Goose-stepping against your best interests

It is truly baffling that so many goosestep to the propaganda of the Welfare Wealthy they are subsidizing, vote against their best interests and continue to put clowns in office that undermine protections for themselves.

About all one needs to know is who is funding the Obamacare opposition.

It would seem discovering the Dirty Energy Kochs, who brought you the Tea Party, would be convincing enough. And they're not the only ones. 

The advantages of poor public education is creating a willingness of too many Americans to blindly seize. Combine that with too much Faux news viewing and it defines the destruction of critical thinking skills.

Yup! Obamacare isn't perfect. It's not the solution that single-payer is, but until folks stop supporting Plutocracy, where are we?

GOP Governors like Scott Walker refused funds to expand Medicaid. (photo: AP)

5 Million Without Insurance, Thanks to GOP Refusal

By Ryan Cooper, The Washington Post

01 January 14

ecause of the decision on Obamacare by the Supreme Court, which left the decision to expand Medicaid (a key part of Obamacare) up to the individual states, most Republican-controlled states refused said expansion, leaving substantial portions of the citizenry in the lurch.

Ed Kilgore has been calling this the "wingnut hole," and many have been speculating about its size.

 

How many Americans will go without health insurance simply because the GOP dislikes the president? Well, happy 2014, dear readers: initial estimates are in, and we have 5 million lucky winners!

About 5 million people will be without health care next year that they would have gotten simply if they lived somewhere else in America. . . . The court effectively left it up to states to decide whether to open Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor and disabled, to more people, primarily poor working adults without children. . . .

Twenty-five states declined. That leaves 4.8 million people in those states without the health care coverage that their peers elsewhere are getting through the expansion of Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation estimate. More than one-fifth of them live in Texas alone, Kaiser's analysis found.

That's approximately the combined population of Delaware, Vermont, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska. Or alternatively, either Alabama, South Carolina, Colorado or the whole of Norway alone.

 

The Supreme Court decision was doubly unfortunate, because Republican states tend to be poorer than average and contain a disproportionate number of potential beneficiaries who are losing out.

 

Obamacare, by virtue of distributing benefits downward, was aimed at those very people; it never occurred to the law's architects that the vagaries of politics and law might give states a way out, and so they didn't design a backup coverage mechanism.

 

Some refusenik states, like Iowa, might go forward with an Obamacare-instead-of-Medicaid expansion, but most probably will do nothing. Prospects are bad enough that health-care industry groups have basically given up trying to push through the expansion by lobbying and are just biding their time until conditions are more favorable.

 

It's worth remembering that the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of the Medicaid expansion through 2016 and 90 percent of the cost afterward. It could very well work out that refusenik states will not even save money because of additional spending on the uninsured in emergency rooms and elsewhere.

 

But regardless of the pitiful sums involved, make no mistake: This action is utterly gratuitous.

 

Combined with the probable coming Republican refusal to extend unemployment benefits that George wrote about this morning, this is a particularly stiff kick in the teeth to the United States' most vulnerable citizens to usher in the new year.

 

 

The rest from RSN:

 

Michael Moore | The Obamacare We Deserve

Michael Moore, The New York Times
Moore writes: "Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful."
READ MORE

The 9 Biggest Privacy and Security Breaches That Rocked 2013
Lauren C. Williams, ThinkProgress
Williams reports: "If you've been paying attention, you know that 2013 has been a terrible year for data security and privacy."
READ MORE

Fireworks and Fear as Latvia Joins Eurozone
Mike Collier, Agence France-Presse
Collier reports: "There is widespread unease in the country about joining a currency union that has seen five of its members forced into painful bailouts since a crippling debt crisis erupted in 2009."
READ MORE

Obamacare: Catholic Groups Get Temporary Reprieve on Contraception
Reuters
Excerpt: "The US supreme court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday night granted Roman Catholic-affiliated groups a temporary exemption from a part of the Obamacare healthcare law that requires employers to provide insurance policies covering contraception."
READ MORE

South Sudan Rebels Seize Regional Capitol Ahead of Peace Talks
Reuters
Excerpt: "South Sudanese rebels loyal to former vice-president Riek Machar have seized control of Bor, the capital of restive Jonglei state."
READ MORE