Medicaid Torture

Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You right here in Kentucky started this shit.  How dare impoverished people - no matter how sick, disabled or already working - dare take a penny of tax money that should be going to make Bevin and his billionaire buddies even more filthy rich?

 

Digby:

Making sick people work in order to get health care is right up there with the most dissonant policies they've ever came up with. It makes even less sense than usual.

Look for them to start saying people need to work to get social security and Medicare as well. After all, just because they're old doesn't mean people shouldn't "take responsibility" for their retirement and health care, amirite?

I wish I could understand what it is about sick people getting health care that makes these people so angry that they lose their humanity.

It's the same reason we can't have all the nice things European socialists have:  because American motherfucking racists hate everything that puts a penny into the pocket of a ni**er or a spic.

3 days

McGrath finally fights back against Candy Barr, and the Herald has it, but can't resist opening with a mendacious slap at the girl in the race.

Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath has spent the past few months talking about how she plans to run a different kind of campaign, one without negative attack ads to help restore civility in politics.

But from the opening question of the only debate between U.S. Rep. Andy Barr and McGrath on Kentucky Educational Television, the two candidates went on the attack.

In fact, McGrath has been running a high-road campaign all year, while Candy has run nothing but vicious, lying attacks on McGrath.  Shame on you, Herald.  Bothsiderism is not journalism, it's cowardice and incompetence.

Though the candidates talked about tax reform, the national debt and election security, the majority of the debate centered around the one issue McGrath has made the centerpiece of her campaign, health care. Not mentioned were immigration and abortion, two issues Barr has featured prominently in his attack ads.

At one point, as McGrath was accusing Barr of lying about her stance on health care, the congressman interrupted her.

“Is this a positive campaign?” Barr said. “Calling me a liar?”

McGrath paused.

“Are you done?” she said before continuing.

Across the country, House Republicans have had to defend their votes for an unpopular bill to replace the Affordable Care Act that ultimately failed in the Senate.

Barr defended the bill, saying it was one of the best opportunities Congress had to reform entitlement programs, while emphasizing that he supported replacing the Affordable Care Act in a way that wouldn’t eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions.

McGrath said she wants to make the Affordable Care Act better and emphasized her support of a Medicaid buy-in plan for people over the age of 55 and a public option for health insurance.

SNIP

McGrath pushed back, calling Barr a liar for continuing to say she supported a single-payer system.

“Look, I came from an institution where if you lie, cheat or steal you get kicked out,” McGrath said.

And Candy belongs to a party that has to lie about everything, because its real agenda of stripping the middle class and giving everything to the idle rich wouldn't get five votes anywhere.

Tuesday.  THIS Tuesday.  6 a.m. to 6 p.m.  If you don't know your polling place, go here. 

Candy Barr Cheers Bevin Killing Kyians Just for Being Poor

The only thing you have to know about Candy is that he's a trump-taint-licking repug, and all his fake concern for caged babies on the border can't hide it.

From the Herald:

U.S. Rep. Andy Barr said Monday he supports Kentucky's ability to determine who receives Medicaid benefits, a day after the Bevin administration eliminated access to vision and dental coverage for 460,000 Kentuckians on Medicaid.

SNIP

(Democratic challenger Lt. Col. Amy) McGrath was critical of the Bevin administration's decision to eliminate dental and vision coverage for the 460,000 Medicaid recipients who received coverage when former Gov. Steve Beshear expanded Medicaid eligibility under the federal Affordable Care Act.

"Bevin's obvious goal is to take health care away from Kentuckians," McGrath said. "He tried to do it by instituting his unconstitutional work requirements. When that didn't work, he's just going through with taking health care away any way he can."

 

Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You Will Strip Health Care from 500,000 Kentuckians

How DARE those disabled poors not show proper gratitude to King Matt for forcing them to work in the salt mines for no pay?  BURN THEM!

