Jonathan Gruber, the mastermind behind Romneycare, provides his perspective:
The number of people covered by employer-based health-care plans is dropping by a percentage point a year. The system is falling apart. So you put in a new safety net. That means a few more people are going to come in. If you’re not willing to risk making some things worse, you’re never going to make anything better. My estimate is that 80 percent of the people are not going to feel any change at all, and that 17 percent or so are going to find that things are better, and that about two or three percent will be worse off, and those are the people who benefit from the discriminatory nature of health-insurance at the present time. If health-insurance companies can’t discriminate any more, those people will have to pay a little more. When we decided that people couldn’t discriminate in what they paid black people or women any more, people had to pay more because employers couldn’t discriminate in what they paid black people and women. Was that a bad thing?
The thing that staggers me about the Republican hatred of this law is its abstract quality. They never address the real problem of our massively inefficient private healthcare market, which is a huge burden on the economy. They never address how to help the millions of uninsured adults get the care all human beings need. They appear to regard a Heritage Foundation, free-market-designed, private healthcare exchange system as some kind of communist plot. They do not seem to believe there is any pressing problem at all. And they have nothing constructive to offer.
This is not about Obamacare. It is not even about politics. It is about a form of revolt against the very country they live in.
In late August, 80 Republican Congressmen signed a letter asking Boehner to defund Obamacare by threatening to shut down the government. They were dubbed the “suicide caucus” by Krauthammer. Lizza mapped their districts:
[S]uicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
Communications scholar Sarah Stroud, who studies online news, thinks comment sections could be made more civil and ideologically diverse with just a few tweaks. Liz Stinson discusses one experiment:
[Professor of communication studies Talia] Stroud wanted to know if it was possible to reduce the level of incivility by altering the wording of the “like” button and increasing a reporter’s involvement in active discussions. Over the course of her study, she found measurable trends towards openness to counter-attitudinal ideas just by switching the “like” or “recommend” button with “respect.” It became clear that people were much more likely to click on opposing viewpoints with the “respect” button in place, and in fact, it led to more interaction in the comments section in general. For example, in a comments section with eight comments, people clicked “recommend” an average of 1.5 times, while they clicked “respect” an average of 1.8 times. “You wouldn’t like a comment that held a totally different view than your own, and I understand why,” she says. “It sounds like you support of it and approve and agree with it.” Respect, on the other hand, is more neutral and doesn’t carry connotations of concurrence.
Right now, most of the public seems to think that since Congress lacks any kind of spending restraint, it would be just fine for the Republicans to pick a debt ceiling fight, even if it means potentially defaulting on our debt. Would they still be fine with it if they realized it could result in their grandparents not receiving their social security checks? Who knows. Voters were much more closely split in a Washington Post/ABC News poll that framed the issue in terms of the government “paying its bills.” But the Republicans pushing for this confrontation are obviously aware that a good chunk of America is in their corner on this, whether those voters know what they’re talking about or not.
[T]he first moment when a Republican Congress might actually be able to pass a health care overhaul won’t arrive until February of 2017, at which point Obamacare will have been the baseline for two years — the new taxes, the subsidies, the mandates, the higher premiums, the Medicare cuts, the Medicaid expansion, all of it. And at that point, the plausible right-of-center alternatives to Obamacare will no longer look risky and disruptive relative to the status quo, because that status quo will no longer be one that Republican interests and voters are deeply invested in defending. Instead, those interests and voters will be looking for ways to limit the health care law’s impact, and the conservative alternatives will look more like what they actually are — proposals that spend less, regulate less, and reflect a greater confidence in markets than the president’s new law, and that would change the underlying health care system in ways that a sensible G.O.P. should support.
How long are we supposed to wait while Republicans jerk us around on health policy in the vain hope that, some day, they’ll stop being full of crap? How many decades do you have to spend being completely insincere on a policy issue before people stop taking you seriously when you talk about it?
