Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Beyond Rebates, How Much Are Consumers Saving from Obamacare Medical Loss Ratio Provision?

Most of the conversation around the Affordable Care Act’s Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) provision has centered on the requirement that insurers issue consumer rebates when they fall short of spending a certain portion of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses.  This makes sense as rebates are one of the more tangible ways consumers have benefited from the law so far, and it likely contributes to the MLR provision being among the more popular aspects of the health reform law.

However, as we’ve written before, rebates represent only a portion, albeit the most concrete portion, of the MLR rule’s savings to consumers.  The primary role of an MLR threshold is to encourage insurers to spend a certain percentage of premium dollars on health care and quality improvement expenses (80 percent in the individual and small group market and 85 percent in the large group market).  The MLR rebate requirement operates as a backstop if insurers do not set premiums at a level where they would be paying out the minimally acceptable share of premiums back as benefits.  Only if those thresholds are not met are insurers required to provide rebates to consumers or businesses. (You can read more about the MLR rule here).

Consumers and businesses, therefore, can realize savings in two ways as a result of the MLR requirement: by paying lower premiums than they would have been charged otherwise (as a result of lower administrative costs and profits), or by receiving rebates after the fact. So while insurers paid out considerable amounts for rebates – last year’s rebates totaled $1.1 billion – this is not the whole story for consumers.

Of course, it is hard to know with certainty what premiums would have been if the MLR rules were not in place: we cannot know for sure how insurers would have priced their products or what rates regulators would have allowed (to the extent that they reviewed rates prior to the ACA). It is also difficult to separate out the direct effects of the MLR provision from other aspects of the health reform law, particularly rate review, which works to moderate unreasonable premium increases and thus increase loss ratios.  There are also data limitations. For example, prior to new reporting requirements put in place to enforce the MLR provision, there were not good data sources that break out premiums and claims on a consistent basis for major medical coverage by all types of carriers. In the initial years this data became available (2010 and 2011), there were some issues with the quality of the data, particularly regarding expenses for quality improvement and other new categories of administrative expenses that are reported on the exhibit.

Within these limitations, we constructed an analysis that looks at the basic proportion of premiums that health plans paid out as claims for medical care over the three years since the ACA was passed, both before and after the MLR requirement went into effect for coverage in 2011.  These proportions do not include adjustments for quality improvement expenses, taxes or other factors that are used when determining whether or not rebates need to be paid; they simply represent the total payments for medical care as a proportion of premiums.  This is the traditional way medical loss ratios have been calculated.  Generally, if the proportion is rising, that means insurers are paying out more of each dollar they receive on enrollee health care, which in most cases would mean that enrollees are getting better value for the premiums they pay. We then quantify what the change in the traditional MLR means to enrollees by estimating how much they would have paid in premium if the observed MLR for 2010 (before the MLR requirement went into effect) were held constant for 2011 and 2012.1 This approach addresses the following question: If insurers had targeted the same claims to premium ratio for 2011 and 2012 as they achieved in 2010, would premiums have been higher or lower, and by how much?  In other words, it addresses how much consumers may have saved in lower premiums as a result of the MLR threshold in addition to receiving rebates.

Our analysis uses insurer data filed to state regulators and compiled by Mark Farrah Associates. These data (filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit) suggest that the main beneficiaries of the MLR rule’s upfront premium savings are people who purchase insurance on their own.  The majority of plans sold to small and large businesses were already in compliance with their respective MLR thresholds before the law went into effect, and our analysis shows that traditional MLRs (claims divided by premiums) for group plans have stayed relatively flat over the past three years.  In the individual market, by contrast, fewer than half of plans were in compliance with the ACA’s MLR thresholds in 2010, and the average traditional MLRs in this market have been steadily increasing since the requirement went into effect. This means that individual market insurers are devoting a greater portion of premium dollars to health care claims and less to administrative costs and profits compared to before the ACA’s MLR rule went into effect.

This pattern is consistent with the idea that some insurers needed to improve their MLRs to comply with the new rebate requirements.  We know that the individual market MLR requirements in the ACA are higher than those that were in effect in many states, and there have been numerous reports that insurers worked to reduce their commissions and other administrative expenses to become more efficient.

So how might these changes have affected premiums?  As noted above, one way to address this question is to compute what these consumers would have paid in premiums in 2011 and 2012 had traditional individual market MLRs stayed at 2010 levels (the year before the provision went into effect). Looked at this way, premiums would have been $856 million higher in 2011, and premiums would have been $1.9 billion higher in 2012.

Adding to the premium savings the amount individual market consumers received in rebates yields a total savings of $1.2 billion for 2011. This year, individual market insurers are expecting to issue $241 million in rebates (based on our analysis of early estimates from insurers filed with state insurance departments), bringing the total estimated savings for 2012 to $2.1 billion.

