying is that regardless of profit or nonprofit status of companies, the long run end results is the same: some types of insurance disappear. Certain types of people are willing to pay a fair price for certain types of insurance but they cannot get it. And simply allowing more companies to compete will do nothing to provide it in the long run.
Edit: I have to go, but will check back later to see your objections, if any.
bemused senior
@Davis X. Machina: My father (RIP — I miss you so much Dad) graduated from law school in 1952, and was an FDR liberal. He told me many times how hard it was for him to sit in constitutional law classes and stomach the Supreme Court decisions that were still good law at the time left over from the Hughes court, which struck down New Deal and other progressive legislation up to 1937. But the court did change. I will relate one more story from my wise father. He said people were always too focused on making progress on a short time line. I guess it was a way of making the same point as Dr. King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”
Baud
@Valdivia: Could be but unlikely. They usually hand down the biggest cases on the last day.
Hill Dweller
@gogol’s wife:
Pardon the language, but that person is a fucking moron.
First, he/she doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the budget deficit and the national debt.
Second, the FY09(which started on Oct. 1st 2008) deficit was going to be, at least, 1.2 trillion dollars regardless of who won the ’08 election.
Third, Dubya doubled the national debt from 5+ trillion to 10+ trillion, and left years of massive budget deficits for the next president(never mind the collapsing economy, housing bubble, and financial/banking clusterfuck).
bemused senior
@MikeJ: This is the first year that the ACA provision goes into effect requiring health insurance policies to devote no more than 20% of your premium to administrative costs, including profit. If you get a check from your insurance company, thank President Obama for it. For Medicaid providers, the per centage is 15%.
ETA: http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8061.pdf is an excellent summary of the provisions of the ACA written by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Hill Dweller
Next time anyone rails about debt and deficit, just ask them two questions:
1) When did FY09 start? (October 1st, 2008)
2) In January ’09, before Obama was even sworn in, what was the CBO’s projected budget deficit for FY’09? (1.2 trillion dollars)
Most people have no clue that a budget/fiscal year starts in October, as opposed to January. Nor do they understand that a new President is sworn in nearly 4 months into a budget year using their predecessor’s budget.
bemused senior
@gogol’s wife: A good place to find a rebuttal of the Rmoney lies and talking points (but I repeat myself) is Steve Benen’s running series at the Maddow Blog, formerly at Political Animal. Here is a link to the latest, which has a set of links to previous editions: http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/15/12241534-chronicling-mitts-mendacity-vol-xxii?lite
SiubhanDuinne
@Valdivia: Thanks :-)
@JPL: I know, right? More and more, I feel as though we’re living in some kind of upside-down topsy-turvy universe. Rmoney, the Supremes, the MSM all contribute to this.
Valdivia
@Baud:
thanks. I didn’t know this.
gogol's wife
@JPL: @BGinCHI: @kay:
I mentioned all those things, made no dent. And you may be interested to hear that the stimulus “made things worse,” “prolonged the depression.” He’s our former mayor, and my former minister had told me he had a volatile temper, but I forgot that because he was being so friendly just a moment before. I really don’t think he was drunk.
bemused senior
@jl: The HHS dept is busy writing the regulations defining the minimum standard for companies that want to be in the exchanges, so in fact there is a base for benefits. See the Kaiser Family Foundation link I supplied above.
gogol's wife
@Hill Dweller: @bemused senior:
Okay, I’m cutting and pasting all this into a Word document that I will carry folded up in my pocket to all social occasions. I’m serious.
jesus h. tapdancing christ
There is only one explanation for these poll results: small business people are soshulists.
Anne Laurie
Well, sure, but that thing’s smaller than any of the particles theoretical physicists spend so much time looking for!
…. Also too, Kay, what EFGoldman said. :)
bemused senior
I just had a scathingly brilliant idea (h/t Haley Mills) resulting from this thread. Wouldn’t it be great to have a smart phone app that allowed you to enter a key word from the lying talking point you just heard and pull up an abstract of the refutation plus a link to the full backup information and a way to quickly email this to the person repeating the bullshit and anyone standing in range to hear the lie?
gogol's wife
@bemused senior:
Wow, I just cut-and-pasted the latest Steve Benen stuff (which I’ve only scanned before), and I realized that everything this guy was saying last night came straight out of Romney’s speeches. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise.
bemused senior
@gogol’s wife: We need a truth squad.
gogol's wife
@bemused senior:
I said to my husband, I wished I could have brought Paul Krugman out from behind a bush the way Woody Allen accessed Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall.
harlana
I look at these numbers and wonder why not 60 or 65%? And then I remember the money.
gogol's wife
@bemused senior:
Oh, this is funny. I didn’t realize you were quoting Hayley Mills, I thought that for some reason she had gotten into blogging about U.S. politics.
JustAnotherBob
@bemused senior:
Correct. In order to get access to those 40 million new customers insurance companies will have to offer policies that meet requirements set by HHS.
Then they can list themselves on the Exchange for whatever geographical areas they wish to serve. By putting in your zip code you can see all the companies selling in your area and what they charge.
