Whom Will Obamacare Burden?

Subsidies Graph

Chait is unconvinced by the most recent ACA “victim” put forth by opponents of the law:

It is true — and nobody has ever denied this — that the hypothetical 25-year-old male will pay higher insurance premiums under Obamacare. Now, this 25-year-old male probably won’t pay higher premiums under Obamacare if he does smoke, or have any potentially worrisome medical history, or have family members with any potential medical history, or even if he’s a perfectly healthy non-smoker from a perfectly healthy family but has a low enough income to qualify for tax credits to cover his premium costs. And of course he’d be unaffected if he already gets insurance through his employer.

Will Wilkinson assesses the claim that the young and healthy will be forced into the insurance pool by the individual mandate, using a hypothetical 25-year-old freelancer named Nicole who makes $30K a year:

Over the next two years, as the penalty scales up, it’s pretty clear that Nicole would be smartest to pay the initially meagre fine and not sign up for insurance unless she comes down with something expensive. (No exclusions for pre-existing conditions!) But what about in 2016, when the non-compliance penalty is finally fully unfurled? That will be the greater of $695 per uninsured person, or 2.5% of household income over the filing threshold, which is not yet set, but this year was about $10,000 for individuals. So in Nicole’s case, that’s 2.5% of $20,000, which is only $500. So she’s on the hook for $695. For Nicole in 2016, then, the difference between going uninsured and getting a Bronze plan is $1,224, which is just a touch more than I recently paid for a cheap catastrophic plan. If America’s Nicoles are going without insurance due to cost, they’re not going to be induced to get it under Obamacare. If the programme is going to bring down the cost of an average policy by goading the likes of Nicole into the risk pool, it needs a bigger carrot, stick or both.

Sarah Kliff adds some important context:

Young Americans tend to have lower incomes than their older counterparts. That means they’re more likely to qualify for subsidies than their parents. In a new analysis released Wednesday, consulting firm Avalere Health estimates that “approximately two-thirds of young adults (30 and under) who are currently uninsured or enrolled in non-group coverage and who will not qualify for Medicaid—the population most likely to experience rate shock— have incomes between 133 and 400 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL), making them eligible for premium tax credits.”

To translate that out of health wonk speak: The federal government will help most young, uninsured people buy coverage under Obamacare. But, there’s also a significant contingent who won’t receive help–and those are the ones most likely to see their rates increase.

Cohn, who flags the above chart, goes into more detail:

A 25-year-old single man, making $35,000 a year, can expect to pay the full price of a bronze policy: About $2,511 a year in 2014. We can argue whether that constitutes true “shock,” given that it’s far less than employer policies cost. Still, it’s a lot more than the $1,104 premiums Roy found on eHealthInsurance. The same would be true for a 25-year-old non-smoker with even higher income. These are the young and healthy people who will end up paying more. That’s important and must be part of conversation.

But look what happens when we think about somebody making less money. If this young man’s annual income was $25,000, he’d pay just $1,184 a year. That’s basically the same as the eHealthInsurance bids, give or take a few six packs of beer. Dude! At $20,000 a year in earnings, the expected bronze premium comes all the way down to $481 a year. And at $15,000 a year, insurance is free. That’s right, the premium would be zero dollars. (If you’re interested, you can run the same calculations for silver policies, which are more generous, although the comparison to cheap eHealthInsurance plans becomes even more unfair to Obamacare. You can also run it for older people, or consider the possiblity of catastrophic-only coverage that Obamacare makes available to people younger than 30.)

Named After Your Parents’ Politics

Is everything now polarized? John Sides summarizes new research (pdf) on the baby names popular on the left and right:

[Eric] Oliver and colleagues argue that liberals, consciously or unconsciously, signal cultural tastes and erudition when picking their child’s name. In conversation with me, Oliver used himself as an example. He and his wife, a novelist, named their daughter Esme — a name gleaned from a story by the writer J.D. Salinger.

