Virginia v Sibelius: Another Such Victory and We Are Undone

A collection of notes, instead of a long piece.

Winners

Health insurance companies!!!!

Yes, everyone's favorite insurance companies will make out like bandits. In exchange for a modest reduction in gross profits (to 15-20% per insured), this weakly-regulated oligopoly will get the entire country as customers, mandated by the federal government.

Pharmaceutical and medical equipment suppliers

And these firms will make out like bandits, because they'll be getting millions of new customers and are weakly-regulated.

I think I detect a pattern here.

Obama

His signature bill survived.

John Roberts

He gets to write a largely conservative decision and saves the prestige of his institution.

Losers

People in red states, especially the poor and the brown-skinned

The working poor will get slammed because the red states are planning not to implement the Medicaid expansion. There will be people who are not covered by either Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act and this group will be disproportionately brown; for an analysis, see David Dayen, link. The same states are planning not to create the insurance exchanges that the ACA mandates, despite the law. And, finally, when those states do implement the ACA, their weak insurance regulators will be the ones overseeing its implementation. In such places, the low end insurance mandated by the ACA is likely to be insurance that can't be used at prices that can't be paid.

The Economy?

No-one I have seen has done any modeling to the end of predicting the macroeconomic impact of the ACA. The ACA mandates an expansion of health care, which might be stimulative, but it is also, in effect, a tax, which might be regressive. If the effect is regressive, full implementation could make the on-going depression worse. If the depression continues, it will also fall disproportionately on the young, who will be required to spend scarce money on insurance.

The Law

The decision is exceptionally incoherent. Future cases regarding Federal power will be hard to decide. It is likely the decisions will be arbitrary, based on politics, rather than a consistent legal or ethical basis.

Progressives

Every new Federal spending program will be subject to the incoherence of this decision, the question of how will the Court rule on it.

Wingnuts 

The didn't get their cruel decision, and the 1930s and 1940s Commerce Clause decisions stand, albeit in weakened form.

And then there's that third thing

That is, people who are both winners and losers.

The middle class and working poor

Why are these people listed last? But in fact Because they are last; Congress and the President put the insurance companies's profits before the majority of the public. Some of this group will, at long last, get needed health care. Others will get costly inadequate insurance.

Young people

Who will have to pay into this system, though their incomes are low and they are the lightest users of health care. For a minority of young people, however, the mandated insurance will be a literal lifesaver.

Women

The ACA requires that a range of women's preventative care be covered without a co-pay. This is a huge thing. On the other hand, the ACA cuts insurance coverage for abortion. Again, this will probably hit hardest in red states, but in all states it is potentially a killer.

Conclusions

Thanks, guys! We really needed this mess. Why, oh why, could Congress not have seen the way clear to Medicare for All?

Corvids Feast in Denver

For those of you who have been hiding under a rock, there has been a mass shooting a the Denver opening of Batman. Twelve are dead and 58 injured. The murderer, a man named Holmes, planned the murder, and apparently also planted a bomb in his apartment, which has so far kept police out, and led to the evacuation of five buildings. It appears that Holmes played annoying music and left his door ajar, apparently in an attempt to attract  neighbors who would open the door and detonate the bomb.

The most extensive coverage is at the Denver Post. Talking Points Memo also has good coverage.

Holmes was a neuroscience student, who recently dropped out of graduate school at the University of Colorado. As usual with such people, he was a polite man who kept to himself.

I will venture the following speculations about what will be found when Holmes's background is investigated:

1. It will turn out that Holmes had a history of violent fantasies, possibly even a history of actual violence, perhaps directed at animals
2. He studied neuroscience in part because he was seeking a cure for his disorder, but it may also have given him the opportunity to cause pain.
3. His problems were recognized. It is possible he sought help for them.
4. The people who recognized his problems did not act on the knowledge, perhaps were unable to do so. If he sought help, he did not get it.

A history of violence-related mental illness would have disqualified Holmes from legal weapons purchase and ownership, if the laws regarding weapons purchase and ownership were taken at all seriously. It is as I said, years ago: you hominids will end up with the right to own weapons and nothing else.

[Update:] Yup.

Colbert to CNN, Fox: You Suck At News

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Let's hear it for conscientious reporting!

On the ACA decision

Me, writing just before the decision:

I think it possible that the Court is going to rule beyond the ACA. Perhaps they will take positions that affect Medicare or Medicaid, or perhaps they will restrict the Commerce Clause in some way. Link.