There are some potential limitations to this approach. While the pattern of increasing MLRs over the three years makes sense given the incentives under the ACA and reports of insurer behavior, we do not have comparable data from earlier years to tell us whether or not the 2010 MLR was typical for the pre-ACA period (though the available evidence suggests that it was).2 Also, MLRs in 2011 and 2012 might be overstated because insurers simply underestimated how much health care expenses would rise following the recession, though increasing MLRs still means that consumers have been getting better value for their premium dollars. Finally, rebate amounts for 2012 are based on preliminary estimates filed on the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit to state insurance departments, and actual rebate amounts will be based on insurer filings with the Department of Health and Human Services, which were due June 1.

If insurers’ preliminary estimates hold true, this year’s rebates (at a total of $571 million across all markets) are expected to be about half the amount of last year’s $1.1 billion in insurer rebates. Smaller rebates, however, are not an indication that consumers are now saving less money as a result of the MLR provision, but rather that insurers are coming closer to meeting the ACA’s MLR requirements and that this provision is having its intended effect of consumers getting more value for the money they spend on premiums. In fact, in the individual market, the $241 million consumers are expected to receive in rebates for 2012 represents roughly one tenth of our estimate of the overall savings from the provision in that year. Perhaps ironically, when the MLR provision is working as intended and insurers set premiums to meet the thresholds, consumers save money but are less likely to get a check in the mail as tangible demonstration of those savings.

A bit wonky, insurance lingo combined with statistics, but it clearly shows that ordinary working Americans are already saving money and getting better insurance for their dollar because of the ACA (Affordable care Act) or Obamacare. Perhaps 11% of self insured will probably see their premiums go up a little. Though those people will also be entitled to rebates and tax credits to offset the expense. Of course conservative lie about "rate shock". Conservatives cannot have an honest debate because they lack the common decency required to have such a debate.

IRS Audited Democratic Groups Under Bush, No Outrage from Wacko Republicans

IRS Audited Democratic Groups Under Bush, No Outrage from Wacko Republicans

While Republicans attack the Obama administration over some IRS agents auditing conservative groups with the words "Tea Party" and "patriot" in their names, they weren't particularly outraged when the IRS targeted liberal groups during President George W. Bush's presidency, noted Salon.com.

“I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told MSNBC on Monday (video below).

One of the liberal groups targeted by the IRS under the Bush administration was All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The IRS actually threatened to revoke the church's tax-emption because Pastor George Regas said: ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine," on the Sunday before the 2004 election.

Ironically, conservative churches that actively campaigned for President Bush in 2004 were not audited by the IRS, reported the New York Times.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the IRS also went after the NAACP after they said Bush was the first president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization.

In 2006, the IRS investigated the liberal environmental group Greenpeace after a conservative group called "Public Interest Watch," which had financial ties to Exxon, pushed for an investigation, reported Democracy Now.

While a few low level bureaucrats seemed to have misbehaved, let's also remember that some of these conservative groups may have been up to some political shenanigans, thus abusing their 501 status.

Republicans have no sense of shame or irony. Comparing Obama to Nixon is more LSD fueled fantasy than reality.

Poor, poor Sarah. They should have named her failed reality show, The Ridiculous Things Palin says, Did Sarah Palin have her own Umbrellagate?

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Having solved the problem of people not wasting enough time on the internet, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now tackling his first real-world political cause: immigration reform. With a slick new non-profit group funded by tech millionaires, Zuckerberg is rallying Silicon Valley's elite into a political force they hope might one day rival Wall Street. Zuckerberg's political moves are of a piece with his career as a tech mogul: hugely ambitious, painfully awkward, entirely self-interested, and surprisingly successful. And he's just getting started.

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg unveiled the vehicle of his political will: FWD.us, a bipartisan, non-profit political advocacy group that sounds like an iPhone app. FWD.us has attracted big names from both politics and technology, including former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, Romney adviser Dan Senor, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The group hopes to raise $50 million to fund its lobbying for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which is currently making its way through Congress.

Why immigration? We need those smart foreign brains: In a Washington Post op-ed announcing FWD.us, Zuckerberg wrote that "in a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country." To that end, FWD.us says on its website it aims to "establish a streamlined process for admitting future workers" and increase the number of H-1B visas that let companies hire high-skilled foreign workers to "continue to promote innovation and meet our workforce needs."

The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn't have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies' needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven't enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.

The self-serving motives behind Zuckerberg's immigration reform push can be seen clearly in Facebook's corporate lobbying efforts. As FWD.us promotes high-minded ideals of openness and opportunity, Facebook's lobbying firms have been doing the dirty work of making sure immigration reform means they can freely hire high-skilled immigrants for less money than their American counterparts. Specifically, Facebook has been trying to insert language into the Senate immigration bill to eliminate a requirement that American companies make a "good faith" effort to hire Americans before looking abroad, according to the Washington Post. And Facebook wants to axe rules that would require companies to pay these foreign workers more. Facebook isn't just a fan of outsourcing its high-skilled jobs: Last year we reported that much of Facebook's dirty and unpleasant content moderation was done by outsourced third-world workers making as little as $1 an hour.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy told the Post, "The real goal is to put Zuckerberg and Facebook front and center with the Washington elite … to better extinguish a growing call to regulate how his company does business.”