On the other hand, conservatives, by being more likely than liberals to pick popular or traditional names (like John, Richard, or Katherine), signal economic capital. That is, they are choosing names traditional to the dominant economic group — essentially, wealthy whites. Oliver noted to me that some immigrants also try to help their children assimilate and succeed by choosing names in this fashion. And, given research that shows that the ethnic connotations of a job applicant’s name can affect the possibility of getting an interview, choosing names this way may make economic sense.

Ask Josh Barro Anything: Caring About Inequality

Josh explains why conservatives need to pay attention to income equality:

Back in November, we looked at Josh’s insistence that the GOP consider some kinds of redistribution to help deal with inequality. Here are some of his additional suggestions from that post:

[Republicans] can take up the cause of cost control in health care and higher education, the effect of which would be to raise real incomes for the middle class. The rising cost of health benefits has been a key driver of middle-class wage stagnation. Unfortunately, many of the policies actually likely to control costs in these sectors are interventionist in a way that makes conservatives recoil.

Another possibility is greater high-skill immigration. Globalization has been disproportionately beneficial to high-skill workers in developed nations: they have seen the prices of products fall as manufacturing shifts to low-wage countries, but their own jobs are insulated from foreign competition. Letting in more foreign doctors and engineers should drive down wages in skilled professions and the cost of the services those professionals provide, raising real incomes for lower-income workers who already face wage competition from other countries. Reducing occupational licensing requirements would similarly raise real incomes.

Recent Dish on inequality here, here and here.

Josh Barro is currently the Politics Editor at Business Insider. He has previously written for Bloomberg View, and before that was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previous Dish on Chait’s recent profile of Barro here and here. Our Ask Anything archive is here.

What IRS Scandal? Ctd

After learning that conservative groups make up two-thirds of the groups that had “received special scrutiny and been approved for tax-exempt status,” Kevin Drum is even less convinced by Republican attempts to play up the scandal:

This doesn’t tell us anything definitive about the entire set of groups that got special scrutiny. If the whole set is similar to the approved set, then about two-thirds were conservative and one-third liberal—most likely because of the boom in new tea party groups in 2010. But that’s just a guess. One thing isn’t a guess, however: Two-thirds of the groups who were approved for tax-exempt status were conservative. If the IRS was on a partisan witch hunt against conservative groups, that’s sure an odd way of showing it, isn’t it?

Garance Franke-Ruta lists some of the progressive organizations whose tax exempt status was checked by the IRS:

Non-conservative advocacy groups given special scrutiny by the IRS in or after 2010 included the Coffee Party USA, the alternative to the Tea Party movement that got a bunch of press in 2010, as well as such explicitly progressive groups as the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada; Rebuild the Dream, founded by former Obama administration official Van Jones; and Progressives United Inc., which was founded by former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold.

Also included in the special scrutiny were Progress Texas and Progress Missouri Inc.; Tie the Knot, which sells bow ties to raise money to promote same-sex marriage; and ProgressNow, which describes itself as “a year-round never-ending progressive campaign.”

Peak Faggot?

The word has been going gangbusters on Twitter lately:

alltimenohomo-grab

What’s interesting is to click on NoHomophobes.com to read the actual contemporaneous tweets that contain the phrases “so gay”, “dyke”, “NoHomo”, and “faggot.” I have to say that “so gay” does seem, from reading the tweets, to be close to meaningless in terms of active, pre-meditated homophobia. Yes, of course it is a negative term and is rooted in the premise that being homosexual is lame. But it has become so generic I’m not really outraged by it. In fact, I’m not that outraged at any of this. Twitter is full of expletives and hate-words. I wonder if the n-word and the word “bitch”, for example, are much more common.

“Faggot” is also somewhat ubiquitous, ranging from the classic hate term against gay men to a general term of abuse for straight women and straight men. But some of that abuse in context is jokey. So this post – which will be tweeted – will register as hate-speech, just as a joke between two friends in which “faggot” has been drained of any explicit homosexual meaning. But “NoHomo” is almost entirely an ugly, nasty prejudice.

I may not be personally outraged, but I’m in a very privileged position (only gay-bashed once in my life), and the general the trend is disturbing, especially when we have seen a spate of anti-gay street violence from the Castro to the West Village, a few blocks from where I now live.

