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Five Pundits Who Confidently Predicted The Obamacare Ruling And Got It Wrong

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jun 28, 2012 at 6:20 pm

Over the last few weeks, nearly every pundit in the U.S. took a guess at whether the Affordable Care Act would be upheld, overturned, or cobbled back together in some new fashion. Many — if not most — of those guesses were wrong.

But some pundits in particular should be cutting a big slice of humble pie as progressives celebrate Obamacare being held up in full. Here they are:

1. Bill O’Reilly: On his show on FOX News, O’Reilly predicted that the law would be struck down: “It’s going to be five-to-four. And, if I’m wrong, I will come on and I will… apologize for being an idiot.”

Watch it:

2. CNN Contributor Jeffrey Toobin: Toobin came out immediately after the arguments and said, “This was a train wreck for the Obama Administration. This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions, including mine, that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong.” Toobin admitted he was wrong today, but he was right about one thing: “The only conservative Justice who looked like he might uphold the law was Chief Justice Roberts, who asked hard questions of both sides.”

Watch his ‘train wreck’ flub:

3. The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky: “This is easy. I take the darkest and most cynical possible view of the conservative majority. …That means overturning the mandate 5-4. But it means doing so narrowly, carefully, almost regretfully. In other words, they want more than anything else not to rile up liberals.”

4. National Review’s Ed Whelan: “[T]he fact that Justice Scalia read his dissent from the bench in the Arizona immigration case leads me to believe that the Court will invalidate the individual mandate by a 5-4 vote.”

5. Dana Perino, former Bush spokesperson: “I do think that it is going to lose and I’ll tell you why. This past weekend, Justice Ginsburg…in public comments said to expect sharp disagreements when the decision comes out. To me, that means it’s either a 6-3 or a 5-4 decision against Obamacare, and I don’t know if that means that the whole thing will be overturned or they’ll try to split it.”

Watch it:

Justice

Republican Congressman Calls Obamacare Ruling ‘One Of The Worst Decisions In Supreme Court History’

By Scott Keyes on Jun 28, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Minutes after the Supreme Court announced its 5-4 decision upholding the landmark Obamacare law, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) told ThinkProgress that “this is one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history.”

KEYES: Do you think this is one of the worst decisions ever?

GINGREY: I think this is one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history. I still respect the Supreme Court justices, I’m just disappointed bitterly and vehemently disagree with the decision, just like I was in 1973 when Chief Justice Warren Burger sided with the majority on that bone-headed ruling to destroy human life.

Watch it:

There have been a number of awful decisions in Supreme Court history, including the Dred Scott ruling that protected slavery and the Plessy case legalizing racial discrimination. To Gingrey, today’s decision ensuring tens of millions of Americans have access to health care is apparently on par with these rulings.

Earlier this month, Gingrey — an obstetrician-gynecologist who serves as the co-chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus — supported the continuation of the young-adult provision of Obamacare should the bill be struck down, calling it “a good policy.” He also promised to pass individual bills geared towards reducing health costs and preserving coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

In theory, Gingrey should be glad that a law that helps young adults get health insurance, reduces health costs and protects people with pre-existing conditions was upheld today. In reality, he and his Republican colleagues are so vehemently opposed to anything President Obama does that he genuinely believes the ruling could be one of the “worst” ever.

Steven Perlberg contributed to this report.

Climate Progress

Game Over: Hoffert On Unconventional Gas & Oil And Unconventional Self-Destruction Of Civilization

By Joe Romm on Jun 28, 2012 at 5:47 pm

Can we preserve a livable climate if we exploit any significant fraction of unconventional oil & gas resources?

The CEO of ExxonMobil, which has been a major funder of climate disinformers, says it will be “manageable” through adaptation.  Actual climate scientists disagree, as does the recent scientific literature.

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several catastrophic, simultaneous, irreversible warming impacts. Hitting 700 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels — means 7+°F global warming and the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it.

Marty Hoffert — an energy expert and climate modeler — posted this blunt comment on a recent DotEarth piece about a report on potentially large unconventional oil resources:

However welcome the news may be to market economists — and I’m confident Exxon-Mobil and company are licking their chops over continuing our highly profitable to them fossil fuel energy infrastructure — it’s an unmitigated environmental disaster for climate change: “Game Over,” as Jim Hansen rightly says.

