As I noted a few weeks ago, I haven't written a whole lot about the idiotic (but terrifyingly so) TexasFoldEm lawsuit in awhile. Part of this is because I was out of the country over the holidays; part is because there hasn't been a whole lot of movement on the case since right-wing federal Judge Reed O'Connor ruled that the ACA was unconstitutional using a legal argument so thin it hula hoops with a Cheerio.
Michigan was pretty much Ground Zero for the 2018 Blue Wave midterm elections. In addition to Democrats flipping the Governor's seat (and holding onto Debbie Stabenow's U.S. Senate seat), they also flipped the Attorney General, Secretary of State, one of two state Supreme Court seats, both of the stateBoard of Education seats which were up and all six state University Board seats which were up. In addition, they picked up two U.S. House seats, five state Senate seats and five state House seats.
It was a complete and utter repudiation of both Republican governance and their agenda.
As Democratic candidates prepare to take three statewide offices on Jan. 1 — governor, attorney general and secretary of state — Republican lawmakers introduced bills Thursday to challenge their authority.
This is about as minor a rate filing update as I've had, but I'm posting it separately in the interest of completeness.
Insurance carriers in my home state of Michigan originally submitted their requested 2019 ACA individual market rate filings back in June. At the time, the average premium increase being asked for was pretty nominal, around 1.7%, with a smaller-than-average #ACASabotage factor of around 5% due to the ACA's Individual Mandate being repealed and #ShortAssPlans being expanded by the Trump Administration.
Today, just two days before the 2019 Open Enrollment Period actually begins, the Michigan Dept. of Financial Services finally posted the approved 2019 rate filings...and practically nothing ended up changing.
There's so many Republican candidates running around trying to gaslight America into completely ignoring their relentless, repeated attempts to strip away protections for people with pre-existing conditions that I've alread stopped bothering to try to keep up with them (I think my Rogues Gallery post stops at around 24 or so at the moment).
Here in Michigan, while I'm pretty sure all nine of our Republican members of Congress who voted for the AHCA last year are lying through their teeth about how they suddenly support "protecting coverage of pre-existing conditions", the one which seems to be getting the most attention is Mike Bishop (MI-08). Part of this is no doubt because Bishop is embroiled in one of the two closest races in the state (the other is MI-11, where Dave Trott also voted for the AHCA, but he's retiring so it's an open seat).
As I've written about many times before, my home state of Michigan is, unfortunately, among the states which are trying to institute work requirements for ACA Medicaid expansion for 680,000 Michiganders. As I've also written about many times before, work requirements for Medicaid are not only burdensome and cruel, they're counterproductive in terms of efficiency, economics and even in the stated goal of such programs, which is supposedly to "inspire" low-income people to get a job.
UPDATE 3:50pm: OK, it sounds like you can completely disregard all the Medicaid-related stuff below; apparently there was a communication error. I've confirmed with the Whitmer campaign that the proposed reinsurance plan would not be tied in with Michigan's ACA Medicaid expansion program at all, nor would it have any impact on the Medicaid eligigibility threshold, which means this would indeed be a standard ACA individual market reinsurance program after all...which is what I assumed in the first place, and which would be perfectly fine!
(Note: I uploaded Livengood's video clip to YouTube because it's the only way I could embed it within the blog post)
VIDEO: Today, I attempted to pin down @SchuetteOnDuty today on whether he will keep @onetoughnerd’s expanded Medicaid program intact if he’s elected governor.
I think I’ll try again next week... pic.twitter.com/hu6ejM2vpt
Livengood: "Attorney General, if you're elected governor, are you gonna keep the Medicaid program that the governor's established, the Healthy Michigan plan?"
Note: Most of this isn't limited to Michigan...nearly all of the items listed here could/should be applied in other states as well.
Dear Democratic nominees for Michigan State House and State Senate:
Hi there, and congratulations on your primary victory!
If you're familiar with me and this site, you probably know three things about me:
1. I strongly support achieving Universal Healthcare coverage, and I'd ideally prefer to utilize some sort of Single Payer system as the payment mechanism to do so.
2. However, even with the recent strengthening in support, I remain skeptical that a SP/Medicare-for-All type of law is feasible yet, for a number of reasons I've talked about before but won't go into right now.
3. Having said that, during the interim between today and whatever the Next Big Thing is in healthcare (whether it's Medicare for All, Medicare X, Medicare Extra (my personal favorite), Medicaid Buy-In, Medicare Part E, CHIPA, USEAHIA, Healthy America or some other federal program), I strongly believe that it is vitally important to protect, repair and strengthen the Affordable Care Act even if it ends up being replaced by something else in the near future.
Later I noted that his primary opponent, former State Senator and County Prosecutor Gretchen Whitmer, has far thinner responses posted on her website when it comes to healthcare policy. I also noted that there are some good reasons for this which likely have nothing to do with being "a tool of the insurance lobby", a "neoliberal sellout" bla bla bla and so forth.
However, for the record, yes, Ms. Whitmer does indeed support universal healthcare coverage, as shown in the Q&A video clip above from one of her town hall appearances (thanks to Mary Bernadette Minnick Weatherly for the clip and the OK to repost it).
Below is a verbatim transcript of the whole exchange:
On November 8, 2010--right after the "Red Wave" midterm election in which Republicans picked up a jaw-dropping 63 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, 6 Senate seats and 680 state legislative seats--Paul Waldman wrote, in The American Prospect:
In charting the last two years, from the euphoria of election night 2008 to the despair of election night 2010, I keep returning to Mario Cuomo's famous dictum that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. The poetry of campaigning is lofty, gauzy, full of possibility, a world where problems are solved just because we want them to be and opposition melts away before us. The prose of governing is messy and maddening, full of compromises and half-victories that leave a sour taste in one's mouth.
...All else being equal, this means Republicans have an easier time getting elected and a harder time legislating the things they really want to do (other than tax cuts, which are never a hard sell), while Democrats have a harder time getting elected but ought to have an easier time legislating.