It gets more disturbing still when you also have the spectacle of a Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia like EW Jackson. The state’s GOP has effectively affirmed the legitimacy of a man who has used not just tired cliches but what I think has to be called “eliminationist” rhetoric, as defined by Daniel Goldhagen. Take this:

“[T]he homosexual movement is a cancer attacking vital organs of faith, family & military – repositories of traditional values.”

Or this:

“The ‘homosexual religion’ is the most virulent anti-Christian bigotry & hatred I’ve ever seen.”

Now look at the actual definition of “eliminationist” rhetoric:

Eliminationism is the belief that one’s political opponents are “a cancer on the body politic that must be excised — either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination — in order to protect the purity of the nation.

I’m a free speech absolutist. But when we find hate terms surging on Twitter, eliminationist anti-gay rhetoric from major candidates, and a rise in attacks on gay men in neighborhoods associated with them, we should take notice. There is a range of tweeted sentiments here – from innocuous to unthinking (the NoHomophobes website has a smart slogan: “Homophobic language isn’t always meant to be hurtful, but how often do we use it without thinking?”). But when they are legitimized by rhetoric that seeks to speak of gays the way Afrikaners spoke of Africans, and extremist Sunnis speak of Shiites, we have a problem. I urge readers to check out the site and tell me what they hear and read, and what they make of it. It can get complex and I have two confirmation biases: I’m gay and am attached to a non-victimology temperament in identity politics.

But one thing I do know in this atmosphere: The GOP is dipping into some of the foulest waters here. I just hope they aren’t legitimizing a wave of hatred.

Can This Party Be Saved?

A Surabaya Zoo health worker checks the

Pareene reviews a report from the College Republicans on the perception of the party among key demographic groups:

[M]ost of these unfortunate impressions people have of the party are accurate reflections of the party’s positions. The report sidesteps most of this, calling for the party to sound more tolerant and open-minded. On same-sex marriage, the authors write, “the party ought to promote the diversity of thought within its ranks and make clear that we welcome healthy debate on the policy topic at hand.” We’ve been having “healthy debate” on the issue for some time now, and most Americans — including overwhelming majorities of young people — have come to the conclusion that the debate is basically over. Another always-fun topic in these reports is how they deal with the party’s recent nationwide reproductive rights tantrum. The College Republicans recommend just shutting up about it.

Amanda Marcotte, focusing on the contraception debate, points out that it’s more than a “problem of branding, misperception, or media bias”:

No one is forcing Republicans to attack contraception subsidies every chance they get. Republicans did not actually have to insist that your employer be able to prevent you from using your own insurance benefits on contraception, nor did they have to convene an all-male panel to discuss how important it was to give a woman’s boss a vote in her reproductive health care. It wasn’t required of the party that it run so many rape philosophers for office. Indeed, the problem for Republicans on the subject of reproductive rights is that young voters accurately understand its positions … The problem is that opponents aren’t distorting the attacks on contraception. The only way for Republicans to not be perceived as anti-contraception is to stop attacking contraception. Nothing else will work.

Drum blames the right-wing media:

It’s conservative media that controls the GOP’s fate. The Republican Party could almost certainly solve its problem if Fox News and the rest of the gang were on board. They could lighten up on the culture war stuff, thus increasing their appeal among young voters, while keeping the oldsters on board too. Right now, though, they can’t do it because the Rush/Drudge/Fox axis will go ballistic, turning the tea partiers into frothing maniacs over every perceived deviation from traditional morality. If they agreed among themselves to stop doing this, the frothing would subside and the party would have a whole lot more short-term maneuvering room to address their long-term problem.

(Photo: A Surabaya Zoo health worker checks the pulse of the sick 35-year-old elephant named Fitri, in East Java on July 26, 2011. STR/AFP/Getty Images)

The FBI May Have Your Phone Records

[tweet https://twitter.com/cgreensit/statuses/342451643381587970 ]

The NSA has been collecting the telephone records of Verizon customers, regardless of any suspected wrongdoing, after obtaining a court order in April. The FISA Court gave the FBI a court order to monitor all national and international calls on an “ongoing, daily basis” for three months. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman report:

The order directs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order”. It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information”, such as “originating and terminating number”, the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information”.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities. For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be “stunned” to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted. …

It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders.

