TPM Reader GC tells us her story from California …
I am a RN. When I worked in health care for big hospitals or surgery centers I received pretty decent health coverage from my employers that covered me and I paid to cover my husband and two kids. When both my husband and I became self employed we ended up having to buy four separate plans on the individual market for the four of us, mostly because of some preexisting conditions. Every year on our birthdays our premiums have gone up.
In case you didn’t see this when I posted it last night (only late night google research and a well placed ad could have brought me to it), take a look at this low low price program to teach your family how to survive the imminent breakdown of law and order and electricity and everything in America.
New poll finds that 22% of Americans are libertarian or “lean” libertarian. The poll also found that “libertarians tend to be non-Hispanic white, young and male.”
From TPM Reader GF …
In a recent letter from a reader he noted:
“My premium, for a plan fairly equivalent to “gold” level on the exchanges is increasing by $1.59 per month…”
I’ve been self-employed since about mid-1997 and live in Seattle. Washington State has had very powerful insurance commissioners, so much so that a bunch of carriers left the state briefly in the late 1990s until the state and they could rejigger some of the actuarial stuff. As a result, when I compare my premiums and benefits to people in other states, I’m generally pretty happy. I suspect Washington’s overall average healthcare costs remain lower than elsewhere, too. Seattle’s big “chain” is a non-profit that has highly compensated executives but it is, nonetheless, pretty great.
“I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”
That’s not from Bernie Sanders of Jesse Jackson. It’s from confirmed supply-sider and Republican Gov. John Kasich (OH), after tangling with a recalcitrant state legislature dead set against his effort to accept Medicaid expansion in his state.
Enzi stands by story that he and Dick Cheney are “fishing buddies”, notwithstanding Cheney’s denials.
Nothing gets a group of feminists more riled up than arguing over how to have a “feminist wedding,” but it’s it’s the thing after the wedding — an equal marriage — that we should be really worried about.
The push, including by many Democratic senators, to extend the Obamacare open enrollment period past the currently scheduled end date of March 31 seems to make intuitive sense: If people haven’t been able to enroll on the front end because of the problems with HealthCare.gov, then give them more time to enroll on the back end.
But it’s a lot more complicated than that, primarily for financial and actuarial reasons, and the insurance industry is launching a lobbying effort to prevent it from happening. Dylan Scott reports.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone bend over quite so far backwards to mislead people about what’s contained in a story. But it is Lisa Myers. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised? We were just discussing this amongst our ed staff: it’s true that the White House did oversell how little change there would be in the individual insurance market. But saying that millions of people are getting ‘cancellation notices’ or ‘losing their coverage’ is deeply misleading.
Here’s a fascinating conglomeration of hucksterism, right-wing paranoia, secular eschatology all from one pasty dude selling something called the “Patriot Survival Plan.” It’s like the ur-document that brings together so much of today’s neo-gold-buggism, Prepperism, paranoia about Obama’s impending martial law, gun hoarding, the coming descent into urban warfare, food shortages and crazed mobs of dark people. How you can survive and thrive after total societal collapse. It’s all in a video, which is epically crazy and yet hard to stop watching. Just watch and let me know what you think. Seriously, you’ve got to see this.