Election Results

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New Yorkers gave liberalism a resounding yes and elected Bill de Blasio mayor of New York. Or, as I have come to think of the office after many hours of riding the subways and reading the announcements out of boredom, el Alcalde de la Ciudad de Nueva York. It sounds better in Spanish.

New York activist lefties to begin complaining about de Blasio selling them out in 5 … 4… 3… 2…

Chris Christie won another term in New Jersey. According to a local television news story I saw yesterday, the state Democratic Party didn’t bother to crank up its GOTV machine for the Dem candidate, Barbara Buono. Buono has accused the NJ Dem establishment of “making a deal” with Christie. From what I know of the NJ Democrats, that is very plausible.

Terry McAuliffe won in Virginia by a slightly smaller margin than had been predicted. This result is being spun into a public referendum vote against Obamacare.

It’s Not Like People Could Keep Their Doctors Before Obamacare, People

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Pundits and baggers alike are grieving over news stories about people losing their dearly beloved health insurance policies, which they had cherished through the years, and how some people may have to switch doctors even through they’d been paying out of pocket anyway, etc.

And they’re all acting as if this sort of thing just never happened before, but in fact it happened a lot.

Never mind the thousands of people who used to fall victim to “rescission” every year. That was the practice of dumping policy holders when their bills got too big — the following was written in 2009 —

In a nutshell — yesterday three big insurance company executives — WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. — told the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that their business models depended on being able to cancel the health insurance policies of customers who cost them too much money. An investigation by the Committee had found that over a five-year period, these companies had canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people in order to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims.

And never mind the one-in-seven Americans who were denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. Not being able to get insurance in the first place probably doesn’t count.

And of course if you changed jobs, by choice or not, that nearly always means getting a new insurance provider. I think people kind of accepted that and didn’t complain about it.

No, let’s talk about people who got insurance through their employers before Obamacare. Especially if you worked for a small- to medium-size company with one insurance provider, there was always a possibility that your employer would change to a different provider that offered a better deal. And that new insurer might not have your health care providers in its network. I’ve personally seen this happen a few times, so it cannot have been that unusual.

In the 1990s, when HMOs were the new new thing, I actually was not able to develop a relationship with a regular health care provider. My insurance got jerked around so much that every time I needed a doctor I had to start over with a new one. Fortunately my health care issues were relatively minor.

Others were not so fortunate. I remember about 1995 I was working for a small company with maybe 40 employees, and the employer changed to a new insurance company. One long-time employee, a woman, had a husband in cancer treatment. He was covered by her insurance. You guessed it — his doctors were not in the new network. I remember her breaking down in tears when she realized this. Her husband was forced to switch doctors. I repeat, this was in the mid-1990s. I don’t believe their story was in the Wall Street Journal.

After I moved in New York early in 2000 I found a primary care physician I like very much who is in everybody’s network. So even though I’ve been covered by five different policies these past 14 or so years, I haven’t had to switch doctors. And big corporations tend to offer menus of insurance plans by more than one company, and unless your regular doctor is a complete loser he’s probably in somebody’s plan, somewhere.

But the bottom line is that under the old system, millions of Americans must have been forced to switch doctors at one time or another, and nobody boo-hooed about it. All of a sudden, now it’s the most awful thing that could ever happen to anybody.

Give me a break.

Of course, part of what’s happening now — beside the tootsie in the Wall Street Journal who lied her ass off about her old policy — is that insurance companies are making a last-chance dump of less-than-profitable policy holders. And most of it is bringing policies up to code — see, for example, Obamacare “victim” now says loss of previous health plan may be “a blessing in disguise”

I’m just calling bullshit on all the bobbleheads who are suddenly weepy about people losing their doctors. How come it never bothered you before?

