I think the headline accurately depicts former Texas Governor and current Presidential Candidate Rick "Do The Glasses Make Me Look Smarter?" Perry's defense of the appallingly high uninsured rate in Texas during his 14-year tenure as chief executive of the state.
Perry appeared on FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace this morning, and for the 2nd week in a row, Wallace actually acted like a Real Journalist® instead of a GOP/FOX hack and pressed Perry with some solid questions regarding the sorry state of healthcare coverage in his state.
Took my wife and 9-year old to see Pixar's latest, Inside Out.
Sheer brilliance. Run-don't-walk to see it, etc. etc.
For anyone who was afraid that they'd lost their touch with Cars 2* (and only partly regained their footing with Brave and Monsters University), I'm thrilled to report that they're back at full throttle here.
That is all.
*(I actually kind of liked Cars 2, but I know most people seemed to hate it.)
No matter how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the King v. Burwell challenge to the Affordable Care Act, Vermont lawmakers say they are optimistic about their state’s health exchange.
State Republican leaders are ratcheting up the pressure on Congress to overhaul the Affordable Care Act if the Supreme Court this month rules that subsidies on the federal exchange are invalid.
Republicans from 33 states have written to Congress as part of a coordinated message urging federal legislators to develop a plan that would free states from the pressure of setting up their own exchanges to salvage subsidies, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative think tank.
While some people spend their lives in search of the Holy Grail or the Lost City of Atlantis, Huffington Post healthcare reporter Jeffrey Young has spent the past year and a half on a Lifelong Quest to discover the elusive, mysterious Republican Replacement Plan for the Affordable Care Act.
Now, here's the thing: I'm not saying that Mr. Roy's 20% is wrong, or that McKinsey's 27% is wrong. Maybe they're correct. I've only documented about 10% of the QHPs as being off-exchange; perhaps it really is only 20 or 27% of the total. I'm just saying that there's too many unknowns for anyone to conclude that it is 20% or 27% for exchange QHPs either. It's still a big unknown.
Furthermore, I do appreciate him at least bothering to read my own analysis. He's a Big Established Expert and I'm just some web developer in Michigan. He's (from his Forbes bio) the Opinion Editor for Forbes, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and was a health care policy advisor to Mitt Romney...while I create websites for small businesses, often while wearing a bathrobe.
But that doesn't mean that he's right, either...and unless I'm missing something important here, nothing that he's said proves that he is.
When the Republican Party replaced the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, with "one of theirs" (Keith Hall, who previously worked as an economist for George W. Bush), there was understandably plenty of concern (or hope, depending on your politics) that CBO projections would suddenly become radically different from what they had been under a "Democratic" CBO director, especially when it comes to politicized issues such as the Affordable Care Act.
Summary Over the past several years, a number of proposals have been advanced for repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which became law in March 2010. In this report, the Congressional Budget Office and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) analyze the main budgetary and economic consequences that would arise from repealing that law.
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post does a nice job of summarizing the Republican response if they win their King v. Burwell court case at the Supreme Court:
The GOP argument is basically this: Obamacare is to blame for the awful outcome of millions of people losing Obamacare, so Republicans will protect all those people from Obamacare by temporarily restoring their Obamacare, before repealing it entirely for all its beneficiaries, and replacing it with … “oh, wow, look over there, a unicorn is wandering through the Capitol!”
Here it is in video form, compliments of South Park:
Over at Vox this morning, Ezra Klein has a good "big picture" look at the true impact of the plaintiffs winning King v. Burwell which goes beyond the specific numbers of people impacted or the dollar amounts involved. His main point, which I generally agree with, is that while the results would be pretty horrible, they wouldn't result in the law being repealed any more than the Medicaid expansion ruling did. In Klein's view, at worst (which, he admits, would be pretty bad), the 2-tier healthcare split between rational & irrational states would deepen...but only temporarily.
So King can't destroy Obamacare. What it can do is let Republican elected officials destroy Obamacare in states where they have a majority. That's a very different thing, and it will lead to very different political dynamics.
For the most part I agree with him, but there's two things I wanted to call attention to: One which he doesn't mention, another which I feel he shouldn't have.
