Trump Regime Moves to Scrap Protections for LGBT Healthcare Patients

Trump, Pence and HHS Secretary Azar.

With the Covid-19 pandemic raging one would think that the main focus of the Trump/Pence regime would be on insuring that all Americans have access to quality healthcare without any obstacles.  Sadly, that would be a false assumption.  As Politico is reporting the Trump/Pence regime is continuing on its quest to roll back Obama administration policies that protected LGBT individuals from discrimination and the refusal of medical services which in the LGBT context are part of Trump's efforts to impose the anti-LGBT license to discriminate laws  Trump's motivation for with such vile actions?  To maintain his support among evangelical Christians and Christofascists who cannot tolerate any regulations or policies that restrict their ability to mistreat those they deem "other" and who have a sick need to look down upon others in order to feel superior.  Here are highlights from Politico:

The Trump administration is moving to scrap an Obama-era policy that protected LGBTQ patients from discrimination, alarming health experts who warn that the regulatory rollback could harm vulnerable people during a pandemic.

The health department is close to finalizing its long-developing rewrite of Obamacare’s Section 1557 provision, which barred health care discrimination based on sex and gender identity. The administration’s final rule on Thursday was circulated at the Justice Department, a step toward publicly releasing the regulation in the coming days, said two people with knowledge of the pending rule. The White House on Friday morning also updated a regulatory dashboard to indicate that the rule was under review. Advocates fear that it would allow hospitals and health workers to more easily discriminate against patients based on their gender or sexual orientation.

The Obama administration moved to create its non-discrimination protections in response to advocates and health care experts who said that LGBTQ patients were being turned away from necessary care or intimidated from seeking it out. The broad rule also offered specific protections for transgender patients for the first time and extended protections for women who had abortions. But a federal judge in 2016 blocked those protections following a lawsuit from religious groups, and the Trump administration has steadily worked to weaken the rule before it could take full effect.

In last year's proposal, the health department also proposed changes that went further than simply rolling back the new Obama protections, moving to eliminate similar nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ patients that were contained in other regulations.

"If the final rule is anything like the proposed rule, HHS is adopting changes that would be harmful in the best of times but that are especially cruel in the midst of a global pandemic that is disproportionately affecting vulnerable communities and exacerbating disparities,” said Katie Keith, a lawyer and Georgetown professor who’s tracked the rule.

The health department's top civil rights official also defended the administration's approach to vulnerable populations. “As we have shown in our recent efforts to protect persons from disability and age discrimination during the pandemic, HHS will vigorously enforce civil rights laws as passed by Congress, before, during, and after any rulemaking,” Roger Severino, the HHS civil rights chief, said in a statement. Severino was an active critic of the Obama-era non-discrimination rules before joining the administration. Any rule issued by the Trump administration on LGBTQ protections could be short-lived. The Supreme Court is set to rule on whether the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ workers, which could create a new regulatory framework and force health officials to swiftly return to the drawing board.

Given the Trump/Pence regime's anit-LGBT agenda - and that of the GOP in general, I find it dumbfounding that a small percentage of gays continue to call themselves Republicans. It makes about as much sense as a 1930's German Jew joining the Nazi Party.

Federal Court Strikes Down Trump/Pence "Conscience Rule" Allowing Discrimination

One consistent trend of the Trump/Pence regime has been the effort to grant Christofascists special privileges and dispensation from complying with non-discrimination laws using a warped and toxic version of "religious freedom" to justify outright bigotry and discrimination.  One such example is the so-called "conscience rule" that would allow health care workers to refuse to treat anyone they disliked or disapproved so long as they could invoke the smoke screen of "religious belief."  The exemption is so broad that in theory even racial discrimination  - not to mention anti-LGBT animus - could be green lighted. The entire argument is an utter distortion of the Founders' view of religious freedom as written in the First Amendment and, as NPR pointed out, the Court noted, based on "false evidence" presented by the Trump/Pence regime:

. . . .that increase in the number of complaints is "demonstrably false," according to Engelmayer's ruling. Nearly 80% of all the complaints given to the court were about vaccinations — unrelated to health care workers and their religious beliefs in providing care. The judge writes that only 21 — or 6% — of the complaints that the government provided the court are even potentially related to providers' moral or religious objections. During oral arguments, the government's attorney conceded that the real number of complaints was "in that ballpark." "This conceded fact is fatal to HHS's stated justification for the Rule," Engelmayer writes. "Even assuming that all 20 or 21 complaints implicated the Conscience Provisions, those 20 or 21 are a far cry from the 343 that the Rule declared represented a 'significant increase' in complaints."

The rule was always about green lighting discrimination with the supposed justification fabricated after the fact. A piece in Mother Jones looks further at the Court's ruling and the insidious discrimination that the rule sought to allow (the Virginia GOP tried similar stunts that help lead to its historic defeat on Tuesday).  Here are article highlights:

The Trump administration’s “conscience rule,” which would have allowed health care providers to refuse to offer services such as abortions, contraceptive care, and vaccinations that they disagree with on religious or moral grounds, was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge on Wednesday. 

The rule, which was set to go into effect later this month, was voided by US District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan. In a 147-page opinion, Engelmayer stated that the administration did not have the authority to enact major portions of the rule change and that several parts of the Department of Health and Human Services’ argument in favor of the change were factually inaccurate. 

Had the rule, also known as the refusal-of-care rule, gone into effect, it would have enabled providers, pharmacists, and potentially employers to deny health care services, information, or referrals to patients on moral or religious grounds, even in emergencies. Hospitals that forced their employees to provide care over their personal objections would have been subject to penalties such as losing federal funding. The rule would also have allowed providers to decline to refer a patient to another provider in order to receive care based on personal objections to the service. 

The lawsuit that resulted in Wednesday’s ruling was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, nearly two dozen other states and cities, and two reproductive rights groups. “Once again, the courts have blocked the Trump administration from implementing a discriminatory rule that would only hurt Americans,” James said in a statement following the ruling. “The refusal of care rule was an unlawful attempt to allow health care providers to openly discriminate.”

Critics of the the rule argued that it would disproportionately affect the LGBTQ population by giving further protection to providers to deny care to patients based on their identities. 