So FWD.us is just another case of a savvy businessman wielding political clout for his financial benefit. But how FWD.us and Zuckerberg have done this is worth considering as a model of tech industry political activism to come. FWD.us demonstrates a bizarre wedding of Silicon Valley idealism with the tepid realities of interest politics. The two worlds collided last week when news stories went viral revealing that the group had funded ads trashing Obama and praising oil drilling in the Arctic. One ad supporting South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham slammed Obamacare and the president's "wasteful stimulus spending." The liberal blogosphere was shocked: The same Mark Zuckerberg who once feted Obama in Silicon Valley and counts Corey Booker as a bff now sounded like a long lost Koch Brother.

While the ad was funded by Zuckerberg's group, it didn't represent a right-wing turn for the politically ambiguous mogul. It was a tactical strike in his immigration reform campaign. The ad was made by a subsidiary group of FWD.us called Americans For a Conservative Direction. Lindsay Graham is one of the few Republican supporters of the Senate immigration reform bill, and the ad is meant to bolster Graham's conservative bona fides so he can push the largely Democrat-backed immigration bill without seeming like a softy. If that means bad-mouthing Obama, so be it.

After the ad went viral, FWD.us tried to placate angry liberals by pointing out that the group had also created a left-leaning organization, the Council for American Job Growth, to support liberal immigration reform backers. A FWD.us spokesperson told ThinkProgress that "maintaining two separate entities… to support elected officials across the political spectrum—separately—means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audience of their constituents." This is politics, Facebook-style: pandering as personalized as your Facebook Newsfeed! It's also about as craven as Washington gets. Even the Koch brothers lacked the devious ingenuity to back two competing teams, as BuzzFeed's Ben Smith pointed out on Twitter. They only disingenuously funded the Tea Party.

The ad fracas was not even the weirdest moment in FWD.us' brief history. Days before it launched, Politico obtained an enthusiastically creepy memo FWD.us president Joe Green sent to potential supporters that sounded like a dispatch from North Korea's propaganda ministry. While the bloviating of the tech elite sounds just a bit ridiculous in blog posts by venture capitalists pumping a new mobile payment service, it takes a more sinister tone when applied to politics.

Green's memo boasted that "technology executives would use their companies to 'control the avenues of distribution' for a political message in support of their efforts," according to Politico. In case the implications of that statement were unclear, the memo also listed three reasons why the tech industry can become "one of the most powerful voices" in politics:

    1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.

    2: Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.

    3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.

We control massive distribution channels is something that would issue from a Facebook lackey's mouth in the most conspiracy-addled daydream of an infowars.com power-user. And yet here is Green, Mark Zuckerberg's old Harvard roommate, essentially promoting technology-enabled subliminal messaging in a confidential memo to the tech elite.

Green said in a statement that his language was "poorly chosen" and gave "a misimpression of the views and aspirations of this organization and those associated with." But he made a very similar pitch Monday in a paid promotional presentation to the assembled geeks and entrepreneurs of the TechCrunch Distrupt conference in New York City:

"This is one of those urgent policy problems that demonstrates how broken Washington D.C. is," he said, "and where we can apply our patented tech community innovation skills."

This framing is important because as tech companies become bigger political players they're likely going to adopt a similar message. Last year, the tech industry spent $132.5 million on lobbying efforts, "placing them among the top lobbying sectors in the Capitol," according to the Washington Post. Many of these companies are taking the same route as Zuckerberg, creating non-profit "stealth PACS" that allow them to wield political influence in the name of some social good without disclosing their donors.

FaceBook has become no more than a captive audience of consumers to be studied by corporate marketeers - users are no more than guinea pigs.  If FaceBook is going to use and exploit their users the least they could do is start paying them.

George W Bush's $250 Million Can of Whitewash. In America, with enough time and money you can convince people you're not evil when you lose $17 trillion dollars of the nation's money and get 20,000 soldiers and marines maimed. Bush was just following the Conservative Road-map for America. He made the rich richer and the middle-class poorer.

Another proud day for the NRA ( National Right to Murder Children Association) 5-Year-Old Get .22 Caliber Birthday Rifle, Shoots and Kills 2-Year-Old Sister

The Conservative Supreme Court May Strike Down Voting Rights Act, Section 5

The Conservative Supreme Court May Strike Down Voting Rights Act, Section 5. Which has had successes both in terms of civil rights and in improving the economic lives of Southern blacks

With most experts expecting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to be struck down by the Supreme Court in the coming months, can you talk about the future of the civil rights movement in the South?

