Patriotic Americans Like Obamacare So It Figures The Anti-American Conservative Media Lies About It

Patriotic Americans Like Obamacare So It Figures The Anti-American Conservative Media Lies About It

Time Warner's Charlotte News 14 omitted critical information about health care premium prices in a report leading up to state-based insurance exchanges opening on October 1 by only reporting average premium prices while omitting the subsidized prices many North Carolina residents would receive under the Affordable Care Act.

The September 25 report relied on data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which listed average subsidized prices for North Carolina residents:

    New estimates show people in North Carolina who shop for health insurance coverage on the federally run, online marketplace could pay more and have fewer choices than the national average.

    The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said premiums for a mid-range plan sold on the health exchange will be $379/month on average. The average cost for that same plan across 48 states will be $328 when the new health insurance markets start.

The figures provided by News 14 represents unsubsidized averages of all people under age 65 but does not tell the entire story for many North Carolina residents. A report by Families USA found that, if Medicaid had been expanded in North Carolina, 868,520 residents would be eligible for tax credits under the exchanges. Yet, as Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy for Families USA explained, this figure is a low estimate because the report assumed the state would expand Medicaid.

Of the more than 850,000 residents eligible for subsidized insurance, younger customers can expect to pay less and will have access to low-cost "catastrophic plans" that provides emergency coverage for people under 30.

Even without the catastrophic coverage plans, premium prices for young adults in North Carolina would be drastically lower than the average price for most individuals purchasing insurance, and they can choose from a variety of "bronze, silver, gold, and platinum plans in the Health Insurance Marketplace." According to an HHS release, a 27-year-old in the state making $25,000 a year can be covered for just $88 dollars a year after applying the tax credit. The same 27-year-old could get a "silver" plan for $145 a month.

Low-income families benefit even more from subsidies. A "bronze" level plan for a family of four making $50,000 can be purchased for $74 dollars a month after applying tax credits, with a "silver" plan costing $282 -- both well under the average price stated in the article.

Nationally, tax credits will allow 6.4 million people to purchase insurance for less than $100 each month. Including the subsidized prices for plans bought on the exchanges is critical to understanding true insurance costs because many of the new shoppers will be low-income uninsured, meaning they are most likely to be eligible for subsidies. As the Kaiser Family Foundation explained in a primer on the makeup of the uninsured:

    Most people without health coverage are in working families and have low incomes. Adults make up a disproportionate share of the uninsured population because they are less likely than children to be eligible for Medicaid. While a plurality of uninsured people are White non-Hispanic, racial/ethnic minorities are at especially high risk of being uninsured.

    [...]

    Health insurance makes a difference in whether and when people get necessary medical care, where they get their care, and ultimately, how healthy people are. The consequences of reduced access to care over time can be serious, including preventable hospitalizations, poor overall health, disability, and premature death.

These low- to mid-income individuals and families will be able to access subsidies based on 2013 poverty guidelines, which according the Miami Herald could mean subsidies for families as high as $10,000 a year:

    When the marketplace open enrollment period under the new health care law begins on Oct. 1, the tax credits will be ready and waiting for eligible citizens and legal residents who earn between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level.

    In 2013, that includes individuals earning from $11,490 to $46,000, two-person families earning between $19,530 and $78,120, and four-person families earning between $23,550 and $94,200 a year. Tax credit eligibility will be based on the 2013 federal poverty guidelines until the 2014 guidelines are determined.

    [...]

    The size of the tax credit for a person receiving insurance coverage under Obamacare could range from a few hundred dollars to more than $10,000, based on family size, income and the cost of coverage in an individual's area.

    The amount will become known after submitting an online coverage application through the insurance marketplaces, which will be operated by either the states or the federal government. Once a person signs up for a marketplace health plan, the tax credit will be sent directly to the insurance company and applied to the plan member's monthly premiums in 2014.

Conservatives do not believe that patriots should have the freedom to have health insurance or even the right to live. That is not in any way an exaggeration. They say the right to health care is not in the constitution, but somewhere in their special copy it does say that patriots have the right to be miserable, in constant pain and die. In other words, conservatives believe in the same things a death cult believes in.