TPM:

Attorneys for Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) will tell a federal court this Friday that that the governor plans to take his ball and go home if he can’t get his way on Medicaid work requirements, premiums, and other restrictions. Bevin, who campaigned on ending the Medicaid expansion but backed down from that threat once elected, is now arguing that he will scrap the state’s Medicaid expansion if the controversial new rules are struck down by federal courts.

Kentucky was the first state in the nation to win permission from the Trump administration to impose the new Medicaid rules, which are expected to throw nearly 100,000 Kentuckians off the program. With at least a dozen other states looking to adopt their own Medicaid work requirements, the outcome of the case could determine the future of the program not only in Kentucky but across the country.

Kentucky and the Trump administration are jointly fighting a lawsuit from a dozen-plus Kentucky residents who fear the work requirements and other hurdles will strip them of their Medicaid coverage. The plaintiffs are arguing, among other points, that the new rules do not further Congress’ original intent for Medicaid — to provide affordable health care to low-income people.

Kentucky’s waiver will allow the state, to deny coverage to any non-disabled adult who cannot prove they are working at least 20 hours per week. The state also will be able to charge low-income Medicaid recipients health care premiums, eliminate full coverage of dental care, vision services, and over-the-counter medications for many adults, end retroactive Medicaid coverage, and implement a six-month lockout period for people who fail to re-enroll in time or report a change in income.

SNIP

Cuello told TPM that their attorneys also plan to implore the judge not to endorse Bevin’s hostage-taking tactic, arguing that doing so would be “rewarding bad threats.”

“If you were to allow Kentucky to get away with this argument, you’d be saying that anytime someone can come up with a threat worse than the harm the plaintiff is identifying, they can strip away someone’s standing,” he explained. “That sends the message that any government official could avoid lawsuits by saying, ‘If you grant this challenge, we’ll do this other thing that’s even worse.'”

Isn't there a word for that kind of tactic? 

DINO Ben Betrays Kentuckians; Will Help Bevin Steal Medicaid From Tens of Thousands

When I saw the headline at the Herald-Leader - Bevin announces partnership to implement Medicaid changes - I knew who it had to be.

Shame on you, Ben Chandler.  And how fucking stupid, aligning yourself with the trumpies just as the Resistance is notching its first victories.

Do you really hate Kentuckians that much for not electing you Governor in 2003? Do you really think the repugs will reward you for this betrayal?

Are you so desperate for money that you will take 30 pieces of silver from the Yankee carpetbagger who is systematically bulldozing the state your grandfather served as governor not once but twice?

What are you getting out of this, you motherfucking piece of shit?

Kentucky's Republican governor is partnering with a former Democratic congressman to help implement the nation's first work requirements for Medicaid.

Former official yes but mostly former Democrat.

On Wednesday, Gov. Matt Bevin announced a partnership with the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, a nonpartisan health policy research group run by Ben Chandler.

Once the new work requirements take effect later this year, state officials predict Medicaid will cover 95,000 fewer people in five years, leading critics to accuse Bevin of taking away people's health insurance. Chandler said the foundation's goal will be to help Kentuckians keep their coverage.

You don't help Kentuckians keep their coverage by partnering with Gov. I Got Mine Fuck You to force 95,000 of them off health coverage.

Shame on you, Ben.  I hope every real Democratic candidate in Kentucky stands up to condemn you, your new repug buddy and every inhuman policy the two of you now stand for.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article212164799.html#storylink=cpy

Stop Targeting the Wrong People for Opioid Abuse

Visit a nursing home sometime.  Look for the old men and women sitting in their chairs with tears running down their faces. They're not lonely; they're suffering non-stop agony because Kentucky's lethal yet ridiculous KASPER law has taken away their painkillers.

Kevin Drum brings the scientific facts:

The main reason prescriptions went up is that doctors really had been undertreating pain for a long time. And it turns out that the biggest problem with high rates of opioid prescription don’t come from pain patients anyway. Addiction rates among pain patients are actually fairly low: anywhere from 0.1 percent to less than 8 percent, and very few pain patients ever move on to heroin or other drugs. Rather, the biggest part of the problem comes from people who score opioid painkillers elsewhere. And where do they get them? From leftovers sitting around their parents’ medicine chests. From friends. From the black market.

