In a media environment where folks can choose from hundreds of sources, sociologists tell us we normally chose those which don’t cause us a lot of dissonance. The result is that we tend to stay in a sort of “bubble of truth” and might miss some of the perspectives that we should acknowledge if we are going to make any progress.
One exception, on rare occasions, is talk radio. The honest “talkers” sometimes deliberately let divergent views through their call screeners. (Thom Hartmann is admirable in this regard.) Sometimes they come through accidentally, as well, and you can almost hear the “talker” do a double take realizing he/she is being scammed. Sometimes they don’t realize it at all, and the listener has to pick it up.
That’s where I was Thursday. I had two “aha” moments listening to Tony Trupiano of Detroit, who was doing a creditable job subbing for Ed Schultz during the holiday break. They provided some real insight into some of the Tea Party objection to ACA, and why seemingly needy lower middle class folks talk about voting against what appears on the surface to be their own self-interest. I’ll explain after that orange squiggle.
The first caller was talking about a letter “his friend” allegedly got from the government. It said that he needed to sign up for Medicare part D or get fined under ACA (“Send your credit card here.”) Now if you are reading this you probably know that there is no requirement to get drug coverage under ACA, but the caller was really a low information voter. My “aha” in this case wasn’t about him, but about the new approach that some of the scammers seem to be taking.
I remember a few years ago my late mother-in-law was getting rafts of mail that looked official, telling her she was about to lose her social security because (sic) Mexican President Vincente Fox wanted to steal it. The solution? Vote Republican and send money to a “Moony” post office box in Virginia. She got so many of these, under so many forms, she started filing them in a few dozen shoe boxes. The letters were pretty professionally done and she truly believed it was the government. Not sure if Trupiano’s caller did, but I heard clearly through the conversation that these folks were at it again with senior citizens. This is something that needs clear investigation and response.
But my second “aha” was bigger and far more significant. A caller actually slipped, as he described why he didn’t want the IRS involved in ACA (those “60,000 new agents” ya know.) He said that he was on Medicare disability and if the IRS got involved he would lose it, and then would have to buy his own health insurance. Again, Trupiano missed it.
This guy was saying that the IRS knew about some of his sources of income that SSA did not, and I know that can be true. Just before writing this I had to provide some information from one to another.
The caller presumed (and I have no reason to dispute it) that under ACA taxpayers would be required to supply IRS with information—i.e., “Yes, I have insurance under social security disability.” If the total income from other (non-SSA) sources is high on the same return, that would raise a red flag. So, for example, if someone did a lot of work in a job that wasn’t under SS, or had a lot of income from a settlement, alimony, rents or so on, SS wouldn’t know about it now but in the future IRS would know that the person was over the disability threshold.
Now, I seriously doubt that there is any enforcement mechanism in that law that would affect the IRS, and in fact I know the IRS is prohibited from prosecuting for not having health insurance. But for most folks in the low middle income range, the IRS is a tremendous bogeyman because these people pay a far higher percentage of their income and have far fewer loopholes than the very rich (or even the very poor.)
But the message was clear. The fact that ACA has any link to the IRS at all is terrifying a sliver of the population who should be celebrating all its benefits. It also makes the challenge of talking to any of them about how great the act is even steeper.
Most diaries end with a moral or an open question. Not sure if there is one here, except "Listen Carefully." There are lots of issues out there among those who appear to be voting against their own self-interest.