This is a word.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Health Care Reform?
Health insurance bills could be hardship for many
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR, Associated Press Writer Ricardo Alonso-zaldivar, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – Many middle-class Americans would still struggle to pay for health insurance despite efforts by President Barack Obama and Democrats to make coverage more affordable.
The legislation advancing in Congress would require all Americans to get insurance — through an employer, a government program or by buying it themselves. But new tax credits to help with premiums won't go far enough for everyone. Some middle-class families purchasing their own coverage through new insurance exchanges could find it out of reach.
Lawmakers recognize the problem.
"For some people it's going to be a heavy lift," said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del. "We're doing our best to make sure it's not an impossible lift."
Added Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine: "We have no certainty as to whether or not these plans are going to be affordable." Both are on the Senate Finance Committee, which finished writing a health care bill on Friday.
A new online tool from the Kaiser Family Foundation illustrates the predicament.
The Health Reform Subsidy Calculator provides ballpark estimates of what households of varying incomes and ages would pay under the different Democratic health care bills. The legislation is still a work in progress and the calculator only a rough guide. Nonetheless, the results are revealing.
A family of four headed by a 45-year-old making $63,000 a year is in the middle of the middle class. But that family would pay $7,110 to buy its own health insurance under the plan from the committee chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.
The family would get a tax credit of $3,970 to help pay for a policy worth $11,080. But the balance due — $7,110 — is real money. Maybe it's less than the rent, but it's probably more than a car loan payment.
Kaiser's calculator doesn't take into account co-payments and deductibles that could add hundreds of dollars, even several thousand, to a family's total medical expenses. A Congressional Budget Office analysis estimates total expenses could average 20 percent of income for some families by 2016.
The issue of affordability "has been lurking in the background and is nowhere near resolved yet," said Kaiser's president, Drew Altman. "It's tricky because it doesn't take a lot of people to make affordability a political problem. It just takes some very visible and understandable cases."
At the root of the concerns is the push to cut the overall cost of health care overhaul legislation. Congress is trimming the budget for subsidies to meet Obama's target of $900 billion over 10 years — as the Baucus plan does. It means premiums will be higher than under earlier Democratic proposals.
The trade-off directly affects people who buy their own coverage. For those with job-based insurance, employers would continue to cover most of the costs.
Most of the uninsured are in households headed by someone who's self-employed or works at a business that doesn't provide coverage. It's this group that Democrats are trying to help.
Because health insurance is so expensive, lawmakers recognize that if they're going to pass a law requiring all Americans to get coverage, government has to defray the cost. The size of those subsidies makes an enormous difference.
Under the Baucus bill, a family of four making $63,000 would have to pay 11 percent of its income for health insurance, according to Kaiser. By comparison, an earlier bill from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with more generous subsidies required the same hypothetical family to pay about 7 percent of its income for premiums — a difference of about $2,500.
"This is not the loaves and the fishes — you can't just throw some subsidies out there and expect that will take care of everybody's needs," said Karen Pollitz, a Georgetown University professor who studies the insurance market for people buying their own coverage.
The legislation provides the most generous subsidies to those at or near the poverty line, about $22,000 for a family of four. That's where the problem is concentrated because about three-fourths of the uninsured are in households making less than twice the poverty level.
But as income rises, the subsidies taper off.
For a family of four making $45,000, federal subsidies would pick up 71 percent of the premium under the Baucus plan, according to the Kaiser calculator.
For a family with an income of $63,000, the subsidies would only cover 36 percent of the premium.
A family making $90,000 would get no help.
Pollitz said the subsidies disappear rapidly for households with solid middle-class incomes. That could be tricky for a self-employed individual who has a particularly good year financially.
Another problem is that people won't be able to get the insurance tax credits immediately after the bill passes. To hold down costs, the assistance won't come until 2013, after the next presidential election.
White House officials say that while Obama wants the cost of the final bill to stay manageable, it has to provide affordable coverage.
"The president is absolutely committed to making this affordable. That's the whole point," said Linda Douglass, spokeswoman for the White House health reform office.
Douglass said it's premature to draw any conclusions while the bill is being shaped in Congress. But House leaders are also cutting back their legislation to meet Obama's target.
Acknowledging the affordability problem, Baucus' committee voted Friday to exempt millions of people from the requirement to buy insurance and reduce penalties for those who fail to do so. But that would mean leaving at least 2 million more uninsured — not very satisfying to Democrats who started out with the goal of coverage for all.
