The Democrat Thread

[StrangeSox]

Raising the Medicare Retirement Age: Not just morally wrong, but fiscally pointless.

 

65- and 66-year-olds would face higher out-of-pocket health care costs, on average. Two-thirds of this group — 3.3 million people — would face an average of $2,200 more each year in premiums and cost-sharing charges.

 

●State Medicaid costs would rise as some of those who lost Medicare coverage (those with the lowest incomes) would obtain coverage through Medicaid instead.

 

●Employer costs would rise as more 65- and 66-year-olds whose employers offered coverage to their retirees received primary coverage through their employer rather than Medicare.

 

●All Medicare beneficiaries would pay higher premiums because the removal of 65- and 66-year-olds, who are typically healthier than the overall Medicare beneficiary population, would leave the Medicare beneficiary population costlier, on average, to cover.

[southsider2k5]

Wait, all of the sudden the Dems care about adding millions of people and costs to private insurance plans? That is a complete 180 from the ObamaCare debates.

 

[Balta1701]

Wait, all of the sudden the Dems care about adding millions of people and costs to private insurance plans? That is a complete 180 from the ObamaCare debates.

Wait, so all of a sudden you're willing to support allowing everyone onto a government-run insurance plan rather than private plans? I'm game!

 

Every Democrat who paid any attention at all to the issue would have scrapped 2/3 of the bill if we could have gotten an expansion of Medicare to cover even people who were 55 and up. Lieberman floated that in December 09 thinking it was a brand new centrist plan to get around the current debate, then it turned out that the liberals loved the idea, so he dumped it immediately.

[StrangeSox]

Wait, all of the sudden the Dems care about adding millions of people and costs to private insurance plans? That is a complete 180 from the ObamaCare debates.

 

ObamaCare is a s*** handout to private insurance but it's better than the previous status quo. Raising Medicare's retirement age doesn't really save money and disproportionately affects the poor, since they tend to work more physically demanding jobs and haven't seen life expectancy increases.

[southsider2k5]

Wait, so all of a sudden you're willing to support allowing everyone onto a government-run insurance plan rather than private plans? I'm game!

 

Every Democrat who paid any attention at all to the issue would have scrapped 2/3 of the bill if we could have gotten an expansion of Medicare to cover even people who were 55 and up. Lieberman floated that in December 09 thinking it was a brand new centrist plan to get around the current debate, then it turned out that the liberals loved the idea, so he dumped it immediately.

 

I'd rather see them on private insurance.

[StrangeSox]

Less efficient, more expensive.

[Balta1701]

Less efficient, more expensive.

And...Obamacare!

[StrangeSox]

I'll just keep pointing out that the US system is the envy of no one and is often the "how terrible things could be" boogey-man used in other countries' domestic policy debates, even by conservative parties.

[southsider2k5]

Less efficient, more expensive.

 

Honestly I would love to see them introduce competition into the health care market. That would go a long way towards knocking costs down, minus all of the other stuff that is being done by the government to explode them.

[Balta1701]

Honestly I would love to see them introduce competition into the health care market. That would go a long way towards knocking costs down, minus all of the other stuff that is being done by the government to explode them.

Actually, in the effort to implement Obamacare, the government is doing this. They're making an effort to prepare new required documents which are more easily comparable statements of benefits of each policy in the exchanges, and there is new research being presented of the number of plans people can actively compare before becoming overwhelmed.

[StrangeSox]

Yglesias responds to The National Review and the "Depravity of the Poor"

 

People don’t become homeless drug addicts because the downside to being a homeless drug addict isn’t severe enough in the contemporary United States. And affluent parents don’t treat their children in this kind of punitive way. If a prosperous teenager develops an addiction problem, he’ll be given help. Any halfway responsible parent with the means to do so would bail out a daughter whose live-in boyfriend is abusing her. Poor people have, typically, made some mistakes in life and it’s often the case that had they lived lives free of error, they wouldn’t be poor. But it’s not like middle class people are living mistake-free lives. The difference is that middle class people have lives that give them a fair margin for error, whereas people who start out in bad circumstances can be crippled by a bit of misfortune, impulsiveness, or bad decision-making.

 

For instance, Chase can have you wrongly arrested for fraud for trying to deposit a legitimate check from Chase. If you're living on the margins, you've got no room for error. This can lead to you losing your job and your car.

Edited August 24, 2011 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

Welfare drug-testing yields 2 percent positive results

[StrangeSox]

Yglesias responds to The National Review and the "Depravity of the Poor"

 

 

 

For instance, Chase can have you wrongly arrested for fraud for trying to deposit a legitimate check from Chase. If you're living on the margins, you've got no room for error. This can lead to you losing your job and your car.

 

More follow-up, this time from a reader of Sullivan's blog

 

Seth Masket effectively exposed the logical fallacy of French's argument, but I want to point out the harmful nature of the argument itself.

 

I worked hard and got a good education, yet I am poor. I have no money and haven't worked in years, and if it weren't for my parents letting me stay with them I would be homeless. The notion that poor people are just lazy isn't new. People have been asserting that Randian trope for years. French adds a claim that religious attendance (if this were true, Nigeria should be an economic superpower) and moral depravity are also to blame.

 

The problem with this argument is that I believed it.

 

It may seem obvious to others that someone who completed an undergraduate double major in three years and graduated from a top ten law school can't really be described as "lazy" but it took *years* of therapy before I could even contemplate the idea that it wasn't my fault, I am not lazy or a bad person, but that I am suffering from depression. It is still sometimes difficult for me to accept that this isn't my fault, but French seems to have no problem assigning that blame.

 

I wonder how this affects other people who are living in poverty. It seems like if you tell people that they are poor because they are lazy and immoral, the message that you're sending is that there is no hope. Unless you believe that the poor have just decided that they would prefer to be lazy and depraved and they can wake up one day and simply choose to become virtuous hardworking citizens.

