From McClatchy we sit a clear trade-off between making sure kids are healthy and able to contribute to a bright future or high income tax cuts:
4.4 million children could lose health coverage in 2019 if the Affordable Care Act is partially repealed through the budget reconciliation process, according new report by the Urban Institute, a progressive, non-partisan think tank.
Likewise, the uninsured rate for … children would more than double in 2019 from … from 4.1 percent to 9.6 percent for children under age 18, the report found…
Of the 4.4 million children who would lose coverage in 2019, 88 percent would have working parents
The previous ACA repeal bill also allowed states to lower child eligibility levels for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) beginning in 2017. If all states did so, another 8.9 million children would be without coverage in 2019
So we’re looking at between 4 and 13 million children being sacrificed to the altars of Moloch.
Good to know.
Uninsured rate among <18 with repeal.
1998: >16%
2016: <5%
2019: 10%I see a problem.https://t.co/1yDWR1qNEb
— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) December 22, 2016
And we call ourselves civilized.
OzarkHillbilly
Fuck the little brats.
Barbara
Civilization does not mean providing a minimum standard of living for your citizens. Civilization means shitting in gold toilets.
rikyrah
They only care about them in the womb, Mayhew.
Once they get here, they’re on their own. it’s their fault that they don’t have rich parents who have insurance.
Angrifon
@OzarkHillbilly: They probably weren’t going to vote Trumpublican anyway.
JPL
@rikyrah: I was going to ask about the fetus, but you beat me to it.
I’m not even sure they care about pre-natal care, since they want to defund clinics that provide it.
MomSense
The Republicans don’t care. Ryan thinks it is better for schoolchildren to go hungry and preserve their “dignity” than to receive free lunch. It’s a compassion fail obviously but it’s also a reasoning fail. The point of making sure our children are clothed, fed, housed, educated, and nurtured is to preserve OUR dignity.
It’s sociopathy and greed all the way through.
japa21
For 8 years Obama and the Dems tried to undo all the damage done during the previous 8 years. Thanks to complete obstruction by the GOP they only partially succeeded.
It will take far more than 8 years to undo the damage that will occur during the next 4, assuming the Dems even get a chance.
Elizabelle
Do people really care about other people’s kids?
Their own, sure.
hovercraft
What problem? These kids obviously have parents who are not working hard enough. Remember that if you work and pray hard enough, you can pull yourself all the way up by your bootstraps. Stupid kids should have had the fore sight to be born to winners.
Elizabelle
Maybe we could hit them with how much more expensive it is to treat conditions that did not get preventative care.
And that might be a reason the GOP is trying so hard to destroy Obamacare. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s that it does.
Richard and others are pulling down statistics and government information, because maybe the program IS cost effective.
Barbara
@Elizabelle: For many people, life is just a zero sum game. Your gain is my loss pretty much sums up how many people view social programs. They don’t connect the dots between average well-being and overall well-being.
ETA: A big price we pay for having fragmented programs is that it a lot easier to pit one group against another. If everyone were affected by cuts, political support would be higher. Gearing programs to specific groups dilutes political support for all of them.
OzarkHillbilly
@Angrifon: If they survive the “scurvy, the dysentery, spotted fever, or the cholera not to mention other maladies contracted in consort with low women,” the climate change superstorms will get them.
cmorenc
The theory goes like this:
– WHEN the cost of the social safety net becomes too big a drag on the entrepreneurs and businesses that are the job-creators and sustainers THEN
– The social safety net will erode and devour the people and enterprises necessary to sustain it.
– The WHEN is NOW.
While the first two elements are, at least in broad-brush form, intuitively persuasive to most people on both logical and emotional levels, underneath the surface this paradigm invokes very different implicit assumptions among different people. For example, the words “parasites” or “moochers” don’t appear anywhere in that paradigm, yet that’s a clear implication many people draw from it, particularly conservatives. Another implicit assumption is that the critical tipping point has already been reached where the third part of the paradigm, the NOW! has been reached (or is inevitably imminent without a sharp course change) – ignoring the potent counter-possibility that there’s a symbiotic positive feedback between the safety-net and the conditions favoring healthy entrepreneurship rather than capitalism only working well under Randian-style pure Darwinian conditions (this sort of symbiosis is the basic notion behind the ACA).