In other words, if we really want to address the opioid epidemic, our best strategy is not to focus all our attention on prescriptions among legitimate pain patients. Nor is it to refight the war on drugs yet again. Instead, we need to:

• Get better at screening people with previous (or current) addictions.
• Prescribe fewer pills after surgeries, but make it easy to get refills. The idea here is to limit the number of leftover pills lying around, but to do it without making things difficult for pain patients.
• Crack down on pill mills and on shipments plainly bound for the black market—but without making doctors live in fear of the DEA knocking on their door if they treat their pain patients properly.
• Get tougher on misleading pharmaceutical marketing.
• Fund much more research on pain management and alternative pain strategies.

This is what President Trump ought to be doing as part of his “public health emergency” over opioid deaths.

How to Save Obamacare

Dok Zoom at Wonkette:

Oh, dear Terrible Ones, you know this one: Organize. Speak up. If you’re currently in an exchange plan, make sure you and everyone you know signs up during the much-shortened open enrollment, November 1 to December 15. Call your representatives and tell them you won’t tolerate the president tearing down Obamacare from within. Organize more. Work to get Democrats elected and for fuckssakes stop refighting the 2016 primary. Try not to get too discouraged, and read Saint Molly Ivins if you need inspiration. Raise hell. Did we mention Organize? This is probably the biggest threat to America’s healthcare yet, and we can’t let it happen.

Repugs Just Murdered Obamacare and Millions Who Depend On It

They've stabbed it in the neck and it's bleeding out.  Do NOT let them get away with claiming it collapsed on its own.

Charlie Pierce:

This is an attempt to do the exact opposite of what the president* took an oath to do. This is an attempt to make sure a law is not faithlessly executed. It's government by renege, which was this president*'s true gift as a businessman. A landscaper in New Jersey or an invalid in Idaho, he'll find some way to stiff them all. 

SNIP

None of the "alternatives" that his order now makes possible are to the benefit of consumers, sick or otherwise. They're all designed to ensure that the Affordable Care Act cannot work, which is the primary goal not only of the president*, but of his enabling political party as well. The executive order turns health insurance back into a bull market for thieves and grifters and once again allows some disreputable characters a chance to coin sickness into gold.

SNIP

The sheer meanness of the calculations behind the effort to deprive millions of people of their health insurance, including the millions of people who found relief from this nightmare only in the past eight years, is hard for the decent mind to comprehend. On Thursday, the president* signed an order guaranteed to corrupt health insurance marketplaces all across the country, and that corruption will not be an unintended consequence. It will be a deliberate act of vandalism, like cutting a gas line into a house and waiting for the explosion that inevitably will occur.

Trump and that pack o'bastards applauding him are the perps, giggling and sweating into their palms across the street, waiting for the detonation that will shatter so many lives.

 And Kentucky's own AynRandy was there cheering it on.

The Resistance: Keep Fighting Zombie Trumpcare

It's ON!  Today, in every town where someone will die if Trumpcare passes, we will gather to say why our health is on the line.

Zombie trumpcare never dies, and neither will our protests.

In Shelbyville, it's going to be at Fifth and Main, in front of the county Courthouse, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.  Bring signs.  There will be a line on which to hang the reasons Our Lives Are On The Line.

In Louisville, it will be at Metro Hall, 11 a.m.to 1 p.m.

Join us on Saturday, July 29 at Metro Hall in Louisville, 527 W. Jefferson St. Americans are coming together all across the country to say: OUR LIVES ARE ON THE LINE if Republicans pass Trumpcare and strip our health coverage.

Healthcare reform should be a deliberate, thoughtful, and bipartisan effort. Neither the house nor the Senate versions of healthcare legislation achieve bipartisan support and both seek to undermine core tenets of the Affordable Care Act that have helped more than 20 million Americans gain equitable, comprehensive coverage. Don’t let Congress turn back the clock on all the progress that has been made.