Shale gas, shale oil and tar sands don’t fundamentally change estimates of total fossil fuel resources; but these “unconventional” sources, now more cost-effective to extract as fuel for the bottomless pit of world energy demand, will make disastrous climate shifts from the CO2 greenhouse a near-certainly. Forget solar, wind and nuclear fission. They can’t compete costwise now with coal-fired electricity, and unconventional cheap hydrocarbons could become as cheap as coal on a dollars per Joule of energy basis.

The result will be a hothouse planetary climate as different from today’s as the middle Cretaceous a hundred million years ago was, when sea level was a hundred meters higher and both poles were de-glaciated; when dinosaurs roamed a verdant Antarctic continent. This will happen virtually instantaneously from a geological perspective as fossil fuel resources accumulated over hundreds of millions of years are burned in a hundred years or so and CO2 in the atmosphere rises as much as fourfold over pre-industrial values.

The best analogy I can think of is watching the rise of Hitler from an isolationist USA in the late thirties as the threshold for stopping him early enough to matter is passed and a holocaust of some as yet unknown horror becomes inevitable. Optimists might observe that Homo sapiens survived WWII and the subsequent cold war. But the coming inundation of coastal zones and cities along with massive species extinctions will likely be far worse. We will need to burn even more fossil fuel to “adapt” to this change by building seawalls and air conditioning, an option perhaps for rich countries, or mass migration inland and poleward for everyone else. Moreover, any attempts by our descendants to rebuild high tech civilization will be seriously hampered by the depleted state of both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon fuels. Maybe they, unlike ourselves, will learn to go straight to solar and controlled fusion power, necessity being the mother of invention. More likely is a feudal agricultural economy in high latitude lands still fertile for crops and habitable in climate; or in the worst case scenario, hunter-gathering capable of supporting perhaps a million or so humans worldwide.

Many climate researchers breathed a sight of relief when Jim Lovelock backed off from nightmare scenarios with humans huddled in polar refugia against a greenhouse-induced waterworld. Too many accept the GOP denialist scam claiming human-induced global warming is a hoax to risk being perceived as alarmists, or worse. We didn’t sign on for this. We went into science and engineering, many of us, not only for the thrill of learning new by mastering objective nature, but to avoid the crazy subjectivity of human behavior. Give us labs and computers and some money and let us be geeks. We make mistakes, but we didn’t sign on for abuse. Thank you Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Jim Hansen, Ken Caldeira and all my other climate/energy colleagues for your courage to speak truth to crazy. The truth is that if we burn identified fossil fuel resources, particularly the so-called unconventional ones now making free marketeers dance with joy, it is only a matter of time before a transition to “hothouse Earth” occurs.

A technology optimist, I like to believe that some genetic evolution of the human genome can produce intelligent Homo superior better adapted to living in a high tech world wrought by scientific revolutions. I hope the spark of self-awareness survives, even if our particular experiment by nature doesn’t adapt and survive.

If, as Carl Sagan speculated, technological civilizations are time bombs triggered by the inability of species evolved in technology-free environments to adapt to the technologies they themselves create, then we may be destined for self-destruction. Short lifetimes of technological civilizations is a reason for the absence of intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy according to the Drake Equation for computing the number of contemporaneous technological civilizations in a galaxy. Too bad, if true, as we have now discovered that extrasolar planets sound other stars are a dime a dozen, and may discover potentially habitable “other Earths” soon with NASA’s Kepler Planet Finder.

Hear! Hear!

At least it would be an unconventional way for civilization to go, not with a bang or a whimper but the inevitable and widely predicted collapse of a self-destructive Ponzi scheme.

I tend to find the people who are most concerned about the climate situation are energy experts who understand a lot about climate science or climate scientists who have studied energy.

NASA’s James Hansen, who is in the second category, has made a similar point to Hoffert’s for a similar reason, though he believes 500 ppm is the cut-off for climaticide:

Read more

NEWS FLASH

Republican Lawmaker Screams With Joy At False News Of Mandate Being Overturned | With some news networks erroneously reporting that the Supreme Court struck down the Affordable Care Act’s individual health care mandate just moments after the justices released their opinion, President Obama wasn’t the only prominent politician who initially thought the provision had fallen. MSNBC posts this video of Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-OH) — an opponent of the measure — screaming with joy at the false news that the Court invalidated the requirement. Watch it:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Economy

REPORT: Reducing Gun-Related Homicides Would Boost Home Prices By Billions Of Dollars In American Cities

By Travis Waldron on Jun 28, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Reducing gun-related homicides would have a positive impact on housing prices in cities across the United States, according to a Center for American Progress report released this week.

