The President Makes a (live) Statement on Iraq
The White House
http://www.whitehouse.gov/live
Rats shown to feel regret over bad decisions
http://richarddawkins.net/2014/06/rats-shown-to-feel-regret-over-bad-decisions/
Too bad we can't get the GOP to do the same...
Iowa Senate Hopeful 'Appalled' Her Husband Called Janet Napolitano A 'Traitorous Skank'
Looks like she has another pig to castrate.
AP Photo / Nati Harnik
Sahil Kapur – June 12, 2014, 4:12 PM EDT
Iowa's Republican Senate nominee Joni Ernst told a local news outlet she's "appalled" that her husband once called former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano a "traitorous skank" on Facebook.
As reported by the Des Moines Register, Democrats took a screenshot of Gail Ernst's written comments, which had been up since April 2013, and seized on them. That prompted him to delete that and other inflammatory posts and apologize for them before Ernst denounced them.
"I'm appalled by my husband's remarks," Joni Ernst said, according to the Register. "They are uncalled for and clearly inappropriate. I've addressed this issue with my husband and that's between us."
Gail Ernst also called Hillary Clinton a "hag" in a May 2013 post on Facebook.
The flap is particularly notable because Ernst's allies have been sensitive to sexist attacks on the candidate in her race against Democrat Bruce Braley for Iowa's open Senate seat this November.
@MontereyJack,
Chai2 has said, "**** the Constitution."
@bobsal u1553115,
Great, now every time I think of Joni Ernst I will think, 'Traitorous Skank'... Her husband apparently a "Fox News Slut Whore"...
95% of Minnesotans now have health insurance
Article by: JACKIE CROSBY , Star Tribune
Updated: June 11, 2014 - 11:40 PM
Percentage without health plan is 2nd-lowest in U.S.
The percentage of uninsured Minnesotans has dropped to the lowest level in state history, and the second-lowest level in the nation, following the end of enrollments under the Affordable Care Act.
About 180,500 Minnesotans gained health insurance from last September to this May, with the vast majority getting coverage through one of the state’s public health programs, a report from the University of Minnesota found.
That left just 4.9 percent of all Minnesotans lacking health coverage on May 1, about a month after the federal health law’s first major sign-up deadline. That’s down from 8.9 percent last Sept. 30.
“A change in the uninsurance rate like this is pretty much unprecedented in Minnesota,” said Julie Sonier of the university’s State Health Access Data Assistance Center and a co-author of the report.
MNsure, the state’s health insurance exchange, commissioned the study to measure the impact of the federal health law on coverage in Minnesota. The study was paid for with a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
For much of the past decade, the rate of uninsured Minnesotans hovered around 7 to 8 percent, though it jumped above 9 percent after the onset of the recession in 2009.
The results rank Minnesota second only to Massachusetts in the percentage of its population with health coverage. That state’s health care reform in 2007 sent its uninsured rate to around 3 percent and, according to a study released there this week, the rate may have fallen below 1 percent in the wave of enrollments driven by the federal law this year.
Democratic backers of health care reform trumpeted the new Minnesota findings.
“It really confirms the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act and MNsure’s part of that,” said Gov. Mark Dayton, who was in Washington, D.C. “People who have been knocking this the whole time really now need to look at the facts. This has been tremendously successful and it’s going to get better.”
Researchers cautioned that the report was a “snapshot” and that people move in and out of the insurance market. The data also doesn’t answer key questions, including the demographics of the newly insured, what factors drove people to seek coverage and how many people who were previously uninsured purchased coverage through MNsure. Some of those questions will be addressed in a follow-up report later this year.
Sen. Michelle Benson, R-Ham Lake, said the drop in the number of uninsured Minnesotans is welcome but that a key question remains: How big an impact did MNsure make in helping people buy insurance from private carriers?
“If it’s mostly people enrolled in public programs, we could have done that without spending $170 million on a website,” she said, adding that money could have gone toward improving the existing county-based infrastructure for public insurance programs. “Let’s not take a victory lap on MNsure until we start counting what MNsure did and then let’s find out if it’s worth it.”
Word of the Minnesota results quickly spread through social media, a sign of how much President Obama’s health care initiative remains a political hot button. White House spokesman Jay Carney tweeted the study results to his more 500,000 followers, and supporters of the law from Congress down to grass roots activists took note.
