Dispatches

BIDEN ACTS TO LIMIT UNEXPECTED HEALTH COSTS. President Joe Biden announced he’ll use his executive power to build on the Affordable Care Act and strengthen consumer health protections with three new measures to reduce costs and medical debt, and to crack down on junk health insurance, calling the new actions a “core pillar” of his “Bidenomics” agenda, Joan McCarter reported at Daily Kos (7/8).

The administration is going to close the loopholes on junk insurance plans Donald Trump created; strengthen guidance on surprise medical billing to further restrict providers; and deputize a trio of agencies to investigate how to protect people from scam medical debt credit cards and loans. “No one should go bankrupt trying to get and keep themself or their family healthy,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said. “CMS is committed to a more transparent, fair, and accountable health system for the people we serve.”

The ACA allowed for short-term, limited duration insurance that didn’t have to comply with the whole set of rules for standard insurance plans created under the law. They were intended as bridge policies for people with changing life situations and coverage needs, and could be held for no more than three months. Companies were not allowed to sell them on the ACA health exchanges. Trump changed all that in 2018, allowing states to let these cheap, bare-bones plans onto the exchanges and extending the duration of them to three years.

Plenty of people were duped into buying these plans, not realizing they didn’t provide all the protections they thought they were getting. There’s the Pennsylvania plumber, for instance, who went to the doctor feeling unwell, and indeed ended up in the hospital for a week with heart failure and previously undiagnosed Type 2 diabetes. He thought he had insurance, but was shocked to get a $35,000 hospital bill. That was back in 2019, and it’s continued until now.

Neera Tanden, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, highlighted one of these cases in a call with reporters ahead of the announcement, a Montanan who received a $43,000 bill for cancer care, after the insurer determined it was a pre-existing condition. “That’s not real insurance—that’s junk insurance,” Tanden said. “We will propose a rule to crack down on these plans.”

In the meantime, about half of the states have acted on their own to ban or restrict these plans. The Biden-proposed rule will roll back their duration to the original ACA limit of three months, with a possible one-month extension, and insurers marketing the plans will have to provide prominent disclaimers about the limits of coverage.

Since Congress passed and Biden enacted a law in 2021 to eliminate surprise billing, loopholes have emerged and providers have been taking advantage of them. The most common instance of surprise billing is getting a procedure at a hospital that’s in your insurance network, but having a lab test, or a consulting provider advising on your case who is not in-network, etc., who then invoice a person separately, charges the insurer won’t pay.

The White House says that the existing rules are “already preventing as many as 1 million surprise medical bills every month,” but some plans have been getting around the rules by contracting with hospitals and claiming those hospitals are not technically in-network in independent dispute resolutions. “New guidance will help stop providers from gaming the system by evading the surprise billing rules with creative contractual loopholes that still leave consumers with unexpected costs,” the White House says.

Finally, Biden is directing Health and Human Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the Department of Treasury “to explore whether health care provider and third-party efforts to encourage consumers to sign up for medical credit cards and loans are operating outside of existing consumer protections and breaking the law.”

The administration has already deputized the CFPB to investigate credit reporting companies and debt collectors who aggressively harass and intimidate people who owe medical debts, and to provide more consumer education tools to help patients navigate medical debt and billing.

But medical debt remains a problem. A 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that 13% of uninsured adults are more likely to report having significant medical debt than insured adults, at 9%. The burden of high debt also falls disproportionately on Black and Brown people—27.9% of households led by a Black person have medical debt, compared to 21.7% of households led by a Hispanic person, and 17.2% of households led by a White person.

The administration is putting all this in the “Bidenomics” bucket, along with its crackdown on “junk fees”: “cracking down on bounced check and overdraft fees in the banking industry, which is saving consumers more than $5 billion every year; proposing rules to require airlines to disclose all of their fees up front and successfully pushing a number of airlines to end family seating fees; and mobilizing private sector action to eliminate hidden junk fees for concert and sports tickets.”

It’s also part of strengthening the ACA while making health insurance more affordable for more people. Trump and the Republicans did their damnedest to undermine the law, once they finally accepted the reality that they weren’t going to be able to repeal it. Biden has had a job on his hands in stabilizing it, building it back, and ultimately, making it better.

A GREAT JOBS REPORT AND VINDICATION OF BIDENOMICS. The Labor Department’s jobs report for June showed the economy adding 209,000 jobs and the unemployment rate staying at 3.6%. Robert Kuttner noted at Prospect.org (7/7), “This is a slight slowing of recent job growth trends. It would be hard to imagine a better jobs report both for the Biden administration and to temper the Fed’s campaign to douse the recovery. Real wages are up slightly, while inflation keeps subsiding.”