You know very well that within weeks rating systems will emerge – Angie’s Lists for insurance companies – on which people will report their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the company they have been using.
Customers will migrate to companies with the best ratings.
Profits and operating costs are locked to 20%/25% of collected premiums. The other 75%/80% of premiums must be spent on health care. That will drive companies to become:
1) very efficient in order to keep more of the 20%/25% as profit and that means jerking customers around as little as possible and
2) to become as ‘customer friendly’ as possible. The only way to increase profits (outside of keeping operating expenses low) is to increase volume. More customers = more profits. More customers will appear only if their existing customers are happy.
There will be no incentive to cut patient services. They can’t put any of that 75%/80% in your pocket. Cut services too much and customer satisfaction goes down, people shop elsewhere. Keep the 75%/80% higher an the 25%/20% is larger. Make the combined 75/25/80/20 too high and customers will move to a cheaper, but decent quality provider.
I like the contingencies.
Will insurance companies find a rat hole or two to crawl through? Of course they’ll look for holes, they already have.
Can we write new legislation to hammer tin over the rat holes if they appear? Of course we can. Part of the ACA was to patch holes in the 50 year old Medicare bill.
—
Would single payer be better? Perhaps. But it would lack the competition built into this system. It could turn out that the current ACA is just fine. Time will tell.
If the Supremes let it happen….
bemused senior
My husband is laughing uproariously in the background as I read him your comments, Gogol’s Wife. We are seriously discussing implementing that app for android. It would also need a backup website to keep the rebuttal info. Maybe the Obama campaign already has a site — I think they did in 2008..
harlana
ugh, there is one thing my dad has to do when he is sitting down, much more often these days because of his health, watching sports or watching the talking heads. he has complete command of the remote during these periods. i would just walk out of the room but the few bits i heard it was all “what Obama needs to do now.” i was just reminded why i never watched the Sunday morning shows.
it just irritates me because i’m thinking, we are the ones, us ordinary people sitting behind our computers or at work or whatever, who should be discussing what we think Obama should do. it’s your fucking job to report the fucking news.
gogol's wife
@bemused senior:
Sounds good! Now I just have to figure out what an app is.
Valdivia
@bemused senior:
he had a truth squad site but this app sounds great. someone has to do it multi platform :)
Baud
@bemused senior:
LOL. Several years ago, when I was younger and more innocent, that’s one of the things I thought lefty blogs would do.
SiubhanDuinne
@gogol’s wife:
LOL
harlana
@gogol’s wife: i’m pretty ADD so it’s very frustrating. it’s irritating because you know it’s all lies.
cmorenc
@JustAnotherBob:
My gut instinct is that the contingent of right-wing justices who entertained ambitions of using the ACA case as the vehicle to radically reshape the commerce clause are finding it hard to assemble the five unqualified votes they need to successfully pull it off. My guess is that Kennedy and perhaps at least one other justice in the conservative block looked hard into the far broader abyss than health care that any sharp or outright overturn would involve and hesitated, and the result will be one of those splintered decisions where it’s upheld 6-3 or even 7-2, but with an array of caveats and exceptions included in the concurring opinions that indicate that the issue of the potential limits to the commerce clause will be revisited in future cases.
Hill Dweller
OT: Claire Danes was really, really good in Homeland.
Valdivia
@Hill Dweller:
she was excellent. I have to speak up for Lewis though. Throughout but specifically in the last episodes he is terrific, controlled rage and fear perfectly done.
Yutsano
@jl: You’re missing a piece of the puzzle: actuaries. Actuarial science is designed precisely because changes and events can be unpredictable. Actuaries take all of the factors into account and devise formulae to account for those variations. And they can often deal with possibilities that most people overlook. And the health insurance companies have actuaries, including Medicare. Assessment and management of risk is a whole level of social science.
Frankensteinbeck
@SiubhanDuinne:
ABL convinced me, and my boomer father’s stories confirmed it. It’s racism. Sure, they’d hate any Democrat president, but they’ve gone bugfuck insane because a black man is president, and to a baby boomer this is like finding out a Martian is president. At best, there is no reality anymore. At worst he MUST be destroyed, or it will happen again.
bemused senior
@gogol’s wife: It’s software to do something on a smart phone or tablet. :-)
@Valdivia: I think a mobile-friendly website for non-Android, as I’ve heard it takes a lot of time to qualify as an Apple developer and get new apps approved.
Hill Dweller
@Valdivia: Lewis is always great. Mandy Patinkin was great, too. But their performances were expected.
Claire Danes has made a huge leap forward with her performances in Temple Grandin and Homeland. Danes was always a solid actress, but in the last couple of years she has been as good as anyone in the business, movie or TV.
slightly-peeved
@jl:
Basic comprehensive insurance plans are part of the PPACA. For plans to get on the exchanges, they must offer particular levels of coverage as defined by the department of HHS. The regulation isn’t quite as tiight as in, say, Switzerland, but the regulations are there in the bill.
Valdivia
@bemused senior:
le sigh. anything that can be used would be great though :)
@Hill Dweller:
agreed. I get a little defensive of Lewis though because he so deserves the recognition and he rarely gets it. I hope he gets the Emmy this year.
