01.09.14
Finally, Obamacare
After years of having no health insurance, no health care of any kind, this week I was informed I would qualify for the Medicaid expansion, funded under Obamacare, in California. And I received my benefit identification card in the mail. Prior to the years of zero health insurance I had a junk insurance policy, sold by one of the big providers nationally and in the state. It paid only for some part of a catastrophic illness that would probably kill you within a year. It was the perfect example of a large predatory fee to the insurance industry for years, in return for absolutely nothing, a tremendous business model in American capitalism.
From Taibbi blog, no link, on the standard Republican/libertarian cant on Obamacare:
[You’d] have to be a complete sociopath to assert that expanding access to health care to millions of people doesn’t improve their health – and that the only tangible benefit of health care reform, in fact, will be taking money out of the pockets of hardworking taxpayers like yourself, and redistributing it to the incorrigibly unhealthy.
Apparently low-income Americans will have no problem taking money from the affluent – the law will improve their “financial stability” …
Indeed, they are sociopaths.
The Republican Party, WhiteManistan, most of the citizens in the distant land where I spent over half my life, have devoted the last eight years to pushing a philosophy that makes it absolutely clear they want people like me to get sick and die.
They made it personal. And now they can boil in their own oil. I don’t live in WhiteManistan anymore. And the Republican Party in California is dead.
This is a tribe that because of two things, its towering hatred of the president and overriding desire to always malevolently strike at the less fortunate, has denied the service I will have to millions of their own.
It’s the Republican legacy and it’s unforgivable. They are demonstrably the worst.
Now you know why I did this. You write what you know, first hand.
UPDATED
At this point, the rise of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is so obvious that it’s no longer possible to shut down any discussion of rising inequality with cries of “class warfare.??? Meanwhile, hard times have forced many more Americans to turn to safety-net programs. And as conservatives have responded by defining an ever-growing fraction of the population as morally unworthy “takers??? — a quarter, a third, 47 percent, whatever — they have made themselves look callous and meanspirited …
Meanwhile, progressives are on offense. They have decided that inequality is a winning political issue. They see war-on-poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned-income tax credit as success stories, initiatives that have helped Americans in need — especially during the slump since 2007 — and should be expanded. And if these programs enroll a growing number of Americans, rather than being narrowly targeted on the poor, so what?
Still more Krugman, on the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare:
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned much, however, is that another aspect of recent developments — the rapid rise in Medicaid enrollment, despite Republican efforts to block it …
Medicaid gets a bad rap. It’s a poor people’s program, and it’s widely assumed that this means poor care. In fact, there’s not much evidence that this is true, and claims that Medicaid patients can’t find care are greatly exaggerated. Beyond that, however, Medicaid is the piece of the US health care system (aside from the VA) that does the best job of controlling costs …
One way to think about this is that Medicaid is actually the piece of the US system that looks most like European health systems, which cost far less than ours while delivering comparable results.
Now, expanded Medicaid is a key part of Obamacare — and so far, despite GOP obstruction, Medicaid enrollments have outpaced insurance through the exchanges.
This comment from the blog post at the Times is worth a read.
Tom Paterson said,
January 10, 2014 at 12:39 am
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
*The direct cost of the EITC to the U.S. federal government was about $56 billion in 2012.
The IRS has estimated that between 21% and 25% of this cost ($11.6 to $13.6 billion) is due to EITC payments that were issued improperly, to recipients who did not qualify for the EITC benefit that they received.
The direct fiscal cost of the EITC may be partially offset by two factors: any new taxes (such as payroll taxes paid by employers) generated by new workers drawn by the EITC into the labor force; and taxes generated on additional spending done by families receiving earned income tax credit.*
Modified from Jay Gould:
*I can rob one half of the working class to pay the other half. *
In the UK, working tax credits have simply enabled employers to go on paying those good old-fashioned Dickensian poverty wages. And, yes, there has been organised criminal fraud on a massive scale.
Just increase wages and tax the hell out of corporate profits … it used to work, but now it seems to be the unsayable.
George Smith said,
January 10, 2014 at 10:18 am
“The IRS has estimated that between 21% and 25% of this cost ($11.6 to $13.6 billion) is due to EITC payments that were issued improperly, to recipients who did not qualify for the EITC benefit that they received.”
I don’t know how they could reliably determine this. The IRS notifies people it thinks have the Earned Income Tax component but haven’t filed for it. They also volunteer to calculate it themselves and send the benefit. I know because I received such notifications. So part of the mission was to actively see that people who qualified received the benefit.
Yes, there is a similar Dickensian dynamic in the US with regards to poverty wages and social benefits. McDonalds, Walmart, and like firms in retail and food service rely on the food stamp benefit to their employees and keep wages depressed. That dynamic is nationwide and massive and these are among the companies fighting hardest to resist any increases to the minimum wage.
There is push back to increase wages now. But it’s just nascent, taken up by in the papers and opinion pieces by the six and seven figure explainers who count for nothing. Politically, the GOP has the US government paralyzed and has been monolithically opposed to paying workers more. They even have some lunatics who can reliably counted upon to lobby for total elimination of the minimum wage.
Whether the push back amounts to anything in the next few years remains to be seen. At the municipal and state level, government has taken action to increase the minimum wage accompanied by the usual threats and blackmail from big American companies. In California, the governor has instituted a minimum wage increase, not a big one, but it’s still something.
Bill said,
January 12, 2014 at 8:15 am
And 13.6 billion is how many days of quantitative easing – which only ensures the “health” of zombie banks.
And don’t forget the QE bill is just deferred taxation, someone somewhere somehow is ultimately going to have to pay for this.
