Blue Shield of California Invests In The LGBT Community

By Guest Blogger on Jun 10, 2011 at 8:50 pm

Our guest bloggers are Kellan Baker and Mark Hines.

In an unprecedented announcement on Tuesday, Blue Shield of California announced that it will cap profits moving forward at 2 percent of total annual revenue. To kick off this initiative, Blue Shield is giving back $180 million of its 2010 profits to the people it insures and their communities.

LGBT Californians should welcome this move by Blue Shield. Some of those who will be receiving rebates on their premiums are members of the LGBT community. But more importantly, Blue Shield is taking a step toward the kind of social responsibility that businesses everywhere should be pursuing. Corporate social responsibility is particularly important in the health insurance industry, where the initiative that insurance carriers take to help extend affordable, accessible coverage to underserved communities – such as the LGBT community – can literally mean the difference between life and death.

California is home to an estimated 1.8 million LGBT people. Discrimination in employment, relationship recognition, and insurance industry policies mean that many LGBT Californians are uninsured. Being uninsured, particularly when combined with the social exclusion that many LGBT people experience, contributes to significant health disparities for the LGBT community. These disparities include higher rates of exposure to violence, HIV/AIDS, and mental health concerns such as depression.

The health disparities and widespread unavailability of insurance that affect the LGBT community make accessible health care facilities such as community health centers especially important for LGBT people and their families. The Blue Shield of California Foundation, which will receive $3 million from the profit cap announced on Tuesday, helps fund the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Center and other health centers that provide vital services to the LGBT community.

Blue Shield is also helping to fund the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in California, both through the Blue Shield Foundation and through donations such as the $10 million from the profit cap that will go toward developing effective models for accountable care organizations (ACOs), a major focus of health care reform.

This support for the Affordable Care Act is of vital importance for the LGBT community. LGBT people, like members of other underserved communities, must fight constantly to try to keep themselves and their families healthy. Their experiences expose our current health system’s failure to serve the many Americans who cannot secure access to insurance coverage and affordable health care. The Affordable Care Act is a crucial step in making our nation’s health system responsive to the needs of everyone in America, including LGBT people.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, many LGBT people who have never been able to afford health insurance or health care will be able to apply for Medicaid or affordable private coverage in every state. LGBT people will not be subject to denials of insurance coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions or to loss of vital coverage when they become ill. The Affordable Care Act is also key to efforts such as expanding LGBT cultural competency in the health care workforce, making preventive care available to everyone who needs it, improving data collection to better identify and address LGBT health disparities, and recognizing the increasing diversity of America’s families.

The Affordable Care Act is a crucial part of making our health system better serve LGBT Americans and their friends, families, and neighbors. But new laws can’t get us there alone. Businesses, particularly those that work for profit in the health sector, need to pitch in and help make sure that everyone can get the support and care they need to live healthy lives. Blue Shield of California has taken an important first step, and others should follow its lead.

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Economy

Tim Pawlenty Believes In The Tax Fairy: Tax Cuts ‘Always Produce An Increase In Revenue’

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 10, 2011 at 6:45 pm

One of the most persistent myths amongst conservatives is that tax cuts magically produce an increase in revenues. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they continue to make this thoroughly debunked claim, keeping the story of the “tax fairy” alive and well.

Last year, during the debate over whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) claimed that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” Today, 2012 GOP hopeful Tim Pawlenty — after releasing a tax plan this week that would cost $7.8 trillion, three times as much as the Bush tax cuts — appeared on Fox News and made a even more audacious claim:

Keep in mind, whether it be the Bush tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts, or other tax cuts, they always produce an increase in revenue. There’s no dispute about that…We don’t have to guess what will happen to revenues if we do bold tax cuts, and mine are amongst the boldest in the modern history of the country. We saw that the revenues increased dramatically because of President Reagan’s tax cuts, same with Kennedy, same to significant extent under President Bush the second. So it’s not a question of whether revenues are going to go up. They will.

Watch it:

This is simply nonsense. As this graph shows, the 1981 Reagan tax cuts and the 2001/2003 Bush tax cuts were both followed by drops in revenue:

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote, “the revenue track under Reagan looks a lot like the track under Bush: a drop in revenues, then a resumption of growth, but no return to the previous trend. This is exactly what you would expect to see if supply-side economics were just plain wrong: revenues are permanently reduced relative to what they would otherwise have been.”