If Democrats Are Socialists How Come The Wealthy Plutocrats Are Wealthier Than Ever

According to the radical Anti-American pundits at Fox News and anti-American conservative sites around the internet, Democrats ( who are a small majority in the Senate and are in the White House - are commies or socialists. Sure it is a bunch of hateful ignorant nutbars say these things, but shouldn't even a nutbar be able to tell the difference between their fetid radical fantasies and the reality that is all around them, If Democrats Are Socialists How Come The Wealthy Plutocrats Are Wealthier Than Ever

Two weeks ago, Forbes released its 2013 list of the richest 400 Americans. And the not-so-surprising news: The fortunes of those at the top continue to rise while Americans across the country continue to suffer. What is surprising though is that they have now regained "all" of the losses from the economic collapse.

    "Five years after the financial crisis sent the fortunes of many in the U.S. and around the world tumbling, the wealthiest as a group have finally gained back all that they lost. The 400 wealthiest Americans are worth just over $2 trillion, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Russia. That is a gain of $300 billion from a year ago, and more than double a decade ago. The average net worth of list members is a staggering $5 billion, $800 million more than a year ago and also a record. The minimum net worth needed to make the 400 list was $1.3 billion. The last time it was that high was in 2007 and 2008, before property and stock market values began sliding. Because the bar is so high, 61 American billionaires didn’t make the cut."

Half of those who dropped off the Forbes list didn't do so because their fortunes' declined. They "fell off the list" because others passed them up. As Forbes notes, "The rest simply couldn't keep up with the rising tide." It's an economic bonanza for the rich.

In glorifying and idolizing the superrich, what Forbes and much of our popular culture fails to acknowledge is the role that inherited wealth, race, gender, and public policy have played in shaping who is and who is not on the list. But last year, United for a Fair Economy (UFE) took a closer, more critical look at the list with the release of our "Born on Third Base" report, which analyzed the 2011 Forbes 400 list. Here’s what we learned:

    At least 40% of those on the 2011 Forbes 400 list inherited a medium-sized business or substantial wealth from a spouse or family member.
    Over 20% – including many Walton family members – inherited enough to place them on the Forbes 400 list with their inheritance alone. It's like they were born on home plate.
    Only a small number can be said to truly come from modest means, and even they had help.

America's long history of race and gender bias also shape who is and is not on the list. Women and people of color make up only a tiny sliver of the overwhelmingly white, male Forbes 400. Even in 2013, the Forbes list includes only one African-America: Oprah Winfrey.

In UFE's 2006 book, The Color of Wealth, we examine the history of these disparities, including the way that women and people of color have been systematically excluded from the wealth-building public programs that helped create the white middle class. These wealth disparities have been passed on to each successive generation through the power of inheritance.

It's not just the birthright, there are public policies that give an unnecessary "leg up" to those at the top. One of the more egregious tax breaks we give to the wealthiest Americans is the reduced tax rate on investment income. We tax investment income from capital gains and appreciated stock at nearly half the top rate at which we tax income from wages earned through actual work.

Who does that special tax break benefit? No great mystery here. 60% of the income made by the Forbes 400 billionaires comes from capital gains, i.e. investment income. Together with the rest of their compatriots in the top 0.1%, they capture half of all capital gains income in the country. At the very least, we need to "tax wealth like work" and end this special tax break that disproportionately benefits those at the top.

By ignoring the role of inherited wealth, race, gender, and public policy advantages, Forbes describes many of the richest Americans as "self-made." This is an assertion that UFE challenged, both in our "Born on Third Base" report and in our 2012 book, The Self-Made Myth.

Attributing the success of those at the top entirely to their own efforts, by implication, also insinuates that those who are poor, are poor by their own efforts. Such an incomplete, black-and-white narrative distorts our views on the merits of a host of public policies—through this lens, progressive taxes become akin to "punishing success," and public policies aimed at correcting past injustices become "hand outs." The list goes on.