Tom Paterson said,
January 12, 2014 at 9:21 am
On Taxation
There was a time in the UK when the top rate of tax was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound … which is to say 97.5 %. When asked how he felt about this Lord Astor replied that you’d be surprised at how quickly all those sixpences mount up.
{If you subtracted 19/6 (234 pennies) from a pound (240 pennies) you were left with sixpence.}
George Harrison was less sanguine about it, but it was progressive taxation that funded the Welfare State and 10 of the first 15 years of his life. One of the first things the new 2010 (minority/unelected) Conservative government did was to fire a great tranche of civil servants, notably those with responsibility for tax-collecting. They also took a chainsaw to the police force (which seemed bizarre given that social unrest was almost guaranteed to follow cuts in jobs, wages and welfare). It was like Bill Pullman in Independence day asking the alien *what do you want us to do?* and the alien, manipulating Brett Spiner’s vocal chords, hissing out the word *die*.
The new droogs:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2013/dec/13/comment-cartoon-martin-rowson-droogs
(left to right) The Employment Minister, the Finance Minister, the Health Minister, [the Education Minister, distant], the Prime Minister
Tax Credit Fraud.
I owned a small shop once. It went bust. (One reason was the taxes that had to be paid! But that was not tax on profit but rather the so-called Business Rates, an essentially regressive/flat property tax that amounts to little more than protection money, a licence to trade.) The shop then stood empty and people began to use it as a fake mailing address for various scams. I’d go down to collect the mail and there would be great wads of letters from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs or the Department for Work & Pensions addressed to non-existent claimants of this, that and the other benefit and tax credit (with money paid electronically into identity-theft bank accounts I guessed).
Tom Paterson said,
January 12, 2014 at 5:00 pm
Um, re-reading the above I can see that I’ve made a pretty long jump from a few dozen letters (returned unopened) to a broad assertion of fraud.
George Smith said,
January 13, 2014 at 9:18 am
The take in the US was that some British musicians set up house here in the 70s to escape the top British tax rate. I’m not sure that’s all true. In “You Never Give Me Your Money,” a latter history of the Beatles, there was some devoted to complaining about taxes and how to get more revenue but nobody really left. Keith Richards wound up living in France for a while, notably during the making of “Exile.” Does he still live there?
In 1944 the top marginal tax rate in the US was 94 percent. In 1980 it was still 70 percent, then it fell off a cliff coinciding with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
What it really comes down to in this country is vengeance by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. And that’s the heart of the Republican Party which is on track to refuse federally paid health insurance for at least 5 million of its own constituents. This may change because it is not popular, particularly as said constituents see more of their fellow citizens getting it, right across the border in blue states.
This tale isn’t complete without emphasizing how deeply that philosophy is ingrained into American world belief. For decades the country has just been marinated in an ideology of malice, packages as trickle-down economics and the concurrent belief that one is only poor or in unfortunate circumstance because one is inferior. And this was used to spackle over everything in the “40 year slump.”
You only now see cracks beginning to appear in it because it’s more and more impossible for people to deny what has happened to them.
Tom Paterson said,
January 13, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Worth a read if you have time. You may not know the names of the TV shows but you’ll get the general drift.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/jan/12/george-osborne-welfare-cuts-distortions-benefits-street
Was Harvey Lacey, the plumbing contractor husband of Mary Beth, the last fully rounded working-man character on US TV?
George Smith said,
January 13, 2014 at 4:59 pm
It’s a carbon copy of the US environment, unsurprisingly. What’s the quaint word Brits have for the undesirable young working class poor?
Chavs.
Topping up poverty pay through tax credits was a short-term fix rather than a long-term solution, while getting the poor to eat “five a day” [fruit and vegetables] or adhere to alcohol guidelines, is Osborne’s supply-side approach in a different guise.
Here again, the pathological obsession with excessive drinking and lousy diet being problems to be corrected to raise people from poverty. Mostly because you don’t have to do anything but tut-tut and like some places near me, get everyone to believe that cheap booze ought not be allowed in supermarkets and stores in poor locations. (Another decades old chestnut.)
As to tax credits. Well, there’s nothing wrong with them. But the working poor qualify for them, I qualified for the EITC when I had work (and one of those years I worked for the government (!) ) and they are welcome but don’t change the basic state. They simply aren’t enough money which leads to a logical discussion, if you want to fix it, to a universal living wage.
Tom Paterson said,
January 13, 2014 at 6:24 pm
Fictional characters takes umbrage.
Harvey tells me he was a high steelworker who probably developed BPPV (my guess) after an ear infection. He became a construction contractor. It was Chris Cagney who had a plumber.
Chav? I have never heard anyone use the word in real life (other than sardonically). But then I’m a recluse. I take it to mean someone with no education or taste but with enough money to flaunt the deficiency. I just look at the poor people and think *me*.
There’s a constant drip-drip media psyops thing going on, isn’t there?
Terry Southern’s *Red Dirt Marijuana*. The first time you see a newspaper or turn on the TV when you’re stoned and see what Zappa called *The Slime*.
Tom Paterson said,
January 13, 2014 at 7:02 pm
An Englishwoman’s attitude
I was listening to the wireless one afternoon … Woman’s Hour, a worthy BBC programme for housewives. They interviewed some upper-crust old dame who’d spent her life working with the poor and destitute in India. She was asked why she chose to work in India; why didn’t she work here in England?
This’ll killya.
She said that she’d driven through the East End of London once in a taxicab and had been disgusted by the poor people she saw through the window: stunted, dirty, ugly, surly and sour-faced, shabbily dressed. No, she said, she could not have tolerated working with them. She preferred to
work with the happy Indian street-dwellers, always smiling, polite and grateful, dressed in clean white clothes.