Tag Archives: Affordable Care Act

This changing Commonwealth of Virginia

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This January, Virginia’s congressional delegation will look different: Four of its 11 members will be women, up from one now. And seven will be Democrats, versus four today.

Along with last year’s Democratic landslide in Virginia’s state elections, these results provide part of the answer I wanted to see after 2016’s meltdown: Virginia voters aren’t buying the sales pitch of a Republican Party decomposing into a Trump personality cult.

But it’s also worth remembering what politics in my adopted state looked like only eight years ago. The GOP had swept races for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general and maintained majorities in the House of Delegates and the Senate.

Some of those Republicans… fell short of the examples of such former Virginia GOP office-holders as Rep. Tom Davis and Sen. John Warner, to phrase things kindly.

Gov. Bob McDonnell showed a fondness for gifts from donors and floated laughably bad ideas about transportation funding before accepting a deal to raise the gas tax. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was exponentially worse, wasting taxpayer dollars on doomed, grandstanding lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act and climate-change research at the University of Virginia.

In the House, Republican delegates like Prince William County’s Bob Marshall pushed measures like an invasive abortion-restriction bill that made “transvaginal ultrasound” a TV punch line.

And even well into Northern Virginia, the ignorant, corrupt, homophobic Eugene Delgaudio kept winning elections to the Loudoun County Board.

Since the entire state had voted in 2006 for a cruel amendment to the state constitution banning even “approximate” legal status for same-sex marriages, this balance of political power looked like something we’d see for a long time.

Now McDonnell, Cuccinelli, Marshall and Delgaudio and others like them are gone from elected politics. Last year’s rout led by Gov. Ralph Northam convinced the Virginia GOP to end its massive resistance against expanding Medicaid–a position that had set it against even hospital and business lobbies. Campaigning on keeping Confederate memorials up will not get you elected, as last year’s failed gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie and this year’s even-more-failed senate candidate Corey Stewart found. And campaigning against the NRA and its gun worship no longer sets you back here, as incoming representatives Elaine Luria, Abigail Spanberger, and Jennifer Wexton can attest.

There’s still work to do. GOP gerrymandering remains an issue–and the fix can’t involve lurching to the other extreme like Maryland Democrats. The state senate’s Republican delegation still includes Loudoun’s Dick Black, who literally pals around with serial-killing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Too many things in the Commonwealth are still named after Confederate leaders who deserve no such honor. And while 2006’s hate amendment has been ruled unconstitutional, it continues to stain the constitution.

But that’s what the 2019 state elections can help fix. Unless voters here go back to sleep the way they did after 2008.

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Self-employment is easier if you’re not at the mercy of health-insurance companies

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I am thankful every day that my wife has a good job that includes affordable health insurance for our family. But seeing the Republican Party attempt to demolish the Affordable Care Act over the past few months has made me even more appreciative of being a kept man.

For as long as I’ve been self-employed, I’ve been able to tell myself that if my wife’s job ever went away, the ACA would give us a fair shot at keeping health insurance for the three of us–even today, the rates I see quoted at HealthCare.gov remain reasonable. Meanwhile, not having to worry about exceeding lifetime coverage caps (my friend Kate Washington’s testimony about the costs of her husband Brad’s treatments for cancer are essential reading) or being judged to have a pre-existing condition takes a lot of anxiety off my mind.

Most of the GOP’s proposed replacements for the ACA would have taken a hammer to some if not all of those protections. It’s possible that my wife’s premiums would have dropped as a result. But we don’t want to trim that bill at the cost of screwing over other people.

Like, for example, self-employed friends who get their coverages on ACA exchanges. Tom Bridge and his wife Tiffany each run tech consultancies in D.C., and without the law’s protection they’d be looking at vastly higher coverage for themselves and their son. He’s tweeted often and well about how this product of the Democratic Party has allowed him to build a business.

Friday morning’s Senate defeat (thanks, Senators Collins, McCain and Murkowski and all 48 of their Democratic colleagues) against the latest in a long line of ACA-gutting bills drafted in secret and in haste should ease the existential dread they and many others have been feeling.

(President Trump being President Trump, he won’t shut up on Twitter about how the GOP should keep trying to kill “Obamacare” despite its unbroken record of failure so far. He’s the Black Knight of American politics on this subject.)

It does not, however, end the need to fix what’s wrong with the ACA in some markets. Another freelancer friend, Seattle-based tech writer Glenn Fleishman, has seen his costs climb to “ridiculous” levels–as in $20,000 this year. He’s now seeking full-time employment to escape that.

Now would be a great time for the Republican Party to accept that Americans have decided health insurance shouldn’t be left as a privilege, then bring some business smarts towards crafting the most efficient, choice-driven way to meet that goal. Since most other industrialized countries achieved universal coverage long ago, there’s a huge variety of ideas for them to steal, and which Republicans could have learned from over the past seven years instead of repeatedly staging stunt votes against the ACA.

The party that constantly says it speaks for entrepreneurs should be able to sell this as making it easier for people to start a business and create jobs. Or the GOP can continue to try to tear down this part of President Obama’s legacy, all so the self-employed can once again be “free” to run into the embrace of a large corporation if they don’t want to have to worry about getting sick.

Don’t blame this nonsense on “Washington” or “Congress”

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Most of the federal government shut down at midnight, and that sucks for multiple reasons. (Beyond the basic breakdown in democratic government on display, the shutdown has cut off a few friends from their next paychecks.) But spare me the ritual outrage over the evils of “Washington” or “Congress.”

Capitol stop-sign barrierThe former is not just a political abstraction but a city of 632,323 people. Most of the residents of the District of Columbia have nothing to do with Congress, and none have voting representation there.

As for the latter, there’s a great deal to dislike in the deliberative body that meets and occasionally gets actual work done a few blocks south of Union Station. But it’s an epic feat of false equivalency to blame the shutdown on some bipartisan failure to cooperate.

One part of one party in one house of Congress made it happen. That segment of House Republicans deeply loathes the Affordable Care Act (would that all these advocates of individual liberty were also at the barricades over the NSA’s subversion of the Fourth Amendment), have already staged dozens of stunt votes against it, and yesterday led the rest of the House GOP to hold up the entire federal budget over a policy that won a mandate in two presidential elections and survived the Supreme Court’s scrutiny.

That won’t work, on account of the simple math of a Democratic majority in the Senate and the absence of a veto-proof Republican majority in the House. That’s normally a cue to compromise. So is the political reality that every minute that ACA insurance signups continue in overwhelming numbers–oh, yes, that’s one thing the government shutdown didn’t stop–Obamacare collects more constituents.

In days or weeks, I trust that enough of the House will realize this–hopefully before the true  believers there shove the country into default. In the meantime, don’t mistake those in the grip of a preexisting condition some have diagnosed as Obamacare Derangement Syndrome for the entirety of Congress, and please leave the good city of Washington right out of this.