“Today, the Trump administration was blocked from providing legal cover for discrimination,” Alexis McGill, acting president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. “As the federal district court made clear, the administration acted outside its authority and made false claims to try to justify this rule. This rule put patients’ needs last and threatened their ability to access potentially lifesaving health care.” 

Insurance Companies: A Major Problem in America's Health Care

Having gone through proton therapy and been on an expensive medication myself during the last year, I know first hand the problems most Americans face when seeking medical treatment.  One of the biggest is the effort by insurance companies to deny coverage and/or restrict permitted medications for the simple purpose of reducing payouts. The companies that happily take your premium payments simply do not want to have to pay out claims when their insureds need medical care or expensive medications.  In my own case, everything was eventually covered after protracted confrontations with my prescription insurance carrier.  Many are not so lucky and the reality is that most of us find non-medical personnel trying to dictate our medical care.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at this problem which, to me, is the reason a private for profit health insurance system without a significant challenge of a public option will never best serve individuals' and families' needs.  Here are column excerpts:

We know how important it is to have insurance so that we can get health care. As a physician, parent and patient, I cannot overemphasize that having insurance is not enough.

As a gastroenterologist, I often prescribe expensive medications or tests for my patients. But for insurance companies to cover those treatments, I must submit a “prior authorization” to the companies, and it can take days or weeks to hear back.

Because it ends up with the desired outcome, you might think this is reasonable. It’s not. On most occasions the “peer” reviewer is unqualified to make an assessment about the specific services. They usually have minimal or incorrect information about the patient. Not one has examined or spoken with the patient, as I have. None of them have a long-term relationship with the patient and family, as I have.

The insurance company will say this system makes sure patients get the right medications. It doesn’t. It exists so that many patients will fail to get the medications they need.

I’ve dealt with this system from the patient side, as well. My daughter has a rare genetic disorder . . . She receives applied behavior analysis therapy, an approach often used for autism, and which has been wildly successful in improving her skills and communication. But recently, our health insurer reduced the amount of therapy they thought she needed.

I probably have better access than almost anyone else can get, yet the ability of my daughter’s providers to mitigate denials for services they deem appropriate is slow and often ineffective.

My daughter can languish for months or years not receiving care that every highly qualified person who treats her agrees she needs. While we wait, the window to give her a little bit more function, a little bit less suffering and a little better life gets smaller.

Consumers have a right to appeal denials for health-care services, but regulations still largely focus on the process, not the content. For instance, insurers are required to notify you in writing of a denial, and patients have the right to an internal appeal; if that fails, some states also allow for an external review.

Insurance companies know that many patients don’t bother to appeal at all. A smaller fraction ask for an internal review, and still fewer seek or even know about external review options available in most states. Of the cases that do end up under external review, almost a third of all insurer denials are overturned. This is clear proof that whatever process insurers have to determine medical necessity is often not in line with medical opinion. A study of emergency room visits found that when one insurance company denied visits as being “not emergencies,” more than 85 percent of them met a “prudent layperson” standard for coverage.

This is a system that saves insurance companies money by reflexively denying medical care that has been determined necessary by a physician. And it should come as no surprise that denials have a disproportionate effect on vulnerable patient populations, such as sexual-minority youths and cancer patients.

When an insurance company reflexively denies care and then makes it difficult to appeal that denial, it is making health-care decisions for patients. In other words, insurance officials are practicing medicine without accepting the professional, personal or legal liability that comes with the territory.

We don’t have to put up with this. Health care in the United States is shockingly opaque; it’s time to take insurance companies out of our decision-making process.

Women - A Vanishing Breed Among Congressional Republicans

As the base of the Republican Party has become increasingly concentrated among aging whites, Christian extremists, white supremacists and vulture capitalists, something has happened to Republican women in Congress: they are vanishing.  At this time, it appears that only 13 women will be among the Republican caucus in 2019 - down by 10 from the present Congress.   To anyone sentient, the reason should be obvious: women do not like the GOP's racist, male privilege based  agenda and will vote against Republicans even when the Republican candidate is a woman.    Yet the GOP seems shocked and ponders how to regain support from women.  Jettisoning much of the current GOP platform would be an obvious choice if one is in touch with objective reality, but don't hold your breath waiting for reality to set in.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

About a half dozen House Republican women gathered this week for a somber, post-election dinner.

Exchanging thoughts about the brutal results for GOP candidates, they realized something depressing, according to one attendee. That small dinner group represented about half the total number of Republican women who would serve in the House next year.

Just 13 GOP women have won election so far to serve in the next Congress, down from 23 this year. With a half dozen races yet to be resolved, the House GOP — the minority party next year — is all but certain to have the lowest number of women in its ranks since 1994.

That drop-off came amid a national political climate that saw female voters sharply break from Republicans. Women favored Democrats over Republicans for Congress, 59 percent to 40 percent, according to exit polls.

It has set off a debate within the Republican Party about how to address this crisis, both in terms of appealing to female voters and recruiting and retaining women in Congress.
“I think the Republicans have to get off of defense on this issue,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Friday in an interview.

Cheney was the uncontested winner this week in the race for House Republican conference chairwoman, which puts her in charge of the party’s communications and messaging strategy. She will become the party’s highest-profile woman in Congress, trying to rebuild and rebrand its battered image.

But she does not see any need for course corrections on policies relating to women, arguing that Democrats create silos for female issues that treat women in a condescending way. . . . She said that issues like security and a strong economy cut across gender lines and that if Republicans made that argument better and had more women making the pitch, they would win more support. “We need more women running for office, no doubt,” Cheney said.  Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) could not agree more. . . . . . “Take a look around,” she told the GOP lawmakers. “This is not reflective of the American public.”

Stefanik said she then asked Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the minority leader candidates, what their plans were to recruit and elect more women.  “I was struck that I really didn’t get an answer,” she recalled in an interview Friday.

Just one new Republican woman, so far, will be sworn in for her first term in January.  Yet when Cheney and Stefanik look across the aisle next year, they will see a record number of female Democrats, at least 89.