Instead of falling over ourselves in gleeful adulation of the superrich, let's honor the labors of all hard-working people across the country, and not overlook all the nuances. At the very least, it will be a more honest dialogue.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Sorry to disappointithe venal minions of anti-American conservatism, but we do not live in, nor or we teetering on the edge of a socialist economy. On the contrary we are living in the plutocratic crony corporate economy that conservatives have been shoving down our throats for years - an economy that rewards wealth because, you know, the wealthier are just better human beings than the rest of us and workers should be grateful for what trickles down.

Seven Venal Anti-American Moments From Conservatives

Seven Venal Anti-American Moments From Conservatives

1. Christian radio hosts says Colorado floods caused by homosexual activity.

However much he excels at it, Pat Robertson is far from the only televangelist who blames natural and unnatural disasters on gay people; plenty of young, up-and-coming, ultra-right, impervious-to-science bible-thumpers agree. So it was that this week, Christian pastor and radio host Kevin Swanson said abortion, marijuana legalization and “decadent homosexual activity” were the causes of the catastrophic flooding in Colorado.

Especially that last one. It just so happens that the Denver Postfeatured Colorado state House Speaker Mark Ferrandino kissing his gay partner not too long ago, and Swanson sees a connection.

 “Is it a coincidence that this was the worst year politically in the history of Colorado, at least if you use God’s law as a means of determining human ethics?” he asked the listeners of his "Generations With Vision" show. “So here we have the very worst year in Colorado’s year in terms of let’s kill as many babies as possible, let’s make sure we encourage as much decadent homosexual activity as possible, let’s break God’s law with impudence at every single level. Let’s make sure that we offend whoever wrote the Bible, so we have the worst year possible politically in the state of Colorado and it happens to be the worst year ever in terms of flood and fire damage in Colorado’s history.”

Co-host Dave Buehner chimed in, paraphrasing a Bible verse, saying, "this last year we walked in lewdness, lust, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties.”

“Marijuana,” Swanson added, though the Bible fails to mention it.

Before there were floods, there was fire. Earlier this year, Swanson said Ferrandino’s gay kiss and women wearing pants were the causes of forest fires in Colorado.

2. Louie Gohmert: Guns...spoons...same thing.
The depressingly familiar spectacle of gun nuts spewing illogical nonsense was in evidence again this week after the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard Monday. The part of the script that never changes is that gun violence can only be solved by more guns. But Tea Partying Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert got a little creative with his metaphors when he said that blaming guns for gun violence was on a par with blaming obesity on “too many spoons.” The difference, of course, is that the spoon industry does not call for more spoons every time someone breaks the Guinness Book of World Records weight record.

Interestingly, though, Gohmert was willing to throw the video game industry under the bus, noting that shooters like Aaron Alexis often play them, probably because the video game lobby is not as well organized, or well-funded as the gun lobby. And speaking of the NRA, you might think that the Washington shootings would knock the teeth out of the argument that the shooting of innocents would happen less often with armed guards around, since Navy Yards have those, but no, the NRA is standing its ground, so to speak, because, as spokesman Wayne La Pierre headscratchingly said, “The Navy Yard shooting happened because of gun control.”

Huh?

3. Koch brothers: Cervical cancer is a small price to pay to defeat Obamacare.

In their abject desperation to forestall the implementation of Obamacare, right-wing zealots released some ads this week that are bound to go down in history as some of the most absurd pieces of political video ever created.

The ad campaign created by Generation Opportunity [3], which is funded by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, specifically targets young people with the rather irresponsible message that they really don’t need health insurance. Better to “opt out,” pay the fine, it’s cheaper. Also, for young women, it avoids those uncomfortable gynecological exams, the ones that might save you from cervical cancer. The somewhat deranged looking advertisement features the legs of a woman in stirrups, presumably ready for her potentially life-saving pap smear, when all of sudden a wooden marionette Uncle Sam pops up between her legs. Uncle Sam apparently wants her. In the final scene, Uncle Sam is shown holding a speculum.

