Study shows Single Payer Health Insurance is Most Cost Efficient

Posted: April 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: health, Health care reform | Tags: | 18 Comments

There are some market transactions that are best done by single providers.  These services or goods are usually provided as public goods through a government agency or a private institution granted the monopoly–then regulated–by the federal government.  There are fairly standard traits characterizing natural monopolies.  One of the primary indicators is that a single provider achieves economies of scale that no other form of market achieves and therefore it has the lowest average total cost.   Health insurance is one of those markets where total risk is minimized–with its associated costs–when the risk pool is maximized.  The high number of subscribers spreads the risk over many.   If costs get high, low risk subscribers tend to drop their policies which leaves only folks that have high usage in the pool.  This makes the service highly unprofitable and usually results in an insurance company trying to get rid of the high usage subscribers or any one that has the potential of being high usage.  This is called cherry-picking.

Pricing insurance is based on trying to quantify risk of payment and that can be a complex business.  Also, insurance–as a third party payer–means the market will eventually break down since the pricing mechanism is based on these ‘gambles’ and the fact that the consumer disconnects health care from insurance payments. Third party payer systems lead to inefficient markets because the normal dynamics of supply and demand do not lead to a market-based price.  So, all development nations–except the US–know that having a purely market driven approach to health insurance fails big time.  They approach their systems differently and do not rely on the largess of employers and the wealth of individuals to drive health care payment institutions.

This is a very brief introduction, but I wanted to give you some introduction to this important study by  professor of economics Gerald Friedman from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.  Friedman shows how a single payer system for the US would save money over the current system and the ACA framework. He also explains how a single payer system could be administered cheaply and easily.

The Expanded & Improved Medicare for all act” (HR 676) would establish a single authority responsible for paying for health care for all Americans. Providing universal coverage with a “single-payer” system would change many aspects of American health care. While it would raise some costs by providing access to care for those currently uninsured or under-insured, it would save much larger sums by eliminating insurance middlemen and radically simplifying payment to doctors and hospitals. While providing superior health care, a single-payer system would save as much as $570 billion now wasted on administrative overhead and monopoly profits. A single-payer system would also make health-care financing dramatically more progressive by replacing fixed, income-invariant health-care expenditures with progressive taxes. This series of charts and graphs shows why we need a single-payer system and how it could be funded.

He succinctly provides the best reasons for choosing Single payer.  It’s cheap and efficient.

Health-care costs have risen much faster than income in the United States over the last 50 years, rising from 5% of Gross Domestic Product in 1960 to nearly 18% today. Some of the increase in costs in the United States, as with other countries, is associated with improvements in care and longevity.  Costs have risen much faster in the United States, however, because of the growing administrative burden of our private health-insurance system.

The article contains a lot of graphs and illustrations comparing the current system that relies on profit-making bureaucratic private insurance companies who are subject to state regulations that are quite varied. These providers also make paper work difficult because coverage, plans, and payments are nonstandard.  This creates high costs for actual providers.  The article is easy to read and I’d suggest you take a look at the article which can be found in Dollars and Sense.

An Immodest Proposal

Posted: April 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Voter Ignorance, War on Women, We are so F'd | Tags: , , | 20 Comments

I’m spitting mad about the attacks on Hillary Rosen and the crocodile tears of folks like Rush Limbaugh and others that are trying to say that the war on women is really about evil feminists and real women. You’ll notice that most of this fabrication is coming from right wing men who have a lot to gain by reigniting the Mommy wars. Just follow this link to the WSJ op ed  page and read how the real misogynists are Feminists. There is nothing more disingenuous that the rant that says feminists don’t support women and child rearing in what ever form that takes.  Most feminists would love to see a situation more like Germany where the country actually supports extended parental leave for babies and toddlers and extends training and quality of day care providers and access to nursery school for all types of families.  If this were really about how to do best by our children we would be having a completely different conversation. We would protect them better from abuse and give them and their parents the kind of support they need to be healthy, happy, and well-educated.  This hoopla is only about splitting the women’s vote.

The heart of the argument needs to be aimed squarely back at the folks that are defunding everything from family planning,  Planned Parenthood, Title X, preschools, school lunches, student loans and all things that support a functioning society.  This includes public health and education structures more than anything else.  Any mother–working a paying job or not–wants institutions in place that support her children.  The real anti-family agenda is from people who do not support the basic structures of civilization.   Folks that can’t write checks for tutors, nannies, preventative health care measures, prenatal services, childhood illness treatment, extra curricular activities and fancy schools and colleges rely on society recognizing the benefits of good health and education for its members.  A decent society provides decent public goods. We pool our funds to benefit the economic security and health of our country. Our recent spending priorities have been wars, weapons, and subsidies to businesses that pollute, gamble, and abuse our resources. None of this is healthy for the future of our children.

