Tag: Premium

Austin Gus Deeds was unable to get the help he needed:

The day before he apparently stabbed his father at the family’s home in rural Bath County, the son of Virginia state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds underwent a psychiatric evaluation but was not admitted to a hospital, because no bed was available. Deeds was listed in fair condition late Tuesday after his son, Austin, stabbed him in the face and chest, then shot himself in what investigators suspect was an attempted murder and suicide.

Suzy Khimm puts this tragedy in context:

Across the country, the number of psychiatric beds has been steadily declining as hospitals moved away from institutionalizing patients and budget cuts have taken hold. The number of hospital beds in freestanding psychiatric hospitals has dropped 13% between 2002 and 2011, according to the American Hospital Association.

But the need hasn’t declined as quickly, and there haven’t been adequate alternatives to pick up the slack. Between April 2010 and March 2011, about 200 Virginia residents were deemed to be “in imminent danger to themselves or others as a result of mental illness or is so seriously mentally ill to care for self and is incapable or unwilling to volunteer for treatment.” But they were nevertheless released from custody because mental facilities didn’t have the capacity to admit them, according to a 2011 report from Virginia’s Inspector General.

In many major US cities, bed shortages have prompted emergency rooms to “warehouse” the mentally ill in holding rooms and hallways, where they languish without treatment. One Seattle woman who tried unsuccessfully to commit her mentally disturbed son in 2011 was told there were no beds available; he killed himself days later.

Tomasky weighs in:

Try this statistic on for a shocker. The per capita state psychiatric bed population in 2010 in the United States was identical to the figure for 1850. Yes, 1850, around when the very idea of caring for mentally ill people first started! Then and now, the number 14.1 beds per 100,000 population.

Between 2009 and 2012, states cut $4.35 billion from mental health services, which eliminated nearly 10 percent of all beds in just those three years. This is while 10 percent more people have been seeking services. I remember when I covered state and local politics in New York, mental health services were always among the first things on the chopping block. No constituency with any political power at all, just a bunch of do-gooders pleading for officials to do the right things. Which in fairness a lot of them want to do, but most don’t end up doing.

Sargent reports that Reid intends to reform the filibuster:

With Senate Republicans blocking a third Obama nomination to the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide tells me Reid is now all but certain to move to change the Senate rules by simple majority — doing away with the filibuster on executive and judicial nominations, with the exception of the Supreme Court – as early as this week.

Kleiman cheers Reid on:

I’m on record as saying that a mid-session change in the filibuster rule made by simple majority vote is a breach of the Senate rules. So be it. Extraordinary abuses demand extraordinary remedies. A asymmetric political process, where one side respects convention and the other systematically abuses whatever power it has, is not sustainable.

Chait assesses the situation:

Ideally, the Senate would find some mechanism that would be strong enough to allow the minority to block unusually extreme judges from the bench, but weak enough to prevent the minority from issuing a total blockade on even qualified judges. That would require the creation of some sort of creative power-sharing arrangement that gives formal definition to the devilishly ill-defined concept of “advice and consent.” But the trend in American government has been that power does not get shared, and instead flows to whichever party has the will to seize it. Senate Republicans have seized new powers by imposing a judicial blockade on the D.C. Circuit, and the only available Democratic response appears to be seizing back more power still.

David Harsanyi suspects Reid is bluffing:

[W]ould Reid really going to blow up the Senate for some D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judges? It seems improbable. But if he does, the GOP, should they ever return to power, will have the justification it needs to undo Obamacare – or pretty much anything they please – with their own majority. If the filibuster is neither sacred nor a check on power, there is no reason for legislation or cabinet nominees to be immune from the up-or-down vote. It’s going to mean a lot less stability in DC, a lot more seesawing legislation, and more severe partisanship than anyone in the Senate could possibly desire.