 

I started receiving food assistance last December after hearing about the program from a neighbor. My parents would be struggling financially even if they weren't paying for my therapy and medication, so I figured it would help a lot if they didn't have to feed me as well. I get $200 a month which can only be used to buy unprepared food. A few days after I started receiving this I happened to hear my state's new House Speaker, Jase Bolger, talking about plans to limit the program I had just joined. He made it clear that he was doing this to *help* people on assistance:

 

“Michigan should help its citizens break the cycle of dependency, not create one for them,” Bolger said.

 

Really? $200 a month for food is going to create a cycle of dependency? People would go out and get a job but they just don't want to give up that free six and a half dollars a day of food? The minimum wage in Michigan is $7.40/hr, and you think people are not working because you're giving them less than that a day in food assistance? If there really are people with such an epic level of laziness I would suggest that the threat of starvation will not magically turn them into hardworking, moral citizens.

 

I like capitalism. I believe it is very effective and I value the freedom that it brings. But free markets are not bags of pixie dust that can be sprinkled on all of societies problems, and all of the failures of the market cannot be blamed on the moral failings of the less fortunate.

[Balta1701]

After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

 

“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” Paul said. “I live on the gulf coast, we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district."

The hurricane in Galveston in 1900 killed 6000 people.

[The Beast]

Would Obama - Clinton 2012 increase the likelihood that they win the election? Have presidents who are seeking re-election been known to switch running mates for the second time around?

[Balta1701]

Would Obama - Clinton 2012 increase the likelihood that they win the election? Have presidents who are seeking re-election been known to switch running mates for the second time around?

Running mate switches used to be more common back in the days when Presidents wouldn't use their VP for anything. The last time I think it happened was Ford swapping in for Agnew.

[Rex Kickass]

Running mate switches used to be more common back in the days when Presidents wouldn't use their VP for anything. The last time I think it happened was Ford swapping in for Agnew.

 

Ford was chosen after Agnew resigned. I don't believe Ford was ever actually elected to the position.

[Balta1701]

Ford was chosen after Agnew resigned. I don't believe Ford was ever actually elected to the position.

Prior to that, FDR had swapped in Truman to improve his election chances.

[Balta1701]

The best way to cause abortions continues to be cutting health and education services for the poor.

A new analysis from the Guttmacher Institute shows that following a considerable decline between 1981 and 1994, the overall U.S. unintended pregnancy rate has remained essentially flat—about 5% of U.S. women have an unintended pregnancy every year. However, the rate has increased dramatically among poor women, while among higher-income women it has continued to decrease substantially, according to “Unintended Pregnancy in the United States: Incidence and Disparities, 2006,” by Lawrence B. Finer and Mia R. Zolna.

 

In 1994, the unintended pregnancy rate among women with incomes below the federal poverty line was 88 per 1,000 women aged 15–44; it increased to 120 in 2001 and 132 in 2006—a 50% rise over the period. At the same time, the rate among higher-income women (those with incomes at or above 200% of the poverty line) fell from 34 in 1994 to 28 in 2001 and 24 in 2006—a 29% decrease. Poor women’s high rate of unintended pregnancy results in their also having high—and increasing—rates of both abortions (52 per 1,000) and unplanned births (66 per 1,000). In 2006, poor women had an unintended pregnancy rate five times that of higher-income women, and an unintended birth rate six times as high.

 

Analyzing U.S. government data from the National Survey of Family Growth and other sources, Finer and Zolna found that of the 6.7 million pregnancies in 2006, nearly half (49%) were unintended. Although some unintended pregnancies are accepted or even welcomed, more than four in ten (43%) end in abortion. Unintended pregnancy rates are elevated not only among poor and low-income women, but also among women aged 18–24, cohabiting women and minority women. It is important to note, however, that poor women have high unintended pregnancy rates nearly across the board, regardless of their education, race and ethnicity, marital status or age.

 

In contrast to the high rates among certain groups, some women in the United States are having considerable success timing and spacing their pregnancies. Higher-income women, white women, college graduates and married women have relatively low unintended pregnancy rates (as low as 17 per 1,000 among higher-income white women—one-third the national rate of 52 per 1,000), suggesting that women who have better access to reproductive health services, have achieved their educational goals or are in relationships that support a desired pregnancy are more likely than other women to achieve planned pregnancies and avoid those they do not want.

 

“These data suggest that women who lead stable lives—women who are older, more affluent and better-educated—tend to have better reproductive health outcomes, while women whose lives are less stable, such as younger, poorer or less educated women, have higher rates of unplanned pregnancies, unwanted births and abortions,” said Finer. “They also show that marriage is not, in and of itself, a solution to the problems women have in controlling their fertility: In fact, poor women who are married have unintended pregnancy rates more than twice as high as those of higher-income women who are unmarried or cohabiting.”

[The Beast]

What would Obama cut to reduce the deficit and how do you guys feel about him being re-elected if you are a Democrat?

[Balta1701]

What would Obama cut to reduce the deficit and how do you guys feel about him being re-elected if you are a Democrat?

Jobs.

[Rex Kickass]

Prior to that, FDR had swapped in Truman to improve his election chances.

 

I believe FDR had three different VP candidates.

[southsider2k5]

The best way to cause abortions continues to be cutting health and education services for the poor.

 

So can we finally ditch the idea that abortion isn't being used as birth control?

[Balta1701]

So can we finally ditch the idea that abortion isn't being used as birth control?

As soon as the Republicans get over the idea that pregnancy is a good punishment.

[kapkomet]

As soon as the Republicans get over the idea that pregnancy is a good punishment.

 

 

That's f***ing lame.