These interests have now set up a cat fight between women to take our minds off the real problems.   Feast your eyes on the Ryan Budget and you will see–as Paul Krugman puts it–who is cannibalizing our future and our families.

One general rule of modern politics is that the people who talk most about future generations — who go around solemnly declaring that we’re burdening our children with debt — are, in practice, the people most eager to sacrifice our future for short-term political gain. You can see that principle at work in the House Republican budget, which starts with dire warnings about the evils of deficits, then calls for tax cuts that would make the deficit even bigger, offset only by the claim to have a secret plan to make up for the revenue losses somehow or other.

And you can see it in the actions of Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, who talks loudly about acting responsibly but may actually be the least responsible governor the state has ever had.

Mr. Christie’s big move — the one that will define his record — was his unilateral decision back in 2010 to cancel work that was already under way on a new rail tunnel linking New Jersey with New York. At the time, Mr. Christie claimed that he was just being fiscally responsible, while critics said that he had canceled the project just so he could raid it for funds.

Now the independent Government Accountability Office has weighed in with a report on the controversy, and it confirms everything the critics were saying.

Chris Christie lied on a project that would shorten commutes, provide jobs, and basically create a better situation for families in the northeast corridor.  I have only to ask why?  Well, if you take a look at the Ryan Budget and the Norquist mentality, the deal is that most of these folks don’t want the community and its families to succeed, they want their cronies to be able to make a buck off of everything.  They want all the power and all the money within their plutocracy. I’m not talking about government ownership of airlines, telecommunications, or any other move that one could logically equate with socialism.  I talking funding and providing infrastructure improvements and the taxes that would enable them for the benefit of all.  These kinds of public projects  are ones that only a government can do successfully because of the scale and related economies.  Jonathan Alter demonstrates that today’s republicans don’t recognize that the benefits from legitimate public projects bring benefits that far outweigh the costs for every one.

Grover Norquist, the tax-cutting champion, famously said he wanted to shrink the federal government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bath tub.”

With gargantuan deficits, that seems like a pipe dream, but it may be time to start running the water.

The new plan offered by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and approved recently by Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans puts the Republicans on record supporting a federal government that within a decade will consist of little more than national defense, entitlements and interest on the national debt.

Those are largely transfer payments to defense contractors, seniors and bankers. The rest of what the government actually does would be eviscerated, from building roads to environmental protection to medical research.

Ryan has abandoned the Republican fantasy on display during the primaries that cutting liberal spending programs will be enough to restore fiscal sanity. He’d go where the big money is — entitlement reform — and also eliminate a series of tax deductions used by the affluent, though in an April 10 editorial board session with Bloomberg View he was still mum on which ones.

Ryan does not represent the historical positions of any Republican administration.  The first Republican Project that required some taxes was the civil war. The used taxes on the rich–among other things–to fund that, reconstruction, and expansion into the westward part of the country.

To fund the war, the federal government taxed as it had never taxed before. The tariff, long the main source of government revenue, was raised sharply. So were excise taxes on commodities such as liquor. The government also instituted the country’s first income tax, which imposed a 3 percent levy on incomes above $800. It was soon raised to 3 percent on earnings of more than $600 and 5 percent on those that exceeded $10,000.

In the mid-19th century, anyone would have considered a person with a $10,000 annual income “rich.”

With the war’s end, government outlays declined sharply. In 1865, they had been almost $1.3 billion, the first time any government anywhere had spent more than $1 billion in a year. By 1870, they had declined to $309 million.

The income tax was allowed to lapse in 1873, and excise taxes were lowered as well. What remained very high was the tariff. But the purpose of a high tariff wasn’t solely to fund federal operations; it was so high that the government ran budget surpluses for 28 straight years, from 1866 to 1893.

Rather, the tariff was kept high to protect the booming industrialization of the American economy in the postwar years. That was very popular in the Northeast and Midwest, where the industry was concentrated, but deeply unpopular in the South and West.

The Republicans also wanted a transcontinental railroad. Look back to the article for the kinds of things built by Republican Presidents–still useful today–that wouldn’t pass muster with today’s Republican Party.  This again comes from the Alter article cited above.  All of these things improved commerce, provided jobs, and made the country much better off.  Each generation of Americans–up until now–were always better off than our predecessors because they invested in a future for us.

The 1856 Republican platform demanded that “the Federal Government render immediate and efficient aid in [the] construction” of a transcontinental railroad. Money was also pledged for “the improvement of rivers and harbors.”

Soon thereafter, Abraham Lincoln signed laws creating hundreds of new colleges (the Morrill Land Grant Act), helping Americans buy property (the Homestead Act), establishing a new Cabinet department (Agriculture) and protecting public land from development (Yosemite).