Trump won two years ago despite more than a dozen women accusing him of improper conduct or sexual assault, charges he denies. After his win, the Democratic Party and liberal activists focused early on recruiting and advancing female candidates. The reaction to the #MeToo movement further encouraged Democratic women, culminating in the clash over sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the GOP’s treatment of his accusers.

Kavanaugh denied the allegations. Trump mocked one of his accusers, .  . . Stefanik took a more nuanced view, believing that the terrible standing with women was pretty well baked before last month’s confirmation vote.  “We were having problems with women voters before that,” she said.

Cheney sees her main focus as sharpening the party’s message. She intends to do a lot more than just stand behind McCarthy, the incoming minority leader, to provide a better visual backdrop.

She wants to go after Democrats for supporting a “socialist economic policy” like single-payer insurance and how such a national health program would limit women’s medical choices. “That would be a disaster,” she said.

I'm sorry, but Cheney - a child of privilege who has ridden her parents' fame to success - is clueless on the issue of heath care access.  The more I see and with a background of doing legal work for  hospital system, single payer insurance is the only way all citizens will have equal access to adequate healthcare. 

Why It is Important to Oppose Trumpism

With hate crimes and acts of intimidation escalating - all, of course with no denunciation of such conduct from Donald trump or Mike Pence - one can certainly feel overwhelmed, especially if one falls within one of the favored targets of Trump's frightening base of Christofascists and white supremacists.  But that doesn't mean that we can crawl into a fetal position and try to deny the reality that something terrible has happened to America.  Rather, if one is a true American patriot, it is now time to step up resistance and do all possible to stop the parade of horribles that Trump and the Congressional Republicans have planned for the nation.   A column in the New York Times underscores the need to rally and resist non-stop.  Here are highlights: 

This is a very dangerous man, our next president. Dangerous in his certitude about what he doesn’t know. Dangerous in his ignorance of history, his antipathy toward reading, his inability to sort fact from fiction. The last man to play things by the gut while in control of the world’s most powerful military left a mortal mess.

But welcome, for now, President-elect Donald Trump. It feels, in much of the nation, like the death of a loved one — the sudden, unexpected kind. I haven’t felt this way since the nuns told our second-grade class that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Still, grief is an emotion that has little power in politics.

A majority — well, not from the popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won — chose radical change over reasoned predictability. They’re going to get plenty of change, much of it chaotic and cruel. Those who think Trump can be contained, or trained by seasoned K Street hacks to act reasonable, are deluding themselves. He’ll do it his way.

The Republicans will control everything, including the Supreme Court. Washington is theirs, with minimal checks and balances. And if the forgotten, the undereducated, the Rust Belt survivors think they are going to see a renaissance of their communities, consider this headline from Yahoo Finance on the day after the election: “Trump win is a ‘grand slam’ for Wall Street Bankers.” He will not betray his class.

But resistance is not futile. Within the durable strength of the Constitution are many options — peaceful, legal, effective countermoves, not the burn-it-all down schemes of the Trumpsters, had Clinton won. One question is existential: Can the world survive the 45th American president?

When he looks the other way while Russia takes a small country, we can remind him that the United States signed a treaty with war-broken European allies that cannot be dismissed by fiat. When he orders the generals to torture suspects, kill family members of suspected terrorists, they can cite Geneva Conventions — something the generals know much more about than Trump.

When Trump takes away people’s health care, when he tries to reinstate a system that was not, in fact, fabulous for those with pre-existing conditions, he will find a constituency of people who are one medical bill from bankruptcy. They will have to shout to be heard above the lobbyists, but they won’t go away quietly.

When Trump tries to ignore the provisions of a global accord to curb climate change, and charts a path for the United States as a rogue nation, the resistance will come from the millions of young Americans who found a voice in old Bernie Sanders. They will be similarly roused when he attempts to let the despoilers have their way on public land. Millennials will learn the hard way that failure to turn out in sufficient numbers at election time could cost their children a habitable planet.

The strongest resistance should come from the white working class; they will soon find out that Trump will treat them the same way he treated the suckers who signed up for his fraudulent university. When steel mills fail to return to Youngstown, or when new trade deals produce no more magic than the old ones, these economic exiles will wonder how they got betrayed. Look to the euphoria of soon-to-be deregulated Wall Street bankers for your explanation.

Finally, all of us in the American family should never trust anyone from the pollster industrial complex, including those at my own newspaper. 

Chaos Would Follow If the GOP Actually Repealed Obamacare

Today the GOP controlled House of Representatives will again vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act, a/k/a Obamacare.  Of course, the Congressional Republicans have no proposed alternative to Obamacare and no plan how to deal with the millions of Americans who would lose healthcare coverage.  Of course, they seemingly don't care about these individuals and families since they most likely view them as part of the 47% who are "takers."  Added to this indifference is the fact that in the minds of many in the GOP, these Americans are minorities, so they truly do not matter.  So much for adherence to the message of Christ.  Mother Jones looks at the chaos that would ensue if the GOP did succeed in its repeal efforts.  Here are article highlights:

On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives plans to vote once again to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It will be the 55th time House GOPers have voted to eliminate or impede the health care reform law, but the very first opportunity for freshman Republicans to register their opposition to Obamacare in the congressional record.

But with each repeal vote, the politics of rolling back the Affordable Care Act become more fraught. After all, the law is now enmeshed with the US health care system. "Talk of repealing the Affordable Care Act is like talk of repealing the interstate highway system," says Timothy Jost, a health care law expert at the Washington and Lee University School of Law. "I mean in theory you could do it. Nobody would want to live with it."

Since President Barack Obama will never sign legislation repealing his signature accomplishment, a vote to strike down the law is largely symbolic. But what if, in some parallel universe perhaps, repeal passed?

"If you with a stroke of a pen took the Affordable Care Act away and there was no transition period, there would essentially be havoc in the markets," says Linda Blumburg, a health care policy analyst.