Beutler also considers how the GOP would respond:

Republicans know they’ve given Reid practically no choice. And if he goes nuclear it might prove to be an even better outcome for them. It will provide them a plausible rationale for taking things a step further if they win back the Senate in 2014. Getting Democratic fingerprints on the nuclear rule-change precedent, will provide Republicans the cover they’ll need to eliminate the filibuster altogether in January 2015.

They aren’t just testing the limits of Constitutional norms for fun. They’re testing Reid’s faith in the durability of his majority.

A woman Obama touted as an ACA success story has soured on the law:

Her problem is both simple and complicated. Read this Washington State Wire post for the complicated part. The first erroneous premium quote was due to — surprise — the feds and the state not having their act together in calculating subsidies. The feds were expecting each applicant’s annual income; the state gave them each applicant’s monthly income. That led to a massive overestimate of how much taxpayer money each applicant was entitled to. The second bad quote came from poor advice given by the state itself: They encouraged her to enroll her son, who has ADHD, in the state Medicaid program, but they didn’t tell her that that meant he couldn’t be counted towards her federal subsidies for her ObamaCare plan. After the second adjustment, she was entitled to no subsidy at all. The Kafkaesque result, per CNN: “Now I have been priced out and will not be able to afford the plans you offer. But, I get to pay $95 and up for not having health insurance.”

Suderman piles on:

It’s worth highlighting the fact that this occurred in one of the 15 state-run exchanges that is supposed to be working better than the federally facilitated system covering 36 states. Indeed, Washington state’s exchange has frequently been touted as one of the systems that works the best among the state-run exchanges. But those reports tend to focus on the consumer experience—the ability of a user to smoothly navigate from start to finish in the insurance enrollment process. Yet as Sanford’s story shows, a smooth process can still be frustrated by inaccurate pricing and subsidy information. The same, naturally, would be true of incorrect enrollment data being sent to insurers, another problem that’s apparently pervasive in the federal system.

The paparazzi suck. However, Baldwin wants to use the law to rein them in:

[T]he press never turns the camera around on themselves. Least of all the tabloid press. My wife is a young mother with a newborn child. Yet reporters harass and hector her and our baby outside our home in ways that approximate a hockey brawl. It is shameful. And it should be illegal.

It is shameful – even vile. But it’s a free country. Alyssa sympathizes with Baldwin but has the same worry as me:

[A]s unpleasant as I find the conduct of very, very many celebrity photographers, I’m not sure Baldwin makes the case (or that anyone has, really) that inconvenience to celebrities justifies laws restricting the press, especially when other legal remedies are available for many of the concerns he expresses. New York City has laws making available restraining orders, handing out driving violations, and governing permitting for shooting film on city streets, all of which are potential avenues Baldwin and his peers could explore to make their lives more livable.

Among her other suggestions:

It’s undoubtedly unpleasant and anxiety-provoking to be pursued this way, but Baldwin is pursued not simply because he is famous–there are New Yorkers more famous than he–but because celebrity outbursts are a commodity. And if you provide them regularly, as Baldwin does, and as Jude Law and Kaney West have in the past, you become a reliable source of income. If Baldwin, who as a trained actor has better tools to put on false emotions than most of us do, simply went inert at the sight of a photographer, or if he and his wife traveled primarily by car and driver, they would almost certainly diminish their value to the people who presently harass them.

The AC360 Later panelists and I tackled the latest Baldwin blowup the other night – watch here. A reader’s two cents:

I was listening to a recent episode of Alec Baldwin’s podcast, Here’s the Thing, and was struck by his own statements about his relationship to papparazi and why he engages in the fights in the first place. It was in the episode with Jerry Seinfeld (which is an interesting one for a lot of reasons). I’ve run out of time to find you the timestamp for the part where Alec explains his outrageous behavior, but you’ll know it when you hear it. He really feels that he is on the side of justice. Nothing in there about why a person would need to use gay slurs in the line of perceived duty, but still, I think the man is a fascinating and complicated person.