The report studied violent crimes in eight cities across the country and found that reducing the rate of homicides corresponds to rising housing prices. According to the report, cities like Boston and Philadelphia would see increases in home prices worth billions of dollars:

On average, a reduction in a given year of one homicide in a zip code causes a 1.5 percent increase in housing values in that same zip code the following year. We applied these findings to available data on the value of the housing stock in the metropolitan areas of all eight cities. The estimated increases in the value of the housing stock for the eight cities and their immediate metropolitan areas, following a 10 percent reduction in homicides, range from $600 million in Jacksonville and the surrounding area to $800 million in the Milwaukee area, to $3.2 billion in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, and $4.4 billion in the Boston area. Unfortunately, inconsistent reporting of other types of violent crime—rapes, assaults, and robberies—preclude a reliable analysis of the impact on housing values of changes in the incidence of those crimes.

Boosting housing values in these areas and others would help cities and states solve their dire budget situations as well, since it would increase the amount the cities and states take in through property taxes. That would help avoid cuts to education and other vital programs that have been crunched during the recession and recovery.

And because two-thirds of homicides are committed with handguns, this report makes it clear that reducing the amount of handguns in our communities — and thus reducing the amount of violent crime committed with those guns — has positive economic benefits.

Alyssa

Vacation

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jun 28, 2012 at 5:37 pm

Gone fishin’. Back Tuesday, complete with episodes 7-9 of the first season of The Wire and the straight dope on The Amazing Spider-Man. Have a gorgeous weekend.

Health

The Top 5 Ways The Supreme Court’s Ruling On Obamacare Helps Women

By Guest Blogger on Jun 28, 2012 at 5:35 pm

Our guest blogger is Jessica Arons, director of the women’s health and rights program at the Center for American Progress.

Today’s historic Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, is a tremendous victory for millions of Americans, and perhaps most of all for women. By upholding the health reform law, the Supreme Court will allow significant reforms to our health insurance system to be fully implemented, helping to keep health care costs down and protecting Americans from the health insurance industry’s worst abuses.

Here are the top 5 ways Obamacare helps women:

1. Women will no longer be denied insurance coverage for gender-related reasons. In today’s insurance market, it is common for insurers to refuse to cover women because of gender-based “pre-existing conditions,” such as having had a Cesarean section or being the victim of domestic violence or sexual assault. Thankfully, this practice will be outlawed under Obamacare in 2014. In the meantime, adults with pre-existing conditions who have been uninsured for at least six months can purchase affordable coverage through temporary Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plans.

2. Women will no longer be charged more for their insurance coverage just for being women. Under a practice known as “gender rating,” insurers currently charge women higher premiums—up to 150 percent more—than men for identical health benefits. As a result, women now pay $1 billion more than men each year for the same health plans in the individual market. As of 2014, however, under the Affordable Care Act, gender rating will become illegal in all new individual and small group plans.

3. Maternity care will be required in new insurance plans. Coverage for maternity care—health care that only women need—is routinely excluded in the individual insurance market. Only 12 percent of plans sold in the individual market even offer maternity coverage, which is frequently inadequate because of waiting periods or deductibles that can be as high as the cost of the birth itself. But once Obamacare is fully implemented in 2014, about 8.7 million women will have guaranteed access to maternity care in all new individual and small group plans.

4. Women will be guaranteed coverage of preventive services with no cost sharing. More than 50 percent of women have delayed seeking medical care due to cost, and one-third of women report forgoing basic necessities to pay for health care. But under the health reform law, insurers are now required to cover recommended preventive services such as mammograms, Pap smears, and well-baby care without cost sharing. More than 45 million women have already taken advantage of these services. And starting this August more services, including contraception, gestational diabetes screening, and breastfeeding supports, will be added to the list of preventive care that must be covered at no additional cost.