[H]ealth care experts have been crunching the numbers to figure out what would happen if the Supreme Court dismantles Obamacare in states that rely on the federal government to run their healthcare marketplaces. Though the Supreme Court scenario, which would halt the subsidies to people purchasing insurance in the federally-run marketplaces, is not the same as full repeal, it helps paint the picture of what would happen. And the picture is not pretty. If the Supreme Court stopped subsidies from flowing to the 34 states that did not establish their own exchanges, 8.2 million fewer people would have coverage by 2016. . . Next year, the number of people insured through purchasing private plans would drop by 69 percent.

Jost says. "Basically, you would have a lot of people die because they couldn't get health care."

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A roll back of the Medicaid expansion would cause millions more Americans to lose their coverage and create mayhem for state governments. Without the ACA to plug the so-called "donut-hole" for prescription drugs, seniors would see their drug bills go up.

A Supreme Court decision against Obamacare would cost millions of Americans their coverage, but full repeal by Congress would be even more devastating. Health care experts describe a state of complete chaos were the ACA to simply disappear from the books.

Repeal would be bad for insurers as well as customers by causing at least short-term turmoil for insurance companies. Without an individual mandate and without subsidies to make insurance affordable, younger, healthier people would likely drop their coverage, leaving insurers to cover older, sicker people with more health-care needs.

Republicans are starting to realize that—even for a symbolic vote of protest against Obamacare—the reality is that repeal alone is not an option.

And for the first time, the bill the House plans to vote on this week requires that the relevant House committees draft replacement legislation for the law. And, though not currently in the text of the bill, its sponsor, Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), plans to introduce an amendment to the bill that would delay repeal for 180 days to give Republicans time to craft a replacement, according to a Byrne aide.

Virginian Pilot: Expand Medicaid to Save Virginia Money

One aspect of the GOP's obsession to kill Obamacare - even though it has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court - is to resist the Medicaid expansion element of the larger plan.  Here in Virginia, Medicaid expansion would bring coverage to 400,000 Virginians, fuel new jobs in the health care industry and save Virginia money.  Yet in the up is down, black is white world of the GOP, these realities are beyond the comprehension of the cretins/Neanderthals of the GOP base and their trained circus dogs who comprise GOP elected officials.  Today's main page editorial in the Virginian Pilot recognizes the idiocy of the GOP position and urges Virginia to expand Medicaid.  Here are editorial highlights:

Census figures peg the number of uninsured Virginians at roughly 1 million, or about 12 percent of the commonwealth's population.

As many as 400,000 would be eligible to enroll in Medicaid's managed-care program if the state expands it in accordance with the federal Affordable Care Act.

Such a move would connect uninsured Virginians with a family doctor and help them seek preventive care and control chronic conditions without going to a hospital emergency room, where taxpayers and private insurance subsidize their care.

About 70 percent of Virginia's uninsured are part of a family where at least one adult works. . . .
But the counties and cities stretching from Surry to Grayson County in southwestern Virginia have high proportions of uninsured Virginians.

And many of them are simply stuck: They don't make enough to afford private insurance yet make too much to qualify for Medicaid under Virginia's miserly system.  The commonwealth's current Medicaid eligibility criteria are among the most exclusive in the nation, with coverage restricted to poor pregnant women, children and the disabled.

Republicans, led by Gov. Bob McDonnell, have opposed expansion of Medicaid by arguing that the federal government won't keep its word to cover costs as specified in federal law. The law requires the feds to pay 100 percent of expansion costs through 2016, gradually decreasing to 90 percent through 2021.

But that skepticism is self-defeating. Virginia can expand Medicaid so it reverts if the federal government's coverage drops below 90 percent.

Virginia can make a conditional expansion of Medicaid that allows the state to keep the $10 billion in new taxes Virginians must pay over the next five years. Otherwise, that money is heading to states that have already agreed to expand Medicaid.

That money will support 30,000 jobs needed to coordinate expansion of services.

More efficient, and effective, managed health care will be provided to the uninsured and working poor, which in turn will reduce overall health care costs for everyone. Virginia can save some of the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent every budget biennium in subsidies to hospitals, free clinics and community health care centers for treatment of the uninsured.

Of course, expanding medical access to the poor and needy is not consistent with the Christofascist/Tea Party desire to see such people simply die and disappear - especially if they are not white.  It is sick and perverse. 

The Obamacare Scandal the Most of the Media Is Ignoring

Joel Osteen has the largest church in America. He also declined to speak about the coverage gap.

I make no secret about the fact that I hold most far right Christians - the Christofascists, if you will - and the Tea Party Neanderthals in little more than open contempt.  To me, most of these "godly folk" are falsely pious, self-righteous bigots and they make the biblical Pharisees look like very upstanding individuals.  One thing that underscores this rank hypocrisy is the GOP base opposition to the Affordable Health Care Act which they derisively call Obamacare.  These greed driven, self-centered folks don't give the slightest damn about the millions of Americans who lack access to decent healthcare .   A piece at CNN looks at the situation and the calls by a few decent Christians to not treat countless Americans (especially minorities and those of different faiths) as disposable human garbage.  Here are some highlights:

The Rev. Timothy McDonald gripped the pulpit with both hands, locked eyes with the shouting worshippers, and decided to speak the unspeakable.

The bespectacled Baptist minister was not confessing to a scandalous love affair or the theft of church funds. He brought up another taboo: the millions of poor Americans who won’t get health insurance beginning in January because their states refused to accept Obamacare.

McDonald cited a New Testament passage in which Jesus gathered the 5,000 and fed them with five loaves and two fishes. Members of his congregation bolted to their feet and yelled, “C’mon preacher” and “Yessir” as his voice rose in righteous anger.

“What I like about our God is that he doesn’t throw people away,” McDonald told First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta during a recent Sunday service. “There will be health care for every American. Don’t you worry when they try to cast you aside.  Just say I’m a leftover for God and leftovers just taste better the next day!”

McDonald’s congregation cheered, but his is a voice crying in the wilderness. He’s willing to condemn state leaders whose refusal to accept Obamacare has left nearly 5 million poor Americans without health coverage. But few of the most famous pastors in the Bible Belt will join him.


Joel Osteen? Bishop T.D. Jakes, and other prominent pastors throughout the South?  Like McDonald, they preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline yet the poor can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere. All declined to comment.
 