The PR War Over the ACA

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By now you may have seen this chart showing that about 3 percent of Americans are expected to have to pay a higher premium for insurance next year because of the ACA. This was not unexpected. But I fear the rightie noise machine has pumped it up to a BIG BLEEPING DEAL. See, for example, this Wall Street Journal op ed by a cancer patient whose policy was canceled, and none of her new options will let her see all of her doctors.

That’s very sad. However, it turns out, the cancellation wasn’t because of the ACA.

(Update: Looks like that’s not the only thing the subject of the article left out.)

Sundby shouldn’t blame reform — United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual health care market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby.

The company, which only had 8,000 individual policy holders in California out of the two million who participate in the market, announced (along with a second insurer, Aetna) that it would be pulling out of the individual market in May. The company could not compete with Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, who control more than 80 percent of the individual market.

Not that Wall Street Journal readers are likely to find that out.

The Washington Post dutifully reports on the “growing backlash”

Americans who face higher ­insurance costs under President Obama’s health-care law are angrily complaining about “sticker shock,” threatening to become a new political force opposing the law even as the White House struggles to convince other consumers that they will benefit from it.

The growing backlash involves people whose plans are being discontinued because the policies don’t meet the law’s more-stringent standards. They’re finding that many alternative policies come with higher premiums and deductibles.

There aren’t enough of them by themselves to become a “new political force,” of course. What the Washingon Post doesn’t bother to mention, but the New York Times did, is that nobody’s policy was cancelled, strictly speaking, because of the ACA. instead, they were upgraded. A lot of those old “cancelled” policies were junk. (See also.)

Making the “sticker shock” worse, however, is that insurers are hiding benefits from customers and trying to gouge them as well.

Across the country, insurance companies have sent misleading letters to consumers, trying to lock them into the companies’ own, sometimes more expensive health insurance plans rather than let them shop for insurance and tax credits on the Obamacare marketplaces — which could lead to people like Donna spending thousands more for insurance than the law intended. In some cases, mentions of the marketplace in those letters are relegated to a mere footnote, which can be easily overlooked.

The extreme lengths to which some insurance companies are going to hold on to existing customers at higher price, as the Affordable Care Act fundamentally re-orders the individual insurance market, has caught the attention of state insurance regulators.

Making this worse is the fact that a lot of people facing higher premiums can’t get on the website yet to find out what better deals might be out there. So we’re in for a bumpy ride for awhile, I’m afraid.

Update and off topic — Smirking Chimp is holding a fundraiser to help it stay online.

The LAX Shooting

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We are getting way too blasé about mass shootings. Yesterday’s shooting at the Los Angeles airport is already dropping out of the headlines. (Oh, yeah, another loser white guy shoots people. Yawn.)

I noticed that the most recent blog posts were mostly from righties. And mostly they were crowing that California’s gun control laws sure worked real well, huh?

But if you want to see what happens when the dregs of humanity get internet access, see the comments to this Reason post. (HT Charles Pierce)

Did We Fail?

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There’s a long conversation amongst leftie bloggers today over the failure of the progressive blog movement. My initial reaction was

1. There’s a progressive blog movement? (Well, yes, there was; see commentary below)
2. If we failed, precisely what did we fail at?

Much of this conversation was initiated by Ian Welsh, and let me say that Ian is a smart guy who, over the years, has been right about a few things that I misjudged. So I don’t want to be unnecessarily snarky here. If this topic interests you, here is the conversation thus far, by author, in sorta kinda chronological order:

Ian Welsh
Jerome Armstrong
John Cole (responding to Jerome Armstrong)
Booman (also responding to Jerome Armstrong)
Scott Lemieux (Responding to Ian Welsh and Jerome Armstrong)
Pachacutec
Athenae

With the caveat that I’m under big-time deadline pressure right now and don’t have time for the long and thoughtful post I’d like to write — A lot of good points are made by all authors, with the exception of Jerome Armstrong, who seems to think progressives should be joining forces with libertarians and Ron/Randbots. Um, no.

