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02.22 Report: Climate Denier to Lead White House Climate Panel [“Stupid is as stupid does.” –Forrest Gump] 02.22 The Uninhabitable Earth [Lots more important than all other problems put together] 02.22 Europe faces 'biodiversity oblivion' after collapse in French birds, experts warn 02.22 World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity 02.22 Venezuela crisis threatens disease epidemic across continent - experts 02.21 'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports 02.20 Young climate strikers can win their fight. We must all help 02.20 Voyage to the Garbage Patch: the female sailors taking on plastic 02.19 Bees brought Bavarians together. And they have a lesson for us all 02.19 Florida is drowning. Condos are still being built. Can't humans see the writing on the wall? [Fear that Trump & Fox News incite makes us avoid unpleasant information we need to know] 02.18 Tesla big battery is holding its own in a burgeoning energy storage market 02.18 Trump administration condemned over delaying action on toxic drinking water 02.16 New experimental drug rapidly repairs age-related memory loss and improves mood 02.16 Toxic black snow covers Siberian coalmining region [0:49 video; If its killing us, stop doing it] 02.16 Renewable energy will be world's main power source by 2040, says BP [But in America's capitalistic bubble, bribed-to-be-biased media and government defy reality] 02.16 My generation trashed the planet. So I salute the children striking back 02.16 US coastal businesses hit by everyday impact of climate change, study shows 02.16 What the pesticides in our urine tell us about organic food [What does inaction tell us about capitalism and our government?] 02.14 Exposure to Glyphosate-Based Herbicides and Risk for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma: A Meta-Analysis and Supporting Evidence [If its killing us, make it illegal] 02.14 To avoid environmental catastrophe, everything must change [Consider why this headline is laughable or confusing to many, if not most, Americans...]02.13 Study Shows Toxic Pesticide Levels in Families Dropped by 60% After One-Week Organic Diet [2:10 video; Produce and canned vegetables laced with toxic chemicals—from fertilizers and herbicides, too—must be quickly phased out to use safe organic alternatives] 02.12 Biggest offshore windfarm to start UK supply this week 02.12 Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognition 02.12 Politicians are complicit in the killing of our insects – we will be next News Media Matters
Daily: FAIR Blog US Politics, Policy & 'Culture'
02.22 So How's Your Tax Refund? Thanks to GOP Tax Scam, Big Banks Made Extra $28 Billion Last Year 02.21 Why Bernie Sanders Matters More Than People Think 02.21 Bezos Says Amazon Drones Ready to Deliver Mueller Report to Every American Household 02.21 Devin Nunes Was Trump’s Mole Inside the Gang of Eight 02.21 Alec Baldwin fears for family's safety after Trump 'retribution' threats [0:40 video] 02.20 ‘Sustained and ongoing’ disinformation assault targets Dem presidential candidates [If you can sense them, block them!] 02.20 The 2020 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet 02.20 Why Bernie Sanders' radicalism can take out Trump 02.20 Why vote for Sanders when you can have Elizabeth Warren instead? Justice Matters
02.19 California Leads 16 States Suing to Block Trump Border Plan 02.19 Fighting pollution: Toledo residents want personhood status for Lake Erie [Hurrah!] High Crimes?
02.20 Despite the slaughter in Yemen, Britain is still chasing arms sales [and the Great-Again-America is too...Capitalism without morality is horrible] 02.16 Elliott Abrams Defends War Crimes As Happening Back In The ’80s When Everyone Was Doing It Economics & Corrupting-Capitalism
02.21 Historian who confronted Davos billionaires leaks Tucker Carlson rant 02.20 A Centuries-Old Idea Could Revolutionize Climate Policy International & Futurism
Sanders Has an Advantage, and It’s Not [Just] About Economics02.22 When multilateralism crumbles, so does our rules-based order [this enables easier corruption by banks and oligarchs and may result in complete societal breakdown, chaos and war] 02.22 Trump has turned foreign aid into shabby political theatre [Psychopaths are a sub-human species without empathy or morals.] 02.21 John Oliver Compares Brexit ‘Disaster’ to Will Smith’s Genie in Live-Action ‘Aladdin’ (Video) [21:26 video; we’re approaching an Idiocracy-type of society, where stupidity is “normal”] 02.20 House report lays bare White House feud over Saudi nuclear push [Its hard to keep up with all the criminal crap going on...] 02.20 My grandfather was a Nazi. I’ve seen why we need the EU 02.19 Centrism isn’t the solution to the mess we’re in 02.19 Renewables need urgent investment to ease Australia's transmission bottlenecks, experts warn We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival. You can also mail a check to: Baltimore News Network, Inc.