The coverage gap was created when 25 states refused to accept the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. The people who fall into this gap make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to qualify for Obamacare subsidies in their state insurance exchanges. If they lived elsewhere, they would probably get insurance. But because they live in a state that refused the new health care law, they likely will remain among the nation’s uninsured poor after Obamacare coverage kicks in come January.

The coverage gap has been treated as a political issue, but there is a religious irony to the gap that has been ignored.

Most of the people who fall into the coverage gap live in the Bible Belt, a 14-state region in the South stretching from North Carolina to Texas and Florida. The Bible Belt is the most overtly Christian region in the country, filled with megachurches and pastors who are treated like celebrities.  All but two Bible Belt states have refused to accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

Is it anti-Christian for state leaders to turn down help for the people Jesus called “the least of these"?  

When these questions were sent to many of the most popular pastors in the Bible Belt, they hit a wall of silence. Virtually no prominent pastor wanted to talk about the uninsured poor in their midst.

Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest church in the nation, declined to be interviewed about the subject. So did Bishop T.D. Jakes. Their megachurches are both in Texas, the state with the nation’s highest number of people without health insurance.

Max Lucado, the best-selling Christian author who is a minister at a church in Texas, declined to speak; Charles Stanley, the Southern Baptist pastor in Georgia whose In Touch Ministries reaches millions around the globe, declined to speak; Ed Young Sr. and Ed Young Jr., a father and son in Texas who pastor two of the fastest-growing churches in the nation, also declined to speak.

The silence is not hard to understand. Obamacare is a polarizing political issue in the Bible Belt. A pastor who publicly weighs in on the subject could divide his or her congregation or risk their job.

[T]his position is impractical and unbiblical, says Ronald Sider, a longtime advocate for the poor and author of “The Scandal of Evangelical Politics."  Churches and charities don’t have enough resources to take care of an estimated 48 million Americans who don’t have health care. The Bible is filled with examples of God's fury over economic oppression of the poor, which Christians should regard as scandalous, he says.

There's much more to the article, some of which involves mealy mouthed excuses from pastors for why they are not speaking out.   The Gospel message calls one to be divisive at times and to call out hypocrisy and to identify wrongs being done to others.  With most of these pastors it is all ultimately about money and the bottom line.  They don't want to rock the boat because then their bigoted and selfish parishioners might stop giving money.  Nasty prostitutes are more honest and have more integrity than these foul pastors.  With every passing day I find myself wanting less and less to do with Christianity.  Or at least the version practiced by the "godly folk." They are truly horrid people. 

The Worst of the Paul Ryan/GOP Budgets

Once again Paul Ryan and the Republican Party have demonstrated that protecting the wealthy while slashing support for the neediest Americans is their priority number one.  Of course, a related GOP theme is slashing government regulation so that rapacious corporations can  - well rape the public.  The Gilded Age and the worse of its abuses and mistreatment of the needy continues to be the "good old days" that the GOP and Ryan seek to restore.  Most of us in this model are disposable trash viewed as hardly even human.  It is disgusting.  It is also the height of hypocrisy for a party that prostitutes itself to far right Christians and claims to honor the Christian message.  The New York Times takes apart the latest Ryan/GOP budget in a main editorial.  Here are excerpts:

Mr. Obama should have no illusions about the core beliefs of some of his Republican dining partners, or their willingness to accept change. That was made clear on Tuesday when the House Budget Committee chairman, Representative Paul Ryan, unveiled his 2014 spending plan: a retread of ideas that voters soundly rejected, made even worse, if possible, by sharper cuts to vital services and more dishonest tax provisions. 

The budget, which will surely fly through the House, was quickly praised as “serious” and job-creating by the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, though it is neither. By cutting $4.6 trillion from spending over the next decade, it would reverse the country’s nascent economic growth, kill millions of real and potential jobs, and deprive those suffering the most of social assistance. 

All the tired ideas from 2011 and 2012 are back: eliminating Medicare’s guarantee to retirees by turning it into a voucher plan; dispensing with Medicaid and food stamps by turning them into block grants for states to cut freely; repealing most of the reforms to health care and Wall Street; shrinking beyond recognition the federal role in education, job training, transportation and scientific and medical research. The public opinion of these callous proposals was made clear in the fall election, but Mr. Ryan is too ideologically fervid to have learned that lesson. 

The 2014 budget is even worse than that of the previous two years because it attempts to balance the budget in 10 years instead of the previous 20 or more. That would take nondefense discretionary spending down to nearly 2 percent of the economy, the lowest in modern history. And in its laziest section, it sets a goal of slashing the top tax rate for the rich to 25 percent from 39.6 percent, though naturally Mr. Ryan doesn’t explain how this could happen without raising taxes on middle- and lower-income people. (Sound familiar?)

There’s no need, of course, to balance the budget in 10 years or even 20; these dates are arbitrary, designed solely to impress the extreme fiscal conservatives who now compose the core of the Republican Party. That same core in the House will almost certainly reject the 2014 Democratic budget expected from the Senate on Wednesday.

If the Ryan budget is any indication, Mr. Obama’s quest to bring reason to an unreasonable party may be doomed from the outset.

Ken Cuccinelli's Frightening Manifesto

While Marco Rubio and many in the GOP may be zombies and challenged when it comes to historical reality, Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli is nothing short of freaking insane in a way that reminds one of the ayatollahs in Iran.  Kookinelli is not even remotely tethered to objective reality and rational sentient people ought to be terrified that such a deranged individual can be the as yet uncrowned GOP nominee for Governor of Virginia.  An article in Slate looks at Kookinelli in general and his new book "The Last Line of Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty."The irony is that under Kookinelli's vision of liberty, most of us lose all liberty and power is vested in insane Christofascists like Kookinelli and the knuckle draggers in the GOP base.  Kookinelli is a clear and present danger to all Virginians.  Here are highlights from the Slate article:

On Jan. 30, two weeks before The Last Line of Defense hit shelves and Kindle apps, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s own book was leaked to the Washington Post. In it, Cuccinelli would “echo Romney’s 47 percent” remarks, writing that Medicare, Social Security, and “outright welfare” all “make people dependent on government,” sapping the country’s verve. “Romney’s words, captured on a hidden camera, helped sink his campaign,” pointed out the paper, helpfully. “Time will tell how the similar language plays for Cuccinelli.”