It doesn’t look good for Section 5. It’s one of those things where almost from the start a piece of legislation was constitutionally innovative and now it may be due for a second look. What Justice Roberts suggested three years ago, that they really ought to rewrite or come up with a new Voting Rights Act that doesn’t use geographic indicators from the 1960s, is something he’s correct to argue.

But what the Court is being asked is whether they will take the relatively radical step of striking down legislation that has existed for decades, was renewed only recently after extensive hearings, and which has accomplished so much. I have no doubts about where my sympathies lie. But I would propose a test to determine whether this act is really needed or not: We should ask, ‘Do you have consensus in affected areas among the black as well as the white community that this kind of federal oversight is no longer needed?’ I doubt very much that those people would agree with what the Court is suggesting. And without that, how can they really say with any credibility, listening overwhelmingly to Southern whites in political power who never agreed that the VRA was ever needed in the first place, that Section 5 is no longer needed? It’s hard for me to see what makes that particular argument so persuasive.

More here, Why We Still Need The Voting Rights Act: Perspectives From Supreme Court Spectators.

Anti-American Oklahoma Conservatives Turn The State Into The New Soviet Union

Welcome to Oklahoma, Otherwise Known as The New Soviet Union of The Midwest, May Deny Women Affordable Birth Control Because It ‘Poisons Their Bodies’

Oklahoma already prevents women from using their insurance plans to help cover abortion services, but Republicans aren’t stopping there. One state lawmaker wants to continue stripping insurance coverage for reproductive health services, advancing a measure that would allow employers to refuse to cover birth control for any reason — based solely on the fact that one of his constituents believes it “poisons women’s bodies.”

Under State Sen. Clark Jolley (R)’s measure, “no employer shall be required to provide or pay for any benefit or service related to abortion or contraception through the provision of health insurance to his or her employees.” According to the Tulsa World, Jolley’s inspiration for his bill came from one of his male constituents who is morally opposed to birth control, and wanted to find a small group insurance plan for himself and his family that didn’t include coverage for those services:

    Jolley said the measure is the result of a request from a constituent, Dr. Dominic Pedulla, an Oklahoma City cardiologist who describes himself as a natural family planning medical consultant and women’s health researcher. [...]

    Women are worse off with contraception because it suppresses and disables who they are, Pedulla said.

    “Part of their identity is the potential to be a mother,” Pedulla said. “They are being asked to suppress and radically contradict part of their own identity, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they are being asked to poison their bodies.”

The bill has already cleared a Senate Health committee and now makes it way to Oklahoma’s full Senate. It is unlikely that either Jolley and Pedulla themselves rely on insurance coverage for hormonal contraceptive services — but if the measure becomes law, the two men could limit the health insurance options for the nearly two million women who live in Oklahoma.

Of course, contraception does not actually poison women. The FDA approved the first oral birth control pill in 1960, and that type of contraception is so safe that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends making it available without a prescription, as it is in most other countries around the world. Furthermore, considering that over 99 percent of women of reproductive age have used some form of birth control, the Oklahoma women who rely on insurance coverage for their contraception would likely disagree with Pedulla’s assertion that it “suppresses and radically contradicts part of their own identity.”

In reality, access to affordable birth control is a critical economic issue for women. When women have control over their reproductive choices, it allows them to achieve economic goals like completing their education, becoming financially independent, or keeping a job. But birth control can carry high out-of-pocket costs, and over half of young women say they haven’t used their contraceptive method as directed because of cost prohibitions. Nonetheless, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly pushed measures to allow employers to drop coverage for birth control.

Conservatives consulting doctors who believe in voodoo medicine to create laws to tyrannize women - much like every dictatorship of the last hundred years, including the old Soviet Union and Iran. Conservatims is a tyrannical phisophy that hides about sloganeering about freedom, values and small gov'mint. Most Americans are catching on to the fact that Conservatives are against freedom, genuine values and small government.

The Patriot Gospel: Guns Don't Kill People, Video Games Kill People

The Patriot Gospel: Gun Don't Kill People, Video Games Kill People

Republicans are more likely to place the blame for gun violence on video games, not guns, according to a recent poll from Public Policy Polling. Sixty seven percent of Republicans believe that such games are a “bigger safety threat” than firearms — only 14 percent think the reverse.

The only problem? There’s no data to support that position. There is evidence that limiting access to guns can help limit violence wrought by those machines. In particular, there’s evidence to show that the Assault Weapons Ban helped to limit gun violence on the Mexican-American border. And in states where gun ownership is high and gun laws are lax, violence rates are higher.

On the other hand, there’s absolutely no conclusive evidence showing that video games are the root cause of violence. There are countries with much lower rates of violence that have much higher consumption of video games.