(Photo: Model Anna Nicole Smith poses on Rodeo Drive as she unveils a poster to promote a new ‘Gentlemen Prefer Fur-Free Blondes’ ad for People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals in Los Angeles, California on December 7, 2004. By Carlo Allegri/Getty Images.)

In October, the NYT reported that the ACA site has around 500 million lines of code. David Auerbach took issue with the number, noting that he’s “seen nearly identical segments of code written in 10 lines or in 50.” Regardless, Healthcare.gov is a massive undertaking. If you want to envision just how massive, take a look at this eye-popping chart, which puts the alleged 500 million lines of code in context.

And the Obamaites thought this didn’t need constant, early and repeated testing? Are they on another planet or another solar system?

Gabriel Arana investigates the grassroots efforts of Christians:

Except for the Episcopal Church, which recognized same-sex unions in 2009 and ordains openly gay and lesbian priests, the leadership of the country’s major Christian denominations has presented a solid front against the spread of same-sex marriage across the country. Further down the totem pole, churches are moving on without their leadership. According to a forthcoming report from the National Congregations Study at Duke University, the number of congregations allowing openly gay and lesbian members has increased from 38 to 48 percent since 2006. Twenty-seven percent of churches gave gay and lesbian congregants leadership roles in the same timeframe—an 8 percent jump.

“Things don’t change that much in religion—there’s a lot of stability,” says Mark Chaves, a sociologist at Duke and one of the researchers behind the study. “This is one of the biggest jumps on a specific subject we’ve seen since we first started collecting data in 1998.” Indeed, while public support for same-sex marriage shot up in the last ten years—in 2003, only 33 percent of the public supported gay unions; today, 55 percent do—polls have generally shown attitudes among religious folk trending upward more languorously. But those who study religious opinion say the trend line among the faithful began to shoot up between 2008 and 2009. “The sea change has hit among religious organizations,” says Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a think tank in Washington, D.C. “Overall, what we’re seeing are the changes in American culture broadly reflected in attitudes of religious Americans as well.”

And the Pope is conducting a survey of Catholics in the pews …

Updates from a few readers:

Please don’t forget the United Church of Christ, which has been on the right side of this issue even longer than the Episcopalians (God bless ’em).

The New York Times called the UCC “the first mainline Christian denomination” to support same-sex marriage officially, in 2005. As the Times notes, “the denomination says it and its predecessors were among the first churches to take a stand against slavery, in 1700, the first to ordain a woman, in 1853, and the first to publish an inclusive-language hymnal, in 1995.” The UCC is one of the oldest and proudest Protestant churches in America. Many of the Pilgrims were Congregationalists (one of the denominations that joined to become the UCC in 1957).  It was a Congregational church that supported the African victims of the Amistad. And President Obama was a UCC church member in Chicago before the Rev. Wright imbroglio. It’s frustrating that the UCC is often left off the list of significant Protestant denominations in America. This is a truly historic American church that has been fighting the good fight for centuries.

Another:

I hope others will be emailing you also, but Arana needs to do a bit more homework.  Yes, he forgot the UCC, but he also forgot the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is home to nearly 4 million Lutherans in more than 10,000 congregations (which makes it about four times larger than the Episcopal Church and the UCC).  In 2009, the ELCA – which has, for its 25 years, always allowed gay and lesbian persons to be ordained – voted to allow churches to call partnered clergy and to allow congregations to recognize and support the LGBT people and relationships in their midst.  The Southern California Synod also recently elected Guy Irwin, an openly (and now engaged to be married) gay man, with very little notice.

The UCC and the Episcopal Church deserve their praise, no doubt.  But we ELCA Lutherans have been quietly fighting the good fight for some time now.  For many in the ELCA, this isn’t part of a political movement, but simply part of our ongoing response to God’s call of love and grace for we vulnerable humans.