"I think we've got to do something about it," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "We've got to make sure health insurance is affordable for the middle class."
___
On the Net:
Kaiser Health Reform Subsidy Calculator: http://tinyurl.com/ydopqx7
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/health(underscore)care/
Sunday, September 13, 2009
This is a free speech issue -- or is it?
Krauthammer brings up some interesting information about the so-called "Green Czar" and his fall from grace. Notice first of all how the columnist debunks some of the blatant smear tactics that some conservatives have chosen to use. He then goes on to give us his take on what happened here. Does his thinking seem reasonable to you? Why or why not? Maybe you think Jones is reasonable in his assumptions about the Bush Administration? If this is the case, give me some facts that support your reasoning. Try to offer some comparisons to the other stories floating out there. Don't just give me an off the wall opinion - give me some of your very own critically sophisticated opinion. (And yes all of you have the ability to think more critically on these issues - you just have to take a little more time to look at them. Ideas will soon follow.)
The Van Jones Matter
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, September 11, 2009
So Van Jones, the defenestrated White House green-jobs czar, once called Republicans "assholes." Big deal. I've said worse about Democrats. I've said worse about Republicans. I've said worse about members of my family (you know who you are).
How prissy have we become? Are we allowed no salt in our linguistic diets?
Having once written a column praising Vice President Cheney's pithy deployment of the F-word -- on the floor of the Senate, no less -- I rise in defense of Jones. True, Jones's particular choice of epithet had none of the one-syllable concision, the onomatopoeic suggestiveness, the explosive charm of Cheney's. But you don't fire a guy for style.
Another charge was that Jones was a self-proclaimed communist. I can't get too excited about this either. In today's America, to be a communist is a pose, not a conviction. After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.
In any case, every administration is allowed a couple of wing nuts among its 8,000 appointees. As long as they're not in charge of foreign policy or the Fed, who cares?
Other critics are scandalized that Jones once accused "white environmentalists" of "essentially steering poison into the people of colored communities."
In fact, from a global perspective, Jones is right. Environmentalists -- overwhelmingly white and middle/upper class -- have blocked drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From where do you think the world gets the missing oil? From the poor, exploited, poisoned people of the Niger Delta, the Amazon Basin and other infinitely less-regulated and infinitely dirtier regions of the Third World.
Affluent enviros are all for wind farms, until one is proposed that might mar the serenity of a sail from the crew-necked precincts near Nantucket Sound. Then it's clean energy for thee, not for me.
Jones's genius as an ideological entrepreneur was to mine white liberal anxiety -- they are quite aware of their own NIMBY hypocrisy -- by selling them the "green jobs" shtick to reconcile class/racial guilt with environmental enthusiasm, thus making them feel better about themselves.
That's why Jones rose so far. That's why he was such a "progressive" star. That's why, as top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett put it, "we've been watching him" and were so eager to recruit him to the White House.
In the White House no more. Why? He's gone for one reason and one reason only. You can't sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 -- i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil -- and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.
Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It's beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It's dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with "truthers."
You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier -- a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.
But reality doesn't daunt Jones's defenders. One Obama administration source told ABC that Jones hadn't read the 2004 petition carefully enough, an excuse echoed by Howard Dean.
Carefully enough? It demanded the investigation of charges "that people within the current [Bush] administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
Where is the confusing fine print? Where is the syntactical complexity? Where is the perplexing ambiguity? An eighth-grader could tell you exactly what it means. A Yale Law School graduate could not?
No need to worry about Jones, however. Great career move. He's gone from marginal loon to liberal martyr. His speaking fees have just doubled. It's only a matter of time before he gets his own show on MSNBC.
But on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 -- a day when there were no truthers among us, just Americans struck dumb by the savagery of what had been perpetrated on their innocent fellow citizens -- a decent respect for the memory of that day requires that truthers, who derangedly desecrate it, be asked politely to leave. By everyone.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
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The Van Jones Matter
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, September 11, 2009
So Van Jones, the defenestrated White House green-jobs czar, once called Republicans "assholes." Big deal. I've said worse about Democrats. I've said worse about Republicans. I've said worse about members of my family (you know who you are).
How prissy have we become? Are we allowed no salt in our linguistic diets?