There was a time during the Bush Administration that progressive bloggers did seem to be a kind of movement, that we called Netroots, but this era of relative solidarity did not survive the 2008 primaries. Unlike others, I do not blame Barack Obama for that. It’s true that he did not cultivate the A-list bloggers as much as other candidates, such as Hillary Clinton, did, but he did speak at the Daily Kos convention in Chicago in 2007, so he didn’t ignore us entirely. I remember at the time there was a lot of buzz that the DK convention goers didn’t support him, but his break-out session was the first one to fill up. Lots of bullshit already was in the air, in other words.

What really killed the movement for me was the dismissive attitude of the kewl kids who were determined to make Hillary Clinton the nominee. Anyone who questioned their elite judgment was attacked as an “Obamabot.” I realize a lot of the Clinton supporters caught grief from the more rabid Obama supporters, but my impression was that the worst of the anti-Clinton snark was not coming from other bloggers. I found it impossible to have anything like a rational conversation with anyone, and even some actual fleshworld friendships did not survive the rancor. By the time the dust settled I considered myself out of the Netroots. I dropped out of the listservs and stopped cross-posting on other blogs. I also didn’t have the money after that to travel to conventions, anyway.

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what ended the “movement.” But anyone who thinks Hillary Clinton represented True Progressivism and would have listened to us after she became President was deluded, IMO.

Now, is it true that we accomplished nothing? We did not become kingmakers, that’s for sure. But some of the candidates supported by large chunks of the blogosophere — Howard Dean and John Warner come to mind — were in most ways even less progressive than Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So if the point was to elect more progressive candidates, even if we had succeeded, we would have failed.

I do think we helped make it possible to get a few progressive voices on national media. The biggest reason I started blogging in 2002 was that progressives were entirely absent from television and radio and mostly absent in print media as well. I was either going to yell at the television or blog, and I decided to blog. Now we have some presence in media, such as Rachel Maddow and Melissa Harris-Perry, and I think in an indirect way the strength of the progressive blogs helped made that possible. If nothing else it demonstrated that there were lots of people out there who were hungry more a more progressive perspective. Of course, news media still mostly suck.

There were many conversations back in the day of how the Netroots should relate to the Democratic Party. There was a general consensus that we must not be captured by the Democrats, but instead support more progressive candidates and work to push the Dems in a more progressive direction. In many ways the party has moved left at least a tad. There is much more robust support among Dems for reproductive rights, marriage rights, and economic populism than there was a decade ago. And I think progressive bloggers played a part in bringing those issues into our national political discourse.

However, I don’t blame Dems for wanting to keep us at arm’s length. More than anything else I think stunts like Jane Hamsher’s very visible and very hysterical anti-ACA campaign in 2009 and 2010 demonstrated that we couldn’t be counted on to support realistic and incremental progressive reform. Instead, too many of the A-listers harbored a completely fantastical notion that if we attacked the Democrats enough they would be scared into becoming more progressive.

In short, that was insane. And I still find it unfathomable how anyone bright enough to tie his own shoes could think that if the ACA had failed to pass, Congress would have opened its arms to single payer. Not on this planet.

So here we are, talking to ourselves, not influencing much of anything. I keep this blog going because I find it therapeutic, and I think some of you do, too, but I’m not kidding myself that I’m part of a movement any more.

Well, I’ve already gone on longer than I intended. Of the comments linked above, I second Athenae most of all. So for all the stuff I’m thinking and leaving out, read her.

Easy to Be Hard

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Apparently if you want to be one of the kewl kids in news media you must badmouth the Obamacare rollout and declare every stumble as proof of Doom. See Dear Journalists: Your privilege is clouding your perspective on Obamacare website glitches.

If I see one more journalist symbolically log on to the Obamacare website, I’m going to scream. If you’re making faux calls into the call center, only to complain about the lack of hold music, as if that is what’s critically important here, you’re severely missing the point.