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NEWS FLASH

Stephen Colbert Grills Fracking Lobbyist Tom Ridge | Stephen Colbert grilled former Pennsylvania governor and current natural gas lobbyist Tom Ridge on the dangers of hydraulic fracturing last night: “One of the things I like about this is that during the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney’s energy taskforce made sure that the gas companies did not have to reveal what the chemicals were that were being pumped into the ground. Now, it’s been reported that some are things like kerosene, benzene, urea, toluene – how many of those can I feed my toddler? Because it’s perfectly safe, right?” Watch it:

Health

Methodology Questions Swirl Around McKinsey’s Employer Survey Faulting Health Law

By Igor Volsky on Jun 10, 2011 at 6:05 pm

Earlier this week, McKinsey published an employer survey which found that 30 percent of businesses could drop coverage as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans quickly seized on the story to further their argument that American’s won’t be able to keep the coverage they have, even though McKinsey refused to release the methodology behind their report.

Now, Greg Sargent reports that “the White House, as well as top Democrats on key House and Senate committees, have privately contacted McKinsey to ask for details on the study’s methodology. According to an Obama administration official and a source on the House Ways and Means Committee, the company refused.” Anonymous sources are also telling Brian Beutler that “the survey was not conducted using McKinsey’s typical, meticulous methodology“:

But multiple sources both within and outside the firm tell TPM the survey was not conducted using McKinsey’s typical, meticulous methodology. Indeed, the article the firm published was not intended to give the subject matter the same authoritative treatment as more thorough studies on the same topic — particularly those conducted by numerous think tanks, and the Congressional Budget Office, which came to the opposite conclusion. And that’s created a clamor within the firm at high levels to set the record straight.

“This particular survey wasn’t designed in away that would allow it to be peer review published or cited academically,” said one source familiar with the controversy. [...]

Another keyed-in source says McKinsey is unlikely to release the survey materials because “it would be damaging to them.”

Both sources disagree with the results of the survey, which was devised by consultants without particular expertise in this area, not by the firm’s health experts.

A third source speculates that the firm may have reached its outlying conclusion by basing its questions on the firm’s own advice to clients on how best to arbitrage the new reforms.

As Paul Krugman concludes, “One has to assume that there was something terribly wrong with the study. At any rate, nobody should be citing it until or unless McKinsey comes clean.”

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Alyssa

Closing Credits and a Programming Note

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 10, 2011 at 6:02 pm

-Hop in the comment threads on the first installment of the Red Mars book club. And get your requests for summer TV recaps in by Monday.

-Colin Hanks is going to kill a bunch of ladies.

-Not content with the medieval decadence in Game of Thrones, HBO will make an I, Claudius miniseries.

-A Gawker-as-Bright-Lights-Big-City movie is not actually the world’s worst idea.

-I’m traveling this weekend for one of my dearest friend’s wedding, which means the Game of Thrones open thread might be a little late on Monday. But it will happen, I promise, and you will get a little something extra over the weekend in exchange. And in honor of David and Joanna, Spoon’s cover of The Damned’s “Love Song”:

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Justice

Herman Cain Breaks With NRA On The Second Amendment

By Ian Millhiser on Jun 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this week, former pizza executive and GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain took a surprisingly liberal view on gun control:

BLITIZER: Let’s talk about gun control. Do you support any gun control?

CAIN: I support the Second Amendment.

BLITZER: So you don’t? What’s the answer on gun control?

CAIN: The answer on gun control is I support, strongly support, the Second Amendment. I don’t support onerous legislation that’s going to restrict people’s rights in order to be able to protect themselves as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

BLITZER: Should states or local governments be allowed to the gun situation . . .

CAIN: Yes

BLITZER: So the answer is yes?

CAIN: Yes. The answer is yes, that should be a state’s decision.

Watch it:

Cain’s position — that Congress can’t regulate guns but states can — not only places him well to the left of the NRA, it also places him at odds with the Supreme Court. In McDonald v. Chicago, the justices held 5-4 that the Second Amendment applies equally to the states and to the federal government. So any gun control law that Congress could not enact also cannot be enacted by state or local governments as Cain would prefer.