Having once written a column praising Vice President Cheney's pithy deployment of the F-word -- on the floor of the Senate, no less -- I rise in defense of Jones. True, Jones's particular choice of epithet had none of the one-syllable concision, the onomatopoeic suggestiveness, the explosive charm of Cheney's. But you don't fire a guy for style.
Another charge was that Jones was a self-proclaimed communist. I can't get too excited about this either. In today's America, to be a communist is a pose, not a conviction. After the Soviet collapse, Marxism is a relic, a pathetic anachronism reduced to its last redoubts: North Korea, Cuba and the English departments of the more expensive American universities.
In any case, every administration is allowed a couple of wing nuts among its 8,000 appointees. As long as they're not in charge of foreign policy or the Fed, who cares?
Other critics are scandalized that Jones once accused "white environmentalists" of "essentially steering poison into the people of colored communities."
In fact, from a global perspective, Jones is right. Environmentalists -- overwhelmingly white and middle/upper class -- have blocked drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From where do you think the world gets the missing oil? From the poor, exploited, poisoned people of the Niger Delta, the Amazon Basin and other infinitely less-regulated and infinitely dirtier regions of the Third World.
Affluent enviros are all for wind farms, until one is proposed that might mar the serenity of a sail from the crew-necked precincts near Nantucket Sound. Then it's clean energy for thee, not for me.
Jones's genius as an ideological entrepreneur was to mine white liberal anxiety -- they are quite aware of their own NIMBY hypocrisy -- by selling them the "green jobs" shtick to reconcile class/racial guilt with environmental enthusiasm, thus making them feel better about themselves.
That's why Jones rose so far. That's why he was such a "progressive" star. That's why, as top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett put it, "we've been watching him" and were so eager to recruit him to the White House.
In the White House no more. Why? He's gone for one reason and one reason only. You can't sign a petition demanding not one but four investigations of the charge that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Sept. 11, 2001 -- i.e., collaborated in the worst massacre ever perpetrated on American soil -- and be permitted in polite society, let alone have a high-level job in the White House.
Unlike the other stuff (see above), this is no trivial matter. It's beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It's dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with "truthers."
You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier -- a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.
But reality doesn't daunt Jones's defenders. One Obama administration source told ABC that Jones hadn't read the 2004 petition carefully enough, an excuse echoed by Howard Dean.
Carefully enough? It demanded the investigation of charges "that people within the current [Bush] administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
Where is the confusing fine print? Where is the syntactical complexity? Where is the perplexing ambiguity? An eighth-grader could tell you exactly what it means. A Yale Law School graduate could not?
No need to worry about Jones, however. Great career move. He's gone from marginal loon to liberal martyr. His speaking fees have just doubled. It's only a matter of time before he gets his own show on MSNBC.
But on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 -- a day when there were no truthers among us, just Americans struck dumb by the savagery of what had been perpetrated on their innocent fellow citizens -- a decent respect for the memory of that day requires that truthers, who derangedly desecrate it, be asked politely to leave. By everyone.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
var comments_url = "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/10/AR2009091003408_Comments.html" ;
var article_id = "AR2009091003408" ;
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Will Family Member Fill Kennedy's Shoes?
Will Family Member Fill Kennedy's Shoes?
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Check out the link above for a short video from ABC news that prefaces this blog post.
With the death of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, there has been a great deal of discussion about his now vacated seat in the U. S. Senate. As the law is now written, there must be a special election to replace him. Until that election his seat will be vacant. This is not normal for states, as normal protocol gives the governor of the affected state the power to immediately appoint a replacement until a new Senator can be elected. In 2004, the 90% Democrat controlled Massachusetts legislature voted in the change that is now law to prevent then Republican governor Mitt Romney (remember him?)from appointing a republican replacement should Senator John Kerry (who was the Dems nominee for president) need to vacate his seat.
Fast forward to the present, and there is a Democratic governor in place, and what was Senator Kennedy's vital vote for Healthcare Reform is now in jeopardy. So to suit their present needs, the Democratic Party, fearing they may need that vote, is asking the Massachusetts legislature (still holding a 90/10 advantage of dems over republicans) to change the law back.
Stepping back from your views, whatever they may be, about the importance of HealthCare Reform in this country - and the consensus - no matter the ideas each side has for fixing the problem, how does this political maneuver feel to you. Is this fair? Does it seem a little too convenient? Or should the minority just learn to grin and bear it until they get enough votes to do what they want?