And even when you defend your negative reporting about the Obamacare website glitches, as The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein did last night on MSNBC, having the privilege of analyzing the process from the perspective of someone who is already insured and not in need of coverage allows the core impact of the new program on the health and security of millions of Americans to be missed….

… And unless you are a journalist who has been chronically uninsured, your feigned frustration about website issues reeks of privilege. To me, a few website glitches are a lot less frustrating than having to use the same inhaler for over a year because I can’t afford to go the doctor. Perspective is everything.

See also John Cole, who wrote of the author of the post above,

That’s Zerlina Maxwell, one of the nicest people I have ever met, who has spent the last week being insulted by people for refusing to fall over into the vapors over the new website and actually explaining how important this new legislation was for her.

This reminds me a bit of those heady days back in 2009, when a certain prominent, upper-income and well-insured progressive blogger and breast cancer survivor was leading the drumbeat to kill the bill. I’m still disgusted.

See also How I became the poster girl for liberal agitprop, Florida Blue CEO Refuses to Play Along with David Gregory’s Concern Trolling and Depends on Where You’re Standing.

Live by the Grift; Die by the Grift

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Richard Viguerie has declared civil war on the Republican establishment and has vowed to root out traitors to the conservative cause, such as Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Reince Priebus. Yes, we weep and we mourn, not so much. But Rod Dreher at The American Conservative is really upset about it.

RINO hunt! This is astonishing, and can only be driven by an ideological mindset so impervious to reality that it would rather destroy political conservatism’s chances of actually running the country than succumb to the least impurity in the ranks. The movement types really do believe that the GOP lost because it was stabbed in the back by its own people at Versailles on Capitol Hill. The GOP tribalism is devolving into a Lord’s Resistance Army conservatism, after the fanatical Ugandan cultists who believe that shea butter and their confidence in God makes them impervious to bullets.

The thing about this dynamic is that the purer the activists make the GOP, the weaker the party becomes, and thus the less likely to achieve policy goals. Which just drives the forces of purgation harder. Ted Cruz rules the Jacobin Republicans now, but he should remember what happened to Robespierre.

I do appreciate the reference to Jacobins. But I doubt very much that Richard Viguerie gives a rodent’s posterior for achieving policy goals. Viguerie is a direct mail tycoon who makes a living by stoking the fears and phobias of the rubes to market ideological snake oil. If Movement Conservatism were ever seen as successful, and the marks got complacent, checks might stop coming in.

Indeed, there is a whole class of grifters on the Right whose incomes depend on keeping the crazy well fed. I’m thinking of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Fox News et al. No doubt Michele Bachmann will become a full-time gifter as soon as she’s out of the House. But there are tons of second- and third-tier gifters, all cashing in nicely.

And why not? If bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is, grifters infest the Right because that’s where the gullibility is. People who can be made to believe in death panels can also be sold on dubious investment schemes, survivalist kits and quack arthritis cures. It’s too easy. See especially Rick Perlstein, “The Long Con.”

There are also subcategories of specialized grifters such as the NRA/firearm industry and climate change denialists/petroleum industry. But it’s all of a piece, really.

I wrote recently that the only substantive difference between the “extremists” and the “moderates/establishment” in the Republican Party is that “the ‘moderates’ realize elections have to be won, and the ‘extremists’ don’t know that, or don’t care.” When you look at someone like Ted Cruz, who unlike many others may not be crazy or stupid, one suspects his long game isn’t winning the White House. The long game is making a ton of money. In this country, once you become a reliable supplier of red meat for the Right, you are set for life. Whether you ever actually accomplish anything that’s good for anyone is irrelevant.

The Republican Party set itself up for this, of course, by being willing to sell out anything that might be an actual principle in order to win elections on the cheap (and dirty). I’m sure most of you are aware of the arc of demagoguery that ran from Spiro Agnew to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove. But Frankenstein’s Monster took over the laboratory, and now Karl Rove (who is still making a lot of money, apparently, in spite of his colossal failure in 2012) can’t understand why no one is listening to him.

Heh.