It doesn't matter what reality says, conservative gun fetishists love believe stuff. Once they believe stuff, it is like trying to convince the member of a cult that the guy up there preaching is not a mini-god. Since conservatism has all the hallmarks of a cult, good luck with trying to get them to consume some reality.

Fox News and Torture Boy Sean /Hannity Uses Ex-LAPD Cop Killer To Dishonestly Smear Liberals

The Terrible Truth About the Republicans' Favorite Historian

The Conservative Republican Movement Sinks Deeper Into Pure Evil With Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories

The Conservative Republican Movement Sinks Deeper Into Pure Evil With Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories

There's been no shortage of delusional claims made by the gun manufacturers' lobby and its allies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Usually, they revolve around macho fantasies of gun owners heroically keeping their cool during surprise attacks, taking down mad gunmen without killing onlookers or being shot by arriving police. In the real world, of course, these are the kinds of people who tend to shoot themselves while shopping for milk at Walmart [3], rummaging around in their purses for lipstick  [4]or sleeping [5] (sleeping can be really dangerous [6]).

But last week, Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reported [7] that a far more disturbing delusion is gaining traction on the fringes of the “gun rights” movement. Seitz-Wald calls them “Sandy Hook Truthers,” and he appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss the phenomenon. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion (you can listen to the whole show here [8]).

Joshua Holland: Alex, Talking Points Memo reported [9] this week that Joe Biden has given some hints of the recommendations that his Gun Control Task Force might offer as soon as next week. They're talking about banning high-capacity magazines and mandating universal background checks. Did you know that as many as 40 percent of all firearm sales in this country are done without a background check?

Alex Seitz-Wald: Yes. It’s really unbelievable. This is the so-called “gun show loophole,” but it extends way beyond gun shows. I can go online on Craigslist right now and find a gun and buy it, without any kind of background check or oversight.

JH: Any private citizen who’s not a licensed firearms dealer can just sell a gun to anybody without doing anything. It’s just crazy.

Anyway, we’re going to have a big fight on our hands against one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, the NRA, which represents the interests of firearms’ manufacturers. That fight is only coming, really, because 20 young children were cut down with a Bushmaster at a Connecticut school. That brings us to your report [7] this week on Salon.com, which I found mindblowing. Alex, tell us about the worst Sandy Hook conspiracy theory out there.

ASW: Yes. This is really unbelievable -- I could hardly believe it myself, but we all know about 9/11 truthers by now. These are the people who thought that 9/11 was an inside job. Now these folks -- I’m calling them the “Sandy Hook truthers” -- these are people, and there’s a surprising number of them, who think that the Sandy Hook massacre either didn’t happen or did happen, but was perpetrated by maybe government agents or crazy liberals.

There are different versions of the theory, all in an attempt to create a national movement for gun control. Obama or somebody killed all these little kids in order to get you and me to talk about guns and get the American people interested in gun control.

This was out there for a little while, but then it really picked up steam after they latched onto a girl named Emily Parker. She was a 6-year-old who was killed, and her father has been pretty active in the media. There was a funeral service in Utah, where the governor spoke, and that got a lot of attention. A photo emerged of her sister, sitting on Obama’s lap when he went and visited the family. The girl is wearing the same dress that Emily was wearing in a photo that the family had distributed to the media. To the Internet conspiracy theorists, it must be the same girl. Emily Parker must be alive! Therefore, the whole thing was a hoax.

There’s a YouTube video that lays this all out, and it’s already gotten over 130,000 views. If you look elsewhere, you can find all kinds of Web sites, and blog posts, and forum messages, where people lay this out. They have all kinds of other crazy things about the car being not the one owned by Adam Lanza, and police audio allegedly suggesting there were multiple shooters in the building.

We all know there was tons of confusion on the day of the shooting and a lot of misreporting happened early on, but instead of them dismissing this as the kind of confusion that happens when a terribly disturbing event like this takes place, they latched onto these little things to create this grand construction.

The worst thing, for me, is that they’re denying the grief of these families, these poor parents who had their kids killed. They’re saying it’s all for show and some of them actually want to prosecute the parents for allegedly being actors and accomplices to this crime.

JH: It’s remarkable that people could be so shameless. Do you not have the basic common decency to leave grieving parents alone? It’s amazing.

The evidence – this is very typical, by the way. I’ve seen it with 9/11 Truthers. In the early moments of a big news story -- a big, confusing, breaking news story -- there are always, always, always conflicting details.

Alex, who’s behind this? Who started this? Do you know who’s pushing this?

ASW: It’s really hard to tell. That video that I mentioned was actually made by a production company that produced the film, Operation Terror, which was a really popular 9/11 truther film. It’s a fictionalized version of the truther theory. It’s the exact same people that did the 9/11 truther stuff.