Organized by Indivisible Kentucky, this is Louisville’s event in Our Lives On The Line, a nationwide day of action being hosted on July 29 by a diverse group of organizations including The Tax March, The Women’s March, Indivisible, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Our Revolution, Center for American Progress, and others.

WHAT: Our Lives Are on the Line! Rally for Healthcare for All
WHERE: Metro Hall in Louisville, 527 W. Jefferson St.
WHEN: Saturday, July 29, 2017, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE: https://www.facebook.com/events/571851719605104/

Last KY Abortion Clinic Fighting for Life

Yes, Life.  The lives of women suffering from malignant unwanted pregnancies.  Scratch that redundancy: all unwanted pregnancies are malignant.

Yes, Malignant, as in Tumor.  Until it takes a breath outside the womb, it's a tumor.  Dictionary definition: a collection of rapidly growing cells endangering the health and life of the host.  That's what a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, a sperm-penetrated egg is:  a tumor.

Yes, Clump of Cells.  Not a baby.  Not a child.  Not a "preborn" anything. Not a human being of any description.

Which is why anyone attempting to deny the bodily autonomy of a woman by restricting abortions is a sex-terrified, woman-hating, freakazoid piece of shit who should have been drowned at birth.  Which would be murder. Unlike abortion, which is simple removal of a malignant tumor.

Deborah Yetter at the Courier:

Gov. Matt Bevin's administration is seeking to shut down Kentucky's only abortion provider, prompting a federal lawsuit by the clinic to block the move it says would have “a devastating impact on women.”

Bevin’s administration has ordered the EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville to stop providing abortions starting Monday, claiming it lacks proper agreements for patient care in the event of a medical emergency.

EMW's lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Louisville, calls the order "blatantly unconstitutional" and asks a federal judge to bar the Bevin administration from revoking the EMW clinic's license.

"They've made it clear they won't stop until no woman can get an abortion in Kentucky," said Donald L. Cox, a lawyer for EMW. "It's just an attempt to ban abortion in Kentucky."

A Bevin spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

SNIP

But EMW, joined in its lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, said the clinic already complies with the law and says that if the state succeeds in forcing it to close, “abortion will be effectively banned in the commonwealth.”

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to temporarily block state efforts to stop abortions at EMW. It says the clinic has patients scheduled and an abrupt shutdown would deprive them of their right to the procedure.

SNIP

The state's new finding that the agreements are deficient amounts to a "bureaucratic sleight of hand," said Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. "This is an attempt to ban abortion in Kentucky, plain and simple. We are fighting to keep this from happening."

SNIP

The dispute comes amid EMW's legal challenge to a new state law requiring doctors providing abortions to first perform an ultrasound and attempt to show and describe the image of the fetus to the patient. EMW and the ACLU argue the law passed in January by the General Assembly is unconstitutional.

Bevin Backs Bill to Force Suffering Kentuckian to Die of Heroin Overdoses

For the nth time, the heroin epidemic and resulting piles of bodies are not the consequence of giving pain relief to people in chronic pain.

They are the result of refusing legal pain relief to people in pain, thus forcing them to use heroin in desperation, thus dying of the fentanyl overdose dealers are distributing.

And now Governor "I don't give a flying fuck about your pain" Bevin is promoting a bill to make those desperate overdose deaths far, far worse.

 

From the Courier:

 

Gov. Matt Bevin testified Wednesday in support of a bill that would restrict some prescriptions for pain-killers to three-day supplies, saying the commonwealth has a moral obligation to take action to curb the opioid addictions afflicting Kentuckians.

“We’ve got to make it harder to get addicted,” Bevin told state lawmakers.

Nope, you're making it far more likely that people in chronic pain will turn to heroin, you heartless, brainless piece of shit.  It's no coincidence that Kentucky's heroin epidemic started as soon as state law started punishing doctor for prescribing necessary pain relief.

House Bill 333 would prohibit medical professionals from giving patients prescriptions for more than a three-day supply of a Schedule II controlled substance - such as narcotics like OxyContin and Dilaudid - to treat pain as an acute medical condition.