Cain’s relatively moderate stance on gun control also places him well to the left of the Republican Party. Senate Republicans savaged Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation hearings because she took the Herman Cain position on gun control while she was a lower court judge — although Sotomayor’s decision was the correct one because it came down before the Supreme Court changed its interpretation of the Second Amendment in McDonald.

To be fair to Cain, however, it is much more likely that he simply doesn’t know anything about the Second Amendment than that he actually is staking out a somewhat liberal position on guns. In his first Sunday show interview, Cain exposed his utter ignorance of foreign policy by not understanding what the Palestinian “right of return” is. Cain launched his campaign with a speech that mixed up the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He claimed that Congress is powerless to regulate bankruptcy, even though the Constitution says exactly the opposite. And he embraced a wildly unconstitutional plan to force Islamic federal employees to swear a loyalty oath.

In other words, Cain is clearly more interested in making the Constitution up as he goes along than in actually following it.

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Politics

John Birch Society Celebrates Koch Family For Their Role In Founding The Hate Group

By Lee Fang on Jun 10, 2011 at 6:00 pm

Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch have been dominant financiers for conservative front groups and nonprofits for nearly three decades. Their money has flowed to organizations dedicated to lobbying for corporate and upper income tax cuts, as well as to groups responsible for mobilizing Tea Party rallies against President Obama. But the Koch family’s association with fringe right-wing groups began a generation earlier with Fred Koch, the patriarch of the clan.

Fred not only founded the company now known as Koch Industries, he also was a founding member of the John Birch Society. As a founding board member, Fred helped engineer a hysterical wave of attacks on labor, intellectuals, public education, liberal clergy members, and other pillars of society he viewed as a threat. Birchers decried everyone from former President Eisenhower to water utility administrators as pawns in a global communist conspiracy. In the last two years, as the Koch name has become synonymous with right-wing plutocracy in the United States, the Koch family has played down its relation to the Birchers.

However, the New American, the official mouthpiece of the John Birch Society, published a piece this morning celebrating Fred and the Koch family’s pivotal role in developing the group:

Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives, from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television — all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. [...] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer. He spent a generous portion of his later years using his wealth and influence to fight the communism he abhorred. He was an early member of the The John Birch Society’s National Council, an advisory group to JBS founder Robert Welch. Koch supported a variety of freedom-related causes, all the while continuing to build the company today known as Koch Industries.

The Bircher ode to Koch glosses over Fred’s record of bigotry. In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a “mongrelization” of the races.

Although the present-day Koch brothers try to eschew explicit racism, their top Tea Party front group, Americans for Prosperity, is currently pursuing similar racial segregation goals. In North Carolina, the Americans for Prosperity chapter led a campaign to end a highly successful public school integration system.

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Economy

Gov. Brewer Calls Special Session To Extend Unemployment Benefits, But State Republicans Refuse

By Pat Garofalo on Jun 10, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Earlier this week, Danielle Lazarowitz reported that Gov. Bev Perdue (D-NC), fed up with a recalcitrant legislature, issued an executive order to preserve unemployment benefits for residents in her state. This contradicted efforts on the part of conservatives in several states to gut unemployment benefits, even with long-term unemployment levels higher than they were during the Great Depression.

And Perdue now has an unlikely ally. Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) — notorious for signing Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB-1070, and for propagating false stories about beheadings in the Arizona desert — called a special session of the Arizona legislature today to try to ensure that Arizonans don’t have their benefits cut off:

“Extending benefits for the unemployed is the right thing to do both for our local economy and for Arizona families,” said Governor Brewer. “For our economy, these federal dollars represent an immediate cash infusion of nearly $3.5 million a week as recipients spend on necessities like food, rent and clothing. For as many as 45,000 Arizonans in need, these federal dollars may mean the difference between making the rent and living on the streets.” [...]

“The Legislature and I have taken concrete steps in recent months to turn Arizona’s economy around, and we’ve begun to see a lot of positive indicators,” said Governor Brewer. “But with the state unemployment rate still at 9.3 percent – and even higher in many rural areas – we can’t pretend there aren’t thousands of our fellow citizens who remain jobless and in need of assistance.“

Brewer, while wrong about so many things, is right on the money here. In a horrible job market, unemployment benefits provide a vital lifeline to workers who are out of work and can’t find a job through no fault of their own. As we’ve shown, unemployment benefits are critical to boosting the economy and reducing poverty.