The rest of them seem to be just your run-of-the-mill, Internet cranks. I talked to one of the guys, actually. This is the guy who started it, so he’s really invested here, and has rounded up all the different pieces and put them all in one place. I thought I’d email him and see if he'd respond. I figured he wouldn’t, but he did. I was really disturbed, actually, by the response. I should mention, on his Web site in the About section, he gives himself some credibility by saying, “I’m the only person in the World to solve Lost,” as in the TV show.

JH: (laughs)

ASW: When I emailed him, I asked him about that. I’m not a psychiatrist. I don’t want to diagnose anybody, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he is having some kind of delusions.

He told me that he launched his Web site on December 21st, which is a significant day. He said – and I’m reading here from his email – “Since I am the new-age Messiah, and the revelation from the Goddess, Tefnut, AKA Ma’at of Egypt, I thought the date was significant.”

This guy, who’s leading this online conspiracy movement, literally thinks he is the new-age Messiah. The word “crazy” gets tossed around a lot, but I think this guy meets a clinical definition of delusions. This is where a lot of this stuff is coming from.

The wild thing, to me, is that you’re only a few steps removed from the other kinds of people that we call “crazy,” but that are intimately involved in the gun debate. Larry Pratt, the head of Gun Owners of America, which is a more radical version of the NRA, he hasn’t said anything quite like this about the Sandy Hook shooting. But after Aurora, he told Alex Jones -- who’s a big conspiracy theorist -- he told Alex Jones that there was a really good chance that government agents perpetrated the Aurora massacre, in order to implement gun control. This is a real thing that’s out there.

There’s a professor at Florida Atlantic University who even got involved in this. It’s really easy to dismiss, but I don’t think we should because it can go, really quickly, from the guy who claims he solved Lost to people who are actually involved in the gun control debate.

...Just one case study that I think is really illuminating here. In Australia, there was a mass shooting, where 35 people were killed. Within weeks, the conservative government passed an assault weapon ban, a much stronger assault weapon ban than we had, including a gun buy back. They actually made it illegal to hold these guns, and they bought them back from the population. Homicide with guns dropped 60 percent in the next decade, and there was no associated rise in crime by other means. This is a common talking point that, if criminals don’t have guns, they’ll just turn to knives or even hammers. There was none of that, and there hasn’t been a single mass shooting in the decade since they passed this law.

There’s no question that gun control is effective, and it’s at least worth trying, but we can’t even talk about it now.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/todd-canady-shoots-himself-buying-milk_n_1698566.html
[4] http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/SC-woman-shoots-self-while-seeking-gun-in-purse-4169655.php
[5] http://www.kxly.com/news/north-idaho-news/Troy-man-shoots-self-while-sleeping/-/101230/10650048/-/1019i8tz/-/index.html
[6] http://www.kansas.com/2012/02/12/2213683/wichita-man-shoots-himself-in.html
[7] http://www.salon.com/2013/01/09/the_worst_sandy_hook_conspiracy_theory_yet/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/alternet-radio-crazy-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theories-auerbach-jack-lew-fed-judge-curtails-stop-and
[9] http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/biden-gun-recommendations.php
[10] http://www.alternet.org/yes-we-can-have-sane-gun-control-without-trampling-gun-owners-rights
[11] http://americansforcommonsensesolutions.com/

Conservatives does not have the kind of historical roots that progressive liberalism has. If anything conservatism is basically a modernized version of monarchism, with bits of anarchism, ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism thrown. Which is a very generous way of saying conservatism is the refuse of venal, knuckle dragging freaks, weirdos, zealots, Taliban type religious fanatics and conspiracy lunatics. Conservatism is intrinsically UnAmerican. Just one recent example, Conservative Republicans Are a Threat to Liberty,  Brag They Won House Majority Because Of Gerrymandering

Gov. Nikki Haley Appoints Radical Anti-American Proto-Fascist Tim Scott, to Replace Wacko Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Gov. Nikki Haley Appoints Radical Anti-American Proto-Fascist Tim Scott, to Replace Wacko Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

Tim Scott is America’s newest senator today after getting tapped by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) to fill the vacancy left by former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). DeMint announced this month that he was leaving the Senate to head up the Heritage Foundation, an arch-conservative think tank in Washington DC.

Though DeMint left big, controversial shoes to fill for Republicans, few conservatives will be disappointed with Scott’s record. Elected to Congress just two years ago in the Tea Party wave, Scott has already garnered headlines for his plan to impeach President Obama, his legislation to cut off union members’ children from food stamps, and his defense of Big Oil.

Here’s a quick look at Scott’s record:

    Floated impeaching Obama over the debt ceiling. As the debt ceiling debate raged in the summer of 2011 because of the intransigence of Tea Party freshmen like Scott, the nation inched perilously close to defaulting on its obligations. One option discussed by some officials to avoid that scenario was for the president to assert that the debt ceiling itself was an unconstitutional infringement on the 14th Amendment. However, Tim Scott told a South Carolina Tea Party group that if Obama were to go this route, it would be an “impeachable act.”
   
    Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott’s legislation made no exception for children or other dependents.
   
    Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display “would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow.” When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge’s orders, Scott was nonplussed: “Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it.”
   
    Defended fairness of giving billions in subsidies to Big Oil. Scott and his Republican allies in Congress voted repeatedly last year to protect more than $50 billion in taxpayer subsidies for Big Oil corporations. When ThinkProgress asked Scott whether it was fair to do that, especially at a time when oil companies are earning tens of billions in profit every quarter, the Tea Party freshman defended the industry: “fair is a relative word,” said Scott.
   
    Helped slash South Carolina’s HIV/AIDS budget. As a state representative, Scott backed a proposal to cut the state’s entire HIV/AIDS budget, despite the fact that South Carolina ranks in the top-third of reported AIDS cases. The cuts were ultimately included in the state’s budget, impacting more than 2,000 HIV-positive South Carolinians who needed help paying for their medication.

 So Scott is against every ideal America stands for: Scott is part of the conservative Taliban and is against separation of church and state, like the European fascists of the 1930s Scott is a social-Darwinist, he likes the ten commandments but hates the teachings of Jesus and the virtue of charity preached by Founders like Benjamin Franklin, Scott hates people simply because they are ill and is happy to withhold medical care. Yep, he is just a Jim Demint clone, an America hating zealot.

5 Lies The Gun Lobby Tells You

MYTH #2: The Second Amendment prohibits strict gun control.  While the Supreme Court ruled in  D.C. v. Heller  that bans on handgun ownership were unconstitutional, the ruling gives the state and federal governments a great deal of latitude to regulate that gun ownership as they choose. As the U.S. Second Court of Appeals  put it in a recent ruling  upholding a New York regulation, “The state’s ability to regulate firearms and, for that matter, conduct, is qualitatively different in public than in the home. Heller reinforces this view. In striking D.C.’s handgun ban, the Court stressed that banning usable handguns in the home is a ‘policy choice‘ that is ‘off the table,’ but that a variety of other regulatory options remain available, including categorical bans on firearm possession in certain public locations.”

 Amazingly people can support the 2nd amendment and some reasonable gun control at the same time.

America Hating Conservative Pundit Matt Drudge And Fox News Push False Attack Against Disaster Relief Bill In Wake Of Hurricane Sandy

2012 Election: The USA Stuck To Its American Values and Sent the Republican Plutocrats and Racists to a Brutal Defeat

2012 Election: The USA Stuck To Its American Values and Sent the Plutocrats and Racists to a Brutal Defeat

On Tuesday night Barack Obama – who had led Mitt Romney in most Electoral College projections every single day of this race – won the election that he was supposed to. But that win represented so much more than a victory for a moderate Democrat. We hear that every election is the most important election of our lives -- it's a cliché. This year, it may well prove to be true.

The diverse, creative, younger coalition that propelled the first black president – a guy whose middle name is Hussein – to the presidency, beat back what may well have been the last stand of Ronald Reagan's coalition of plutocrats, white working-class men and religious conservatives. The Republican party, with its deep-pocketed donors and extensive network of supportive media and think-tanks remains viable for the immediate future – thanks in part to some dramatic gerrymandering in 2010 – but the demographic head winds it faces will soon be too powerful to overcome. The GOP's most reliable supporters remain white, married couples who identify themselves as Christians [3], a group that continues its sharp decline in numbers.

Women, especially unmarried women, delivered a sharp blow to those “limited government” conservative men who feel entitled to regulate their reproductive choices and are intent on making them miserable – with waiting periods and vaginal probes and the forced consumption of anti-abortion propaganda – if they make a choice that conflicts with the beliefs of the religious right.

A fifth hard-right justice won't be seated on the Supreme Court for the next four years -- a lost opportunity for the Chamber of Commerce and a potential victory for Roe v Wade, the Voting Rights Act and a slew of other key precedents.

Although it's unlikely that the war is over, the politics of playing on white racial anxiety lost a major battle on Tuesday night as well. The Romney campaign, as my colleague Adele Stan wrote [4], “pushed the boundaries of 'acceptable racism' to extremes.” The dog-whistles from the conservative media went far beyond, yet it wasn't enough to win it for Romney.

Tens of millions of Americans who were priced out of the insurance market won big on Tuesday. Rather than seeing a concerted effort to strangle “Obamacare” in its cradle, the administration's signature achievement will be fully implemented, and hopefully then built upon and improved in the same way Social Security and Medicare were. Millions of poor people will get tax-funded, single-payer healthcare through an expanded Medicaid program and tens of millions more will come to realize that there are no death panels, but there are subsidies for small businesses to provide insurance for their workers, and more subsidies for middle-class families that have been getting squeezed to death by the growing burden of their heal-care costs. Watch the popularity of Obama's health-care reforms rise over the next four years. That will also be a victory over the right's almost religious belief that “the market” can cure all our ills.