(Photo from Getty)

The case against doing so:

Mayo Clinic psychiatrist J. Michael Bostwick recently addressed this subject (pdf):

Just because the general public wants to believe the tautology that heinous crimes must be the province of the mentally ill (because no one in his right mind would perpetrate such acts) does not make it so.

In a nationwide Swedish study of 13 years of violent crimes such as homicide, aggravated assault, and robbery, individuals discharged from psychiatric hospitals with severe psychotic or affective diagnoses did have 3.8 times the odds of committing such crimes than did their none mentally ill countrymen. However, their number relative to the general populace was so low that only 1 in 20 violent crimes could be attributed to them. These findings are consistent with earlier American studies, which estimated a 2- to 4-fold increase in the risk of violence by individuals with schizophrenia but only a 3% to 5% population-attributable risk.

Calling the epidemiology of mass murder “counterintuitive,” Friedman and Michels write that “we must explain an epidemiologic fact that the public likely finds counterintuitive in the wake of a mass killing: Although mass murderers probably have more psychopathology than other killers, the mentally ill as a group pose little risk of violence.” Moreover, Appelbaum warns that increased violence may not actually be a result of the mental illness itself but of comorbid substance abuse and sociopathic personality traits. Given these statistics, the American Psychiatric Association has questioned both the “fundamental fairness” of re-stricting firearm access for the mentally ill and the possibility that such restrictions could further stigmatize an already marginalized group.

Maria Bustillos explores why a writer might be “immune to the lure of fame” and prefer anonymity:

Anonymous is more than a pseudonym. It is a stark declaration of intent: a wall explicitly thrown up, not only between writer and reader, but between the writer’s work and his life. His book is one thing and his “real” life another, and the latter is entirely off limits, not only to you, the reader, but presumably to almost everybody. Sometimes he has written about something too intimate, too scary, too real, for him to bear public scrutiny. Once the connection is known, what he has written will mark his ordinary life ineradicably. …

No book is dangerous in and of itself. A book is only a collection of words in a certain order, pages, screens, a sequence of ideas. Ideas alone can never hurt us. People only make ideas dangerous by fearing and hating them, and by vilifying and persecuting those who disagree with them. In this way, the association of a writer with his ideas can be very dangerous, even deadly. You stand a reasonably good chance of denying ever having read a book, but it’s a great deal harder to hide from having written one. Beyond this, though, lies the deeper problem for those who imagine that they can write, and yet escape a reckoning. Writers are generally fated to commit the truest parts of themselves to the page, whether they choose to own their work in public or not. That is the ultimate vulnerability, and it is inescapable.

Self-described “hack writer” Nicole Dieker offers a different logic for writing anonymously – making a living:

I am one of the unsung, invisible hacks of the internet generation. I help fill blogs and news sites and online stores with the new text those sites need every day. Within an hour I can give you the ten best celebrity wedding dresses, or a thousand words on how to get your kids to eat healthy snacks. I can ghostwrite to match your blog’s tone and style, if you need a post in a hurry. I write approximately 5,000 words per day, at various rates that average out to about $20/hour.

I can’t tell you who my clients are. Yes, in part because of the NDAs, but also because my writing, at its best, is supposed to be invisible. Take, for example, the copy you see when you log on to your bank’s website. 500 words on the importance of compound interest or CD laddering. No byline, of course. That’s the type of stuff I write. More functional than memorable. I’ve done work for dictionaries and catalogs and multiple-choice test questions. I’ve described how to French braid hair, how to reverse French braid hair, how to French twist hair, how to make a sock bun. I’ve written the introductions to probably a hundred recipes…. My goal is to continue to increase the number of words out there with my name on them, although I’m not foolish enough to think that means I’ll never have to write another hair-braiding article again. Nor, honestly, would I want to give up that type of copy work. How-to articles and byline-free content seems to be where the money is, these days.

Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” underwent major changes in meaning; it was “originally written as a peace song for Armistice Day in 1938, but by 1940 [it] had become an anthem for intervention”: