The month before making that famous descent on his own personal gilded escalator, to bask in the adulation of a hired crowd while excoriating those less fortunate than himself, a certain overweight draft dodger with implausible hair proclaimed on Twitter, “I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid. Huckabee copied me.”
Yesterday, presuming things proceed as planned, his administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS] will…. We don’t even have to spell it out, do we?
We will, anyway: barring any unforseen disruptions, CMS Director Seema Verma will give New Hampshire, and other states which expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, a new tool to deny health care to those who can’t afford it: aptly-named block grants.
Instead of the current system, under which eligible patients’ health care providers submit bills for the treatment rendered—local control, as it were—unelected Federal bureaucrats will decide how much health care those patients deserve, and write the State a check to cover that amount.
What could possibly go wrong?
This latest effort to restrict health care among the undeserving comes on the heels of the apparent failure of an earlier scheme. Under a Dickensian work requirement program lauded by Hereditary Governor Chris Sununu, Medicaid recipients would have been required to work 100 hours a month. To make sure they weren’t cheating, they would have been required to submit documentation, on a monthly basis, to a small army of otherwise useless bureaucrats.
While these programs often appear to be simply instances of people in power putting a boot in the ribs of those already on the ground, their proponents uniformly assert that their motive is purely beneficial—they want to save the taxpayers’ precious dollars. Somehow their concern seems…intermittent.
Last year Politico reported that CMS, which “has its own large communications shop, including about two dozen people who handle the press,” had shelled out, in several contracts with a number of Republican-connected PR flaks, at least $3 million taxpayer dollars, most of which went to stories glorifying Verma’s outstanding work.
Explaining that this was perfectly fine, Tom Corry, CMS’s “new top communications official,” told Politico, “we use our resources judiciously. We’re not wasting the taxpayer dollar.”
Oh. Our eyes must be lying again.
How did Escalator Man discover this gem of a public servant?
A 1996 grad of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health—formerly a reputable institution—Verma made her bones in Indiana, Vice President Pence’s home state. She founded SVC Inc., a company that developed a health insurance plan “ostensibly designed for people with low income,” according to the hack editor’s friend, Wikipedia. “The plan requires participants to pay into a health savings account and has high deductibles. According to Verma, ‘you have to make your contribution every month, with a 60-day grace period. If you don’t make the contribution, you’re out of the program for 12 months. It’s a strong personal responsibility mechanism.’”
Right: people who are barely making the rent are going to park all that abundant spare cash in a plan that assures only one thing—that the plan gets paid. If keeping the patient alive gets too expensive, though, it’s “So long, loser. Thanks for all the premiums.”
That “personal responsibility” line is particularly rich considering a visit Verma paid to San Francisco in July, 2018. She delivered a speech—ironically enough, at the Commonwealth Club—in which she claimed that adoption of Medicare for All would result in Medicare for None. (This, in a nation that is unique on several fronts among allegedly civilized countries: our health care costs per capita are much higher, our overall health is poorer, our longevity is declining, and—purely a coincidence—we’re the only nation saddled with a bloodsucking private health insurance care denial industry, exemplified by corporations such as SVC Inc.).
Anyway, while in San Francisco, Verma’s luggage was stolen from her rented Chevy Tahoe. She alleges it contained two dozen pieces of jewelry appraised at $43,065, some clothing valued at $2,000, and another $2,000 worth of the usual necessities, such as a $325 jar of moisturizer.
Naturally, she filed a $47,000 claim for reimbursement with the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department, well-versed in these matters, did what Verma’s SVC has doubtlessly done thousands of times. It searched through the rules, found one that said stolen jewelry is not covered, and reimbursed her with a check that covered six percent of her loss.
She’s lucky she didn’t lose a vital organ—“Here you go, Seema: six percent of a small intestine.”
Among those treasures she did lose was an Ivanka Trump-brand pendant which sells for $5,900—a little more than the $5,736 Medicaid spends each year on the average patient.
Thursday’s attack on Medicaid will be just the opening salvo. Trump admitted as much last week, whilst hobnobbing in Davos.
“[Will] entitlements ever be on your plate?” he was asked. Mister “Say the Quiet Part Loud” replied, “At some point they will be.” For a few moments he blathered simultaneously, in his signature aphasic fashion, about the “tremendous growth. We’re going to have tremendous growth”—which no one else sees coming—while reiterating his intention to rob the elderly of their benefits: “This next year I…it’ll be toward the end of the year. The growth is going to be incredible. And at the right time, we will take a look at that. You know, that’s actually the easiest of all things, if you look, cause it’s such a…”
President Trumpsterfire was vague about the timing, but we think he meant, “after my re-election, that’s when the knives come out.”
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Hmmm…
“Our corporate media system prioritizes making money over producing adversarial journalism and covering working-class issues. We should dare to imagine something different: a public media system that privileges democracy over profits.
“Our goal must be to reinvent news media, not shore up old commercial models. Given this chance to unhook journalism from profit imperatives, we can reclaim and reinvent a public good. By designing a system that actually serves democracy, we can finally create the media we need.”
Victor Picard, from Democracy Without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society, excerpted in Jacobin, January 27th.