The legislation includes several exceptions to its proposed three-day rule, which will preserve prescribers' ability to make professional judgments on a case-by-case basis, according to its sponsor, Republican Rep. Kimberly Poore Moser of Taylor Mill.

Doctors who determine it’s medically necessary to give a patient a larger supply of a restricted drug could do so as long as they provide justification for that decision. And Schedule II drugs could be prescribed for more than three days to treat chronic or cancer-related pain as well as for patients in hospice care.

“The goal is to reduce the potential for addiction,” Moser said. "This is not telling providers that they can't prescribe more than three days."

Yes, it is.  Kentucky's viciously stupid KASPER prescription-monitoring program strips doctors of their medical license if they step out of line.  Doctors are terrified of losing their livelihoods if they prescribe so much as an aspirin.

Obviously, Bevin and the repug motherfuckers in the General Assembly have never suffered intense chronic pain and been denied relief because of KASPER.

 

I wish agonizing, unending pain on all of them.

Gov. "Forced Birth for All the Bitches" Bevin Orders Doctors to Rape Their Patients

Do not fall for the euphemism: "ultrasound" before an abortion refers to jamming a mechanical object deep into a woman's body against her will.  That's Object Rape, and that's what Bevin signing this bill requires.

From the media advisory:

Gov. Matt Bevin will ceremonially sign two historic pro-life measures during the Kentucky Right to Life Association’s annual “Rally for Life” at the Capitol on Wednesday. 
 

More than a dozen state legislators and pro-life advocates from across the Commonwealth will participate in the event, as Gov. Bevin commemorates the recently enacted Senate Bill 5 (protecting unborn children after 20 weeks of gestation) and House Bill 2 (requiring an ultrasound before a pregnancy is terminated), which both passed with broad bipartisan support in the General Assembly.

Yes, Kentucky DINOs are cowardly, misogynistic pieces of shit.  What else is new?

Not this:

State-sanction rape is not enough for Stan "Nobody can have sex that I don't approve of" Lee.

From the Courier:

Many conservatives have touted "defunding" Planned Parenthood as a goal for years, but a new bill targeting that organization potentially could affect a wider range of groups, including churches, if Kentucky's Republican-run legislature approves it.

House Bill 149 would prohibit public funds from going to any organizations or individuals that provide abortion services or are affiliates of that type of group. It includes exceptions for hospitals, universities and medical schools.

The bill's sponsor, Rep. Stan Lee, R-Lexington, said it targets Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, which currently doesn't provide abortions in the state. Critics say the legislation could prevent other organizations from getting public money.

"This legislation is directed at essentially defunding Planned Parenthood," Lee said. “This was designed to ... make sure there wasn’t a way for them to kind of sidestep this requirement, get around it and obtain funding.”

Lee said he filed HB 149 because he didn't think a similar bill in the state Senate went far enough in terms of preventing Planned Parenthood from getting a shot at public funding.

Under his bill, an organization wouldn't have to perform abortions to be considered an abortion-services provider. The bill says abortion services also include providing referrals to or information about facilities where abortions are performed as well as "providing counseling, advice, written materials or other information that encourages or promotes abortion."

 

Yeah, it's an unconstitutional gag rule and completely typical of Stan "No saying anything I don't want you to say" Lee.

 

Somebody need to start counting the bodies of all the Kentucky women who now cannot get health care anywhere.

So When the Vaccine for Climate-Change-Caused Yellow Fever Is Rationed, Trumpies Go to the Back of the Line

Dr. Walter Reed was a government employee.  A government-employed scientist.  A government-employed scientist using government funding to put an end to a millenias-old scourge that killed millions until government-funded scientific research attacked it.

 

Charlie Pierce:

Reed's discovery of its source ranks in medical history just a little bit behind the eradication of smallpox. But it never really went away—it killed almost 350 people in Angola last year. One of the reasons that outbreak got out of hand is that there happens to be a worldwide shortage of the vaccine against Yellow Fever. Can we have a show of hands from everyone who thinks the current administration is prepared to have epidemic disease land on its doorstep?