JustAnotherBob
@Frankensteinbeck:
Please, can we not equate “racist” and “baby boomer”?
Are you not aware that flower children were boomers and that boomers and folks just a bit older opened up society as it had never been opened before?
A combination of pre-boomers and boomers were the ones fighting for civil rights and getting our heads busted for equality for all.
To call us racists is a great disservice.
SiubhanDuinne
@Frankensteinbeck:
I agree that racism is a huge factor, although I disagree it’s the sole driver. More accurate, I think, to say that the denizens of Wingnuttopia are always going to define, identify and oppose “the Other” whoever “the Other” is — if POTUS had been Hillary, we would have seen unrestrained sexism; when Bill was in the WH, it was “those uncouth Arkansas hillbillies,” etc.
Also, as an almost-Boomer myself (born in 1942), I don’t think I’d be so quick to slander a whole generation with the “racist” label. Surely many are, but so are a fair number of young people as well as a lot of really old people (i.e., born before 1942). But more (I hope) are not.
Frankensteinbeck
@JustAnotherBob:
The point is not that you as a group are racists. It’s that you grew up in a segregation world where the idea that you’d live to see a black president was a joke, something that would never actually happen. Further, that almost all of your fellows have big emotional baggage over the end of segregation in one direction or another. The lunatics leading the GOP charge right now are boomers… because for them, the world just turned on its head.
Frankensteinbeck
@JustAnotherBob: and @SiubhanDuinne:
Let me try to put it another way. If you’re a racist, a black man is president and he should be put down. If you’re a racist AND a boomer, you’re living in a nightmare dystopia you were warned about as a child, where up is down and anything, ANYTHING is more believable than the reality in front of you.
If you are a boomer and not a racist you’re not part of that model. I’m guessing you’re going ‘Wow, we’ve come so far’ but that tends to not be a loud reaction and I really have to guess.
JustAnotherBob
@Frankensteinbeck:
I was born into the segregated south. I grew up in the segregated south. I can assure you that many of “my fellows” worked for the day when a black man, or a woman, could be president.
It continues to bring tears of joy to my eyes that we made it during my lifetime. I wasn’t convinced that we could change the country that rapidly. If you think ‘Wow, we’ve come so far’ is not a statement of wonder and welcomed wonder, then you have no idea what our country was like 50 years ago.
I’m really insulted by your prejudicial behavior toward people of my age. Perhaps you hang out with a bunch of racists and you need to get out and experience the world a bit more.
xian
@Trentrunner: well, of course inthe past even right-wing republicans compromised to get things done. was he really naive? as it predictable?
xian
@Joseph Nobles: i thought they technically failed to include the severability language in the final bill?
Jane Austin
This small business owner (a non-racist Texas Boomer) is highly amused to hear Mitt Romney say that he gets complaints from small business people to the effect that the ACA is bogging them down in paperwork.
As far as I know, we have had to fill out zero paperwork, as the part of the law where we have to offer a health plan to our employees hasn’t gone into effect yet.
We did, however, receive a check for around $6000 from the government last year as a rebate for already offering our employees fully-paid health insurance.
Depositing that check was the only thing we’ve had to do regarding the ACA.
I rather think Mr. Romney’s small business friends are the imaginary kind.
Mnemosyne
@JustAnotherBob:
I think I can see what Frankensteinbeck is trying to say, though. My (step)mother is a Boomer and for some reason she says she’s embarrassed to have the Obamas representing us as a country, because Those People should not be in charge. I really don’t get it, except as a hangover of having been raised in a segregated country (she’s one of the very first true Boomers, born in 1946) and not having quite turned her head around. She had her first son at 16, so she never graduated high school and never had the educational opportunities that a lot of others of her generation had, which I think had a little something to do with it, too.
Mnemosyne
@Jane Austin:
You have to remember, to Republicans, you can have a “small business” if you have 50,000 employees. As long as you call yourself a small business, you are, QED.
Lizzy L
@Frankensteinbeck: Please don’t assume that all boomers are like your Dad. I was born in 1946, and I’m a lifelong liberal. There are many of us. It was men and women of my generation who were inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.; it was my friends who fought and died in the Vietnam War, and it was me and my friends who fought at home to end it. I worked for the 2008 Obama campaign, and will do so again this year. We are allies, not enemies.
jl
@Yutsano:
@bemused senior:
@slightly-peeved:
If enough people have access to the exchanges and they get a big market share, that might be enough. I hope so.
Yutsano: I don’t see how actuaries make a big difference. They can price a policy, but they cannot dictate what policies are offered, the excecs, whether profit or nonprofit do that.
bob h
But Romney said the PPACA is going to kill small business.
slag
The question that has come up in our circles time and time again is, “Why would any small business not want universal healthcare?”. Healthcare is not a core competency for a lot of small businesses; it’s not a good performance motivator; it’s not the greatest recruiting device…
Glad to see some real evidence here that some members of the small business community are actually thinking rationally when it comes to healthcare.