I was pleasantly surprised to see your post on Stolperstein. Two years ago my family flew out to Berlin to see the unveiling of two Stolpersteins bearing the names of great-grandparents outside of their apartment. My grandfather, who was raised in the house until he was ferried off to hide in France at age 11 and never got to see his parents again, led a brief but beautiful ceremony standing standing outside on the quiet and peaceful Neukolln street. For me, the Stolpersteins are an unassuming, simple and devastatingly powerful reminder of the personal toll of the monstrosities of the Holocaust. It’s one thing to try to visualize 6,000,000, and it’s another thing to try to imagine the family that once lived right where you happen to be standing.
But for my grandfather, they were something else. As he walked us down his childhood streets, each Stolperstein would bring up memories of this gossiping neighbor, or this childhood friend, or this guy who ran the shop down the street. Whereas we could only see each as a tragedy, he could see them as memories as well.
[Above] is a particularly powerful video that was sent to us of a child living in the same building as my grandfather grew up in, seeing and learning about the Stolperstein for the first time.
If any German-speaking Dishheads would be willing to send us a translation, we will update. (Update below.) Another reader points to a different memorial:
The reader who shared his experiences in Bad Godesberg struck a chord with me. He wrote: “Finding out a few years ago that it had been owned by a prominent Jewish Family that had to flee was dumbfounding to me; I had never thought of that possibility while sneaking in and playing on its grounds.” I, too, had an experience like that.
My father was stationed in Bad Tölz during the 1980s, and I spent four years playing in the (now closed) US Special Forces base there – the Flint Kaserne. After college, in 2000, I returned to Germany for the first time since I was ten years old. While in Munich, I paid a visit to the Dachau concentration camp. They had a map of all the satellite camps and stations where prisoners would be sent to work as slave laborers, and there in big bold letters was “Bad Tölz.”
In that instant I knew (and later confirmed) that my old swimming pool, bowling alley, t-ball fields, playgrounds, Dad’s office, soccer fields, basketball courts, trick-or-treating streets, and cafeterias – practically my whole existence for four of the best years of my life … all of it was on the satellite camp.
It’s been 13 years since I made that discovery, and I still feel conflicted about the Flint Kaserne. I had a wonderful childhood there, and yet I think of all the elderly German neighbors, who would have been adults during WWII, and I can’t help but want to yell at them: “You knew! All this time you knew!” Sadly, my experience is hardly unique.
Update from a reader:
It is hard to understand some parts, and in fact they say nothing extremely moving (very German). It goes as the following:
woman: i am not sure if this has an educational value
young man steps out of the door: whose roses are these?
he reads: 1942, two years before the end of the war, what happened at this point?
old man: they lived here
young man: ok
woman: that was a jewish family that lived here
young man: and they survived the holocaust?
woman: no they were killed, in belgium
young man: they lived in this flat, in this house?
woman: yes, they lived in this house, we put these small “stolpersteine” everywhere, because these people have no …
young man reads the names: ok they were married
woman: we put these stones in the pavement all over berlin
young man: a horrible time
woman: because nobody cares about them any longer are we putting these stones in the ground, they were gassed and because of that there is nobody left
young man: i hope they rest in peace
I am a young German (18), living in Trondheim in Norway and I was amazed to see that even here there are a number of Stolpersteine. This is a great project, and if you live in a bigger German city, chances are good that you walk over some of these stones every day. They remind one in a very careful way of those who were killed because our ancestors supported or cowardly accepted the Nazis.
Stan Fedun largely blames the Kremlin for Russia’s history of alcohol abuse:
The Kremlin’s own addiction to liquor revenues has overturned many efforts to wean Russians from the snifter: Ivan the Terrible encouraged his subjects to drink their last kopecks away in state-owned taverns to help pad the emperor’s purse. Before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the 1980s, Soviet leaders welcomed alcohol sales as a source of state revenue and did not view heavy drinking as a significant social problem. In 2010, Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, explained that the best thing Russians can do to help, “the country’s flaccid national economy was to smoke and drink more, thereby paying more in taxes.”