Their Future, Their Climate
“…global warming has left its mark on Garmisch-Partenkirchen—the site of the 1936 Winter Olympics—putting the town’s identity and affluence at risk. It’s January, and there’s so little natural snow that anxiety is building whether upcoming ski races can go ahead.” – Bloomberg News
Thanks to climate change, New Hampshire’s lucrative ski industry and its tradition of maple sugaring—which, though less important monetarily, carries great meaning in other ways—are now in a precarious state, making them what economists would call wasting assets: “assets which have a limited life and therefore decrease in value over time.” Under Republican doctrine, shouldn’t the owners of ski resorts—and of farms that make maple syrup—be able to sue the shareholders of the fossil fuel industry for wrongful taking?
One of our most faithful readers, over Acworth way, alerted us to a New Hampshire Youth Climate & Clean Energy Town Hall to be held in Concord, on February 5th, six days before the New Hampshire primary. While it is open to the general public, it’s apparently intended primarily for high school and college students to meet with and question several of the presidential candidates. And why should “the youth” not have such an event? They’re going to have to live with a lot more of this dubious future than us fogies. The dayl-ong event will be held at the Bank of New Hampshire Stage in Concord, wherever that is; it shouldn’t be too hard to find in this day and age. The event is sponsored by the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and Stonyfield Organic.
Recently it was so cold in Florida that iguanas began falling out of trees.
Flag Police: Greenville Station
Jim Giddings, of Greenville, sends the following dispatch:
“We had a little press conference on a cold, windy Friday, to protest the fact that Governor Sununu had arranged a community development tax break for Waterville Valley while ignoring Greenville, whose median income would definitely qualify for such a tax break.
The Flag Police are dismayed but not surprised to see this evidence of the consequences of our Hereditary Governor’s skewed, self-serving, and Trump-like priorities.—HQ
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Don’t Miss the Bus!
The deadline fast approaches—deposits are due by February 14th for the 2020 Sankofa Bus Tour to Washington D.C.’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Scheduled for Monday, August 10th through Friday, August 14th, this trip will include a VIP motor-coach from Portsmouth, N.H. to and around Washington, D.C., five days and four nights lodging at the Madison Hilton, visits to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, the Frederick Douglass House Museum, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, and more.
The total cost is $955 per person, with a $355 non-refundable deposit per person due on February 14, 2020. An installment payment plan is available.
For information contact the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire, 222 Court Street, Portsmouth, N.H. 03801; (603) 570-8466; or email info@blackheritagetrailnh.org.
We Can’t Forget, They Won’t Remember
This is the 51st anniversary of the Tet Offensive, when Vietnamese communists gave a lesson in geography to those Americans who were capable of learning: they were born there, and, if necessary, they would die there, if that was what it would take to get us the hell out of there.
That lesson stuck in the minds of most Americans throughout the 1970s. Then the Gipper found it useful to turn the U.S. into a re-education camp. He convinced a lot of people—including a surprising number of veterans—that we lost an unwinnable war because the media told the truth about it.
Veterans who had been badly treated by the establishment—first by the Department of Defense [DoD], then by the VA and traditional veterans service organizations—began to be portrayed instead as the hapless victims of the media and spitting protestors.
In fact, many veterans were welcomed by the anti-war movement. Nevertheless, improbable incidents were conjured up in which mobs of protesting dweebs somehow cowed and spat upon combat veterans.
Jerry Lembke, a Vietnam veteran himself, who went on to become a professor of sociology, rigorously scoured the public record for contemporary reports of such incidents. Finding none, he wrote a book: The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, [New York University Press, 1998.] He concluded, “given the manipulation of information and images that began with the Nixon administration and continued at the hands of filmmakers and the news media during the 1970s and 1980s, it would be remarkable if a majority of Americans had not come to believe that Vietnam veterans were abused by the antiwar movement.”
Perversely, by portraying its veterans as betrayed heroes, those who supported the war were able to rehabilitate it—which was probably the point in the first place: Vietnam had stood in the way of further imperial ventures.
The latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction [SIGAR] demonstrates the cost of forgetting the lesson Uncle Ho so generously taught us 51 years ago:
“…in Afghanistan, most military, embassy, and civilian personnel rotate out of country after a year or less. This means that new people are constantly arriving, all with the best of intentions, but with little or no knowledge of what their predecessors were doing, the problems they faced, or what worked and what didn’t work. SIGAR’s Lessons Learned Program is a unique source of institutional memory to help address this ‘annual lobotomy.’”
The “annual lobotomy” was invented in Vietnam with the introduction of the one-year tour of duty. DoD policy for officers was more extreme: they rotated in and out on six-month tours. All too often they started out getting people killed, and by the time they wised up, it was time to go home.
The latest SIGAR report is enough to cause déjà vu: “To be effective, reconstruction efforts must be based on a deep understanding of the historical, social, legal, and political traditions of the host nation. The United States sent personnel into Afghanistan who did not know the difference between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and who lacked any substantive knowledge of Afghan society, local dynamics, and power relationships.”
Swap out a few proper nouns, substitute mud for dust, and you’re back in Vietnam.