Today’s Republican Party is on the other side of each of those Lincoln-era achievements, voting to slash money for education (Pell grants, which are discretionary, would be eviscerated in the Ryan budget), withdraw federal loans to buy property (closing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), shut Cabinet departments (Romney has said he’d shutter a few, though not which ones) and open up more coastlines for drilling.

The idea of using government money to invest in the future hardly died with Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal; Dwight Eisenhower constructed the interstate highway system; and Republicans have voted for smaller such investments repeatedly over the years.

You get the idea.  We shouldn’t even have to introduce the other items coming from Democratic Presidents like FDR that did projects like the Hoover Dam, rural electrification, and the blue star highways that were predecessors to Eisenhower’s interstate system.  If you look at countries that have made priorities of internet systems and/or solar energy projects rather than let a few for-profit businesses piece together networks around urban areas, you’ll see the benefits of federal projects that we’re losing right now.  We may not only see rural Americans loose the benefit of these things but also of something as basic as the constitutionally mandated postal service.  If some one can’t make extraordinary profit from it, today’s Republicans don’t want it.

I”ll let Paul Krugman have the last word.

America used to be a country that thought big about the future. Major public projects, from the Erie Canal to the interstate highway system, used to be a well-understood component of our national greatness. Nowadays, however, the only big projects politicians are willing to undertake — with expense no object — seem to be wars. Funny how that works.

But think beyond that, public education, the national park system, great science projects like the moon shots or huge telescopes would not be done by private industry without huge amounts of federal largess or protection.  Then there’s medical research like Nuclear medicine, genetics, and prevention of diseases by vaccinations.  All of these started out as government funded projects before they were profitable enough to be transferred to the private sector. Why do today’s republicans think small for the country and big only for the 1%?  Why are they creating a cat fight to take us off the real problems that challenge our children’s future?

Friday Reads

Posted: April 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Foreign Affairs, Iran, morning reads, War on Women, Women's Rights | 20 Comments

Good Morning!

More news in the “imaginary” War on Women.  As usual, many Republican Fembots are sadly selling out our interests. Wacko Tea Party Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signs another bill designed to remove the constitutional right to access to abortion.  The state is banning abortions from 18 weeks forward.  This directly conflicts with Roe v. Wade and medical science.  Welcome to the beginning of the world of The Handmaiden’s Tale.  Jan Brewer is no Fay Dunaway either.

Despite its name, critics derided the Women’s Health and Safety Act that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law today as cruel, dangerous, and hostile to women—likely to deter many Arizona women from seeking an abortion, and to distress those who nonetheless go through with one.

Life starts earliest in Arizona, which now defines gestational age as beginning on the first day of a woman’s last period, rather than at fertilization. In practice, that means the state has banned abortions after about 18 weeks (20 weeks from the last menstruation) except in the case of medical emergencies. While that provision has been much discussed, abortions after that point account for only about 1 percent of the procedures currently performed.

The stipulation likely to be most widely felt is what experts are calling an effective shutdown of medication abortions. These nonsurgical abortions are usually performed within the first nine weeks of pregnancy, and account for between 17 and 20 percent of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-rights advocacy group. While women often take the pills at clinics and in their homes, the bill now mandates that a medical provider must have hospital privileges within 30 miles of where the procedure takes place. Many times clinics or homes are not within 30 miles of hospitals, and the distance prevents providers from other cities or even states from caring for women, says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute. Another factor that could contribute to what Nash called a “shutdown” of medication abortions is that the law requires abortion pills to be administered using outdated protocols, confusing providers and obscuring proper use of the drugs.

While it becomes the seventh state to pass such legislation in the past two years, many Arizonans believe theirs is the most restrictive and sinister because of the degree to which it will legislate health care, thwart evidence-based medicine, and shame women. One in three women will have an abortion before age 45 according to Guttmacher, and more than half of those women already have a child.

The Virginia Speaker of the House who also is an ex-ALEC Chair was heard telling a woman ‘I’m Not Speaking In Little Enough Words For You To Understand’.

ProgressVA recently released a report on the legislative influence of the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — which began hemorrhaging donors in the wake of a campaign raising awareness of its efforts to disenfranchise voters and enact Florida-style “stand your ground” laws. The group noted that the Commonwealth of Virginia has spent $232,000 of taxpayer’s dollars over the past decade to send legislators to ALEC conferences and meetings.

Virginia House Speaker William Howell (R), himself a national board member of ALEC and its 2009 national chairman, took issue with the report and called it “inaccurate.”

In an exchange caught on camera, Howell berates the group’s executive director Anna Scholl, mocking the group’s website and her. Howell criticizes the Washington Post’s article about the group’s as “full of half-truths or un-truths.”