Young men can also get in on the invasive healthcare action with Obamacare. Another ad features a young man about to receive a prostate exam. He is told to take off his pants, and Uncle Sam appears behind him.

We knew right-wing Republicans had an unhealthy obsession with our orifices, from advocating mandatory vaginal probes for abortion seekers to seeking reinstatement of anti-sodomy laws, but these ads are truly hitting a new low. The good news is that the young people seeing them are not so easily fooled.

Caution: If you see the ads you might make the mistake of thinking you are watching "Saturday Night Live" parodies, even if it is the middle of the day on Tuesday.

4. Fox News’ Todd Starnes has a racist reaction to the new Miss America.

Usually a ridiculous, outdated exercise in mere sexism, this year’s Miss America pageant managed to spark a conversation about ethnicity and nationality when it bestowed the coveted tiara on Nina Davuluri, a native of Syracuse, New York who is of Indian descent. This apparent triumph for diversity quickly degenerated into a carnival of hate speech in the twitterverse, where idiots naturally assumed Davuluri was an Arab or a Muslim, and therefore a terrorist.

Not to be outdone in ill-informed racism, Fox News radio host [4] Todd Starnes said the American-born Davuluri doesn’t “represent American values.” The American values purveyor in the contest was Theresa Vail, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Kansan, who spent five year in the Kansas National Guard. Starnes' theory: Vail lost because, “the liberal Miss America judges were not interested in a gun-toting, deer-hunting, military veteran.”

5. He’s back. Steve “cantaloupe calves” King opines some more on undocumented immigrants.

Saying irresponsible, racist things about immigrants is Iowa Tea Party Rep. Steve King’s brand, and he continues to hone and promote it. At a recent anti-immigration rally in Omaha, he out and out called “illegal immigrants” a murderous mob. King recounted to the already-converted-to-hate audience a conversation he had recently with INS agent Mike Cutler at a congressional hearing. “How many Americans have died at the hands of illegal immigrants? What’s the price Americans are paying for an open door policy?” King asked Cutler.

To which, King claims Cutler helpfully replied: “‘I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you it will be in multiples of the victims of September 11th."

Good at math King, randomly multiplied 9/11’s death toll of about 3,000 by four and told the hate rally that 12,000 murders were likely committed by these out-of-control immigrants, who would be crashing planes into our buildings if they could, but sometimes just have to settle for raping and murdering us.

6. Ken Cuccinelli supporter at a rally: Did you hear the one about the rabbi?

Normally, Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial hopeful can handle making his own offensive comments — like the time he compared immigrants to vermin in need of extermination. But at a recent rally for Cuccinelli, it was Virginia Republican leader John Whitbeck who trotted out the off-color joke.

Whitbeck is the Republican leader in Virginia's 10th congressional District, and he is also a Catholic, he wanted the crowd to know. His hilarious joke concerned an incident in which the “head of the Jewish faith” (FYI, there is no head of the Jewish faith) hands a "ceremonial piece of paper" to the pope. And the pope says, “that was a bill for the Last Supper.”

Okay, we don’t exactly get it either.

Alienating Jewish voters is poor campaign strategy. Cuccinelli has already alienated women with his anti-choice rhetoric, and alienated modern people by advocating reinstatement of anti-sodomy laws. So the Cuccinelli team quickly tried to distance their candidate from the anti-Semitic joke. One campaign strategist even told the Washington Post he did not even know who Whitbeck was.

When in doubt, deny, deny, deny.

7. Idaho Republican proposes license to discriminate against same-sex couples.

Not content to simply deny food stamps to poor people this week, busy House Republicans also continued their fight to deny equal rights to married same-sex couples. A group led by Rep. Raúl Labrador of Idaho proposed a new bill that would provide a nationwide “license to discriminate” against them, although of course Labrador claims the bill is about protecting “religious liberty.” The logic with these attempts is always this: It discriminates against Christians (or other religious people, but really Christians) not to be able to discriminate against gays. The draft of the bill says there would be no consequences for any organization, business or individual who refuses to recognize same-sex marriage. Exact words:

    “The Federal Government shall not take an adverse action against a person, on the basis that such person acts in accordance with a religious belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage.”