Shared via AddThis
Check out the link above for a short video from ABC news that prefaces this blog post.
With the death of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, there has been a great deal of discussion about his now vacated seat in the U. S. Senate. As the law is now written, there must be a special election to replace him. Until that election his seat will be vacant. This is not normal for states, as normal protocol gives the governor of the affected state the power to immediately appoint a replacement until a new Senator can be elected. In 2004, the 90% Democrat controlled Massachusetts legislature voted in the change that is now law to prevent then Republican governor Mitt Romney (remember him?)from appointing a republican replacement should Senator John Kerry (who was the Dems nominee for president) need to vacate his seat.
Fast forward to the present, and there is a Democratic governor in place, and what was Senator Kennedy's vital vote for Healthcare Reform is now in jeopardy. So to suit their present needs, the Democratic Party, fearing they may need that vote, is asking the Massachusetts legislature (still holding a 90/10 advantage of dems over republicans) to change the law back.
Stepping back from your views, whatever they may be, about the importance of HealthCare Reform in this country - and the consensus - no matter the ideas each side has for fixing the problem, how does this political maneuver feel to you. Is this fair? Does it seem a little too convenient? Or should the minority just learn to grin and bear it until they get enough votes to do what they want?
Friday, August 14, 2009
Beginning my Constitution Blog
Welcome to my blog about all things constitutional. In this class project we will develop, not as constitutional scholars, but as constitunial scholarly bloggers. Each person will be responsible for his or her content and will monitor and comment on at least three other bloggers' post with each assignment. There will on occasion be a question asked on this blog (your instructor's) in particular that all will be expected to comment on. In general, however, your main responsibilities will lie in blogging about and commenting on each of the constitution's twenty seven amendments. We will discuss these blogs at random in class, so every entry should be viewed as informative to your classmates. Blog posts will be due two hours prior to class discussion of a specified amendment.
The format of this blog will be as follows:
1. First you will copy down the amendment it self in full and as read.
Example - Amendment I
Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
2. Next you talk about what this amendment means to you, then offer two separate entries that relate to your views. You then must find - or perhaps you'd like to start with this - an example online, either in an article, podcast, or video clip to use as an example of the point you want to make. You must have two entries for every amendment and at least one referenced source.
A. Example one - must be copied from a newspaper article, a book, or a
scholarly journal - make sure that your reference is duly cited.
August 4, 2009
Vietnam says booting Buddhist monks not repression
By BEN STOCKING Associated Press Writer
Monks following a world-famous Buddhist teacher are being evicted from a Vietnamese monastery for failing to clear their activities with the government, an official said Tuesday, but he denied the dispute was about religious freedom.
Followers of Thich Nhat Hanh, who has sold more than 1 million books in the West, say the government is punishing them because their France-based leader suggested that his native Vietnam's communist government should abolish its control of religion.
However, Bui Huu Duoc of the government's Committee on Religious Affairs, blamed the dispute on a failure to abide by local regulations and said it is normal for governments to oversee the operations of religious groups operating within their borders.
"Managing religious groups doesn't mean controlling them," Duoc, who oversees Buddhist affairs for the committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We're here to facilitate their efforts to do good things for the country."
However, Duoc did allow that officials were "very surprised" at postings on the main Web site for Hanh's main monastery in southern France calling for the government to disband religious police.
Vietnam formally recognizes less than a dozen religions, and they are all required to register with the state.
Hanh's followers have been asked to leave the Bat Nha monastery in the Central Highlands by early September.
Tensions at Bat Nha boiled over in late June, when a mob descended on the site with sledgehammers, damaged buildings and threatened the Plum Village monks and nuns. Authorities also cut off electricity at the site.
The dispute represents a remarkable turnaround from four years ago, when France-based Hanh returned to his native land after 39 years of exile. He had been forced out of what was then U.S.-backed South Vietnam in 1966 for criticizing the Vietnam War. His return in 2005 made the front pages of state-owned newspapers.
Hanh's brand of Buddhism is very popular in the West. Followers from around the world travel to his Plum Village monastery in southern France to study with him. He is perhaps the best known Buddhist after the Dalai Lama.
When Hanh's followers first came in 2005, Duoc said, Vietnamese authorities approved their activities. But since July 2008, he said, they have offered 11 courses at the Bat Nha monastery without permission.