In a failed attempt to back up his accusation, Howell notes that while the Commonwealth paid about $230,000 on ALEC-related expenses, it spent even more on travel for the same and other legislators to attend conferences by the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislators.

When by Scholl pressed as to how omission of that irrelevant detail constituted an inaccuracy, Howell berated her:

I guess I’m not speaking in little enough words for you to understand.

When Scholl responded to the slight, telling him “I’m a smart girl, actually I went to the University of Virginia,” more than capable of understanding polysyllabic words. Howell curtly replied, “We’ll good for you.”

Planned Parenthood has sued Texas.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the state of Texas over the state’s exclusion of the nonprofit group’s clinics from a state women’s health program primarily funded by federal dollars.

PPFA told Austin American Statesman reporter Chuck Lindell that they’ve already closed 12 clinics across Texas since last year, after Texas Republicans slashed family planning funds by $74 million. Exclusion from Medicaid funding will see another $10-$13 million pulled from the group, which would trigger the closure of even more clinics serving lower-income communities.

Texas Republicans say they are within their lawful authority to deny funding to the nonprofit group because abortion providers are not considered to be qualified organizations. To those ends, the legislature last year passed a new rule that bans abortion providers from receiving taxpayer money.

PPFA, however, insists that only 3 percent of services performed across the whole country in 2010 had to do with abortion: the vast majority of their work, they claim, relates to breast and cervical cancer screenings, reproductive health, education and contraceptive support.

The Obama Administration said last month that Texas’s move was illegal, and began to cut off federal funds for the Texas Medicaid Women’s Health Program because of the state’s decision to exclude PPFA.

 

 A study conducted by U.S. government scientists are linking the rise in earthquakes in the U.S. to fracking.

A spate of earthquakes across the middle of the U.S. is “almost certainly” man-made, and may be caused by wastewater from oil or gas drilling injected into the ground, U.S. government scientists said in a study.

Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey said that for the three decades until 2000, seismic events in the nation’s midsection averaged 21 a year. They jumped to 50 in 2009, 87 in 2010 and 134 in 2011.

Those statistics, included in the abstract of a research paper to be discussed at the Seismological Society of America conference next week in San Diego, will add pressure on an energy industry already confronting more regulation of the process of hydraulic fracturing.

“Our scientists cite a series of examples for which an uptick in seismic activity is observed in areas where the disposal of wastewater through deep-well injection increased significantly,” David Hayes, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior, said in a blog post yesterday, describing research by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey.

N.C. Gov. Bev Perdue is arguing that those pushing a highly restrictive marriage amendment could wind up invalidating the states’s domestic violence laws.

North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue warned on Thursday that Amendment One, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman, could remove protections against domestic violence for unmarried women.

“It would ban the state from recognizing civil unions, strip away domestic partner benefits and it actually could eliminate legal protections for all unmarried couples in the state,” she said in a video on YouTube. “This will harm the stability and security of North Carolina families like never before.”

“The amendment I believe is dangerous for women,” Perdue continued. “There is a real risk that some laws we have on the books now to protect the victims of domestic violence may no longer apply to many women in the state.”

Because the proposed amendment states that marriage between a man and women is the “only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized,” opponents have said that it could render domestic violence laws invalid for unmarried couples.

After Ohio passed a similar marriage amendment, some judges dropped domestic violence charges in cases involving unmarried couples.

Yeah, right, no war on women here.

Seymour Hersh has evidence that the Bush administration trained Iranian terrorists in Nevada.  Amy Goodman interviews Hersh on the subject.

AMY GOODMAN: In what appears to be a first for U.S. foreign policy, new revelations have emerged that the Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group despite its inclusion on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists. Writing for The New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reports U.S. Joint Special Operations Command trained operatives from Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, at a secret site in Nevada beginning in 2005. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office. The MEK has been included on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist groups since 1997. It’s been linked to a number of attacks, spanning from the murders of six U.S. citizens in the ’70s to the recent wave of assassinations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists.

Although the revelation that the U.S. government directly trained the MEK comes as a surprise, it’s no secret the group has prominent backers across the political spectrum. Despite it’s designation as a “terrorist” organization by the State Department for 15 years, a number of prominent former U.S. officials have been paid to speak in support of the MEK. The bipartisan list includes two former CIA directors, James Woolsey and Porter Goss; former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani; former Vermont Governor Howard Dean; former Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former FBI Director Louis Freeh; former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton; and former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

Punking Hilary Rosen

Posted: April 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: religious extremists, right wing hate grouups, Rush Limbaugh, the GOP, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Rights | Tags: | 36 Comments

Hilary Rosen provided the right wing noise machine with a two second sound byte that has been used to reignite the Mommy Wars.  They have purposefully obfuscated what Rosen said thinking they will dupe women into voting for Romney.  I am not falling for it.  I can’t imagine most of the women I know will fall for it either.  Any one that thinks that Hilary Rosen believes that stay-at-home parents without access to maids, nannies, yard crews, and millions of dollars don’t work, raise your hand! I thought so.  It’s different when you have the ability to just write a check to get anything done. Ann Romney does not have the day-to-day experience of 99% of the women in this country, housewife or not. Most women who work inside and outside of the home have to do stuff for themselves. They can’t just write a check and call on an army of servants. Not so with Ann Romney. So, why is every one punking Hillary Rosen? That Punk’d treatment  would include that provided by “this is what a feminist looks like” President Obama and his gang of campaign boyz.