Voters and election protection activists scored a very hard-fought win over those who believe that some Americans have a greater right to vote than others. Efforts to suppress the vote among typically Democratic-leaning groups was flagrant and widespread. But Americans waited in the cold on those 6-hour lines, they got the right ID and jumped through whatever hoops they had to. And the lawyers blocked or blunted many of the worst restrictions on our right to vote. Small-d democracy won on Tuesday. Karl Rove, with his plan to use the concocted specter of voter fraud to gain a structural advantage lost.

A unified America was a winner as well. It's likely that most voters didn't grasp just how reactionary the Romney-Ryan agenda really was. They would have turned vast swaths of our already threadbare social safety-net over to the states to administer, making deep cuts in the process. As a result, people living in “blue” and “red” states would have effectively become citizens of different countries. The poor and working class in those red states would have been eligible for far fewer public benefits. The disparities that now exist in funding education, job training and the like would have become far more pronounced. We would have no longer been citizens of the United States who happen to live in Alabama or Vermont; we would become Alabamians and Vermonters, citizens of states with markedly different philosophies of government.

Gays and lesbians emerged victorious on Tuesday. Not only did the first president to come out in support of marriage equality win – one whose administration has worked tirelessly, often below the radar [5], to advance LGBT rights – but Wisconsin's Tammy Baldwin will also be seated as the first openly gay senator in the history of the United States. As of this writing, marriage equality passed by a popular vote for the first and second times in history – in Maryland and Maine. A third ballot initiative recognizing marriage equality is ahead in Washington State; a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage is trailing in Minnesota.

After the running the most opaque and mendacious campaign in memory, “post-truth politics” lost on Tuesday. Never again will a candidate think he or she can promise to reveal his or her plans after the election and hope it will fly with the public.

Fat-cat, right-wing donors spent billions for nothing. As Paul Blumenthal notes [6], Casino Magnate Sheldon Adelson went 0-5 in campaigns in which he invested over $50 million. As much as $6 billion was spent in an election that returned the same Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader, and the same man in the Oval Office.

Reality-based analysis, personified by nerdy number-cruncher Nate Silver, landed a devastating blow to a legion of lazy pundits who make their living relaying what their guts are telling them. Who's got “the MoJo” -- who's winning the soccer mom vote or the waitress vote or white working class men – is now an irrelevance, trivia.

Now is not the time to be over confidant. Conservatives are called zombies for a good reason - they are relentless in pursuing their goals of turning America into something like the Confederate states of the old South. Just as the treasonous Confederacy used Bible quotes and fraudulent patriotism to sell their agenda, their modern iteration - The conservative movement - continues to do the same. Republicans will continue to deal in bumper sticker slogans instead of solutions. They'll keep nibbling away at women's rights and thus men's rights as well - when they take way the rights of our sisters, mothers and wives - they're taking away everyone's rights and freedoms.

Small Businesses Grew Twice As Fast Under Clinton Tax Rates

Democratic Senator Calls Out Conservative Republican's ‘Rumpelstiltskin Fairy Tale’ On Taxes

Democratic Senator Calls Out Conservative Republican's ‘Rumpelstiltskin Fairy Tale’ On Taxes

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) yesterday, in a move that many in the media deemed conciliatory, said that House Republicans are open to raising more revenue for the federal government, as long as it comes “as a byproduct of growing our economy, energized by a simpler, cleaner, fairer tax code, with fewer loopholes and lower rates for all.”

Believing that lower tax rates will magically raise revenue thanks to a growing economy is a favorite conservative fantasy. (It’s been dubbed believing in the “tax fairy.”) Today, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) responded to Boehner’s speech by calling it “a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale“:

    Schumer derided the theory that substantial revenues can be raised without increasing the tax burden on the wealthy.

    “Part of his speech he talked about dynamic scoring, this idea if you cut taxes you increase revenues,” Schumer said.

    “It’s about time we debunked that myth, it’s a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, dynamic scoring. You may remember Rumpelstiltskin was the fairy tale figure who turned straw into gold,” he added, making reference to the popular German children’s tale from the 19th century.

Many studies have shown “that tax cuts do not come anywhere close to paying for themselves over the long term.” Greg Mankiw, chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, called those who believe that tax cuts will result in a revenue increase “charlatans and cranks.” “There is no serious research evidence to suggest that” tax cuts pay for themselves, Republican economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin agreed. But Republican leaders still claim that such a thing will happen, all evidence to the contrary.

How can anyone negotiate compromises with a political movement that is ruled by belief in magic. Math has become an enemy of conservatism in the same way that reason and the scientific method have become enemies.

The River of Denial runs deep, Defeated Once Again, Right-Wing Media Wage War...On Voters.