No winner-take-all law
Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill fits perfectly in the current presidential administration’s and Democratic Party’s disdain for the Founding Fathers. The Missouri senator, in a recent MSNBC interview, recently questioned the checks and balances the country’s founders came up with in order that one branch of government be no more powerful than another. In her view, perhaps especially when the party in the White House matches hers, the party should be given total control of the government.
Her comments came when host Joe Scarborough, on the “Morning Joe” program, questioned her for blaming the GOP for all of Washington’s problems.
“You’re just talking about the Republicans and the Republican candidate for president. Is this just a problem of one party?” he asked. “Or is this a problem of a system that just has been divisive long before Donald Trump even became a Republican?”
“Well, I think part of the problem is that our framers were a little maniacal in that if you look at other democracies around the world, when one party wins the congressional branch,” she said, “they take the executive branch. Not in our country.”
No doubt McCaskill may have forgotten, if she ever knew it, the country’s history. So Scarborough told her the separation of powers was intended to protect the country against dictators, which some in her party fear what Trump might become if elected.
Going, going
Only one-third of the 24 health cooperatives created under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) are left. Two more bit the dust this month.
Connecticut’s co-op, HealthyCT, was placed under an immediate order of supervision on July 5, according to the Washington Free Beacon, after being forced to pay $13.4 million to the Affordable Care Act’s risk adjustment program. The co-op initially had been awarded $75.8 million by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in June 2012, then $3.8 million in November 2013 and $48.4 million in September 2014.
Three days later, the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services said it would place Oregon’s Health Co-Op in receivership and liquidate the company’s assets. The co-op, which received a total of $56.7 million from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, lost $18.4 million in 2015 and owes $900,000 to the risk adjustment program.
Dr. Scott Harrington, a professor at the Wharton School, predicted the continuing demise in a March Senate hearing.
“Future closures seem likely,” he said, adding that only one of the-then 11 co-ops still operating had a positive net income. The 10 others, he said, had a cumulative loss of $202.3 million. Further, he said, very little of the federal start-up money and solvency loans given to the co-ops was likely to be paid back, and some of the co-ops would be unable to meet their obligations to health care providers and policy holders.
Some financial legacy for the president.
Laughing matter?
Abortion, according to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), is now proper material for a comedy clip.
A six-and-a-half-minute ad, “Comedians in Cars Getting Abortions,” depicts a couple seeking an abortion clinic. The first one they come to is closed; then they wind up at a crisis pregnancy center, where a super-smiley front-desk clerk tells them at eight weeks their baby should “be able to recognize iPhone passwords” and presents them a clay model the size of a weeks-old fetus, prompting the father to say, “That doesn’t look like you at all.”
When the mother asks about a doctor, the clerk responds, “Who needs doctors when you have the book of Jeremiah?”
They next arrive at an abortion clinic, where a worker tells them they can get what they came for, causing the mother to bump fists with the father and say, “Let’s get this s– done.”
But the clerk alerts them to some “teensy-weensy requirements”: They must come back in 32 hours exactly. She has to tell them an abortion may increase a mother’s chance of breast cancer (but whispers under her breath that it’s not true, though studies vary, according to the American Cancer Society). And she must show them photos of a fetus at 15 weeks (which the mother compares to an apple) and at 536 weeks (a photo of a 10-year-old). If she really wants an abortion, the clerk tells them, they should go where it’s legal, like in Canada, Uruguay or international waters.
The message, which flashes up at the end: “It shouldn’t be this hard to get an abortion.”
Unfortunately, since an estimated 954,000 happened in the U.S. in 2014, it can’t be too hard.