President Obama strongly disagreed with Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s controversial comment about Ann Romney, saying today that “there’s no tougher job than being a mom.”

“Anybody who would argue otherwise, I think, probably needs to rethink their statement,” the president told Bruce Aune of ABC’s Cedar Rapids affiliate KCRG.

Rosen sparked a political firestorm when she questioned Wednesday whether Ann Romney is qualified to gauge women’s economic concerns, claiming the mother of five has “never worked a day in her life.” The Romney campaign pounced on the comments as an opportunity to boost the GOP frontrunner’s standing among female voters, while the president’s campaign and the White House publicly distanced themselves from Rosen.

My mom was a “housewife” too.  However,  Mildred cleaned our house.  Mrs. Anders watched me and my sister when we weren’t at Miss Margaret’s pre-school, Miss Donna’s ballet lessons, or Mrs. Donna’s swimming classes. My mom played a lot of bridge, spent a lot of time at the country club, and then did things for junior league like volunteering at the hospital gift shop or attending lunches for the local Red Cross.  Mrs Olsen did all our laundry except for our clean ironed bed sheets that were dropped off by Kimball’s laundry at  our front door. My dad did the grocery shopping since mom hated doing that and he cooked dinner any way so it was pointless for her to do that.  So, as you can see the life of an upper middle class house wife is just full of challenges.  Most of the women I’ve mentioned here–like Miss Donna who taught me ballet or the Mrs Donna that taught me swimming–were either widowed or divorce.  Mildred and Mrs. Anders had husbands that were old and not able to make money any more since their bodies had way gone pass the point of being able to do the kinds of physical work their educations would allow.  Mrs. Olsen was putting her son through college.  Yup, my mom had the toughest job in the world.  Did I mention that we were the poor ones in my family?  My mother’s brother and sister had live-ins for all of that.  Of course,  my aunts were “housewives” too although I came to think of them more as country club wives.   They never worried about much of anything except boredom and when to pick us up.  None of us were rich enough to have chauffeurs.  Some how, I can’t imagine Ann Romney cleaning any of those multitudes of houses, can you? So,  I wish I was reading a lot more articles in support of Hillary Rosen, like this one from The Nation.  My mother had the ability to pay a lot of other people do a lot of things. She didn’t have to worry about making ends meet, for example.  She had other women doing a lot of work because they needed that money just to stay in their houses.  I don’t think my mother could’ve related to Mrs. Olsen’s concerns any more than Ann Romney could relate to most women. The issue is not if you choose to work or not.  The issue is if your life is completely underwritten by millions of dollars or a struggle to keep food on the table.

Rosen was responding to Mitt Romney’s constant trotting out of Ann when he gets a question on women’s issues:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that’s what I’m hearing.Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we—why do we worry about their future?

There’s nothing there about stay-at-home moms, or the idea that that raising children isn’t work. Rosen was referring to the fact that Ann Romney—an incredibly rich and elite woman—likely does not understand the economic concerns of most American women. Again, it was unfortunate choice of words—but she wasn’t wrong.

The Romney campaign, predictably, has grabbed onto this “controversy” in an attempt to divert attention from their missteps around equal pay and the war on women yesterday. Ann Romney joined Twitter, and her first two messages were about the flap, writing that “all moms are entitled to choose their path” and that she “made a choice to stay home and raise five boys.”

Since all moms are “entitled” to “choose” their path, I’m very much looking forward to the Romney’s plan for national mandated paid parental leave. I’m also wondering, since they believe that women’s domestic labor is valuable and real work, when they will come out in support of wages for said work. (Or perhaps women are only entitled to make their “choice” when they have the financial means to do so.)

Focusing on this slip-up just brings more attention to the way in which a Romney presidency wouldn’t support mothers. Because empty platitudes about motherhood “being the hardest job in the world” doesn’t change the reality of most moms’ lives, or make their job any easier.

