David Dayen/Intercept and a top notch reporter with some political reality:
California single-payer organizers are deceiving their supporters. It’s time to stop
IN THE DAYS SINCE California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelved for the year SB562, which intends to establish a state single-payer health care system, he’s been subject to mass protests and even death threats. The bill’s chief backers, including the California Nurses Association and the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution, angrily point to Rendon as the main roadblock to truly universal health care.
They’re completely wrong. What’s more, they know they’re wrong. They’re perfectly aware that SB562 is a shell bill that cannot become law without a ballot measure approved by voters. Rather than committing to raising the millions of dollars that would be needed to overcome special interests and pass that initiative, they would, apparently, rather deceive their supporters, hiding the realities of California’s woeful political structure in favor of a morality play designed to advance careers and aggrandize power.
That may sound harsh. It’s gentle.
You don’t have to agree or like the piece, but a must read if you care about single payer.
ICYMI from Lawfare last night, to go with the WSJ piece:
The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians
I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest. I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story. What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”
Must read. That WSJ piece is real.
Mitchell Stephens/Politico:
Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And Good Riddance.
But bursts of investigation come and go. The big news in American journalism today has been that reporters, editors and producers at legacy journalism organizations have become so eager to dispute the more questionable pronouncements and proposals of the Trump administration. Increasingly, they are prepared to label the president’s wilder statements and tweets “falsehoods” or even “lies.” The big news is that many of our best journalists seem, in news coverage, not just opinion pieces, to be moving away from balance and nonpartisanship.
Is this the end of all that is good and decent in American journalism? Nah. I say good for them. An abandonment of the pretense to “objectivity”—in many ways a return to American journalism’s roots—is long overdue.
Kathleen Parker/WaPo with an essay on what really matters, sorta:
Is this it for Trump?
Brzezinski is wonder woman — smart, strong, wealthy — and engaged to marry her best friend. I seriously doubt she has been wounded by Trump’s pathetic second-grader taunts. But I get it. The most one can hope for these days is that enough Republican men can be shamed into defending Brzezinski, a woman many of them know personally — and who has thumbs-down power over potential guests on the show everybody in Washington watches.
Whatever works.
Biggest policy failure, it’s not. He’s the same person he always was. Well, Capone went up the river on tax evasion, not murder.
Economist:
Mr Trump won power partly because he spoke for voters who feel that the system is working against them, as our special report this week sets out. He promised that, by dredging Washington of the elites and lobbyists too stupid or self-serving to act for the whole nation, he would fix America’s politics.
His approach is not working. Five months into his first term, Mr Trump presides over a political culture that is even more poisonous than when he took office. His core voters are remarkably loyal. Many businesspeople still believe that he will bring tax cuts and deregulation. But their optimism stands on ever-shakier ground. The Trump presidency has been plagued by poor judgment and missed opportunities. The federal government is already showing the strain. Sooner or later, the harm will spread beyond the beltway and into the economy.
Brookings:
In its report, CBO estimated that average individual market premiums under the AHCA would be 10 percent lower in 2026 than they would be under current law (before considering subsidies). However, as some observers have noted, this estimated change incorporates changes in the generosity of the plans being offered on the individual market, as well as a shift in the composition of individual market enrollment toward younger individuals, who pay lower premiums. The CBO estimate does not, therefore, answer the question of greatest interest, which is how CBO expects the AHCA to affect average premiums for a given generosity of coverage and a fixed population of individual market enrollees.
However, other information provided in CBO’s analysis can be used to answer this question. Using that information, we estimate that premiums would be around 13 percent higher under the AHCA than they are under current law, holding plan generosity and the individual market age distribution fixed at their current law levels. As illustrated in Figure 1, around three-fifths of the difference between this estimate and the CBO estimate of a 10 percent premium decline reflects the adjustment to hold the individual market age distribution constant. The remainder reflects the adjustment to hold plan generosity constant.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
All of these claims are absurd in their own way, but they add up to a big bundle of unified nonsense. Yet McConnell is now laying waste to this entire story-line. McConnell’s argument to fellow Republicans — that failure means talks with Democrats over the ACA’s future — concedes a number of points. It concedes that, despite Trump’s claim of a desire for talks with Democrats, Republicans cannot work with Democrats, as long as Republicans remain wedded to their own priorities — that there is simply no bipartisan consensus possible, as long as Republicans are hellbent on cutting health spending on poor people by hundreds of billions of dollars to finance an enormous tax cut for the rich. After all, McConnell is arguing that passing a bill that does this, on a purely partisan basis, is the only way to avert any need to dilute the GOP’s devotion to those priorities.