The right hates and denigrates the examples of the Scandinavian countries precisely because they represent successful examples of this alternative vision of successful symbiosis between capitalism and a robust safety net covering the middle class. True, Sweden did tip the balance too far for a couple of decades or so, seemingly proving to the RW the truth of the basic paradigm above, but the fact that Sweden was able to successfully dial it back enough into a sustainable state without any substantial abandonment of the symbiotic model is refutation of this negative picture.
Yarrow
Why aren’t those kids pulling themselves up by their bootstraps? Trump’s Education nominee wants to bring back child labor. Let the little brats earn their own health coverage.
Patricia Kayden
@OzarkHillbilly: Yep. Once they’re out of the the womb, they’re on their own. That’s pro-life logic for ya.
greennotGreen
@Elizabelle: The people now in charge of all branches of government have shown themselves to be immune to facts and rational analysis. It’s ideology all the way down.
Patricia Kayden
@hovercraft: I’m assuming that many of these kids are related to the “poorly educated” so beloved by Trump.
Elizabelle
@Barbara: We need more Scandinavians!
I think the rightwing think tanks have poisoned us with the zero sum game. Yes, you always had some folks who thought like that. FDR certainly faced opposition by the more hardright Republicans of his day, and was a traitor to his fellow plutocrats.
But the average American appreciated and benefited from those New Deal programs. The programs were strengthened, used, and eventually taken for granted.
And then, the crusade against Social Security. By fuckin’ Pete Petersen and his ilk.
It’s taken decades of cruel, selfish rightwing messaging to get us to this point. It’s easier to sell selfish than “we all benefit.” It’s happening with everything. Except the military.
Thoroughly Pizzled
“How dare you call us deplorable?”
ruemara
For many, as long as the right sort of child suffers and dies, they’re sorry but ok with it. It’s going to be a huge shock when they find it affects their kids as well.
Elizabelle
@cmorenc:
AND: there are less Swedes to bear the tax burden, so their taxes are higher. We are a huge country. The tax burden need not be that onerous. Economies of scale. (Isn’t that the concept the MBAs use to sell every harebrained merger?)
Of course, it would be nice if the plutocrats played by everyone else’s rules.
gene108
@rikyrah:
Not true. They work to slag places that provide pre-natal care, like Planned Parenthood and other family planning clinics, because birth control and abortion might be discussed.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
This is one of the founding tenets of conservatism. They don’t speak of it or even understand that it is, they just don’t/can’t recognize that it’s bullshit, which is why it is so difficult to break the chain of “thinking” that it leads to.
gene108
@Elizabelle:
Partly. The other part is eliminating redundancy. Does a merged entity really need two A/P clerks? Nope. Pass those savings along to investors and shareholders.
Reagan’s green lighting of many M&A deals, in the 1980’s, created the culture of downsizing that has hurt the middle and working class to this day.
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle: They play by the Golden Rule: The man with the gold makes the rules.
Glidwrith
@Elizabelle: “Maybe we could hit them with how much more expensive it is to treat conditions that did not get preventative care.”
Therein lies the rub. I don’t think they care in the slightest that those conditions are more expensive to treat because they have NO intention of paying for care. They intend to let people die because if the sickees were good and Godly people they would not have gotten sick in the first place.
Elizabelle
@OzarkHillbilly: And now the man with the gold makes the conventional wisdom too. To support the proposed rules.
Droppy
It’s frustrating to deal with pure irrationality. Arguments don’t work. Facts don’t work. Emotional appeals to compassion don’t work. The empathy bone in right wingers is only attuned to themselves and (possibly) their offspring. But they can’t see that even their own selfish and depraved life choices will be more likely to come about under a system where, you know, the system works; where there isn’t a lot of crime and despair because just about everyone is doing ok. But their status-seeking primate brains can’t allow the unworthy to have nice things, so they’d rather wreck everything.
J R in WV
There’s a terrible typo in the first sentence:
Sit makes no sense whatsoever. Thought you would want to know.
Yarrow
@Droppy: Lack of empathy is what makes them what they are. It’s the one consistent characteristic of conservatives/Republicans. You can count on it every time. Don’t make the mistake of “trying” to appeal to their empathy. It will always fail. Appeal to their fear or their wallets. It’s what works.
Tokyokie
ALL Republican policies can be explained with one of two rationales: giving more of the country’s wealth to the obscenely rich, or ensuring the social primacy of straight, white males.
matryoshka
@hovercraft: Nailed it.
dr. luba
@Barbara:
This sums up many of the right wing memes going around on Facebook. Recently there have been a lot pitting veteran against you choose it–refugees, foreign aid, what have you. Not that these people have any intention of actually increasing funding for veterans’ care–any savings would go directly into more tax cuts for the rich. But you can’t put that in a meme…..
MomSense
O/T but I think the holiday season needs moar Fiona Apple.
trump’s nuts roasting on an open fire
Phylllis
@Elizabelle:
.
I remember reading an article years ago regarding a city hospital that reviewed its ER data & saw that many of the patients were there due to accidents, and quite a few were kids. Falling off their bikes, that kind of thing. For adults, kitchen-related, like cutting themselves, or slips/trips/falls. So they got a grant and embarked on a safety campaign in the community. ER visits for accidents dropped. The pesky unintended consequence? ER revenue dropped significantly as well.
Morzer
@Elizabelle:
The little fascist voice that whispers: “But you could do so much better, if your inconvenient neighbors weren’t holding you back…” has a powerful appeal to all too many of the nastier areas of the human psyche. A lot of people want to believe it – and they certainly aren’t going to try and fact-check it too hard.
Yarrow
@MomSense: Also O/T. Apparently Trump is very upset that none of the Hollywood A-listers will give him the time of day.
Also, too:
Heh.
There’s all sorts of gossipy goodness in that article.
Bobby D
Who is “we”? I don’t call us civilized. I forget who wrote it, but the most accurate take I’ve seen lately is: “We are a barely civilized, asshole nation”. And with the lunatic asylum that is our incoming administration, now the whole world knows it.
I work with a scientist that specializes in air pollution permitting and compliance work. He is a climate denier!! WTF??!! The guy can run computations of NOx emissions, or calculate the carbon load from combustion and 30min later go on a rant about Clinton and emails, and in the next breath say that the historical climate data set has been tampered with on purpose. And there are more than one of them here…career environmental people, intelligent, well and highly educated, full tilt wingnuts. I look around the room and check off alma maters – Stanford, MIT, UCLA, GaTech, Caltech. These aren’t a bunch of Trump U or DeVry grads. We are so fked.
Yarrow
@Bobby D: Wait, let me guess….white guys? A lot of them middle-aged? It’s tribalism. The climate denial and email stuff isn’t actual belief; they’re cultural signifiers. It’s how they indicate they belong to the tribe.
GregB
So now A list Hollywood celebrities are an important voice to be heard from those in heartland?
Can’t KellyAnn Conaway get one of her Hydra affiliated scientists to create some new petri dish talent to wow the world?
Also, does this mean that Robert Davi, Scott Baio, Ted Nugent, Victoria Jackson and John Ashcroft aren’t good enough for Trump?
Bobby D
@MomSense: Yes, our dignity as a society. But also, kids don’t learn very well when they are hungry. There’s no fkin dignity in lurking in the bushes out back of the McD’s dumpster at night, waiting for the night shift to throw out the leftovers so you have something to eat. I’d love to have about ten minutes in a locked room with Paul Ryan and no cameras.
Elizabelle
@Yarrow:
From The Wrap article, and maybe it’s gossip, but LOL:
Bookers, hookers, whatever.
How much do you think Steve Wynn appreciates Mr. Trump causing problems for him with his booked stars?
HeleninEire
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m going to hell. That made me laugh out loud.
Elizabelle
@GregB: John Ashcroft. Let the Eagle Soar.
Maybe Trump could demand James Comey duet with him, condition of keeping his job. For a few months.
Yarrow
@Elizabelle: He can’t get Garth Brooks. No country people seem to have signed on. I’m shocked by that – I figured the country people would be the ones to do it.
Yarrow
@HeleninEire: How are things in Ireland today? Ready for Christmas?
Morzer
@Elizabelle:
He failed to book David Brooks to perform his centrist rap artistry at the inauguration? Man, we have been so deprived as a nation!