But it’s not just that Romney is bad for women (whether they work outside the home or not). What’s being lost in this conversation is the incredibly facile and insulting notion that just because a woman made the decision to marry Romney and occasionally talk to him about other women, that he is somehow well-informed on women’s issues. Ann Romney is not an expert on women’s issues just because she happens to be one. And she’s not an expert in what mothers need just because she has children. Believing otherwise is infantilizing and reduces women’s very important and complex concerns to beauty parlor chitchat.

What’s disappointing to me is that most of the press and even many Democrats are allowing the right wing to frame and punk single mother Hillary Rosen. Here’s a little sample of the right wing smear going on right now.

No one is arguing that raising children isn’t work. Democratic strategist and CAP Action board member Hilary Rosen is a single mother of twins who had to go through the expensive and challenging process of adoption with her then partner Elizabeth Birch. Now, she’s trying to stick up for other mothers who don’t have the luxury of millionaire husbands to help fund their child-rearing duties, and the backlash is getting ugly. Catholic League president Bill Donohue attacked her family on Twitter this morning:

@CatholicLeague: Lesbian Dem Hilary Rosen tells Ann Romney she never worked a day in her life. Unlike Rosen, who had to adopt kids, Ann raised 5 of her own.

So, just so you know this is right wing spin, here’s Limbaugh and the newly fabricated “democratic war on mothers”.  So, the defunding and removing access to prenatal care, school lunches, family planning services, preschool, maternal leave, and a myriad of other family-friendly programs wasn’t enough evidence of a republican war on mothers that we need to invent things out of thin air?

Rush Limbaugh jumped into the firestorm on Thursday created by Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s jab at stay-at-home-mom Ann Romney as the radio talk show host accused the Democratic Party of launching a “war on mothers.”

Limbaugh spent the bulk of his three-hour afternoon program griping about Rosen’s charge Wednesday that Mitt Romney’s wife has “never worked a day in her life,” telling listeners that the comment summed up the Democrats’ position on women’s role in society.

“This is big because it’s such a teachable moment. It’s such an illustration of who these people are, the left. It’s such an illustration of phonies of feminism. It is an illustration of the absolute hostility that the left has for women who stay at home,” the conservative radio host said, speaking before Rosen issued a statement apologizing to Ann Romney.

He continued, “Obama and the Democrats are not content to just divide men and women. They want to go deeper and dive working mothers from stay at home mothers. And they want to attach the virtue to working mothers and assign no virtue to stay at home moms. Now you talk to most women, even those who consider themselves feminists … they will tell you that they thought that was a battle they fought and won and ended years ago.”

Limbaugh also personally defended Ann Romney, referring to her as a “role model.”

“They’ve gone after the wrong woman here. Ann Romney is not disliked. Ann Romney is not unlikeable. Ann Romney isn’t controversial. Ann Romney isn’t telling anybody how to live. … Ann Romney’s a role model. Don’t care what you think of Mitt. That’s not the point here. She is a role model for living and trying to live a fulfilling life,” he said.

No one but Ann Romney knows if her life is fulfilling and if she considers herself any kind of a role model. I would hope my daughters would not consider Ann Romney’s life one worth copying but then that’s my values. For one, I love my father a lot. If he were an outspoken atheist like Ann Romney’s was, I certainly would have never allowed any one to sneak-baptize him into any religion after his death. I consider that the panultimate disrespect. I also would not for a minute raise my daughters in any tradition where women must call 18 year old man children “elders”, where tons of money is spent defeating the ERA, and where women are not allowed access to “heaven” with out a husband sponsor. That’s just the short list of the kinds of patriarchal, women-hating stuff that goes on in Romney’s religion. I don’t consider that much of a role model for self respect. I also would’ve put my husband on the roof of the car if he’d have tried to put the family dog up there.  However, Ann Romney has to live with all of these decisions and her life. That’s the deal with being a mother, you should be able to choose the way you do it. I can’t imagine any one thinking Ann Romney’s choices or lifestyle is common to all but a few women and I challenge all of us that see this backlash and stand behind Hillary Rosen. For a group of people that scream class war at the drop of a hat, the misogynists sure have done a great job of missing the point of class and money in Rosen’s comments.

endnote:

I’ve just been told that David Pflouffe is on Lawrence O’Donnell acting lie a complete ass.  He just called the pillorying of Rosen a “rare moment of bi-partisan agreement”.  This is just another example of the inability of Democratic men to really stand up for what’s right.  Unbelievable! This is akin to them joining in the swift boating of Kerry.  This has nothing to do with the choice of not working or working.  It has everything to do with being a member of a privileged elite that’s far removed from the rest of us.  We need to be very vocal about this.

or as Hillary herself puts it on her facebook:

I’ve nothing against @AnnRomney. I just don’t want Mitt using her as an expert on women struggling $ to support their family. She isn’t.