However, the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature refused to play along, abandoning the special session this afternoon without extending benefits. “It’s shocking that we’re not going to fix this today,” said the state’s House Minority Leader Chad Campbell (D).

At the moment, eight states (Alaska, Arizona, Utah, Kansas, Wisconsin, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) and the District of Columbia are about to see their benefits expire. Other states, like Michigan and Florida, are actively cutting back on benefits. Brewer is on the right side of this issue, and the rest of Arizona’s lawmakers should join her.

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Yglesias

Mercatus Institute Study Refutes Libertarian Conception of Freedom

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 10, 2011 at 5:30 pm

The Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, produced a study today purporting to show that New York and California are the least-free places in the United States while New Hampshire and South Dakota are the freest:

Reasonable people can disagree as to whether there’s more freedom in Los Angeles or Brooklyn, and there may be good reasons to move from either place to Sioux Falls, but obviously “for the freedom” is not one of those reasons. For the lower taxes? Sure. Because there’s less government regulation? Maybe so. But because there’s more freedom? Clearly not. They say that they “explicitly ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework” but all that goes to show is that their understanding of the individual rights framework offers an unsound conception of freedom. These answers are clearly and uncontroversially mistaken. Nick Gillespie, card-carrying libertarian, wrote a good column about this six years ago back when Kansas was the allegedly freest state and New York was still the least-free.

To state the obvious, New York and California contain gigantic, prosperous, freedom-enhancing metropolitan areas to which people flock from all the world ’round. New Hampshire has a funny parody song. It’s possible (I’d even say likely) that there would be even more freedom in California were the state to have less economic regulation, but that’s a different issue.

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Security

Green Movement Spokesperson: Iran ‘Regime Would Really Like For Someone To Come Drop Two Bombs On Natanz’

By Ali Gharib on Jun 10, 2011 at 5:30 pm

Many Iran hawks who claim to support Iran’s embattled opposition Green Movement say a military attack on Iran would spur the population there to overthrow the regime. Neoconservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, who advocates for airstrikes, wrote that “an attack would serve as a tipping point rather than a rallying point.” Another neocon, Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an admirer of the Iranian opposition, recommended Israel launch strikes against Iran in the Weekly Standard last year. He wrote:

Too much has been made in the West of the Iranian reflex to rally round the flag after an Israeli (or American) preventive strike… Neither the Israelis nor anyone else need fear for the Green Movement.

But there is a serious knowledge gap in Washington about what the Green Movement inside Iran is. Today at a forum with a close adviser of Green Movement leader and presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, a very different view — from someone from the actual Green Movement inside Iran — came to the fore.

Ardechir Amir Arjomand, an Iranian lawyer who’s now the secretary and spokesperson of a Green Coordinating Council, said an attack would likely hurt the Green Movement and help the cadre currently atop the Iranian government. Asked after the forum by ThinkProgress about keeping the “military option on the table” and drawing up attack plans, Arjomand said:

The regime would really like for someone to come drop two bombs on Natanz [an Iranian nuclear facility]. This would then increase nationalism and the regime would gather everyone and all the political parties around itself.

At a conference Tuesday convened by the Arms Control Association, an analyst from the RAND Corporation, Iran expert Alireza Nader, expressed an almost identical sentiment. After briefly introducing some of the current rifts in the Iranian polity — between the establishment and the Green Movement and even recently exposed rifts within various conservative factions in power — Nader said:

[T]hese internal divisions in Iran really blunt Iran’s ability to project power in the Middle East and it keeps the Iranian regime very preoccupied. It can’t focus its efforts outward.

And this potentially provides U.S. leverage in following more successful strategy toward Iran and pressuring Iran through sanctions, for example. But a military strike on Iran could reverse all of that.

What a military strike could do is unite all Iran’s various factions and personalities around the supreme leader.

If Iran hawks want to argue that Iran poses a security threat to U.S. allies in the region and an attack is necessary, they should do that. But they shouldn’t make disingenuous arguments that they’re doing it for the Green Movement.

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