Such prudish legislation could have far-reaching consequences: Businesses could refuse benefits to same-sex partners, hospitals could refuse visitation rights, anyone at all could refuse services to LGBT people—pretty much all of the civil rights that legalizing same-sex marriage were meant to protect would vaporize.

Unsurprisingly, in the up-is-down world of rabid conservative thinking, the Heritage Foundation and National Organization of Marriage heartily endorsed the proposed legislation for “encouraging tolerance.”

Conservatism is a form of fascism - though fascism is not something that started around the mid 20th century - fascism and it's ugly twin conservatism is descended from the days of kings, peasants and slaves. Even then the kings, the princes - the landowners told the regular folks that what they were doing was for the glory of the kingdom and God. Pretty much what conservatives do today - claim that the anti-American agenda they shove down our throats is good for the country and what their freaky interpretation of God's will. Conservatism ( the Republican partay in the U.S.) really stands for what conservatism sounds like - to be very conservative, to keep things the way they were back in the day - all the power, money, pledges and rights for the elite, and everyone else better get down on their knees and be grateful for our modern day King Louies and John Galts.

Conservatives Lie When They Say They're Capitalists, They're Plutocrats and Captives of Modern Feudal Lords

Conservatives Lie When They Say They're Capitalists, They're Plutocrats and Captives of Modern Feudal Lords

Spare a thought this Labor Day holiday, when you fire up the barbecue for the last weekend of the summer and raise a beer for the workers in this country, for some of the notable men who have lost their jobs over the past 20 years. I’m thinking of Richard Fuld, Dennis Kozlowski and Eckhard Pfeiffer.

They aren’t union leaders who were fired for organizing for better wages or men who lost their jobs to sweatshop labor in Bangladesh. They aren’t even the engineers who have been put out to rust by robot-run assembly lines. They don’t really number among the almost 20 million who areestimated to be unemployed or underemployed [3].

No, these three names popped up in a review of the “Bailed Out, Booted and Busted” – a study released Wednesday [4] by the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington DC of the 241 people who have ranked as the highest paid CEOs in the US in the past two decades.
An astonishing 38% of these titans of finance and industry have either been kicked out of their jobs, put in jail or had to have their companies be rescued from bankruptcy. Fuld, Kozlowski and Pfeiffer are three that top the list.

“Outrageous pay packets seem to encourage outrageous behavior,” says Sarah Anderson, one of the authors of the new report.

Fuld raked in $466.3m in salary and stocks in seven years as CEO of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank, before the company collapsed in September 2008, precipitating the last financial crisis [5]. He’s just one of 112 such CEOs whose companies were given a total of $258bn in taxpayer bailouts.
Kozlowski ran Tyco, a conglomerate which bought companies that did everything from laying undersea fiber-optic cables to making fire-fighting foam, from 1992 to 2002. He paid himself $170m in 1999 and $125m in 2000. Found guilty of systematically looting the company in 2005, he was sent to jail, and is now serving time at a minimum-security facility [6] near Central Park in Manhattan.
He joins 18 other top paid CEOs in the past 20 years that have led companies that were “busted” or ordered to pay more than $100m each for fraud-related fines and settlements.
Then there’s Pfeiffer, who ran Compaq computer from 1992 to 1999, and was fired when his company lost business to rivals Dell and Gateway. Like 27 other CEOs on the list, he was smart enough to have given himself a generous “golden parachute” contract, allowing him to walk away with $416m in compensation [7] on his final payday.
It’s easy to argue that there are a couple of bad apples in every cart, but think of it this way: if two out of every five pieces of fruit in a store were rotten, it would behoove the manager to tell stockers that if they didn’t cull the bad ones, customers would take their business elsewhere.
In other words: shouldn’t we be asking companies’ boards of directors to tighten the rules on CEOs to make sure they don’t fail at such an astounding rate? And what better way than tying it to their pay packets? And if the boards won’t do this, could government step in, if only to save the companies from their own CEOs abject levels of failure?
One of the simplest reforms that shareholder activists have lobbied for is a report by companies to shareholders comparing CEO compensation to that of their worst paid worker. This has been mandated by the US Congress under the 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation but companies have fought tooth and nail [8] against this being implemented.