They must think Women are Really Stupid

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 31 Comments

Unless Harvard MBA math is radically different from the math taught in this universe, the Romney campaign must have decided that women are really gullible and stupid.  They realize they have a gender gap and have decided giving us bad math and no answers is the answer.  The Republican moves to regain ground with women are akin to an ad campaign coming from the writers of Mad Men. It’s a blast from the stereotype past.  Not only is the ad lame and dated, but it doesn’t hold up to fact checking and questioning which is very easy to do on today’s internet database.  Etcha Sketch positions and lies don’t cut it with most of the women I know.

First, we learned Romney keeps in touch with women by sending his wife–the great white rich huntress–out to stalk the elusive beasts that are rare animals in the world of venture and plunder finance. How does Romney answer questions about women’s concerns?

Virtually every time, Romney answers by invoking his wife of 43 years, and reports what’s she’s told him about what women want.

“She reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves,” Romney told the Newspaper Association of America on Wednesday. “They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school or to practice and so forth after school. That is what women care about in this country, and my vision is to get America working again.”

A few days earlier in Middleton, he was asked how he’d counter the Democrats’ narrative on contraception. He prefaced his answer this way: “I wish Ann were here … to answer that question in particular.”

Then, we saw Republican Fembots out on the talk circuit–Nikki Haley being one–to say that women really want good jobs for their sons and don’t care at all about their health concerns like pregnancy prevention and access to mammograms for women without private health insurance.

During an appearance on ABC’s The View, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked Haley how conservatives could make the case that Republicans represent the interest of women.

“All of my policy is not based on a label,” Haley remarked. “It’s based on what I’ve lived and what I know: Women don’t care about contraception. They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all of those things.”

Then, they send Prince Reibus to the chat spin zone who says the War on Women was a campaign ploy with as much validity as a War on Caterpillars after we’ve endured about two years with of laws to defund Planned Parenthood, remove state equal pay laws, and block women’s constitutional right to access abortion, birth control, and health care in general. Then there are the Ryan spending priorities which hit women, the elderly and children hardest while giving millionaires more tax breaks.  Here’s a few headlines just to remind you what they’ve been up to the first two weeks of April alone.  Notice that the list of restrictions aimed at women are aren’t exactly coming from the most blue states with Democratic Governors.   Don’t forget Romney has vowed to get rid of Planned Parenthood and Title X and supports the Blunt Amendment.

The Los Angeles Times: Mississippi could close state’s sole abortion clinic, by Richard Fausset

ABC News: Texas Teacher Fired for Unwed Pregnancy Offered to Get Married, by Christina Ng

USA Today: Ariz. House OKs bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, by Alia Beard Rau

WEAU-TV: Controversial abortion bill among several Walker quietly signed into law, by Aaron Dimick

ACLU press release: ACLU and Women’s Health Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Vital Health Services in Oklahoma

Let’s put that in perspective for the years 2011 and 2012 to date.

“We’re looking at about 430 abortion restrictions that have been introduced into state legislatures this year, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as 2011,” says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group that focuses on health and reproductive rights. This year, Nash says, “is shaping up to be quite busy.”

Keep in mind, 2011 was already a watershed year for abortion restrictions: States passed 83 such laws, more than triple the 23 laws passed in 2010. And much of that had to do with the 2010 election, when Republicans gained control of many state legislatures. With the political makeup of state capitols unchanged, lawmakers are continuing to put more limits abortion.

The latest Romney lie should make Romney’s nose reach all the way around the world to touch the back of his head. Romney just doesn’t spin a story to his advantage, he makes things up from whole cloth.  This time he’s playing numbers games with unemployment statistics.

Mitt Romney’s campaign wants you to know that the same president who argues for contraceptive coverage and suggests that a Congress with more female members would get more accomplished has also presided over disproportionate job losses among women.

On April 6, 2012, Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3% of the jobs lost under @BarackObama, a claim also made on Romney’s website.

She followed it up a few hours later with this: “@BarackObama touts policies for women & 92.3% jobs lost under him r women’s. He’s even more clueless than we thought.”

When we asked for backup for the claim, the campaign cited national employment figures spanning four years. We found that though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.

Here is the real bottom line from PolitiFact.

… if you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total.

Romney denies that his gender gap is due to the many laws passed recently to restrict women’s civil liberties and rights.

As the Republican field winnowed Tuesday, Mitt Romney made an appeal to a voting bloc key to any candidate’s success in November: women.

Though the day’s headlines revolved around a decision by former Sen. Rick Santorum to suspend his campaign, Mitt Romney barreled forward with a push against Democrats as to who could best appeal to female voters.

Speaking at a Delaware structural steel factory, Romney responded to Democratic claims his party had waged a “war on women” and alienated female voters. Romney turned the argument around, accusing President Barack Obama’s administration of failing working women.