Elizabelle
@Yarrow: Somebody better make sure Glen Campbell’s memory care facility is locked down.
Rob in CT
@dr. luba:
You can, actually. There was a good one that went around in 2012, IIRC. A fat cat at a table with two other people. 20 cookies. The fat cat had just grabbed 19 of them. He points to the last one and speaks to one of the two normal people “Hey, watch out! That school teacher is gonna take your cookie!”
Repurposed, the normals could be a vet and an immigrant.
EDIT: LOL, I think I saw it here –
https://balloon-juice.com/2011/02/28/a-modern-parable/
[though admittedly it wasn’t a visual]
Yarrow
@Morzer: You mean his #1 hit, “More in Sadness than in Anger”?
delk
As long as they just break their arms, the kids will be okay (at least over night).
germy
@Yarrow: Burnett is responsible for so much trash culture. Dancing with the Starz, celebrity apprentiz, what garbage.
I watched a ton of TV in the ’60s, like every other kid, and talented people from the 1930s and ’40s were all over the place. Maybe they were past their prime (Bob Hope, George Burns, Milton Berle, etc.) but they were given airtime.
When was the last time Burnett or someone like him gave a primetime showcase to Willie Nelson or Bob Dylan or Arlo Guthrie? The Smothers Brothers are still active, but you wouldn’t know it from the primetime popular culture.
Morzer
@Yarrow:
To be followed by Friedman and the Taxi Drivers of Portentous Utterances.
germy
@delk:
Was it someone here who asked the musical question: “What would happen if a Black single mom admitted she kept her child home with a broken arm, rather than going to the ER?”
Yarrow
@Elizabelle: Aww…that makes me sad. Glenn Campbell is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Such a terrible disease.
Frank Wilhoit
“… And we call ourselves civilized.”
No, actually, we don’t. I wrote as long ago as 1987 that civilization has lost its fan club. Civilization is a vector of accountability and what is going on today is first and foremost a revolt against accountability.
Elizabelle
@Yarrow: I know. Lovely, talented man.
So: protect him!
Brachiator
Various news sources are reporting this:
And there is this little tidbit:
So, people want health insurance, and get it when they have good, competent assistance.
Yeah, we need to repeal this right away.
And, who did Florida vote for in the presidential election?
Mnemosyne
@Yarrow:
Garth Brooks isn’t quite as liberal as, say, Tim McGraw is, but he seems like a decent guy, so I would have been sad if he had agreed to do it. IIRC, one of the reasons he dropped out of sight for so long was that he wanted to stay at home with his kids after he and his first wife divorced, and he had plenty of money to do it.
Yarrow
@germy: Mark Burnett doesn’t produce Dancing with the Stars. He does The Apprentice and Survivor and The Voice.
Tony Bennett just had a long special on NBC for his 90th birthday celebration. I think there are a lot of ways to discuss the issue of older performers not being on TV. One is the TV landscape is so fractured and there are so many ways to watch things that it’s harder to put together a show like that and make cost effective. Back in the day there are three networks and people watched what was on. It’s not like that now.
MomSense
@Yarrow:
HAHAHAHA!
Didn’t trump already scoop up one of the Dancing with the Stars failures – Perry to be in his cabinet of deplorables?
Seems like the election and his administration are a big fuck you to intelligence.
HeleninEire
@Yarrow: Fabulous. I found a great running trail along the Liffy Quays. I mostly walked, but I’ll get there.
I sent all of my Christmas gifts by the 5th and everyone in the US got them and their cards in 4-6 days. SCORE for the post office.
Not much planned for Christmas day. I’m gonna go to church!!!!!!!! Not for the services but apparently the choir at St. Patrick’s Cathedral here is divine. Then its off to my (so far) favorite restaurant for Christmas dinner. It’ll be a quiet one this year.
Yarrow
@HeleninEire: Sounds fabulous! You’ll have to tell us all about it.
Bobby D
@Yarrow: Yeah, white dudes, early 50s. If it was meant as a cultural cue/signifier, it worked. Because they definitely id’ed me as “the other side” when I started mocking them as ignorant rubes to their face and wondering aloud how in the hell their school allowed them to graduate with a science or engineering degree. Not winning me any friends among those people, but had plenty approach me after and thank me for “taking that loudmouth down a notch”.