Corporate America has been backed up by business school pundits who say that CEO compensation is not a matter that government should regulate. I asked VG Narayan, who runs the Board of Directors Compensation Committee Executive Education Program of the Harvard Business School what he thought of the IPS findings. “It’s terrible when poor performance gets rewarded with a high level of compensation,” he said via email.
But he firmly believes that corporate boards and executives are best placed to fix this. “Governmental and shareholder second-guessing on pay would create an environment of fear in which no board would dare try an approach that’s different from the herd’s or that is tailored to the company’s particular strategy,” Narayan wrote in 2009. “For instance, if the maximum ratio of CEO pay to worker pay were mandated, companies might respond by outsourcing the work of the lowest paid workers [9] rather than curbing CEO pay.”

David Larcker, the director of the Corporate Governance Research Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, also says that governments should be cautious about scaring away these CEOs.
“Executive compensation may be the lightning rod for shareholders in the wake of the financial crisis, but the truth about how pay should be structured is clouded by a lot of popular myths,” Larcker wrote in 2011. “Boards have to consider that how much they pay will have an impact [10] on the types of people who want to take the CEO position. You don’t want to drive talented CEOs out of public companies so that they can avoid scrutiny over how much they are paid.”
Well, these business schools have had decades to preach about better practices. Workers jobs are being outsourced anyway, and the CEOs are still getting away with outrageous pay packages. And the IPS study shows that these CEOs aren’t that talented – since they are failing at an incredibly high rate.

As Anderson says:
Boards of directors are not going to change this. They are mostly made up of other CEOs who says if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Unless regulators, lawmakers or shareholders do something to stop this madness, 20 years from now today’s corporate compensation will seem as modest as the pay levels of 1993.

The IPS report suggests several additional legal reforms in addition to encouraging narrower CEO-worker pay gaps such as bolstering accountability to shareholders and extending accountability to broader stakeholder groups.
Plus governments can eliminate taxpayer subsidies for excessive executive pay and encourage reasonable limits on total compensation by not giving out contracts to companies who pay excessive CEO salaries (effectively subsidized by the taxpayer) and rewarding those who pay their workers well.

Maybe fewer businesses would fail and more workers would be able to celebrate Labor Day if CEO’s had a government-led incentive to do a better job in the first place. Hopefully, the US Congress will get on this when they return from their summer vacations and barbecues.

But this kind of massive welfare for failure, unethical behavior, cronyism and outright corruption cannot be happening. Conservatives tell us all day every day that if we only had less regulation poor old corporate America would be buzzing along and hiring everyone in sight. Gosh, it turns out that business is raking in the cash like never before. CEOs are taking the capital created by low paid workers and working stiffs who buy their generally crappy products, and redistributing that money to bank accounts that get fatter no matter how incompetent they are. That is not fuzzy corruption, that is stealing from labor. Labor whose powers have been weakened by conservatism. Let's change the rules if corporate America can't get anyone to be a CEO for a reasonable amount of money, so what. Maybe we'll geta new class of business managers who are  humanitarians, patriots and capitalists, instead of modern day feudal lords who see average Americans as serfs.

Patriotic American Veterans and Seniors have No Reason To Support The Radical Conservative Agenda

Patriotic American Seniors have No Reason To Support The Radical Conservative Agenda

Heritage Foundation president and former Senator Jim DeMint suggested to a town hall audience in Wilmington, Delaware, Thursday that health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid are “un-American” and built on the principles of “socialism and collectivism.”

“I cannot think of anything that’s more un-American than national government-run health care,” DeMint said. “Those who believe in those principles of socialism and collectivism we’ve seen over the centuries, they see as their holy grail taking control of the health care system.”

Though DeMint was referring specifically to the Affordable Care Act, a law the Heritage Foundation is urging Congress to defund in next month’s continuing resolution, his comments could also apply to existing programs that have more direct government involvement than the ACA.