“The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy,” he told an audience in Wilmington, saying women had lost 92.3% of jobs lost under the Obama administration.

Romney said his private sector career had helped him understand what women worry about: jobs and the economy.

“If we’re going to get women back to work and help women with the real issues women care about – good jobs, good wages, a bright future for themselves, their families, and their kids, we’re going to have to elect a president who understands how the economy works, and I do.”

I would argue that understanding the unemployment  rates would be one of them.   So given that, wouldn’t you think Romney would know what he thinks about the Lilly Ledbetter Act and its status as Obama’s signature law to help women and pay?  This happened this morning. 

Given that Tea Party/Koch Puppet Governor Walker of Wisconsin just repealed his state’s equal pay act, you think some one in the Romney campaign would realize it’s an important question for women who work.  Obviously, the DNC and the Obama campaign have already asked the question.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman called out Republican Gov. Scott Walker today for repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, a law intended to lower the cost for plaintiffs suing employers for pay discrimination.

“He tried to quietly repeal the Equal Pay Act. Women aren’t going to stand for that,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The law allowed for victims to sue employers in state court which is often less expensive than filing in federal court.

The Republican controlled state Senate passed the measure in November, followed by passage in the state Legislature in February. Walker then repealed it Thursday.

“The focus of the Republican Party on turning back the clock for women really is something that’s unacceptable and shows how callus and insensitive they are towards women’s priorities,” the Florida congresswoman said.

National Republicans have yet to comment on the Wisconsin repeal but the Obama campaign has seized the opportunity to tie Walker’s law to Mitt Romney, who has argued that women voters in 2012 only care about pocketbook issues.

“Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?” Obama campaign representative Lis Smith said Friday.

This sounds a lot like Romney’s journey to the Blunt Amendment this year.  First, Romney says no state is trying to make birth control illegal, then he says that birth control is a private issue, then, he supports the intrusive Blunt Amendment within the hour of not supporting it.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Wednesday he opposed Senate Republicans’ effort that critics say would limit insurance coverage of birth control, then reversed himself quickly in a second interview saying he misunderstood the question.

Romney told Ohio News Network during an interview that he opposed a measure by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., that was scheduled for a vote Thursday. “I’m not for the bill,” Romney said before urging the interviewer to move on.

Romney later said he didn’t understand the question.

“Of course I support the Blunt amendment. I thought he was talking about some state law that prevented people from getting contraception so I was simply — misunderstood the question and of course I support the Blunt amendment,” Romney later told Howie Carr’s radio program in Boston, noting that Blunt is his campaign’s point man in the Senate.

Just hours earlier, ONN reporter Jim Heath asked Romney about rival Rick Santorum and the cultural debate happening in the campaign and the legislation proposed by Blunt and co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

“He’s brought contraception into this campaign. The issue of birth control — contraception, Blunt-Rubio — is being debated, I believe, later this week. It deals with banning or allowing employers to ban providing female contraception. Have you taken a position on it?” Heath said. “He (Santorum) said he was for that. We’ll talk about personhood in a second, but he’s for that. Have you taken a position?”

Romney replied: “I’m not for the bill, but look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”

So, the Romney camp holds a campaign call on “women’s issues”, wants to talk about women and jobs, then has no idea what the Lilly Ledbetter Act is or what Romney thinks about it.  This is major fail imho and just like the clueless response on the Blunt Amendment Dosado.  Maddow sums this up succinctly.

Romney has cited a misleading statistic, and his aides couldn’t defend it. Romney has said current policies are keeping women from getting more jobs, and given three separate chances to say something coherent, his aides couldn’t explain what would change if the former governor is elected president. Were they not expecting these kinds of question?

To borrow a Casey Stengel line, can’t anybody here play this game?

As for the Fair Pay law, Lilly Ledbetter released a statement shortly after the Romney campaign wouldn’t state the former governor’s position on this.

“I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Mitt Romney is not willing to stand up for women and their families. If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This Act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also. Women earn just 77 cents to every dollar that men earn for the same job, which is why President Obama took decisive action and made this the first bill that he signed when he took office. Women should have the ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers.

“Anyone who wants to be President of the United States shouldn’t have to think about whether they support pursuing every possible avenue to ensuring women get the same pay for the same work as men. Our economic security depends on it.”

Eventually, after Ledbetter’s statement was released to the media, the Republican campaign said a Romney administration wouldn’t try to repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but wouldn’t say whether Romney supported the law itself. (Remember, the vast majority of congressional Republicans opposed the law when it passed in 2009.)

I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I would vote for this schmuck.  I say this as women who ran as a Republican in the 1990s and who is squarely an independent today.  You have to be a seriously self loathing woman to consider voting for today’s Republican Party.  They’ve gone way off the deep end and Willard’s gone right with them.

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