Of course it doesn’t solve anything, or change their minds. But that’s not why I do it. I do for strictly for the conflict and the idea that the best way to deal with a bully is to punch them in the face, hard, and do it first while they’re still running their mouth. I’m sure that makes me a bad person, but I never claimed to be a good one.
Yarrow
@MomSense: My favorite part of this is that Trump is too busy for the Presidential Daily Briefing, but he’s hands-on with shaking up his inauguration entertainment scouting team. Priorities!
Bobby D
@Yarrow: Sorry to hear that. I just thought of Glenn as a country music guy that was kind of big in the 70s. I had no idea until earlier this year that he was way, way more than just a country-pop star. Watched a documentary on the “Wrecking Crew”, a bunch of LA studio musicians from that era that played on hundreds of hit records. Well, Glenn Campbell was an integral part of that crew. I was too young to remember that he’d had a TV show for a while, and also wrote tons of songs for others. There’s a doc specifically on Glenn available on Netflix right now, haven’t seen it yet, but did wathc the wrecking crew one and it was really enjoyable.
Yarrow
@Bobby D: Good for you! Being punched back is pretty much the only language bullies understand.
Yarrow
@Bobby D: I don’t know if the doc on Netflix is the one they made about his last tour. His daughter (I think) was touring with him to help him say goodbye to his fans as his Alzheimer’s worsened. He’s now too ill to play or even to see anyone outside of family. I haven’t seen the film but saw clips and an interview with him and his daughter before he got too ill to do that. It was very moving. It’s on my list to see sometime.
Davis X. Machina
In a hundred years, American English will have lost its first-person-plural pronoun.
Languages shed words when they don’t refer to any extant thing.
Bobby D
I guess the inauguration entertainment will be a duet: Kanye and Ashcroft with the hip-hop remix of “Let the Eagle Soar”.
Yarrow
@Bobby D: I think I heard that so far he’s got military bands. That’s it. If so they’ll probably promote it as such – he’s taking America back to what’s important, focusing on the military, etc. The one kid for the National Anthem and nothing more.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Super late to the thread, but I’m just stupefied at how these insurance-slashing people like Ryan and Trump undoubtedly think of themselves as good, kind, caring people. They don’t go to bed thinking, “Excellent, I screwed another million kids today!”
That horse shit expression so many use (“You know, I just try to do my best everyday…”), is nonsense. About 43% of human beings are just lazy, greedy, dishonorable, ignorant or wilfully stupid louts. They are not trying their best. These people voted for Trump. Now they deserve him.
Phylllis
@Bobby D: If you’re talking about I’ll Be Me, it’s terrific, and also bittersweet. It documents his last tour as his Alzheimer’s worsens, with his kids as his backup band. Worth a watch.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
anybody watching MSNBC: Did I hear right? Did Howard Dean just call for eliminating the individual mandate?
I’m not what you’d call a health insurance wonk, but isn’t that a tad bit nuts?
Weaselone
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
If he did, he should be completely out of the running for the DNC chair.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bobby D:
FTFY.
Bobby D
@Phylllis: Yes, that’s the one. Will have to watch it tonight, thanks for the tip. As a guitarist, I’m a sucker for music docs. Youtube has become a real treasure trove of old footage of bands too. Last night I watched a show on youtube that was cut for a TV special in the 70s or 80s (no idea if it ever aired) with JJ Cale taking some of his band into Leon Russell’s studio and cutting tracks live with Leon. Just stellar.
JustRuss
Assuming we ever have Democratic majority and President again, how about expanding Medicare to cover kids under 18? Sure the Freedom Caucus will hate it, but “Think of the Children!” is always a winner, and “boot-straps and personal responsibility!” is hard to spin when you’re talking about 10-year-olds, even to some Republicans.
BC in Illinois
@Yarrow:
For the inauguration, how about the Alexandrov Ensemble? (The Russian Army Chorus) The travel expenses may be high, but I’m sure there are emoluments to make it happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrov_Ensemble
Yarrow
@BC in Illinois: Good thinking. Hey, maybe the KKK has a band.
Brachiator
@Bobby D:
Yes! An absolutely enjoyable and enlightening documentary.
Highly recommended. Might even be available through your favorite streaming service. A nice tonic in these hard times.