MNsure CEO Scott Leitz called the report “an important starting point.”
“We know reduction of the uninsured was substantial, but we also know we have some people we need to work to get into coverage,” he said. There are “communities where we know the uninsurance rate is higher, communities of color, certain rural areas.”
Technical problems hobbled the launch of MNsure and forced the agency to rely on manual workarounds to meet the March 31 enrollment deadline. So far, nearly 237,000 Minnesotans have used MNsure to get coverage. The report didn’t quantify the contribution of MNsure or the work of thousands of navigators and brokers who tried to help people get access to federal tax credits through the clunky website.
The report also revealed that the state’s employers have not stopped offering coverage to workers in any meaningful way.
Meanwhile, the number of people buying private individual insurance on or off the exchange grew by almost 36,000.
The main drivers behind the drop in the uninsured came from enrollment gains in state health insurance coverage, Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare.
Researchers have long known that as many as two-thirds of the state’s uninsured were eligible for coverage through public programs, but either didn’t know it or didn’t take advantage of the aid.
Minnesota was one of 26 states that decided to expand Medicaid to include childless adults, which accounted for a surprising gain in new applicants, said Department of Human Services Commissioner Lucinda Jesson.
“We anticipated growth in children and families because we were simplifying the process and we were doing more outreach,” Jesson said. “But we had more adults without kids than we expected, and we had pretty healthy projections. That tells me the Medicaid expansion was even more significant than we anticipated, so far. We’re only a few months in.”
The state already offers a more generous subsidy for the working poor than other states through its MinnesotaCare program, so making Medicaid benefits available to more people doesn’t fully explain the accelerated growth in coverage.
“People haven’t enrolled in such large numbers before in such a short period of time, so there was something else going on during the open enrollment period,” Sonier said. “Whether it was awareness of the individual mandate or far more intensive, effective outreach ... something really got these people in the door where other attempts to do so had not been successful.”
Star Tribune Washington correspondent Corey Mitchell contributed to this report.
Jackie Crosby • 612-673-7335
joint says:
Quote:Funny how someone is always getting fucked from this idiotic law.
Funny how that law helped 180,000 Minnesotans who didn't have health insurance to actually get health insurance, isn't it? (the cite just before yours).
Funny also how your source (and you) neglect to mention that this had been an ongoing problem for years before Obamacare was even invented, because private health plans had similar lists of non-covered drugs (usually, as in your cite, obscure ones for obscure problems), and patients had huge out-of-pocket expenses as a result. Which is one reason 60-plus percent of personal bankrupticies in America pre-Obamacare were for catastrophic health costs and 60plus percent of those were from people who DID have health insurance . Obamacare is a work in progress, which is working to address those issues. Private healthcare had decades to address those issues and notoriously failed to do so.
@MontereyJack,
MontereyJack wrote:
Funny also how your source (and you) neglect to mention that this had been an ongoing problem for years before Obamacare was even invented, because private health plans had similar lists of non-covered drugs (usually, as in your cite, obscure ones for obscure problems), and patients had huge out-of-pocket expenses as a result. Which is one reason 60-plus percent of personal bankrupticies in America pre-Obamacare were for catastrophic health costs and 60plus percent of those were from people who DID have health insurance . Obamacare is a work in progress, which is working to address those issues. Private healthcare had decades to address those issues and notoriously failed to do so.
Apparently you believe that a politically/bureaucratically managed authoritarian system will, as a "work in progress" evolve to something better that what was achieved through a relatively free market. There is very little historical precedent with which to back up that assumption. (Indeed your assurances here appear to be weak rationalizations at best.)
The observable fact is that a majority of Americans don't like Obamacare, and the indicators of foresight, competence, and truthful, honest reporting of facts on the part of its executors (and the current administration generally) are poor and in many areas worsening daily.
Prior to Ocare, health care constituted 20 percent of our GDP, while health premiums were going up in annual double-digit amonts. This is at the same time that our cost of living was increasing about 2 to 3 percent annually. When it was only 10 percent of our GDP, economists screamed that this cost was unsustainable. I guess this is why we were the only advanced country that didn't have a universal system. Even Switzerland, which is no nanny country, realized that their old system didn't work, and went over to something similar to Ocare. But the right revels in its stupidity and know-nothing attitude.
@georgeob1,
Explain the fascist part of this, you amuse me.