As President Biden pointed out in a statement released by the White House, “This is Bidenomics in action: Our economy added … a total of 13.2 million jobs since I took office. That’s more jobs added in two and a half years than any president has ever created in a four-year term. The unemployment rate has now remained below 4% for 17 months in a row—the longest stretch since the 1960s.”

Kuttner noted, “We haven’t heard a lot from Larry Summers lately. When inflation was high, Summers mistakenly blamed it on the stimulus of Biden’s several public-investment programs, and virtually called for a recession in order to reduce rising prices. Last October, he said that unemployment was likely to rise to 6%. As late as this past April, Summers was still predicting that recession risks were rising.

“In fact, as recent disinflation trends have made clear, the inflation of 2021-2022 was mainly the result of supply chain shocks and other transient labor market factors related to the pandemic. And the strong recovery continues.

“It’s hard to think of another economist who makes so many errors and keeps being treated by the media as a font of wisdom. The only good thing about Summers’s posture is that it has burned his last bridge to the White House, and we don’t need to worry about Biden giving him a government job,” Kuttner concluded.

INFLATION REDUCTION ACT IS TURNING U.S. INTO RENEWABLE ENERGY SUPERPOWER. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation announced that the state landed a new “gigafactory” that will bring a $400 million investment and generate 500 jobs. That gigafactory will be run by Norwegian company Nel Hydrogen and will be used to create components needed to generate hydrogen gas, Mark Sumner noted at DailyKos (7/9).

That factory comes in part due to some necessary courting and negotiating with foreign companies by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. However, Whitmer is quick to point out that it would not have happened were it not for the funding provided through President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Thanks to that act and other Biden-sponsored legislation, like the Chips and Science Act, private companies have already announced $435 billion in manufacturing and clean energy investments in the United States.

It’s not only funding projects that are quickly increasing the amount of renewable energy used in many states, it’s also creating a way that renewable energy can be moved over long distances, or even shipped overseas in the form of clean-burning hydrogen. In fact, the United States is becoming a hub for this technology. Replacing oil and gas with a clean substitute could make America the world’s leading renewable energy superpower.

As Politico reports, the incentives offered under CHIPS and the Inflation Reduction Act have been so effective that they’re frustrating European leaders. The two laws combined put $400 billion in place for renewable energy projects like the Nel Hydrogen plant. And that’s in addition to the subsidies that have been provided to taxpayers to use renewable energy and drive electric vehicles.

For decades, the US was at the back of the pack when it came to eliminating greenhouse gasses and promoting renewable energy. Thanks to the power of fossil fuel lobbies, Democratic administrations were able to make little progress, and Republican administrations swiftly reversed any changes made.

However, under Biden the US hasn’t just moved to place limits on fossil fuel use, the country has also made investments in renewable energy so significant that they are rapidly changing the global landscape.

“A year ago, the EU clearly had the yellow jersey,” said the CEO of Nel, referring to the shirt signifying the leader of the Tour de France bicycle race. “Now the US has it.”

That Michigan plant is part of a seven-state cooperative to develop widespread use of hydrogen. That even includes some states like Kentucky and Indiana, which have been very reluctant to make any moves that would be seen as less than 100% supportive of coal, oil, and gas. Now those states are eager to dive into the possibility of jobs and development that the Inflation Reduction Act promotes, and an interstate compact is resulting in a shared effort to standardize and expand the necessary infrastructure.

Hydrogen can be burned in cars, either directly in a combustion engine or in generating electricity through hydrogen fuel cells. Several manufacturers have created small numbers of cars using this technology, but their use is currently limited by the lack of a hydrogen fuel infrastructure. In the immediate future, it’s clear that cars are going to be driven by battery technology, not hydrogen—though in the longer term, that could change.

BIDEN’S LEGISLATIVE WINS A BOON FOR BATTLEGROUND DEMS. Democrats in battleground districts and states are beginning to capitalize on successful Biden administration policies as they seek to define Democratic accomplishments before their competition does, Kerry Eleveld noted at Daily Kos (7/6).

Some are stressing Biden’s bipartisan wins while others are emphasizing the fact that Republicans had nothing to do with the material good voters are now experiencing.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, for instance, represents Ohio’s 9th District and recently tweeted out news that $35 Insulin was coming on the market for Medicare recipients—pricing Democrats pushed through last year as part of the Inflation Reduction Act on a party-line vote.

“Democrats stood up to big Pharma and Insurance,” tweeted Kaptur, whose district went for Trump in 2020 by 3 points. “Starting tomorrow, July 1, insulin will be capped at $35 per month for Medicare users. Every Republican voted NO,” she added.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, a top target for Senate Republicans, took a different tack, playing up the bipartisan nature of Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

“I teamed up with Republicans and Democrats to secure the largest ever investment in Montana’s high speed internet,” Tester tweeted (7/5) , linking to an article touting a $628 million investment to expand high-speed internet access across Montana, a state Trump won by 16 points.

