“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: A Gap in Health Coverage
The Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of health care reform inadvertently opened a hole in health insurance coverage that could harm some of the nation’s poorest citizens. The problem arises from a mismatch between how the law was framed and how the court’s ruling will affect Medicaid, the joint state-federal health program for the poor. [..]
In states that choose not to expand Medicaid, substantial numbers of the very poor could be left out of coverage. The reform law provides tax credits to help people with incomes between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level (about $23,000 to $92,000 for a family of four) buy private insurance. But the bill’s drafters made no provision to provide subsidies for anyone below the poverty line because they assumed that those people would be covered by expanded Medicaid.
Tina Rosenberg: In Rwanda, Health Care Coverage That Eludes the U.S.
Last week’s Supreme Court decision upholding of the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law moves the United States closer to the goal of health coverage for all. All other developed countries have it. But so do some developing nations – Brazil, Thailand, Chile. These countries are mostly middle income. But one country on the list is among the poorest of the poor: Rwanda.
The point is not that Americans should envy Rwanda’s health system – far from it. But Rwanda’s experience illustrates the value of universal health insurance. “Its health gains in the last decade are among the most dramatic the world has seen in the last 50 years,” said Peter Drobac, the director in Rwanda for the Boston-based Partners in Health, which works extensively with the Rwandan health system.
It couldn’t have happened without health insurance.
There is a solution to unemployment: if we worked the same shorter hours as Germany, we’d eliminate joblessness overnight
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, a distinguished British economist, took the lead last week in drafting a sign-on “Manifesto for Economic Common Sense“, condemning the turn toward austerity in many countries. This manifesto seems destined to garner tens or even hundreds of thousands of signatures, including mine.
While the basic logic of the manifesto is solid, there is an important aspect to the argument that is overlooked. We can deal with unemployment every bit as effectively by having people work fewer hours, as we can by increasing demand.
The most important point to realize is that the problem facing wealthy countries at the moment is not that we are poor, as the stern proponents of austerity insist. The problem is that we are wealthy. We have tens of millions of people unemployed precisely because we can meet current demand without needing their labor.
Jim Hightower: Supreme Court’s Plutocratic Political Hacks Rule Against the People in Montana
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” as my old Texas momma used to instruct my brothers and me. But apparently, five of the justices on our Supreme Court didn’t have mommas with such ethical sensibilities – or perhaps they’re just ignoring their mommas’ wisdom now in order to impose their extremist political agenda on you and me.
That agenda became startlingly clear in 2010, when the black-robed cabal of Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Sam Alito hung their infamous Citizens United edict around America’s neck. It allowed unlimited sums of corporate cash to spew into our elections, effectively legalizing the wholesale purchase of America’s elected officials. In his majority decision, Supreme joker Kennedy drew from his deep well of political ignorance and judicial arrogance to declare that these gushers of special interest money “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”
Is he on the court – or in a comedy club? Not only were Kennedy and his fellow corporatists wrong on the substance of their decree, but also ridiculously wrong on the politics. You don’t need a law degree to see that CEOs are presently flooding this year’s presidential and congressional races with hundreds of millions of corporate campaign dollars, gleefully perverting the political process to buy government policy for their own gain. That not only gives the appearance of corruption, it is corrupt.
Laura Flanders: Workers vs. Investors: Famous Windows Factory in Danger of Liquidation
A workers’ cooperative in the Goose Island area of Chicago is desperately trying to stop the liquidation of a windows and doors factory the sale of which will scuttle their plans but benefit some well-connected investors.
Union members who put their bodies on the line not once but twice to save their windows and doors factory in Chicago found out Sunday that their former employer has broken a pledge to give workers a fair chance to buy factory equipment and plans instead to sell off machines as soon as Friday rather than let a Black and Latino-led workers’ cooperative buy and keep the plant in operation.
The workers, members of the United Electrical and Machine Workers of America Local 1110, sat in and briefly occupied their plant this February after owner, Serious Energy of California, announced a shut-down and a plan to move jobs out of state. Many of the same workers occupied the same factory in December 2008, becoming a cause-celebre at the height of the unemployment crisis.
Jules Boykoff and Alan Tomlinson: Olympian Arrogance
While Europe roils in economic turmoil, London is preparing for a lavish jamboree of international good will: in a few weeks, the city will host the 2012 Summer Olympics.
But behind the spectacle of athletic prowess and global harmony, brass-knuckle politics and brute economics reign. At this nexus sits the International Olympic Committee, which promotes the games and decides where they will be held. Though the I.O.C. has been periodically tarnished by scandal – usually involving the bribing and illegitimate wooing of delegates – those embarrassments divert us from a deeper problem: the organization is elitist, domineering and crassly commercial at its core.
The I.O.C., which champions itself as a democratic “catalyst for collaboration between all parties of the Olympic family,” is nonetheless run by a privileged sliver of the global 1 percent. This has always been the case: when Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympics in the 1890s, he assembled a hodgepodge of princes, barons, counts and lords to coordinate the games. Eventually the I.O.C. opened its hallowed halls to wealthy business leaders and former Olympians. Not until 1981 were women allowed in.
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