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COMMENTARY:Insurers Make Case for Public OptionOriginally published in ConsortiumNews.com yesterday, 12 October 2009
By demanding that the Baucus health-care bill toughen the coercive penalties to force young Americans to sign up for private insurance, industry lobbyists have inadvertently made the most dramatic argument to date for including a strong public option in any health reform law. After all, the bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, already was widely regarded as industry friendly. It had scrapped the public option, a lower-cost government-run insurance alternative that the industry hated because it would create strong competitive pressures. Plus, there appeared to be plenty of goodies for the industry. The Baucus bill, which is expected to clear the Finance Committee on Tuesday, would impose “an individual mandate” on Americans, requiring them to buy insurance or face a government fine. The bill also contained government subsidies to help modest-income citizens pay for their insurance. So, the industry stood to gain an estimated 27 million new customers and get federal subsidies to boot. But industry lobbyists began to send signals last week that they wanted more. They feared that the government fines would not be coercive enough to force many healthy young Americans to sign up for insurance, meaning that many new customers might be just the ones the industry doesn’t want – people who are sick and need medical attention. Without more severe government penalties on young Americans, the lobbyists warned that the industry would jack up rates on everyone. “Between 2010 and 2019 the cumulative increases in the cost of a typical family policy under this reform proposal will be approximately $20,700 more than it would be under the current system,” said Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobbying arm which commissioned the price study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2009] In other words, the private health insurance industry is demanding more concessions in the reform bill – particularly stiffer fines on Americans who balk at signing up for health insurance – or the industry will make health insurance even more expensive for Americans. Yet, while the industry may view its new hardball tactics as smart politics, its threats of sharply higher insurance premiums may backfire. The admission that the industry can’t control costs without greater government coercion on citizens may end up simply dramatizing the value of a strong public option. The public option, which could cut costs by piggybacking on the existing Medicare bureaucracy, was always the one possible route to substantial savings. Based on Medicare’s experience, a public option could operate with an overhead of around two percent compared to the 20 percent or more that private insurers take for administrative costs, executive salaries and profits. If a public option were available to individual consumers and small businesses – as four bills that have passed other congressional committees call for – then customers could get coverage at a lower price and thus the mandate to buy insurance would be less burdensome. Rather than strong-arming Americans to get private insurance by imposing stiffer fines, Congress might find the public option a far less draconian alternative, one that would enable more people to afford health insurance and thus make the need for penalties less necessary. That, of course, was the reason private insurers worked so hard to demonize the public option as “a government takeover” of medicine and lobbied aggressively to make sure it was rejected by the Senate Finance Committee. Yet, even with the public option stripped from the Baucus bill, Congress finds the industry ratcheting up the pressure to get more concessions or to kill the reform package altogether. The industry’s move, however, represents a gamble, in that Democrats might finally recognize the potential for their own political suicide if a new health-reform law turns the federal government into the enforcer for an industry that has long prospered from the business of paying as few medical bills of sick Americans as possible. Rather than using fines to muscle more citizens into the arms of private insurers, the Democrats might finally rebel against the lobbyists and make sure that a strong public health-insurance option is available as an alternative to private policies. Just the outcome that the industry feared most. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com. This article is republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on October 13, 2009. |
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