Bevin Can't Wait to Kill Half a Million Kentuckians

Because once the ACA - also known as kynect and Obamacare and expanded Medicaid - goes away, we'll be back to the suffering of 10 years ago, when you couldn't get health insurance if you had a pre-existing condition or if you worked a minimum-wage job.

The suffering of 10 years ago, when a single bad accident or serious illness or cancer diagnosis would either bankrupt you or kill you because you turned down treatment you couldn't afford.

The suffering of 10 years ago - only worse, because high-risk pools Do. Not. Work. - is what Governor "I got mine, fuck you" Bevin can't wait to establish in Kentucky

 

From Cincinnati.com:

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin is urging GOP leaders in Congress to repeal Obamacare “in its entirety,” including the Medicaid expansion and popular consumer protections.

In a Jan. 6 letter to House Republicans, Bevin did not advocate any major replacement ideas. Instead, he said Kentucky should be given “maximum flexibility” to regulate health insurance as the state did before Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

“States understand the unique challenges and demographics of their own populations, so repealing the cumbersome one-size-fits-all” law will allow states to “be nimble” and develop their own health care solutions, Bevin wrote. “Congress should repeal the ACA in its entirety and permit Kentucky to return to regulating the health insurance market under its existing state authority.”

A spokeswoman for the governor did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the Kentucky Republican’s letter stands in sharp contrast to missives from other GOP governors, including Ohio’s John Kasich, who called on lawmakers in Washington to preserve the Medicaid expansion and other elements of the ACA.

The Medicaid expansion helped drive down Kentucky’s uninsured rate from 14.3 percent in 2013 to 6 percent in 2015, one of the sharpest declines of any state in the country, according to data from the U.S. Census and an analysis by Gallup, the nonpartisan polling outlet.

Sold Down the River

Yeah, all you Kentucky coal county folks who voted 90 percent for a corrupt game-show host, his repug buddies in Congress are now killing your union health care and retirement.  Stop acting surprised.  Hillary Clinton and all us commie muslin terrist feminazi faggots have been telling you so for months.

Charlie Pierce:

... the (repug) elves in the Congress are busy, busy, busy selling out the Rust Belt suckers to whom, if the guilt-ridden elite political media is to be believed, we all owe a cookie for the next decade. First up, the coal miners! From the MetroNews in West Virginia:

The Miners Protection Act to address health and pension benefits for coal miners and their families will not be included in a continuing resolution bill, according to a Tuesday announcement. Congress said the bill, which would continue to fund the federal government, only has four months of funding for those retired miners and their widows. Cecil Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America, called the announcement "a slap in the face to all 22,000 of them who desperately need their health care next month, next year and for the rest of their lives."

But, wait, isn't West Virginia represented in the Senate by that highly influential Democrat, Joe Manchin, who's been running around telling every camera crew inside the Beltway that that his party has to get right with the workin' man? Yeah, he's got the juice, no question.

Approximately 12,500 retired union miners and the widows of retirees stand to lose their pension and health care benefits across the nation

And those stalwart Kentucky defenders of Big Coal - which will benefit enormously from the ass-fuck, as opposed to the actual coal miners, AKA the ass-fuckees -  Senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, and Representatives Hal Rogers, Thomas Massie, Brett Guthrie, Andy Barr and Ed Whitfield, repugs all, voted for the ass-fucking then refused to face the voters they just ass-fucked.

Folks, you're being sold down the river. I feel for you because selling you down the river is not good for the country. It never was. It is not immigrants who are selling you down the river. It is not minorities who are selling you down the river. It is not LGBTQ folks who are selling you down the river. Please remember all of that when you wake up pissed that you're, you know, down the river. If you look around the table and can't figure out who the mark is…

When They Suffer and Die, I Will Laugh

No sympathy for the greedy morons who voted for a fascist tangelo who's going to destroy everything good Obama gave the ungrateful shits.