The Washington Post keeps waiting for the time when Cuccinelli will be sunk. It never comes. “He doubts the science of global warming,” wrote the paper in a 2009 editorial, endorsing his opponent in the attorney general race. “He peddles outmoded, half-baked and prejudicial theories about homosexuals.” He won by 15 points. He spooked any possible Republican rival out of this year’s gubernatorial race—they remembered 2009, when Gadsen-flag-waving Cuccinelli fans took over the state party convention—and in the most recent poll, he’s winning.

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Cuccinelli’s secret is simple: He runs when things are good for Republicans. Virginia holds state elections in odd-numbered years, so their A-team—Gov. Bob McDonnell, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, Cuccinelli—haven’t ever fought the tide of Obama turnout. In 2009, Virginia’s electorate was 78 percent white and 40 percent “conservative”  .  . .  .

The biggest threat to a Cuccinelli governorship comes from Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, who keeps threatening to run as an independent, and warns that Cuccinelli’s new tome will give Democrats “ammunition” to destroy him. If that’s the case, then 2013 will be the year the Tea Party finally croaks. Cuccinelli is the Tea Party in one body, an underrated and likeable politician who sees it as his mission on earth to unwind government power.

The bulk of his book recounts the history of the health care lawsuit, which the attorneys general lost—and which Cuccinelli, who sued the government independently of the main AG coalition, lost even more decisively. He tells the history that became less than relevant after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision

Why did the good guys lose? Cuccinelli decides that the game was rigged against them. The media—he mentions columnists like Richard Cohen, excerpting their calumnies—never told the truth about the law, or the mandate to buy health insurance. “Imagine how apoplectic the big-government statists would get if Congress voted to force everyone to buy a gun,” he harrumphs. In his reading, conservatives absolutely won the argument, but President Obama—the head of a “group of lawbreakers”—browbeat the court into caving. 

The people responsible are either liars or dupes. In shorter chapters about his quest to get—then, one assumes, debunk—climate change data, Cuccinelli suggests that “climate researchers may have given up the purity of science to forward a global warming agenda … simply for the research money.” 

Kookinelli lies in a fantasy world.  If he somehow is elected governor, Virginians will find themselves living in a nightmare.  The man must be defeated.

The South - Dumb America

At this point in my life, I have lived far longer in the South than any where else, including in Alabama, Texas and Virginia.  One phenomenon that continually strikes me is that more often than not, southern states more often than not take actions and support positions that are against there own best interest when viewed by any objective rational basis.  Motivating these counter productive actions and policies is typically a slavish deference to ignorance embracing religion and all to frequently racism.  While most southern white Republicans won't verbalize the true motivation for their hatred of Barack Obama, in truth they cannot tolerate a black man in the White House.  It reminds them all too well of their declining power and privilege. One certainly sees the symptoms of this sickness in the Virginia GOP and its ignorance and bigotry embracing masters at The Family Foundation.  A piece in the New York Review of Books looks at the South's self-defeating behavior.  Here are highlights:

[T]he current South is willing to cut off its own nose to show contempt for the government. Governor Rick Scott of Florida turned down more than $2 billion in federal funds for a high-speed rail system in Florida that would have created jobs and millions of dollars in revenues, just to show he was independent of the hated federal government. In this mood, his forebears would have turned down TVA. People across the South are going even farther than Scott, begging to secede again from the Union. Packer notes that the tea is cooling in parties across the rest of the nation, but seems to be fermenting to a more toxic brew in the South. No one needs better health care more than the South, but it fights it off so long as Obama is offering it, its governors turning down funds for Medicaid. This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution.

No part of the country will suffer the effects of global warming earlier or with more devastation than the South, yet its politicians resist measures to curb carbon emissions and deny the very existence of climate change—sending it to the dungeon with evolution and biblical errancy. One doesn’t need much imagination to see the South with lowered or swollen waters in its rivers and ports, raging kudzu, swarming mosquitos, and record-breaking high temperatures, still telling itself that global-warming talk is just a liberal conspiracy. But it just digs deeper in denial. The South has decided to be defeated and dumb.

Humans should always cling to what is good about their heritage, but that depends on being able to separate what is good from what is bad. It is noble to oppose mindless change, so long as that does not commit you to rejecting change itself. The South defeats its own cause when it cannot discriminate between the good and the evil in its past, or pretends that the latter does not linger on into the present .  .  .

Tradition dies hard, hardest among those who cannot admit to the toll it has taken on them. That is why the worst aspects of the South are resurfacing under Obama’s presidency. It is the dignity. That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe—that is what many Southerners cannot stomach. They would let him ride on the bus, or get into Ivy League schools. But he must be kept from the altar; he cannot perform the secular equivalent of taking the Lord in his hands. It is the dignity.

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

Romney Still Clueless: "No One Dies Because They Don't Have Insurance"

One of the biggest failings of healthcare in America is the huge number of Americans who do not receive preventive medical care.  As a result, medical treatment is not sought all too often until the situation becomes serious and as a consequence the medical costs of treatment too late are not only catastrophic but often the patient dies from the illness that might have been curable/treatable if addressed earlier.  The other consequence is that because hospitals have to treat so many uninsured patients, the costs for everyone else skyrocket and vastly exceed the cost of similar treatment in virtually every other advanced industrialized nation.  Sadly, through his latest statements it is evident that Mitt Romney - who has never in his life had to forgo medical treatment because of cost worries - does not understand the reality that most Americans face daily.  Even with decent health care insurance many still think twice about seeking preventive or early diagnostic testing because of deductibles and/or copays.  Likewise, he doesn't grasp that its the millions of uninsured who do precisely what Romney describes that cause our medical cost to be so exorbitant.  Think Progress looks at Romney's utterly out of touch  statements as he talks about repealing "Obamacare."  Here are excerpts:

Mitt Romney doubled down on his suggestion that uninsured Americans can find the care they need in emergency rooms, telling The Dispatch that people will always receive the treatment they need, and do not die or suffer because they can not pay for care. He pointed to federal law that requires hospitals to admit emergency patients, repeating his advice that patients rely on the most expensive form of care reserved strictly for emergencies. Romney told the Columbus Dispatch:

“We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack,’  ” he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of “Obamacare,” which he has pledged to repeal.

