When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convictedand that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
I haven't actually done Short Cuts in awhile, letting dozens of significant ACA-related stories disappear into the Memory Hole. Will try to be better about this going forward:
Normally this is exactly the sort of story which I'd post a full point-by-point debunking of (see McConnell, Mitch), but frankly I've had a lousy weekend and am just too damned tired to bother. It's like playing whack-a-mole, anyway; sometimes it's just not worth the effort.
Fortunately, Jason Easley of PoliticsUSA clears up at least a couple of the whoppers John Boehner spewed this morning:
So, the good news is that new Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, who has already scrapped his predecessor's unnecessarily confusing "alternative" Medicaid expansion plan in favor of regular expansion, has officially submitted a latter to the HHS Dept. stating that yes, if the Supreme Court does rule against the government in the King v. Burwell case, PA will indeed establish their own ACA healthcare exchange.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - Gov. Tom Wolf's administration advanced plans Friday to maintain federal health insurance subsidies for nearly 400,000 Pennsylvanians ahead of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that could wipe out the aid to insurance buyers in some states.
The Democrat wrote to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell to declare his administration's intent to take over operation of the insurance marketplace in 2016. The federal government currently operates the marketplace, which is a prominent feature of the 2010 federal health care law designed to extend insurance coverage to 35 million Americans.
However, there's still no enrollment data since late February for about 10 states, and only fractional data for the other 40. Based on my best estimates, the actual total QHP selections to date should beslightly over 12.3 million as of yesterday (click image below for the full-size version).
As for the tax filing season Special Enrollment Period specifically, there have been over 110,500 confirmed enrollments to date (68,000 via Healthcare.Gov, 33,000 in California, around 4,800 in Washington State and over 4,700 in Maryland). My best estimate is that #ACATaxTime QHPs will end up being roughly 140,000 in the end.
BALTIMORE (May 1, 2015) — More than 4,700 Marylanders took advantage of a special six week enrollment period that allowed them to enroll for health insurance to avoid an additional federal tax penalty for 2015 if they had already owed a tax penalty for lacking health coverage in 2014.
Marylanders who applied for the special enrollment period, which ran from March 15 through yesterday, attested that they owe the penalty for lacking health insurance in 2014 and that they became aware of this after the Feb. 15 close of open enrollment for 2015 coverage.
"One of the things Ford had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day’, 'You’re very tall’, or 'You seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?’
At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up.
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Sarah Ferris at The Hill has a story this morning about the Republican Party's "list of demands" in the event that the Supreme Court rules against the federal government in the King v. Burwell case.
I was tempted to point out the obvious terrorist/hostage theme in the headline, but instead I'm gonna just focus on one snippet from the article:
But, in the event the justices rule against ObamaCare, Democrats will offer a simpler solution — passing a bill to fix the few sentences of the statute that are under scrutiny.
“The president can say, here’s our one-page bill,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who opposes the current congressional strategy, told a D.C. audience on Thursday.
Why yes...yes, that sounds about right. In fact, I seem to recall posting this several months ago:
OK, I admit this caught me by surprise; last year the first following-year rate increase requests didn't start popping up in the major media until late May (or perhaps they did but I didn't happen to notice until then). My first entry on the subject wasn't until May 17, 2014.
This year, the first state out of the gate with the proposed rate changes is Oregon. There's a reason why I'm emphasizing "requested" and "proposed" here...because it's very important for people to understand that in most states, anyway, the state insurance commissioner can veto rate increases which are out of line. An insurance company can ask for a 10,000% increase...that doesn't mean they're gonna get it.