Rude Pundit:

And I'm gonna bet a fuckload of people who got insurance through the Affordable Care Act, either through the exchanges or through the Medicaid expansion, voted for Donald Trump and Republicans, who have vowed to make repealing the law one of their first tasks.

And when they lose their health insurance, when they get sick, and when they die and when their children die, I will laugh at them.

Does that seem harsh? I mean, I know, I know, we're all supposed to pretend the ugly months that preceded Tuesday never happened. I wish Hillary Clinton had walked up to the microphone yesterday and said, "Burn shit down. Burn down everything the misogynists built. Bring the country to its filthy knees." But, alas, both she and President Obama went with the conciliatory, healing approach, as if somehow those who have broken the country want it to heal. They don't. They want it to scar.

But, no, no, "Stop Shaming Trump Supporters," liberal rabbi Michael Lerner tells us. "The left needs to stop ignoring people’s inner pain and fear. The racism, sexism and xenophobia used by Mr. Trump to advance his candidacy does not reveal an inherent malice in the majority of Americans," he writes. This presupposes that the racism, etc. isn't intrinsic to the fear, that those who have learned and expressed and exulted in hate of others for the crime of not being white and Christian and male are somehow able to be convinced by telling them we understand their class anxiety and poverty. God, how that would be amazing. It would be even more amazing if the left hadn't just been told to take the health insurance we just got most of them and go fuck ourselves with it. And you know what sucks about being a liberal? When we get a chance, we'll be right back at it, trying to make sure these same short-sighted twat fleas can have access to medical care.

This conflagration of anger at the coalition of dumb fucks, assholes, and shitheads who voted for Trump is going to take a long time to calm down to the usual dull roar of blind rage at the fuckery of the ignorant. The idiot hordes have overrun the joint, like barbarians have ever since they evolved enough to wield clubs. Shit, most Trump voters don't have an idea of what the fuck he's gonna do, which makes them that much more pathetic.

SNIP

No, I'm not playing nice. I'm not gonna fuckin' pretend, as the country falls apart, as attacks on Muslims and others increase, as the world distances itself from us, that there was something wrong with me, that I didn't understand Trump voters' concerns, that I didn't try to elect people whose policies attempted to make their lives better. I get it. They don't.

I don't need to reach out to arsonists to understand fire.

Who to Thank

This giving your invisible sky wizard friend credit for what is actually accomplished by experts who went to school for a decade and practiced for several more just makes me insane.

Divine Irony:

Health Insurers Throw Tantrum Because Profits Not Obscene Any More

Poor babies.  Obamacare exchanges reduced their profits to merely outrageous and disgusting. How will they ever survive?

By bitching and pissing and moaning and holding their breath until they turn blue in the hopes somebody will kill off that health-care-for-everyone Affordable Care Act and let them get back to fucking over everybody who is not a healthy 25-year-old and making obscene profits at the expense of working people.

Governor Shitting His Pants to use this corporate fraud to justify killing off the last vestiges of kynect, along with the hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians who depend on it to keep them alive, in 3, 2, 1 ....

TPM:

Aetna’s announcement comes after UnitedHealth said in April it would be cutting its marketplace involvement significantly, and Humana has also signaled a retreat from ACA exchanges. All three decisions have prompted Republicans to declare that Obamacare is failing and that they were right all along. But experts say some of the criticisms miss the nuance on what is actually driving the cutbacks.

“It’s not a statement that the marketplaces can’t work or that they aren't working," Linda Blumberg, a healthcare policy fellow at the Urban Institute, told TPM. "It’s a statement that these insurers are by and large not terribly competitive the way they came in, and if they are going to make money in this market they're going to have restructure and re-orient to the characteristics of what the consumers want.”

SNIP

Not every carrier is struggling on the exchanges, and consumers’ willingness to shop around for deals has benefited insurers that offer plans that are on the cheaper end.

“There are insurance companies that are doing well and those are companies that have experience serving a low-income population,” Cox said.

Many of those carriers offer plans with narrow provider networks, while big insurers like Aetna and UnitedHealth have tended towards broader provider plans, which offer consumers more choices but at a higher cost.