“No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.”

He pointed out that federal law requires hospitals to treat those without health insurance — although hospital officials frequently say that drives up health-care costs.

Emergency rooms serve as a place of last resort, but 45,000 Americans still die every year because they lack health insurance, or one every 12 minutes. Uninsured adults under age 65 are also at a 40 percent higher death risk. Hospitals may treat patients for emergency medical conditions regardless of legal status or ability to pay, but patients with chronic conditions that don’t require emergency interference are often unable to access needed care.

Romney’s health care proposal would leave 72 million Americans without health insurance and wouldn’t provide all uninsured Americans with a stable source of insurance.

Romney is not only a shameless liar but totally out of touch with the reality that most Americans face ever day of their lives.  Those born to wealth like Romney AND Paul Ryan simply have no clue because neither they nor their families have ever had to worry about how necessary medical care will be paid for.

 

Ann "Marie Antoinette" Romney on "Meet the Press"

If you don't know what you are talking about - or in the case of Ann Romney are clueless about the struggles and reality of others - sometimes it is better to simply shut up and be quiet.  Ms. Romney apparently has not gotten that message as she tried on Meet the Press to humanize her plastic robotic husband and herself yet she ended up underscoring just how out of touch they are in fact.  David Badash has a piece in The New Civil Rights Movement that looks at Ms. Romney's ill advised performance.  The woman truly has no clue how most Americans live pay check to pay check and may lie awake at night worry about how they will care for their families and make sure that they have health care, a roof over their heads, and basic necessities.  Here are highlights:

Ann Romney, in a Meet The Press interview – rare for a candidate and their spouse to appear together — took that opportunity and severely damaged her husband’s campaign. Ann Romney suffers from Marie Antoinette syndrome, apparently, and the Romney campaign is ludicrously unaware that when the 63-year old dressage equestrian speaks to the press, she often reveals just how much of a moneyed, out-of-touch one percenter she, and Mitt, truly are.

Ann says Mitt “has been demonized in many ways as being heartless,” and uses the example of him visiting a dying leukemia patient.

Ann neglects to connect the dots that Mitt may have visited a dying leukemia patient, but President Obama has worked to ensure that dying leukemia patients, people with pre-existing conditions, and practically all Americans can get the healthcare they need by making it more accessible and affordable, eliminating lifetime caps and pre-existing condition denials.

Mrs. Romney also told David Gregory on Meet The Press:

Well, I think the thing that I want to communicate to people, and that it’s so important that people understand, is that Mitt and I do recognize that we have not had a financial struggle in our lives. But I want people to believe in their hearts that we know what it is like to struggle. And our struggles have not been financial, but they’ve been with health and with difficulties in different things in life.

While Ann Romney has had to struggle with breast cancer and MS — two devastating diseases that are no one should have to face in the 21st century — she had the benefit of access to the best healthcare, drugs and treatments — traditional and alternative — and doctors money can buy, something her husband would deny Americans who can’t afford it. Indeed, Ann Romney’s MS treatment regime is just plain inaccessible to the vast majority of those who might need it. While diseases place unimaginable stresses and struggles on anyone who is fighting them, and their family, Ann Romney never had to worry about how to pay for her treatments.

When Americans are literally cutting their prescriptions in half to make them last longer, Ann Romney has never used a pill cutter to save money, or worry about what to buy: medication or food, as far too many Americans do every day. The very Americans who her husband would like to deprive of access to those medications, and government programs that literally help keep them alive.

In short, Ann Romney and her husband Mitt no doubt have faced some of the same struggles as many Americans. Illness, a prime example. But their financial ability to shield themselves from the ravages of those diseases has apparently inoculated them from understanding how not being able to afford life saving treatment, drugs, and care impact the rest of America. If it hadn’t, they would be championing Obamacare, food stamps, and TANF.

Yes, I have been brutal on Ann Romney.  I make no apologies.  What her husband and Paul Ryan seek to do to countless Americans is even more brutal and certainly underscores the hypocrisy of both Romneys and Paul Ryan who pretend to embrace the Gospel message even as they make the Biblical Pharisees look like pretty in touch folks.

What GOP Policies Mean to Upward Mobility

Republicans constantly argue that for America to prosper taxes on the wealthy need to be cut drastically and the working poor basically thrown to their own devices since the GOP would dismantle the social safety net.  And all too often, Europe is held up as the bogeyman for what might befall America if the GOP policies aren't implemented.  Truth be told, we should want to be more like Europe which now has more opportunity for upward mobility than the United States.  Moreover, with largely national health care systems, European don't need to go without preventive care or live in fear that a serious illness will drive them into bankruptcy.  Talking Points Memo looks at the reality of where we are as opposed to the disingenuous claims of greed driven Republicans and their Kool-Aid imbibing followers.  Here are some story highlights:

In his widely trumpeted speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation Wednesday, Republican budget guru and liberal bogeyman Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin rejected the notion that wealthier Americans should pay higher taxes to sustain or broaden a social safety net for poor and middle class workers and retirees.

Instead, he argued, policy should be geared toward allowing high earners to grow the economy, and to facilitate upward mobility for the working class. America, he argued, exemplifies the latter model while European economies illustrate the perils of the former.

That is what they do in class-riven Europe, he said, where “Top-heavy welfare states have replaced the traditional aristocracies, and masses of the long-term unemployed are locked into the new lower class. The United States was destined to break out of this bleak history.”  Turns out that is — not true. 

There are a lot of data available on this issue, but the clearest chart comes courtesy of the Economic Mobility Project, which looked at the correlation between parent and child income in various countries. Turns out in America, you’re more likely to stay rich if born rich, and stay poor if born poor, than you are in most European countries.

These findings are more striking when put in comparative context. There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. If anything, the data seem to suggest the opposite.”