5. Women will gain better access to affordable health insurance. Starting in 2014 women and their families, as well as small businesses, will receive tax credits on an income-based sliding scale to help purchase insurance coverage. This will help individuals who earn up to $43,000 per year and up to $92,200 for families of four. Also in 2014 up to 10.3 million women will gain insurance coverage when Medicaid expands its income eligibility to include people with incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty level—less than $15,000 for individuals and about $31,809 for a family of four in 2011. The health law also eliminates Medicaid’s categorical requirements, so that low-income women who meet the income requirements can be enrolled even if they have no children and are not pregnant.

To learn more about the benefits of Obamacare for women, see the Center for American Progress report, “Women and Obamacare.”

LGBT

How Medicaid Expansion Affects Gay and Transgender Communities

By Guest Blogger on Jun 28, 2012 at 5:02 pm

Our guest bloggers are Andrew Cray, health policy consultant for LGBT Progress, and Kellan Baker, health care analyst for LGBT Progress.

The Supreme Court’s decision on health reform concludes a tense chapter in the life of the Affordable Care Act. The lawsuit decided today challenged the constitutionality of several important provisions of the law, including the expansion of the Medicaid program to cover lower-income people without insurance.

On the issue of Medicaid, the court’s decision was mixed. Overall the court held that while states can receive federal funds to expand Medicaid coverage to all Americans under the age of 65 who make less than $15,000 per year, they cannot lose all Medicaid funding as a penalty for refusing to do so. States that expand eligibility will receive increased federal funding to cover the vast majority of the costs of covering new beneficiaries — a 2010 report projected that the expansion of Medicaid in all fifty states would cost the states $21 billion between 2014 and 2019, while the federal government would spend $443 billion. States that don’t expand eligibility will forfeit this funding and could potentially leave millions of people still without coverage.

By upholding the Medicaid expansion as constitutional, the Court’s decision leaves the door open for states to extend lifesaving access to care for an additional 16 million currently uninsured people, including many gay and transgender people and their families. Despite common stereotypes, poverty and unemployment are higher among LGBT communities, particularly LGBT communities of color, than for the general U.S. population. For example, lesbians and bisexual women are 20 percent more likely to be poor than straight women, and a recent survey indicates that transgender people are twice as likely as the general population to make less than $10,000 a year.

Additionally, without the Affordable Care Act, people living with HIV must have had a disabling AIDS diagnosis before they could qualify for Medicaid coverage. The law eliminates this requirement for states that accept new federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs.

Many experts anticipate that most states will opt to expand their Medicaid programs with the new federal funds available under the Affordable Care Act. Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy professor at George Washington University, expects “the overwhelming number of states” to adopt the Medicaid expansion. “The pressure to participate will be enormous from health care providers and communities,” she says, and “the majority of states will not want to have [their] poorest residents without coverage.”

A recent study estimated that 26,000 people die every year because they do not have health insurance coverage. While today’s decision is a major victory for gay and transgender people, there is still work to be done to make sure our communities fully benefit from the Medicaid expansion. Advocates across the country will need to work hard to make sure that their state governments do not turn their backs on those who are literally dying for coverage.

NEWS FLASH

IRS Struggling To Keep Up With Fraud Cases After Budget Cuts | According to a report from the Taxpayer Advocate Service, the watchdog arm of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the IRS is facing a skyrocketing number of fraud cases without adequate resources. Potentially fraudulent returns are up 72 percent from last year, yet the IRS is working with a budget that is 3 percent lower than last year. As ThinkProgress has noted, slashing funds for the IRS ultimately ends up costing the U.S. money.

Justice

WATCH: Congressional Black Caucus Leads Democrats In Walk Out Of Attorney General Contempt Vote

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jun 28, 2012 at 4:44 pm

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who has been leading the investigation

House Democrats stormed out of a Congressional vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress today.

Led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who originally planned a walk-out yesterday, most Democrats exited the chamber instead of voting to hold the Attorney General in contempt. Both House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) called for the walkout.

Watch it:

Holder has been the target of Republican fury over ‘Fast and Furious,’ a misguided gun tracking effort initiated by the Bush administration and continued under Pres. Barack Obama in which thousands of guns went missing.

Democrats have criticized the vote for being about politics, not action, since the Republicans’ focus has been on Holder, and not on the gun trading scheme. They feel that Congress should be concentrating on the economy, jobs, and seeking the truth of what happened to the missing guns and a man killed by one.

Holder is the first-ever Attorney General to be charged with contempt by the full House.

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