And, b'golly, I called that one. Croak!  Croakcroakcroak! They did blow away the enforcement of the Medicaid expansion in the ACA, and they did it by weakening the Commerce Clause.

I guess they didn't touch Medicare because it is too popular.

The other thing that strikes me, is that like most of the major decisions of the Roberts Court, is that this decision is a mess.  We have no idea how the Court is going to rule on future social welfare programs, now that the Commerce Clause has been held as not applying to this one.  I gather the rest of the Court's conservatives rendered a blithering, blistering disaster of a dissent.  I haven't seen much reporting of it yet, but I suspect some of the ideas expressed in it are going to figure in future conservative decisions.

Meantime, let us take note that for Roberts the wealth of the 1% trumps conservative ideology, but for the rest of the Court's conservatives it is the other way.

Gonna keep us corvids well-fed, what, hey?

Civil Rights: Saving the Best Moves for the Campaign

Obama has announce that "the administration wouldn't seek to deport illegal immigrants under 30 who entered the U.S. as children and meet certain other residency and education requirements for the next two years. They also would be eligible to apply for work permits, [...]"--MSNBC

Looks to me like Obama saved his best civil rights moves for his reelection campaign: this, the end of DADT, and support for gay marriage. These are all both decent things to do, and will garner Obama votes. These civil rights moves do give a bit of hope for his second term. But only a bit. We know he’s a great salesman, but after four years we still don't know what the product is.

The Failure of Communism in Russia and Capitalism in the West

Thoughts inspired by the Crooked Timber's on-going seminar on Francis Spufford's Red Plenty and by Gordon's remark, “The dreamers and revolutionaries are still there, but now that the USSR is gone they confront a Right which has far more confidence” in this thread.

    Yet now the right is failing, drifting into ever more radical and authoritarian politics, as its policies fail. They take over powerful countries and what do they do? Impoverish those countries. Start pointless wars. Trash banking and property law systems so that even the privileges of wealth and power are endangered. And in the background, the rising storm of environmental disaster. Like the Soviet Union, this also cannot be sustained.

    I admire this sentence of Spufford's: “The theory of rule by steely, ‘conscious’ guardians of the public good arrived pre-vitiated, grotesquely self-cancelled, by having the actual representatives of the theory turn out to be beefy backslappers with the mental horizons of warthogs.” Yet no more than “steely, ‘conscious’ guardians of the public good” are there Randian super-heroes; many capitalists also have “the mental horizons of warthogs.”

    There is, I think, something wrong with our philosophies, something other than poor economic theories. It is striking to me how both capitalism and communism seem to be failing in the same way and for the same reasons.

    Perhaps we are solving the wrong problems. the 20th century has given us economic theory that could vastly improve the lives of vast majority. And yet we do not implement that theory. If both the Soviet calculation model and the Austrian market model were foredoomed by taking on too much complexity, by trying to encompass too much, what can we say of Keynesian models and the mixed economy, which, setting more modest goals, seem capable of vastly improving material life, and yet which we seem unable to implement with any resolve?

Stealing homes with a pen

"If you add all those up, I don’t think there’s a loan in America that is not touched by this in some way."--David Dayen

"When I pay it off, what will I have, [is] the most famous broken chain of title in the country."--Lynn Szymoniak.

"The millions facing foreclosure [are] not facing foreclosure just because of individual actions."--Malcolm Chu

This was a Netroots Nation panel held "in a room with no streaming, and President Obama is holding a press conference to conflict with it." Marci Wheeler's rush transcript (liveblog) shows possibly the best overview of the homeownership disaster I've seen.

David Dayen kicked off the panel with a catalog of types of housing fraud:

1. Origination fraud (liar loans, discriminatory, paper fraud) 
2. Appraisal fraud. Then 
3. Securitization fraud, failure to convey the mortgages to the trust properly. 
4. Investor fraud, putting bad mortgages into packages willingly, and not telling the investors. 
5. MERS, which is a giant tax avoidance scheme. 
6. Servicer fraud—fee pyramiding. HUD did test of 35 loans from, of the 35 actual price of mortgage could not be verified on 34. 
7. HAMP.  
8. Force place insurance fraud. Servicer buys at a huge price and make mortgage holder pay for it. 
9. Foreclosure mill. 
10. Robosigning. 
11. Breaking and entering.

Panel information: Moderator, David Dayen. Panelists: former TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky, community organizer Malcolm Chu, and whistleblower Lynn Szymoniak. Read Marci Wheeler's liveblog post at Emptywheel. Video is promised for later today.