The entire report on America's declining upward mobility can be found here.   As is the case with the Christianists, if a Republican's lips are moving, nowadays the best approach is to assume that they are lying.  It's unlikely that you'll be proven wrong.

The GOP Rush to Abandon the Poor

As this blog has noted many times before, the Republican Party's verbal claims that it's the "family values" party and the party of Christian values are totally disconnected from the Party's actions.  While the GOP kisses the ass of the Christian Right non-stop, the Gospel message is nowhere to be seen in the hate, geed, and ignorance agenda of the Party. One of the things this blog tries to highlight is hypocrisy whether the hypocrisy occurs in government, religious institutions or elsewhere.  Today's GOP is all about hypocrisy and the policies it is pursuing makes a mockery of the Gospel message of the Bible - the book that the whore like members of the GOP claim to honor, if not outright worship.  The New York Times looks at the total disconnect of the GOP the Gospel message of aiding the poor as the GOP at the state and local level strive to kick the poor to the curb.  Interestingly enough, Taliban Bob McDonnell is acting in a moderate manner as he apparently still campaigns for the VP nod from Mitt Romney.  Here are editorial highlights:

The state with the country’s worst health care record just happens to have a governor who has been the loudest voice against national efforts to improve it.

A quarter of the residents of Texas, 6.3 million people, are uninsured, by far the highest percentage in the country. (That number includes more than a million children.) Texas ranks last in prenatal care and finished last on a new federal assessment of overall health quality that examined factors like disease prevention, deaths from illnesses, and cancer treatment.

Yet Gov. Rick Perry — strangely puffed up as he was so often in his presidential bid — recently told the Obama administration that he would proudly refuse a huge infusion of Medicaid money that would significantly reduce those shameful statistics and cover 1.7 million more people. The same indifference to suffering that pushed Texas to the bottom is now threatening to keep it there.

At least five other Republican governors have made a similar choice, announcing that they will not expand their Medicaid program for the poor even though the federal government would pay for almost all of it for several years under President Obama’s health care reform law.

Their refusal illuminates a growing divide over the nature of a state government’s role. Around the country, a new study shows, states continue to face a fiscal crisis because of rising costs and Republican-driven cuts in federal aid. 

Over the last year, for example, eight states have cut or eliminated cash welfare payments to their poorest residents. It happened last week in Pennsylvania, where 61,000 residents — almost all of whom are disabled and poor — were told that they would abruptly lose their $200 monthly general assistance payments, all to save $150 million a year. Our hands are tied by a tightening budget, welfare officials told astonished recipients, though Gov. Tom Corbett’s hands didn’t seem restrained when he handed out $300 million in business tax cuts earlier this month.

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio has cut hundreds of millions from education, but when the state found itself with a $235 million surplus a few weeks ago, he announced that it would all go into a rainy-day fund, doing nothing to deal with rising classroom sizes. In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage — who compared the health care reform law to the Holocaust — signed a budget bill in May that will reduce or eliminate existing Medicaid coverage for 21,000 people. 

Many mainstream Republican governors are taking a different approach. In a letter to the president last week, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said states should think carefully before they reject Washington’s money. Though he remained quite critical of health reform and Medicaid, he also noted that refusing the expansion would create “a significant gap in coverage” for low-income people.

For now, at least, Virginia recognizes an obligation to its weakest citizens. It’s time for Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa and Louisiana to do the same.

Republicans: Et tu, John Roberts?

Today was a crazy day at the office with a large commercial closing and chaos with the installation with a new computer system server.  Hence, until now, I haven't had a chance to comment on today's stunning surprise of this morning's U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding "Obamacare" as the wingnuts like to call it.  It's been fun watching the far right and the Tea Party go utterly berserk over the ruling and seeing Chief Justice Roberts be viewed as a Judas by the Kool-Aid drinkers.  As I noted last night - especially if one claims to give any deference to the Gospel message - it is a national disgrace that so many Americans are viewed as human trash by the Republican Party ans its Christofascist base.  Worse yet, Americans who do have health care coverage pay literally twice or more the costs paid for more expansive health care in every other industrialized nation.  A piece in Politico looks at the shock and spewing spittle among Republicans over what they view as Justice Roberts' betrayal.  Here are highlights:

Republicans on Capitol Hill were in a state of shock Thursday that Chief Justice John Roberts, their longtime ally on the court, sided with liberals in upholding the health care law.

I thought he was the champion of limited government,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) told POLITICO. Wilson famously yelled “You lie!” to the president during his 2009 health care speech before a joint session of Congress.

 Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said he was “surprised” by Roberts and “uneasy” about the court’s interpretation that the individual mandate was constitutional as a tax, but not under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Sessions was struggling to understand how Roberts reached that key conclusion.
“I am stunned and shocked, somewhat confused, by the decision, by the nature of the decision, by the nature of the majority and by the nature of the reasoning,” said Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on the floor. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a tea party favorite, also described himself as “shocked” by the turn of events.

And, grasping for an explanation, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) remarked: “As a lawyer, I can see where Roberts is concerned about the institution and maybe that explains it?

Roberts — the architect of the 2010 Citizens United ruling that opened the door to unlimited spending by outside groups in elections and a frequent boogeyman of the left — joined the court’s four liberal justices in saying that Congress had the authority to force most Americans to buy health insurance through its constitutional powers of taxation. The court’s three conservative justices, along with swing vote Anthony Kennedy, voted to strike down the law in its entirety.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a frequent critic of Roberts’s decisions in the court, said he sees this week’s decisions as “efforts by the chief justice to move the court back to the center line when it came to political neutraility.”

“The earlier decision in Bush v. Gore and Citizens United raise serious questions about the drift by the court,” Durbin said. “Some of the comments being made by Justice [Antonin] Scalia from the bench, where it sounded he was just quoting Fox News verbatim, really didn’t enhance the image of the court in the mind of the American public.”

We may never know what ultimately motivated Roberts.  It may be something as simple as the fact that he realized that the health care system before ACA in this country was broken and morally wrong.  Some suggest that Scalia's obnoxiousness and extremism may have tilted Roberts' decision.  Whatever the cause, I am glad that Justice Roberts put the nation and lies of millions of citizens ahead of partisan politics and greed.