While the federal government does establish the rules and guidelines private insurers must follow in offering coverage for the uninsured though reform and directly finances insurance expansion for lower-income Americans who are eligible for Medicaid — often by contracting with private insurers — numerous other popular government programs like Medicare, the Veterans Health Administration and even the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan (FEHBP) (which DeMint himself relied on for health care coverage as a member of the Senate) are operated by the government.

Public health comprises more than 40 percent [2] of the nation’s health care spending and that percentage will remain stable [3] as the Affordable Care Act is implemented. By 2014,“private health insurance is anticipated to account forroughly 31 percent [4]of national health spending, or about the same share as was expected without enactment of the Affordable Care Act,” actuaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid estimate.

DeMint warned his town hall audience that the system threatens Americans’ freedoms. “[Health care is] such a personal service, it’s such a big part of the economy,” he said. “If [Democrats] can control that, they can control most areas of our lives.”

Nothing could be more American than Americans taking care of Americans. What is Medicare? It is an insurance program that Americans pay into to help ourselves, our families and our neighbors. And if any kind of public program is anti-American socialism as freaky radical conservative Jim DeMint says, than every veteran who has ever received any benefits from government health care is a socialist. Why can't seniors, vets and the disabled pay their own way. Well, the fact is they do. One way or another they contribute money, work or economic activity to the system, run by and for the people. What could be more democratic about that. DeMint and the increasingly radical conservative movement are preaching a dangerous UnAmerican philosophy called social-darwinism. It is time to stop being fooled by conservative doubletalk that wraps deeply radical UnAmerican ideas in the flag and the Bible.

This Week's Links For True Blue Patriots

This Week's Links For True Blue Patriots

Good News: Gilberton Police Chief  and Neo-Confederate Conservative Mark Kessler Suspended Indefinitely

 GOP’s destructive grifter: Super Conservative America Hater Jim DeMint peddles political poison - Republicans are starting to realize that Jim DeMint's “Defund Obamacare” campaign is all about funding his empire

National Right to Kill Children member and draft dodging America hater Ted Nugent: Great Society "Responsible For More Destruction To Black America" Than Slavery, KKK

In fact, the President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiative -- which included Medicare, Medicaid and a variety of other anti-poverty programs -- was responsible for significant and lasting reductions in poverty. As Washington Post reporter Dylan Matthews noted, "the best evidence indicates that the War on Poverty made a real and lasting difference"

Health Insurance "Coverage Gap" Coming to a Red State Near You

Roughly 260 million Americans (roughly 85 percent) already have health insurance provided by their employers, the government or through individual policies they purchased. In places like Oregon, Colorado, New York, California and other, mostly Democratic states, governors and state legislators accepted the expansion of Medicaid to provide free health insurance for those earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty (FPL). For those earning between 138 and 400 percent of the FPL, the Affordable Care Act's subsidies will help them purchase insurance in the private market. But in the states where Republicans said "no" to the expansion of Medicaid, the picture is much different. As the AP explained the coverage gap:

    Nearly 2 in 3 uninsured people who would qualify for health coverage under an expansion of Medicaid live in states which won't broaden the program or have not yet decided on expansion.

The resulting Republican body count is staggering. Thanks to the GOP's rejection of Medicaid expansion, 1.3 million people in Texas, 1 million in Florida, 534,000 in Georgia and 267,000 in Missouri will be ensnared in the coverage gap.

How can this be, the conservative movement claims to be pro-life. It truns out they mean they only care about clumps of cells.

National Public Radio, which the wacky conservative movement claims has a pro-American liberal bias, Pushes Myth That Raising Minimum Wage Would Kill Jobs. These large corporations are making historic profits and paying their executives historically high wages and bonuses. They could pay themselves something reasonable for not doing much except seating at a desk and going to meetings, take the money saved and pay it to the people who do the actual work that makes these companies have a profit.

In Effort To Woo Female Voters, The UnAmerican plastic patriot from Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell(R) Touts Women’s Law He Voted Against