Tester noted the funding would create jobs; increase access to work, school, and telehealth; and make Montanans competitive “anywhere in the world.”

“As a third-generation farmer from Northcentral Montana, I know firsthand how important high speed internet access is to our rural communities and growing economy,” Tester said in a press release.

Tester also announced that he had secured $7 million in the 2023 government funding bill to expand Glacier Park International Airport. According to Tester’s press release, the funding expands on about $144 million the senator already secured through President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law, to expand some 69 airports across the state.

Another GOP target, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, also touted internet investments, tweeting, “It’s time every Ohioan had access to high-speed internet. We’re getting things done for Ohio.”

Ohio, a state Trump won by 8 points, is poised to receive nearly $794 million to make high-speed internet accessible to some 183,000 Buckeye households, according to local Youngstown TV station WKBN.

WKBN began the article, “Finally, communities that are usually ignored by those in Washington are getting another look after new funding became available to get their internet up to speed, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown said ...”

Brown and Tester’s internet push piggybacks off Biden’s announcement of his administration’s $40 billion effort to “connect everyone in America” to high-speed internet by 2030.

One Democrat hoping to join the Senate also took his shot at promoting Biden administration investments he helped secure.

“Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, starting today Medicare patients’ insulin is capped at $35/month - saving seniors in our state more than $500/year,” tweeted Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Arizona, who is making a bid for Democrat-turned-Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat.

“Next, we need to expand the cap to cover all Arizonans,” Gallego added, a measure Biden has been calling on Congress to pass but stands no chance if Republicans control either chamber.

The unique approaches of different Democrats appealing to varying audiences give a small sense of the panoply of tools Democratic candidates can use to sell their candidacies in the 2024 election.

CORPORATE PROFITS SURGED TO $1 TRILLION A YEAR AS WORKING PEOPLE SUFFER. The world’s top corporations made combined windfall profits of $1 trillion per year in 2021 and 2022 as people across the planet struggled to meet basic needs due to price hikes that businesses have used to pad their bottom lines, an analysis reported by Jake Johnson at CommonDreams.org showed (7/6).

The humanitarian groups Oxfam and ActionAid found that 722 companies raked in $1.09 trillion in windfall profits—defined as profits significantly above a given corporation’s average—in 2021 and $1.1 trillion last year.

That’s an 89% increase in total profits compared to the average between 2017 and 2020, according to Oxfam and ActionAid’s analysis of Forbes’ “Global 2000” ranking of the world’s largest companies—a major windfall during a period in which extreme poverty and global hunger surged.

The two groups found that “45 energy corporations made on average $237 billion a year in windfall profits in 2021 and 2022” while “food and beverage corporations, banks, Big Pharma, and major retailers also cashed in on the cost-of-living crisis that has seen more than a quarter of a billion people in 58 countries hit by acute food insecurity in 2022.”

The windfall profits of leading food and beverage companies in 2021 and 2022 would be “enough to cover the $6.4 billion funding gap needed to deliver life-saving food assistance in East Africa more than twice over,” Oxfam and ActionAid noted.

“People are sick and tired of corporate greed,” Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s interim executive director, said in a statement. “It’s obscene that corporations have raked in billions of dollars in extraordinary windfall profits while people everywhere are struggling to afford enough food or basics like medicine and heating.”

“Big business is gaslighting us all—they’re hiking prices to make monster profits, plundering people under the cover of a polycrisis,” Behar added.

Oxfam and ActionAid argued that governments should “claw back gains driven by profiteering” by imposing a 50-90% windfall tax on the profits of major corporations.

The groups said such a tax would generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue that could be used to lift people out of poverty, reduce hunger, slash energy bills, and support Global South nations on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

TRUMP JUST MADE THE CASE FOR EXPANDING THE SUPREME COURT. “If this isn’t enough to convince reluctant Democrats that the Supreme Court needs fixing, I don’t know what is," Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (7/6):

(From Trump: Make America Great Again! 2024)

President Donald J. Trump’s Supreme Court Justices Have Delivered Massive Wins

Bedminster, NJ - Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down massive wins for the American people halting Joe Biden’s unconstitutional student loan gimmick, restoring fairness to the college admissions process, and applying the strongest safeguards to First Amendment rights in a generation. One thing is clear: these wins were only made possible through President Trump’s strong nomination of three distinguished and courageous jurists to the Supreme Court.

“Talk about “politicization” and harming the court!,” McCarter noted. “(Chief Justice John Roberts must be so proud.) If former President Donald Trump considers the results of the last session of the Supreme Court ‘massive wins,’ then how much more proof is necessary to show he broke it?

“Trump packed the court and is crowing about it. ‘These wins were only made possible,’ he says, due to the fact that he got three illegitimate, dark money-backed nominees jammed through, thanks to the Senate machinations of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

“Fixing that isn’t stooping to his level. It’s not ‘politicizing’ or ‘packing’ the court. It would save the court.”

