“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial Board: A New G.O.P. Excuse for Doing Nothing
With unrestrained glee, Republicans are using the calamitous debut of the Affordable Care Act as their latest justification for undermining all of health care reform. But they’re not stopping there. The Obama administration’s fumbling is apparently a good excuse for them to do nothing on immigration reform, on a budget agreement, and on any other initiative coming out of the White House. [..]
Their opportunistic theme is clear: If you can’t trust President Obama on this issue, how can you trust him on anything else? Unquestionably, the White House handed them this gift through two kinds of incompetence: the technical failure of the health-exchange website, and the political failure of the president in falsely promising that no one would lose an insurance policy they already had.
But just as these blunders are not the end of the health reform, they will also, in the end, not stop the long march to immigration reform, more jobs or desperately needed improvements to education, transportation and other fundamental functions.
Michael Klare: Are we witnessing the start of a global green revolution?
Mass environmental protests are gaining strength. If governments won’t take the lead on an imperiled planet, someone will
A week after the most powerful “super typhoon” ever recorded pummeled the Philippines, killing thousands in a single province, and three weeks after the northern Chinese city of Harbin suffered a devastating “airpocalypse“, suffocating the city with coal-plant pollution, government leaders beware!
Although individual events like these cannot be attributed with absolute certainty to increased fossil fuel use and climate change, they are the type of disasters that, scientists tell us, will become a pervasive part of life on a planet being transformed by the massive consumption of carbon-based fuels. If, as is now the case, governments across the planet back an extension of the carbon age and ever increasing reliance on “unconventional” fossil fuels like tar sands and shale gas, we should all expect trouble. In fact, we should expect mass upheavals leading to a green energy revolution.
This week Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gave an important speech on the floor of the United State Senate. Said Sen. Warren, “the conversation about retirement and Social Security benefits is not just a conversation about math. At its core, this is a conversation about our values.” Sen. Warren knows her values.
She knows her math, too. As co-author of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, Warren helped document a phenomenon which most Americans had observed but few had fully recognized: Typical two-earner middle-class families today can’t maintain the standard of living which single-earner middle-class households enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s.
Why? Because real wages have fallen, mortgages are more expensive, education costs have skyrocketed, and out-of-pocket health care costs have risen dramatically for families with employer-based insurance.
Paul Rieckhoff: Who Will Stand With Military Sexual Assault Survivors When It Counts This Week
Serving in the U.S. military requires courage. Coming forward to describe surviving military sexual assault takes even more.
That is what thousands of survivors like those shown in the Academy Award-nominated film, The Invisible War have done. And for every survivor who is able to come forward, thousands are suffering in silence.
When the Department of Defense reported that there were an estimated 26,000 cases of unwanted sexual contact in the military in 2012, it was a massive wake-up call. It showed our military is being weakened from the inside. And this week, the issue has finally reached a tipping point. After 20 years of broken promises to end sexual assault in the military, one vote will determine whether or not Congress has the courage to strengthen the military justice system.
Wendall Potter: The Real Reasons Insurers Are Canceling Policies
Before Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies already were making rapid progress in implementing their business plans of “migrating” their customers from traditional managed care plans to so-called “consumer-directed” plans, the industry euphemism for high-deductible policies. At the same time they’ve been requiring us to pay more out of our own pockets for care, they’ve also been implementing a strategy of reducing benefits. Investors and Wall Street financial analysts refer to these common industry practices as “benefit buydowns.” That’s another euphemism, by the way.
I myself — and thousands of my fellow Cigna employees — were notified several years ago, long before I left my job, that our HMOs and PPOs were being discontinued. Yep, we got notices in the mail. If we wanted to stay in a Cigna-subsidized health plan, we would have to switch to a high-deductible plan. The same thing has happened to tens of millions of other Americans in recent years.
Yet if you relied on the Washington media for your news and information about health care, you’d think that insurance companies would never have considered sending policy discontinuation notices to their policyholders until forced to do so by Obamacare.
The truth: they have always done this when profits were at stake.
Norman Solomon: The Obamacare Disaster and the Poison of Party Loyalty
Four years ago, countless Democratic leaders and allies pushed for passage of Barack Obama’s complex healthcare act while arguing that his entire presidency was at stake. The party hierarchy whipped the Congressional Progressive Caucus into line, while MoveOn and other loyal groups stayed in step along with many liberal pundits. [..]
It should now be painfully obvious that Obamacare’s little helpers, dutifully reciting White House talking points in 2009 and early 2010, were helping right-wing bogus populism to gather steam. Claiming that the Obama presidency would sink without signing into law its “landmark” healthcare bill, many a progressive worked to throw the president a rope; while ostensibly attached to a political life preserver, the rope was actually fastened to a huge deadweight anvil. [..]
With such disingenuous sales pitches four years ago, President Obama and his Democratic acolytes did a lot to create the current political mess engulfing Obamacare-exaggerating its virtues while pulling out the stops to normalize denial about its real drawbacks. That was a bad approach in 2009. It remains a bad approach today.
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