Josh Barro/Business Insider:
The GOP health bill is doomed to toxic unpopularity, no matter how it's changed
But there are just too many cuts to go around for people not to notice.
You could reduce public spending on healthcare without making people angry if you made cheaper the healthcare people consume. This is hard, but last week, I laid out some ways to do this.
You could press drug prices down, for example, by letting the federal government use its buying power to negotiate down the prices it pays under Medicare. You could stop hospitals from merging, so they have less power to raise prices. You could widen the scope of services that people can get from nurse practitioners instead of doctors. You could issue more visas to foreign doctors willing to accept lower salaries.
These policies would cause some pain for doctors and hospital systems and pharmaceutical company shareholders. But they would make things easier for consumers of healthcare, which is most of us. And they would make it possible for the government to reduce spending on healthcare without forcing patients to spend more of their money on it.
Mark Z, Barabak/LA Times:
Trump succeeds where Obama failed – spawning a new wave of liberal activism
Powered by social media and fired by deep antagonism, Bosworth and others have produced a movement seemingly without precedent: artists, doctors, lawyers, scientists, software engineers and others organizing themselves to seek elected office, flood congressional town hall meetings and agitate on a broad range of issues.
Their numbers are unknowable; for many, a good part of the appeal of the do-it-yourself movements is the lack of rigid structure or top-down management.
But seemingly every week brings a new group with new designs: academics giving advice, librarians raising their voices, quilters taking up their sewing needles.
It turns out Trump, a president loathed by Democrats, is a far greater spur to liberal activism than the revered Barack Obama, a former community organizer who hoped to inspire a wave of officeholders and Democratic idealists. Instead, he presided over the hollowing-out of his party.
Rachel Gershon/Governing:
A ‘Sleeper’ Lurking in the GOP’s Health-Care Overhaul
One little-discussed aspect of the legislation would significantly change the way state Medicaid programs are funded and could erode coverage nationwide.
I've worked on health care access issues since 2004 -- before passage of the ACA as a health care navigator and afterward as an attorney specializing in health policy. While it's too early to know what shape the final version of the Republican-crafted health care legislation might take, it's clear from what we know about the proposals on the table that both the Senate and House versions would reintroduce issues that individuals faced before the ACA and would make historic changes to Medicaid, resulting in added pressure on states to cut benefits and eligibility.
One "sleeper" section of both bills, Medicaid per capita caps, has received less media coverage than provisions affecting the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA, but it also has the potential to erode coverage nationwide.
Emma Sandoe and David Grabowski/Daily News:
Just how badly the Senate's health bill will eviscerate Medicaid: Understanding the devastating mechanics of the cuts
Medicaid provides health insurance for the poorest and most vulnerable among us — including children, pregnant women, older adults and disabled persons. It also pays for most long-term care for those who need assistance because of diseases like Alzheimer's. BCRA, which is estimated to reduce Medicaid spending by roughly one-fourth, is going to lead to a lot of these individuals losing coverage.
The Senate health bill dramatically changes the financing structure of the Medicaid program. For the last 52 years, the Medicaid program has been jointly funded by the states and the federal government.
Thus, if there is a disease outbreak or the emergence of a new expensive cure, the federal government funds a percentage of the amount a state spends on Medicaid via what is known as a match rate.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Don’t sugarcoat this. Trump just called for 32 million people to lose health coverage.
Trump, it pains me to inform you, is the president. When he calls on Congress to do something, he is basically saying that he would sign it if they did do it. There is no reason to treat this as trivial or frivolous simply because Trump is an ignoramus and a buffoon. Indeed, Republicans have in fact voted for repealmultiple times in the past. The only reason they aren’t doing so right now is because repeal cannot pass, now that there is a Republican in the White House who would actually sign such a bill. (Yes, Trump would sign such a bill in two seconds. He called for one today, remember?)
In this sense, Trump’s tweet is actually kind of useful. It reveals once again that Republicans have been running a massive scam on Obamacare for years.