“What consumers are showing time and again on these marketplaces is that they are very willing to trade a broad choice of providers for a low price, and the carriers that figured that out early are the ones that seem to be doing well,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute.

There is the possibility that the big insurers who are now pulling back will re-enter the marketplaces once they're better equipped to meet its demands. UnitedHealth, for instance, kept its new, more boutique-style subsidiary, Harken Health in the Indiana and Georgia exchanges where the insurer was otherwise withdrawing. It has signaled it could expand Harken Health to Florida.

"I would expect that, in a lot of those areas, they'll come back in. But they'll come back in with different looking products that are more similar to the ones that are competing well,” Blumberg said.

It's called competition, motherfuckers. 

HT End Opiate Abuse: Legalize Pot

But they won't because ending opioid abuse is not the point of stupid laws like KASPER. 

 

The point of KASPER is to keep Big Pharma obscenely rich, the population permanently disabled by chronic pain and doctors cowed into obedience by the terroristic threat of losing their license and livelihood.

 

From Kevin Drum:

Here's a fascinating study. A pair of researchers at the University of Georgia took a look at what happened to prescriptions for opioid painkillers in states that passed medical marijuana laws. Over at the Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham summarizes their results:

They found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013,prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law. The drops were quite significant: In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication.

Needless to say, the painkiller industry would much rather have you gulp down their addictive and lucrative product. They are not taking the threat from medical marijuana lying down:

The tanking numbers for painkiller prescriptions in medical marijuana states are likely to cause some concern among pharmaceutical companies. These companies have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization.

Pharmaceutical companies have also lobbied federal agencies directly to prevent the liberalization of marijuana laws. In one case, recently uncovered by the office of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the Department of Health and Human Services recommended that naturally derived THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, be moved from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 of the Controlled Substances Act — a less restrictive category that would acknowledge the drug's medical use and make it easier to research and prescribe. Several months after HHS submitted its recommendation, at least one drug company that manufactures a synthetic version of THC — which would presumably have to compete with any natural derivatives — wrote to the Drug Enforcement Administration to express opposition to rescheduling natural THC, citing "the abuse potential in terms of the need to grow and cultivate substantial crops of marijuana in the United States."

The study estimates that if all 50 states legalized medical marijuana, Medicare would save $500 million per year in painkiller spending. It's hard to extrapolate that to overall spending on painkiller medication, but the total savings would be on the order of $2 billion per year—maybe more.

Privatization Always Kills: UL Hospital "Unsafe"

Shame on everyone who ever fell for the scam that public services should be "run like a business." A business does not serve the public. A business rakes in profit for its owner(s.) Public services - like hospitals and universities - do not rake in profits. Its owners are the taxpaying public to which the public entity provides services.

The two are not the same and cannot work together. This is fucking obvious, people, and always has been.

Privatization is an unholy partnership between anti-government conservatives and greedhead corporations sucking up tax dollars for bad service.

From the Herald:

A leading University of Louisville surgeon says staffing cuts at U of L Hospital since a private company took over its management have made it unsafe, and that the hospital has "never been worse" in his 34 years at the facility.

In an email to the university's top health officials, Dr. J. David Richardson, vice chair of surgery and the current president of the American College of Surgeons, says the hospital is facing "major" safety issues, reported The Courier-Journal (http://cjky.it/1PiCGFg).

The hospital is poorly staffed at night, resulting in emergency room crowding, Richardson said. The Intensive Care Unit, he said, is understaffed as well.

Furthermore, Richardson said it's "virtually impossible" to do clinic research in the hospital. One approved study was canceled last week because of inadequate nurse staffing, resulting in a "major embarrassment" for the hospital, he said.

The only solution, according to Richardson, is to cut ties with the company that took over hospital management in 2013 and laid off several employees shortly thereafter.

"They are destroying the hospital," Richardson said of KentuckyOne Health.

Talking Points Memo has started a new investigative series on privatization.  Part One is on how the scam got started.