Timothy B. Lee adds:

“This confirms what we had long suspected,” says Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization that has long accused the government of operating a secret dragnet surveillance program. “We’ve been suing over this since 2006.”

The order is based on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to obtain a wide variety of “business records,” including calling records. EFF has long criticized Section 215, which sets a threshold for obtaining records much lower than the “probable cause” standard required to get a search warrant.

But Cohn argues that the kind of dragnet surveillance suggested by the Verizon order exceeds even the authority granted by the Patriot Act. “Section 215 is written as if they’re going after individual people based on individual investigations,” she says. In contrast, the order leaked to the Guardian affects “millions and millions of innocent people. There’s no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation.”

Marc Ambinder weighs in:

My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that’s necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.

In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can’t know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.

Unfortunately, we don’t know precisely what the NSA can do because its rules are highly classified. This disclosure will hopefully force the government to clarify the rules it uses to actually analyze the data it collects.

Amen. But like Ambers, I’m neither shocked nor that outraged. Meta-data is not the content of our phone records. Gregory Ferenstein’s view:

The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal datasets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism.

Late last year, I wrote about a few actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs. Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.

Ed Morrissey compares Obama’s data-mining to Bush’s:

Hypocrisy is an unfortunately ubiquitous condition in politics, but in the case of NSA seizing Verizon’s phone records, it’s particularly widespread.  Some of the people expressing outrage for the Obama administration’s efforts at data mining had a different attitude toward it when Bush was in office.  Conversely, we’ll see some people defending Obama who considered Bush evil incarnate for the same thing.

On that front, this kind of meta-data gathering hasn’t outraged me too much under either administration. This kind of technology is one of the US’ only competitive advantages against Jihadists. Yes, its abuses could be terrible. But so could the consequences of its absence. Maybe the record shows my passionate denunciation of this by Bush. I don’t remember it. If someone finds me in a double-standard here, let me know. Pareene zooms out:

While the fact that the NSA has the power to do this has been public for some time, we’ve never seen, until the Guardian obtained one, an actual Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant. They are very top secret. Someone will probably be prosecuted for leaking this one. That, in fact, is one of the primary issues civil libertarians, like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been raising: If the way the administration interprets the law is secret, the law itself is effectively secret.

Where Coming Out Takes Real Courage

Joe My God passes along the trailer for Call Me Kuchu, opening in NYC on June 14th and LA the following week. A synopsis:

In an unmarked office at the end of a dirt track, veteran activist David Kato labors to repeal Uganda’s homophobic laws and liberate his fellow lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, or “kuchus.”  … But one year into filming Call Me Kuchu and just three weeks after a landmark legal victory, the unthinkable happens: David is brutally murdered in his home. His death sends shock waves around the world, and leaves the Bishop and Kampala’s kuchus traumatized and seeking answers for a way forward. With unprecedented access, Call Me Kuchu depicts the last year in the life of a courageous, quick-witted and steadfast man whose wisdom and achievements were not fully recognized until after his death, and whose memory has inspired a new generation of human rights advocates.

Elsewhere, Stephen Fry shares a shocking quote from his upcoming documentary Out There, which looks at the experience of being gay around the world:

I actually got a Ugandan minister to say on camera — he’s the Minister for Ethics and Integrity; it’s the only such ministry in the world — and I said to him, ‘Look, even if these… utterly false supports on which you base your homophobia were true, which they aren’t, there’s so much more to worry about in your country than the odd gay person going to bed with the other gay person. For example, you have almost an epidemic of child rape in this country, which is just frightening.’ And he said, ‘Ah, but it is the right kind of child rape.’ …

I said ‘That was on camera. Do you know that that was on camera?’ He said yes. I said, ‘Can you just explain what you mean? He said, ‘Well, it is men raping girls, which is natural.’