FLORIDA LAW HAS SCHOOLS SCARED TO TEACH SHAKESPEARE. A Ron DeSantis-backed law tightening restrictions on books in school libraries and classrooms is having a major impact in one Florida county, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (7/6). Orange County Public Schools have at least temporarily rejected a staggeringly long list of books as media specialists seek to remove any books that censorship-happy parents might decide to challenge once the school year starts.

The law in question requires that books where sexual content is a concern are to be removed from shelves while they are inspected. Books are not supposed to be banned for sexual content, according to the letter of the law, unless they are “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” But that’s obviously not how it’s playing out, and it’s clear that the way things are going is the way the Republicans who put the policy in place intended.

The books on the temporarily rejected list include “A Room With a View,” “Madame Bovary,” “Paradise Lost,” “Into the Wild,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Catch-22,” “Brave New World,” and more. They include books that have been part of the official school curriculum.

There is hope for works that are temporarily on the rejected list while educators consider them: William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was initially rejected, then approved for grades 10 through 12 only, a status it shares with three other Shakespeare plays, the Tennessee Williams classic “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Guidance from the state told educators to “err on the side of caution” on making decisions about books, and that’s what Orange County Public Schools are doing—erring on the side of caution in an environment in which right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education have flagged literally thousands of books as “concerning.” Orange County’s own guidance to the media specialists reviewing the books warned, “You are tasked with protecting your colleagues, yourself, and OCPS to ensure content being made available to students is in compliance with Florida Statutes.”

In debating the law, one Republican state senator directly conflated pornography and anything with sexual content, saying, “There are materials that are pornographic. There are materials that depict sexual activity.” He added, “School districts should be held accountable for that.” And the fear of being “held accountable” under the new laws is driving the removal of scores of books with well-established literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Again and again, this is what Republicans do. They pass broad, vague bans on things intended to instill fear beyond the letter of the law. This gives them plausible deniability on outrageous outcomes if they want it—“Hey, we didn’t say to ban Shakespeare”—but it makes those outcomes more likely by making the rank and file workers tasked with making thousands of decisions about content fear for their jobs.

This is a state where a 1998 Disney movie about Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to integrate a White public school in New Orleans in 1960, was removed from schools in one county because a parent complained that it might make kids learn that White people hate Black people. A textbook company removed mentions of race from the Rosa Parks story after looking at the books being banned in Florida, including dozens of math textbooks. The College Board backed down in response to DeSantis’ demands on an Advanced Placement African American Studies class only to have his administration call for changes to AP Psychology too. Educators have every reason to believe that Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans will target them.

ABOUT THOSE ‘MIRACLE’ READING SCORES IN MISSISSIPPI … Mississippi schools have pulled off a “miracle” in raising fourth-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress standardized test from second-worst in the nation in 2013 to 21st overall in 2022. Or so we’re told by the media. But a series of commentators are raising serious questions about the state’s methods for achieving this so-called miracle, Joan Clawson noted at DailyKos (7/7).

The increase in test scores is attributed to a policy Mississippi put in place making kids repeat third grade if they failed a reading test at the end of that year. During their second year of third grade, they would then get intensive reading instruction. It’s that intensive reading instruction, along with increases in teacher training on literacy instruction and an emphasis on the “science of reading” approach (a.k.a. updated phonics) that’s being credited with making the difference, but Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times and bloggers Bob Somerby, and Kevin Drum are all looking at the data and asking if the kids who are being taken out of the fourth-grade testing pool, combined with the extra year itself, might be a key difference. In that, they follow some education researchers who raised this question before this year’s “miracle” claims.

Mississippi makes a lot of kids repeat grades throughout their early school years: In the 2018-2019 school year, it was 8.7% in kindergarten, 7.9% in first grade, 5% in second grade, and 9.6% in third grade. So what are the effects of that on reading scores in one specific grade? (The NAEP is administered in fourth, eighth, and 12th grade.) Drum notes that if the state holds back 9.6% of third graders for failing the year-end reading test, and “we then test in fourth grade we’re automatically going to get higher scores than we should because the bottom kids are no longer in the testing pool. They’re still back in third grade.” Drum then recalculated as if the scores of the held-back kids—the bottom 10% on reading scores—were still included, and said, “it turns out that Mississippi scores in 2022 are still about 13 points below the national average. In other words, the 2013 reforms had all but no effect.”

The increased fourth-grade NAEP scores didn’t decrease racial disparities, something you would hope would be the effect of a major new initiative like this. Additionally, these improvements in reading scores haven’t shown up on the eighth-grade NAEP results. Maybe they’re coming next year, but it seems premature to declare victory, especially when some studies show that reading gains achieved in early grades through phonics instruction then fade in later grades.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2023

Populist.com