Having won the big battles for legalization, activists in Colorado and Washington are aiming at new obstacles:
Top of the list is access to financial services. Most banks and credit-card companies will not deal with dispensaries for fear of violating federal money-laundering laws. This forces many to operate as cash-only businesses, with all the attendant hassle and security problems. One frustrated dispensary owner says the payroll accountant must spend a day a week sorting employees’ wages into piles of cash: “It’s so old-school I feel like she should be wearing a monocle.”
Grilled at a congressional hearing last week, [deputy Attorney General James] Cole said the justice department was reviewing the issue with banking regulators. Tax reform, dispensary owners’ other big worry, will be trickier. … Jaime Lewis, a Denver-based dispensary operator, says she pays an effective tax rate of 67 percent; about twice as much, she reckons, as comparably sized companies in other sectors.
Meanwhile, Mike Riggs insists that investors would be pouring money into Colorado’s cannabis industry if not for the state’s unreasonable residency requirement:
The rule, which Colorado residents did not vote for when they approved Amendment 64, requires a person to have been a Colorado resident for two years before they can apply for a marijuana business license, and three years before they can invest in a marijuana grower or retailer. It also has to be the investor’s primary residence. For comparison, Washington state has a three month residency requirement, and it doesn’t have to be the investor’s primary residence.
But financiers are getting creative:
The silver lining for investors is that growing and selling marijuana aren’t the only investment opportunities. “There’s obviously the industry itself, but there’s also the ancillary market,” says Mason Tvert of the Marijuana Policy Project, the group that led Colorado’s legalization campaign (and which did not push for a residency requirement). Paraphernalia, like vaporizers and vape pens, are an obvious opportunity, but the list doesn’t end there. Tvert points to Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry, and suggests that a similar app could be developed for marijuana. He also wouldn’t be surprised to see interest grow in specialized gardening products and classes on cultivation, thanks largely to the provision in Colorado’s law that allows adults to grow marijuana in their homes.
Tvert touches on the banking obstacle in the above video. Previous Dish on the business of bud here and here.
According to Robert Farley, America’s spotty nuclear safety history suggests that “there is a far greater likelihood that North Korea will accidentally drop a nuclear weapon on itself than on South Korea, Japan, or the United States”:
A 2012 Center for Strategic and International Studies presentation [pdf] highlighted many of the difficulties associated with preventing a nuclear mishap in North Korea. Although the report focused on problems in production and in the fuel cycle, the difficulties associated with developing proper weapon handling techniques are even more challenging. The relatively early stage of North Korea’s nuclear program means that safety procedures remain in their infancy, and thus that the potential for accident is high. At the same time, in part because of the program, North Korea is isolated from the knowledge and expertise of the international community with respect to nuclear weapons handling and safety protocols.
Moreover, the small size of North Korea’s arsenal and the apparent paranoia of Pyongyang’s military and political leadership may necessitate a nearly constant alert status, putting pressure on personnel and increasing the chances of an accident. And indeed, this same paranoia (even, to some degree, with respect to China) may make North Korea particularly unlikely to agree to any transparency in its nuclear program.
First up, a correction. I wrote in talking about women in the Catholic church that only women were at the foot of the Cross when Jesus died. Most were indeed women. But John, the Disciple Jesus loved, was also there. John is different than the other apostles in the Gospels – because he is most clearly Jesus’ closest friend. I write about this intense friendship in Love Undetectable, and am mad at myself for such a stupid error. On the cross, indeed,
when Jesus then saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then He said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” From that hour the disciple took her into his own household.
Peter was his disciple; but John was family. The other glib statement I made about Mary Magdalen being a prostitute is highly contentious. I’m going to follow up with another post on that soon.
But enough of all “the God stuff”, as some Dish atheists call it. Today we discovered just how radical the House GOP is: threatening to blow up the entire faith and credit of the country in order, among other things, to build the Keystone Pipeline and effectively nullify the last election. Between the risible Cruz and this gob-smacking ransom note to the country, is our system of government grinding to a halt? One reader said it reminded him of 1860.
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See you in the morning.
(Photo: Sacro Monte di Varallo; Unknown Master, Last Supper (with Jesus and the disciple he loved); wood statues, ca. 1500-05.)
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