Hanh's followers say they have kept the official Vietnam Buddhist Church fully informed.
They were invited to practice at Bat Nha by Abbot Duc Nghi during Hanh's 2005 visit and say they have since spent nearly $1 million expanding the property and adding new buildings.
Nghi could not be reached for comment, but Duoc says the abbot now wants the nearly 400 Hanh followers at the monastery to leave.
Hanh's followers believe Nghi is simply responding to pressure from above.
Duoc also said Tuesday that Vietnamese officials were "very surprised" by postings that appeared on the Plum Village Web site in February 2008. These included suggestions that Hanh made to President Nguyen Minh Triet during a 2007 visit to Hanoi, he said.
Among them was a proposal to abolish the Committee on Religious Affairs, disband Vietnam's religious police, and make modifications to the formal names of both the communist party and the state, known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
"When we first saw that information posted on the Plum Village Web site, we thought it must have been a mistake," Duoc said.
Second Example:
The format of this blog will be as follows:
1. First you will copy down the amendment it self in full and as read.
Example - Amendment I
Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
2. Next you talk about what this amendment means to you, then offer two separate entries that relate to your views. You then must find - or perhaps you'd like to start with this - an example online, either in an article, podcast, or video clip to use as an example of the point you want to make. You must have two entries for every amendment and at least one referenced source.
A. Example one - must be copied from a newspaper article, a book, or a
scholarly journal - make sure that your reference is duly cited.
August 4, 2009
Vietnam says booting Buddhist monks not repression
By BEN STOCKING Associated Press Writer
Monks following a world-famous Buddhist teacher are being evicted from a Vietnamese monastery for failing to clear their activities with the government, an official said Tuesday, but he denied the dispute was about religious freedom.
Followers of Thich Nhat Hanh, who has sold more than 1 million books in the West, say the government is punishing them because their France-based leader suggested that his native Vietnam's communist government should abolish its control of religion.
However, Bui Huu Duoc of the government's Committee on Religious Affairs, blamed the dispute on a failure to abide by local regulations and said it is normal for governments to oversee the operations of religious groups operating within their borders.
"Managing religious groups doesn't mean controlling them," Duoc, who oversees Buddhist affairs for the committee, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We're here to facilitate their efforts to do good things for the country."
However, Duoc did allow that officials were "very surprised" at postings on the main Web site for Hanh's main monastery in southern France calling for the government to disband religious police.
Vietnam formally recognizes less than a dozen religions, and they are all required to register with the state.
Hanh's followers have been asked to leave the Bat Nha monastery in the Central Highlands by early September.
Tensions at Bat Nha boiled over in late June, when a mob descended on the site with sledgehammers, damaged buildings and threatened the Plum Village monks and nuns. Authorities also cut off electricity at the site.
The dispute represents a remarkable turnaround from four years ago, when France-based Hanh returned to his native land after 39 years of exile. He had been forced out of what was then U.S.-backed South Vietnam in 1966 for criticizing the Vietnam War. His return in 2005 made the front pages of state-owned newspapers.
Hanh's brand of Buddhism is very popular in the West. Followers from around the world travel to his Plum Village monastery in southern France to study with him. He is perhaps the best known Buddhist after the Dalai Lama.
When Hanh's followers first came in 2005, Duoc said, Vietnamese authorities approved their activities. But since July 2008, he said, they have offered 11 courses at the Bat Nha monastery without permission.
Hanh's followers say they have kept the official Vietnam Buddhist Church fully informed.
They were invited to practice at Bat Nha by Abbot Duc Nghi during Hanh's 2005 visit and say they have since spent nearly $1 million expanding the property and adding new buildings.
Nghi could not be reached for comment, but Duoc says the abbot now wants the nearly 400 Hanh followers at the monastery to leave.
Hanh's followers believe Nghi is simply responding to pressure from above.
Duoc also said Tuesday that Vietnamese officials were "very surprised" by postings that appeared on the Plum Village Web site in February 2008. These included suggestions that Hanh made to President Nguyen Minh Triet during a 2007 visit to Hanoi, he said.
Among them was a proposal to abolish the Committee on Religious Affairs, disband Vietnam's religious police, and make modifications to the formal names of both the communist party and the state, known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
"When we first saw that information posted on the Plum Village Web site, we thought it must have been a mistake," Duoc said.
Second Example:
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